Authors: William Alexander Percy
Dead, then, the most imperial of emperors
And by some accident of flesh my father!
I am content, Berard; nay, I am glad.
Life’s infamy was overgalling to him.
He suffered like a god that had no part
In its creation, but was resolved — how madly —
To make it over, if not beautiful,
Tolerable at least and roomed for men.
And then, Berard, his godlike loneliness
With only you and me to lean upon!
I but a gold-haired bastard lad and you
An old man sworn to serve the Church he loathed,
Forsworn for love of him; and both of us
Brimmed and surbrimmed by his enormous dreams
And alchemized in his fond fiery love —
But of ourselves unmeriting and common.
How could all nature not rise up and be
His partisan? How could he fail, Berard,
Unless the very dastard race of men
He suffered for deserve its doom of failure?
But I forget the laws of courtesy,
Remembered first, and last forgot by him.
The night is late and you have travelled far
And secretly to tell me of his death.
I should say words of thanks and let you go.
Your hand shakes and you have great need of sleep —
We both have need of sleep, I think — long sleep.
But O, Berard, when that door clangs behind you
It will not ever open on a friend;
And I, the young king of Sardinia,
The emperor’s son, will be a tame pet prisoner
Till the end, till the long sleep we need so.
Sit down, I pray you: let me talk of him —
Of him they call the Second Frederick,
But I call father. Tears — ah! And in your eyes.
How many times I’ve wept so at your knee!
You knew him from his birth, as you knew me,
For which I have it in my heart to envy you.
I’ve often wondered of that little boy
With red wild hair and sultry shadowed eyes,
Orphaned and penniless, the old Pope’s ward,
An unwished, scanted guest from house to house
Among the ignorant burghers of Palermo —
Despite which the incorrigible heir
Of Barbarossa’s and blond Guiscard’s blood.
Those years of vile neglect and unjust anguish
Were often in his eyes, when fixed on me,
And made, I think, the passionate tenderness
Of his solicitude and vigilant love.
I was to be all he had never been —
The darling citizen of his new world;
Delight’s own bosom friend; above all, free.
Now he is dead, his rosy world salt red,
And I the citizen of four wet walls,
Of freedom and of father both bereft!
If he had been content to merely be
The Kingdom’s king, the lord of Sicily:
If when great Barbarossa’s heavy crown
Was tendered to his brows uncrowned with manhood
He had refused it, had not dashed with you
And that gay handful of adventurers
To Constance, crashed the gates to, laughed at Otho —
Today he might be hawking in the Kingdom,
Or matching rhymes with young-voiced troubadours,
Or naming stars with some lean Arab seer:
And I’d be hearing still his great clean laugh.
But then he had been an oblivion’s king,
Not Frederick, the Wonder of the World,
The Torch shook out one great amazed short instant,
Then dashed, to leave for us intenser dark.…
Within this nothingness ahead, I’ll try
Forgetting of the smoky latter years,
The blood spilled and the failure, and solace me
With dreaming of his dream when it was true —
At least it seemed so once in our Palermo.
’Tis not the rich deceptive blue of retrospect
Makes so serenely excellent those days
When you and I, Pietro and Thaddeus,
Were cornerstones of his imperial life,
Miraculously graven with his love.
There never was on earth such dowered peace,
Such laughter blowing through old wisdom’s cell,
Such intellect shot like a proud gold arrow
Into the giant freedom of the sun!
Mere memory of those times is more alive
Than the brash breathing days allowed most mortals!
That room, Berard, that opened on the sea,
Full of slant sunbeams in the afternoon,
Where he revised the idiot world’s affairs
With you by as grave councillor and me,
No taller than a broadsword, listening,
Quite gravely too, as like as not my head
Against his knee, beneath his hovering hand —
That room touched with its inmate light the lengths
Of Araby, Illyria, England, Greece,
Dazzled outlandish folk beyond the Rhine,
Warmed Aragon, Provence, dull Austria,
And flared our own obscure sweet Sicily
Into the day-star of a starless night.
I’d listen in a blinking glow of wonder
To orders, laws, decisions, policies:
A fleet to Reggio; a thousand men to Jaffa;
A brace of falcons to the king of France;
To our belovèd vassals of Cologne
A charter and the right of toll; requests
For cotton and the barley seed he promised
Of Sultan Kamel, our especial friend,
Appended to a note on Aristotle;
Exemption of all silk looms from taxation;
Death for a judge whose greed was not for justice;
Appointment of a notary for Flanders,
A seneschal for Treves, a captain for
The ships of oil and wheat outbound for India;
Our thanks to Brother Leo for the copy
Of that last Canticle as Francis wrote it,
Enclosing our own manuscript on hawking;
An edict granting freedom to the Jews:
The whole a brave clear text of liberal wisdom
Illumined with light-hearted blue and gold!
The pageant of the world passed through that room,
Their colors burning in the moted sunlight —
Ambassadors and pilgrims, knights and seers,
Star-gazers, troubadours, philosophers,
The wise, the wisdom-seeking, the renowned.
The race’s best and foremost swarmed to him
As night-things to a streaming far-seen light.
But when the day was over, the candles lit,
The last petitioner gone, the empire’s needs
Dismissed till morning, then it was, Berard,
The day began, for then we were alone.
He’d think aloud to me, pacing the room’s length
Or standing mute, one hand lost in his beard,
His brain the battle-ground of two strong thoughts.
’Twas then the infinite details of his task
Assembled in perspective, and resolved
To fractions of his intricate patterned dream.
And when his vehement revery was done
That smile he had for me would quite uncloud
His face, and with one arm about my shoulder
He’d pass out to the sea-cooled balcony
Where the full darkness fell and no sound stole.
And he would stand there silent a long while,
Watching in a profound remote repose
The multitudinous slow flight of stars,
All hush and ecstasy, or, far beneath,
The bleak silver ocean barred with black,
Calm as eternity, though quivering always.
Then he would say: “Now let us sleep, my son.
The infinitudes of beauty with no toil
Pursue their ministries we may not guess,
Though vibrant to the music they exhale:
Our waking or our sleep will vex them not.”
He was aware no keenlier of the actual
Than of the instigating powers that buoy us.
Caesar, I think, nor Alexander saw
So rightly nor so far into the dark.
The day that thrust me suddenly from boy’s
To man’s estate shines yet through fifteen years.
It was the day he honored Michael Scott
As though the king of India were his guest,
Not some pinched nobody in broidered gown
Of stars and moons and suns and hieroglyphs,
Who dubbed himself astrologer and watched
Dancing girls, rabbis, princes, desert sheiks —
The palace-full assembled in his honor —
In the cold English way and never laughed.
But most, I found, he watched my glowing father,
Single in debonair and gracious ease
Among the guests. And I could swear, Berard,
There was some dry and cynic pity in his gaze.
Then Pietro asked him, in a voice all heard,
What was the emperor’s own fated star.
With his thin smile and pale satiric eyes
He answered in a blight of sudden silence
“Canopus,” and again the silence closed.
My father’s laugh was shorter than his words:
“A star so small his very name’s unknown.”
“Ask of your Arab friends,” the wizard’s voice
Ran smooth as ice: “In fiery magnitude
He is the greatest of all stars.” “Then why,”
Pursued my father, “should I have never seen
His flaming orb?” There was a long strange pause.
At last the answer came, but hardly heard:
“He is too bright for our cold northern skies.
They see him but an instant, then he goes.”
My father laughed, “Thanks for a brilliant moment,”
And with accustomed calm and showered banter
Passed through the company. Alone with me,
In silence that seemed almost sorrowful,
He reached the room I loved and sat awhile
In some abstracted lassitude of thought,
While I, boylike, wished Michael Scott were dead.
Thus da Vigna found us.
O even now
’Tis hard to hate da Vigna — and then he seemed
The perfect knight; as poet, councillor,
Vice-regent, friend, the nonpareil and pattern.
There was such glitter of resolve about him,
Such frankness, yet such reticence of mood,
As if he were a quarrying hawk that hovered
For game far off before he flashed and struck.
Ah, well, that night he only came to reckon
What stallions would be needed for Apulia,
And how Phoenician trade might be drawn off
From Genoa and the purple ships of Venice.
Pietro da Vigna leaned across the table
Fingering maps and schedules while my father,
Sunk in his cushioned chair almost a throne,
Listened, the weavings of his burnished gown
Seeming to breathe in the gold-spun candlelight.
Then Pietro said the rebel town of Bari —
To capture which was his express stout task —
Had not yet fallen, nay, it would not fall
Until a further complement of men
Was furnished them that had attacked in vain.
There was a panther stir in the great chair.
“I have no men to send you,” came his voice.
“Then Bari holds out till the crack o’ doom,”
Broke bitterly from Pietro. My father grew
Stone still, and when his voice at last whipped out
It was no friendly voice: “Why ask for men
Before you have exhausted gold and guile?”
Da Vigna’s hand went dead among his papers
And dead his face, except his eyes that winced.
But he was silent. Again the emperor spoke:
“Bribe them: or feast their leaders at a truce
And poison them.” Pietro at that leaped up,
Pale truly, but a thousand miles from fear:
“Bribe or assassinate, your Majesty,
But find a fitter tool for such base work.”
His voice was steady challenge and despair.
I shut my eyes so that I might not see
My father’s terrible anger boiling up,
But when I looked his chin was on his hand
And he regarded Pietro dreamily
And from a cold great distance. Then he said,
As if in weariness: “Sit down: compose
That answer to the Pope we planned together,
While I have Enzio read aloud to me
His last translation from the happy Greek.
His Arab master found it in Byzantium.”
So, gulping down the terror I had felt,
I found the manuscript, leaned back against
His knees, and while da Vigna seemed to write
And he to sleep, for he was breathless-still,
With eyelids closed, I read aloud to him.
And the very candles seemed to fall asleep.
It was the story of the son of Helios,
His gold-haired only son, not yet a man,
Who, watching his divinely sinewed father
Drive from the stables of the dark each dawn
The chariot and horses of the sun,
Besought that he might be their driver once
And for one glorying lonely day race up
The azure mountain of the infinite air.
And dotingly his father gave him leave,
While his young sisters of the clear gold hair
Wept for him as they wandered by the river
Gathering hyacinths. But who may bear
The burden of all light through solitude
Except a god? Or, swathed in dizzy foam
Of hissing manes, hold to their difficult course
Those passionate stallions fed on naked fire?
Half up the sky, seething in whirlwind light,
He gazed in anguish on the earth he knew,
The friendly, populous earth, dappled with shade,
And through his sweat-bright hands the taut reins slipped.
Down plunged the horses, down the chariot plunged;
And like a meteor in full day descried
Headlong the gold-haired son of Helios fell —
Silent and lovely, his hand before his eyes.…
I ceased. There was great quietness, except
My father’s hand was groping in my hair.
It seemed he had been speaking ere he spoke:
“But thou shalt never fall, my son, nor guide
Alone the golden chariot of the sun.
My hands shall grasp the reins and close beside me
Thou shalt behold the turmoil of my sky,
The sweetness of thine earth, smiling, untroubled.”