| |
I THE EVENING light has soaked with ancient gold | |
| And gall the yellow hills. Like tawny fur | |
| Grass rises shaggy in a ruddy blur; | |
| Past fiery bushes metal waves unfold; | |
| And enigmatic cliffs and boulders hold | 5 |
| Worn troughs that are the sea’s chronologer. | |
| In the winged twilight figures seem to stir: | |
| A heavy paw, a jowl grins stark and bold, | |
| Like swelling ribs the dubious hillocks show; | |
| On what bent back, like wool, does savory grow? | 10 |
| What brute, what titan, to this region cleaves? | |
| The dark is strange … and yonder, space is clean. | |
| And there the tired ocean, panting, heaves, | |
| And rotting grasses breathe of iodine. | |
| |
II Here stood a sacred forest. Here the messenger | 15 |
| Wing-footed went, his touch upon the dumb glades leaving… | |
| Upon the site of cities, nor stones, nor ruins heaving: | |
| Now on burnt slopes but sheep in scattered patches stir. | |
| The mountain peaks: cut crowns! Across each bitten spur | |
| The clear green twilight flows, mysteriously grieving. | 20 |
| By whose dim longing stung, what is my soul retrieving? | |
| Who knows the road of gods? The dawns and dusks that blur? | |
| In its sonorous caves the rubble, churned, is sounding; | |
| Lifting its weighty crests, the troubled sea is pounding | |
| Upon the sandy dunes, upon the ringing shore. | 25 |
| The heavy nights pass on in tears through starry spaces… | |
| The outcast gods command, whom men invoke no more, | |
| And ineluctably they show dark, alien faces. | |
| |
III Above dark, rippled waters rises in retreat | |
| Earth’s heavy mass: the spines and rocky crests defying | 30 |
| The tortured steep in torrents of red rubble lying— | |
| A lifeless land, its mourning reaches at my feet. | |
| Sad dreams and solemn dreams flow by me, bitter-sweet: | |
| Earth ancient and obscure, whose echoing bays are sighing, | |
| Where in late twilight with a sadder beauty dying | 35 |
| The waves in waste hexameters billow and beat. | |
| And where no roadways run upon the dark’s still rivers, | |
| Breathing an ancient mystery, the dim sail swells and quivers | |
| With winds of tossed desire and seas that lift and fall. | |
| An alien tremor takes my ship upon its going | 40 |
| Where destined roads of daring and retribution call. | |
| And lamp-like in the sky the Seven Stars are glowing. | |
| |
