Poems Alan Seeger (1917) Edited for the Web by Bob Blair

An Ode to Natural Beauty

THERE is a power whose inspiration fills

Nature's fair fabric, sun- and star-inwrought,

Like airy dew ere any drop distils,

Like perfume in the laden flower, like aught

Unseen which interfused throughout the whole

Becomes its quickening pulse and principle and soul.

Now when, the drift of old desire renewing,

Warm tides flow northward over valley and field,

When half-forgotten sound and scent are wooing

From their deep-chambered recesses long sealed

Such memories as breathe once more

Of childhood and the happy hues it wore,

Now, with a fervor that has never been

In years gone by, it stirs me to respond, -- -

Not as a force whose fountains are within

The faculties of the percipient mind,

Subject with them to darkness and decay,

But something absolute, something beyond,

Oft met like tender orbs that seem to peer

From pale horizons, luminous behind

Some fringe of tinted cloud at close of day;

And in this flood of the reviving year,

When to the loiterer by sylvan streams,

Deep in those cares that make Youth loveliest,

Nature in every common aspect seems

To comment on the burden in his breast -- -

The joys he covets and the dreams he dreams -- -

One then with all beneath the radiant skies

That laughs with him or sighs,

It courses through the lilac-scented air,

A blessing on the fields, a wonder everywhere.

Spirit of Beauty, whose sweet impulses,

Flung like the rose of dawn across the sea,

Alone can flush the exalted consciousness

With shafts of sensible divinity -- -

Light of the World, essential loveliness:

Him whom the Muse hath made thy votary

Not from her paths and gentle precepture

Shall vulgar ends engage, nor break the spell

That taught him first to feel thy secret charms

And o'er the earth, obedient to their lure,

Their sweet surprise and endless miracle,

To follow ever with insatiate arms.

On summer afternoons,

When from the blue horizon to the shore,

Casting faint silver pathways like the moon's

Across the Ocean's glassy, mottled floor,

Far clouds uprear their gleaming battlements

Drawn to the crest of some bleak eminence,

When autumn twilight fades on the sere hill

And autumn winds are still;

To watch the East for some emerging sign,

Wintry Capella or the Pleiades

Or that great huntsman with the golden gear;

Ravished in hours like these

Before thy universal shrine

To feel the invoked presence hovering near,

He stands enthusiastic. Star-lit hours

Spent on the roads of wandering solitude

Have set their sober impress on his brow,

And he, with harmonies of wind and wood

And torrent and the tread of mountain showers,

Has mingled many a dedicative vow

That holds him, till thy last delight be known,

Bound in thy service and in thine alone.

I, too, among the visionary throng

Who choose to follow where thy pathway leads,

Have sold my patrimony for a song,

And donned the simple, lowly pilgrim's weeds.

From that first image of beloved walls,

Deep-bowered in umbrage of ancestral trees,

Where earliest thy sweet enchantment falls,

Tingeing a child's fantastic reveries

With radiance so fair it seems to be

Of heavens just lost the lingering evidence

From that first dawn of roseate infancy,

So long beneath thy tender influence

My breast has thrilled. As oft for one brief second

The veil through which those infinite offers beckoned

Has seemed to tremble, letting through

Some swift intolerable view

Of vistas past the sense of mortal seeing,

So oft, as one whose stricken eyes might see

In ferny dells the rustic deity,

I stood, like him, possessed, and all my being,

Flooded an instant with unwonted light,

Quivered with cosmic passion; whether then

On woody pass or glistening mountain-height

I walked in fellowship with winds and clouds,

Whether in cities and the throngs of men,

A curious saunterer through friendly crowds,

Enamored of the glance in passing eyes,

Unuttered salutations, mute replies, -- -

In every character where light of thine

Has shed on earthly things the hue of things divine

I sought eternal Loveliness, and seeking,

If ever transport crossed my brow bespeaking

Such fire as a prophetic heart might feel

Where simple worship blends in fervent zeal,

It was the faith that only love of thee

Needed in human hearts for Earth to see

Surpassed the vision poets have held dear

Of joy diffused in most communion here;

That whomsoe'er thy visitations warmed,

Lover of thee in all thy rays informed,

Needed no difficulter discipline

To seek his right to happiness within

Than, sensible of Nature's loveliness,

To yield him to the generous impulses

By such a sentiment evoked. The thought,

Bright Spirit, whose illuminings I sought,

That thou unto thy worshipper might be

An all-sufficient law, abode with me,

Importing something more than unsubstantial dreams

To vigils by lone shores and walks by murmuring streams.

Youth's flowers like childhood's fade and are forgot.

Fame twines a tardy crown of yellowing leaves.

How swift were disillusion, were it not

That thou art steadfast where all else deceives!

Solace and Inspiration, Power divine

That by some mystic sympathy of thine,

When least it waits and most hath need of thee,

Can startle the dull spirit suddenly

With grandeur welled from unsuspected springs, -- -

Long as the light of fulgent evenings,

When from warm showers the pearly shades disband

And sunset opens o'er the humid land,

Shows thy veiled immanence in orient skies, -- -

Long as pale mist and opalescent dyes

Hung on far isle or vanishing mountain-crest,

Fields of remote enchantment can suggest

So sweet to wander in it matters nought,

They hold no place but in impassioned thought,

Long as one draught from a clear sky may be

A scented luxury;

Be thou my worship, thou my sole desire,

Thy paths my pilgrimage, my sense a lyre

Aeolian for thine every breath to stir;

Oft when her full-blown periods recur,

To see the birth of day's transparent moon

Far from cramped walls may fading afternoon

Find me expectant on some rising lawn;

Often depressed in dewy grass at dawn,

Me, from sweet slumber underneath green boughs,

Ere the stars flee may forest matins rouse,

Afoot when the great sun in amber floods

Pours horizontal through the steaming woods

And windless fumes from early chimneys start

And many a cock-crow cheers the traveller's heart

Eager for aught the coming day afford

In hills untopped and valleys unexplored.

Give me the white road into the world's ends,

Lover of roadside hazard, roadside friends,

Loiterer oft by upland farms to gaze

On ample prospects, lost in glimmering haze

At noon, or where down odorous dales twilit,

Filled with low thundering of the mountain stream,

Over the plain where blue seas border it

The torrid coast-towns gleam.

I have fared too far to turn back now; my breast

Burns with the lust for splendors unrevealed,

Stars of midsummer, clouds out of the west,

Pallid horizons, winds that valley and field

Laden with joy, be ye my refuge still!

What though distress and poverty assail!

Though other voices chide, yours never will.

The grace of a blue sky can never fail.

Powers that my childhood with a spell so sweet,

My youth with visions of such glory nursed,

Ye have beheld, nor ever seen my feet

On any venture set, but 'twas the thirst

For Beauty willed them, yea, whatever be

The faults I wanted wings to rise above;

I am cheered yet to think how steadfastly

I have been loyal to the love of Love!

Alan Seeger

The Deserted Garden

I KNOW a village in a far-off land

Where from a sunny, mountain-girdled plain

With tinted walls a space on either hand

And fed by many an olive-darkened lane

The high-road mounts, and thence a silver band

Through vineyard slopes above and rolling grain,

Winds off to that dim corner of the skies

Where behind sunset hills a stately city lies.

Here, among trees whose overhanging shade

Strews petals on the little droves below,

Pattering townward in the morning weighed

With greens from many an upland garden-row,

Runs an old wall; long centuries have frayed

Its scalloped edge, and passers to and fro

Heard never from beyond its crumbling height

Sweet laughter ring at noon or plaintive song at night.

But here where little lizards bask and blink

The tendrils of the trumpet-vine have run,

At whose red bells the humming bird to drink

Stops oft before his garden feast is done;

And rose-geraniums, with that tender pink

That cloud-banks borrow from the setting sun,

Have covered part of this old wall, entwined

With fair plumbago, blue as evening heavens behind.

And crowning other parts the wild white rose

Rivals the honey-suckle with the bees.

Above the old abandoned orchard shows

And all within beneath the dense-set trees,

Tall and luxuriant the rank grass grows,

That settled in its wavy depth one sees

Grass melt in leaves, the mossy trunks between,

Down fading avenues of implicated green;

Wherein no lack of flowers the verdurous night

With stars and pearly nebula o'erlay;

Azalea-boughs half rosy and half white

Shine through the green and clustering apple-spray,

Such as the fairy-queen before her knight

Waved in old story, luring him away

Where round lost isles Hesperian billows break

Or towers loom up beneath the clear, translucent lake;

And under the deep grass blue hare-bells hide,

And myrtle plots with dew-fall ever wet,

Gay tiger-lilies flammulate and pied,

Sometime on pathway borders neatly set,

Now blossom through the brake on either side,

Where heliotrope and weedy mignonette,

With vines in bloom and flower-bearing trees,

Mingle their incense all to swell the perfumed breeze,

That sprung like Hermes from his natal cave

In some blue rampart of the curving West,

Comes up the valleys where green cornfields wave,

Ravels the cloud about the mountain crest,

Breathes on the lake till gentle ripples pave

Its placid floor; at length a long-loved guest,

He steals across this plot of pleasant ground,

Waking the vocal leaves to a sweet vernal sound.

Here many a day right gladly have I sped,

Content amid the wavy plumes to lie,

And through the woven branches overhead

Watch the white, ever-wandering clouds go by,

And soaring birds make their dissolving bed

Far in the azure depths of summer sky,

Or nearer that small huntsman of the air,

The fly-catcher, dart nimbly from his leafy lair;

Pillowed at ease to hear the merry tune

Of mating warblers in the boughs above

And shrill cicadas whom the hottest noon

Keeps not from drowsy song; the mourning dove

Pours down the murmuring grove his plaintive croon

That like the voice of visionary love

Oft have I risen to seek through this green maze

(Even as my feet thread now the great world's garden-ways);

And, parting tangled bushes as I passed

Down beechen alleys beautiful and dim,

Perhaps by some deep-shaded pool at last

My feet would pause, where goldfish poise and swim,

And snowy callas' velvet cups are massed

Around the mossy, fern-encircled brim.

Here, then, that magic summoning would cease,

Or sound far off again among the orchard trees.

And here where the blanched lilies of the vale

And violets and yellow star-flowers teem,

And pink and purple hyacinths exhale

Their heavy fume, once more to drowse and dream

My head would sink, from many an olden tale

Drawing imagination's fervid theme,

Or haply peopling this enchanting spot

Only with fair creations of fantastic thought.

For oft I think, in years long since gone by,

That gentle hearts dwelt here and gentle hands

Stored all this bowery bliss to beautify

The paradise of some unsung romance;

Here, safe from all except the loved one's eye,

'Tis sweet to think white limbs were wont to glance,

Well pleased to wanton like the flowers and share

Their simple loveliness with the enamored air.

Thrice dear to them whose votive fingers decked

The altars of First Love were these green ways, -- -

These lawns and verdurous brakes forever flecked

With the warm sunshine of midsummer days;

Oft where the long straight allies intersect

And marble seats surround the open space,

Where a tiled pool and sculptured fountain stand,

Hath Evening found them seated, silent, hand in hand.

When twilight deepened, in the gathering shade

Beneath that old titanic cypress row,

Whose sombre vault and towering colonnade

Dwarfed the enfolded forms that moved below,

Oft with close steps these happy lovers strayed,

Till down its darkening aisle the sunset glow

Grew less and patterning the garden floor

Faint flakes of filtering moonlight mantled more and more.

And the strange tempest that a touch imparts

Through the mid fibre of the molten frame,

When the sweet flesh in early youth asserts

Its heyday verve and little hints enflame,

Disturbed them as they walked; from their full hearts

Welled the soft word, and many a tender name

Strove on their lips as breast to breast they strained

And the deep joy they drank seemed never, never drained.

Love's soul that is the depth of starry skies

Set in the splendor of one upturned face

To beam adorably through half-closed eyes;

Love's body where the breadth of summer days

And all the beauty earth and air comprise

Come to the compass of an arm's embrace,

To burn a moment on impassioned lips

And yield intemperate joy to quivering finger-tips,

They knew; and here where morning-glories cling

Round carven forms of carefullest artifice,

They made a bower where every outward thing

Should comment on the cause of their own bliss;

With flowers of liveliest hue encompassing

That flower that the beloved body is -- -

That rose that for the banquet of Love's bee

Has budded all the aeons of past eternity.

But their choice seat was where the garden wall,

Crowning a little summit, far and near,

Looks over tufted treetops onto all

The pleasant outer country; rising here

From rustling foliage where cuckoos call

On summer evenings, stands a belvedere,

Buff-hued, of antique plaster, overrun

With flowering vines and weatherworn by rain and sun.

Still round the turrets of this antique tower

The bougainvillea hangs a crimson crown,

Wistaria-vines and clematis in flower,

Wreathing the lower surface further down,

Hide the old plaster in a very shower

Of motley blossoms like a broidered gown.

Outside, ascending from the garden grove,

A crumbling stairway winds to the one room above.

And whoso mounts by this dismantled stair

Finds the old pleasure-hall, long disarrayed,

Brick-tiled and raftered, and the walls foursquare

Ringed all about with a twofold arcade.

Backward dense branches intercept the glare

Of afternoon with eucalyptus shade;

Eastward the level valley-plains expand,

Sweet as a queen's survey of her own Fairyland.

For through that frame the ivied arches make,

Wide tracts of sunny midland charm the eye,

Frequent with hamlet, grove, and lucent lake

Where the blue hills' inverted contours lie;

Far to the east where billowy mountains break

In surf of snow against a sapphire sky,

Huge thunderheads loom up behind the ranges,

Changing from gold to pink as deepening sunset changes;

And over plain and far sierra spread

The fulgent rays of fading afternoon,

Showing each utmost peak and watershed

All clarified, each tassel and festoon

Of floating cloud embroidered overhead,

Like lotus-leaves on bluest waters strewn,

Flushing with rose, while all breathes fresh and free

In peace and amplitude and bland tranquillity.

Dear were such evenings to this gentle pair;

Love's tide that launched on with a blast too strong

Sweeps toward the foaming reef, the hidden snare,

Baffling with fond illusion's siren-song,

Too faint, on idle shoals, to linger there

Far from Youth's glowing dream, bore them along,

With purple sail and steered by seraph hands

To isles resplendent in the sunset of romance.

And out of this old house a flowery fane,

A bridal bower, a pearly pleasure-dome,

They built, and furnished it with gold and grain,

And bade all spirits of beauty hither come,

And winged Love to enter with his train

And bless their pillow, and in this his home

Make them his priests as Hero was of yore

In her sweet girlhood by the blue Dardanian shore.

Tree-ferns, therefore, and potted palms they brought,

Tripods and urns in rare and curious taste,

Polychrome chests and cabinets inwrought

With pearl and ivory etched and interlaced;

Pendant brocades with massive braid were caught,

And chain-slung, oriental lamps so placed

To light the lounger on some low divan,

Sunken in swelling down and silks from Hindustan.

And there was spread, upon the ample floors,

Work of the Levantine's laborious loom,

Such as by Euxine or Ionian shores

Carpets the dim seraglio's scented gloom.

Each morn renewed, the garden's flowery stores

Blushed in fair vases, ochre and peach-bloom,

And little birds through wicker doors left wide

Flew in to trill a space from the green world outside.

And there was many a dainty attitude,

Bronze and eburnean. All but disarrayed,

Here in eternal doubt sweet Psyche stood

Fain of the bath's delight, yet still afraid

Lest aught in that palatial solitude

Lurked of most menace to a helpless maid.

Therefore forever faltering she stands,

Nor yet the last loose fold slips rippling from her hands.

Close by upon a beryl column, clad

In the fresh flower of adolescent grace,

They set the dear Bithynian shepherd lad,

The nude Antinous. That gentle face,

Forever beautiful, forever sad,

Shows but one aspect, moon-like, to our gaze,

Yet Fancy pictures how those lips could smile

At revelries in Rome, and banquets on the Nile.

And there were shapes of Beauty myriads more,

Clustering their rosy bridal bed around,

Whose scented breadth a silken fabric wore

Broidered with peacock hues on creamiest ground,

Fit to have graced the barge that Cydnus bore

Or Venus' bed in her enchanted mound,

While pillows swelled in stuffs of Orient dyes,

All broidered with strange fruits and birds of Paradise.

'Twas such a bower as Youth has visions of,

Thither with one fair spirit to retire,

Lie upon rose-leaves, sleep and wake with Love

And feast on kisses to the heart's desire;

Where by a casement opening on a grove,

Wide to the wood-winds and the sweet birds' choir,

A girl might stand and gaze into green boughs,

Like Credhe at the window of her golden house.

Or most like Vivien, the enchanting fay,

Where with her friend, in the strange tower they planned,

She lies and dreams eternity away,

Above the treetops in Broceliande,

Sometimes at twilight when the woods are gray

And wolf-packs howl far out across the lande,

Waking to love, while up behind the trees

The large midsummer moon lifts -- - even so loved these.

For here, their pleasure was to come and sit

Oft when the sun sloped midway to the west,

Watching with sweet enjoyment interknit

The long light slant across the green earth's breast,

And clouds upon the ranges opposite,

Rolled up into a gleaming thundercrest,

Topple and break and fall in purple rain,

And mist of summer showers trail out across the plain.

Whereon the shafts of ardent light, far-flung

Across the luminous azure overhead,

Ofttimes in arcs of transient beauty hung

The fragmentary rainbow's green and red.

Joy it was here to love and to be young,

To watch the sun sink to his western bed,

And streaming back out of their flaming core

The vesperal aurora's glorious banners soar.

Tinging each altitude of heaven in turn,

Those fiery rays would sweep. The cumuli

That peeped above the mountain-tops would burn

Carmine a space; the cirrus-whorls on high,

More delicate than sprays of maiden fern,

Streak with pale rose the peacock-breasted sky,

Then blanch. As water-lilies fold at night,

Sank back into themselves those plumes of fervid light.

And they would watch the first faint stars appear,

The blue East blend with the blue hills below,

As lovers when their shuddering bliss draws near

Into one pulse of fluid rapture grow.

New fragrance on the freshening atmosphere

Would steal with evening, and the sunset glow

Draw deeper down into the wondrous west

Round vales of Proserpine and islands of the blest.

So dusk would come and mingle lake and shore,

The snow-peaks fade to frosty opaline,

To pearl the domed clouds the mountains bore,

Where late the sun's effulgent fire had been -- -

Showing as darkness deepened more and more

The incandescent lightnings flare within,

And Night that furls the lily in the glen

And twines impatient arms would fall, and then -- - and then . . .

Sometimes the peasant, coming late from town

With empty panniers on his little drove

Past the old lookout when the Northern Crown

Glittered with Cygnus through the scented grove,

Would hear soft noise of lute-strings wafted down

And voices singing through the leaves above

Those songs that well from the warm heart that woos

At balconies in Merida or Vera Cruz.

And he would pause under the garden wall,

Caught in the spell of that voluptuous strain,

With all the sultry South in it, and all

Its importunity of love and pain;

And he would wait till the last passionate fall

Died on the night, and all was still again, -- -

Then to his upland village wander home,

Marvelling whence that flood of elfin song might come.

O lyre that Love's white holy hands caress,

Youth, from thy bosom welled their passionate lays -- -

Sweet opportunity for happiness

So brief, so passing beautiful -- - O days,

When to the heart's divine indulgences

All earth in smiling ministration pays -- -

Thine was the source whose plenitude, past over,

What prize shall rest to pluck, what secret to discover!

The wake of color that follows her when May

Walks on the hills loose-haired and daisy-crowned,

The deep horizons of a summer's day,

Fair cities, and the pleasures that abound

Where music calls, and crowds in bright array

Gather by night to find and to be found;

What were these worth or all delightful things

Without thine eyes to read their true interpretings!

For thee the mountains open glorious gates,

To thee white arms put out from orient skies,

Earth, like a jewelled bride for one she waits,

Decks but to be delicious in thine eyes,

Thou guest of honor for one day, whose fetes

Eternity has travailed to devise;

Ah, grace them well in the brief hour they last!

Another's turn prepares, another follows fast.

Yet not without one fond memorial

Let my sun set who found the world so fair!

Frail verse, when Time the singer's coronal

Has rent, and stripped the rose-leaves from his hair,

Be thou my tablet on the temple wall!

Among the pious testimonials there,

Witness how sweetly on my heart as well

The miracles of dawn and starry evening fell!

Speak of one then who had the lust to feel,

And, from the hues that far horizons take,

And cloud and sunset, drank the wild appeal,

Too deep to live for aught but life's sweet sake,

Whose only motive was the will to kneel

Where Beauty's purest benediction spake,

Who only coveted what grove and field

And sunshine and green Earth and tender arms could yield -- -

A nympholept, through pleasant days and drear

Seeking his faultless adolescent dream,

A pilgrim down the paths that disappear

In mist and rainbows on the world's extreme,

A helpless voyager who all too near

The mouth of Life's fair flower-bordered stream,

Clutched at Love's single respite in his need

More than the drowning swimmer clutches at a reed -- -

That coming one whose feet in other days

Shall bleed like mine for ever having, more

Than any purpose, felt the need to praise

And seek the angelic image to adore,

In love with Love, its wonderful, sweet ways

Counting what most makes life worth living for,

That so some relic may be his to see

How I loved these things too and they were dear to me.

I sometimes think a conscious happiness

Mantles through all the rose's sentient vine

When summer winds with myriad calyces

Of bloom its clambering height incarnadine;

I sometimes think that cleaving lips, no less,

And limbs that crowned desires at length entwine

Are nerves through which that being drinks delight,

Whose frame is the green Earth robed round with day and night.

And such were theirs: the traveller without,

Pausing at night under the orchard trees,

Wondered and crossed himself in holy doubt,

For through their song and in the murmuring breeze

It seemed angelic choirs were all about

Mingling in universal harmonies,

As though, responsive to the chords they woke,

All Nature into sweet epithalamium broke.

And still they think a spirit haunts the place:

'Tis said, when Night has drawn her jewelled pall

And through the branches twinkling fireflies trace

Their mimic constellations, if it fall

That one should see the moon rise through the lace

Of blossomy boughs above the garden wall,

That surely would he take great ill thereof

And famish in a fit of unexpressive love.

But this I know not, for what time the wain

Was loosened and the lily's petal furled,

Then I would rise, climb the old wall again,

And pausing look forth on the sundown world,

Scan the wide reaches of the wondrous plain,

The hamlet sites where settling smoke lay curled,

The poplar-bordered roads, and far away

Fair snowpeaks colored with the sun's last ray.

Waves of faint sound would pulsate from afar -- -

Faint song and preludes of the summer night;

Deep in the cloudless west the evening star

Hung 'twixt the orange and the emerald light;

From the dark vale where shades crepuscular

Dimmed the old grove-girt belfry glimmering white,

Throbbing, as gentlest breezes rose or fell,

Came the sweet invocation of the evening bell.

Alan Seeger

The Torture of Cuauhtemoc

THEIR strength had fed on this when Death's white arms

Came sleeved in vapors and miasmal dew,

Curling across the jungle's ferny floor,

Becking each fevered brain. On bleak divides,

Where Sleep grew niggardly for nipping cold

That twinged blue lips into a mouthed curse,

Not back to Seville and its sunny plains

Winged their brief-biding dreams, but once again,

Lords of a palace in Tenochtitlan,

They guarded Montezuma's treasure-hoard.

Gold, like some finny harvest of the sea,

Poured out knee deep around the rifted floors,

Shiny and sparkling, -- - arms and crowns and rings:

Gold, sweet to toy with as beloved hair, -- -

To plunge the lustful, crawling fingers down,

Arms elbow deep, and draw them out again,

And watch the glinting metal trickle off,

Even as at night some fisherman, home bound

With speckled cargo in his hollow keel

Caught off Campeche or the Isle of Pines,

Dips in his paddle, lifts it forth again,

And laughs to see the luminous white drops

Fall back in flakes of fire. . . . Gold was the dream

That cheered that desperate enterprise. And now? . . .

Victory waited on the arms of Spain,

Fallen was the lovely city by the lake,

The sunny Venice of the western world;

There many corpses, rotting in the wind,

Poked up stiff limbs, but in the leprous rags

No jewel caught the sun, no tawny chain

Gleamed, as the prying halberds raked them o'er.

Pillage that ran red-handed through the streets

Came railing home at evening empty-palmed;

And they, on that sad night a twelvemonth gone,

Who, ounce by ounce, dear as their own life's blood

Retreating, cast the cumbrous load away:

They, when brown foemen lopped the bridges down,

Who tipped thonged chests into the stream below

And over wealth that might have ransomed kings

Passed on to safety; -- - cheated, guerdonless -- -

Found (through their fingers the bright booty slipped)

A city naked, of that golden dream

Shorn in one moment like a sunset sky.

Deep in a chamber that no cheerful ray

Purged of damp air, where in unbroken night

Black scorpions nested in the sooty beams,

Helpless and manacled they led him down -- -

Cuauhtemotzin -- - and other lords beside -- -

All chieftains of the people, heroes all -- -

And stripped their feathered robes and bound them there

On short stone settles sloping to the head,

But where the feet projected, underneath

Heaped the red coals. Their swarthy fronts illumed,

The bearded Spaniards, helmed and haubergeoned,

Paced up and down beneath the lurid vault.

Some kneeling fanned the glowing braziers; some

Stood at the sufferers' heads and all the while

Hissed in their ears: "The gold . . . the gold . . . the gold.

Where have ye hidden it -- - the chested gold?

Speak -- - and the torments cease!"

                                       They answered not.

Past those proud lips whose key their sovereign claimed

No accent fell to chide or to betray,

Only it chanced that bound beside the king

Lay one whom Nature, more than other men

Framing for delicate and perfumed ease,

Not yet, along the happy ways of Youth,

Had weaned from gentle usages so far

To teach that fortitude that warriors feel

And glory in the proof. He answered not,

But writhing with intolerable pain,

Convulsed in every limb, and all his face

Wrought to distortion with the agony,

Turned on his lord a look of wild appeal,

The secret half atremble on his lips,

Livid and quivering, that waited yet

For leave -- - for leave to utter it -- - one sign -- -

One word -- - one little word -- - to ease his pain.

As one reclining in the banquet hall,

Propped on an elbow, garlanded with flowers,

Saw lust and greed and boisterous revelry

Surge round him on the tides of wine, but he,

Staunch in the ethic of an antique school -- -

Stoic or Cynic or of Pyrrho's mind -- -

With steady eyes surveyed the unbridled scene,

Himself impassive, silent, self-contained:

So sat the Indian prince, with brow unblanched,

Amid the tortured and the torturers.

He who had seen his hopes made desolate,

His realm despoiled, his early crown deprived him,

And watched while Pestilence and Famine piled

His stricken people in their reeking doors,

Whence glassy eyes looked out and lean brown arms

Stretched up to greet him in one last farewell

As back and forth he paced along the streets

With words of hopeless comfort -- - what was this

That one should weaken now? He weakened not.

Whate'er was in his heart, he neither dealt

In pity nor in scorn, but, turning round,

Met that racked visage with his own unmoved,

Bent on the sufferer his mild calm eyes,

And while the pangs smote sharper, in a voice,

As who would speak not all in gentleness

Nor all disdain, said: "Yes! And am -- I- then

Upon a bed of roses?"

                     Stung with shame -- -

Shame bitterer than his anguish -- - to betray

Such cowardice before the man he loved,

And merit such rebuke, the boy grew calm;

And stilled his struggling limbs and moaning cries,

And shook away his tears, and strove to smile,

And turned his face against the wall -- - and died.

Alan Seeger

The Nympholet

THERE was a boy -- - not above childish fears -- -

With steps that faltered now and straining ears,

Timid, irresolute, yet dauntless still,

Who one bright dawn, when each remotest hill

Stood sharp and clear in Heaven's unclouded blue

And all Earth shimmered with fresh-beaded dew,

Risen in the first beams of the gladdening sun,

Walked up into the mountains. One by one

Each towering trunk beneath his sturdy stride

Fell back, and ever wider and more wide

The boundless prospect opened. Long he strayed,

From dawn till the last trace of slanting shade

Had vanished from the canyons, and, dismayed

At that far length to which his path had led,

He paused -- - at such a height where overhead

The clouds hung close, the air came thin and chill,

And all was hushed and calm and very still,

Save, from abysmal gorges, where the sound

Of tumbling waters rose, and all around

The pines, by those keen upper currents blown,

Muttered in multitudinous monotone.

Here, with the wind in lovely locks laid bare,

With arms oft raised in dedicative prayer,

Lost in mute rapture and adoring wonder,

He stood, till the far noise of noontide thunder,

Rolled down upon the muffled harmonies

Of wind and waterfall and whispering trees,

Made loneliness more lone. Some Panic fear

Would seize him then, as they who seemed to hear

In Tracian valleys or Thessalian woods

The god's hallooing wake the leafy solitudes;

I think it was the same: some piercing sense

Of Deity's pervasive immanence,

The Life that visible Nature doth indwell

Grown great and near and all but palpable . . .

He might not linger, but with winged strides

Like one pursued, fled down the mountain-sides -- -

Down the long ridge that edged the steep ravine,

By glade and flowery lawn and upland green,

And never paused nor felt assured again

But where the grassy foothills opened. Then,

While shadows lengthened on the plain below

And the sun vanished and the sunset-glow

Looked back upon the world with fervid eye

Through the barred windows of the western sky,

Homeward he fared, while many a look behind

Showed the receding ranges dim-outlined,

Highland and hollow where his path had lain,

Veiled in deep purple of the mountain rain.

Alan Seeger

The Wanderer

TO SEE the clouds his spirit yearned toward so

Over new mountains piled and unploughed waves,

Back of old-storied spires and architraves

To watch Arcturus rise or Fomalhaut,

And roused by street-cries in strange tongues when day

Flooded with gold some domed metropolis,

Between new towers to waken and new bliss

Spread on his pillow in a wondrous way:

These were his joys. Oft under bulging crates,

Coming to market with his morning load,

The peasant found him early on his road

To greet the sunrise at the city-gates, -- -

There where the meadows waken in its rays,

Golden with mist, and the great roads commence,

And backward, where the chimney-tops are dense,

Cathedral-arches glimmer through the haze.

White dunes that breaking show a strip of sea,

A plowman and his team against the blue,

Swiss pastures musical with cowbells, too,

And poplar-lined canals in Picardie,

And coast-towns where the vultures back and forth

Sail in the clear depths of the tropic sky,

And swallows in the sunset where they fly

Over gray Gothic cities in the north,

And the wine-cellar and the chorus there,

The dance-hall and a face among the crowd, -- -

Were all delights that made him sing aloud

For joy to sojourn in a world so fair.

Back of his footsteps as he journeyed fell

Range after range; ahead blue hills emerged.

Before him tireless to applaud it surged

The sweet interminable spectacle.

And like the west behind a sundown sea

Shone the past joys his memory retraced,

And bright as the blue east he always faced

Beckoned the loves and joys that were to be.

From every branch a blossom for his brow

He gathered, singing down Life's flower-lined road,

And youth impelled his spirit as he strode

Like winged Victory on the galley's prow.

That Loveliness whose being sun and star,

Green Earth and dawn and amber evening robe,

That lamp whereof the opalescent globe

The season's emulative splendors are,

That veiled divinity whose beams transpire

From every pore of universal space,

As the fair soul illumes the lovely face -- -

That was his guest, his passion, his desire.

His heart the love of Beauty held as hides

One gem most pure a casket of pure gold.

It was too rich a lesser thing to hold;

It was not large enough for aught besides.

Alan Seeger

The Need to Love

THE need to love that all the stars obey

Entered my heart and banished all beside.

Bare were the gardens where I used to stray;

Faded the flowers that one time satisfied.

Before the beauty of the west on fire,

The moonlit hills from cloister-casements viewed,

Cloud-like arose the image of desire,

And cast out peace and maddened solitude.

I sought the City and the hopes it held:

With smoke and brooding vapors intercurled,

As the thick roofs and walls close-paralleled

Shut out the fair horizons of the world -- -

A truant from the fields and rustic joy,

In my changed thought that image even so

Shut out the gods I worshipped as a boy

And all the pure delights I used to know.

Often the veil has trembled at some tide

Of lovely reminiscence and revealed

How much of beauty Nature holds beside

Sweet lips that sacrifice and arms that yield:

Clouds, window-framed, beyond the huddled eaves

When summer cumulates their golden chains,

Or from the parks the smell of burning leaves,

Fragrant of childhood in the country lanes,

An organ-grinder's melancholy tune

In rainy streets, or from an attic sill

The blue skies of a windy afternoon

Where our kites climbed once from some grassy hill:

And my soul once more would be wrapped entire

In the pure peace and blessing of those years

Before the fierce infection of Desire

Had ravaged all the flesh. Through starting tears

Shone that lost Paradise; but, if it did,

Again ere long the prison-shades would fall

That Youth condemns itself to walk amid,

So narrow, but so beautiful withal.

And I have followed Fame with less devotion,

And kept no real ambition but to see

Rise from the foam of Nature's sunlit ocean

My dream of palpable divinity;

And aught the world contends for to mine eye

Seemed not so real a meaning of success

As only once to clasp before I die

My vision of embodied happiness.

Alan Seeger

El Extraviado

OVER the radiant ridges borne out on the offshore wind,

I have sailed as a butterfly sails whose priming wings unfurled

Leave the familiar gardens and visited fields behind

To follow a cloud in the east rose-flushed on the rim of the world.

I have strayed from the trodden highway for walking with upturned eyes

On the way of the wind in the treetops, and the drift of the tinted rack.

For the will to be losing no wonder of sunny or starlit skies

I have chosen the sod for my pillow and a threadbare coat for my back.

Evening of ample horizons, opaline, delicate, pure,

Shadow of clouds on green valleys, trailed over meadows and trees,

Cities of ardent adventure where the harvests of Joy mature,

Forests whose murmuring voices are amorous prophecies,

World of romance and profusion, still round my journey spread

The glamours, the glints, the enthralments, the nurture of one whose feet

From hours unblessed by beauty nor lighted by love have fled

As the shade of the tomb on his pathway and the scent of the winding-sheet.

I never could rest from roving nor put from my heart this need

To be seeing how lovably Nature in flower and face hath wrought, -- -

In flower and meadow and mountain and heaven where the white clouds breed

And the cunning of silken meshes where the heart's desire lies caught.

Over the azure expanses, on the offshore breezes borne,

I have sailed as a butterfly sails, nor recked where the impulse led,

Sufficed with the sunshine and freedom, the warmth and the summer morn,

The infinite glory surrounding, the infinite blue ahead.

Alan Seeger