Authors: William Alexander Percy
All has been said that need be said, all has been done.
Let us return through the fields she loved in the sorrowless sun,
And steady our hearts if we may, our hearts so many, yet one.
Not for forgetting she’d ask, to spare us our brief pain:
She knew the Lethe in all sorrow; she knew the gain,
The flower that blows but by the flower-forgotten rain.
Because of her, life was sweeter: that be the whole of our praise —
Tenderness wrought in a few, a few but for all of their days.
Than that is it fairer at last to have honors, anthems, and bays?
Let us touch hands and part. If simple words can bless
May ours through the mothering grass fall softly and caress:
Earth, lie gently on a heart all gentleness.
When I go down to Acheron,
A tired lonely shade,
I’ll wish the hand of some sweet ghost,
Once dear, in mine were laid;
And ferrying that murky flood
The valiant scorn to drink,
I’ll strain to see the dead I love
Down at the landing’s brink.
Far off in blue and silver glens
Where melts the folded mist,
They will be loitering blissfully
In cloaks of amethyst.
But as my prow scrapes on the marl,
One watcher faithful, quaint,
Will dash to meet me who am still
His master, friend, and saint.
And Rip with paws upon my breast
And warm breath on my hair
Will tell with little snuggled whines
How long was waiting there,
And how the madness is quite gone
That turned his heart untrue.
I shall have lost, please Proserpine,
Somewhat of madness, too.
Evening brings all things home that bright day scattered —
The lamb, the kid, the child, each to its mother.
You, you only, evening brings not home,
But comes, for me, without the evening star.
This same white snake of road the great dead trod,
Each with some dolorous burden such as mine:
Each prayed of Helios, the healing god,
A cure, an answer, some one heartening sign.
Here Agamemnon stood and Œdipus,
Here I, and Nicias, and Pericles.
The selfsame answer came to each of us:
I learn as little now, as then did these.
Yet they that sought for comfort, and in vain,
Returned, and lived, and mostly found life good,
But, good or ill, labored and took their pain
As if their acre were the Sacred Wood.
And it is well to know that there’s no grief
A god may pluck away and heal us from
And none too great to bear, for all are brief,
And we are kingliest when most they come.
I have no knowledge what it was
That Atlas stood upon,
The time he hove the burly world
And held it in the sun —
Ignorance that alone prevents
My shouldering as much,
Who reel to lift sunflower-high
A bubble-soul or such.
Damocles, friend Damocles,
Felicitous in single doom,
High in the dark of my own room
So many sword-blades tug and tease
I envy luck like Damocles’.
I knew Midas, I knew him well,
I am familiar with his hell:
A secret cankered in his heart,
By speech he thought to ease the smart
And chose for hearers of his shame
Reeds that suck mud and have no name,
Fancying though they’d shed no tear
They might than man (his brother dear)
Calumniate less tauntingly
God’s curse and his deformity.
(Midas, Midas, couldn’t you guess?
Cracked bells should be clapperless.)
There is a tale of brow and clotted hair
Thrust in the window of a banquet room
Which froze eternally the revellers there,
The lights full on them in their postured doom:
The queen still held the carmine to her lips,
The king’s mouth stood wide open for its laugh,
The jester’s rigid leer launched silent quips;
Only a blind man moved and tapped his staff.
I cannot guess that physiognomy
The sight of which could curdle into stone
The gazer, though pities, horrors, terrors I
Have made encounter of and sometimes known.
But I knew one who turned to stone with terror
Of facing quietly a flawless mirror.
See the grasshoppers, flame-colored, beautiful,
Singing and flying in the harsh sunlight,
On the heights of Phæstos, Phæstos trembling with sun.
Hear the click of their wings, flame-colored,
And watch them swarming and singing
Where once the high-built palace towered and sang,
Where now the rubble whitens in glare.
The dark blue sea is yonder
With mints and thyme and grasses,
And yonder down in the valley
The plane trees pool their shadow,
The olives sprinkle a shifting lace,
And the cypresses like silence
Lay a finger of shade.
Surely if I had wings,
I should go slithering down
Where the rose-laurels wade in the pasture,
Their perfume hazy about them,
Heavy with bloom and drowsy,
Too beautiful, ah, to think of.
Why are they crowding here,
Shutting, unshutting their wings,
Here on the shadowless cliff-top
Where only the thistle is thriving,
Blue through all of its body,
Hot blue like a twist of the sky?
The thistles, the parched pale grasses,
These and the dead acanthus,
These are all that remain
Of the garlands and wreaths of Phæstos,
On the shattered tomb of Phæstos.
Why are they here with their singing
And not on the steep of Ida
Where chalk-marks of snow attest
The infinite ravage of summer?
Ah, these are the people of Minos,
The beautiful flame-colored Cretans of old,
Who sang through the palace and danced in the dædal days,
In the delicate days before Troy.
And now they cry through the palace,
Drunk with the harsh desolation,
Mad with the terrible sunlight,
Calling for Minos the king,
Calling for sweet Ariadne,
In the empty desolate sunlight,
Flashing their flame-colored wings.
Beauty gone, and beauty gone,
And gallant wisdom lost —
Crowns the race so hardly won,
Twines of phantom frost!
Sappho and Empedocles,
Time’s kleptomaniac clan
Coffers their gold where golden sleep
Knossos and Yucatan.
Dreams that found their way in stone,
Cool mesmerists of peace,
Or flushed to plumage in a song,
Or crimsoned Parian Greece,
Loveliness dissuaded from
The locked and stubborn air —
What rifling of the golden urn,
Our ransom from despair!
Learn again, and lose again,
Create, and then destroy —
For knowledge is the race’s game
And loveliness its toy.
He stood with the screen of trees betwixt him and the summit,
The oak-trees of his father, old as time and bronze,
But vehement silver now where the moonlight sprinkled the leaves with silver
And even the ebon snakes of the trunks and branches
Had markings of silver and burned where they curved.
Beyond the screen, where his somber gaze thrust vainly,
Eternal dark and hush, the place of the god,
Dread abode of his father, under the stars.
He spoke, and the untrembling silver of the trees
Shivered: “My brother is dead.” The silence healed,
Like lake-water where a sword thrusts and withdraws.
He waited. Again his low words shook and died away:
“I am your son, and you have slain my brother.”
The tangle of the trees plunged in a panic breathing
And reared, the rapid silver of their undersides quaking like mail;
But the words clove them large and quiet, for the god spoke:
“The beautiful children of the earth perish:
It is the law. And brief is sorrow.”
But the elder and immortal of the Dioscuri
Lowered not his head, and the long pallor of his throat
Shone like marble, only the hollow at its base in shadow:
“My sorrow has no mortal element to briefen it.
Send into hell, not unpitiful god, and fetch my brother back.”
An ocean sigh from the core of dark took tone: “To die again?”
As a young hunter lost in the woods, in the twilight forest,
Passing the craggy mouth of some gray cave,
Feels the cold river of ghosts flow out and eddy about him
And draws back shuddering, his sidelong eyes gone gray —
So Pollux shrank, and cold flooded him.
But anger followed, and thrust him one pace nearer,
So the shadow of a leaf lay in his outstretched palm;
“Then, one by one, you will strike down my heart’s belovèds —
They mortal, I deformed by immortality — until
Parting’s repeated anguish wean me of love!
Bring not my brother back, O god, if he must die again
And I must watch a second horror film his eyes
And touch his eyelids down and know they will not lift,
But take instead my immortality;
Deliver me to hell and him release to earth.
You slew him when he seemed to me
For all his manhood but a little boy
Who’d just made treasure of the wild bee’s comb
And dipped his finger in its honey, once.
Let him live out the natural little span
Of his own kind, the warm high-hearted life of earth,
Even to the cruel ebb and break of age;
And I will take his place and sit in weary hell,
Nor plead for change, immortal god.”
Vainly he waited answer —
The dark behind the steepled silver of the oak-trees
Tolled with silence. His anger ebbed.
Down the gigantic undulations of Olympos
The moonlight streamed in quietness, and far, far down
Seeped through the patterned woods
And pooled about the timid outlander’s unlighted hut
And brimming through the sedgy pastures far below
Piled with gray glister of innumerable sheaves
The mead of the infertile sea.
Through the long levels of the air
The earth-sounds rose, infrequent and unearthly:
The loud cicada of the goatherd’s shout,
The thud where ocean in her sleep
Flings one arm up the shore,
The warning from mid-air the leader of the wild-geese sounds
Piloting through the smoke of smouldering Troy
His solemn echelons.
Pollux heard the signal of the bird
As he stood at the portal of the unmerciful god,
And pain bowed his beautiful head and closed his eyes:
For he remembered how in Lacedæmon
When the first film of ice clinked on the marshes
And grass was stiff and morning blue with cold,
He lay in the saw-grass with his laughing brother
As the honking flights drew in;
Together whispering they lay and peered and counciled
Till the seething wings stormed in and thundered above their covert,
When crying aloud they leaped, and loosened the long clean arrows.
He remembered, and bowed, alone in the moonlight;
His heart was founded within him, the fresh wound bled,
And he turned to the god again, for otherwhere
There was no turning and no hope at all.
His voice plead through his words:
“You will not bring him back … Then let me go
And be with him in hell, for hell with him
Is sweeter than the earth without.”
The words broke there; his sorrow’s reason went unsaid;
But they had been in Lacedæmon, their dear home,
Twin sprays of apple-bloom
When rain has wetted them and they seem younger still.
Hopelessly he stood now nor deemed the god would speak
The revocation of his doom or let him search
The draughty twilight land of Dis for Castor, lost.
So when no sound breathed from the black recess
But the shadows blotched immovably the sand
And the leaf-light shone unsplinteringly,
He turned and with slow hesitant footsteps made toward the slope,
The deep and chasm of the pearl-gray air before him.
But where the crest declines, he paused, wheeled,
His rapid steps returning spattered the sand to silver.
Into the shadow of the branches, into the sacred shadow, he plunged
And the leaves, affrighted, dappled his loveliness.
Leaning, he clung to the midmost branch, and his words poured urgently:
“Ah, piteous god, vexed with dooms and lonely,
Hear me, and read my pain’s petitioning
Not in my words, but in the script where it is written, here!
Hateful to me is hell, and the drear nightmare of the dead,
My veins teem with the rank cold ichor of the gods
Which heals with heartlessness
And lets them bear with laughter
The eternal misery outspread.
In the sweet ways of earth, in the long years,
I would forget my brother, or remember
With tenderness unvenomed of all pain.
I would live on in leafy Lacedæmon
With new companions and the olden zest,
Renewed, eternal, lordly in strength,
And tinder to the spark of hot adventure.
Felicities ahead, on the dancing floor of the cymballed sun,
Even with Castor gone, allure me more
Than faint companionship with him among the shades.
This is the truth, the shameful truth of wisdom
That rowels to rebellion all my heart.
But god, my father, O lonely god,
He is the lonesomest of all your ghosts!
Life to him was my companionship,
And now, bewildered, on the bank of Lethe
He waits, his heart calls like a child in fear,
Calls out for me, who always answered.
If I had gone before him into hell
He would have followed, wilfuller than fate.
The swan-like woman, our own mother, and the swan-bright sire
Dowered us both with cold white hardihood,
But him with the wild swan’s burden and perfection
Of single love. He needed me in life,
And, O, in death, implacable and holy sire,
His need is infinite, and tears my heart!
Let me cast off my youth, and die, and be with him!
I kneel for what men ask delaying of —
Beseech you, father, death!”
A great peace came, the stillness grew all peace;
The wings of the oak-trees drooped and curved themselves
Over the bowed young god. His bosom was drenched with peace.
And the glory of a voice bright-brimming
Covered him over with ravelled rainbows of music;
“As the wild swans beautiful and silver
Float in the coral air of summer evening,
Mated and inseparable lovers,
So I shall set the dear sons of the swan
In the low sky of summer, in the pure twilight,
Beautiful companions, silver stars!
Aldebaran shall call to them
And Sirius lift his blue targe in salute;
Orion’s hail shall shake his jewelled corselet
And the young keepers of the outposts
Pacing the battlements and watch-paths of creation
Pause and turn on them their eyes, friendly and pure.
What sons of earth dare the vast floor of ocean
At sight of them, on evenings of early summer,
Standing together in dewfall, in the burnished twilight,
Shall dance on the deck and tipple the bulging goatskin,
For starlight weathers are at hand.”
And Pollux heard; the tears broke;
He stretched himself on the ground,
And touched with his fingers the dark hem of the god.