Authors: William Alexander Percy
The swallows curling in the sky,
Less wishful to be gone than I,
Well know the land whereto they fly
In fickle flight.
To bathe in sun-soothed southern air,
Where one cloud-shadow is as rare
As true love, is their only care
And sole delight.
But I, what south could I attain
That would not seem a journey vain
When all my sun doth here remain,
How coldly bright!
Tiberius is in his grave,
But where that is who’s saying?
It’s long and long since hereabouts
Poppaea went a-maying.
Oh, all the hearts that on this breeze
Brush by like motes of gold!
The many a tear, the many a kiss
No secret to this mold!
Oh, let’s not let the lovely dead
Distract us from our passion —
They are so dead, so soon we’ll be!
Love passes like a fashion.
Palazzo di Tiberio
Delight it is has kept me
From thinking much, I fear,
And I’d have loved more wisely
Had not delight been near;
And tears a few he’s cost me,
But saved me many a tear.
O friends that I have clung to
To save me from time’s spite,
O loves of mine whom kissing
I’ve wished all time were night —
I’d keep you all, but lose you
Before I’d lose delight!
When evening skies are smoked with rose,
And dubious spring behind the hill
To come or not a thistle blows,
And buds amaze wet puckered snows —
Then watch your will, your lazy will,
For then he loves to sleep his fill.
He yawns if yearning’s in the breeze,
Nods at violets paused before,
And should you watch with soft unease
The sad blood-pink of Judas trees,
He’s sleeping sure, content to snore
At warm temptation’s very door.
To nunneries, you maidens all!
You old despairs of saving grace,
Young men so lusty-limbed and tall,
To desert caves and diets small!
For earth’s a shameful, sighful place
Beneath the unwimpled spring’s embrace.
O little boats of Capri
That fish a mile from town
And nick the dark with torches
Till heaven is upside-down,
I may forget these brown warm eyes,
These brown throats as they turn,
These girls with burdens on their heads
Like Greek girls on an urn;
Their dark-lashed, rascal sweetness,
Their smiles I may forget, —
But not your constellations
Splashed gold on miles of jet.
Above you Mars and Spica
Curve down into the sea,
Springing from you the Scorpion’s vine
Festoons the heavenly tree.
May all your nets be silver-chocked,
May all your sails win through!
In each of you were sleepless eyes
When mine were sleepless, too.
Lock your sin in a willow cage,
Cover the key with clay:
Hanging beneath your rafters’ shade
He’ll sing for you some day.
Outside your good deeds cluck and strut,
But small’s the joy they bring.
It’s only a wistful prisoner bird
With a wicked heart can sing.
Break not the lock, bend not the withes!
Escaping through some chink,
His song will cease — in your live heart
His beak will take its drink.
Sweet as the furze flower fainting in the noon heat,
The yellow furze flower tufted in a cliff above the ocean,
Floating its too sweet perfume over the peacock waters
And weakening the diving swallows half down the air —
So sweet, so weakening the breath of you comes to me, belovèd,
When I lean over you, or even, even when I dream of you, my flower.
Mournful and miraculous beauty bathes the sea
When the rose-misted sun melts out,
And for one perfect moment —
While two swallows can eddy and plunge their white breasts
From the cliff-crest to the beach —
The waters are misty rose for infinite miles
Save for the silver chariot-tracks of the winds;
Curving and leading nowhere and always silver,
But edged, how strangely, with keen victorious green.
Just over the gray cliffs
In the blue brumal air
Glistens a faint unwilling Hesper,
His curls bound with a fillet of white fire.
Along the sky his steps seem slow
Like a young sulky god’s,
So I should see him as he stands a moment
Dreamily on the cliff top, between the two twisted stone-pines.
There he may pause and watch the blue lilies of the twilight
Like sleep-flowers on the fields of the still sea,
Blue-gray like sleep-flowers on the mountain flanks
And the coves of the unwindy coming night.
There I have stood on other evenings
Watching a long time the lonely twilight.
But the young Hesper has no heart to look.
Barely I saw his silver instep touch the top
And he was gone —
Running, running, not pausing for a glance,
Down the dark other side of the sheep-strewn cliff.
He is no shepherd:
He had no tawny wisp of net over his arm,
No net to cast in the foam-flowered breakers from the beach
Like a fisher-boy.
I think he has some love far down on the tilted side in the darkness
To whom he hurries —
A nymph perhaps, maybe another star
With floating hair and a girl’s silver body.
Surely with such a single amorous haste
Before the night is over,
Even before the Pleiads tremble up,
He will be with her,
Lying, I dare say, greedily,
The sweat-beads pearling still the curve of his shoulders
And his breast still heaving.
I shall bring you blue morning-glories ribbed with purple,
Or hazy-blue plumbago flowers.
But they will not please you: they have no perfume.
Shall I search higher and twitch a spray of golden gorse?
The bees cannot leave it
And it is sweeter and more golden than their honey.
Or I know a cleft above the sapphire ocean
Where grows one shoot of the wild oleander.
Its flowers are crimson pink:
Some say it is Adonis’ blood that they are dipped in,
Others, more rightly, Aphrodite’s own.
And their perfume when full open in the noon heats
Has often made a passing dryad drowsy.
Pan never nears their shadow except on tiptoe —
He has made lucky finds in their sleepy shade.
But you — none of these will content you,
Neither the blue morning-glories
Nor ash-blue clusters of plumbago
Nor gorse that is golden yellow
Nor blood-rose oleanders.
How shall I hope that my heart may please you
Which is less lovely than these,
But not less quickly withered?
Far, far from here,
Above Andritsaena,
In the naked hills that paling darkness covers,
A sandalled goatherd climbs the path
Behind his flock.
Vacant the sleeping pastures,
For the bees, too, still are sleeping,
Vacant and thick with dew and flower-strown,
Tempting to bearded goats.
Slowly he follows them,
Thongs criss-cross to his knees,
With short Arcadian skirt,
A stripling, brown and roughened by the sun.
Limpid breezes,
Running slim fingers through his burnt black hair,
Have touselled it to elf-locks;
Slender and straight,
His thighs are hardened to the upward pull.
Companionless he goes, half insolent,
His crook behind his shoulders,
A smile behind his lips,
A tuft of golden crocus buds
In one cold hand.
His arrogant unamorous eyes, brook-brown,
Scorn to laugh, though flickering with laughter.
The pasture ground is reached,
A rocky hillside, rank with asphodel,
Beneath the temple ruin shepherds know —
Bassae, the healing god’s gray windy house.
The flock apprize the field with yellow eyes,
Shallow and cold,
Then scatter, some
On hind legs reaching for the wet cool buds
Of stunted trees,
Some browsing where the scentless heliotrope
Patterns the ground with white and lilac bloom.
Below,
The brook sends up a breezy sound
From clustered laurel trees
That gad its mirrory lengths along
To watch the crimson fillets of their buds,
That smell and open to the passionate sun.
He stops, lays down his crook,
Then, catching up the world in one sure glance,
Draws from his leathern belt
The uncouth shepherd’s flute,
Perches him on a ledge of seeded grasses
And, knees drawn up,
Fills it with steady breath.
His cheeks swell out;
His neck strains into chords,
Crimsons beneath the tan;
His mischievous eyes tilt upward in delight,
And raucous happy sounds insult the dawn.
Shadows whisk in the temple portico,
Advance on shaggy feet,
Drop down, again advance,
Scurry from bush to bush,
And crowd at last
The crest of hills that half encircle him
Noisy below.
But he pipes on and only hears his piping,
And never sees for all his laughing glances
Flat in the dew, with chin on hand and ears pricked up,
Biting a wisp of feathered grass,
The little wood-gods
Listening.
Far, far from here,
By Tristan’s isle,
The bay awaits the breeze,
Paler than harebells breathed on by the dew,
Paler than turquoise, for the dawn is young
And single stars yet shine above Douarnenez.…
An easterly wind at sunset blew the fishing fleet
From its safe harborage beneath the town
Into the sunset.
With single sails they flew,
Yellow and brown and carmine-stained,
Across the blinding mirrors of the bay,
Beneath the tawny sunset flared with blue,
Beyond the western portals of the world.
But where the cold Atlantic waters, hoar and black,
Catch on their sleek enormous rhythms slurs of stars,
They lowered sail, and rocked upon the swell.
Then nets were cast and glimmering sank,
And night long, with few words
But mighty laborings,
The fisher-folk hauled in the flickering catch.
Beneath the stars they toiled, on ocean’s floor.
But now the night is passing,
Leaving a silver wake
And aster petals halfway up the sky.
It is a lover’s sunrise:
Lavender and gray and shining pink,
A tilted sea-shell’s inner opulence.
Beyond the jetty that the town throws out
For harborage and home to little boats,
The concave waves are dappled with rose leaves
And floats of foam.
At the jetty’s end, far out from shore,
Nearest the point where turning in
From open water to calm anchorage
The fishing-fleet sails past,
A girl is standing.
And only she and the sunrise and wavering gulls
See the curves of rustling tide run in
And hear the calm world’s breathing.
She is not lonely
For all her loneliness,
There in the summer sunrise,
With her simple peasant’s dress of black,
Her meagre shawl of black crochet,
And her peasant’s cap, looped and starched and white,
Prim on her pale gold hair.
Her arms are idly spread across the coping,
Her eyes turn always seaward, for she knows
Soon will the ships come home on the gales of morning,
Soon her lover’s ship, and her tall brown lover,
The sailor-lad, soft-spoken, who is hers.
And he will smile to her his secret smile,
Tending the tiller as the boat swings past,
And wave to her as if to all he waved,
And meet her eyes with his, then look away.
Her lids are lowered and her lips just smile,
For she is conjuring in dream those eyes —
Bitter and bright and blue,
Like thin-topped waves against the sun,
The eyes men fear —
But she knows they can warm and seem to touch
Resistlessly.
And all the while she hums forgetfully
An old, old song the Breton girls have sung
Since first they loved and feared
And eased their hearts in song
(Perhaps Iseult of Brittany
Was humming the same words in that same place
A thousand years ago,
What time she waited for Lord Tristan
Whom she loved so grievously) :
My only love is a sailor lad
Whose home is the fickle sea.
To other girls he gives his smiles,
But his mouth he gives to me.