PANTHEA

Nay, let us walk from fire unto fire,

From passionate pain to deadlier delight, –

I am too young to live without desire,

Too young art thou to waste this summer night

Asking those idle questions which of old

Man sought of seer and oracle, and no reply was told.

For, sweet, to feel is better than to know,

And wisdom is a childless heritage,

One pulse of passion – youth’s first fiery glow, –

Are worth the hoarded proverbs of the sage:

Vex not thy soul with dead philosophy,

Have we not lips to kiss with, hearts to love and eyes to see!

Dost thou not hear the murmuring nightingale,

Like water bubbling from a silver jar,

So soft she sings the envious moon is pale,

That high in heaven she is hung so far

She cannot hear that love-enraptured tune, –

Mark how she wreathes each horn with mist, yon late and labouring moon.

White lilies, in whose cups the gold bees dream,

The fallen snow of petals where the breeze

Scatters the chestnut blossom, or the gleam

Of boyish limbs in water, – are not these

Enough for thee, dost thou desire more?

Alas! the Gods will give nought else from their eternal store.

For our high Gods have sick and wearied grown

Of all our endless sins, our vain endeavour

For wasted days of youth to make atone

By pain or prayer or priest, and never, never,

Hearken they now to either good or ill,

But send their rain upon the just and the unjust at will.

They sit at ease, our Gods they sit at ease,

Strewing with leaves of rose their scented wine,

They sleep, they sleep, beneath the rocking trees

Where asphodel and yellow lotus twine,

Mourning the old glad days before they knew

What evil things the heart of man could dream, and dreaming do.

And far beneath the brazen floor they see

Like swarming flies the crowd of little men,

The bustle of small lives, then wearily

Back to their lotus-haunts they turn again

Kissing each others’ mouths, and mix more deep

The poppy-seeded draught which brings soft purple-lidded sleep.

There all day long the golden-vestured sun,

Their torch-bearer, stands with his torch ablaze,

And, when the gaudy web of noon is spun

By its twelve maidens, through the crimson haze

Fresh from Endymion’s arms comes forth the moon,

And the immortal Gods in toils of mortal passions swoon.

There walks Queen Juno through some dewy mead,

Her grand white feet flecked with the saffron dust

Of wind-stirred lilies, while young Ganymede

Leaps in the hot and amber-foaming must,

His curls all tossed, as when the eagle bare

The frightened boy from Ida through the blue Ionian air.

There in the green heart of some garden close

Queen Venus with the shepherd at her side,

Her warm soft body like the briar rose

Which would be white yet blushes at its pride,

Laughs low for love, till jealous Salmacis

Peers through the myrtle-leaves and sighs for pain of lonely bliss.

There never does that dreary north-wind blow

Which leaves our English forests bleak and bare,

Nor ever falls the swift white-feathered snow,

Nor ever doth the red-toothed lightning dare

To wake them in the silver-fretted night

When we lie weeping for some sweet sad sin, some dead delight.

Alas! they know the far Lethaean spring,

The violet-hidden waters well they know,

Where one whose feet with tired wandering

Are faint and broken may take heart and go,

And from those dark depths cool and crystalline

Drink, and draw balm, and sleep for sleepless souls, and anodyne.

But we oppress our natures, God or Fate

Is our enemy, we starve and feed

On vain repentance – O we are born too late!

What balm for us in bruised poppy seed

Who crowd into one finite pulse of time

The joy of infinite love and the fierce pain of infinite crime.

O we are wearied of this sense of guilt,

Wearied of pleasure’s paramour despair,

Wearied of every temple we have built,

Wearied of every right, unanswered prayer,

For man is weak; God sleeps: and heaven is high:

One fiery-coloured moment: one great love; and lo! we die.

Ah! but no ferry-man with labouring pole

Nears his black shallop to the flowerless strand,

No little coin of bronze can bring the soul

Over Death’s river to the sunless land,

Victim and wine and vow are all in vain,

The tomb is sealed; the soldiers watch; the dead rise not again.

We are resolved into the supreme air,

We are made one with what we touch and see,

With our heart’s blood each crimson sun is fair,

With our young lives each spring-impassioned tree

Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range

The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change.

With beat of systole and of diastole

One grand great life throbs through earth’s giant heart,

And mighty waves of single Being roll

From nerveless germ to man, for we are part

Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,

One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill.

From lower cells of waking life we pass

To full perfection; thus the world grows old:

We who are godlike now were once a mass

Of quivering purple flecked with bars of gold,

Unsentient or of joy or misery,

And tossed in terrible tangles of some wild and wind-swept sea.

This hot hard flame with which our bodies burn

Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil,

Ay! and those argent breasts of thine will turn

To water-lilies; the brown fields men till

Will be more fruitful for our love to-night,

Nothing is lost in nature, all things live in Death’s despite.

The boy’s first kiss, the hyacinth’s first bell,

The man’s last passion, and the last red spear

That from the lily leaps, the asphodel

Which will not let its blossoms blow for fear

Of too much beauty, and the timid shame

Of the young bridegroom at his lover’s eyes, – these with the same

One sacrament are consecrate, the earth

Not we alone hath passions hymeneal,

The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth

At daybreak know a pleasure not less real

Than we do, when in some fresh-blossoming wood,

We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that life is good.

So when men bury us beneath the yew

Thy crimson-stained mouth a rose will be,

And thy soft eyes lush bluebells dimmed with dew,

And when the white narcissus wantonly

Kisses the wind its playmate some faint joy

Will thrill our dust, and we will be again fond maid and boy.

And thus without life’s conscious torturing pain

In some sweet flower we will feel the sun,

And from the linnet’s throat will sing again,

And as two gorgeous-mailed snakes will run

Over our graves, or as two tigers creep

Through the hot jungle where the yellow-eyed huge lions sleep

And give them battle! how my heart leaps up

To think of that grand living after death

In beast and bird and flower, when this cup,

Being filled too full of spirit, bursts for breath,

And with the pale leaves of some autumn day

The soul earth’s earliest conqueror becomes earth’s last great prey.

O think of it! we shall inform ourselves

Into all sensuous life, the goat-foot Faun,

The Centaur, or the merry bright-eyed Elves

That leave their dancing rings to spite the dawn

Upon the meadows, shall not be more near

Than you and I to nature’s mysteries, for we shall hear

The thrush’s heart beat, and the daisies grow,

And the wan snowdrop sighing for the sun

On sunless days in winter, we shall know

By whom the silver gossamer is spun,

Who paints the diapered fritillaries,

On what wide wings from shivering pine to pine the eagle flies.

Ay! had we never loved at all, who knows

If yonder daffodil had lured the bee

Into its gilded womb, or any rose

Had hung with crimson lamps its little tree!

Methinks no leaf would ever bud in spring,

But for lovers’ lips that kiss, the poets’ lips that sing.

Is the light vanished from our golden sun,

Or is this daedal-fashioned earth less fair,

That we are nature’s heritors, and one

With every pulse of life that beats the air?

Rather new suns across the sky shall pass,

New splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass.

And we two lovers shall not sit afar,

Critics of nature, but the joyous sea

Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star

Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be

Part of the mighty universal whole,

And through all aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!

We shall be notes in that great Symphony

Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,

And all the live World’s throbbing heart shall be

One with our heart; the stealthy creeping years

Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,

The Universe itself shall be our Immortality.