V — ESTHER DANCING

Speak not nor stir.  Here music is alive,
Woven from those swift fingers, strong and light,
Marching across those singing hands, or shed
Slowly, like echoes down the muffled night,
Or beautifully translated, note by note,
Some fainter voice, rhapsodic and remote,
Or shaken out in melodies that dive
Clear into fathoms of profounder things,
Then suddenly again on rising wings,
Burst into sun and hover overhead.

Incarnate music flashing into form
Fled from the vineyards of melodious Greece,
Feet that have flown before the gathering storm
Or glanced in gardens of the Golden Fleece,
Face atune to all the songs that mass
Their gusts of passion on the sunlit grass,
Image of lyric hope and veiled despair,
Like them, thou shalt unutterably pass
Into the silence and the shadowed air.

POMFRET, 1919

VI — HUNTERS

A vase red-wrought in Athens long ago.... 
The hunter and his gay companion ride
Through the young fields of life; on every side
Frail and fantastic the tall lilies grow. 
Her head thrown back, her eyes afraid and wide,
Flies like a phantom the grey spectral doe,
Her light feet scarcely bend the grass below,
Gloriously flying into eventide.

Ahead there lies the shadow, then the dark,
And safety in the thick forestial night,
But nearer still she hears the bloodhounds bark,
And horses panting in impetuous flight,
And hunters without pity for the slain,
Halloing shrilly over the windy plain.

Sombre become the skies, the winds of fall
Sing dangerously through the hissing grass;
Sunlight and clouds in slow procession pass
Over the tress, then comes an interval
Of utter calm, the air is a morass
Of humid breathlessness.  A dreadful call
Rings suddenly from the onrushing squall,
And the storm closes in a whirling mass.

And still the doe eludes the raging hounds,
And still the youths press onward toward the woods,
Though the world shudders with diluvian sounds
And the rain streams in undulating floods. 
Sharp lightning splits the sky; the doe is gone. 
O follow! follow! if it be till dawn.

The hunted flees, the boyish hunters follow
Into the forest’s dripping everglades,
The wind goes wailing through the swaying shades,
And violent rain gushes in every hollow. 
The doe runs free, triumphantly evades
Those straining eyes; the ghastly shadows swallow
Her flying form; the frightened horses wallow
Deep in the mire.  Then the last daylight fades.

O Youths, turn back! the year is getting late,
And autumn has no pity for the slain. 
Twining like serpents, the lean arms of fate
Grope toward you through the blackness and the rain,
Then Death, and the obliterating snow.... 
A vase, red-wrought in Athens long ago.