Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, FOUR CAPRI IMPROMPTUS, by WILLIAM ALEXANDER PERCY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

FOUR CAPRI IMPROMPTUS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Sweet as the furze flower fainting in the noon heat
Last Line: But not less quickly withered?
Subject(s): Flowers; Sea; Ocean


I

Sweet as the furze flower fainting in the noon heat,
The yellow furze flower tufted in a cliff above the ocean,
Floating its too sweet perfume over the peacock waters
And weakening the diving swallows half down the air --
So sweet, so weakening the breath of you comes to me, beloved,
When I lean over you, or even, even when I dream of you, my flower.

II

Mournful and miraculous beauty bathes the sea
When the rose-misted sun melts out
And for one perfect moment --
While two swallows can eddy and plunge their white breasts
From the cliff-crest to the beach --
The waters are misty rose for infinite miles
Save for the silver chariot tracks of the winds;
Curving and leading nowhere and always silver,
But edged, how strangely, with keen victorious green.

III

Just over the gray cliffs
In the blue brumal air
Glistens a faint unwilling Hesper,
His curls bound with a fillet of white fire.
Along the sky his steps seem slow
Like a young sulky god's,
So I should see him as he stands a moment
Dreamily on the cliff top, between the two twisted stone-pines.
There he may pause and watch the blue lilies of the twilight
Like sleep-flowers on the fields of the still sea,
Blue-gray like sleep-flowers on the mountain flanks
And the coves of the unwindy coming night.
There I have stood on other evenings
Watching a long time the lonely twilight.
But the young Hesper has no heart to look.
Barely I saw his silver instep touch the top
And he was gone --
Running, running, not pausing for a glance,
Down the dark other side of the sheep-strewn cliff.
He is no shepherd:
He had no tawny wisp of net over his arm,
No net to cast in the foam-flowered breakers from the beach
Like a fisher-boy.
I think he has some love far down on the titled side in the darkness
To whom he hurries --
A nymph perhaps, maybe another star
With floating hair and a girl's silver body.
Surely with such a single amorous haste
Before the night is over,
Even before the Pleiads tremble up,
He will be with her,
Lying, I dare say, greedily,
The sweat-beads pearling still the curve of his shoulders
And his breast still heaving.

IV

I shall bring you blue morning-glories ribbed with purple
Or hazy-blue plumbago flowers.
But they will not please you: they have no perfume.
Shall I search higher and twitch a spray of golden gorse?
The bees cannot leave it
And it is sweeter and more golden than their honey.
Or I know a cleft above the sapphire ocean
Where grows one shoot of the wild oleander.

Its fiowers are crimson pink:
Some say it is Adonis' blood that they are dipped in,
Others, more rightly, Aphrodite's own.
And their perfume when full open in the noon heats
Has often made a passing dryad drowsy.
Pan never nears their shadow except on tiptoe --
He has made lucky finds in their sleeping shade.
But you -- none of these will content you,
Neither the blue morning-glories
Nor ash-blue clusters of plumbago
Nor gorse that is golden yellow
Nor blood-rose oleanders.
How shall I hope that my heart shall please you
Which is less lovely than these
But not less quickly withered?





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