Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Poets Series Book 13)
Page 80
These choristers with lips of stone,
Whose music is not heard, but seen,
Still chant, as from their organ-screen,
Their Maker’s praise; nor these alone,
But the more fragile forms of clay, 205
Hardly less beautiful than they,
These saints and angels that adorn
The walls of hospitals, and tell
The story of good deeds so well
That poverty seems less forlorn, 210
And life more like a holiday.
Here in this old neglected church,
That long eludes the traveller’s search,
Lies the dead bishop on his tomb;
Earth upon earth he slumbering lies, 215
Life-like and death-like in the gloom;
Garlands of fruit and flowers in bloom
And foliage deck his resting-place;
A shadow in the sightless eyes,
A pallor on the patient face, 220
Made perfect by the furnace heat;
All earthly passions and desires
Burnt out by purgatorial fires;
Seeming to say, “Our years are fleet,
And to the weary death is sweet.” 225
But the most wonderful of all
The ornaments on tomb or wall
That grace the fair Ausonian shores
Are those the faithful earth restores,
Near some Apulian town concealed, 230
In vineyard or in harvest field, —
Vases and urns and bas-reliefs,
Memorials of forgotten griefs,
Or records of heroic deeds
Of demigods and mighty chiefs: 235
Figures that almost move and speak,
And, buried amid mould and weeds,
Still in their attitudes attest
The presence of the graceful Greek, —
Achilles in his armor dressed, 240
Alcides with the Cretan bull,
And Aphrodite with her boy,
Or lovely Helena of Troy,
Still living and still beautiful.
Turn, turn, my wheel! ‘T is nature’s plan 245
The child should grow into the man,
The man grow wrinkled, old, and gray
In youth the heart exults and sings,
The pulses leap, the feet have wings;
In age the cricket chirps, and brings 250
The harvest-home of day.
And now the winds that southward blow,
And cool the hot Sicilian isle,
Bear me away. I see below
The long line of the Libyan Nile, 255
Flooding and feeding the parched lands
With annual ebb and overflow,
A fallen palm whose branches lie
Beneath the Abyssinian sky,
Whose roots are in Egyptian sands. 260
On either bank huge water-wheels,
Belted with jars and dripping weeds,
Send forth their melancholy moans,
As if, in their gray mantles hid,
Dead anchorites of the Thebaid 265
Knelt on the shore and told their beads,
Beating their breasts with loud appeals
And penitential tears and groans.
This city, walled and thickly set
With glittering mosque and minaret, 270
Is Cairo, in whose gay bazaars
The dreaming traveller first inhales
The perfume of Arabian gales,
And sees the fabulous earthen jars,
Huge as were those wherein the maid 275
Morgiana found the Forty Thieves
Concealed in midnight ambuscade;
And seeing, more than half believes
The fascinating tales that run
Through all the Thousand Nights and One, 280
Told by the fair Scheherezade.
More strange and wonderful than these
Are the Egyptian deities,
Ammon, and Emeth, and the grand
Osiris, holding in his hand 285
The lotus; Isis, crowned and veiled;
The sacred Ibis, and the Sphinx;
Bracelets with blue enamelled links;
The Scarabee in emerald mailed,
Or spreading wide his funeral wings; 290
Lamps that perchance their night-watch kept
O’er Cleopatra while she slept, —
All plundered from the tombs of kings.
Turn, turn, my wheel! The human race,
Of every tongue, of every place, 295
Caucasian, Coptic, or Malay,
All that inhabit this great earth,
Whatever be their rank or worth,
Are kindred and allied by birth,
And made of the same clay. 300
O’er desert sands, o’er gulf and bay,
O’er Ganges and o’er Himalay,
Bird-like I fly, and flying sing,
To flowery kingdoms of Cathay,
And bird-like poise on balanced wing 305
Above the town of King-te-tching,
A burning town, or seeming so, —
Three thousand furnaces that glow
Incessantly, and fill the air
With smoke uprising, gyre on gyre, 310
And painted by the lurid glare,
Of jets and flashes of red fire.
As leaves that in the autumn fall,
Spotted and veined with various hues,
Are swept along the avenues, 315
And lie in heaps by hedge and wall,
So from this grove of chimneys whirled
To all the markets of the world,
These porcelain leaves are wafted on,
Light yellow leaves with spots and stains 320
Of violet and of crimson dye,
Or tender azure of a sky
Just washed by gentle April rains,
And beautiful with celadon.
Nor less the coarser household wares, 325
The willow pattern, that we knew
In childhood, with its bridge of blue
Leading to unknown thoroughfares;
The solitary man who stares
At the white river flowing through 330
Its arches, the fantastic trees
And wild perspective of the view;
And intermingled among these
The tiles that in our nurseries
Filled us with wonder and delight, 335
Or haunted us in dreams at night.
And yonder by Nankin, behold!
The Tower of Porcelain, strange and old,
Uplifting to the astonished skies
Its ninefold painted balconies, 340
With balustrades of twining leaves,
And roofs of tile, beneath whose eaves
Hang porcelain bells that all the time
Ring with a soft, melodious chime;
While the whole fabric is ablaze 345
With varied tints, all fused in one
Great mass of color, like a maze
Of flowers illumined by the sun.
Turn, turn, my wheel! What is begun
At daybreak must at dark be done, 350
To-morrow will be another day;
To-morrow the hot furnace flame
Will search the heart and try the frame,
And stamp with honor or with shame
These vessels made of clay. 355
Cradled and rocked in Eastern seas,
The islands of the Japanese
Beneath me lie; o’er lake and plain
The stork, the heron, and the crane
Through the clear realms of azure drift, 360
And on the hillside I can see
The villages of Imari,
Whose thronged and flaming workshops lift
Their twisted columns of smoke on high,
Cloud cloisters that in ruins lie, 365
With sunshine streaming through each rift,
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And broken arches of blue sky.
All the bright flowers that fill the land,
Ripple of waves on rock or sand,
The snow on Fusiyama’s cone, 370
The midnight heaven so thickly sown
With constellations of bright stars,
The leaves that rustle, the reeds that make
A whisper by each stream and lake,
The saffron dawn, the sunset red, 375
Are painted on these lovely jars;
Again the skylark sings, again
The stork, the heron, and the crane
Float through the azure overhead,
The counterfeit and counterpart 380
Of Nature reproduced in Art.
Art is the child of Nature; yes,
Her darling child, in whom we trace
The features of the mother’s face,
Her aspect and her attitude; 385
All her majestic loveliness
Chastened and softened and subdued
Into a more attractive grace,
And with a human sense imbued.
He is the greatest artist, then, 390
Whether of pencil or of pen,
Who follows Nature. Never man,
As artist or as artisan,
Pursuing his own fantasies,
Can touch the human heart, or please, 395
Or satisfy our nobler needs,
As he who sets his willing feet
In Nature’s footprints, light and fleet,
And follows fearless where she leads.
Thus mused I on that morn in May, 400
Wrapped in my visions like the Seer,
Whose eyes behold not what is near,
But only what is far away,
When, suddenly sounding peal on peal,
The church-bell from the neighboring town 405
Proclaimed the welcome hour of noon.
The Potter heard, and stopped his wheel,
His apron on the grass threw down,
Whistled his quiet little tune,
Not overloud nor overlong, 410
And ended thus his simple song:
Stop, stop, my wheel! Too soon, too soon
The noon will be the afternoon,
Too soon to-day be yesterday;
Behind us in our path we cast 415
The broken potsherds of the past,
And all are ground to dust at last,
And trodden into clay!
Birds of Passage: Flight the Fifth.
The Herons of Elmwood
Collected in the volume entitled Kéramos and other Poems, 1878. Elmwood, in the first poem, was the home of James Russell Lowell.
WARM and still is the summer night,
As here by the river’s brink I wander;
White overhead are the stars, and white
The glimmering lamps on the hillside yonder.
Silent are all the sounds of day; 5
Nothing I hear but the chirp of crickets,
And the cry of the herons winging their way
O’er the poet’s house in the Elmwood thickets.
Call to him, herons, as slowly you pass
To your roosts in the haunts of the exiled thrushes, 10
Sing him the song of the green morass,
And the tides that water the reeds and rushes.
Sing him the mystical Song of the Hern,
And the secret that baffles our utmost seeking;
For only a sound of lament we discern, 15
And cannot interpret the words you are speaking.
Sing of the air, and the wild delight
Of wings that uplift and winds that uphold you,
The joy of freedom, the rapture of flight
Through the drift of the floating mists that infold you; 20
Of the landscape lying so far below,
With its towns and rivers and desert places;
And the splendor of light above, and the glow
Of the limitless, blue, ethereal spaces.
Ask him if songs of the Troubadours, 25
Or of Minnesingers in old black-letter,
Sound in his ears more sweet than yours,
And if yours are not sweeter and wilder and better.
Sing to him, say to him, here at his gate,
Where the boughs of the stately elms are meeting, 30
Some one hath lingered to meditate,
And send him unseen this friendly greeting;
That many another hath done the same,
Though not by a sound was the silence broken;
The surest pledge of a deathless name 35
Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken.
A Dutch Picture
SIMON DANZ has come home again,
From cruising about with his buccaneers;
He has singed the beard of the King of Spain,
And carried away the Dean of Jaen
And sold him in Algiers. 5
In his house by the Maese, with its roof of tiles,
And weathercocks flying aloft in air,
There are silver tankards of antique styles,
Plunder of convent and castle, and piles
Of carpets rich and rare. 10
In his tulip-garden there by the town,
Overlooking the sluggish stream,
With his Moorish cap and dressing-gown,
The old sea-captain, hale and brown,
Walks in a waking dream. 15
A smile in his gray mustachio lurks
Whenever he thinks of the King of Spain,
And the listed tulips look like Turks,
And the silent gardener as he works
Is changed to the Dean of Jaen. 20
The windmills on the outermost
Verge of the landscape in the haze,
To him are towers on the Spanish coast,
With whiskered sentinels at their post,
Though this is the river Maese. 25
But when the winter rains begin,
He sits and smokes by the blazing brands,
And old seafaring men come in,
Goat-bearded, gray, and with double chin,
And rings upon their hands. 30
They sit there in the shadow and shine
Of the flickering fire of the winter night;
Figures in color and design
Like those by Rembrandt of the Rhine,
Half darkness and half light. 35
And they talk of ventures lost or won,
And their talk is ever and ever the same,
While they drink the red wine of Tarragon,
From the cellars of some Spanish Don,
Or convent set on flame. 40
Restless at times with heavy strides
He paces his parlor to and fro;
He is like a ship that at anchor rides,
And swings with the rising and falling tides,
And tugs at her anchor-tow. 45
Voices mysterious far and near,
Sound of the wind and sound of the sea,
Are calling and whispering in his ear,
“Simon Danz! Why stayest thou here?
Come forth and follow me!” 50
So he thinks he shall take to the sea again
For one more cruise with his buccaneers,
To singe the beard of the King of Spain,
And capture another Dean of Jaen
And sell him in Algiers. 55
Castles in Spain
HOW much of my young heart, O Spain,
Went out to thee in days of yore!
What dreams romantic filled my brain,
And summoned back to life again
The Paladins of Charlemagne, 5
The Cid Campeador!
And shapes more shadowy than these,
In the dim twilight half revealed;
Phœnician galleys on the seas,
The Roman camps like hives of bees, 10
The Goth uplifting from his knees<
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Pelayo on his shield.
It was these memories perchance,
From annals of remotest eld,
That lent the colors of romance 15
To every trivial circumstance,
And changed the form and countenance
Of all that I beheld.
Old towns, whose history lies hid
In monkish chronicle or rhyme, — 20
Burgos, the birthplace of the Cid,
Zamora and Valladolid,
Toledo, built and walled amid
The wars of Wamba’s time;
The long, straight line of the highway, 25
The distant town that seems so near,
The peasants in the fields, that stay
Their toil to cross themselves and pray,
When from the belfry at midday
The Angelus they hear; 30
White crosses in the mountain pass,
Mules gay with tassels, the loud din
Of muleteers, the tethered ass
That crops the dusty wayside grass,
And cavaliers with spurs of brass 35
Alighting at the inn;
White hamlets hidden in fields of wheat,
White cities slumbering by the sea,
White sunshine flooding square and street,
Dark mountain ranges, at whose feet 40
The river beds are dry with heat, —
All was a dream to me.
Yet something sombre and severe
O’er the enchanted landscape reigned;
A terror in the atmosphere 45
As if King Philip listened near,
Or Torquemada, the austere,
His ghostly sway maintained.
The softer Andalusian skies
Dispelled the sadness and the gloom; 50
There Cadiz by the seaside lies,
And Seville’s orange-orchards rise,
Making the land a paradise
Of beauty and of bloom.
There Cordova is hidden among 55
The palm, the olive, and the vine;
Gem of the South, by poets sung,
And in whose mosque Almanzor hung
As lamps the bells that once had rung
At Compostella’s shrine. 60
But over all the rest supreme,