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| NOONDAY languors of summer-tide | |
| Voluptuous hang on Cintra’s side, | |
| Luxuries of languor, deep | |
| And rich as a dream ’twixt wake and sleep; | |
| Over all a delicious drowse, | 5 |
| As—seen in an opium-eater’s vision,— | |
| Goddesses, with slumberous brows | |
| Beautiful, droop in bowers elysian; | |
| All adown the mountain’s side | |
| A hazy sunshine mantling wide,— | 10 |
| And the golden quiet gentliest falls | |
| Round Montserrat’s deserted halls. | |
| Lo! the ruin,—the site romantic! | |
| Wanderer o’er the broad Atlantic, | |
| Sick at heart of the restless ocean | 15 |
| That rolled thee hither, thou deemest hell | |
| To be a whirlpool of driving motion, | |
| Motion incessant and forced and frantic, | |
| As Vathek did; and thou as well | |
| Wouldst choose in so sweet a place to dwell; | 20 |
| A haven for the stormy-stressed, | |
| Where all that blooms, that breathes, seems blest | |
| With the fulness of a heavenly rest. | |
| Yet a shadow haunts the ruin lone, | |
| And voices are echoing mournfully; | 25 |
| This the burden of their moan: | |
| Vanity! All is vanity! | |
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| I wander about the grassy knoll, | |
| Whereon the crumbling mansions stand; | |
| And, O, the scene that the site commands | 30 |
| Might charm the least enthusiast soul! | |
| Smoothed from the door is a sunny slope, | |
| Changeful as the kaleidoscope | |
| With wild-flowers, which so gayly flaunt | |
| That the green is not predominant, | 35 |
| For a young child’s fall in a butterfly-chase | |
| Smoothed even to the mountain’s base. | |
| And thence away to the eastward roll | |
| In light and shadow the sea-like hills; | |
| And a kingdom’s breadth the vision fills. | 40 |
| Then, turning, I see above the browned | |
| Bald mountain’s forehead, with turrets crowned, | |
| Where topples ever, our eyes to mock, | |
| The House of Our Lady of the Rock, | |
| All soft with a color of amethyst | 45 |
| Through lazy up-coilings of long-drawn mist; | |
| A mist whose moisture is dropped again | |
| In myriad threads of waterfall | |
| Down sunny valley and sunless glen; | |
| And I hear the descent all musical | 50 |
| With silvery tinklings. From the frown | |
| Of a blue-green gulféd gorge, behind | |
| The mansion’s site, bursts, vast and white, | |
| One torrent, in large flakes snowing adown, | |
| With a mellow yet hollow roar rolled on the wind, | 55 |
| Treble and base in harmony, | |
| A chorus of waters, and breathlessly | |
| Hang all things charmed on the lullaby. | |
| And it fills the halls and chambers lone, | |
| Ever so mournfully, mournfully; | 60 |
| This the burden of its moan: | |
| Vanity! Hollow vanity! * * * * * | |
| Scarce in their mazes the midges move, | |
| With the webs of gossamer interwove; | |
| The lizard’s slim shadow lies motionless | 65 |
| On the mossy stone, in the path unthridded; | |
| Droops, with still pulse, a trancéd life | |
| Over rich fields with poppies rife, | |
| Their deep eyes, snowy and scarlet lidded, | |
| Heavy as with the consciousness | 70 |
| Of a secret weight, pregnant with power. | |
| Death that sleeps never, and Sleep that dies | |
| Into life, with the dawn of awakening eyes, | |
| Differing in breathing mortal breath, | |
| Dreamful or dreamless, O Sleep, O Death, | 75 |
| How are ye so of kin, born twin | |
| From the selfsame womb of a simple flower? | |
| Yet breathe on our brows, sweet peace profound, | |
| Be it Sleep, be it Death; O, fold us round, | |
| Or above or under the poppied mound! | 80 |
| For life, saith the shade on the ruin lone, | |
| Is mutable, full of misery; | |
| A fever-flush, a fainting moan, | |
| Vanity! Hectic vanity! | |
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| A mountain-spur on either side | 85 |
| Shoots out, with the gray-mossed cork-tree hoary, | |
| Like a long and lofty promontory | |
| Into and over an ocean-tide; | |
| And I, like an idle boat, embayed, | |
| Embowered, like a bird, in aloe-shade, | 90 |
| Like a babe, embosomed in Love’s sweet zone, | |
| Am possessed by the beauty all alone. | |
| A glorious picture from mount to valley! | |
| There the cork, shagging fantastically | |
| The steeps; here, waveless in the calm, | 95 |
| The feathery willow and plume-like palm, | |
| Where flow, developed to the skies, | |
| Fair and fertile declivities, | |
| Rounded into mound and dell, | |
| Green ripples light on the longer swell; | 100 |
| Gardens perennial as the Hesperides; | |
| Where, ever spangling one bough, we find | |
| Fragrances of leaf and rind; | |
| White-twinkling stars and planet-globes | |
| Golden, pending in orange-glooms, | 105 |
| All untabled their ephemerides; | |
| Trailers blowing trumpet-blooms, | |
| And heavily purpled the grape-festoons; | |
| All,—save the beating heart of June | |
| Glowingly felt, which never a wind | 110 |
| Reveals by the lifting of lustrous robes,— | |
| All would seem but a painting grand, | |
| The silent work of a master hand: | |
| That windless and unclouded air, | |
| That seem so rapture-hushed and fair, | 115 |
| And the perishing palace frowning there! | |
| In faery land is a shadow lone, | |
| And voices that ever sing mournfully; | |
| This the burden of their moan: | |
| Vanity! Dissonant vanity! | 120 |
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| And now, shut in from the scene’s expansion, | |
| In the central hall of the lonely mansion, | |
| Around me are but the crumbling walls, | |
| Weather-embrowned and mossy-dank, | |
| And a shadow of cold and darkness falls | 125 |
| Upon me. Weeds and grass are rank | |
| Where undistinguished lie roof and floors, | |
| And, choking the gaps which once were doors, | |
| The ivy. Yet more in their prime superb | |
| Than now did the intruding pile disturb | 130 |
| Nature’s juvenile, jubilant choir; | |
| For jangles less the shattered lyre | |
| Than when its false note sounded high | |
| And loud in a lovely harmony; | |
| And joy hath a tone, dark, tender, holy, | 135 |
| That often, ay, ever is but twin-brother | |
| To the music-tears of melancholy; | |
| Blending still the one with the other, | |
| Even as with the beauty around | |
| These bare walls, toppling to the ground, | 140 |
| Blending closelier seem to be, | |
| Evermore wasting silently, | |
| Like icebergs in a torrid sea. | |
| Haunted by a shadow lone, | |
| And voices that echo mournfully; | 145 |
| This the burden of their moan: | |
| Vanity! Perishing vanity! | |
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| Ah! here the accomplished voluptuary | |
| Had found the content he sought, if the faery | |
| Loveliness of the still seclusion | 150 |
| Could of its own sweet self suffice | |
| For a soul like his; but wealth’s profusion | |
| He poured around him, never stopping, | |
| Any more than a drainless fountain, | |
| Silver-dropping, for the counting,— | 155 |
| Esteeming his affluent heart and mind, | |
| His gorgeous fancy, his masséd treasure | |
| Of knowledge, no more than the silks and spice | |
| And gold and gems of Orient Ind, | |
| Valueless save to subserve pleasure,— | 160 |
| And lo! a palace in paradise! | |
| Holy the garden-bloom of Eden; | |
| And he turned it into a Moslem Heaven! | |
| Youngest Eve its genius maiden; | |
| And to her was the flush of an houri given! | 165 |
| The one philosophy throned in his thought | |
| Was that which the sage of Cyrene taught; | |
| Until, his finer perceptions dull, | |
| Even in the fane of the beautiful, | |
| The hierophant turned from the shrine, | 170 |
| And bowed to a light that was not divine. | |
| That pomp can pall and pleasure sate | |
| He proved, as was preached from his proud estate | |
| By a prince in his grandeur not elate. | |
| And a shadow lay on his own heart lone, | 175 |
| As now on the ruin, audibly; | |
| In the words of Solomon making moan: | |
| Vanity! Vexing vanity! | |
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| And Vathek measured, O Israel, | |
| The height of thy crownéd wisdom hoary: | 180 |
| Changes he rang on the same old story: | |
| Blight to the bloom, and gloom to the glory, | |
| From the inward upon the outward fell. | |
| The restless fiend of satiety | |
| Into the hell of his very thought, | 185 |
| Into the hell of unrest, had wrought | |
| His Elysium of idlesse and luxury, | |
| Ere he left it lone. In northern-more climes, | |
| Not wiser grown, hill-brows less faery | |
| Did he tiara with towers aery, | 190 |
| Which all in turn, like these, grew dreary, | |
| Like these, which are mine for my moral rhymes; | |
| While the south is sunning bower and hall, | |
| Desolate and dismantled all, | |
| In their solitude paradisiacal. | 195 |
| While a shadow haunts the ruin lone, | |
| And voices are echoing mournfully; | |
| This is the burden of their moan: | |
| Vanity! Restless vanity! * * * * * | |
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