ODE TO SILENCE
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ye, but she?Your other sister and my other soulGrave Silence, lovelierThan the three loveliest maidens, what of her?Clio, not you,Not you, Calliope,Nor all your wanton line,Not Beauty's perfect self shall comfort meFor Silence once departed,For her the cool-tongued, her the tranquil-hearted,Whom evermore I follow wistfully,Wandering Heaven and Earth and Hell and the four seasons through;Thalia, not you,Not you, Melpomene,Not your incomparable feet, O thin Terpsichore,I seek in this great hall,But one more pale, more pensive, most beloved of you all.I seek her from afar,I come from temples where her altars are,From groves that bear her name,Noisy with stricken victims now and sacrificial flame,And cymbals struck on high and strident facesObstreperous in her praiseThey neither love nor know,A goddess of gone days,Departed long ago,Abandoning the invaded shrines and fanesOf her old sanctuary,A deity obscure and legendary,Of whom there now remains,For sages to decipher and priests to garble,Only and for a little while her letters wedged in marble,Which even now, behold, the friendly mumbling rain erases,And the inarticulate snow,Leaving at last of her least signs and tracesNone whatsoever, nor whither she is vanished from these places."She will love well," I said,"If love be of that heart inhabiter,The flowers of the dead;The red anemone that with no soundMoves in the wind, and from another woundThat sprang, the heavily-sweet blue hyacinth,That blossoms underground,And sallow poppies, will be dear to her.And will not Silence knowIn the black shade of what obsidian steepStiffens the white narcissus numb with sleep?(Seed which Demeter's daughter bore from home,Uptorn by desperate fingers long ago,Reluctant even as she,Undone Persephone,And even as she set out again to growIn twilight, in perdition's lean and inauspicious loam).She will love well," I said,"The flowers of the dead;Where dark Persephone the winter round,Uncomforted for home, uncomforted,Lacking a sunny southern slope in northern Sicily,With sullen pupils focussed on a dream,Stares on the stagnant streamThat moats the unequivocable battlements of Hell,There, there will she be found,She that is Beauty veiled from men and Music in a swound." "I long for Silence as they long for breathWhose helpless nostrils drink the bitter sea;What thing can beSo stout, what so redoubtable, in DeathWhat fury, what considerable rage, if only she,Upon whose icy breast,Unquestioned, uncaressed,One time I lay,And whom always I lack,Even to this day,Being by no means from that frigid bosom weaned away,If only she therewith be given me back?"I sought her down that dolorous labyrinth,Wherein no shaft of sunlight ever fell,And in among the bloodless everywhereI sought her, but the air,Breathed many times and spent,Was fretful with a whispering discontent,And questioning me, importuning me to tellSome slightest tidings of the light of day they know no more,Plucking my sleeve, the eager shades were with me where I went.I paused at every grievous door,And harked a moment, holding up my hand,--and for a spaceA hush was on them, while they watched my face;And then they fell a-whispering as before;So that I smiled at them and left them, seeing she was not there.I sought her, too,Among the upper gods, although I knewShe was not like to be where feasting is,Nor near to Heaven's lord,Being a thing abhorredAnd shunned of him, although a child of his,(Not yours, not yours; to you she owes not breath,Mother of Song, being sown of Zeus upon a dream of Death).Fearing to pass unvisited some placeAnd later learn, too late, how all the while,With her still face,She had been standing there and seen me pass, without a smile,I sought her even to the sagging board whereatThe stout immortals sat;But such a laughter shook the mighty hallNo one could hear me say:Had she been seen upon the Hill that day?And no one knew at allHow long I stood, or when at last I sighed and went away. There is a garden lying in a lullBetween the mountains and the mountainous sea,I know not where, but which a dream diurnalPaints on my lids a moment till the hullBe lifted from the kernelAnd Slumber fed to me.Your foot-print is not there, Mnemosene,Though it would seem a ruined place and afterYour lichenous heart, being fullOf broken columns, caryatidesThrown to the earth and fallen forward on their jointless knees,And urns funereal altered into dustMinuter than the ashes of the dead,And Psyche's lamp out of the earth up-thrust,Dripping itself in marble wax on what was once the bedOf Love, and his young body asleep, but now is dust instead. There twists the bitter-sweet, the white wisteriaFastens its fingers in the strangling wall,And the wide crannies quicken with bright weeds;There dumbly like a worm all day the still white orchid feeds;But never an echo of your daughters' laughterIs there, nor any sign of you at allSwells fungous from the rotten bough, grey mother of Pieria!
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