Authors: William Alexander Percy
Unto perfection I was born;
The shepherd boy, who would not see my sin,
Recalled me to myself. That was the end …
Imperative to keep my soul superb,
For his sake, mine, and Thine,
And one sole method to that end.
But lest my resolution should be wax
Beneath his nearness, and because I chose
To speak with Thee apart, in calm,
I minded me of those, my lying words.
Therefore, when morning bore the harbor ships
Upon their devious, blue wanderings,
Myself, beneath a glistening sail, wide-eyed,
Gazed on the fading island that I loved,
A last, long time on Lesbos …
Think not, O Zeus, I render me to death
Because the shepherd loved me not.
Such pain as many mortals bear,
Myself would scorn to shun.
Sterner than unrequited love the cause,
And not unpitiful.… Perhaps in time
My burnt, high-bosomed beauty might have lured
His blood — No, no! not that! not possible!
Hearken, O God, the truth, the utter truth!
Had mine been siren sorcery
To draw him tremulous to my desire,
And had he answered love with love,
Passion with passion, ardent equally —
I know that I had cooled — the wanton’s trick —
Found tedious what had been bliss, grown strange,
At last, despised! More — more — I stifle —
If far from Lesbos and from him
I should remain — I should forget the boy!
And this — indignant heart of mine, I will not lie —
Could Phaon’s magic pass,
Yet other snares, perhaps as sweet — if such
Could be, — would trap and madden me as his.
Some summer-tinted mouth, some curvèd throat;
The Bacchic grace of some young body, bare
And glistening in the games — I know … I know …
Perhaps some throbbing, lawless-eyed barbarian,
Sea-burnt, gorgeous, and bestial —
Surely, not that, my God!
But always I shall be
Hurt with the vehemence of too, too perfect beauty;
Bare and resistless always
To all the sorceries of fair, fair flesh! …
Enough … The truth hath sickened me …
But all is told, and now comes rest.
I would make calm my brow and heart for death.
One step across this darkling cliff, and in
The ocean’s weary breathing I am caught,
Made one, assuaged forever. Yet I pause …
The bitter sea with its pale tentacles
Of foam half seen below my feet cannot
Now make me truckle unto cowardice,
Who knew not fear in life … But is it life,
Not death, I dare not face? ’Tis surely ill
The wine of life to spill contemptuously,
Wearied, in wantonness, or in despite.
If, though, the wine of its own nature sour,
Lose all the jewel and the perfume, shall
The drinker pause to cast it back to earth?
Why spare the rose
Doomed to the worm? The soul incurably
Hurt with a crescent sin? T’ avoid
The loosened shaft of seen necessity
Is wisdom, not some trick of fear.
To me, my kinship with immortal things
Hath been too clear revealed that I should watch
With willingness my retrogression to the clay
And baseness mortals own as parent.
Either the starry, wind-swept, sea-enraptured soul
Of me, myself, myself shall last unto the end.
Or summonable death shall quench me out
Undimmed, exalted still.
No cowardice, O Zeus, I swear!
With all my spirit I have ever fought
Life’s battles; nor testing conflict shunned,
When righteousness made part. But when the enemy
Thou sett’st against me is the sacred element,
The prime nobility that wings my spirit,
What boots the battle? And the event — defeat
Or victory alike — is utter ruin.
To me hath beauty been the ripple and the light
That proved a sea divine,
Sweeping the stars, our little universe, all, all,
Into the wave of some sublime and glittering doom.
Oh, always beauty was to me
Thyself half seen, my Father.
In windy leaves and grass, thy laughter loose,
In yellow noon, thy nectared, slumberous ease,
Thy clean and lofty joy in high, sun-striken woods,
In storms thy restlessness, thyself
In this vast, darkling sea.
And this same beauty now betrayeth me.
So long as life by it is made divine,
So long by it am I made harlot-hearted.
No cure, no cure! but oh,
That such perfection in such wise should be
Rifted, and out of harmony!
Methinks, Thyself, the author of the flaw,
Must doubt Thy fathering wisdom.
Indeed, indeed, beneath their calm content,
Thou and the other gods must feel the tears
That make the human breast almost divine,
To see me thus, alone and lonely,
That once was Sappho, song o’ the world.…
And yet no wind of heaven beareth me
Breath of compassioning.… Perhaps they laugh or scorn.
Oh, can it be that in the halls of heaven
The very gods are tainted with the Cyprian’s sin?
What if the bestial gossip told of them be true,
And too authentic be the lecherous tales
Of Io and the rest?
Then will I break with all the gods,
And more divine than they, snuff out this flame
Ere it be vile with universal degradation!
O night, O night, am I the only struggling thing?
Doth any cry save mine rise to thy stars
Against the tyranny of flesh and mortal grossness?
O mothering darkness, fold
Obliteration closer round me, for
Mine eyes blur, and my throat is hurt
With welling pain.… Tears, tears,
Ye rob me of the little left me, godly pride,
And leave me woman.…
And I had thought the hour that summed
And closed my lonely struggle for perfection,
Had been a thing of triumph. It is pitiful.
Leaning across this sea here in the night,
A moment’s space from death, I can recall
No old, high legend whereupon to lean my heart.
Instead, I seem to know the rain-grey, hungering eyes
Calypso bent across the surge that gave
And took forever her delight.
The deep air, too, seems somehow cleansed with tears,
And cooler grown. The stars are not so close.
A breath of silver up the sky! Again —
Dawn! dawn! O Zeus,
The dawn that I had thought to never see!
Eastward the cold light brims into the sky
And joyous sweeps away the stars that watched with me.
They come no more.… Dawn.… Dawn, and spring
again!
This grey and lucent hour, light sleep
Steals from the shepherds’ clustered curls,
And leaves them dewy as the bended grass.
At home it is a dawn of dew and hyacinths,
With silver-footed April loose upon the hills.
Along the curving road the flocks
Lag half asleep, lag, but still come
Nearer and nearer till —
Oh, the insufferable beauty of his bending head!
O home! O Lesbos!
To lean above that roadside, breathless,
And see again the shepherd boy I love —
His thonged and sandalled grace —
His bare, brown throat —
The violets careless round his head —
Those eyes of spring and unawakened fire —
The dew and roses of the mouth that once I kissed!
Forget, forget all else, O gods, and grant this boon!
Bear me back home to Lesbos and the boy!
Steep me but one short hour in his love!
Oh, let the anguished crimson of his mouth
Seek fire from mine, and all his brown, light grace
Flame into strength to crush my paleness; let
His morning eyes know drought and noon,
The haze of hidden tears, the film of hope,
And me the only cool and dew.
One misty, scarlet kiss within your arms —
Phaon! Phaon!
I would forswear song — beauty — Zeus, my father …
Ah, — madness — madness — uncoil, old anguish! … Ah!
O cool, grey wind of dawn! O sea! —
Thou harlot-hearted woman, sleep!
And wake thou, Sappho, leafy-templed child of God!
Upon the lovely world another day.…
Come, fearless, piteous heart of mine … come.…
At last the comfort and the cleansing of the sea.
Surely in no benignant mood
The gods have fashioned us, but craftily
To send us homing to the sod
Wise only in our own futility.
With hyancinthine brows of youth,
We enter life as to a festival;
But, ere the feast is spread, the gods
Snatch back the wine, the song, the coronal.
And, lusterless, we turn, afraid,
Turn to the sole vouchsafèd heritage,
And in the shaken darkness clutch
The disenchanted ledges of old age.
Thy taunting happiness,
Thy overbold upflashing bliss,
Pierces my heart to-night, O mocking-bird!
Beneath the limpid surge of darkness,
The awe of stars and all the hush,
Thou flingest far thy little joy, unawed —
Flushed with some momentary triumph,
Or stray, delicious whim.
The tumult of thy silver mockery
Shakes through the trees, across the trancèd lawn,
And rouses weariness to pain within my heart.
Cease, cease thy rapture!
To-night the courage and the joy are gone;
I would forget the battles and the ceaseless clash,
The long, rewardless surge of strife,
The race run and no laurels,
The fight fought and no guerdon.
To-night, only to-night, ’tis sweet
No more to buffet with the winds of grief
But bend to them, luxuriously abandoned.
Again the light notes leap
In gusts of gaiety!
Ah, bird, thy song, derisive of defeat
And age and the inevitable doom,
Is but the song of mine own people —
The conquerors, the unafraid —
And thou, in thy bright arrogance and fearless bliss
Summest the spirit of a newer age,
The unprophetic confidence
Of this new-sinewed western world.
Cease, cease thy song of triumph and unwisdom!
To-night I long to hear an alien sweetness that
Long vision hath made sad.
Oh, for a silver-steepèd garden overseas,
Hung with too poignant perfumes,
Where thy frail sister lifts her piteous cry,
Her little hidden cry,
Sharp with a hundred centuries of pain,
Hurt with the constant woe,
The weariness and all the tears
Of generations that have gone, darkly!
Oh, to forget this western flaunt of living!
To breathe in those far lands that air
Breathèd by dreamers dead, lovely and purposeless;
To hear the anguished nightingale that Sappho heard;
To see beneath the moon the olive trees
And cypresses asleep, as when Antinous,
With eastern-scented brows and poppy lids
Looked forth, godlike, upon them;
To catch, perhaps, — the myrtle boughs between —
Glimpse of that unforgettable, sweet sea
That heard of yore Sicilian shepherd boys
Piping across their shining pastures,
That still, upon the shores of Ithaca,
Beareth the blue, Homeric. star-entangled tide!