The Marble Faun and a Green Bough

by William Faulkner

  “Yes, it is I who, in the world’s clear evening

  with a silver star like a rose in a bowl of lacquer,

  when you have played your play and at last are quiet,

  will wait for you with sleep, and you can drown.”

  XVII

  o atthis

  for a moment an aeon i pause plunging

  above the narrow precipice of thy breast

  what before thy white precipice the eagle

  sharp in the sunlight and cleaving

  his long blue ecstasy and what

  wind on hilltops blond with the wings of the morning

  what wind o atthis sweeping the april to lesbos

  whitening the seas

  XVIII

  ONCE upon an adolescent hill

  There lay a lad who watched amid the piled

  And silver shapes of aircarved cumulae

  A lone uncleaving eagle, and the still

  Serenely blue dissolving of desire.

  Easeful valleys of the earth had been: he looked not back,

  Not down, he had not seen

  Lush lanes of vernal peace, and green

  Unebbing windless tides of trees; no wheeling gold

  Upon the lamplit wall where is no speed

  Save that which peaceful tongue ’twixt bed and supper wrought.

  Here still the blue, the headlands; here still he

  Who did not waken and was not awaked.

  The eagle sped its lonely course and tall;

  Was gone. Yet still upon his lonely hill the lad

  Winged on past changing headlands where was laked

  The constant blue

  And saw the fleeing canyons of the sky

  Tilt to banshee wire and slanted aileron,

  And his own lonely shape on scudding walls

  Where harp the ceaseless thunders of the sun.

  XIX

  GREEN is the water, green

  The grave voluptuous music of the sun;

  The pale and boneless fingers of a queen

  Upon his body stoop and run.

  Within these slow cathedralled corridors

  Where ribs of sunlight drown

  He joins in green caressing wars

  With seamaids red and brown

  And chooses one to bed upon

  And lapped and lulled is he

  By dimdissolving music of the sun

  Requiemed down through the sea.

  XX

  HERE he stands, while eternal evening falls

  And it is like a dream between gray walls

  Slowly falling, slowly falling

  Between two walls of gray and topless stone,

  Between two walls with silence on them grown.

  The twilight is severed with waters always falling

  And heavy with budded flowers that never die,

  And a voice that is forever calling

  Sweetly and soberly.

  Spring wakes the walls of a cold street,

  Sows silver remembered seed in frozen places:

  Upon meadows like still and simply smiling faces,

  and wrinkled streams, and grass that knew her feet.

  Here he stands, without the gate of stone

  Between two walls with silence on them grown,

  And littered leaves of silence on the floor;

  Here, in a solemn silver of ruined springs

  Among the smooth green buds, before the door

  He stands and sings.

  XXI

  WHAT sorrow, knights and gentles? scroll and

  Harp will prop the shaken sky

  With the bronzehard fame of Roland

  Who was not bronze, and so did die.

  And ladies fair, why tears? why sighs?

  There’s still many a champion that’ll

  Feel the sharp goads of your eyes

  As Roland did, in love and battle.

  And be of cheer, ye valiant foemen.

  Woman bore you: though amain

  Life’s gale may blow, there’s born of woman

  One who’ll give you sleep again.

  Weep not for Roland: envy him

  Whose fame is fast in song and story,

  While he, with myriad cherubim

  Is lapped in ease, asleep in glory.

  XXII

  I SEE your face through the twilight of my mind,

  A dusk of forgotten things, remembered things;

  It is a corridor dark and cool with music

  And too dim for sight,

  That leads me to a door which brings

  You, clothed in quiet sound for my delight.

  XXIII

  SOMEWHERE a moon will bloom and find me not,

  Then wane the windless gardens of the blue;

  Somewhere a lost green hurt (but better this

  Than in rich desolation long forgot)

  Somewhere a sweet remembered mouth to kiss—

  Still, you fool; lie still: that’s not for you.

  XXIV

  HOW canst thou be chaste, when lonely nights

  And nights I lay beside in intimate loveliness

  Thy grave beauty, girdle-slacked; and grief

  So long my own was gone, and there was peace

  Like azure wings my body along to lie

  Wherein thy name like muted silver bells

  Breathed over me, and found

  Less joy, but less of grief than waking thou didst stir?

  Then I did need but turn to thee, and then

  My hand dreamed on thy little breast. Then flowed

  Beneath my hand thy body’s curve, and turned

  To me within the famished lonely dark

  Thy sleeping kiss.

  XXV

  WAS this the dream?

  Thus: It seemed I lay

  Upon a beach where sand and water kiss

  With endless kissing in a dying fall. The moon

  Walked in the water, trod with silver shoon

  The quavering sands: naught else but this.

  And then and soon, O soon

  What wind

  Shaped thee in Cnydos? shaped

  Thy graven music? whence such guise

  Doth starlight take nor beauty never taken

  Yet hand so hungry for?

  O I have seen

  The ultimate hawk unprop the ultimate skies,

  And with the curving image of his fall

  Locked beak to beak. And waked

  And waked. And then the moon

  And quavering sands where kissing crept and slaked

  And that was all.

  (Or had I slept

  And in the huddle of its fading, wept

  That long waking ere I should sleep again?)

  XXVI

  STILL, and look down, look down:

  Thy curious withdrawn hand

  Unprobes, now spirit and sense unblend, undrown,

  Knit by a word and sundered by a tense

  Like this: Is: Was: and Not. Nor caught between

  Spent beaches and the annealed insatiate sea

  Dost myriad lie, cold and intact Selene,

  On secret strand or old disastrous lee

  Behind the fading mistral of the sense.

  XXVII

  THE Raven bleak and Philomel

  Amid the bleeding trees were fixed.

  His hoarse cry and hers were mixed

  And through the dark their droppings fell

  Upon the red erupted rose,

  Upon the broken branch of peach

  Blurred with scented mouths, that each

  To another sing, and close.

  ’Mid all the passionate choristers

  Of time and tide and love and death,

  Philomel with jewelled breath

  Dreams of flight, but never stirs.

  On rose and peach their droppings bled;

  Love a sacrifice has lain,

  Beneath his hand his mouth is slain,

  Beneath his hand his mouth i
s dead.

  Then the Raven, bleak and blent

  With all the slow despair of time,

  Lets Philomel about him chime

  Until her quiring voice is spent.

  Philomel, on pain’s red root

  Bloomed and sang, and pain was not;

  When she has sung and is forgot,

  The Raven speaks, no longer mute.

  The Raven bleak and Philomel

  Amid the bleeding trees were fixed.

  His hoarse cry and hers were mixed,

  On rose and peach their droppings fell.

  XXVIII

  OVER the world’s rim, drawing bland November

  Reluctant behind them, drawing the moons of cold:

  What do their lonely voices wake to remember

  In this dust ere ’twas flesh? what restless old

  Dream a thousand years was safely sleeping

  Wakes my blood to sharp unease? what horn

  Rings out to them? Was I free once, sweeping

  Their wild and lonely skies ere I was born?

  The hand that shaped my body, that gave me vision,

  Made me a slave to clay for a fee of breath.

  Sweep on, O wild and lonely: mine the derision,

  Then the splendor and speed, the cleanness of death.

  Over the world’s rim, out of some splendid noon,

  Seeking some high desire, and not in vain,

  They fill and empty the red and dying moon

  And, crying, cross the rim of the world again.

  XXIX

  AS to an ancient music’s hidden fall

  Her seed in the huddled dark was warm and wet

  And three cold stars were riven in the wall:

  Rain and fire and death above her door were set.

  Her hands moaned on her breast in blind and supple fire,

  Made light within her cave: she saw her harried

  Body wrung to a strange and bitter lyre

  Whose music once was pure strings simply married.

  One to another in sleepy difference

  Her thin and happy sorrows once were wed,

  And what tomorrow’s chords are recompense

  For yesterday’s single song unravished?

  Three stars in her heart when she awakes

  As winter’s sleep breaks greening in soft rain,

  And in the caverned earth spring’s rumor shakes

  As in her loins, the tilled and quickened grain.

  XXX

  GRAY the day, and all the year is cold,

  Across the empty land the swallows’ cry

  Marks the southflown spring. Naught is bowled

  Save winter, in the sky.

  O sorry earth, when this bleak bitter sleep

  Stirs and turns and time once more is green,

  In empty path and lane grass will creep

  With none to tread it clean.

  April and May and June, and all the dearth

  Of heart to green it for, to hurt and wake;

  What good is budding, gray November earth?

  No need to break your sleep for greening’s sake.

  The hushed plaint of wind in stricken trees

  Shivers the grass in path and lane

  And Grief and Time are tideless golden seas—

  Hush, hush! He’s home again.

  XXXI

  HE WINNOWED it with bayonets

  And planted it with guns,

  And now the final cannonade

  Is healed with rains and suns

  He looks about—and leaps to stamp

  The stubborn grinning seeds

  Of olden plantings back beneath

  His field of colored weeds.

  XXXII

  look, cynthia,

  how abelard evaporates

  the brow of time, and paris

  tastes his bitter thumbs—

  the worm grows fat, eviscerate,

  but not on love, o cynthia.

  XXXIII

  DID I know love once? Was it love or grief,

  This grave body by where I had lain,

  And my heart, a single stubborn leaf

  That will not die, though root and branch be slain?

  Though warm in dark between the breasts of Death,

  That other breast forgot where I did lie,

  And from the tree are stripped the leaves of breath,

  There’s still one stubborn leaf that will not die

  But restless in the sad and bitter earth,

  Gains with each dawn a death, with dusk a birth.

  XXXIV

  THE ship of night, with twilightcolored sails,

  Dreamed down the golden river of the west,

  And Jesus’ mother mused the sighing gales

  While Jesus’ mouth shot drinking on her breast.

  Her soft doveslippered eyes strayed in the dusk

  Creaming backward from the fallen day,

  And a haughty star broke yellow musk

  Where dead kings slept the long cold years away.

  The hushed voices on the stair of heaven

  Upward mounting, wake each drowsing king;

  The dawn is milk to swell her breast, her seven

  Sorrows crown her with a choiring ring;

  A star to fleck young Jesus’ eyes is given,

  And white winds in the duskfilled sails to sing.

  XXXV

  THE courtesan is dead, for all her subtle ways,

  Her bonds are loosed in brittle and bitter leaves;

  Her last long backward look’s to see who grieves

  The imminent night of her reverted gaze.

  Another will reign supreme, now she is dead

  And winter’s lean clean rain sweeps out her room,

  For man’s delight and anguish: with old new bloom

  Crowning his desire, garlanding his head.

  Thus the world, turning to cold and death

  When swallows empty the blue and drowsy days

  And lean rain scatters the ghost of summer’s breath—

  The courtesan that’s dead, for all her subtle ways—

  Spring will come! rejoice! But still is there

  An old sorrow sharp as woodsmoke on the air.

  XXXVI

  GUSTY trees windily lean on green

  eviscerated skies, the stallion, Wind,

  against the sun’s gold collar stamps, to lean

  his weight. And once the furrowed day behind,

  the golden steed browses the field he breaks

  and full of flashing teeth where he has been

  trees, the waiting mare his neighing shakes,

  hold his heaving shape a moment seen.

  Upon the hills, clashing the stars together,

  stripping the tree of heaven of its blaze,

  stabled, richly grained with golden weather—

  within the trees that he has reft and raped

  his fierce embrace by riven boughs in shaped,

  while on the shaggy hills he stamps and neighs.

  XXXVII

  The race’s splendor lifts her lip, exposes

  Amid her scarlet smile her little teeth;

  The years are sand the wind plays with; beneath,

  The prisoned music of her deathless roses.

  Within frostbitten rock she’s fixed and glassed;

  Now man may look upon her without fear.

  But her contemptuous eyes back through him stare

  And shear his fatuous sheep when he has passed.

  Lilith she is dead and safely tombed

  And man may plant and prune with naught to bruit

  His heired and ancient lot to which he’s doomed,

  For quiet drowse the flocks when wolf is mute—

  Ay, Lilith she is dead, and she is wombed,

  And breaks his vine, and slowly eats the fruit.

  XXXVIII

  LIPS that of thy weary all seem weariest,

  And wearier for the curled and pallid sly


  Still riddle of thy secret face, and thy

  Sick despair of its own ill obsessed;

  Lay no hand to heart, do not protest

  That smiling leaves thy tired mouth reconciled,

  For swearing so keeps thee but ill beguiled

  With secret joy of thine own flank and breast.

  Weary thy mouth with smiling: canst thou bride

  Thyself with thee, or thine own kissing slake?

  Thy belly’s waking doth itself deride

  With sleep’s sharp absence, coming so awake;

  And near thy mouth thy twinned heart’s grief doth hide

  For there’s no breast between: it cannot break.

  XXXIX

  LIKE to the tree that, young, reluctant yet

  While sap’s but troubled rumor of green spring;

  Like to the leaf that in warm bud does cling

  In maidened sleep unreft though passionate;

  Or like the cloud that, quicked and shaped for rain

  But flees it in a silver hot despair;

  The bird that dreams of flight and does not dare,

  The sower who fears to sow and reaps no grain.

  Beauty or gold or scarlet, then long sleep:

  All this does buy brave trafficking with breath,

  That though gray cuckold Time be horned by Death,

  Then Death in turn is cuckold, unawake.

  But sown cold years the stolen bread you reap

  By all the Eves unsistered since the Snake.

  XL