LIBER PRIMUS VEL CARMINUM
141
Olympus alone
Of earth’s glories is taken
For deity’s throne
Deep-frozen, storm-shaken.
What glories are shown
When their slumbers awaken !
The avalanche thunders adown, and the gods
of the gods are forsaken.
To mortals your voices
Are mighty and glad.
The maiden rejoices:
The man is grown mad
For love, and his choice is
The choice of a lad
When a virgin first smiles on his suit, and
the summer for envy is sad.
Wan grows Aphrodite,
And Artemis frail ;
Apollo less mighty,
Red Bacchus too pale.
Dark Hades grows bright, he
Alone may avail
When the god and the mortal are one, as the
mountain is one with the gale.
THE CHILDREN OF EARTH.
Our hair deep laden with the scent of earth,
The colour of her rosy body’s birth,
Our mother, lady and life of all that is
divine ;
We gather to the sombre sound, as spring
Had whispered, ‘ Follow.’ hiding in her
wing
Her glorious head and flowing breast of
wine.
Though in the hollow of her heart be set
So deep and awful a fire, though the net
Of all her robes be frail as we are fine,
We gather, listening to the living lyre
Like falling water shot with amber fire,
And blown aloft by winds even to heaven’s
desire.
Deep starry gems set in a silver sea,
Sullen low voices of dark minstrelsy,
Light whispers of strange loves, of silver
woven,
Dumb kisses and wild laughter following:
All these as lives of autumn and of spring
We are: we follow across the rainbow
cloven,
A never-fading path of golden glory,
Whereof the lone Leucadian promontory
Holds one divinest gate: the other troven
Far, far beyond in interlunar skies,
Where the Himalayas stir them, and arise
To listen to the song that swells our arteries.
O moving labyrinth sun-crowned, dread maze
Ofstarry paths, of Zeus-untrodden ways,
Of mystic vales unfooted of the deep,
Our mother, virgin yet in many places
Unseen of man, beholden of the faces
Only of elemental shapes of sleep
That are ourselves, her daughters wild and fair
Caught nymphwise in the kisses of the air,
That flings our songs reverberate from
steep to steep,
Songs caught in solar light, we are shed
Even down beyond the valleys of the dead,
And smiled upon in groves ruled by the holy
head.
Great Pan hath heard us, children of his
wooing,
Great Pan, that listens to the forest, suing
Vainly His peace that dwells even in the
desolate halls.
The delicately-chiselled flowers nod,
Look to the skies, and see thee for a God,
O sightless lyre that wails, O viewless voice
that calls!
Thy sound is in our death and in her womb,
Far in Spring’s milky breast, in Autumn’s
gloom,
In Summer’s feast and song, in Winter’s
funerals.
In the dead hollow of the hills there rings,
Sharp song, like frost hissing on silver wings,
Or like the swelling tune we listen to for
Spring’s.