Twelve Poems by Edith Wharton

THE RICCARDI

PRESS BOOKS

3(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—
4But, 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
5Carry 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.

9Roofed 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....

13Let 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;
14And 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.

17Beauty 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.

21High 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.

25I 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.

26She 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.

29Somewhere, 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.

33Ah, how I pity the young dead who gave
All that they were, and might become, that we
With tired eyes should watch this perfect sea
Reweave its patterning of silver wave
Round scented cliffs of arbutus and bay.

No more shall any rose along the way,
The myrtled way that wanders to the shore,
Nor jonquil-twinkling meadow any more,
Nor the warm lavender that takes the spray,
Smell only of the sea-salt and the sun,

But, through recurring seasons, every one
Shall speak to us with lips the darkness closes,
Shall look at us with eyes that missed the roses,
Clutch us with hands whose work was just begun,
Laid idle now beneath the earth we tread—

And always we shall walk with the young dead—
Ah, how I pity the young dead, whose eyes
Strain through the sod to see these perfect skies,
Who feel the new wheat springing in their stead,
And the lark singing for them overhead!

37Somewhere 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 tide they pass,
Their shaken sail grown small upon the moon.

Often I thought of this, and pictured me
How many a man that lives with throngs about him,
Yet straining in 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 out
Content upon the ebb-tide, with safe hearts.

But never
To worker summoned when his day was done
Did mounting tide bear such a freight of friends
As stole to you up the white wintry shingle
That night while those that watched you thought you slept.
Softly they came, and beached the boat, and stood
In the still cove, under the icy stars,
Your last-born and the dear loves of your heart,
And with them all the friends you called by name,
And all men that have loved right more than ease,
38And honour above honours; all who gave
Free-handed of their best for other men,
And thought the giving taking; they who knew
Man’s natural state is effort: up and up—
All these were there, so great a company
Perchance you marvelled, wondering what great craft
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 light passage;
But first of a long line of towering ships,
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 on the flood-tide, to some farther quest.

41Wild wingèd 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 even then
Expert to lift the latch of our low door
And profit by the hours when, dusked about
By human misintelligence, we made
Our first weak fledgling flights—
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
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
42The 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 sea’s unalterable calm
That ever like a slow-swung mirror rocks
The balanced breasts of sea-birds....

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—till your touch
Has drawn me back to earth, as, in the dusk,
A scent of lilac from an unseen hedge
Bespeaks the hidden farm, the bedded cows,
And safety, and the sense of human kind....

And I have climbed with you by secret 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....

Yet farther have I fared with you, and known
Love and his sacred tremors, and the rites
Of his most inward temple; and beyond
Have seen the long grey waste where lonely thoughts
Listen and wander where a city stood.
43And creeping down by waterless defiles
Under an iron midnight, have I kept
My vigil in the waste till dawn began
To walk 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....

47(i)

Here in my darkness
I lie in the depths of things,
As in a black wood whereof flowers and boughs are the roots,
And the moist-branching tendrils and ligaments,
Woven or spiralled or spreading, the roof of my head,
Blossomless, birdless, starless, skied with black earth,
A ponderous heaven.

But they forget,
Too often forget, and too soon, who above us
Brush the dead leaves from our mounds,
Scrape the moss from our names,
And feel safe,
They forget that one day in the year our earth becomes ether,
And the roots binding us loosen
As Peter’s chains dropped for the Angel,
In that old story they read there;
Forget—do they seek to remember?—
That one day in the year we are with them,
Rejoin them, hear them, behold them, and walk the old ways with them—
One!

To-morrow....
And already I feel
The harsh arms of ivy-coils loosening
Like a dead man’s embrace,
I feel the cool worms from my hair
Rain like dew,
And the soft-muzzled moles boring deeper,
Down after the old dead that stir not,
Or just grumble: “Don’t wake me,” and turn
The nether side of their skulls to their head-slab....
While I ... I their one-year neighbour,
Thrusting up like a willow in spring,
From my hair
Untwine the thick grass-hair carefully,
Unbind the cool roots from my lids,
48Straining up, straining up with thin hands,
Scattering the earth like a cloud,
And stopping my ears from the cry,
Lower down,
Persistent, like a sick child’s wail,
The cry of the girl just below me:
“Don’t go, don’t go ...” the poor coward!

(ii)

How light the air is!
I’m dizzy ... my feet fly up ...
And this mad confusion of things topsy-turvey,
With the friendly comprehensible roots all hidden,
In this queer world where one can’t see how things happen,
But only what they become....
Was it always so queer and inexplicable?
Yes, but the fresh smell of things ...
Are these apples in the wet grass, I wonder?
Sweet, sweet, sweet, the smell of the living!
And the far-off sky, and the stars,
And the quiet spaces between,
So that one can float and fly ...
Why used we only to walk?

This is the gate—and the latch still unmended!
Yet how often I told him.... Ah, the scent of my box-border!
And a late clove-pink still unfrozen.
It’s what they call a “mild November” ...
I knew that, below there, by the way the roots kept pushing,
But I’d forgotten how tender it was on the earth ...
So quickly the dead forget!
And the living? I think, after all, they remember,
With everything about them so unchanged,
And no leaden loam on their eyes.
Yes, surely, I know he remembers;
Whenever he touches the broken latch,
He thinks: “How often she asked me,
And how careless I was not to mend it!”
And smiles and sighs; then recalls
How we planted the box-border together,
Knee to knee in the wet, one November ...
And the clove-pinks—
49Here is the window.
They’ve put the green lamp on the table,
Where his books lie, heaped as of old—
Ah, thank God for the old disorder!
How I used to hate it, and now—
Now I could kiss the dust on the mirror, the pipe-ashes
Over everything—all the old mess
That no strange hand interferes with ...
Bless him for that!

(iij)

Just at first
This much contents me; why should I peer
Past the stripped arms of the rose, the metallic
Rattle of clematis dry as my hair,
There where June flushes and purples the window like sunset? I know
So well the room’s other corner: the hearth
Where autumn logs smoulder,
The hob,
The kettle, the crane, the cushion he put for my feet,
And my Chair—
O Chair, always mine!
Do I dare?
What—the room so the same, his and mine,
Not a book changed, the inkstand uncleaned,
The old pipe-burn scarring the table,
The old rent in the rug, where I tripped
And he caught me—no woman’s hand here
Has mended or marred; all’s the same!
Why not dare, then? Oh, but to think,
If I stole to my chair, if I sat there,
Feet folded, arms stretched on the arms,
So quiet,
And waited for night and his coming ...
Oh, think, when he came
And sank in the other chair, facing me,
Not a line of his face would alter,
Nor his hands fall like sun on my hair,
Nor the old dog jump on me, grinning
Yet cringing, because she half-knew
I’d found out the hole in my border,
And why my tallest auratum was dead—
50But his face would be there, unseeing,
His eyes look through me;
And the old dog—not pausing
At her bowl for a long choking drink,
Or to bite the burrs from her toes, and stretch
Sideward to the fire, dreaming over their tramp in the stubble—
Would creep to his feet
Bristling a little ...
And I,
I should be there, in the old place,
All the old life bubbling up in me,
And to him no more felt than the sap
Struggling up unseen in the clematis—
Ah, then, then, then I were dead!

But what was I, then? Lips and hands only—
Since soul cannot reach him without them?
Oh, heavy grave of the flesh,
Did I never once reach to him through you?
I part the branches and look....

(iv)

O my Chair ...
But who sits in you? One like me
Aflame yet invisible!
Only I, with eyes death-anointed,
Can see her young hair, and the happy heart riding
The dancing sea of her breast!
Then she too is waiting—
And young as I was?
Was she always there?
Were her lips between all our kisses?
Did her hands know the folds of his hair?
Did she hear what I said when I loved him?
Was the room never empty? Not once?
When I leaned in that chair, which one of us two did he see?
Did he feel us both on his bosom?
How strange! If I spoke to her now she would hear me,
She alone ...
Would tell me all, through her weeping,
Or rise up and curse me, perhaps—
As I might her, were she living!

51But since she is dead, I will go—
Go home, and leave them together ...
I will go back to my dungeon,
Go back, and never return;
Lest another year, in my chair,
I find one sitting,
One whom he sees, and the old dog fears not, but springs on ...
I will not suffer what she must have suffered, but creep
To my bed in the dark,
And mind how the girl below called to me,
Called up through the mould and the grave-slabs:
“Do not go! Do not go! Do not go!”

(i)

Death touched me where your head had lain.
What other spot could he have found
So tender to receive a wound,
So versed in all the arts of pain?

(ii)

Love came, and gave me wind and sun,
Love went, and left me light and air.
Nor gave he anything more fair
Than what I found when he was gone.

Nightingales in Provence	Page 1
Mistral in the Maquis	„ 7
Les Salettes	„ 11
Dieu d’Amour	„ 15
Segesta	„ 19
The Tryst	„ 23
Battle Sleep	„ 27
Elegy	„ 31
With the Tide	„ 35
La folle du logis	„ 39
The First Year	„ 45
Alternative Epitaphs	„ 53

TWELVE POEMS BY
EDITH WHARTON

CONTENTS

NIGHTINGALES IN PROVENCE

MISTRAL IN THE MAQUIS

LES SALETTES
[December 1923]

DIEU D’AMOUR
[A CASTLE IN CYPRUS]

SEGESTA

THE TRYST
[1914]

BATTLE SLEEP
[1915]

ELEGY
[1918]

WITH THE TIDE
[6th January 1919]

LA FOLLE DU LOGIS

THE FIRST YEAR
[ALL SOULS’ DAY]

ALTERNATIVE EPITAPHS

CONTENTS

NIGHTINGALES IN PROVENCE

MISTRAL IN THE MAQUIS

LES SALETTES [December 1923]

DIEU D’AMOUR [A CASTLE IN CYPRUS]

SEGESTA

THE TRYST [1914]

BATTLE SLEEP [1915]

ELEGY [1918]

WITH THE TIDE [6th January 1919]

LA FOLLE DU LOGIS

THE FIRST YEAR [ALL SOULS’ DAY]

ALTERNATIVE EPITAPHS

TWELVE POEMS BY
EDITH WHARTON

LES SALETTES
[December 1923]

DIEU D’AMOUR
[A CASTLE IN CYPRUS]

THE TRYST
[1914]

BATTLE SLEEP
[1915]

ELEGY
[1918]

WITH THE TIDE
[6th January 1919]

THE FIRST YEAR
[ALL SOULS’ DAY]