Artemis to Actæon (1909)

Front matter

ARTEMIS TO ACTÆON

ARTEMIS TO ACTÆON AND OTHER VERSE

BY EDITH WHARTON

Artemis to Actæon

I

ARTEMIS TO ACTÆON

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 saw'st 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!

Yes, this we wait for, this renews us, this 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 labouring sea! O thus through use to reign again, to drink The cup of peradventure to the lees, For one dear instant disimmortalised 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.

Life

LIFE

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 charmèd 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.

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?" 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 shed 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, 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—

Vesalius in Zante

VESALIUS IN ZANTE

(1564)

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 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, 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, I pray you, note, 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! 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 honours 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, 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 labour 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. 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.

Margaret of Cortona

MARGARET OF CORTONA

Fra Paolo, since they say the end is near, And you of all men have the gentlest eyes, Most like our father Francis; since you know How I have toiled and prayed and scourged and striven, Mothered the orphan, waked beside the sick, Gone empty that mine enemy might eat, Given bread for stones in famine years, and channelled With vigilant knees the pavement of this cell, Till I constrained the Christ upon the wall To bend His thorn-crowned Head in mute forgiveness … Three times He bowed it … (but the whole stands writ, Sealed with the Bishop's signet, as you know), Once for each person of the Blessed Three—— A miracle that the whole town attests, The very babes thrust forward for my blessing, And either parish plotting for my bones—— Since this you know: sit near and bear with me.

I have lain here, these many empty days I thought to pack with Credos and Hail Marys So close that not a fear should force the door—— But still, between the blessed syllables

That taper up like blazing angel heads, Praise over praise, to the Unutterable, Strange questions clutch me, thrusting fiery arms, As though, athwart the close-meshed litanies, My dead should pluck at me from hell, with eyes Alive in their obliterated faces… I have tried the saints' names and our blessed Mother's Fra Paolo, I have tried them o'er and o'er, And like a blade bent backward at first thrust They yield and fail me——and the questions stay. And so I thought, into some human heart, Pure, and yet foot-worn with the tread of sin, If only I might creep for sanctuary, It might be that those eyes would let me rest…

Fra Paolo, listen. How should I forget The day I saw him first? (You know the one.) I had been laughing in the market-place With others like me, I the youngest there, Jostling about a pack of mountebanks Like flies on carrion (I the youngest there!), Till darkness fell; and while the other girls Turned this way, that way, as perdition beckoned, I, wondering what the night would bring, half hoping: If not, this once, a child's sleep in my garret,

At least enough to buy that two-pronged coral The others covet 'gainst the evil eye, Since, after all, one sees that I'm the youngest—— So, muttering my litany to hell (The only prayer I knew that was not Latin), Felt on my arm a touch as kind as yours, And heard a voice as kind as yours say "Come." I turned and went; and from that day I never Looked on the face of any other man. So much is known; so much effaced; the sin Cast like a plague-struck body to the sea, Deep, deep into the unfathomable pardon—— (The Head bowed thrice, as the whole town attests). What more, then? To what purpose? Bear with me!——

It seems that he, a stranger in the place, First noted me that afternoon and wondered: How grew so white a bud in such black slime, And why not mine the hand to pluck it out? Why, so Christ deals with souls, you cry——what then? Not so! Not so! When Christ, the heavenly gardener, Plucks flowers for Paradise (do I not know?), He snaps the stem above the root, and presses The ransomed soul between two convent walls, A lifeless blossom in the Book of Life.

But when my lover gathered me, he lifted Stem, root and all—ay, and the clinging mud— And set me on his sill to spread and bloom After the common way, take sun and rain, And make a patch of brightness for the street, Though raised above rough fingers——so you make A weed a flower, and others, passing, think: "Next ditch I cross, I'll lift a root from it, And dress my window… and the blessing spreads. Well, so I grew, with every root and tendril Grappling the secret anchorage of his love, And so we loved each other till he died…

Ah, that black night he left me, that dead dawn I found him lying in the woods, alive To gasp my name out and his life-blood with it, As though the murderer's knife had probed for me In his hacked breast and found me in each wound… Well, it was there Christ came to me, you know, And led me home——just as that other led me. (Just as that other? Father, bear with me!) My lover's death, they tell me, saved my soul, And I have lived to be a light to men. And gather sinners to the knees of grace.

All this, you say, the Bishop's signet covers. But stay! Suppose my lover had not died? (At last my question! Father, help me face it.) I say: Suppose my lover had not died— Think you I ever would have left him living, Even to be Christ's blessed Margaret? ——We lived in sin? Why, to the sin I died to That other was as Paradise, when God Walks there at eventide, the air pure gold, And angels treading all the grass to flowers! He was my Christ——he led me out of hell—— He died to save me (so your casuists say!)—— Could Christ do more? Your Christ out-pity mine? Why, yours but let the sinner bathe His feet; Mine raised her to the level of his heart… And then Christ's way is saving, as man's way Is squandering——and the devil take the shards! But this man kept for sacramental use The cup that once had slaked a passing thirst; This man declared: "The same clay serves to model A devil or a saint; the scribe may stain The same fair parchment with obscenities, Or gild with benedictions; nay," he cried, "Because a satyr feasted in this wood, And fouled the grasses with carousing foot,

Shall not a hermit build his chapel here And cleanse the echoes with his litanies? The sodden grasses spring again—why not The trampled soul? Is man less merciful Than nature, good more fugitive than grass?" And so——if, after all, he had not died, And suddenly that door should know his hand, And with that voice as kind as yours he said: "Come, Margaret, forth into the sun again, Back to the life we fashioned with our hands Out of old sins and follies, fragments scorned Of more ambitious builders, yet by Love, The patient architect, so shaped and fitted That not a crevice let the winter in—" Think you my bones would not arise and walk, This bruised body (as once the bruised soul) Turn from the wonders of the seventh heaven As from the antics of the market-place? If this could be (as I so oft have dreamed), I, who have known both loves, divine and human, Think you I would not leave this Christ for that?

——I rave, you say? You start from me, Fra Paolo? Go, then; your going leaves me not alone. I marvel, rather, that I feared the question,

Since, now I name it, it draws near to me With such dear reassurance in its eyes, And takes your place beside me… Nay, I tell you, Fra Paolo, I have cried on all the saints—— If this be devil's prompting, let them drown it In Alleluias! Yet not one replies. And, for the Christ there—is He silent too? Your Christ? Poor father; you that have but one, And that one silent——how I pity you! He will not answer? Will not help you cast The devil out? But hangs there on the wall, Blind wood and bone——? How if I call on Him—— I, whom He talks with, as the town attests? If ever prayer hath ravished me so high That its wings failed and dropped me in Thy breast, Christ, I adjure Thee! By that naked hour Of innermost commixture, when my soul Contained Thee as the paten holds the host, Judge Thou alone between this priest and me; Nay, rather, Lord, between my past and present, Thy Margaret and that other's—whose she is By right of salvage—and whose call should follow! Thine? Silent still.—— Or his, who stooped to her,

And drew her to Thee by the bands of love? Not Thine? Then his? Ah, Christ——the thorn-crowned Head Bends … bends again … down on your knees, Fra Paolo! If his, then Thine! Kneel, priest, for this is heaven…