LIBER QUARTUS VEL MORTIS
205
AUTONOE.
Fall soft and sweet !
AGAVE,
Moaning for love the woods lie.
AUTONOE.
Sad the land
Lies thirsty for our kisses.
MANADS,
All wild things
Yearn towards the kiss that ends in blood.
AGAVE.
Blood! Blood!
Bromius, Bromius!
Ha!
Bring wine !
MAENADS.
Come, sweet God,
Come forth and lie with us !
AUTONOE.
Us, maidens now
And then and ever afterwards !
AGAVE,
Chaste, chaste !
Our madness hath no touch of bitterness,
No taste of foulness in the morning mouth.
AUTONOE,
O mouth of ripe red sunny grapes! God!
God !
Evoe! Dwell! Abide!
AGAVE.
I feel the wings
Of love, of mystery ; they waft soft streams
Of night air to my heated breast and brow.
MANADS.
He comes! Iie comes!
AGAVE,
Silence, O girls, and peace !
The God’s most holy presence asks the hymn
The solemn hymn, the hymn of agony,
Lest in the air of glory that surrounds
The child of Semelé we lose the earth
And corporal presence of the Zeus-begot.
AUTONOR,
Yea, sisters, raise the chant of riot! Lift
Your wine-sweet voices, move your wine-
stained limbs
In joyful invocation !
M-ENADS.
Ay, we sing.
Hail, child of Semelé !
To her as unto thee
Be reverence, be deity, be immortality !
Shame ! treachery of the spouse
Of the Olympian house,
Hlera! thy grim device against the sweet
carouse !
Lo! in red roar and flame
Did Zeus descend! What claim
To feel the immortal fire had then the
-Theban dame !
Caught in that fiery wave
Her love and life she gave
With one last kissing cry the unborn child
to save.
And thou, O Zeus, the sire
Of Bromius—hunter dire !—
Didst snatch the unborn babe from
Olympian fire :
that
In thine own thigh most holy
That ofispring melancholy
Didst hide, didst feed, on light, ambrosia,
and moly.