A Dream Of Artemis

There was soft beauty on the linnet's tongue To see the rainbow's coloured bands arch wide. The thunder darted his red fangs among South mountains, but the East was like a bride Drest for the altar at her mother's door Weeping between two loves. The fields were pied With May's munificence of flowers, that wore The fashion of the days when Eve was young, God's kirtles, ere the first sweet summer died. The blackbird in a thorn of waving white Sang bouquets of small tunes that bid me turn From twilight wanderings thro' some old delight I heard in my far memory making mourn. Such music fills me with a joy half pain, And beats a track across my life I spurn In sober moments. Ah, this wandering brain Could play its hurdy-gurdy all the night To vagrant joys of days beyond the bourn.

I heard the river warble sweetly nigh To meet the warm salt tide below the weir, And saw a coloured line of cows pass by,-- And then a voice said quickly, "Iris here!" "What message now hath Hera?" then I woke, An exile in Arcadia, and a spear Flashed by me, and ten nymphs fleet-footed broke Out of the coppice with a silver cry, Into the bow of lights to disappear.

For one blue minute then there was no sound Save water-noise, slow round a rushy bend, And bird-delight, and ripples on the ground Of windy flowers that swelling would ascend The coloured hill and break all beautiful And, falling backwards, to the woods would send The full tide of their love. What soft moons pull Their moving fragrance? did I ask, and found Sad Io in far Egypt met a friend.-- It was my body thought so, far away In the grey future, not the wild bird tied That is the wandering soul. Behind the day We may behold thee, soft one, hunted wide By the loud gadfly; but the truant soul Knows thee before thou lay by night's dark side, Wed to the dimness; long before its dole Was meted it, to be thus pound in clay-- That daubs its whiteness and offends its pride.

There were loud questions in the rainbow's end, And hurried answers, and a sound of spears. And through the yellow blaze I saw one bend Down on a trembling white knee, and her tears Fell down in globes of light, and her small mouth Was filled up with a name unspoken. Years Of waiting love, and all their long, long drought Of kisses parched her lips, and did she spend Her eyes blue candles searching thro' her fears. "She hath loved Ganymede, the stolen boy." Said one, and then another, "Let us sing To Zeus that he may give her living joy Above Olympus, where the cool hill-spring Of Lethe bubbles up to bathe the heart Sorrow's lean fingers bruised. There eagles wing To eyries in the stars, and when they part Their broad dark wings a wind is born to buoy The bee home heavy in the far evening."