I have since then contended and rejoiced; Profoundly entered, and the shrine beheld: What sound shall come but the old cry of the wind In our inclement city? what return But the image of the emptiness of youth, Filled with the sound of footsteps and that voice So, as in darkness, from the magic lamp, АРЕМАМА, THE HE tropics vanish, and meseems that I, There, on the sunny frontage of a hill, Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive; Where the rain erases and the rust consumes, Fell upon lasting silence. Continents And continental oceans intervene; A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle, Environs and confines their wandering child ΑΡΕΜΑΜΑ. I TO S. C. HEARD the pulse of the besieging sea Throb far away all night. I heard the wind Fly crying and convulse tumultuous palms. I rose and strolled. The isle was all bright sand, And flailing fans and shadows of the palm; The heaven all moon and wind and the blind vault; The keenest planet slain, for Venus slept. The king, my neighbour, with his host of wives, Slept in the precinct of the palisade; Where single, in the wind, under the moon, To other lands and nights my fancy turned- The consentaneous trill of tiny song Lo, now, when to your task in the great house At morning through the portico you pass, One moment glance, where by the pillared wall Far-voyaging island gods, begrimed with smoke, Sit now unworshipped, the rude monument Of faiths forgot and races undivined: Sit now disconsolate, remembering well The priest, the victim, and the songful crowd, The blaze of the blue noon, and that huge voice Incessant, of the breakers on the shore. As far as these from their ancestral shrine, So far, so foreign, your divided friends Wander, estranged in body, not in mind. АРЕМАМА. |