Transcriber’s Note:

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

THE RICCARDI

PRESS BOOKS

¶ Of this edition of TWELVE POEMS BY EDITH WHARTON 130 copies have been printed in the Riccardi fount on handmade paper of which 100 are for sale.

¶ Copy Number 44

TWELVE POEMS BY
EDITH WHARTON

TWELVE POEMS BY EDITH

WHARTON PUBLISHED BY THE

MEDICI SOCIETY VII GRAFTON

STREET LONDON

MDCCCCXXVI

CONTENTS

NIGHTINGALES IN PROVENCE

(i)

Whence come they, small and brown,

Miraculous and frail,

Like spring’s invisible pollen blown

On the wild southern gale?

From whatsoever depth of gold and blue,

Far-templed sand and ringèd palms they wing,

Falling like dew

Upon the land, they bring

Music and spring,

With all things homely-sweet

Exhaled beneath the feet

On stony mountain-trail,

Or where green slopes, through tamarisk and pine,

Seaward decline—

Thyme and the lavender,

Where honey-bees make stir,

And the green dragon-flies with silver whirr

Loot the last rosemaries—

The morning-glory, rosy as her name,

The poppies’ leaping flame

Along the kindled vines,

Down barren banks the vetches spilt like lees,

In watery meadows the great celandines

Afloat like elfin moons,

In the pale world of dunes

A foam of asphodel

Upon the sea’s blue swell,

And, where the great rocks valley-ward are rolled,

The tasselled ilex-bloom fringing dark woods with gold.

Shyly the first begin—

And the thrilled ear delays,

Through a fresh veil of interblossomed mays

Straining to win

That soft sequestered note,

Where the new throat,

In some deep cleft of quietness remote,

Its budding bliss essays.

Shyly the first begin—

But, as the numerous rose

First to the hedgerow throws

A blossom here and there,

As if in hope to win

The unheeding glances of the passer-by,

And, never catching his dulled eye,

Thinks: “But my tryst is with the Spring!”

And suddenly the dusty roadside glows

With scented glory, crimsoned to its close—

So wing by wing,

Unheeded and unheard,

Bird after bird,

They come;

And where the woods were dumb,

Dumb all the streamsides and unlistening vales,

Now glory streams along the evening gales,

And all the midday is a murmuring,

Now they are come.

(ii)

I lie among the thyme:

The sea is at my feet,

And all the air is sweet

With the capricious chime

Of interwoven notes

From those invisible and varying throats,

As though the blossomed trees,

The laden breeze,

The springs within their caves,

And even the sleeping waves,

Had all begun to sing.

Sweet, sweet, oh heavy-sweet

As tropic bales undone

At a Queen’s ebon feet

In equatorial sun,

Those myriad balmy voices

Drip iterated song,

And every tiny tawny throat rejoices

To mix its separate rapture with the throng.

For now the world is theirs,

And the captivated airs

Carry no other note.

As from midsummer’s throat,

Strong-pillared, organ-built,

Pours their torrential glory.

On their own waves they float,

And toss from crest to crest their cockle-shell of story—

And, as plumed breakers tilt

Against the plangent beaches,

And all the long reticulated reaches

Hiss with their silver lances,

And heave with their deep rustle of retreat

At fall of day—

So swells, and so withdraws that tidal lay

As spring advances....

(iij)

I lie among the thyme,

The sea is at my feet,

And the slow-kindling moon begins to climb

To her bejewelled seat—

And now, and now again,

Mixed with her silver rain,

Listen, a rarer strain,

A tenderer fall—

And all the night is white and musical,

The forests hold their breath, the sky lies still

On every listening hill,

And far far out those straining sails,

Even as they dip and turn,

One moment backward yearn

To the rich laughter of the nightingales.

MISTRAL IN THE MAQUIS

Roofed in with creaking pines we lie

And see the waters burn and whiten,

The wild seas race the racing sky,

The tossing landscape gloom and lighten.

With emerald streak and silver blotch

The white wind paints the purple sea.

Warm in our hollow dune we watch

The honey-orchis nurse the bee.

Gold to the keel the startled boats

Beat in on palpitating sail,

While overhead with many throats

The choral forest hymns the gale.

’Neath forest-boughs the templed air

Hangs hushed as when the Host is lifted,

While, flanks astrain and rigging bare,

The last boat to the port has drifted....

Nought left but the lost wind that grieves

On darkening seas and furling sails,

And the long light that Beauty leaves

Upon her fallen veils....

LES SALETTES
[December 1923]

Let all my waning senses reach

To clasp again that secret beach,

Pine-roofed and rock-embrasured, turned

To where the winter sunset burned

Beyond a purpling dolphin-cape

On charmèd seas asleep....

Let every murmur, every shape,

Fanned by that breathing hour’s delight,

Against the widening western deep

Hold back the hour, hold back the night....

For here, across the molten sea,

From golden islands lapped in gold,

Come all the shapes that used to be

Part of the sunset once to me,

And every breaker’s emerald arch

Bears closer their ethereal march,

And flings its rose and lilac spray

To dress their brows with scattered day.

As trooping shoreward, one by one,

Swift in the pathway of the sun,

With lifted arms and eyes that greet,

The lost years hasten to my feet.

All is not pain, their eyes declare;

The shoreward ripples are their voice,

The sunset, streaming through their hair,

Coils round me in a fiery flood,

And all the sounds of that rich air

Are in the beating of my blood,

Crying: Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice!

Rejoice, because such skies are blue,

Each dawn, above a world so fair,

Because such glories still renew

To transient eyes the morning’s hue.

Such buds on every fruit-tree smile,

Such perfumes blow on every gale,

Such constellated hangings veil

The outer emptiness awhile;

And these frail senses that were thine,

Because so frail, and worn so fine,

Are as a Venice glass, wherethrough

Life’s last drop of evening wine

Shall like a draught of morning shine.

The glories go; their footsteps fade

Into an all-including shade,

And isles and sea and clouds and coasts

Wane to an underworld of ghosts.

But as I grope with doubtful foot

By myrtle branch and lentisk root

Up the precipitous pine-dark way,

Through fringes of the perished day

Falters a star, the first alight,

And threaded on that tenuous ray

The age-long promise reappears,

And life is Beauty, fringed with tears.

DIEU D’AMOUR
[A CASTLE IN CYPRUS]

Beauty hath two great wings

That lift me to her height,

Though steep her secret dwelling clings

’Twixt earth and light.

Thither my startled soul she brings

In a murmur and stir of plumes,

And blue air cloven,

And in aerial rooms

Windowed on starry springs

Shows me the singing looms

Whereon her worlds are woven;

Then, in her awful breast,

Those heights descending,

Bears me, a child at rest,

At the day’s ending,

Till earth, familiar as a nest,

Again receives me,

And Beauty veiled in night,

Benignly bending,

Drops from the sinking west

One feather of our flight,

And on faint sandals leaves me.

SEGESTA

High in the secret places of the hills

Cliff-girt it stands, in grassy solitude,

No ruin but a vision unachieved.

This temple is a house not made with hands

But born of man’s incorrigible need

For permanence and beauty in the scud

And wreckage of mortality—as though

Great thoughts, communing in the noise of towns

With inward isolation and deep peace,

And dreams gold-paven for celestial feet,

Had wrought the sudden wonder; and behold,

The sky, the hills, the awful colonnade,

And, night-long woven through the fane’s august

Intercolumniations, all the stars

Processionally wheeling—

Then it was

That, having reared their wonder, it would seem

The makers feared their God might prove less great

Than man’s heart dreaming on him—and so left

The shafts unroofed, untenanted the shrine.

THE TRYST
[1914]

I said to the woman: Whence do you come,

With your bundle in your hand?

She said: In the North I made my home,

Where slow streams fatten the fruitful loam,

And the endless wheat-fields run like foam

To the edge of the endless sand.

I said: What look have your houses there,

And the rivers that glass your sky?

Do the steeples that call your people to prayer

Lift fretted fronts to the silver air,

And the stones of your streets, are they washed and fair

When the Sunday folk go by?

My house is ill to find, she said,

For it has no roof but the sky;

The tongue is torn from the steeple-head,

The streets are foul with the slime of the dead,

And all the rivers run poison-red

With the bodies drifting by.

I said: Is there none to come at your call

In all this throng astray?

They shot my husband against a wall,

And my child (she said), too little to crawl,

Held up its hands to catch the ball

When the gun-muzzle turned its way.

I said: There are countries far from here

Where the friendly church-bells call,

And fields where the rivers run cool and clear,

And streets where the weary may walk without fear,

And a quiet bed, with a green tree near,

To sleep at the end of it all.

She answered: Your land is too remote,

And what if I chanced to roam

When the bells fly back to the steeples’ throat,

And the sky with banners is all afloat,

And the streets of my city rock like a boat

With the tramp of her men come home?

I shall crouch by the door till the bolt is down,

And then go in to my dead.

Where my husband fell I will put a stone,

And mother a child instead of my own,

And stand and laugh on my bare hearth-stone

When the King rides by, she said.

BATTLE SLEEP
[1915]

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,