A Lonely Flute

Excerpt

PROEM

Beyond the pearly portal,
Beyond the last dim star,
Pale, perfect, and immortal,
The eternal visions are,
That never any rapture
Of sorrow or of mirth
Of any song shall capture
To dwell with men on earth.

Many a strange and tragic
Old sorrow still is mute
And melodies of magic
Still slumber in the flute,
Many a mighty vision
Has caught my yearning eye
And swept with calm derision
In robes of splendor by.

The rushing susurration
Of some eternal wing
Beats mighty variation
Through all the song I sing;
The vague, deep-mouthed commotion
From its ancestral home
Booms like the shout of ocean
Across the crumbling foam;
And these low lyric whispers
Make answer wistfully
As sea-shells ... dreaming lispers
Beside the eternal sea.

There is a name like some deep melody
Hallowed by sundown, delicate as the plash
Of lonely waves on solitary lakes
And rounded as the sudden-bursting bloom
Of bold, deep-throated notes in a midnight cloud
When shadowy belfries far away roll out
Across the dark their avalanche of sound.

It is a wild voice lost in the wail of the wind;
The silvery-twinkling plectrum of the rain
Plays in the poplar tree no other tune
And pines intone it softly as a prayer
In leafy litanies.
The name is raised
Even to God's ear from ancient arches dim
With caverned twilight and dull altar smoke
Where tapers weave athwart the azure haze
Innumerable pageantries of dusk.

Low-voiced and soft-eyed women must they live
Who bear that holy name. And now for one
Time has no other honor than to be
The meaning of an unremembered rhyme,
The breath of a forgotten singer's song.

(October, 1903)

RECOLLECTION

I must forget awhile the mellow flutes
And all the lyric wizardry of strings;
The fragile clarinet,
Tremulous over meadows rich with dawn,
Must knock against my vagrant heart
And throb and cry no more.

For I am shaken by the loveliness
And lights and laughter and beguiling song
Of all this siren world;
The regal beauty of women, round on round,
The swift, lithe slenderness of girls,
And children's loyal eyes,

Hill rivers and the lilac fringe of seas
Lazily plunging, glow of city nights
And faces in the glow—
These things have stolen my heart away, I lie
Parcelled abroad in sound and hue,
Dispersed through all I love.

I must go far away to a still place
And draw the shadows down across my eyes
And wait and listen there
For wings vibrating from beyond the stars,
Wide-ranging, swiftly winnowing wings
Bearing me back mine own.

So soon, now, I shall lie deep hidden away
From sound or sight, with hearing strangely dull
And heavy-lidded eyes,—
'T is time, O passionate soul, for me to go
Some far, hill-folded road apart
And learn the ways of peace.

In a crumbling glory sets
The unhastening sun;
The fishers draw their shining nets;
The day is done.

Across the ruddy wine
That brims the sea
Black boats drag shoreward through the brine
Dreamily,

And dark against the glow
Firing the west,
By three and two the great gulls go
Seaward to rest....