Collected Works (Vol. III)

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.