The Sisters' Tragedy, with Other Poems, Lyrical and Dramatic

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The Sisters' Tragedy, with Other Poems, Lyrical and Dramatic

THE SISTERS' TRAGEDY

A. D. 1670  AGLAE, a widow  MURIEL, her unmarried sister.  IT happened once, in that brave land that lies  For half the twelvemonth wrapt in sombre skies,  Two sisters loved one man. He being dead,  Grief loosed the lips of her he had not wed,  And all the passion that through heavy years  Had masked in smiles unmasked itself in tears.  No purer love may mortals know than this,  The hidden love that guards another's bliss.  High in a turret's westward-facing room,  Whose painted window held the sunset's bloom,  The two together grieving, each to each  Unveiled her soul with sobs and broken speech.  Both still were young, in life's rich summer yet;  And one was dark, with tints of violet  In hair and eyes, and one was blond as she  Who rose—a second daybreak—from the sea,  Gold-tressed and azure-eyed. In that lone place,  Like dusk and dawn, they sat there face to face.  She spoke the first whose strangely silvering hair  No wreath had worn, nor widow's weed might wear,  And told her blameless love, and knew no shame—  Her holy love that, like a vestal flame  Beside the sacred body of some queen  Within a guarded crypt had burned unseen  From weary year to year. And she who heard  Smiled proudly through her tears and said no word,  But, drawing closer, on the troubled brow  Laid one long kiss, and that was words enow!

MURIEL.

  Be still, my heart! Grown patient with thine ache,  Thou shouldst be dumb, yet needs must speak, or break.  The world is empty now that he is gone.

AGLAE.

Ay, sweetheart!

MURIEL.

                  None was like him, no, not one.  From other men he stood apart, alone  In honor spotless as unfallen snow.  Nothing all evil was it his to know;  His charity still found some germ, some spark  Of light in natures that seemed wholly dark.  He read men's souls; the lowly and the high  Moved on the self-same level in his eye.  Gracious to all, to none subservient,  Without offence he spake the word he meant—  His word no trick of tact or courtly art,  But the white flowering of the noble heart.  Careless he was of much the world counts gain,  Careless of self, too simple to be vain,  Yet strung so finely that for conscience-sake  He would have gone like Cranmer to the stake.  I saw—how could I help but love? And you—

AGLAE.

  At this perfection did I worship too . . .  'Twas this that stabbed me. Heed not what I say!  I meant it not, my wits are gone astray,  With all that is and has been. No, I lie—  Had he been less perfection, happier I!

MURIEL.

  Strange words and wild! 'Tis the distracted mind  Breathes them, not you, and I no meaning find.

AGLAE.

  Yet 'twere as plain as writing on a scroll  Had you but eyes to read within my soul.—  How a grief hidden feeds on its own mood,  Poisons the healthful currents of the blood  With bitterness, and turns the heart to stone!  I think, in truth, 'twere better to make moan,  And so be done with it. This many a year,  Sweetheart, have I laughed lightly and made cheer,  Pierced through with sorrow!                                Then the widowed one  With sorrowfullest eyes beneath the sun,  Faltered, irresolute, and bending low  Her head, half whispered,                            Dear, how could you know?  What masks are faces!—yours, unread by me  These seven long summers; mine, so placidly  Shielding my woe! No tremble of the lip,  No cheek's quick pallor let our secret slip!  Mere players we, and she that played the queen,  Now in her homespun, looks how poor and mean!  How shall I say it, how find words to tell  What thing it was for me made earth a hell  That else had been my heaven! 'Twould blanch your cheek  Were I to speak it. Nay, but I will speak,  Since like two souls at compt we seem to stand,  Where nothing may be hidden. Hold my hand,  But look not at me! Noble 'twas, and meet,  To hide your heart, nor fling it at his feet  To lie despised there. Thus saved you our pride  And that white honor for which earls have died.  You were not all unhappy, loving so!  I with a difference wore my weight of woe.  My lord was he. It was my cruel lot,  My hell, to love him—for he loved me not!  Then came a silence. Suddenly like death  The truth flashed on them, and each held her breath—  A flash of light whereby they both were slain,  She that was loved and she that loved in vain!

THE LAST CAESAR

1851-1870I  Now there was one who came in later days  To play at Emperor: in the dead of night  Stole crown and sceptre, and stood forth to light  In sudden purple. The dawn's straggling rays  Showed Paris fettered, murmuring in amaze,  With red hands at her throat—a piteous sight.  Then the new Caesar, stricken with affright  At his own daring, shrunk from public gaze  In the Elysee, and had lost the day  But that around him flocked his birds of prey,  Sharp-beaked, voracious, hungry for the deed.  'Twixt hope and fear behold great Caesar hang!  Meanwhile, methinks, a ghostly laughter rang  Through the rotunda of the Invalides.II  What if the boulevards, at set of sun,  Reddened, but not with sunset's kindly glow?  What if from quai and square the murmured woe  Swept heavenward, pleadingly? The prize was won,  A kingling made and Liberty undone.  No Emperor, this, like him awhile ago,  But his Name's shadow; that one struck the blow  Himself, and sighted the street-sweeping gun!  This was a man of tortuous heart and brain,  So warped he knew not his own point of view—  The master of a dark, mysterious smile.  And there he plotted, by the storied Seine  And in the fairy gardens of St. Cloud,  The Sphinx that puzzled Europe, for awhile.III  I see him as men saw him once—a face  Of true Napoleon pallor; round the eyes  The wrinkled care; mustache spread pinion-wise,  Pointing his smile with odd sardonic grace  As wearily he turns him in his place,  And bends before the hoarse Parisian cries—  Then vanishes, with glitter of gold-lace  And trumpets blaring to the patient skies.  Not thus he vanished later! On his path  The Furies waited for the hour and man,  Foreknowing that they waited not in vain.  Then fell the day, O day of dreadful wrath!  Bow down in shame, O crimson-girt Sedan!  Weep, fair Alsace! weep, loveliest Lorraine!  So mused I, sitting underneath the trees  In that old garden of the Tuileries,  Watching the dust of twilight sifting down  Through chestnut boughs just toucht with autumn's brown—  Not twilight yet, but that illusive bloom  Which holds before the deep-etched shadows come;  For still the garden stood in golden mist,  Still, like a river of molten amethyst,  The Seine slipt through its spans of fretted stone,  And, near the grille that once fenced in a throne,  The fountains still unbraided to the day  The unsubstantial silver of their spray.  A spot to dream in, love in, waste one's hours!  Temples and palaces, and gilded towers,  And fairy terraces!—and yet, and yet  Here in her woe came Marie Antoinette,  Came sweet Corday, Du Barry with shrill cry,  Not learning from her betters how to die!  Here, while the Nations watched with bated breath,  Was held the saturnalia of Red Death!  For where that slim Egyptian shaft uplifts  Its point to catch the dawn's and sunset's drifts  Of various gold, the busy Headsman stood. . . .  Place de la Concorde—no, the Place of Blood!  And all so peaceful now! One cannot bring  Imagination to accept the thing.  Lies, all of it! some dreamer's wild romance—  High-hearted, witty, laughter-loving France!  In whose brain was it that the legend grew  Of Maenads shrieking in this avenue,  Of watch-fires burning, Famine standing guard,  Of long-speared Uhlans in that palace-yard!  What ruder sound this soft air ever smote  Than a bird's twitter or a bugle's note?  What darker crimson ever splashed these walks  Than that of rose-leaves dropping from the stalks?  And yet—what means that charred and broken wall,  That sculptured marble, splintered, like to fall,  Looming among the trees there? . . . And you say  This happened, as it were, but yesterday?  And here the Commune stretched a barricade,  And there the final desperate stand was made?  Such things have been? How all things change and fade!  How little lasts in this brave world below!  Love dies; hate cools; the Caesars come and go;  Gaunt Hunter fattens, and the weak grow strong.  Even Republics are not here for long!  Ah, who can tell what hour may bring the doom,  The lighted torch, the tocsin's heavy boom!

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY

"The Southern Transept, hardly known by any other name but Poet's Corner."

DEAN STANLEY.

  TREAD softly here; the sacredest of tombs  Are those that hold your Poets. Kings and queens  Are facile accidents of Time and Chance.  Chance sets them on the heights, they climb not there!  But he who from the darkling mass of men  Is on the wing of heavenly thought upborne  To finer ether, and becomes a voice  For all the voiceless, God anointed him:  His name shall be a star, his grave a shrine.  Tread softly here, in silent reverence tread.  Beneath those marble cenotaphs and urns  Lies richer dust than ever nature hid  Packed in the mountain's adamantine heart,  Or slyly wrapt in unsuspected sand—  The dross men toil for, and oft stain the soul.  How vain and all ignoble seems that greed  To him who stands in this dim claustral air  With these most sacred ashes at his feet!  This dust was Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden this—  The spark that once illumed it lingers still.  O ever-hallowed spot of English earth!  If the unleashed and happy spirit of man  Have option to revisit our dull globe,  What august Shades at midnight here convene  In the miraculous sessions of the moon,  When the great pulse of London faintly throbs,  And one by one the stars in heaven pale!

ALEC YEATON'S SON

GLOUCESTER, AUGUST, 1720  The wind it wailed, the wind it moaned,     And the white caps flecked the sea;  "An' I would to God," the skipper groaned,     "I had not my boy with me!"  Snug in the stern-sheets, little John     Laughed as the scud swept by;  But the skipper's sunburnt cheek grew wan     As he watched the wicked sky.  "Would he were at his mother's side!"     And the skipper's eyes were dim.  "Good Lord in heaven, if ill betide,     What would become of him!  "For me—my muscles are as steel,     For me let hap what may;  I might make shift upon the keel     Until the break o' day.  "But he, he is so weak and small,     So young, scarce learned to stand—  O pitying Father of us all,     I trust him in Thy hand!  "For Thou, who markest from on high     A sparrow's fall—each one!—  Surely, O Lord, thou'lt have an eye     On Alec Yeaton's son!"  Then, helm hard-port; right straight he sailed     Towards the headland light:  The wind it moaned, the wind it wailed,     And black, black fell the night.  Then burst a storm to make one quail     Though housed from winds and waves—  They who could tell about that gale     Must rise from watery graves!  Sudden it came, as sudden went;     Ere half the night was sped,  The winds were hushed, the waves were spent,     And the stars shone overhead.  Now, as the morning mist grew thin,     The folk on Gloucester shore  Saw a little figure floating in     Secure, on a broken oar!  Up rose the cry, "A wreck! a wreck!     Pull, mates, and waste no breath!"—  They knew it, though 'twas but a speck     Upon the edge of death!  Long did they marvel in the town     At God his strange decree,  That let the stalwart skipper drown     And the little child go free!

AT THE FUNERAL OF A MINOR POET

[One of the Bearers soliloquizes:]

  . . . Room in your heart for him, O Mother Earth,  Who loved each flower and leaf that made you fair,  And sang your praise in verses manifold  And delicate, with here and there a line  From end to end in blossom like a bough  The May breathes on, so rich it was. Some thought  The workmanship more costly than the thing  Moulded or carved, as in those ornaments  Found at Mycaene. And yet Nature's self  Works in this wise; upon a blade of grass,  Or what small note she lends the woodland thrush,  Lavishing endless patience. He was born  Artist, not artisan, which some few saw  And many dreamed not. As he wrote no odes  When Croesus wedded or Maecenas died,  And gave no breath to civic feasts and shows,  He missed the glare that gilds more facile men—  A twilight poet, groping quite alone,  Belated, in a sphere where every nest  Is emptied of its music and its wings.  Not great his gift; yet we can poorly spare  Even his slight perfection in an age  Of limping triolets and tame rondeaux.  He had at least ideals, though unreached,  And heard, far off, immortal harmonies,  Such as fall coldly on our ear to-day.  The mighty Zolaistic Movement now  Engrosses us—a miasmatic breath  Blown from the slums. We paint life as it is,  The hideous side of it, with careful pains,  Making a god of the dull Commonplace.  For have we not the old gods overthrown  And set up strangest idols? We could clip  Imagination's wing and kill delight,  Our sole art being to leave nothing out  That renders art offensive. Not for us  Madonnas leaning from their starry thrones  Ineffable, nor any heaven-wrought dream  Of sculptor or of poet; we prefer  Such nightmare visions as in morbid brains  Take shape and substance, thoughts that taint the air  And make all life unlovely. Will it last?  Beauty alone endures from age to age,  From age to age endures, handmaid of God.  Poets who walk with her on earth go hence  Bearing a talisman. You bury one,  With his hushed music, in some Potter's Field;  The snows and rains blot out his very name,  As he from life seems blotted: through Time's glass  Slip the invisible and magic sands  That mark the century, then falls a day  The world is suddenly conscious of a flower,  Imperishable, ever to be prized,  Sprung from the mould of a forgotten grave.  'Tis said the seeds wrapt up among the balms  And hieroglyphics of Egyptian kings  Hold strange vitality, and, planted, grow  After the lapse of thrice a thousand years.  Some day, perchance, some unregarded note  Of our poor friend here—some sweet minor chord  That failed to lure our more accustomed ear—  May witch the fancy of an unborn age.  Who knows, since seeds have such tenacity?  Meanwhile he's dead, with scantiest laurel won  And little of our Nineteenth Century gold.  So, take him, Earth, and this his mortal part,  With that shrewd alchemy thou hast, transmute  To flower and leaf in thine unending Springs!

BATUSCHKA.<1>

  From yonder gilded minaret  Beside the steel-blue Neva set,  I faintly catch, from time to time,  The sweet, aerial midnight chime—       "God save the Tsar!"  Above the ravelins and the moats  Of the white citadel it floats;  And men in dungeons far beneath  Listen, and pray, and gnash their teeth—       "God save the Tsar!"  The soft reiterations sweep  Across the horror of their sleep,       <1> "Little Father," or "Dear Little Father,"  a term of endearment applied  to the Tsar in Russian folk-song.  As if some daemon in his glee  Were mocking at their misery—       "God save the Tsar!"  In his Red Palace over there,  Wakeful, he needs must hear the prayer.  How can it drown the broken cries  Wrung from his children's agonies?—       "God save the Tsar!"  Father they called him from of old—  Batuschka! . . . How his heart is cold!  Wait till a million scourged men  Rise in their awful might, and then—       God save the Tsar!

ACT V

[Midnight.]

  First, two white arms that held him very close,  And ever closer as he drew him back  Reluctantly, the loose gold-colored hair  A thousand delicate fibres reaching out  Still to detain him; then some twenty steps  Of iron staircase winding round and down,  And ending in a narrow gallery hung  With Gobelin tapestries—Andromeda  Rescued by Perseus, and the sleek Diana  With her nymphs bathing; at the farther end  A door that gave upon a starlit grove  Of citron and clipt palm-trees; then a path  As bleached as moonlight, with the shadow of leaves  Stamped black upon it; next a vine-clad length  Of solid masonry; and last of all  A Gothic archway packed with night, and then—  A sudden gleaming dagger through his heart.

TENNYSON

I  Shakespeare and Milton—what third blazoned name     Shall lips of after-ages link to these?     His who, beside the wild encircling seas,  Was England's voice, her voice with one acclaim,  For threescore years; whose word of praise was fame,     Whose scorn gave pause to man's iniquities.II  What strain was his in that Crimean war?     A bugle-call in battle; a low breath,     Plaintive and sweet, above the fields of death!  So year by year the music rolled afar,  From Euxine wastes to flowery Kandahar,     Bearing the laurel or the cypress wreath.III  Others shall have their little space of time,     Their proper niche and bust, then fade away     Into the darkness, poets of a day;  But thou, O builder of enduring rhyme,  Thou shalt not pass! Thy fame in every clime     On earth shall live where Saxon speech has sway.IV  Waft me this verse across the winter sea,     Through light and dark, through mist and blinding sleet,     O winter winds, and lay it at his feet;  Though the poor gift betray my poverty,  At his feet lay it: it may chance that he     Will find no gift, where reverence is, unmeet.

THE SHIPMAN'S TALE

  Listen, my masters! I speak naught but truth.  From dawn to dawn they drifted on and on,  Not knowing whither nor to what dark end.  Now the North froze them, now the hot South scorched.  Some called to God, and found great comfort so;  Some gnashed their teeth with curses, and some laughed  An empty laughter, seeing they yet lived,  So sweet was breath between their foolish lips.  Day after day the same relentless sun,  Night after night the same unpitying stars.  At intervals fierce lightnings tore the clouds,  Showing vast hollow spaces, and the sleet  Hissed, and the torrents of the sky were loosed.  From time to time a hand relaxed its grip,  And some pale wretch slid down into the dark  With stifled moan, and transient horror seized  The rest who waited, knowing what must be.  At every turn strange shapes reached up and clutched  The whirling wreck, held on awhile, and then  Slipt back into that blackness whence they came.  Ah, hapless folk, to be so tost and torn,  So racked by hunger, fever, fire, and wave,  And swept at last into the nameless void—  Frail girls, strong men, and mothers with their babes!And was none saved?My masters, not a soul!  O shipman, woful, woful is thy tale!  Our hearts are heavy and our eyes are dimmed.  What ship is this that suffered such ill fate?What ship, my masters? Know ye not?—The World!

"I VEX ME NOT WITH BROODING ON THE YEARS"

  I vex me not with brooding on the years     That were ere I drew breath: why should I then     Distrust the darkness that may fall again     When life is done? Perchance in other spheres—  Dead planets—I once tasted mortal tears,     And walked as now among a throng of men,     Pondering things that lay beyond my ken,     Questioning death, and solacing my fears.  Ofttimes indeed strange sense have I of this,     Vague memories that hold me with a spell,     Touches of unseen lips upon my brow,  Breathing some incommunicable bliss!     In years foregone, O Soul, was all not well?     Still lovelier life awaits thee. Fear not thou!

MONODY ON THE DEATH OF WENDELL PHILLIPS

I  One by one they go  Into the unknown dark—  Star-lit brows of the brave,  Voices that drew men's souls.  Rich is the land, O Death!  Can give you dead like our dead!—  Such as he from whose hand  The magic web of romance  Slipt, and the art was lost!  Such as he who erewhile—  The last of the Titan brood—  With his thunder the Senate shook;  Or he who, beside the Charles,  Untoucht of envy or hate,  Tranced the world with his song;  Or that other, that gray-eyed seer  Who in pastoral Concord ways  With Plato and Hafiz walked.II  Not of these was the man  Whose wraith, through the mists of night,  Through the shuddering wintry stars,  Has passed to eternal morn.  Fit were the moan of the sea  And the clashing of cloud on cloud  For the passing of that soul!  Ever he faced the storm!  No weaver of rare romance,  No patient framer of laws,  No maker of wondrous rhyme,  No bookman wrapt in his dream.  His was the voice that rang  In the fight like a bugle-call,  And yet could be tender and low  As when, on a night in June,  The hushed wind sobs in the pines.  His was the eye that flashed  With a sabre's azure gleam,  Pointing to heights unwon!III  Not for him were these days  Of clerkly and sluggish calm—  To the petrel the swooping gale!  Austere he seemed, but the hearts  Of all men beat in his breast;  No fetter but galled his wrist,  No wrong that was not his own.  What if those eloquent lips  Curled with the old-time scorn?  What if in needless hours  His quick hand closed on the hilt?  'Twas the smoke from the well-won fields  That clouded the veteran's eyes.  A fighter this to the end!  Ah, if in coming times  Some giant evil arise,  And Honor falter and pale,  His were a name to conjure with!  God send his like again!

INTERLUDES

ECHO-SONG

I  Who can say where Echo dwells?     In some mountain-cave, methinks,     Where the white owl sits and blinks;  Or in deep sequestered dells,  Where the foxglove hangs its bells,                 Echo dwells.                      Echo!                           Echo!II  Phantom of the crystal Air,     Daughter of sweet Mystery!     Here is one has need of thee;  Lead him to thy secret lair,  Myrtle brings he for thy hair—                 Hear his prayer,                      Echo!                           Echo!III  Echo, lift thy drowsy head,     And repeat each charmed word     Thou must needs have overheard  Yestere'en ere, rosy-red,  Daphne down the valley fled—                 Words unsaid,                      Echo!                           Echo!IV  Breathe the vows she since denies!     She hath broken every vow;     What she would she would not now—  Thou didst hear her perjuries.  Whisper, whilst I shut my eyes,                 Those sweet lies,                      Echo!                           Echo!

A MOOD

  A blight, a gloom, I know not what, has crept upon my gladness—  Some vague, remote ancestral touch of sorrow, or of madness;  A fear that is not fear, a pain that has not pain's insistence;  A sense of longing, or of loss, in some foregone existence;  A subtle hurt that never pen has writ nor tongue has spoken—  Such hurt perchance as Nature feels when a blossomed bough is broken.

GUILIELMUS REX

  The folk who lived in Shakespeare's day  And saw that gentle figure pass  By London Bridge, his frequent way—  They little knew what man he was.  The pointed beard, the courteous mien,  The equal port to high and low,  All this they saw or might have seen—  But not the light behind the brow!  The doublet's modest gray or brown,  The slender sword-hilt's plain device,  What sign had these for prince or clown?  Few turned, or none, to scan him twice.  Yet 'twas the king of England's kings!  The rest with all their pomps and trains  Are mouldered, half-remembered things—  'Tis he alone that lives and reigns!

"PILLARED ARCH AND SCULPTURED TOWER"

  Pillared arch and sculptured tower  Of Ilium have had their hour;  The dust of many a king is blown  On the winds from zone to zone;  Many a warrior sleeps unknown.  Time and Death hold each in thrall,  Yet is Love the lord of all;  Still does Helen's beauty stir  Because a poet sang of her!

THRENODY

I  Upon your hearse this flower I lay.  Brief be your sleep! You shall be known  When lesser men have had their day:  Fame blossoms where true seed is sown,  Or soon or late, let Time wrong what it may.II  Unvext by any dream of fame,  You smiled, and bade the world pass by:  But I—I turned, and saw a name  Shaping itself against the sky—  White star that rose amid the battle's flame!III  Brief be your sleep, for I would see  Your laurels—ah, how trivial now  To him must earthly laurel be  Who wears the amaranth on his brow!  How vain the voices of mortality!

SESTET

SENT TO A FRIEND WITH A VOLUME OF TENNYSON  Wouldst know the clash of knightly steel on steel?  Or list the throstle singing loud and clear?  Or walk at twilight by some haunted mere  In Surrey; or in throbbing London feel  Life's pulse at highest—hark, the minster's peal! . . .  Turn but the page, that various world is here!