Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, CHAITIVEL; OR, THE LAY OF LOVE'S UNFORTUNATE, by MARIE DE FRANCE


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

CHAITIVEL; OR, THE LAY OF LOVE'S UNFORTUNATE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Ladies and lovers, may ye dwell
Last Line: And so they two fight on till doom.
Alternate Author Name(s): Shaftesbury, Marie, Abbess Of
Subject(s): Beauty; Future Life; Love; Women; Retribution; Eternity; After Life


LADIES and lovers, may ye dwell
In joy; yea, now and after me;
And, for all I shall sing or tell,
Hold me but one who loveth well,
And singeth of mere joy to see
His lady's golden loveliness,—
Yea, joyeth, and may scarce repress
The song he hath for every tress
Her hand hath braided or set free—
The rush of rapturous words that break
Frail wings against his lips and take
A songless death, for mere delight
In that fresh miracle of white
And perfect red and perfect gold
Each new day brings him to behold
Renewed and yet unchanged in her.
Whence are the rosy seas that stir
With richly glowing wave of thin
Ethereal fire, alway within,
Alway about her heart—all day
Flooding the extreme flower of lip
And finger-tip and bosom-tip,—
As summer, flooding in such way
Earth, air and heaven, will seem to stay
Gathered up richly in the last
And least of the last rose?—O whence
Is all her wonder, never past,
Nor ever dwelt with and possest
Quite through, bewildering the sense
With loving, looking and suspense
Of loving;—shapeless shades and swift
Transfigurement of heavens that drift
Ever with glory giving place
To glory on her form and face?—
Yea, infinite of change and light
And wide uncomprehended sight
Seems every way his lady's grace,—
As seemeth to the day and night
Some infinite world of flowers, transformed
By unseen wands of wind. And he,
Beholding, loves; but may not see
Or know whence aught of her may be:
Only, beholding, he hath formed,
Ah, many a song for very love
Of her and wonder. But, above,
—Yea, quite beyond the rapturous days
He leads with her, he thinketh well
Some heaven with fair untrodden ways
Shall ever be for him to dwell
Rejoicing in her, learning praise
More passionate of her, winning whole
Immortal knowledge of her soul.

Ladies and lovers, will ye see
How gold hair hath its perjury?
And how the lip may twice or thrice
Undo the soul; and how the heart
May quite annul the heart's own price
Given for many a goodly part
Of heaven? How one love shall be fair,
And whole and perfect in the rare
Great likeness of an angel,—yea,
And how another, golden-miened,
With lovely seeming and sweet way,
Shall come and be but as a fiend
To tempt and drag the soul away—
And all for ever? Listen well:
This is a lay of heaven and hell:
Listen, and think how it shall be
With you in love's eternity.

Some age ago, love's splendid lures
Through the enchanted world made fair
Each woman's soft enamouring snare;
And the contagion that endures
Among men's hearts spread everywhere
Love's ailing that love only cures;
And, far as the unblemished fire
Flooded down joyous from the sun
Caused rapturous living and desire
Unearthly in the earth, not one
Of fair mankind was free to shun
The sudden endless fate of flame
Caught in the hazard of a look
Crossing a kindled look. The same
Frail human life it was that shook
With the immortal burning soul
Of love traversing it, consumed
With bearing inwardly the whole
Of some celestial joy, or sole
—In fair midst of the world that bloomed
Or withered—through the long sharp throe
Of some inexplicable woe
Reaching out to a shoreless sea
Of sadness after death. The earth
Was beautiful with flower and tree,
And full of the delicious mirth
And low soft endless jubilee
Of bird and nameless creature free
To feel the sun; and, where the grave
Saddened and broke the last year's green,
There most was this year's summer brave
With glorious flower and fresh with keen
New scent. And men and women, thrilled
With their own passionate thoughts unseen,
Went fair about the fair world, filled
With wondrous joy or misery
Killing them at the heart; beheld
The sun, and looked upon the sky,
And saw the flowers, and felt go by
The summer; and were not changed, but held
Their secret of eternity
Within them. And the earth was glad,
Whether the heart was blithe or sad.

But Sarrazine, of whom I sing,
Had shut her soul up from each thing
That once with all her soul she knew
Sweet in the earth, bright in the blue;
And, joyless, in the midst between
Fair blue of heaven and green earth's green,
Lived now this lovely Sarrazine
With passionate thinking and unknown
Most secret flowering of her lone
And infinite beauty. All amazed
She was, and fearfully she gazed
Into each dismal future year,
The while it ceased not that a tear,
Born of her thought right wearily,
Found its way backward to the drear
Dead ashes of some memory
In a sweet fatal reckless past
Love had made recklessly and cast
Against her soul.
She did not die,
But dreamed and lived, and bade the grey
Of grieving, more and more each day,
Gather around and steal away
Her hidden fairness, that was bloom
More white and wondrous in that tomb
Where the sun touched it not, and sight
Should never worship, and delight
Flower not of it day or night.

The slow cloud found it sweet to rest
Over each shadow-haunted tower
Of her lone castle, and to remain
Low brooding over that domain
Of deep autumnal wood and plain
And mirroring lake that she possest;
The sun and summer owned no flower
Down in the deep and wayward ways
Ruined and lost about her bower,
Whose desolation was the nest
Of a strange plaintive bird with crest
Of tarnished fiery feathers. Haze
Of changeless morn and noon was blue
Above the still blue of the lake,
Where, year by year, some long dream grew
More and more wonderful, and threw
A stranger spell over wild brake
And dripping mile of sallow sedge—
Where the dark bittern and the crake
Answered with lone unearthly cry,
Or spectral, on the oozy edge,
Some tall grey egret with wide eye
Stood slumbering. Not a troubled thought
Of toiling in the world, or deeds
Of living men, was ever brought
To break such magic as dreams wrought
In that dim region; but the reeds,
And redolent snakelike flowers, and weeds
Trailed in the wave, and songless bird,
With many a shadow thinly seen
And many a strange unseen thing heard
To wander up and down between
The desolate sedges with drear sound—
All were become unearthly, bound
In the enchanting solitude
Of some vast supernatural mood
Of sadness. All had learned the heart
Of Sarrazine; and every sore
Bewailing thought of hers was part
Of burdens that the silent things
Of wave and fen and feather bore,
On languid leaves and drooping wings,
In the blue stillness more and more
The haunt of cloud and dream.

And for his sake—who quite possest,
In short blind life upon the earth,
The whole irrevocable gift
Of her sweet body's passionate worth—
Whose soul was ever strong and swift
To seek her shaken soul and wrest
Some irremediable word
Out of its troubled speech to drift
Onward eternal and be heard
Among the destinies,—for him,
She now had given up to grief,
To let grief ruin it and dim
And waste it as worms do a leaf,
The rich continual flowering
Of each white unregarded limb,
Yea, and the whole of that rich thing,
Her woman's loveliness, that love
Would perfect secretly and bring
To many a marble grace above
His wont. O how grief slew each day
With deadliest remembering
Of some first day the cruel past
Held golden with joy torn away
For ever! Snake-like, how he cast
His sickly and bewildering coil
About her life, holding his prey,
Her heart, with fierce fang of regret,
And making poisoned thought to spoil
Her desolate fairness with lone fret!

Now she would weary out the days,
Joylessly looking on the white
Slim wonder that she was, whose praise
Henceforth must be omitted quite
Out of men's praising mouths; whose sight
Should ne'er strike sudden with amaze
One other heart fain to have crost
That solitude, where she must be
Evermore as a flower lost
Or nameless unto men. To see
The wild white lilies, passionless
And lonely, wasted in the rank
Green shadowy shallows of the bank,
Was to see many a loveliness—
No more rejected and left out,
As a thing none cared to possess
Of love and time—than, past all doubt,
Her joyless form and face were now
Till death. Was the world whole without
One need of her, one thought of how
Love prospered making her—one look
At the short perfect miracle
His passionate hands wrought when they took
The rare sweet elements, the fine
And delicate fires, and wove the spell
Of her rich being? Did days yet shine,
And men love boundlessly and well
In the fair world, beyond that cell
Of grey thoughts shutting out the sun
Her life seemed brought to? yea, since none
Set living heart upon her more,
And all she was and all she bore,
Of rare and wonderful lay known
To the worms only left alone
With faded secrets in the core
Of dead men's hearts?

Time was so bare,
—Her heart at solitary feast
Of sorrow sitting unreleast
For ever, wasting slow the hair
Of gold, the plenteous form of white
Unconquerable flower, through night
And day, that emptied year and year
Of sullied summers, drawing near
To death scarce more a winter;—yea,

And one last chosen tomb seemed, day
And night, so little comforted
With summer given or true tear shed—
There might have been—her heart now said
Sometimes all softly—even for him,
That earlier lover, lightly slain
Without the touch of her for dim
Delicious dreaming after vain,
Void life, the guiltless recompense
Of more love than he sought to save
His soul; yea, though he had gone hence,
Telling the worms they should but have
Hair's gold that once had been his bed,
And dust that love for once had wed
To his glad dust, when death made her
Some next year's spoil! O who would stir
In sleep down there, and think he missed
Aught of the faultless mouth that kissed
His life all through? For, verily,
—He who had all—was not his day,
E'en to death softened endlessly
With love, filled to the full and more
With sweet of hers? And, where he lay,
Was not the grave o'erbrimmed with store
Of perfect memories and rich ore
Of a life rich in love? And, now,
It seemed all bitter to avow
That one most gracious should have gone
Uncheered to death, who had lived on
Right rapturously, if once his brow
Had felt her lips; if once his hand
Had revelled on her, and his heart
Filled itself with one lovely part
Of loveliness, the rotting sand
Of time alone should use with kiss
Joyless for ever. Would not this—
To weigh the lost wealth of her hair
Once in his hand, as one might poise
Some weight of gold—have seemed right fair
To him, amid the few sad joys
He thought it well to die for? Yea,
And now the whole sweet, that he lay
Evermore thirsting for, was there
At waste for ever, out of care
Of any; and no man came back
To call it his.
And, since to her
No man returned; since no more lack
Of her gave any strength to stir
The very grave-stone and come back;
And he whose soul's least word of love
Seemed a love-fetter strong enough
To bind eternity to whole
Eternity,—since now his soul
Having content of her, or quite
Forgetting, left her, as a thing
Not owned, and never jealous sting
Caused him to care now, day or night,
What chance might happen to the white
Unblemished beauty or the heart
His empire:—ah, as houseless wraiths
And unhoused creeping beasts would glide
Back to a house the day he died
Who cast them forth,—so, from each part
Of her annulled past, full of faiths
Abjured and fruitless loves and loss,
There came back to her heart the host
Of memories comfortless; the ghost
Of every lover now might cross
Its threshold when he would, to scare
And grieve her with his tears, or bare
The great wound in his heart, or make
Long threat of unknown things for sake
Of some forgotten heedless word.

It seemed now as a sad thing heard
But yesterday, how, bearing still
Fair vow of hers, wherefrom the will
Of other love had wrenched her, yea,
Relying ever on each fair
Uncancelled word, and, night and day,
Bound, with her gift of golden hair,
To hold hers only heart and hand,
For ever,—one in Paynim land
Died loving her. The intense flower
Of waving strange-leaved trees that sang
His dirge with voices wild and soft,
Wafted her perfume that had power
To shake her heart; warm air, that rang
With ends of unknown singing, oft
Broke in upon her, as though space
Of cold climes and cold seas between
Were dwindling, and she should have seen
That fair unconsecrated place,
Golden in sunlight, green in shade
Of many a palm and mighty blade
Of monstrous herb.
Yea, these were three
Whose lives and deaths were hers; and she
Had only given good to one;
And all were with her now, to share
And haunt her thoughts quite to the bare
Lone end of living. There was none
Among sweet women whose ripe heart,
Full of the perfect precious part
Of many a love, was a deep tomb
Where fair dead lay in goodly gloom
More royally than these, whose fate
Was filled and ended in her, lay
In her proud heart, disconsolate
And lonely, turning from the day
Into its own rich grieving grey.

But in the separate place that death
Had found for him, to rest from life,
To dream upon it, or to wait,
Each of her lovers held the breath
Of his strong dauntless spirit rife
With memories; or content with late
Fair kisses on his mouth; or sure
Of heaven because of some sweet lure
Of looks or pledge or perfect vow
She made him,—doubting her not his
For ever in fair destinies.

He who ne'er felt upon his brow
The perfect blessing of her kiss,
Stayed his long thirst with thinking how
Some early and far-reaching smile,
That looked on many a distant mile
Of golden promise, seemed to bind
His love to follow her and find
Dim outskirts of her life to cling
With solace in; and, where the chill
And changeless dark spread covering
His patient soul, he thought it still
Her shadow on him; and a thrill
That was not joyless turned the sting
Of death.
And he who, in the fair
Rich Paynim place, with the ripe glare
Of foreign summers gilding palm
And poisonous fruit about him, calm
And mighty, rusted in red steel—
Not merely barren did he feel
Death's prison and the silent gloom
Around him; but, within, the tomb
Was opulent with a glimmering gold;
For the slim tress that once was hid
Upon his heart, was grown to fold
On fold that many times had rolled
About him; and he lay amid
The splendours of it, and thought well
That he should have her soul for hell
Or heaven.
But he who had all sweet
Latest and longest of her,—day
And night and many a year he lay,
Enthralled, past knowing cold or heat
Or hearing thunder or the feet
Of armies, in a long deep dream
Of her sweet body, full of joy
And magical amaze and gleam
Of endless excellence; there nought
Might reach his spirit or destroy
Its passionate raptures of long thought,
—Save only if, beneath God's sky,
One other creature should draw nigh
To touching her whom his soul bought.
Tranquil, and holding it enow
Each of them had his hope or bliss
Or memory of her; and with this
He lay alone there,—as I trow,
Thinking that she was only his.

—O men and women, Love is king
Upon the earth; summer and spring
Will serve him in the year to come
With all new rapture, when the blast
Of many a long-drawn autumn day,
Made golden with fair thought and dumb
Remembering of the perfect past,
Shall have swept utterly away
The dry dead leaves of summer and spring
That spent themselves with worshipping
His latest godhead perfectly:
His realms are all the lands that lie
Beneath yon distant unknown sky—
Where only freed souls go unseen
To different dooms: his are the green
Of grass, the blue of seas, the red
Of passionate roses,—each frail life
Of rose and bird and slight thing rife
With sunlight is but sweetly led
By him to its sweet life and death.
But, more than all, while ye have breath
And rosy relic of the rose
Born with you—men and women, lo,
Your rich eternal hearts that grow
Like widening flowers that cannot close
Their leaves—are Love's, to turn and use,
And work upon as he may choose.

Do ye not feel how love pursues
Your full hearts ever with his new
Inconstant summer—to convert
And steal them from the thing they knew
Their own,—to cause them to desert
Their piteous memories and the few
Fond faiths of perfect years? Alas,
He careth not how he may hurt
The dead, or trouble them that wait
In heaven, so he may bring to pass
Ever some new thing passionate
And sweet upon the earth: his sun
Hath need of you; and, if he takes
Last year's spoiled roses and remakes
Red summer with them, shall he shun
To steal your soft hearts every one,
O men and women, to enrich
His fair new transitory reign?

Are ye mere flowers to love again
With each fresh summer, knowing not which
Hath had the ripest of your bloom?—
Nay, but, for you, there is a doom
For ever making in the fair
Unalterable world above
The blue, unknown to your new love,
Irrevocable in your own
Sweet word:—O women, have a care
What if two come to claim your hair
Of God?—what if two shall have thrown
Their strong arms round your body, quite
Belonging with an equal right
To each for ever?

Would the place,
That bore so long the lovely grace
And wayward grief of Sarrazine,
Had never lost the tender spell
Of the half death that seemed to dwell
Out of time there on what was green
Of leaf and what was grey, on bird
And sleepless wraith;—would none had stirr'd
The gloomy magic making there
Some lone eternity to scare
Untoward striving fates and save
Her soul and body in one grave
Of safe sleep unresponsive.
Yea,
For, at the last, I cannot say
What thing fell on her, when my lay
Hath told you of this Chaitivel,
Whom his fate made to love her well
And seek her, knowing nought of those
That held her on the other side
Of death. May this man's woe abide
With God for ever, among woes
Some heaven of his—some mystic kiss
Of Mary sweet shall turn to bliss!

It may be, still, for many a year
Sarrazine counted tear on tear
To soften death unto the dead;
And many a thing, that they might hear
Sometimes all faintly in the bed
Of earth and leaves about them, said
—To touch them, if she might, and set
Some late desire of her at fret
Within them—And, if, day or night,
The grave had let them, fair and white,
And far more wondrous as she was
Than in their memory, she would quite
Have hailed that one who should have earned
To come to her in any pause
Of death, with words that long had burned
Her breast, and love that had long turned
To fair earth near their hearts. But now,
The graves grew winterly, and how
It fared with them in that long sleep
She knew not: and they lay and dreamed,
Each one his dream, that he should keep
And hold her his for evermore.

Then Love, who rules the bright world, deemed
That, all too well indeed, she bore
Such sorrow for the dead who seemed
No longer worth one's caring for;
And, so, I ween, he sent one day
This Chaitivel—who was a man
Most goodly, full of all the gay
And thrilling summer-time that ran
Once more with rapture through the earth.

Alas, for her who gave him birth,
And put indeed, upon his face
And form, somewhat of her own grace
To make men love him, and her smile
Like magic in his mouth! No guile
Was in her; and she saw him fair
And stayed with him, maybe a while,
For the mere joy to see his hair
Grown lovely with youth's golden crown,
And to behold his perfect bloom,
As of a flower that she had sown:
And, having loved indeed and known
His heart, she left him to the doom
Another woman's love should make:—
Alas, for her down in the tomb!

Was there no little deadly snake
Curled on the threshold, for her sake,
To save him with its fiery fang?
Nay, but he entered; and this sad
Too lovely Sarrazine, all clad
In clinging robes, with voice that sang
The piteous music of lone thought
Most luringly, is unto him,
As 'twere some fatal serpent, slim
And gracious that hath softly caught
His soul twining about it close,
Sinking it into ways of woes
Past saving.
But his coming brought
The new strange miracle of love
Upon her; and her heart, estranged
From all that once had seemed enough,
Sprang sudden at him as a bird
Breaking a snare, or as a free
Blithe butterfly some second birth
Lifts in the air, no more to be
The joyless worm it was on earth.

And, lo—once, when the night was sore,
And the world, for a faint space, bore
The bitter nearness of its dead
Unwontedly, and every pore
Of the chill graves seemed free to shed
The white and ghastly dews long bred
In lone laborious agonies
Of those on whom the death-sleep lies
Uneasily,—she said or sang,
Mourning one last while, words that rang
With their full farewell in the ear
Of those her listening lovers,—clear
With poignant doom of anguish, straight
Awakening them to fight with fate
For ever.

"Wheresoe'er ye be,
Forgetting or remembering me,"
She sang,—"I bid you now farewell:
Surely, I think, you shall not tell
Hard things of me in heaven or hell:
I pray God, that the grave be sweet
About you,—yea, and, if ye keep
Some sort of love of me through sleep,—
May the worms cease not to repeat
My sweet words lest ye wake and weep:
Only, if before God we meet,
I pray you, lovers, that no more
Ye tell me of the things I swore;
I loved you: may all death be sweet,
And peace be with you evermore.

"O lover, who had all delight
In winning me,—'tis many a night,
Since, through the sweet hours lovingly,
I lay by you and you by me;
And now, perchance, if you should see
My flowerless beauty, loved by you,
Wasted to white and kissed all through
With sorrow,—scarcely might I seem
Your love of lost days or your dream
Down there in charmed sleep; and, to-day,
Why need I take your dream away?
—Sleep on; and think of me, I say,
Whatever sweet thing lets you lie
Content with death; I have made rich
Your grave indeed with tear and sigh;
And many a night hath been, through which
I prayed to God that I might die
And go down softly to you. Dear,
I do believe you would not hear;
You would not know or feel me near;
And, though I kissed you, till you saw
My wan face, I should never draw
One warm kiss from your lips, or thaw
The hard ice at your heart! What song
Of mine hath ever reached you? Long
Mad nights I lay awake, and wrought
My sorrowing heart to such a plaint
Of lone imploring words, I thought
Some of them surely must have brought
Your soul quite to me, roused with faint
Most piteous murmurings that made way
Through earth and leaves to where you lay.
And, if indeed death had not set
Some cold and very mighty spell
Upon you, making you forget
My face, yea, and your love, to dwell
With some unearthly dream, or rest
Dreamless and joyless in his breast
For ever,—O you had not failed
To steal up somehow, wearying night,
Death, dreams, and mystic ways of sight
And sound, till one fair path availed
To make you known to me. And now,
It seems we both who made the vow
Of love have fallen on either side
Somewhat away; and I, who chide
Thee never for it, hold, maybe,
At length the greater memory.

" 'Tis as though both of us had died
I think; and that lone grave of thine
Is scarce a harder place to pine
And gnaw the inmost heart and shed
Unsolaced tears in, than this bed,
Lonely and waste and white, where grief
Hath held me buried, years wrought sore
With sorrowing. No fair hope made brief
The agony it was, no more
To see one loved face bring relief
Of love: the hollow darkness bore
No dream to comfort; and the sight
Of the yet fair unruined white
Of my forlorn lost beauty pained
My spirit, showing me but chained
To so much more of death. Farewell:
Memory or sleep shall hold their spell
Unchanged upon you, till the name
Or thought of Sarrazine shall dwell
No more with you; and though, at last,
She winneth any sweet the past
Knew nothing of, she will not cast
The tenderness of many a day
Quickly and utterly away:
And, though quite other she became,
Surely the grave will feel the same."

But he who, living, had possest
Her peerless body—who, till then,
Rapt in sweet thought, had never known
How death grew chill and cold earth prest
And walled him in, nor felt the stone
Lie heavy between him and men,—
But he who, giving his soul's best
Of heaven and God's eternal good,
Had won that woman to be his
And change not: in mere solitude
Of death he woke, without a kiss,
And knew that fate was false;—the hiss
Of a fell serpent seemed to bring
The words that woke him to his ear,
Bitter with endless echoing,
And one long agony stretched clear
Out to his soul's eternity.
Then, in the hollow of the tomb,
Where his speech thundered into doom,
He answered her:

"Woman," said he,
"Why have you been so false with me?
Was it the waste thought of a day
I gave to you?—was it to win
A wanton hour, I cast away
My untried heavens and slew straightway
My greater unknown self within?
Was it to shrivel, with the sin
Of mere rich revelling to dull
My fallen soul once beautiful
Because of love, sharing the hell
Of harlots, that I chose to sell
Usurious fate so much of vast,
Yea boundless, that lay known between
Me and God only? So, at last,
Not half way into doom, I find
This fails me,—this that should have been
All heaven, this love that was to blind
So richly, I should ne'er have seen
The depth I dwelt in nor the height
I forfeited; now, all behind,
At once I see as many kings
As golden seeming days, with light
And lustre fading on them; bright
Imperial crowns and goodly things
Fall from them hastily; they sit
Dishonoured spectres of me, bare
In the bare past, abhorring it.
If I could go back and repair
One hour, one moment, to make fair
Eternity,—O I should seem
Not quite denuded of some dream
To keep my soul unshamed before
The fiends and angels: but, indeed,
I am too distant from that shore
Of life already; and no seed
Is left for sowing any more.
Henceforth, a weed among much weed
Of foundered love and life, my soul
Shall drift upon dark waves and waste
Upon the ceaseless seas that roll
Through the lone Infinite.
Ah, haste
To live thy false life through, that I
May have that wrecked thing I did buy
—A body for a soul!—for mine
I think you shall be, since I hold
A vow for every hair of gold,
And destinies and all divine
Unalterable things of old
Witnessed your pale frail body bound
To me immutably.—Ah, white
And worthless blossom, for delight
Of the lips only: Ah, the round
Quite faultless fashioning of slim
And sinuous side and shapely limb:
Ah, the delirious abyss
Of the mouth fainting in a kiss:—
Ah, all this, yea, though merely this,—
Can make a goodly hell for him
Who loses heaven. And I grow sick
Of waiting since I am no more
Than one to kiss your bosom sore
For ever. Wherefore now the thick
Polluted darkness? Wherefore gloom
And lonely wakings in the tomb?
Sin all, and, as you are, come quick
And share my sin down here. How long
Have I endured to dream among
The worms in faithful wretchedness—
Sure you would come and lie along
Beside me and be sweet no less
Than I believed you? You would bless
Some fond way for it all, and set
Your mouth upon my mouth and let
The dreamed-of heaven begin: and, quite
So noble was I with my faith,—
But for these sad words, I felt bite
The ground through to me—O I might
Have ceased not trusting the sweet wraith
Of word and kiss and memory,
Of what I left you, endlessly!
Here, in my place among the things
That change not, I myself, in all,
A changeless spirit past recall,
With life's supreme rememberings
Unshaken in me,—here I feel
And shudder at your shameful word.
O woman, think you no fates heard,
When, passionately, beyond repeal,
You bade them know you mine and seal
Your life and death so? See the blue—
The sight you have up there with you
Most near to heaven,—and, if you can,
Believe there is a God to let
You change the word you would forget,
And quite revoke the doom a man
Hath lived and died in! Change; and yet
You cannot change, but earth and sky
And death will keep you mine: and I—
Do not I live for ever?"

And it befell, another day,
When earth, well ravished of the gay
Turbulent summer, fell to swoon
Under the perfume of the moon,—
That Sarrazine, now rich at heart
With love's fond thinking, felt a part
Of tender pity that must go
And find the grave out there beyond
So many a sea, where, lone and low,
Beneath the palms, that Pharamond
Lay buried, with his love of her,
And bound as though he might not stir,
In meshes of soft growing gold.
And him, believing death must hold
So rigorously his heart and hands
That no fair singing in those lands
Had ever soothed him,—now she named;
And, murmuring softly of him, framed
Her last thought of him in a song;
Singing it idly to the birds,
And finding as she went along
Mere wanton music in the words:

Hath any loved you well, down there,
Summer or winter through?
Down there, have you found any fair
Laid in the grave with you?
Is death's long kiss a richer kiss
Than mine was wont to be—
Or have you gone to some far bliss
And quite forgotten me?

What soft enamouring of sleep
Hath you in some soft way?
What charmed death holdeth you with deep
Strange lure by night and day?
—A little space below the grass,
Out of the sun and shade;
But worlds away from me, alas,
Down there where you are laid?

My bright hair's waved and wasted gold,
What is it now to thee—
Whether the rose-red life I hold
Or white death holdeth me?
Down there you love the grave's own green,
And evermore you rave
Of some sweet seraph you have seen
Or dreamt of in the grave.

There you shall lie as you have lain,
Though in the world above,
Another live your life again,
Loving again your love:
Is it not sweet beneath the palm?
Is not the warm day rife
With some long mystic golden calm
Better than love and life?

The broad quaint odorous leaves like hands
Weaving the fair day through,
Weave sleep no burnished bird withstands,
While death weaves sleep for you;
And many a strange rich breathing sound
Ravishes morn and noon:
And in that place you must have found
Death a delicious swoon.

Hold me no longer for a word
I used to say or sing:
Ah, long ago you must have heard
So many a sweeter thing:
For rich earth must have reached your heart
And turned the faith to flowers;
And warm wind stolen, part by part,
Your soul through faithless hours.

And many a soft seed must have won
Soil of some yielding thought,
To bring a bloom up to the sun
That else had ne'er been brought;
And, doubtless, many a passionate hue
Hath made that place more fair,
Making some passionate part of you
Faithless to me down there.

But Pharamond heard that sweet sound,
As the one strange thing waited for
Through death; and, waking at the sore
Inconstant words, his hands unwound
The shining chain and tress that bound
His limbs; and, in the glorious gloom
Of that unconsecrated tomb,
He rose up, dumb and mighty,—pale
And terrible in blood-stained mail,
And the gold on him as a belt,—
He rose up,—a great soul that felt
Death ended ere a word from God:
And, going forth, he once more trod
The waste ways of the human earth;
And, terrible, and giving birth
To wide dismay, he crossed all lands,
Mountains and forests, and the sands
Of deserts, and the pathless seas,
And where suns burnt or snows did freeze
The summer,—going back to take
Her soul for vows she could not break.

And yet again, the last rich eve
—Ere, for this Chaitivel, whom woe
Lay waiting for, she thought to leave
The past for ever, yea, and go
Through earths and heavens that ne'er should know
Other than her new love of her,—
Fearing not that the dead should stir
Nor fate remember,—as they stayed,
Having used up their words and sighed
To soften hours that yet delayed
Their souls from mingling to divide
No more for ever,—Sarrazine,
Making her voice sad as might be
Some bird's last singing in the tree
It nested in, said:

"As I lean
This way upon your bosom, love,
Dreaming how it shall be above,
—Yea, when we go from star to star,
Finding innumerable ways
To heaven,—a little thought flies far
Behind me, to the piteous days
Of one whom no soft memory stays,
Maybe, from cursing me down there
To death—who might have made life fair
And death less bitter, with one care,
One fond angelic word: O you,
Whose love quite governs me and finds
No will in me but your will binds
And turns it all to serving you—
You might have hated, if you knew
How I was sterner than the death
That gave him ease of the last breath,
Watching him hollow out his grave
In his deep boyish love of me!
I had a thousand ways to save
And strengthen him and make him flee;
Nay, but I rather chose to see
His passionate face from day to day
Consuming near me, knowing well
The different thoughts that made their prey
His heart, having a word to say
—A word unsaid yet!—ah, what spell
Of peace should I delight to weave
Over his grave there! I would take
The very waste the autumns leave
Upon it, thinking, for his sake
Who lies there, no one stays to grieve,
And I would change it into flowers
Forced up and fostered in my heart,
So I might soften the least part
Of death, and make him quite forgive
And never hate me for the hours
That made death sweeter than to live.
"Ah, love, but, now, I feel, as though
I may forget all this and say
It was another woman, yea,
And not this Sarrazine; for, so
Your love hath changed me, I may throw
The past into a grave, and shrink
From ever looking o'er the brink
To see the dead in it and see
A mouldering form of one like me."

And he who never had a joy
In life because of her,—he heard
Quite plainly; and she did destroy
His slender hope with every word.
And, in the silence, his soul prayed
That she might never take away
The little joy it was to stay
Not far off in the place she made
Her heaven, to steal there unbetrayed,
And only see her from some shade.
But that night, ere they bade farewell,
A fear of unknown sadness fell
Between them; and her lover went
To wait for joy, with such a heart
As if an omen had been sent
Sorrow would come to take joy's part.

And when he sought her the next morn,
Lo, there was one who sat forlorn
In the room with her,—a mute, pale,
Uncertain semblance of a man
Dreary and wasted past the span
Of mortal sorrow; with a frail
Still passionate look he haunted her,
As though his pain changed with each stir
Her hand or body made;—and, lo,
When, fearful, with a voice that burned
His heart, he asked concerning him,
And why he came to her,—she turned
And trembled, looking to and fro,
And said, indeed, it was not so;
Only a chill mist seemed to dim
Her sight; but surely none was there
Beside himself and her. Then, straight
That other answered him from where
He stood: a voice lent by mere fate
It seemed to be, and, thin as air,
The void form seemed to vacillate,
As though sound shook it through and through:
—"O lover, loved of her whom I
Must love unloved for ever,—you
Have naught to hate me for; e'en death
Found little he might purify,
When he divided the last sigh
I gave her with an earthly breath;
And now I have long learnt to take
Content in ways that could not break
Your peace or hers: none hindreth
My soul from loving of her still:
I pray God keep her from the chill
Of seeing me; and only this—
Which he hath granted for my bliss
Shall all suffice me—to traverse
Quite after her his universe
And dwell in the enchanted place
Her shadow filleth with her grace:
Do thou not grudge me this I pray;
And this she cannot take away."

The phantom flickered as a flame
Blown blue and rent about by wind;
It seemed that every word became
A second agony like death
Racking a soul caught and confined
In the strained film of some last breath;
But, when the utterance ceased, the same—
A cheerless wraith of form and face
Shrinking into the room's far place
Of shade—that semblance did abide
Before the living man who held
That living woman for his bride:
And still when, stricken with amaze,
He said: "That other hath his gaze
Upon thee and but now he held
The speech thou must have heard," she grew
As one whom many deaths pursue,
Pale and affrighted, but averred
She nothing saw neither had heard
At all one speaking.
And, behold,
As they sat speechless through the day
The spirit of the boy did stay
Saddening them both and making cold
Their hearts; he stirred not from the gloom
Of the far corner of the room,
Crouched like a phantom in a tomb.

But a more fearful thing befell
Ere night; and they have done full well
To call this man the Chaitivel—
The wretched one.
For when, at eve,
He went to her, and did believe
God and her love for evermore
Had power to make her his,—before
He could have taken her or laid
A trembling hand on her,—there past
One between her and him. A blast
Brought him in fearfully and made
Unearthly winter chill the place;
A torn grave garment seemed the last
Earth-relic on him; form and face
Were mysteries where no man could trace
A part of former man,—within,
Without, he was become what sin
His soul invented; for, intense,
He bore the hell of it. And this
Was he who thought to buy the bliss
Of holding one frail woman his
For ever, yea, at the expense
And loss of half his soul. Mere flame
His thought seemed as he stood between,
Finding a voice that might have been
A man's: and then in God's great name,
He said:—"Touch not her body, thou!
Mine only hath it been; and now
I come and hold her for her vow
Mine only!"
Then he took her, fair
And deathly, fainting in the clutch
Of his grim darkness, with her hair
Sweeping the ground, and all her bare
Delicious beauty free from touch
Borne desolately. Her lover there
Could find no way to strive at all
With that appalling shape of dim
Illimitable darkness:—him
No sword reached; but the blow did fall
On Sarrazine: then, with a yell
Unearthly, which no tongue could tell
The horror of, that spectre fled
Bearing the body of her dead,
Dragging it inward to his hell
For ever.

But her soul did stay:
Amazed with knowledge, and aghast
To see, that moment and too late,
The real eternities and vast
Terrific truths of love and fate.
The Wretched one sank down, and lay
Knowing and suffering no more,
As though he struck some dark closed door
At the blank end of being and ceased
Against the darkness.—Who can say
If one may die so, rent away
From life and after-life, and eased
At once from destiny? How long
He felt not: but he felt again
The irremediable pain
Recall him; and he woke among
Dread repetitions of the plain
And reeking horror: then his sight
Met all things uttering the vast
Relentless record: then, at last,
Beheld her soul remaining white
And whole and beautiful, no blight
Or ruin cleaving on it. Free
Of the torn frame now would she be,
And all acquitted! And the drear
And clanging night subsided near
And far; and holy stillness grew.

There, after all, remained they two
Together: death's mere subtle change
Dividing. And a new voice—strange,
Ineffable in the night,—it seemed
One in a distant star were heard
Singing celestially,—brought word
Revealing more than he had dreamed
Of love about him: for the speech
Of her rapt spirit gazing straight
Into the veilless face of fate
Was heard there; seeming to beseech
Unyielding destinies and strive
With angels. Only, visible there,
In the clear wonder death did give
The face of her unfading soul,
She seemed an angel, thrice more fair
Than she had seemed a woman.

Yea;
But now, for many a league away,
Where he was wandering by day
And night, through many a land beyond
The seas and deserts,—Pharamond
Beheld her in that hour: and, whole
Immeasurable miles between,
Across the dark, her soul had seen
And trembled at him. Strong and loud
And dreadful were his feet that trod
Thundering on mountain or on cloud—
Traversing earth and sea and air—
With vehement will defying God
To take her; for the golden hair
Gleamed like a flaunted robe of flame
Through earth and hell and heaven. He came
With no help of the wind or storm,
Or miracle by sea or land,
Or deathly terror: in the form
Of one most mighty, with the brand
Of blood upon stained steel he bore
Till doom, and blood upon his hand,
And burning badge of one who swore
To bear his love for evermore,
He came on through the night. And hate
A long way off did emanate
And fly before him, making felt
The coming of a fiend. And, lo,
Vengeful, a great way off, he dealt
Defiance with his voice.
I know
This only: that, as one might go
Against one's death, the Chaitivel
Went against Pharamond that night
And met him; and the two did fight
Out on the moor.
And some can tell
How, while they fought and neither fell,
The fiend did mock the man and said:
"How long wilt thou contend with me,
A day, a year, a century?—
That thou art come to me arrayed
In this frail garb of flesh and blood,
And with these arms, as man to strive
For some dull perishable good
With man; or, thinkest thou to drive
Back to the grave this soul of mine
That brake the grave asunder? Yea,
Look on my soul and think if thine
May fight for an eternal thing
With me eternal?"
And they say
That, wrestling with the fiend, the man
Replied: "O Pharamond, I can;
And we must go on combating,
My soul and thy soul to the end!"

Then Pharamond's red sword did rend
The swart air; and they saw him smite
The man; and, ere the man was dead,
Once more a great voice shook the night
Saying: "Come up and let us fight
Unto the end, as thou hast said;
And peradventure, thou or I
May vanquish some day in the sky;
Or after ages have been spent,
Fighting through every element;
Or in the place where shadows dwell;
In thy far heaven or my far hell;
Or never; till some final gloom
Shall end all things and God entomb
Eternity!"...

And so they two fight on till doom.




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