Marble Faun & Green Bough (2 page)

               Ah, the world
About which mankind’s dreams are furled
Like a cocoon, thin and cold,
And yet that is never old!
Earth’s heart burns with winter snows
As fond and tremulous Pan blows
For other springs and cold and sad
As this; and sitting garment-clad
In sadness with dry stricken eyes
Bent to the unchanging skies,
Pan sighs and broods upon the scene
Beside this hushèd pool where lean
His own face and the bending sky
In shivering soundless amity.

A
LL
the air is gray with rain
Above the shaken fields of grain,
Cherry orchards moveless drip
Listening to their blossoms slip
Quietly from wet black boughs.
There a soaking broad-thatched house
Steams contemplatively. I
Sit beneath the weeping sky
Crouched about the mountains’ rim
Drawing her loose hair over them.

My eyes, peace-filled by falling rain,
Brood upon the steamy plain,
Crouched beneath a dripping tree
Where strong and damp rise up to me
The odors of the bursting mold
Upon the earth’s slow-breathing old
Breast; of acorns swelling tight
To thrust green shoots into the light
As shade for me in years to come
When my eyes grow dim and I am dumb
With sun-soaked age and lack of strength
Of things that have lived out the length
Of life; and when the nameless pain
To fuller live and know again

No more will send me over earth
Puzzling about the worth
Of this and that, nor crying “Hence!”
At my unseeking impotence
To have about my eyes close-furled
All the beauty in the world.
But content to watch by day
The dancing light’s unthinking play
Ruffling the pool. Then I’ll be
Beneath the roses. sleepily
Soaking in the sun-drenched air
Without wish or will or care,
With my softened fading eyes
Shackled to the curving skies.

T
HE
poplars look beyond the wall
With bending hair, and to me call,
Curving shivering hands to me
Whispering what they can see:
Of a dim and silent way
Through a valley white with may.
On either hand gossiping beeches
Stir against the lilac reaches
Half of earth and half of sky;
There the aspens quakingly
Gather in excited bands,
The dappled birches’ fluttering hands
Cast their swift and silver light
Through the glade spun greenish white.

So alone I follow on
Where slowly piping Pan has gone
To draw the quiet browsing flocks,
While a blackbird calls and knocks
At noon across the dusty downs
In quivering peace, until Pan sounds
His piping gently to the bird,
And saving this no sound is heard.

Now the blackbirds’ gold wired throats
Spill their long cool mellow notes;
In solemn flocks slowly wheeling
Intricately, without revealing
Their desires, as on blue space
They thread and cross like folds of lace
Woven black; then shrilling go
Like shutters swinging to and fro.

O
N
the downs beyond the trees
Loved by the thrilling breeze,
While the blackbird calls and knocks
Go the shepherds with their flocks.
It is noon, and the air
Is shimmering still, for nowhere
Is there a sound. The sky, half waked,
Half sleep, is calm; for peace is laked
Between the world rim’s far spread dikes
And the trees, from which there strikes
The flute notes that I, listening, hear
Liquidly falling on my ear:

“Come quietly, Faun, to my call;
Come, come, the noon will cool and pass
That now lies edgelessly in thrall
Upon the ripened sun-stilled grass.

“There is no sound in all the land,
There is no breath in all the skies;
Here Warmth and Peace go hand in hand
’Neath Silence’s inverted eyes.

“My call, spreading endlessly,
My mellow call pulses and knocks;
Come, Faun, and solemnly
Float shoulderward your autumned locks.

“Let your fingers, languorous,
Slightly curl, palm upward rest,
The silent noon waits over us,
The feathers stir not on his breast.

“There is no sound nor shrill of pipe,
Your feet are noiseless on the ground;
The earth is full and stillily ripe,
In all the land there is no sound.

“There is a great God who sees all
And in my throat bestows this boon:
To ripple the silence with my call
When the world sleeps and it is noon.”

When I hear the blackbirds’ song
Piercing cool and mellowly long,
I pause to hear, nor do I breathe
As the dusty gorse and heath
Breathe not, for their magic call
Holds all the pausing earth in thrall
At noon; then I know the skies
Move not, but halt in reveries
Of golden-veiled and misty blue;
Then the blackbirds wheeling through
By Pan guarded in the skies,
Piercing the earth with remorseless eyes
Are burned scraps of paper cast
On a lake quiet, deep, and vast.

U
PON
a wood’s dim shaded edge
Stands a dusty hawthorn hedge
Beside a road from which I pass
To cool my feet in deep rich grass.
I pause to listen to the song
Of a brook spilling along
Behind a patchy willow screen
Whose lazy evening shadows lean
Their scattered gold upon a glade
Through which the staring daisies wade,
And the resilient poplar trees,
Slowly turning in the breeze,
Flash their facets to the sun,
Swaying in slow unison.
Here quietude folds a spell
Within a stilly shadowed dell
Wherein I rest, and through the leaves
The sun a soundless pattern weaves
Upon the floor. The leafy glade
Is pensive in the dappled shade,
While the startled sunlight drips
From beech and alder fingertips,
And birches springing suddenly
Erect in silence sleepily
Clinging to their slender limbs,
Whitening them as shadow dims.

As I lie here my fancy goes
To where a quiet oak bestows
Its shadow on a dreaming scene
Over which the broad boughs lean
A canopy. The brook’s a stream
On which long still days lie and dream,
And where the lusty summer walks—
Around his head are lilac stalks—
In the shade beneath the trees
To let the cool stream fold his knees;
While I lie in the leafy shade
Until the nymphs troop down the glade.
Their limbs that in the spring were white
Are now burned golden by sunlight.
They near the marge, and there they meet
Inverted selves stretched at their feet;
And they kneel languorously there
To comb and braid their short blown hair
Before they slip into the pool—
Warm gold in silver liquid cool.

Evening turns and sunlight falls
In flecks between the leafèd walls,
Like golden butterflies whose wings
Slowly pulse and beat. Slow sings
The stream in a lower key
Murmuring down quietly
Between its solemn purple stone
With cooling ivy overgrown.

Sunset stains the western sky;
Night comes soon, and now I
Follow toward the evening star.
A sheep bell tinkles faint and far,
Then drips in silence as the sheep
Move like clouds across the deep
Still dusky meadows wet with dew.
I stretch and roll and draw through
The fresh sweet grass, and the air
Is softer than my own soft hair.
I lift up my eyes; the green
West is a lake on which has been
Cast a single lily. —See!
In meadows stretching over me
Are humming stars as thick as bees,
And the reaching inky trees
Sweep the sky. I lie and hear
The voices of the fecund year,
While the dark grows dim and deep,
And I glide into dreamless sleep.

C
AWING
rooks in tangled flight
Come crowding home against the night.
And all other wings are still
Except rooks tumbling down the hill
Of evening sky. The crimson falls
Upon the solemn ivied walls;
The horns of sunset slowly sound
Between the waiting sky and ground;
The cedars painted on the sky
Hide the sun slow flamingly
Repeated level on the lake,
Smooth and still and without shake,
Until the swans’ inverted grace
Wreathes in thought its placid face
With spreading lines like opening fans
Moved by white and languid hands.

Now the vesper song of bells
Beneath the evening flows and swells,
And the twilight’s silver throat
Slowly repeats each resonant note:
The dying day gives those who sorrow
A boon no king can give: a morrow.

The westering sun has climbed the wall
And silently we watch night fall
While sunset lingers in the trees
Its subtle gold-shot tapestries,
The sky is velvet overhead
Where petalled stars are canopied
Like sequins in a spreading train
Without fold or break or stain.

A cool wind whispers by the heads
Of flowers dreaming in their beds
Like convent girls, filling their sleep
With strange dreams from the outer deep.
On every hill battalioned trees
March skyward on unmoving knees,
And like a spider on a veil
Climbs the moon. A nightingale,
Lost in the trees against the sky,
Loudly repeats its jewelled cry.

I
AM
sad, nor yet can I,
For all my questing, reason why;
And now as night falls I will go
Where two breezes joining flow
Above a stream whose gleamless deeps
Caressingly sing the while it sleeps
Upon sands powdered by the moon.
And there I’ll lie to hear it croon
In fondling a wayward star
Fallen from the shoreless far
Sky, while winds in misty stream,
Laughing and weeping in a dream,
Whisper of an orchard’s trees
That, shaken by the aimless breeze,
Let their blossoms fade and slip
Soberly, as lip to lip
They touch the misty grasses fanned
To ripples by the breeze.

                                     Here stand
The clustered lilacs faint as cries
Against the silken-breasted skies;
They nod and sway, and slow as rain
Their slowly falling petals stain
The grass as through them breezes stray,
Smoothing them in silver play.
And we, the marbles in the glade,
Dreaming in the leafy shade
Are saddened, for we know that all
Things save us must fade and fall,
And the moon that sits there in the skies
Draws her hair across her eyes:
She sees the blossoms blow and die,
Soberly and quietly,
Till spring breaks in the waiting glade
And the first thin branchèd shade
Falls ’thwart them, and the swallows’ cry
Calls down from the stirring sky,
Thin and cold and hot as flame
Where spring is nothing but a name.

The stream flows calmly without sound
In the darkness gathered round;
Trembling to the vagrant breeze
About me stand the inky trees
Peopled by some bird’s loud cries,
Until it seems as if the skies
Had shaken down their blossomed stars
Seeking among the trees’ dim bars,
Crying aloud, each for its mate,
About the old earth, insensate,
Seemingly, to their white woe,
But their sorrow does she know
And her breast, unkempt and dim,
Throbs her sorrow out to them.
The dying day gives all who sorrow
The boon no king may give: a morrow.

T
HE
ringèd moon sits eerily
Like a mad woman in the sky,
Dropping flat hands to caress
The far world’s shaggy flanks and breast,
Plunging white hands in the glade
Elbow deep in leafy shade
Where birds sleep in each silent brake
Silverly, there to wake
The quivering loud nightingales
Whose cries like scattered silver sails
Spread across the azure sea.
Her hands also caress me:
My keen heart also does she dare;
While turning always through the skies
Her white feet mirrored in my eyes
Weave a snare about my brain
Unbreakable by surge or strain,
For the moon is mad, for she is old,
And many’s the bead of a life she’s told;
And many’s the fair one she’s seen wither:
They pass, they pass, and know not whither.

The hushèd earth, so calm, so old,
Dreams beneath its heath and wold—
And heavy scent from thorny hedge
Paused and snowy on the edge
Of some dark ravine, from where
Mists as soft and thick as hair
Float silver in the moon.

Stars sweep down—or are they stars?—
Against the pines’ dark etchèd bars.
Along a brooding moon-wet hill
Dogwood shines so cool and still,
Like hands that, palm up, rigid lie
In invocation to the sky
As they spread there, frozen white,
Upon the velvet of the night.

T
HE
world is still. How still it is!
About my avid stretching ears
The earth is pulseless in the dim
Silence that flows into them
And forms behind my eyes, until
My head is full: I feel it spill
Like water down my breast. The world,
A muted violin where are curled
Pan’s fingers, waits, supine and cold
And bound soundlessly in fold
On fold of blind calm rock
Edgeless in the moonlight’s shock,
Until the hand that grasps the bow
Descends; then grave and strong and low
It rises to his waiting ears.
The music of all passing years
Flows over him and down his breast
Of ice and gold, as in the west
Sunsets flame, and all dawns burn
Eastwardly, and calm skies turn
Always about his frozen head:
Peace for living, peace for dead.

And the hand that draws the bow
Stops not, as grave and strong and low
About his cloudy head it curls
The endless sorrow of all worlds,
The while he bends dry stricken eyes
Above the throngs; perhaps he sighs
For all the full world watching him
As seasons change from bright to dim.

And my eyes too are cool with tears
For the stately marching years,
For old earth dumb and strong and sad
With life so willy-nilly clad,
And mute and impotent like me
Who marble bound must ever be;
And my carven eyes embrace
The dark world’s dumbly dreaming face,
For my crooked limbs have pressed
Her all-wise pain-softened breast
Until my hungry heart is full
Of aching bliss unbearable.

T
HE
hills are resonant with soft humming;
It is a breeze that pauses, strumming
On the golden-wirèd stars
The deep full music to which was
The song of life through ages sung;
And soundlessly there weaves among
The chords a star, a falling rose
That only this high garden grows;
A falling hand with beauty dumb
Stricken by the hands that strum
The sky, is gone: yet still I see
This hand swiftly and soundlessly
Sliding now across my eyes
As it then slid down the skies.