HEPHAESTUS
PERSEPHONE AT ENNA AND
SAPPHO IN LEUCADIA
BY
ARTHUR STRINGER
DEDICATION
What bird that climbs the cool dim Dawn
But loves the air its wild wings roam?
And yet when all the day is gone
But turns its weary pinions home,
And when the yellow twilight fills
The lonely stretches of the West,
Comes down across the darkened hills,
Once more to its remembered nest?
And I who strayed, O Fond and True,
To seek that glory fugitive
And fleeting music that is You,
But echoes of yourself can give
As through the waning gold I come
To where the Dream and Dreamer meet:
Yet should my faltering lips be dumb,
I lay these gleanings at your feet!
(Hephaestus, finding that his wife Aphrodite is loved by his brother Ares, voluntarily surrenders the goddess to this younger brother, whom, it is said, Aphrodite herself preferred.)
Take her, O Ares! As Demeter mourned
Through many-fountained Enna, I shall grieve
Forlorn a time, and then, it may be, learn,
Some still autumnal twilight by the sea
Golden with sunlight, to remember not!
As the dark pine forgoes the pilgrim thrush
I, sad of heart, yet unimpassioned, yield
To you this surging bosom soft with dreams,
This body fashioned of Aegean foam
And languorous moonlight. But I give you not
The eluding soul that in her broods and sleeps,
And ne’er was mine of old, nor can be yours.
It was not born of sea and moon with her,
And though it nests within her, no weak hand
Of hers shall cage it as it comes and goes,
Sorrows and wakens, sleeps, and sings again.
And so I give you but the hollow lute,
The lute alone, and not the voices low
That sang of old to some forgotten touch.
The lamp I give, but not the glimmering flame
Some alien fire must light, some alien dusk
Enisle, ere it illume your land and sea.
The shell I give you, Ares, not the song
Of murmuring winds and waves once haunting it;
The cage, but not love’s wings that come and go.
I give you them, light brother, as the earth
Gives up the dew, the mountain-side the mist!
Farewell sad face, that gleamed so like a flower
Through Paphian groves to me of old—farewell!
Some Fate beyond our dark-robed Three ordained
This love should wear the mortal rose and not
Our timeless amaranth. ’Twas writ of old, and lay
Not once with us. As we ourselves have known,
And well your sad Dodonian mother found,
From deep to deep the sails of destined love
Are blown and tossed by tides no god controls;
And at the bud of our too golden life
Eats this small canker of mortality!
I loved her once, O Ares—
I loved her once as waters love the wind;
I sought her once as rivers seek the sea;
And her deep eyes, so dream-besieged, made dawn
And midnight one. Flesh of my flesh she was,
And we together knew dark days and glad.
Then fell the change;—some hand unknown to us
Shook one white petal from the perfect flower,
And all the world grew old. Ah, who shall say
When Summer dies, or when is blown the rose?
Who, who shall know just when the quiet star
Out of the golden West is born again?
Or when the gloaming saddens into night?
’Twas writ, in truth, of old; the tide of love
Has met its turn, the long horizon lures
The homing bird, the harbour calls the sail.
Home, home to your glad heart she goes, while I
Fare on alone, and only broken dreams
Abide with me! And yet, when you shall tread
Lightly your sunlit hills with her and breathe
Life’s keener air, all but too exquisite,
Or look through purpling twilight on the world,
Think not my heart has followed nevermore
Those glimmering feet that walked once thus with me,
Nor dream my passion by your passion paled.
But lower than the god the temple stands;
As deeper is the sea than any wave,
Sweeter the summer than its asphodel,
So love far stronger than this woman is.
She from the untiring ocean took her birth,
And from torn wave and foam her first faint breath;
Child of unrest and change, still through her sweeps
Her natal sea’s tumultuous waywardness!
And losing her, lo, one thin drifting cloud
Curls idly from the altar in that grove
Where burn the fires that know not change or death!