Edith Wharton's Verse, 1879-1919, from various journals
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Edith Wharton’s Verse, 1879-1919, from various journals.Edith Wharton’s Verse, 1879-1919, from various journals. Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937 Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library

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Edith Wharton’s Verse, 1879-1919, from various journals. Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937

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1995

Note: This electronic text is a compilation of items from a variety of journals: Atlantic Monthly 45 (Feb. 1880); Atlantic Monthly 45 (Mar. 1880); Atlantic Monthly 45 (April 1880); Atlantic Monthly 45 (May 1880); Scribner’s Magazine 6 (Oct. 1889); Atlantic Monthly 64 (Dec. 1889); Scribner’s Magazine 6 (Dec. 1889); Scribner’s Magazine 9 (Jan. 1891); Scribner’s Magazine 9 (Feb. 1891); Century Magazine 43 (Nov. 1891); Scribner’s Magazine 12 (Nov. 1892); Scribner’s Magazine 13 (Jan. 1893); Scribner’s Magazine 14 (Sept. 1893); Scribner’s Magazine 15 (June 1894); Scribner’s Magazine 16 (Oct. 1894); Century Magazine 49 (Jan. 1895); Scribner’s Magazine 23 (Jan. 1898); Scribner’s Magazine 24 (July 1898); Atlantic Monthly 88 (Sept. 1901); Scribner’s Magazine 31 (Feb. 1902); Scribner’s Magazine 31 (June 1902); Harper’s Magazine 105 (Sept. 1902); North American Review 175 (Nov. 1902); Scribner’s Magazine 33 (April 1903); Scribner’s Magazine 43 (Jan. 1908); Century Magazine 76 (July 1908); Atlantic Monthly 102 (Oct. 1908); Scribner’s Magazine 45 (Jan. 1909); Current Literature 46 (June 1909); Atlantic Monthly 104 (Dec. 1909); Atlantic Monthly 106 (Dec. 1910); Scribner’s Magazine 49 (Mar. 1911); Scribner’s Magazine 51 (Mar. 1912); Scribner’s Magazine 64 (Nov. 1918); Scribner’s Magazine 65 (Feb. 1919); Saturday Evening Post 191, (29 Mar. 1919).

About the print version

Edith Wharton’s Verse, 1879-1919, from various journals. Edith Wharton Verification made against printed text
fiction; poetry

Revisions to the electronic version corrector
etext@virginia.edu. Commercial use prohibited; all usage governed by our Conditions of Use: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/conditions.html

EDITH WHARTON’S VERSE, 1879-1919, from various journals. “The Parting Day.” Atlantic Monthly 45 (Feb. 1880): 194.

I.

SOME busy hands have brought to light, And laid beneath my eye, The dress I wore that afternoon You came to say good-by.

About it still there seems to cling Some fragrance unexpressed, The ghostly odor of the rose I wore upon my breast;

And, subtler than all flower-scent, The sacred garment holds The memory of that parting day Close hidden in its folds.

The rose is dead, and you are gone, But to the dress I wore The rose’s smell, the thought of you, Are wed forevermore.

II.

That day you came to say good-by (A month ago! It seems a year!) How calm I was! I met your eye, And in my own you saw no tear.

You heard me laugh and talk and jest, And lightly grieve that you should go; You saw the rose upon my breast, But not the breaking heart below.

And when you came and took my hand, It scarcely fluttered in your hold. Alas, you did not understand! For you were blind, and I was cold.

And now you cannot see my tears, And now you cannot hear my cry. A month ago? Nay, years and years Have aged my heart since that good-by.

“Aeropagus.” Atlantic Monthly 45 (Mar. 1880): 335.

WHERE suns chase suns in rhythmic dance, Where seeds are springing from the dust, Where mind sways mind with spirit-glance, High court is held, and law is just.

No hill alone, a sovereign bar; Through space the fiery sparks are whirled That draw and cling, and shape a star, — That burn and cool, and form a world

Whose hidden forces hear a voice That leads them by a perfect plan: “Obey,” it cries, “with steadfast choice, Law shall complete what law began.

“Refuse, — behold the broken arc, The sky of all its stars despoiled; The new germ smothered in the dark, The snow-pure soul with sin assoiled.”

The voice still saith, “While atoms weave Both world and soul for utmost joy, Who sins must suffer, — no reprieve; The law that quickens must destroy.”

“A Failure.” Atlantic Monthly 45 (April 1880): 464-65.

( She Speaks.)

I MEANT to be so strong and true! The world may smile and question, When? But what I might have been to you I cannot be to other men. Just one in twenty to the rest, And all in all to you alone, — This was my dream; perchance ‘tis best That this, like other dreams, is flown.

For you I should have been so kind, So prompt my spirit to control, To win fresh vigor for my mind, And purer beauties for my soul; Beneath your eye I might have grown To that divine, ideal height, Which, mating wholly with your own, Our equal spirits should unite.

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To others I am less than naught; To you I might have been so much, Could but your calm, discerning thought Have put my powers to the touch! Your love had made me doubly fair; Your wisdom made me thrice as wise, Lent clearer lustre to my hair, And read new meanings in my eyes.

Ah, yes, to you I might have been That happy being, past recall, The slave, the helpmeet, and the queen, — All these in one, and one in all. But that which I had dreamed to do I learned too late was dreamed in vain, For what I might have been to you I cannot be to other men.

“Patience.” Atlantic Monthly 45 (April 1880): 548-49.

PATIENCE and I have traveled hand in hand So many days that I have grown to trace The lines of sad, sweet beauty in her face, And all its veiled depths to understand.

Not beautiful is she to eyes profane; Silent and unrevealed her holy charms;

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But, like a mother’s, her serene, strong arms Uphold my footsteps on the path of pain.

I long to cry, — her soft voice whispers, “Nay!” I seek to fly, but she restrains my feet; In wisdom stern, yet in compassion sweet, She guides my helpless wanderings, day by day.

O my Beloved, life’s golden visions fade, And one by one life’s phantom joys depart; They leave a sudden darkness in the heart, And patience fills their empty place instead.

“Wants.” Atlantic Monthly 45 (May 1880): 599.

WE women want to many things; And first we call for happiness, — The careless boon the hour brings, The smile, the song, and the caress.

And when the fancy fades, we cry, Nay, give us one on whom to spend Our heart’s desire! When Love goes by With folded wings, we seek a friend.

And then our children come, to prove Our hearts but slumbered, and can wake; And when they go, we’re fain to love Some other woman’s for their sake.

But when both love and friendship fail, We cry for duty, work to do; Some end to gain beyond the pale Of self, some height to journey to.

And then, before our task is done, With sudden weariness oppressed, We leave the shining goal unwon And only ask for rest.

“The Last Giustianini.” Scribner’s Magazine 6 (Oct. 1889): 405-06. By Edith Wharton.

O WIFE, wife, wife! As if the sacred name Could weary one with saying! Once again Laying against my brow your lips’ soft flame, Join with me, Sweetest, in love’s new refrain, Since the whole music of my late-found life Is that we call each other “husband — wife.”

And yet, stand back, and let your cloth of gold Straighten its sumptuous lines from waist to knee, And, flowing firmly outward, fold on fold, Invest your slim young form with majesty As when, in those calm bridal robes arrayed, You stood beside me, and I was afraid.

I was afraid — O sweetness, whiteness, youth, Best gift of God, I feared you! I, indeed, For whom all womanhood has been, forsooth, Summed up in the sole Virgin of the Creed, I thought that day our Lady’s self stood there And bound herself to me with vow and prayer.

Ah, yes, that day. I sat, remember well, Half-crook’d above a missal, and laid in The gold-leaf slowly; silence in my cell; The picture, Satan tempting Christ to sin Upon the mount’s blue, pointed pinnacle, The world outspread beneath as fair as hell —

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When suddenly they summoned me. I stood Abashed before the Abbot, who reclined Full-bellied in his chair beneath the rood, And roseate with having lately dined; And then — I standing there abashed — he said: “The house of Giustiniani all lie dead.”

It scarcely seemed to touch me (I had led A grated life so long) that oversea My kinsmen in their knighthood should lie dead, Nor that this sudden death should set me free, Me, the last Giustiniani — well, what then? A monk! — The Giustiniani had been men.

So when the Abbot said: “The state decrees That you, the latest scion of the house Which died in vain for Venice overseas, Should be exempted from your sacred vows, And straightway, when you leave this cloistered place, Take wife, and add new honors to the race,”

I hardly heard him — would have crept again To the warped missal — but he snatched a sword And girded me, and all the heart of men Rushed through me, as he laughed and hailed me lord, And, with my hand upon the hilt, I cried, “Viva San Marco!” like my kin who died.

But, straightway, when, a new-made knight, I stood Beneath the bridal arch, and saw you come, A certain monkish warping of the blood Ran up and struck the man’s heart in me dumb; I breathed an Ave to our Lady’s grace, And did not dare to look upon your face.

And when we swept the waters side by side, With timbrelled gladness clashing on the air, I trembled at your image in the tide, And warded off the devil with a prayer, Still seeming in a golden dream to move Through fiendish labyrinths of forbidden love.

But when they left us, and we stood alone, I, the last Giustiniani, face to face With your unvisioned beauty, made my own In this, the last strange bridal of our race, And, looking up at last to meet your eyes, Saw in their depths the star of love arise,

Ah, then the monk’s garb shrivelled from my heart, And left me man to face your womanhood. Without a prayer to keep our lips apart I turned about and kissed you where you stood, And gathering all the gladness of my life Into a new-found word, I called you “wife!”

“Euryalus.” Atlantic Monthly 64 (Dec. 1889): 761.

UPWARD we went by fields of asphodel, Leaving Ortygia’s moat-bound walls below; By orchards, where the wind-flowers’ drifted snow Lay lightly heaped upon the turf’s light swell; By gardens, whence upon the wayside fell Jasmine and rose in April’s overflow; Till, winding up in Epipolae’s wide brow, We reached at last the lonely citadel.

There, on the ruined rampart climbing high, We sat and dreamed among the browsing sheep, Until we heard the trumpet’s startled cry Waking a clang of arms about the keep, And seaward saw, with rapt foreboding eye, The sails of Athens whiten on the deep. Edith Wharton.

“Happiness.” Scribner’s Magazine 6 (Dec. 1889): 715. By Edith Wharton.

THIS perfect love can find no words to say. What words are left, still sacred for our use, That have not suffered the sad world’s abuse, And figure forth a gladness dimmed and gray? Let us be silent still, since words convey But shadowed images, wherein we lose The fulness of love’s light; our lips refuse The fluent commonplace of yesterday.

Then shall we hear beneath the brooding wing Of silence what abiding voices sleep, The primal notes of nature, that outring Man’s little noises, warble he or weep, The song the morning stars together sing, The sound of deep that calleth unto deep.

“Botticelli’s Madonna in the Louvre.” Scribner’s Magazine 9 (Jan. 1891): 74.

WHAT strange presentiment, O Mother, lies On thy waste brow and sadly-folded lips, Forefeeling the Light’s terrible eclipse On Calvary, as if love made thee wise, And thou couldst read in those dear infant eyes The sorrow that beneath their smiling sleeps, And guess what bitter tears a mother weeps When the cross darkens her unclouded skies?

Sad Lady, if some mother, passing thee, Should feel a throb of thy foreboding pain, And think — “My child at home clings so to me, With the same smile … and yet in vain, in vain, Since even this Jesus died on Calvary” — Say to her then: “He also rose again.”

“The Tomb of Ilaria Giunigi.” Scribner’s Magazine 9 (Feb. 1891): 156. By Edith Wharton.

ILARIA, thou that wert so fair and dear That death would fain disown thee, grief made wise With prophecy thy husband’s widowed eyes And bade him call the master’s art to rear Thy perfect image on the sculptured bier, With dreaming lids, hands laid in peaceful guise Beneath the breast that seems to fall and rise, And lips that at love’s call should answer, “Here!”

First-born of the Renascence, when thy soul Cast the sweet robing of the flesh aside, Into these lovelier marble limbs it stole, Regenerate in art’s sunrise clear and wide As saints who, having kept faith’s raiment whole, Change it above for garments glorified.

“The Sonnet.” Century Magazine 43 (Nov. 1891): 113.

PURE form, that like some chalice of old time Contain’st the liquid of the poet’s thought Within thy curving hollow, gem-enwrought With interwoven traceries of rhyme, While o’er thy brim the bubbling fancies climb, What thing am I, that undismayed have sought To pour my verse with trembling hand untaught Into a shape so small yet so sublime? Because perfection haunts the hearts of men, Because thy sacred chalice gathered up The wine of Petrarch, Shakspere, Shelley — then Receive these tears of failure as they drop (Sole vintage of my life), since I am fain To pour them in a consecrated cup. Edith Wharton.

“Two Backgrounds.” Scribner’s Magazine 12 (Nov. 1892): 550. By Edith Wharton.

I. LA VIERGE AU DONATEUR.

HERE by the ample river’s argent sweep, Bosomed in tilth and vintage to her walls, A tower-crowned Cybele in armored sleep The city lies, fat plenty in her halls, With calm, parochial spires that hold in fee The friendly gables clustered at their base, And, equipoised o’er tower and market-place, The Gothic minster’s winged immensity; And in that narrow burgh, with equal mood, Two placid hearts, to all life’s good resigned, Might, from the altar to the lych-gate, find Long years of peace and dreamless plenitude.

II. MONA LISA.

Yon strange blue city crowns a scarped steep No mortal foot hath bloodlessly essayed; Dreams and illusions beacon from its keep, But at the gate an Angel bares his blade; And tales are told of those who thought to gain At dawn its ramparts; but when evening fell Far off they saw each fading pinnacle Lit with wild lightnings from the heaven of pain; Yet there two souls, whom life’s perversities Had mocked with want in plenty, tears in mirth, Might meet in dreams, ungarmented of earth, And drain Joy’s awful chalice to the lees.

“Experience.” Scribner’s Magazine 13 (Jan. 1893): 91. By Edith Wharton.

I.

LIKE Crusoe with the bootless gold we stand Upon the desert verge of death, and say: “What shall avail the woes of yesterday To buy to-morrow’s wisdom, in the land Whose currency is strange unto our hand? In life’s small market they have served to pay Some late-found rapture, could we but delay Till Time hath matched our means to our demand.”

But otherwise Fate wills it, for, behold, Our gathered strength of individual pain, When Time’s long alchemy hath made it gold, Dies with us — hoarded all these years in vain, Since those that might be heir to it the mould Renew, and coin themselves new griefs again.

II.

O, Death, we come full-handed to thy gate, Rich with strange burden of the mingled years, Gains and renunciations, mirth and tears, And love’s oblivion, and remembering hate, Nor know we what compulsion laid such freight Upon our souls — and shall our hopes and fears Buy nothing of thee, Death? Behold our wares, And sell us the one joy for which we wait. Had we lived longer, life had such for sale, With the last coin of sorrow purchased cheap, But now we stand before thy shadowy pale, And all our longings lie within thy keep — Death, can it be the years shall naught avail?

“Not so,” Death answered, “they shall purchase sleep.”

“Chartres.” Scribner’s Magazine 14 (Sept. 1893): 287. By Edith Wharton.

I.

IMMENSE, august, like some Titanic bloom, The mighty choir unfolds its lithic core, Petalled with panes of azure, gules and or, Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom, And stamened with keen flamelets that illume The pale high-altar. On the prayer-worn floor, By surging worshippers thick-thronged of yore, A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb, The stranded driftwood of Faith’s ebbing sea — For these alone the finials fret the skies, The topmost bosses shake their blossoms free, While from the triple portals, with grave eyes, Tranquil, and fixed upon eternity, The cloud of witnesses still testifies.

II.

The crimson panes like blood-drops stigmatize The western floor. The aisles are mute and cold. A rigid fetich in her robe of gold The Virgin of the Pillar, with blank eyes, Enthroned beneath her votive canopies, Gathers a meagre remnant to her fold. The rest is solitude; the church, grown old, Stands stark and gray beneath the burning skies. Wellnigh again its mighty frame-work grows To be a part of nature’s self, withdrawn >From hot humanity’s impatient woes; The floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn, And in the east one giant window shows The roseate coldness of an Alp at dawn.

“Life.” Scribner’s Magazine 15 (June 1894): 739. By Edith Wharton.

LIFE, like a marble block, is given to all, A blank, inchoate mass of years and days, Whence one with ardent chisel swift essays Some shape of strength or symmetry to call; One shatters it in bits to mend a wall; One in a craftier hand the chisel lays, And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia’s gaze, Carves it apace in toys fantastical.

But least is he who, with enchanted eyes Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be, Muses which god he shall immortalize In the proud Parian’s perpetuity, Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies That the night cometh wherein none shall see.

“An Autumn Sunset.” Scribner’s Magazine 16 (Oct. 1894): 419. By Edith Wharton

I

LEAGUERED in fire The wild black promontories of the coast extend Their savage silhouettes; The sun in universal carnage sets, And, halting higher, The motionless storm-clouds mass their sullen threats, Like an advancing mob in sword-points penned, That, balked, yet stands at bay. Mid-zenith hangs the fascinated day In wind-lustrated hollows crystalline, A wan valkyrie whose wide pinions shine Across the ensanguined ruins of the fray, And in her lifted hand swings high o’erhead, Above the waste of war, The silver torch-light of the evening star Wherewith to search the faces of the dead.

II

Lagooned in gold, Seem not those jetty promontories rather The outposts of some ancient land forlorn, Uncomforted of morn, Where old oblivions gather, The melancholy, unconsoling fold Of all things that go utterly to death And mix no more, no more With life’s perpetually awakening breath? Shall Time not ferry me to such a shore, Over such sailless seas, To walk with hope’s slain importunities In miserable marriage? Nay, shall not All things be there forgot, Save the sea’s golden barrier and the black Closecrouching promontories? Dead to all shames, forgotten of all glories, Shall I not wander there, a shadow’s shade, A spectre self-destroyed, So purged of all remembrance and sucked back Into the primal void, That should we on that shore phantasmal meet I should not know the coming of your feet?

“Jade.” Century Magazine 49 (Jan. 1895): 391.

THE patient craftsman of the East who made His undulant dragons of the veined jade, And wound their sinuous volutes round the whole Pellucid green redundance of the bowl, Chiseled his subtle traceries with the same Keen stone he wrought them in. Nor praise, nor blame, Nor gifts the years relinquish or refuse, But only a grief commensurate with thy soul, Shall carve it in a shape for gods to use. Edith Wharton.

“Phaedra.” Scribner’s Magazine 23 (Jan. 1898): 68. By Edith Wharton

NOT that on me the Cyprian fury fell, Last martyr of my love-ensanguined race; Not that my children drop the averted face When my name shames the silence; not that hell Holds me where nevermore his glance shall dwell Nightlong between my lids, my pulses race Through flying pines the tempest of the chase, Nor my heart rest with him beside the well.

Not that he hates me; not, O baffled gods — Not that I slew him! — yet, because your goal Is always reached, nor your rejoicing rods Fell ever yet upon insensate clods, Know, the one pang that makes your triumph whole Is, that he knows the baseness of my soul.

“The One Grief.” Scribner’s Magazine 24 (July 1898): 90. By Edith Wharton

ONE grief there is, the helpmeet of my heart, That shall not from me till my days be sped, That walks beside me in sunshine and shade, And hath in all my fortunes equal part. At first I feared it, and would often start Aghast to find it bending o’er my bed, Till usage slowly dulled the edge of dread, And one cold night I cried: How warm thou art!

Since then we two have travelled hand in hand, And, lo, my grief has been interpreter For me in many a fierce and alien land Whose speech young Joy had failed to understand, Plucking me tribute of red gold and myrrh >From desolate whirlings of the desert sand.

“Mould and Vase.” Atlantic Monthly 88 (Sept. 1901): 343.

GREEK POTTERY OF AREZZO. HERE in the jealous hollow of the mould, Faint, light-eluding, as templed in the breast Of some rose-vaulted lotus, see the best The artist had — the vision that unrolled Its flying sequence till completion’s hold Caught the wild round and bade the dancers rest — The mortal lip on the immortal pressed One instant, ere the blindness and the cold.

And there the vase: immobile, exiled, tame, The captives of fulfillment link their round, Foot-heavy on the inelastic ground, How different, yet how enviously the same! Dishonoring the kinship that they claim, As here the written word the inner sound. Edith Wharton.

“Uses.” Scribner’s Magazine 31 (Feb. 1902): 180. By Edith Wharton

AH, from the niggard tree of Time How quickly fall the hours! It needs no touch of wind or rime To loose such facile flowers.

Drift of the dead year’s harvesting, They clog to-morrow’s way, Yet serve to shelter growths of Spring Beneath their warm decay.

Or, blent by pious hands with rare Sweet savors of content, Surprise the soul’s December air With June’s forgotten scent.

“Artemis to Actaeon.” Scribner’s Magazine 31 (June 1902): 661-62. By Edith Wharton

THOU couldst not look on me and live: so runs The mortal legend — thou that couldst not live Nor look on me (so the divine decree)! That sawst me in the cloud, the wave, the bough, The clod commoved with April, and the shapes Lurking ‘twixt lid and eye-ball in the dark. Mocked I thee not in every guise of life, Hid in girls’ eyes, a naiad in her well, Wooed through their laughter, and like echo fled, Luring thee down the primal silences Where the heart hushes and the flesh is dumb? Nay, was not I the tide that drew thee out Relentlessly from the detaining shore, Forth from the home-lights and the hailing voices, Forth from the last faint headland’s failing line, Till I enveloped thee from verge to verge And hid thee in the hollow of my being? And still, because between us hung the veil, The myriad-tinted veil of sense, thy feet Refused their rest, thy hands the gifts of life, Thy heart its losses, lest some lesser face Should blur mine image in thine upturned soul Ere death had stamped it there. This was thy thought. And mine? The gods, they say, have all: not so! This have they — flocks on every hill, the blue Spirals of incense and the amber drip Of lucid honey-comb on sylvan shrines, First-chosen weanlings, doves immaculate, Twin-cooing in the osier-plaited cage, And ivy-garlands glaucous with the dew: Man’s wealth, man’s servitude, but not himself! And so they pale, for lack of warmth they wane, Freeze to the marble of their images, And, pinnacled on man’s subserviency, Through the thick sacrificial haze discern Unheeding lives and loves, as some cold peak Through icy mists may enviously descry Warm vales unzoned to the all-fruitful sun. So they along an immortality Of endless-vistaed homage strain their gaze, If haply some rash votary, empty-urned, But light of foot, with all-adventuring hand, Break rank, fling past the people and the priest, Up the last step, on to the inmost shrine, And there, the sacred curtain in his clutch, Drop dead of seeing — while the others prayed! Yea, this we wait for, this renews us, this

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Incarnates us, pale people of your dreams, Who are but what you make us, wood or stone, Or cold chryselephantine hung with gems, Or else the beating purpose of your life, Your sword, your clay, the note your pipe pursues, The face that haunts your pillow, or the light Scarce visible over leagues of laboring sea! O thus through use to reign again, to drink The cup of peradventure to the lees, For one dear instant disimmortalized In giving immortality! So dream the gods upon their listless thrones. Yet sometimes, when the votary appears, With death-affronting forehead and glad eyes, Too young, they rather muse, too frail thou art, And shall we rob some girl of saffron veil And nuptial garland for so slight a thing? And so to their incurious loves return.

Not so with thee; for some indeed there are Who would behold the truth and then return To pine among the semblances — but I Divined in thee the questing foot that never Revisits the cold hearth of yesterday Or calls achievement home. I from afar Beheld thee fashioned for one hour’s high use, Nor meant to slake oblivion drop by drop. Long, long hadst thou inhabited my dreams, Surprising me as harts surprise a pool, Stealing to drink at midnight; I divined Thee rash to reach the heart of life, and lie Bosom to bosom in occasion’s arms, And said: Because I love thee thou shalt die!

For immortality is not to range Unlimited through vast Olympian days, Or sit in dull dominion over time; But this — to drink fate’s utmost at a draught, Nor feel the wine grow stale upon the lip, To scale the summit of some soaring moment, Nor know the dulness of the long descent, To snatch the crown of life and seal it up Secure forever in the vaults of death!

And this was thine: to lose thyself in me, Relive in my renewal, and become The light of other lives, a quenchless torch Passed on from hand to hand, till men are dust And the last garland withers from my shrine.

“The Bread of Angels.” Harper’s Magazine 105 (Sept. 1902): 583-85.

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AT that lost hour disowned of day and night, The after-birth of midnight, when life’s face Turns to the wall and the last lamp goes out Before the incipient irony of dawn — In that obliterate interval of time Between the oil’s last flicker and the first Reluctant shudder of averted day, Threading the city’s streets (like mine own ghost Wakening the echoes of dispeopled dreams), I smiled to see how the last light that fought Extinction was the old familiar glare Of supper tables under gas-lit ceilings, The same old stale monotonous carouse Of greed and surfeit nodding face to face O’er the picked bones of pleasure … So that the city seemed, at that waste hour, Like some expiring planet from whose face All nobler life had perished — love and hate, And labor and the ecstasy of thought — Leaving the eyeless creatures of the ooze, Dull offspring of its first inchoate birth, The last to cling to its exhausted breast.

And threading thus the aimless streets that strayed Conjectural through a labyrinth of death, Strangely I came upon two hooded nuns, Hands in their sleeves, heads bent as if beneath Some weight of benediction, gliding by Punctual as shadows that perform their round Upon the inveterate bidding of the sun Again and yet again their ordered course At the same hour crossed mine: obedient shades Cast by some high-orbed pity on the waste Of midnight evil! and my wondering thoughts Tracked them from the hushed convent where there kin Lay hived in sweetness of their prayer built cells. What wind of fate had loosed them from the lee Of that dear anchorage where their sisters slept? On what emprise of heavenly piracy Did such frail craft put forth upon this world; In what incalculable currents caught

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And swept beyond the signal-lights of home Did their white coifs set sail against the night?

At last, upon my wonder drawn, I followed The secret wanderers till I saw them pause Before the dying glare of those tall panes Where greed and surfeit nodded face to face O’er the picked bones of pleasure … And the door opened and the nuns went in.

Again I met them, followed them again. Straight as a thought of mercy to its goal To the same door they sped. I stood alone. And suddenly the silent city shook With inarticulate clamor of gagged lips, As in Jerusalem when the veil was rent And the dead drove the living from the streets. And all about me stalked the shrouded dead, Dead hopes, dead efforts, loves and sorrows dead, With empty orbits groping for their dead In that blind mustering of murdered faiths … And the door opened and the nuns came out.

I turned and followed. Once again we came To such a threshold, such a door received them, They vanished, and I waited. The grim round Ceased only when the festal panes grew dark And the last door had shot its tardy bolt. “Too late!” I heard one murmur; and “Too late!” The other, in unholy antiphon. And with dejected steps they turned away.

They turned, and still I tracked them, till they bent Under the lee of a calm convent wall Bounding a quiet street. I knew the street, One of those village byways strangely trapped In the city’s meshes, where at loudest noon The silence spreads like moss beneath the foot, And all the tumult of the town becomes Idle as Ocean’s fury in a shell.

Silent at noon — but now, at this void hour, When the blank sky hung over the blank streets Clear as a mirror held above dead lips, Came footfalls, and a thronging of dim shapes About the convent door: a suppliant line Of pallid figures, ghosts of happier folk, Moving in some gray underworld of want On which the sun of plenty never dawns.

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And as the nuns approached I saw the throng Pale emanation of that outcast hour, Divide like vapor when the sun breaks through And take the glory on its tattered edge. For so a brightness ran from face to face, Faint as a diver’s light beneath the sea And as a wave draws up the beach, the crowd Drew to the nuns. I waited. Then those two Strange pilgrims of the sanctuaries of sin Brought from beneath their large conniving cloaks Two hidden baskets brimming with rich store Of broken viands — pasties, jellies, meats, Crumbs of Belshazzar’s table, evil waste Of that interminable nightly feast Of greed and surfeit, nodding face to face O’er the picked bones of pleasure … And piteous hands were stretched to take the bread Of this strange sacrament — this manna brought Out of the antique wilderness of sin.

Each seized a portion, turning comforted From this new breaking of the elements; And while I watched the mystery of renewal Whereby the dead bones of old sins become The living body of the love of God, It seemed to me that a like change transformed The city’s self … a little wandering air Ruffled the ivy on the convent wall; A bird piped doubtfully; the dawn replied; And in that ancient gray necropolis Somewhere a child awoke and took the breast.

“Vesalius in Zante. (1564)” North American Review 175 (Nov. 1902): 625-31. BY EDITH WHARTON

SET wide the window. Let me drink the day. I loved light ever, light in eye and brain — No tapers mirrored in long palace floors, Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles, But just the common dusty wind-blown day That roofs earth’s millions. O, too long I walked In that thrice-sifted air that princes breathe, Nor felt the heaven-wide jostling of the winds And all the ancient outlawry of earth! Now let me breathe and see. This pilgrimage They call a penance — let them call it that! I set my face to the East to shrive my soul Of mortal sin? So be it. If my blade Once questioned living flesh, if once I tore The pages of the Book in opening it, See what the torn page yielded ere the light Had paled its buried characters — and judge!

The girl they brought me, pinioned hand and foot In catalepsy — say I should have known That trance had not yet darkened into death, And held my scalpel. Well, suppose I knew? Sum up the facts — her life against her death. Her life? The scum upon the pools of pleasure Breeds such by thousands. And her death? Perchance

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The obolus to appease the ferrying Shade, And waft her into immortality. Think what she purchased with that one heart-flutter That whispered its deep secret to my blade! For, just because her bosom fluttered still, It told me more than many rifled graves; Because I spoke too soon, she answered me, Her vain life ripened to this bud of death As the whole plant is forced into one flower, All her blank past a scroll on which God wrote His word of healing — so that the poor flesh, Which spread death living, died to purchase life!

Ah, no! The sin I sinned was mine, not theirs. Not that they sent me forth to wash away — None of their tariffed frailties, but a deed So far beyond their grasp of good or ill That, set to weigh it in the Church’s balance, Scarce would they know which scale to cast it in. But I, I know. I sinned against my will, Myself, my soul — the God within the breast: Can any penance wash such sacrilege?

When I was young in Venice, years ago, I walked the hospice with a Spanish monk, A solitary cloistered in high thoughts, The great Loyola, whom I reckoned then A mere refurbisher of faded creeds, Expert to edge anew the arms of faith, As who should say, a Galenist, resolved To hold the walls of dogma against fact, Experience, insight, his own self, if need be! Ah, how I pitied him, mine own eyes set Straight in the level beams of Truth, who groped In error’s old deserted catacombs And lit his tapers upon empty graves! Ay, but he held his own, the monk — more man Than any laurelled cripple of the wars, Charles’s spent shafts; for what he willed he willed, As those do that forerun the wheels of fate,

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Not take their dust — that force the virgin hours, Hew life into the likeness of themselves And wrest the stars from their concurrences. So firm his mould; but mine the ductile soul That wears the livery of circumstance And hangs obsequious on its suzerain’s eye. For who rules now? The twilight-flitting monk, Or I, that took the morning like an Alp? He held his own, I let mine slip from me, The birthright that no sovereign can restore; And so ironic Time beholds us now Master and slave — he lord of half the earth, I ousted from my narrow heritage.

For there’s the sting! My kingdom knows me not. Reach me that folio — my usurper’s title! Fallopius reigning, vice — nay, not so: Successor, not usurper. I am dead. My throne stood empty; he was heir to it. Ay, but who hewed his kingdom from the waste, Cleared, inch by inch, the acres for his sowing, Won back for man that ancient fief o’ the Church, His body? Who flung Galen from his seat, And founded the great dynasty of truth In error’s central kingdom? Ask men that, And see their answer: just a wondering stare, To learn things were not always as they are — The very fight forgotten with the fighter; Already grows the moss upon my grave! Ay, and so meet — hold fast to that, Vesalius. They only, who re-conquer day by day The inch of ground they camped on over-night, Have right of foothold on this crowded earth. I left mine own; he seized it; with it went My name, my fame, my very self, it seems, Till I am but the symbol of a man, The sign-board creaking o’er an empty inn. He names me — true! “Oh, give the door its due I entered by. Only, my masters, note,

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Had door been none, a shoulder-thrust of mine Had breached the crazy wall” — he seems to say. So meet — and yet a word of thanks, of praise, Of recognition that the clue was found, Seized, followed, clung to, by some hand now dust — Had this obscured his quartering of my shield?

How the one weakness stirs again! I thought I had done with that old thirst for gratitude That lured me to the desert years ago. I did my work — and was not that enough? No; but because the idlers sneered and shrugged, The envious whispered, the traducers lied, And friendship doubted where it should have cheered, I flung aside the unfinished task, sought praise Outside my soul’s esteem, and learned too late That victory, like God’s kingdom, is within. (Nay, let the folio rest upon my knee. I do not feel its weight.) Ingratitude? The hurrying traveller does not ask the name Of him who points him on his way; and this Fallopius sits in the mid-heart of me, Because he keeps his eye upon the goal, Cuts a straight furrow to the end in view, Cares not who oped the fountain by the way, But drinks to draw fresh courage for his journey. That was the lesson that Ignatius taught — The one I might have learned from him, but would not — That we are but stray atoms on the wind, A dancing transiency of summer eves, Till we become one with our purpose, merged In that vast effort of the race which makes Mortality immortal. “He that loseth His life shall find it”: so the Scripture runs. But I so hugged the fleeting self in me, So loved the lovely perishable hours, So kissed myself to death upon their lips, That on one pyre we perished in the end — A grimmer bonfire than the Church e’er lit!

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Yet all was well — or seemed so — till I heard That younger voice, an echo of my own, And, like a wanderer turning to his home, Who finds another on the hearth, and learns, Half-dazed, that other is his actual self In name and claim, as the whole parish swears, So strangely, suddenly, stood dispossessed Of that same self I had sold all to keep, A baffled ghost that none would see or hear! “Vesalius? Who’s Vesalius? This Fallopius It is who dragged the Galen-idol down, Who rent the veil of flesh and forced a way Into the secret fortalice of life” — Yet it was I that bore the brunt of it!

Well, better so! Better awake and live My last brief moment, as the man I was, Than lapse from life’s long lethargy to death Without one conscious interval. At least I repossess my past, am once again No courtier med’cining the whims of kings In muffled palace-chambers, but the free Friendless Vesalius, with his back to the wall And all the world against him. O, for that Best gift of all, Fallopius, take my thanks — That, and much more. At first, when Padua wrote: “Master, Fallopius dead, resume again The chair even he could not completely fill, And see what usury age shall take of youth In honors forfeited” — why, just at first, I was quite simply credulously glad To think the old life stood ajar for me, Like a fond woman’s unforgetting heart. But now that death waylays me — now I know This isle is the circumference of my days, And I shall die here in a little while — So also best, Fallopius! For I see The gods may give anew, but not restore; And though I think that, in my chair again,

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I might have argued my supplanters wrong In this or that — this Cesalpinus, say, With all his hot-foot blundering in the dark, Fabricius, with his over-cautious clutch On Galen (systole and diastole Of Truth’s mysterious heart!) — yet, other ways, It may be that this dying serves the cause. For Truth stays not to build her monument For this or that co-operating hand, But props it with her servants’ failures — nay, Cements its courses with their blood and brains, A living substance that shall clinch her walls Against the assaults of time. Already, see, Her scaffold rises on my hidden toil, I but the accepted premiss whence must spring The airy structure of her argument; Nor could the bricks it rests on serve to build The crowning finials. I abide her law: A different substance for a different end — Content to know I hold the building up; Though men, agape at dome and pinnacles, Guess not, the whole must crumble like a dream But for that buried labor underneath. Yet, Padua, I had still my word to say! Let others say it! — Ah, but will they guess Just the one word — ? Nay, Truth is many-tongued. What one man failed to speak, another finds Another word for. May not all converge In some vast utterance, of which you and I, Fallopius, were but halting syllables? So knowledge come, no matter how it comes! No matter whence the light falls, so it fall! Truth’s way, not mine — that I, whose service failed In action, yet may make amends in praise. Fabricius, Cesalpinus, say your word, Not yours, or mine, but Truth’s, as you receive it! You miss a point I saw? See others, then! Misread my meaning? Yet expound your own! Obscure one space I cleared? The sky is wide, And you may yet uncover other stars.

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For thus I read the meaning of this end: There are two ways of spreading light; to be The candle or the mirror that reflects it. I let my wick burn out — there yet remains To spread an answering surface to the flame That others kindle.

Turn me in my bed. The window darkens as the hours swing round; But yonder, look, the other casement glows! Let me face westward as my sun goes down. EDITH WHARTON.

Note: Note. — Vesalius, the great anatomist, studied at Louvain and Paris, and was called by Venice to the chair of surgery in the University of Padua. He was one of the first physiologists to dissect the human body, and his great work “The Structure of the Human Body” was an open attack on the physiology of Galen. The book excited such violent opposition, not only in the Church, bu in the University, that in a fit of discouragement he burned his remaining manuscripts and accepted the post of physician at the Court of Charles V., and afterward of his son, Philip II. of Spain. This closed his life of free enquiry, for the Inquisition forbade all scientific research, and the dissection of corpses was prohibited in Spain. Vesalius sank into the rich and successful court physician, but regrets for his past life were never wholly extinguished, and in 1561 they were roused afresh by the reading of an anatomical treatise by Gabriel Fallopius, his successor in the chair at Padua. From that moment life in Spain became intolerable to Vesalius, and in 1563 he set out for the East. Tradition reports that this journey was a penance to which the Church condemned him for having opened the body of a woman before she was actually dead; but more probably Vesalius, sick of his long servitude, made the pilgrimage a pretext to escape from Spain. Fallopius had meanwhile died, and the Venetian Senate is said to have offered Vesalius his old chair; but on the way home from Jerusalem he was seized with illness, and died at Zante in 1564.]

“A Torchbearer.” Scribner’s Magazine 33 (April 1903): 504-05. (J. B. M., NOVEMBER 29, 1902) By Edith Wharton

GREAT cities rise and have their fall; the brass That held their glories moulders in its turn, Hard granite rots like an uprooted weed, And ever on the palimpsest of earth Impatient Time rubs out the word he writ. But one thing makes the years its pedestal, Springs from the ashes of its pyre, and claps A skyward wing above its epitaph — The will of man willing immortal things.

The ages are but baubles hung upon The thread of some strong lives — and one slight wrist May lift a century above the dust; For Time, The Sisyphean load of little lives, Becomes the globe and sceptre of the great. But who are these that, linking hand in hand, Transmit across the twilight waste of years The flying brightness of a kindled hour? Not always, nor alone, the lives that search How they may snatch a glory out of heaven Or add a height to Babel; oftener they That in the still fulfilment of each day’s Pacific order hold great deeds in leash, That in the sober sheath of tranquil tasks Hide the attempered blade of high emprise, And leap like lightning to the clap of fate.

So greatly gave he, nurturing ‘gainst the call Of one rare moment all the daily store

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Of joy distilled from the acquitted task, And that deliberate rashness which bespeaks The pondered action passed into the blood; So swift to harden purpose into deed That, with the wind of ruin in his hair, Soul sprang full-statured from the broken flesh, And at one stroke he lived the whole of life, Poured all in one libation to the truth, A brimming cup whose drops shall overflow On deserts of the soul long beaten down By the brute hoof of habit, till they spring In manifold upheaval to the sun.

Call here no high artificer to raise His wordy monument — such lives as these Make death a dull misnomer and its pomp An empty vesture. Let resounding lives Re-echo splendidly through high-piled vaults And make the grave their spokesman — such as he Are as the hidden streams that, underground, Sweeten the pastures for the grazing kine, Or as spring airs that bring through prison bars The scent of freedom; or a light that burns Immutably across the shaken seas, Forevermore by nameless hands renewed, Where else were darkness and a glutted shore.

“The Old Pole Star.” Scribner’s Magazine 43 (Jan. 1908): 68. By Edith Wharton

BEFORE the clepsydra had bound the days Man tethered Change to his fixed star, and said: “The elder races, that long since are dead, Marched by that light; it swerves not from its base Though all the worlds about it wax and fade.”

When Egypt saw it, fast in reeling spheres, Her Pyramids shaft-centred on its ray She reared and said: “Long as this star holds sway In uninvaded ether, shall the years Revere my monuments — ” and went her way.

The Pyramids abide; but through the shaft That held the polar pivot, eye to eye, Look now — blank nothingness! As though Change laughed At man’s presumption and his puny craft, The star has slipped its leash and roams the sky.

Yet could the immemorial piles be swung A skyey hair’s breadth from their rooted base, Back to the central anchorage of space, Ah, then again, as when the race was young, Should they behold the beacon of the race!

Of old men said: “The Truth is there: we rear Our faith full-centred on it. It was known Thus of the elders who foreran us here, Mapped out its circuit in the shifting sphere, And found it, ‘mid mutation, fixed alone.”

Change laughs again, again the sky is cold, And down that fissure now no star-beam glides. Yet they whose sweep of vision grows not old Still at the central point of space behold Another pole-star: for the Truth abides.

“Moonrise Over Tyringham.” Century Magazine 76 (July 1908): 356-57.

NOW the high holocaust of hours is done, And all the west empurpled with their death, How swift oblivion drinks the fallen sun, How little while the dusk remembereth!

Though some there were, proud hours that marched in mail, And took the morning on auspicious crest, Crying to Fortune, “Back! For I prevail!” — Yet now they lie disfeatured with the rest;

And some that stole so soft on Destiny Methought they had surprised her to a smile; But these fled frozen when she turned to see, And moaned and muttered through my heart awhile.

But now the day is emptied of them all, And night absorbs their life-blood at a draught; And so my life lies, as the gods let fall An empty cup from which their lips have quaffed.

Yet see — night is not: by translucent ways, Up the gray void of autumn afternoon Steals a mild crescent, charioted in haze, And all the air is merciful as June.

The lake is a forgotten streak of day That trembles through the hemlocks’ darkling bars, And still, my heart, still some divine delay Upon the threshold holds the earliest stars.

O pale equivocal hour, whose suppliant feet Haunt the mute reaches of the sleeping wind, Art thou a watcher stealing to entreat Prayer and sepulture for thy fallen kind?

Poor plaintive waif of a predestined race, Their ruin gapes for thee. Why linger here? Go hence in silence. Veil thine orphaned face, Lest I should look on it and call it dear.

For if I love thee thou wilt sooner die; Some sudden ruin will plunge upon thy head, Midnight will fall from the revengeful sky And hurl thee down among thy shuddering dead.

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Avert thine eyes. Lapse softly from my sight, Call not my name, nor heed if thine I crave; So shalt thou sink through mitigated night And bathe thee in the all-effacing wave.

But upward still thy perilous footsteps fare Along a high-hung heaven drenched in light, Dilating on a tide of crystal air That floods the dark hills to their utmost height.

Strange hour, is this thy waning face that leans Out of mid-heaven and makes my soul its glass? What victory is imaged there? What means Thy tarrying smile? Oh, veil thy lips and pass!

Nay — pause and let me name thee! For I see, Oh, with what flooding ecstasy of light, Strange hour that wilt not loose thy hold on me, Thou’rt not day’s latest, but the first of night!

And after thee the gold-foot stars come thick; From hand to hand they toss the flying fire, Till all the zenith with their dance is quick, About the wheeling music of the Lyre.

Dread hour that leadst the immemorial round, With lifted torch revealing one by one The thronging splendors that the day held bound, And how each blue abyss enshrines its sun —

Be thou the image of a thought that fares Forth from itself, and flings its ray ahead, Leaping the barriers of ephemeral cares, To where our lives are but the ages’ tread,

And let this year be, not the last of youth, But first — like thee! — of some new train of hours, If more remote from hope yet nearer truth, And kin to the unfathomable powers.

“Life.” Atlantic Monthly 102 (Oct. 1908): 501-04.

NAY, lift me to thy lips, Life, and once more Pour the wild music through me —

I quivered in the reed-bed with my kind, Rooted in Lethe-bank, when at the dawn There came a groping shape of mystery Moving among us, that with random stroke Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe, Pierced, fashioned, lipped me, sounding for a voice, Laughing on Lethe-bank — and in my throat I felt the wing-beat of the fledgeling notes, The bubble of godlike laughter in my throat.

Such little songs she sang, Pursing her lips to fit the tiny pipe, They trickled from me like a slender spring That strings frail wood-growths on its crystal thread, Nor dreams of glassing cities, bearing ships. She sang, and bore me through the April world Matching the birds, doubling the insect-hum In the meadows, under the low-moving airs, And breathings of the scarce-articulate air When it makes mouths of grasses — but when the sky Burst into storm, and took great trees for pipes, She thrust me in her breast, and warm beneath Her cloudy vesture, on her terrible heart, I shook, and heard the battle. But more oft, Those early days, we moved in charmed woods, Where once, at dusk, she piped against a faun, And one warm dawn a tree became a nymph Listening; and trembled; and Life laughed and passed. And once we came to a great stream that bore The stars upon its bosom like a sea, And ships like stars; so to the sea we came. One wild pang through me; then refrained her hand, And whispered: “Hear — ” and into my frail flanks, Into my bursting veins, the whole sea poured Its spaces and its thunder; and I feared.

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We came to cities, and Life piped on me Low calls to dreaming girls, In counting-house windows, through the chink of gold, Flung cries that fired the captive brain of youth, And made the heavy merchant at his desk Curse us for a cracked hurdy-gurdy; Life Mimicked the hurdy-gurdy, and we passed.

We climbed the slopes of solitude, and there Life met a god, who challenged her and said: “Thy pipe against my lyre!” But “Wait!” she laughed, And in my live flank dug a finger-hole, And wrung new music from it. Ah, the pain!

We climbed and climbed, and left the god behind. We saw the earth spread vaster than the sea, With infinite surge of mountains surfed with snow, And a silence that was louder than the deep; But on the utmost pinnacle Life again Hid me, and I heard the terror in her hair.

Safe in new vales, I ached for the old pang, And clamoured “Play me against a god again!” “Poor Marsyas-mortal — he shall bleed thee yet,” She breathed and kissed me, stilling the dim need. But evermore it woke, and stabbed my flank With yearnings for new music and new pain. “Another note against another god!” I clamoured; and she answered: “Bide my time. Of every heart-wound I will make a stop. And drink thy life in music, pang by pang. But first thou must yield the notes I stored in thee At dawn beside the river. Take my lips.”

She kissed me like a lover, but I wept, Remembering that high song against the god, And the old songs slept in me, and I was dumb.

We came to cavernous foul places, blind With harpy-wings, and sulphurous with the glare Of sinful furnaces — where hunger toiled, And pleasure gathered in a starveling prey, And death fed delicately on young bones.

“Now sing!” cried Life, and set her lips to me. “Here are gods also. Wilt thou pipe for Dis?”

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My cry was drowned beneath the furnace roar, Choked by the sulphur-fumes; and beast-lipped gods Laughed down on me, and mouthed the flutes of hell.

“Now sing!” said Life, reissuing to the stars; And wrung a new note from my wounded side.

So came we to clear spaces, and the sea. And now I felt its volume in my heart, And my heart waxed with it, and Life played on me The song of the Infinite. “Now the stars,” she said.

Then from the utmost pinnacle again She poured me on the wild sidereal stream, And I grew with her great breathings, till we swept The interstellar spaces like new worlds Loosed from the fiery ruin of a star.

Cold, cold we rested on black peaks again, Under black skies, under a groping wind, And life, grown old, hugged me to a numb breast, Pressing numb lips against me. Suddenly A blade of silver severed the black peaks >From the black sky, and earth was born again, Breathing and various, under a god’s feet. A god! A god! I felt the heart of Life Leap under me, and my cold flanks shook again. He bore no lyre, he rang no challenge out, But Life warmed to him, warming me with her, And as he neared I felt beneath her hands The stab of a new wound that sucked my soul Forth in a new song from my throbbing throat.

“His name — his name?” I whispered, but she poured The music faster, and I grew with it, Became a part of it, while Life and I Clung lip to lip, and I from her wrung song As she from me, one song, one ecstasy, In indistinguishable union blent, Till she became the flute and I the player. And lo! the song I played on her was more Than any she had drawn from me; it held The stars, the peaks, the cities, and the sea, The faun’s catch, the nymph’s tremor, and the heart Of dreaming girls, of toilers at the desk, Apollo’s challenge on the sunrise slope,

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And the hiss of the night-gods mouthing flutes of hell — All, to the dawn-wind’s whisper in the reeds, When Life first came, a shape of mystery, Moving among us, and with random stroke Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe. All this I wrung from her in that deep hour, While Love stood murmuring: “Play the god, poor grass!”

Now, by that hour, I am a mate to thee Forever, Life, however spent and clogged, And tossed back useless to my native mud! Yea, groping for new reeds to fashion thee New instruments of anguish and delight, Thy hand shall leap to me, thy broken reed, Thine ear remember me, thy bosom thrill With the old subjection, then when Love and I Held thee, and fashioned thee, and made thee dance Like a slave-girl to her pipers — yea, thou yet Shalt hear my call, and dropping all thy toys Thou’lt lift me to thy lips, Life, and once more Pour the wild music through me —

“All Souls.” Scribner’s Magazine 45 (Jan. 1909): 22-23. BY EDITH WHARTON

I

A THIN moon faints in the sky o’erhead, And dumb in the churchyard lie the dead. Walk we not, Sweet, by garden ways, Where the late rose hangs and the phlox delays, But forth of the gate and down the road, Past the church and the yews, to their dim abode. For it’s turn of the year and All Souls’ night, When the dead can hear and the dead have sight.

II

Fear not that sound like wind in the trees: It is only their call that comes on the breeze; Fear not the shudder that seems to pass: It is only the tread of their feet on the grass; Fear not the drip of the bough as you stoop: It is only the touch of their hands that grope — For the year’s on the turn, and it’s All Souls’ night, When the dead can yearn and the dead can smite.

III

And where should a man bring his sweet to woo But here, where such hundreds were lovers too? Where lie the dead lips that thirst to kiss, The empty hands that their fellows miss, Where the maid and her lover, from sere to green, Sleep bed by bed, with the worm between? For it’s turn of the year and All Souls’ night, When the dead can hear and the dead have sight.

IV

And now that they rise and walk in the cold, Let us warm their blood and give youth to the old. Let them see us and hear us, and say: “Ah, thus In the prime of the year it went with us!” Till their lips drawn close, and so long unkist, Forget they are mist that mingles with mist! For the year’s on the turn, and it’s All Souls’ night, When the dead can burn and the dead can smite.

V

Till they say, as they hear us — poor dead, poor dead! — “Just an hour of this, and our age-long bed — Just a thrill of the old remembered pains To kindle a flame in our frozen veins, Just a touch, and a sight, and a floating apart, As the chill of dawn strikes each phantom heart — For it’s turn of the year and All Souls’ night, When the dead can hear, and the dead have sight.”

VI

And where should the living feel alive But here in this wan white humming hive, As the moon wastes down, and the dawn turns cold, And one by one they creep back to the fold? And where should a man hold his mate and say: “One more, one more, ere we go their way”? For the year’s on the turn, and it’s All Souls’ night, When the living can learn by the churchyard light.

VII

And how should we break faith who have seen Those dead lips plight with the mist between, And how forget, who have seen how soon They lie thus chambered and cold to the moon? How scorn, how hate, how strive, we too, Who must do so soon as those others do? For it’s All Souls’ night, and break of the day, And behold, with the light the dead are away… .

“A Grave.” Current Literature 46 (June 1909): 685. [TEXT MISSING]

“Ogrin the Hermit.” Atlantic Monthly 104 (Dec. 1909): 844-48.

Vous qui nous jugez, savez-vous quel boivre nous avons bu sur la mer?

Ogrin the Hermit in old age set forth This tale to them that sought him in the extreme Ancient grey wood where he and silence housed:

Long years ago, when yet my sight was keen, My hearing knew the word of wind in bough, And all the low fore-runners of the storm, There reached me, where I sat beneath my thatch, A crash as of tracked quarry in the brake, And storm-flecked, fugitive, with straining breasts And backward eyes and hands inseparable, Tristan and Iseult, swooning at my feet, Sought hiding from their hunters. Here they lay.

For pity of their great extremity, Their sin abhorring, yet not them with it, I nourished, hid, and suffered them to build Their branched hut in sight of this grey cross, That haply, falling on their guilty sleep, Its shadow should part them like the blade of God, And they should shudder at each other’s eyes.

So dwelt they in this solitude with me, And daily, Tristan forth upon the chase, The tender Iseult sought my door and heard The words of holiness. Abashed she heard, Like one in wisdom nurtured from a child, Yet in whose ears an alien language dwells Of some far country whence the traveller brings Magical treasure, and still images Of gods forgotten, and the scent of groves That sleep by painted rivers. As I have seen Oft-times returning pilgrims with the spell

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Of these lost lands upon their lids, she moved Among familiar truths, accustomed sights, As she to them were strange, not they to her. And often, reasoning with her, have I felt Some ancient lore was in her, dimly drawn >From springs of life beyond the four-fold stream That makes a silver pale to Paradise; For she was calm as some forsaken god Who knows not that his power is passed from him, But sees with tranced eyes rich pilgrim-trains In sands the desert blows about his feet.

Abhorring first, I heard her; yet her speech Warred not with pity, or the contrite heart, Or hatred of things evil: rather seemed The utterance of some world where these are not, And the heart lives in heathen innocence With earth’s innocuous creatures. For she said: “Love is not, as the shallow adage goes, A witch’s filter, brewed to trick the blood. The cup we drank of on the flying deck Was the blue vault of air, the round world’s lip, Brimmed with life’s hydromel, and pressed to ours By myriad hands of wind and sun and sea. For these are all the cup-bearers of youth, That bend above it at the board of life, Solicitous accomplices: there’s not A leaf on bough, a foam-flash on the wave, So brief and glancing but it serves them too; No scent the pale rose spends upon the night, Nor sky-lark’s rapture trusted to the blue, But these, from the remotest tides of air Brought in mysterious salvage, breathe and sing In lovers’ lips and eyes; and two that drink Thus onely of the strange commingled cup Of mortal fortune shall into their blood Take magic gifts. Upon each others’ hearts They shall surprise the heart-beat of the world, And feel a sense of life in things inert; For as love’s touch upon the yielded body Is a diviner’s wand, and where it falls

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A hidden treasure trembles: so their eyes, Falling upon the world of clod and brute, And cold hearts plotting evil, shall discern The inextinguishable flame of life That girdles the remotest frame of things With influences older than the stars.”

So spake Iseult; and thus her passion found Far-flying words, like birds against the sunset That look on lands we see not. Yet I know It was not any argument she found, But that she was, the colour that life took About her, that thus reasoned in her stead, Making her like a lifted lantern borne Through midnight thickets, where the flitting ray Momently from inscrutable darkness draws A myriad-veined branch, and its shy nest Quivering with startled life: so moved Iseult. And all about her this deep solitude Stirred with responsive motions. Oft I knelt In night-long vigil while the lovers slept Under their outlawed thatch, and with long prayers Sought to disarm the indignant heavens; but lo, Thus kneeling in the intertidal hour ‘Twixt dark and dawning, have mine eyes beheld How the old gods that hide in these hoar woods, And were to me but shapings of the air, And flit and murmur of the breathing trees, Or slant of moon on pools — how these stole forth, Grown living presences, yet not of bale, But innocent-eyed as fawns that come to drink, Thronging the threshold where the lovers lay, In service of the great god housed within Who hides in his breast, beneath his mighty plumes, The purposes and penalties of life. Or in yet deeper hours, when all was still, And the hushed air bowed over them alone, Such music of the heart as lovers hear, When close as lips lean, lean the thoughts between — When the cold world, no more a lonely orb Circling the unimagined track of Time,

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Is like a beating heart within their hands, A numb bird that they warm, and feel its wings — Such music have I heard; and through the prayers Wherewith I sought to shackle their desires, And bring them humbled to the feet of God, Caught the loud quiring of the fruitful year, The leap of springs, the throb of loosened earth, And the sound of all the streams that seek the sea.

So fell it, that when pity moved their hearts, And those high lovers, one unto the end, Bowed to the sundering will, and each his way Went through a world that could not make them twain, Knowing that a great vision, passing by, Had swept mine eye-lids with its fringe of fire, I, with the wonder of it on my head, And with the silence of it in my heart, Forth to Tintagel went by secret ways, A long lone journey; and from them that loose Their spiced bales upon the wharves, and shake Strange silks to the sun, or covertly unbosom Rich hoard of pearls and amber, or let drip Through swarthy fingers links of sinuous gold, Chose their most delicate treasures. Though I knew No touch more silken than this knotted gown, My hands, grown tender with the sense of her, Discerned the airiest tissues, light to cling As shower-loosed petals, veils like meadow-smoke, Fur soft as snow, amber like sun congealed, Pearls pink as may-buds in an orb of dew; And laden with these wonders, that to her Were natural as the vesture of a flower, Fared home to lay my booty at her feet.

And she, consenting, nor with useless words Proving my purpose, robed herself therein To meet her lawful lord; but while she thus Prisoned the wandering glory of her hair, Dimmed her bright breast with jewels, and subdued Her light to those dull splendours, well she knew The lord that I adorned her thus to meet

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Was not Tintagel’s shadowy King, but he, That other lord beneath whose plumy feet The currents of the seas of life run gold As from eternal sunrise; well she knew That when I laid my hands upon her head, Saying, “Fare forth forgiven,” the words I spoke Were the breathings of his pity, who beholds How, swept on his inexorable wings Too far beyond the planetary fires On the last coasts of darkness, plunged too deep In light ineffable, the heart amazed Swoons of its glory, and dropping back to earth Craves the dim shelter of familiar sounds, The rain on the roof, the noise of flocks that pass, And the slow world waking to its daily round… .

And thus, as one who speeds a banished queen, I set her on my mule, and hung about With royal ornament she went her way; For meet it was that this great Queen should pass Crowned and forgiven from the face of Love.

“The Comrade.” Atlantic Monthly 106 (Dec. 1910): 785-87.

WILD winged thing, O brought I know not whence To beat your life out in my life’s low cage; You strange familiar, nearer than my flesh Yet distant as a star, that were at first A child with me a child, yet elfin-far, And visibly of some unearthly breed; Mirthfullest mate of all my mortal games, Yet shedding on them some evasive gleam Of Latmian loneliness — O seven then Expert to lift the latch of our low door And profit by the hours when, dusked about By human misintelligence, our first Weak fledgling flights were safeliest essayed; Divine accomplice of those perilous-sweet Low moth-flights of the unadventured soul Above the world’s dim garden! — now we sit, After what stretch of years, what stretch of wings, In the same cage together — still as near And still as strange! Only I know at last That we are fellows till the last night falls, And that I shall not miss your comrade hands Till they have closed my lids, and by them set A taper that — who knows! — may yet shine through.

Sister, my comrade, I have ached for you, Sometimes, to see you curb your pace to mine, And bow your Maenad crest to the dull forms Of human usage; I have loosed your hand And whispered: ‘Go! Since I am tethered here;’ And you have turned, and breathing for reply, ‘I too am pinioned, as you too are free,’ Have caught me to such undreamed distances As the last planets see, when they look forth,

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To the sentinel pacings of the outmost stars — Nor these alone, Comrade, my sister, were your gifts. More oft Has your impalpable wing-brush bared for me The heart of wonder in familiar things, Unroofed dull rooms, and hung above my head The cloudy glimpses of a vernal moon, Or all the autumn heaven ripe with stars.

And you have made a secret pact with Sleep, And when she comes not, or her feet delay, Toiled in low meadows of gray asphodel Under a pale sky where no shadows fall, Then, hooded like her, to my side you steal, And the night grows like a great rumouring sea, And you a boat, and I your passenger, And the tide lifts us with an indrawn breath Out, out upon the murmurs and the scents, Through spray of splintered star-beams, or white rage Of desperate moon-drawn waters — on and on To some blue ocean immarcescible That ever like a slow-swung mirror rocks The balanced breasts of sea-birds motionless.

Yet other nights, my sister, you have been The storm, and I the leaf that fled on it Terrifically down voids that never knew The pity of creation — or have felt The immitigable anguish of a soul Left last in a long-ruined world alone; And then your touch has drawn me back to earth, As in the night, upon an unknown road, A scent of lilac breathing from the hedge Bespeaks the hidden farm, the bedded cows, And safety, and the sense of human kind …

And I have climbed with you by hidden ways To meet the dews of morning, and have seen The shy gods like retreating shadows fade, Or on the thymy reaches have surprised Old Chiron sleeping, and have waked him not …

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Yet farther have I fared with you, and known Love and his sacred tremors, and the rites Of his most inward temple; and beyond His temple lights, have seen the long gray waste Where lonely thoughts, like creatures of the night, Listen and wander where a city stood. And creeping down by waterless defiles Under an iron midnight, have I kept My vigil in the waste till dawn began To move among the ruins, and I saw A sapling rooted in a fissured plinth, And a wren’s nest in the thunder-threatening hand Of some old god of granite in the dust …

“Summer Afternoon (Bodiam Castle, Sussex).” Scribner’s Magazine 49 (Mar. 1911): 277-78. By Edith Wharton

THOU couldst not look on me and live: so runs The mortal legend — thou that couldst not live Nor look on me (so the divine decree)! That sawst me in the cloud, the wave, the bough, The clod commoved with April, and the shapes Lurking ‘twixt lid and eye-ball in the dark. Mocked I thee not in every guise of life, Hid in girls’ eyes, a naiad in her well, Wooed through their laughter, and like echo fled, Luring thee down the primal silences Where the heart hushes and the flesh is dumb? Nay, was not I the tide that drew thee out Relentlessly from the detaining shore, Forth from the home-lights and the hailing voices, Forth from the last faint headland’s failing line, Till I enveloped thee from verge to verge And hid thee in the hollow of my being? And still, because between us hung the veil, The myriad-tinted veil of sense, thy feet Refused their rest, thy hands the gifts of life, Thy heart its losses, lest some lesser face Should blur mine image in thine upturned soul Ere death had stamped it there. This was thy thought. And mine? The gods, they say, have all: not so! This have they — flocks on every hill, the blue Spirals of incense and the amber drip Of lucid honey-comb on sylvan shrines, First-chosen weanlings, doves immaculate, Twin-cooing in the osier-plaited cage, And ivy-garlands glaucous with the dew: Man’s wealth, man’s servitude, but not himself! And so they pale, for lack of warmth they wane, Freeze to the marble of their images, And, pinnacled on man’s subserviency, Through the thick sacrificial haze discern Unheeding lives and loves, as some cold peak Through icy mists may enviously descry Warm vales unzoned to the all-fruitful sun. So they along an immortality Of endless-vistaed homage strain their gaze, If haply some rash votary, empty-urned, But light of foot, with all-adventuring hand, Break rank, fling past the people and the priest, Up the last step, on to the inmost shrine, And there, the sacred curtain in his clutch, Drop dead of seeing — while the others prayed! Yea, this we wait for, this renews us, this

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Incarnates us, pale people of your dreams, Who are but what you make us, wood or stone, Or cold chryselephantine hung with gems, Or else the beating purpose of your life, Your sword, your clay, the note your pipe pursues, The face that haunts your pillow, or the light Scarce visible over leagues of laboring sea! O thus through use to reign again, to drink The cup of peradventure to the lees, For one dear instant disimmortalized In giving immortality! So dream the gods upon their listless thrones. Yet sometimes, when the votary appears, With death-affronting forehead and glad eyes, Too young, they rather muse, too frail thou art, And shall we rob some girl of saffron veil And nuptial garland for so slight a thing? And so to their incurious loves return.

Not so with thee; for some indeed there are Who would behold the truth and then return To pine among the semblances — but I Divined in thee the questing foot that never Revisits the cold hearth of yesterday Or calls achievement home. I from afar Beheld thee fashioned for one hour’s high use, Nor meant to slake oblivion drop by drop. Long, long hadst thou inhabited my dreams, Surprising me as harts surprise a pool, Stealing to drink at midnight; I divined Thee rash to reach the heart of life, and lie Bosom to bosom in occasion’s arms, And said: Because I love thee thou shalt die!

For immortality is not to range Unlimited through vast Olympian days, Or sit in dull dominion over time; But this — to drink fate’s utmost at a draught, Nor feel the wine grow stale upon the lip, To scale the summit of some soaring moment, Nor know the dulness of the long descent, To snatch the crown of life and seal it up Secure forever in the vaults of death!

And this was thine: to lose thyself in me, Relive in my renewal, and become The light of other lives, a quenchless torch Passed on from hand to hand, till men are dust And the last garland withers from my shrine.

“Moonrise Over Tyringham.” Century Magazine 76 (July 1908): 356-57.

NOW the high holocaust of hours is done, And all the west empurpled with their death, How swift oblivion drinks the fallen sun, How little while the dusk remembereth!

Though some there were, proud hours that marched in mail, And took the morning on auspicious crest, Crying to Fortune, “Back! For I prevail!” — Yet now they lie disfeatured with the rest;

And some that stole so soft on Destiny Methought they had surprised her to a smile; But these fled frozen when she turned to see, And moaned and muttered through my heart awhile.

But now the day is emptied of them all, And night absorbs their life-blood at a draught; And so my life lies, as the gods let fall An empty cup from which their lips have quaffed.

Yet see — night is not: by translucent ways, Up the gray void of autumn afternoon Steals a mild crescent, charioted in haze, And all the air is merciful as June.

The lake is a forgotten streak of day That trembles through the hemlocks’ darkling bars, And still, my heart, still some divine delay Upon the threshold holds the earliest stars.

O pale equivocal hour, whose suppliant feet Haunt the mute reaches of the sleeping wind, Art thou a watcher stealing to entreat Prayer and sepulture for thy fallen kind?

Poor plaintive waif of a predestined race, Their ruin gapes for thee. Why linger here? Go hence in silence. Veil thine orphaned face, Lest I should look on it and call it dear.

For if I love thee thou wilt sooner die; Some sudden ruin will plunge upon thy head, Midnight will fall from the revengeful sky And hurl thee down among thy shuddering dead.

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Avert thine eyes. Lapse softly from my sight, Call not my name, nor heed if thine I crave; So shalt thou sink through mitigated night And bathe thee in the all-effacing wave.

But upward still thy perilous footsteps fare Along a high-hung heaven drenched in light, Dilating on a tide of crystal air That floods the dark hills to their utmost height.

Strange hour, is this thy waning face that leans Out of mid-heaven and makes my soul its glass? What victory is imaged there? What means Thy tarrying smile? Oh, veil thy lips and pass!

Nay — pause and let me name thee! For I see, Oh, with what flooding ecstasy of light, Strange hour that wilt not loose thy hold on me, Thou’rt not day’s latest, but the first of night!

And after thee the gold-foot stars come thick; From hand to hand they toss the flying fire, Till all the zenith with their dance is quick, About the wheeling music of the Lyre.

Dread hour that leadst the immemorial round, With lifted torch revealing one by one The thronging splendors that the day held bound, And how each blue abyss enshrines its sun —

Be thou the image of a thought that fares Forth from itself, and flings its ray ahead, Leaping the barriers of ephemeral cares, To where our lives are but the ages’ tread,

And let this year be, not the last of youth, But first — like thee! — of some new train of hours, If more remote from hope yet nearer truth, And kin to the unfathomable powers.

“Life.” Atlantic Monthly 102 (Oct. 1908): 501-04.

NAY, lift me to thy lips, Life, and once more Pour the wild music through me —

I quivered in the reed-bed with my kind, Rooted in Lethe-bank, when at the dawn There came a groping shape of mystery Moving among us, that with random stroke Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe, Pierced, fashioned, lipped me, sounding for a voice, Laughing on Lethe-bank — and in my throat I felt the wing-beat of the fledgeling notes, The bubble of godlike laughter in my throat.

Such little songs she sang, Pursing her lips to fit the tiny pipe, They trickled from me like a slender spring That strings frail wood-growths on its crystal thread, Nor dreams of glassing cities, bearing ships. She sang, and bore me through the April world Matching the birds, doubling the insect-hum In the meadows, under the low-moving airs, And breathings of the scarce-articulate air When it makes mouths of grasses — but when the sky Burst into storm, and took great trees for pipes, She thrust me in her breast, and warm beneath Her cloudy vesture, on her terrible heart, I shook, and heard the battle. But more oft, Those early days, we moved in charmed woods, Where once, at dusk, she piped against a faun, And one warm dawn a tree became a nymph Listening; and trembled; and Life laughed and passed. And once we came to a great stream that bore The stars upon its bosom like a sea, And ships like stars; so to the sea we came. One wild pang through me; then refrained her hand, And whispered: “Hear — ” and into my frail flanks, Into my bursting veins, the whole sea poured Its spaces and its thunder; and I feared.

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We came to cities, and Life piped on me Low calls to dreaming girls, In counting-house windows, through the chink of gold, Flung cries that fired the captive brain of youth, And made the heavy merchant at his desk Curse us for a cracked hurdy-gurdy; Life Mimicked the hurdy-gurdy, and we passed.

We climbed the slopes of solitude, and there Life met a god, who challenged her and said: “Thy pipe against my lyre!” But “Wait!” she laughed, And in my live flank dug a finger-hole, And wrung new music from it. Ah, the pain!

We climbed and climbed, and left the god behind. We saw the earth spread vaster than the sea, With infinite surge of mountains surfed with snow, And a silence that was louder than the deep; But on the utmost pinnacle Life again Hid me, and I heard the terror in her hair.

Safe in new vales, I ached for the old pang, And clamoured “Play me against a god again!” “Poor Marsyas-mortal — he shall bleed thee yet,” She breathed and kissed me, stilling the dim need. But evermore it woke, and stabbed my flank With yearnings for new music and new pain. “Another note against another god!” I clamoured; and she answered: “Bide my time. Of every heart-wound I will make a stop. And drink thy life in music, pang by pang. But first thou must yield the notes I stored in thee At dawn beside the river. Take my lips.”

She kissed me like a lover, but I wept, Remembering that high song against the god, And the old songs slept in me, and I was dumb.

We came to cavernous foul places, blind With harpy-wings, and sulphurous with the glare Of sinful furnaces — where hunger toiled, And pleasure gathered in a starveling prey, And death fed delicately on young bones.

“Now sing!” cried Life, and set her lips to me. “Here are gods also. Wilt thou pipe for Dis?”

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My cry was drowned beneath the furnace roar, Choked by the sulphur-fumes; and beast-lipped gods Laughed down on me, and mouthed the flutes of hell.

“Now sing!” said Life, reissuing to the stars; And wrung a new note from my wounded side.

So came we to clear spaces, and the sea. And now I felt its volume in my heart, And my heart waxed with it, and Life played on me The song of the Infinite. “Now the stars,” she said.

Then from the utmost pinnacle again She poured me on the wild sidereal stream, And I grew with her great breathings, till we swept The interstellar spaces like new worlds Loosed from the fiery ruin of a star.

Cold, cold we rested on black peaks again, Under black skies, under a groping wind, And life, grown old, hugged me to a numb breast, Pressing numb lips against me. Suddenly A blade of silver severed the black peaks >From the black sky, and earth was born again, Breathing and various, under a god’s feet. A god! A god! I felt the heart of Life Leap under me, and my cold flanks shook again. He bore no lyre, he rang no challenge out, But Life warmed to him, warming me with her, And as he neared I felt beneath her hands The stab of a new wound that sucked my soul Forth in a new song from my throbbing throat.

“His name — his name?” I whispered, but she poured The music faster, and I grew with it, Became a part of it, while Life and I Clung lip to lip, and I from her wrung song As she from me, one song, one ecstasy, In indistinguishable union blent, Till she became the flute and I the player. And lo! the song I played on her was more Than any she had drawn from me; it held The stars, the peaks, the cities, and the sea, The faun’s catch, the nymph’s tremor, and the heart Of dreaming girls, of toilers at the desk, Apollo’s challenge on the sunrise slope,

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And the hiss of the night-gods mouthing flutes of hell — All, to the dawn-wind’s whisper in the reeds, When Life first came, a shape of mystery, Moving among us, and with random stroke Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe. All this I wrung from her in that deep hour, While Love stood murmuring: “Play the god, poor grass!”

Now, by that hour, I am a mate to thee Forever, Life, however spent and clogged, And tossed back useless to my native mud! Yea, groping for new reeds to fashion thee New instruments of anguish and delight, Thy hand shall leap to me, thy broken reed, Thine ear remember me, thy bosom thrill With the old subjection, then when Love and I Held thee, and fashioned thee, and made thee dance Like a slave-girl to her pipers — yea, thou yet Shalt hear my call, and dropping all thy toys Thou’lt lift me to thy lips, Life, and once more Pour the wild music through me —

“All Souls.” Scribner’s Magazine 45 (Jan. 1909): 22-23. BY EDITH WHARTON

I

A THIN moon faints in the sky o’erhead, And dumb in the churchyard lie the dead. Walk we not, Sweet, by garden ways, Where the late rose hangs and the phlox delays, But forth of the gate and down the road, Past the church and the yews, to their dim abode. For it’s turn of the year and All Souls’ night, When the dead can hear and the dead have sight.

II

Fear not that sound like wind in the trees: It is only their call that comes on the breeze; Fear not the shudder that seems to pass: It is only the tread of their feet on the grass; Fear not the drip of the bough as you stoop: It is only the touch of their hands that grope — For the year’s on the turn, and it’s All Souls’ night, When the dead can yearn and the dead can smite.

III

And where should a man bring his sweet to woo But here, where such hundreds were lovers too? Where lie the dead lips that thirst to kiss, The empty hands that their fellows miss, Where the maid and her lover, from sere to green, Sleep bed by bed, with the worm between? For it’s turn of the year and All Souls’ night, When the dead can hear and the dead have sight.

IV

And now that they rise and walk in the cold, Let us warm their blood and give youth to the old. Let them see us and hear us, and say: “Ah, thus In the prime of the year it went with us!” Till their lips drawn close, and so long unkist, Forget they are mist that mingles with mist! For the year’s on the turn, and it’s All Souls’ night, When the dead can burn and the dead can smite.

V

Till they say, as they hear us — poor dead, poor dead! — “Just an hour of this, and our age-long bed — Just a thrill of the old remembered pains To kindle a flame in our frozen veins, Just a touch, and a sight, and a floating apart, As the chill of dawn strikes each phantom heart — For it’s turn of the year and All Souls’ night, When the dead can hear, and the dead have sight.”

VI

And where should the living feel alive But here in this wan white humming hive, As the moon wastes down, and the dawn turns cold, And one by one they creep back to the fold? And where should a man hold his mate and say: “One more, one more, ere we go their way”? For the year’s on the turn, and it’s All Souls’ night, When the living can learn by the churchyard light.

VII

And how should we break faith who have seen Those dead lips plight with the mist between, And how forget, who have seen how soon They lie thus chambered and cold to the moon? How scorn, how hate, how strive, we too, Who must do so soon as those others do? For it’s All Souls’ night, and break of the day, And behold, with the light the dead are away… .

“Ogrin the Hermit.” Atlantic Monthly 104 (Dec. 1909): 844-48.

Vous qui nous jugez, savez-vous quel boivre nous avons bu sur la mer?

Ogrin the Hermit in old age set forth This tale to them that sought him in the extreme Ancient grey wood where he and silence housed:

Long years ago, when yet my sight was keen, My hearing knew the word of wind in bough, And all the low fore-runners of the storm, There reached me, where I sat beneath my thatch, A crash as of tracked quarry in the brake, And storm-flecked, fugitive, with straining breasts And backward eyes and hands inseparable, Tristan and Iseult, swooning at my feet, Sought hiding from their hunters. Here they lay.

For pity of their great extremity, Their sin abhorring, yet not them with it, I nourished, hid, and suffered them to build Their branched hut in sight of this grey cross, That haply, falling on their guilty sleep, Its shadow should part them like the blade of God, And they should shudder at each other’s eyes.

So dwelt they in this solitude with me, And daily, Tristan forth upon the chase, The tender Iseult sought my door and heard The words of holiness. Abashed she heard, Like one in wisdom nurtured from a child, Yet in whose ears an alien language dwells Of some far country whence the traveller brings Magical treasure, and still images Of gods forgotten, and the scent of groves That sleep by painted rivers. As I have seen Oft-times returning pilgrims with the spell

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Of these lost lands upon their lids, she moved Among familiar truths, accustomed sights, As she to them were strange, not they to her. And often, reasoning with her, have I felt Some ancient lore was in her, dimly drawn >From springs of life beyond the four-fold stream That makes a silver pale to Paradise; For she was calm as some forsaken god Who knows not that his power is passed from him, But sees with tranced eyes rich pilgrim-trains In sands the desert blows about his feet.

Abhorring first, I heard her; yet her speech Warred not with pity, or the contrite heart, Or hatred of things evil: rather seemed The utterance of some world where these are not, And the heart lives in heathen innocence With earth’s innocuous creatures. For she said: “Love is not, as the shallow adage goes, A witch’s filter, brewed to trick the blood. The cup we drank of on the flying deck Was the blue vault of air, the round world’s lip, Brimmed with life’s hydromel, and pressed to ours By myriad hands of wind and sun and sea. For these are all the cup-bearers of youth, That bend above it at the board of life, Solicitous accomplices: there’s not A leaf on bough, a foam-flash on the wave, So brief and glancing but it serves them too; No scent the pale rose spends upon the night, Nor sky-lark’s rapture trusted to the blue, But these, from the remotest tides of air Brought in mysterious salvage, breathe and sing In lovers’ lips and eyes; and two that drink Thus onely of the strange commingled cup Of mortal fortune shall into their blood Take magic gifts. Upon each others’ hearts They shall surprise the heart-beat of the world, And feel a sense of life in things inert; For as love’s touch upon the yielded body Is a diviner’s wand, and where it falls

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A hidden treasure trembles: so their eyes, Falling upon the world of clod and brute, And cold hearts plotting evil, shall discern The inextinguishable flame of life That girdles the remotest frame of things With influences older than the stars.”

So spake Iseult; and thus her passion found Far-flying words, like birds against the sunset That look on lands we see not. Yet I know It was not any argument she found, But that she was, the colour that life took About her, that thus reasoned in her stead, Making her like a lifted lantern borne Through midnight thickets, where the flitting ray Momently from inscrutable darkness draws A myriad-veined branch, and its shy nest Quivering with startled life: so moved Iseult. And all about her this deep solitude Stirred with responsive motions. Oft I knelt In night-long vigil while the lovers slept Under their outlawed thatch, and with long prayers Sought to disarm the indignant heavens; but lo, Thus kneeling in the intertidal hour ‘Twixt dark and dawning, have mine eyes beheld How the old gods that hide in these hoar woods, And were to me but shapings of the air, And flit and murmur of the breathing trees, Or slant of moon on pools — how these stole forth, Grown living presences, yet not of bale, But innocent-eyed as fawns that come to drink, Thronging the threshold where the lovers lay, In service of the great god housed within Who hides in his breast, beneath his mighty plumes, The purposes and penalties of life. Or in yet deeper hours, when all was still, And the hushed air bowed over them alone, Such music of the heart as lovers hear, When close as lips lean, lean the thoughts between — When the cold world, no more a lonely orb Circling the unimagined track of Time,

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Is like a beating heart within their hands, A numb bird that they warm, and feel its wings — Such music have I heard; and through the prayers Wherewith I sought to shackle their desires, And bring them humbled to the feet of God, Caught the loud quiring of the fruitful year, The leap of springs, the throb of loosened earth, And the sound of all the streams that seek the sea.

So fell it, that when pity moved their hearts, And those high lovers, one unto the end, Bowed to the sundering will, and each his way Went through a world that could not make them twain, Knowing that a great vision, passing by, Had swept mine eye-lids with its fringe of fire, I, with the wonder of it on my head, And with the silence of it in my heart, Forth to Tintagel went by secret ways, A long lone journey; and from them that loose Their spiced bales upon the wharves, and shake Strange silks to the sun, or covertly unbosom Rich hoard of pearls and amber, or let drip Through swarthy fingers links of sinuous gold, Chose their most delicate treasures. Though I knew No touch more silken than this knotted gown, My hands, grown tender with the sense of her, Discerned the airiest tissues, light to cling As shower-loosed petals, veils like meadow-smoke, Fur soft as snow, amber like sun congealed, Pearls pink as may-buds in an orb of dew; And laden with these wonders, that to her Were natural as the vesture of a flower, Fared home to lay my booty at her feet.

And she, consenting, nor with useless words Proving my purpose, robed herself therein To meet her lawful lord; but while she thus Prisoned the wandering glory of her hair, Dimmed her bright breast with jewels, and subdued Her light to those dull splendours, well she knew The lord that I adorned her thus to meet

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Was not Tintagel’s shadowy King, but he, That other lord beneath whose plumy feet The currents of the seas of life run gold As from eternal sunrise; well she knew That when I laid my hands upon her head, Saying, “Fare forth forgiven,” the words I spoke Were the breathings of his pity, who beholds How, swept on his inexorable wings Too far beyond the planetary fires On the last coasts of darkness, plunged too deep In light ineffable, the heart amazed Swoons of its glory, and dropping back to earth Craves the dim shelter of familiar sounds, The rain on the roof, the noise of flocks that pass, And the slow world waking to its daily round… .

And thus, as one who speeds a banished queen, I set her on my mule, and hung about With royal ornament she went her way; For meet it was that this great Queen should pass Crowned and forgiven from the face of Love.

“The Comrade.” Atlantic Monthly 106 (Dec. 1910): 785-87.

WILD winged thing, O brought I know not whence To beat your life out in my life’s low cage; You strange familiar, nearer than my flesh Yet distant as a star, that were at first A child with me a child, yet elfin-far, And visibly of some unearthly breed; Mirthfullest mate of all my mortal games, Yet shedding on them some evasive gleam Of Latmian loneliness — O seven then Expert to lift the latch of our low door And profit by the hours when, dusked about By human misintelligence, our first Weak fledgling flights were safeliest essayed; Divine accomplice of those perilous-sweet Low moth-flights of the unadventured soul Above the world’s dim garden! — now we sit, After what stretch of years, what stretch of wings, In the same cage together — still as near And still as strange! Only I know at last That we are fellows till the last night falls, And that I shall not miss your comrade hands Till they have closed my lids, and by them set A taper that — who knows! — may yet shine through.

Sister, my comrade, I have ached for you, Sometimes, to see you curb your pace to mine, And bow your Maenad crest to the dull forms Of human usage; I have loosed your hand And whispered: ‘Go! Since I am tethered here;’ And you have turned, and breathing for reply, ‘I too am pinioned, as you too are free,’ Have caught me to such undreamed distances As the last planets see, when they look forth,

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To the sentinel pacings of the outmost stars — Nor these alone, Comrade, my sister, were your gifts. More oft Has your impalpable wing-brush bared for me The heart of wonder in familiar things, Unroofed dull rooms, and hung above my head The cloudy glimpses of a vernal moon, Or all the autumn heaven ripe with stars.

And you have made a secret pact with Sleep, And when she comes not, or her feet delay, Toiled in low meadows of gray asphodel Under a pale sky where no shadows fall, Then, hooded like her, to my side you steal, And the night grows like a great rumouring sea, And you a boat, and I your passenger, And the tide lifts us with an indrawn breath Out, out upon the murmurs and the scents, Through spray of splintered star-beams, or white rage Of desperate moon-drawn waters — on and on To some blue ocean immarcescible That ever like a slow-swung mirror rocks The balanced breasts of sea-birds motionless.

Yet other nights, my sister, you have been The storm, and I the leaf that fled on it Terrifically down voids that never knew The pity of creation — or have felt The immitigable anguish of a soul Left last in a long-ruined world alone; And then your touch has drawn me back to earth, As in the night, upon an unknown road, A scent of lilac breathing from the hedge Bespeaks the hidden farm, the bedded cows, And safety, and the sense of human kind …

And I have climbed with you by hidden ways To meet the dews of morning, and have seen The shy gods like retreating shadows fade, Or on the thymy reaches have surprised Old Chiron sleeping, and have waked him not …

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Yet farther have I fared with you, and known Love and his sacred tremors, and the rites Of his most inward temple; and beyond His temple lights, have seen the long gray waste Where lonely thoughts, like creatures of the night, Listen and wander where a city stood. And creeping down by waterless defiles Under an iron midnight, have I kept My vigil in the waste till dawn began To move among the ruins, and I saw A sapling rooted in a fissured plinth, And a wren’s nest in the thunder-threatening hand Of some old god of granite in the dust …

“Summer Afternoon (Bodiam Castle, Sussex).” Scribner’s Magazine 49 (Mar. 1911): 277-78. Edith Wharton

NOT all the wasteful beauty of the year Heaped in the scale of one consummate hour Shall this outweigh: the curve of quiet air That held, as in the green sun-fluted light Of sea-caves quivering in a tidal lull, Those tranced towers and long unruined walls, Moat-girdled from the world’s dissolving touch, The rook-flights lessening over evening woods, And, down the unfrequented grassy slopes, The shadows of old oaks contemplative Reaching behind them like the thoughts of age.

High overhead hung the long Sussex ridge, Sun-cinctured, as a beaker’s rim of gold Curves round its green concavity; and slow Across the upper pastures of the sky The clouds moved white before the herding airs That in the hollow, by the moated walls, Stirred not one sleeping lily from its sleep.

Deeper the hush fell; more remote the earth Fled onward with the flight of cloud and sun, And cities strung upon the flashing reel Of nights and days. We knew no more of these

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Than the grey towers redoubling in the moat The image of a bygone strength transformed To beauty’s endless uses; and like them We felt the touch of that renewing power That turns the landmarks of man’s ruined toil To high star-haunted reservoirs of peace. And with that sense there came the deeper sense Of moments that, between the beats of time, May thus insphere in some transcendent air The plenitude of being. Far currents feed them, from those slopes of soul That know the rise and set of other stars White-roaring downward through remote defiles Dim-forested with unexplored thought; Yet tawny from the flow of lower streams That drink the blood of battle, sweat of earth, And the broached vats of cities revelling. All these the moments hold; yet these resolved To such clear wine of beauty as shall flush The blood to richer living… . Thus we mused, And musing thus we felt the magic touch, And such a moment held us. As, at times, Through the long windings of each other’s eyes We have reached some secret hallowed silent place That a god visits at the turn of night — In such a solitude the moment held us. And one were thought and sense in that profound Submersion of all being deep below The vexed waves of action. Clear we saw, Through the clear nether stillness of the place, The gliding images of words and looks Swept from us down the gusty tides of time, And here unfolding to completer life; And like dull pebbles from a sunless shore Plunged into crystal waters, suddenly We took the hues of beauty, and became, Each to the other, all that each had sought.

Thus did we feel the moment and the place One in the heart of beauty; while far off The rooks’ last cry died on the fading air, And the first star stood white upon the hill.

“Pomegranate Seed.” Scribner’s Magazine 51 (Mar. 1912): p284-91. BY EDITH WHARTON

DEMETER PERSEPHONE HECATE HERMES In the vale of Elusis

DEMETER

Hail, goddess, from the midmost caverned vale Of Samothracia, where with darksome rites Unnameable, and sacrificial lambs, Pale priests salute thy triple-headed form, Borne hither by swift Hermes o’er the sea: Hail, Hecate, what word soe’er thou bring To me, undaughtered, of my vanished child.

HECATE

Word have I, but no Samothracian wild Last saw me, and mine aged footsteps pine For the bleak vale, my dusky-pillared house, And the cold murmur of incessant rites Forever falling down mine altar-steps Into black pools of fear … for I am come Even now from that blue-cinctured westward isle, Trinacria, where, till thou withheldst thy face, Yearly three harvests yellowed to the sun, And vines deep-laden yoked the heavier boughs — Trinacria, that last saw Persephone.

DEMETER

Now, triune goddess, may the black ewe-lambs Pour a red river down thine altar-steps, Fruit, loaves and honey, at the cross-roads laid, With each young moon by pious hands renewed, Appease thee, and the Thracian vale resound With awful homage to thine oracle! What bring’st thou of Persephone, my child?

HECATE

Thy daughter lives, yet never sees the sun.

DEMETER

Blind am I in her blindness. Tell no more.

HECATE

Blind is she not, and yet beholds no light.

DEMETER

Dark as her doom is, are thy words to me.

HECATE

When the wild chariot of the flying sea Bore me to Etna, ‘neath his silver slope

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Herding their father’s flocks three maids I found, The daughters of the god whose golden house Rears in the east its cloudy peristyle. “Helios, our father,” to my quest they cried, “Was last to see Persephone on earth.”

DEMETER

On earth? What nameless region holds her now?

HECATE

Even as I put thy question to the three, Etna became as one who knows a god, And wondrously, across the waiting deep, Wave after wave the golden portent bore, Till Helios rose before us.

DEMETER

O, I need Thy words as the parched valleys need my rain!

HECATE

May the draught slake thee! Thus the god replied: When the first suns of March with verdant flame Relume the fig-trees in the crannied hills, And the pale myrtle scents the rain-washed air — Ere oleanders down the mountain stream Pass the wild torch of summer, and my kine Breathe of gold gorse and honey-laden sage; Between the first white flowering of the bay And the last almond’s fading from the hill, Along the fields of Enna came a maid Who seemed among her mates to move alone, As the full moon will mow the sky of stars, And whom, by that transcendence, I divined Of breed Olympian, and Demeter’s child.

DEMETER

All-seeing god! So walks she in my dreams.

HECATE

Persephone (so spake the god of day) Ran here and there with footsteps that out-shone The daffodils she gathered, while her maids, Like shadows of herself by noon fore-shortened, On every side her laughing task prolonged; When suddenly the warm and trusted earth Widened black jaws beneath them, and therefrom Rose Aides, whom with averted head Pale mortals worship, as the poplar turns, Whitening, her fearful foliage from the gale. Like thunder rolling up against the wind He dusked the sky with midnight ere he came, Whirling his cloak of subterraneous cloud In awful coils about the fated maid, Till nothing marked the place where she had stood But her dropped flowers — a garland on a grave.

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DEMETER

Where is that grave? There will I lay me down, And know no more the change of night to day.

HECATE

Such is the cry that mortal mothers make; But the sun rises, and their task goes on.

DEMETER

Yet happier they, that make an end at last.

HECATE

Behold, along the Eleusinian vale A god approaches, by his feathered tread Arcadian Hermes. Wait upon his word.

DEMETER

I am a god. What do the gods avail?

HECATE

Oft have I heard that cry — but not the answer.

HERMES

Demeter, from Olympus am I come, By laurelled Tempe and Thessalian ways, Charged with grave words of aegis-bearing Zeus.

DEMETER ( as if she has not heard him) If there be any grief I have not borne, Go, bring it here, and I will give it suck …

HERMES

Thou art a god, and speakest mortal words?

DEMETER

Even the gods grow greater when they love.

HERMES

It is the Life-giver who speaks by me.

DEMETER

I want no words but those my child shall speak.

HERMES

His words are winged seeds that carry hope To root and ripen in long-barren hearts.

DEMETER

Deeds, and not words, alone can quicken me.

HERMES

His words are fruitfuller than deeds of men. Why hast thou left Olympus, and thy kind?

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DEMETER

Because my kind are they that walk the earth For numbered days, and lay them down in graves. My sisters are the miserable women Who seek their children up and down the world, Who feel a babe’s hand at the faded breast, And live upon the words of lips gone dumb. Sorrow no footing on Olympus finds, And the gods are gods because their hearts forget.

HERMES

Why then, since thou hast cast thy lot with those Who painfully endure vain days on earth, Hast thou, harsh arbitress of fruit and flower, Cut off the natural increase of the fields? The baffled herds, tongues lolling, eyes agape, Range wretchedly from sullen spring to spring, A million sun-blades lacerate the ground, And the shrunk fruits untimely drop, like tears That Earth at her own desolation sheds. These are the words Zeus bids me bring to thee.

DEMETER

To whom reply: No pasture longs for rain As for Persephone I thirst and hunger. Give me my child, and all the earth shall laugh Like Rhodian rose-fields in the eye of June.

HERMES

What if such might were mine? What if, indeed, The exorable god, thy pledge confirmed, Should yield thee back the daughter of thy tears?

DEMETER

Such might is thine? Beyond Cithaeron, see The footsteps of the rain upon the hills.

HERMES

Tell me whence thy daughter must be led.

HECATE

So much at least it shall be mine to do. If ever urgency hath plumed thy heels, By Psyttaleia and the outer isles Westward still winging thine ethereal way, Beyond the moon-swayed reaches of the deep, And that unvestiged midnight that confines The verge of being, succourable god, Haste to the river by whose sunless brim Dark Aides leads forth his languid flocks. There shalt thou find Persephone enthroned. Beside the ruler of the dead she sits, And shares, unwilling, his long sovereignty. Thence lead her to Demeter and these groves.

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DEMETER

Round thy returning feet the earth shall laugh As I, when of my body she was born!

HECATE

Lo, thy last word is as a tardy shaft Lost in his silver furrow. Ere thou speed Its fellow, we shall see his face again And not alone. The gods are justified.

DEMETER

Ah, how impetuous are the wings of joy! Swift comes she, as impatient to be gone! Swifter than yonder rain moves down the pass I see the wonder run along the deep. The light draws nearer… . Speak to me, my child!

HECATE

I feel the first slow rain-drop on my hand … She fades. Persephone comes, led by Hermes.

PERSEPHONE

How sweet the hawthorn smells along the hedge … And, mother, mother, sweeter are these tears.

DEMETER

Pale art thou, daughter, and upon thy brow Sits an estranging darkness like a crown. Look up, look up! Drink in the light’s new wine. Feelest thou not beneath thine alien feet Earth’s old endearment, O Persephone?

PERSEPHONE

Dear is the earth’s warm pressure under foot, And dear, my mother, is thy hand in mine. As one who, prisoned in some Asian wild, After long days of cheated wandering Climbing a sudden cliff, at last beholds The boundless reassurance of the sea, And on it one small sail that sets for home, So look I on the daylight, and thine eyes.

DEMETER

Thy voice is paler than the lips it leaves. Thou wilt not stay with me! I know my doom.

PERSEPHONE

Ah, the sweet rain! The clouds compassionate! Hide me, O mother, hide me from the day!

DEMETER

What are these words? It is my love thou fearest.

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PERSEPHONE

I fear the light. I fear the sound of life That thunders in mine unaccustomed ears.

DEMETER

Here is no sound but the soft-falling rain.

PERSEPHONE

Dost thou not hear the noise of birth and being, The roar of sap in boughs impregnated, And all the deafening rumour of the grass?

DEMETER

Love hear I, at his endless task of life.

PERSEPHONE

The awful immortality of life! The white path winding deathlessly to death! Why didst thou call the rain from out her caves To draw a dying earth back to the day? Why fatten flocks for our dark feast, who sit Beside the gate, and know where the path ends? O pitiless gods — that I am one of you!

DEMETER

They are not pitiless, since thou art here.

PERSEPHONE

Who am I, that they give me, or withhold? Think’st thou I am that same Persephone They took from thee?

DEMETER

Within thine eyes I see Some dreadful thing —

PERSEPHONE

At first I deemed it so.

DEMETER

Loving thy doom, more dark thou mak’st it seem.

PERSEPHONE

Love? What is love? This long time I’ve unlearned Those old unquiet words. There where we sit, By the sad river of the end, still are The poplars, still the shaken hearts of men, Or if they stir, it is as when in sleep Dogs sob upon a phantom quarry’s trail. And ever through their listlessness there runs The lust of some old anguish; never yet Hath any asked for happiness: that gift They fear too much! But they would sweat and strive, And clear a field, or kill a man, or even Wait on some long slow vengeance all their days.

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DEMETER

Since I have sat upon the stone of sorrow, Think’st thou I know not how the dead may feel? But thou, look up; for thou shalt learn from me, Under the sweet day, in the paths of men, All the dear human offices that make Their brief hour longer than the years of death. Thou shalt behold me wake the sleeping seed, And wing the flails upon the threshing-floor, Among young men and maidens; or at dawn, Under the low thatch, in the winnowing-creel, Lay the new infant, seedling of some warm Noon dalliance in the golden granary, Who shall in turn rise, walk, and drive the plough, And in the mortal furrow leave his seed.

PERSEPHONE

Execrable offices are theirs and thine! Mine only nurslings are the waxen-pale Dead babes, so small that they are hard to tell >From the little images their mothers lay Beside them, that they may not sleep alone.

DEMETER

Yet other nurslings to those mothers come, And live and love —

PERSEPHONE

Thou hast not seen them meet, Ghosts of dead babes and ghosts of tired men, Or thou wouldst veil thy face, and curse the sun!

DEMETER

Thou wilt forget the things that thou hast seen.

PERSEPHONE

More dreadful are the things thou hast to show.

DEMETER

Art thou so certain? Hard is it for men To know a god, and it has come to me That we, we also, may be blind to men.

PERSEPHONE

O mother, thou hast spoken! But for me, I, that have eaten of the seed of death, And with my dead die daily, am become Of their undying kindred, and no more Can sit within the doorway of the gods And laughing spin new souls along the years.

DEMETER

Daughter, speak low. Since I have walked with men Olympus is a little hill, no more. Stay with me on the dear and ample earth.

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PERSEPHONE

The kingdom of the dead is wider still, And there I heal the wounds that thou hast made.

DEMETER

And yet I send thee beautiful ghosts and griefs! Dispeopling earth, I leave thee none to rule.

PERSEPHONE

O that, mine office ended, I might end!

DEMETER

Stand off from me. Thou knowest more than I, Who am but the servant of some lonely will.

PERSEPHONE

Perchance the same. But me it calls from hence.

DEMETER

On earth, on earth, thou wouldst have wounds to heal!

PERSEPHONE

Free me. I hear the voices of my dead. She goes.

DEMETER

( after a long silence) I hear the secret whisper of the wheat.

“The Hymn of the Lusitania.” New York Herald, 7 May 1915: 1.

“The Great Blue Tent.” New York Times, 25 Aug. 1915: 10.

“Battle Sleep.” Century Magazine 90 (Sept. 1915): 736. by EDITH WHARTON

SOMEWHERE, O sun, some corner there must be Thou visitest, where down the strand Quietly, still, the waves go out to sea From the green fringes of a pastoral land.

Deep in the orchard-bloom the roof-trees stand, The brown sheep graze along the bay, And through the apple-boughs above the sand The bees’ hum sounds no fainter than the spray.

There through uncounted hours declines the day To the low arch of twilight’s close, And, just as night about the moon grows gray, One sail leans westward to the fading rose.

Giver of dreams, O thou with scatheless wing Forever moving through the fiery hail, To flame-seared lids the cooling vision bring, And let some soul go seaward with that sail!

“‘On Active Service’; American Expeditionary Force (R. S., August 12, 1918).” Scribner’s Magazine 64 (Nov. 1918): 619. By Edith Wharton

HE is dead that was alive. How shall friendship understand? Lavish heart and tireless hand Bidden not to give or strive, Eager brain and questing eye Like a broken lens laid by.

He, with so much left to do, Such a gallant race to run, What concern had he with you, Silent Keeper of things done?

Tell us not that, wise and young, Elsewhere he lives out his plan. Our speech was sweetest to his tongue, And his great gift was to be man.

Long and long shall we remember, In our breasts his grave be made. It shall never be December Where so warm a heart is laid, But in our saddest selves a sweet voice sing, Recalling him, and Spring. August, 1918.

“You and You; to the American private in the great war.” Scribner’s Magazine 65 (Feb. 1919): 152-153. By Edith Wharton

EVERY one of you won the war — You and you and you — Each one knowing what it was for, And what was his job to do.

Every one of you won the war, Obedient, unwearied, unknown, Dung in the trenches, drift on the shore, Dust to the world’s end blown; Every one of you, steady and true, You and you and you — Down in the pit or up in the blue, Whether you crawled or sailed or flew, Whether your closest comrade knew Or you bore the brunt alone —

All of you, all of you, name after name, Jones and Robinson, Smith and Brown, You from the piping prairie town, You from the Fundy fogs that came, You from the city’s roaring blocks, You from the bleak New England rocks With the shingled roof in the apple boughs, You from the brown adobe house — You from the Rockies, you from the Coast, You from the burning frontier-post And you from the Klondyke’s frozen flanks, You from the cedar-swamps, you from the pine, You from the cotton and you from the vine, You from the rice and the sugar-brakes, You from the Rivers and you from the Lakes, You from the Creeks and you from the Licks And you from the brown bayou — You and you and you — You from the pulpit, you from the mine, You from the factories, you from the banks, Closer and closer, ranks on ranks, Airplanes and cannon, and rifles and tanks, Smith and Robinson, Brown and Jones, Ruddy faces or bleaching bones, After the turmoil and blood and pain Swinging home to the folks again Or sleeping along in the fine French rain — Every one of you won the war.

Every one of you won the war — You and you and you — Pressing and pouring forth, more and more,

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Toiling and straining from shore to shore To reach the flaming edge of the dark Where man in his millions went up like a spark, You, in your thousands and millions coming, All the sea ploughed with you, all the air humming, All the land loud with you, All our hearts proud with you, All our souls bowed with the awe of your coming!

Where’s the Arch high enough, Lads, to receive you, Where’s the eye dry enough, Dears, to perceive you, When at last and at last in your glory you come, Tramping home?

Every one of you won the war, You and you and you — You that carry an unscathed head, You that halt with a broken tread, And oh, most of all, you Dead, you Dead!

Lift up the Gates for these that are last, That are last in the great Procession. Let the living pour in, take possession, Flood back to the city, the ranch, the farm, The church and the college and mill, Back to the office, the store, the exchange, Back to the wife with the babe on her arm, Back to the mother that waits on the sill, And the supper that’s hot on the range.

And now, when the last of them all are by, Be the Gates lifted up on high To let those Others in, Those Others, their brothers, that softly tread, That come so thick, yet take no ground, That are so many, yet make no sound, Our Dead, our Dead, our Dead!

O silent and secretly-moving throng, In your fifty thousand strong, Coming at dusk when the wreaths have dropt, And streets are empty, and music stopt, Silently coming to hearts that wait Dumb in the door and dumb at the gate, And hear your step and fly to your call — Every one of you won the war, But you, you Dead, most of all!

November, 1918.

“With the Tide.” Saturday Evening Post 191, 29 Mar. 1919: 8.

SOMEWHERE I read, in an old book whose name Is gone from me, I read that when the days Of a man are counted, and his business done, There comes up the shore at evening, with the tide, To the place where he sits, a boat — And in the boat, from the place where he sits, he sees, Dim in the dusk, dim and yet so familiar, The faces of his friends long dead; and knows They come for him, brought in upon the tide, To take him where men go at set of day. Then rising, with his hands in theirs, he goes Between them his last steps, that are the first Of the new life — and with the ebb they pass, Their shaken sail grown small upon the moon.

Often I thought of this, and pictured me How many a man who lives with throngs about him, Yet straining through the twilight for that boat Shall scarce make out one figure in the stern, And that so faint its features shall perplex him With doubtful memories — and his heart hang back. But others, rising as they see the sail Increase upon the sunset, hasten down, Hands out and eyes elated; for they see Head over head, crowding from bow to stern, Repeopling their long loneliness with smiles, The faces of their friends; and such go forth Content upon the ebb tide, with safe hearts.

But never To worker summoned when his day was done Did mounting tide bring in such freight of friends As stole to you up the white wintry shingle That night while they that watched you thought you slept. Softly they came, and beached the boat, and gathered In the still cove under the icy stars, Your last-born, and the dear loves of your heart, And all men that have loved right more than ease, And honor above honors; all who gave Free-handed of their best for other men, And thought their giving taking: they who knew Man’s natural state is effort, up and up — All these were there, so great a company Perchance you marveled, wondering what great ship Had brought that throng unnumbered to the cove Where the boys used to beach their light canoe After old happy picnics —

But these, your friends and children, to whose hands Committed, in the silent night you rose And took your last faint steps — These led you down, O great American, Down to the winter night and the white beach, And there you saw that the huge hull that waited Was not as are the boats of the other dead, Frail craft for a brief passage; no, for this Was first of a long line of towering transports, Storm-worn and ocean-weary every one, The ships you launched, the ships you manned, the ships That now, returning from their sacred quest With the thrice-sacred burden of their dead, Lay waiting there to take you forth with them, Out with the ebb tide, on some farther quest. Hyeres, January 7th, 1919.