THAMAR

(_To Thamar Karsavina_)

Once in the sombre light of the throng'd courts of night,

In a dream-haunted land only inhabited

By the unhappy dead, came one who, anxious eyed,

Clung to my idle hand with clenched fingers weak

And gazed into my eyes as he had wrongs to speak.

Silent he stood and wan, more pallid than the leaves

Of an aspen blown under a wind that grieves.

Then I: 'O haggard one, say from what ghostly zone

Of thwarted destinies or torment hast thou come?

Tell me thy race and name!' And he, with veiled face:

'I have neither name nor race, but I have travelled far,

A timeless avatar of never-ending dooms,

Out of those tyrannous glooms where, like a tired star

In stormy darkness, looms the castle of Thamar...

Once in a lonely dawn my eager spirit fared

By ways that no men dared unto a desert land,

Where, on a sullen strand, a mouldering city, vast

As towered Babylon, stood in the dreamy sand--

Older a million years: Babel was builded on

That broken city's tears; dust of her crumbled past

Rose from the rapid wheels of Babel's charioteers

In whorled clouds above those shining thoroughfares

Where Babel's millions tread on her unheeding dead.

Forth from an eastern gate where the lips of Asia wait

Parch'd with an ancient thirst that no aeons can abate,

Passed I, predestinate, to a thorn'd desert's drought,

Where the rivers of the south, flowing in a cloudy spate,

Spend at last their splendid strength in a sea of molten glass

Seething with the brazen might of a white sun dipped at length

Like a baked stone, burning hot, plunged in a hissing pot.

Out of that solemn portal over the tawny waste,

Without stay, without haste, nor the joy of any mortal

Glance of eye or clasp of hand, desolate, in a burning land,

Lonely days and nights I travelled and the changing seasons squandered

Friendless, endlessly, I wandered nor my woven fate unravelled;

Drawn to a hidden goal, sore, forlorn with waiting,

Seeking I knew not what, yet unhesitating

Struggled my hapless soul...

There, in a thousand springs,

Slow, beneath frozen snow, where the blind earth lay cringing,

Have I seen the steppe unfold uncounted blossomings,

Where salty pools shone fair in a quivering blue air

That shivered every fringing reed-bed with cool delight,

And fanned the mazy flight of slow-wing'd egrets white

Beating and wheeling bright against the sun astare;

But I could not hear their wings for they were ghostly things

Sent by the powers of night to mock my sufferings

And rain upon the bitter waterpools their drops aglitter.

Yet, when these lakes accursed tortured my aching thirst,

The green reeds fell to dust, the cool pools to a crust

Of frozen salt crystallised to taunt my broken lips,

To cheat my staring eyes, as a vision of great ships

With moving towers of sail, poops throng'd with grinning crowds

And a wind in their shrouds, bears down upon the pale

Wasted castaway afloat with the salt in his throat

And a feeble wild desire to be quenched of his fire

In the green gloom beneath.

So, again and again,

Hath a phantom city thrust to the visionary vault

Of inviolate cobalt, dome and dreaming minaret

Mosque and gleaming water-tower hazy in a fountain's jet

Or a market's rising dust; and my lips have cried aloud

To see them tremble there, though I knew within my heart

They were chiselled out of cloud or carven of thin air;

And my fingers clenched my hand, for I wondered if this land

Of my stony pilgrimage were a glimmering mirage,

And I myself no more than a phantom of the sand.

'But beyond these fading slender cities, many leagues away,

Strange brooding mountains lay heaped, crowding range on range

In a changing cloudy splendour; and beyond, in lakes of light,

As eastward still I staggered, there swam into my sight,

More vast and hoar and haggard, shoulders of ice and snow

Bounding the heavens low of burnished brass, whereunder

The hot plains of Cathay perpetually slumber:

Where tawny millions breed in cities without number,

Whither, a hill-born thunder, rolling on Tartary

With torrents and barb'd lightning, swelleth the yellow river

To a tumult of whitening foam and confused might

That drowns in a single night many a mud-made city;

And cities of boats, and frail cities of lath and reed,

Are whirled away without pity or set afloat in a pale,

Swirling, shallow sea ... and their names seem lost for ever

Till a stranger nomad race drive their herds to the sad place

Where old sorrows lie forgotten, and raise upon the rotten

Level waste another brood to await another flood.

'But I never might attain to this melancholy plain

For the mountains rose between; stark in my path they lay

Between me and Cathay, through moving mist half-seen.

And I knew that they were real, for their drooping folds of cloud

Enwrapped me in a shroud, and the air that fell at night

From their frozen summits white slid like an ice-blue steel

Into my living breast and stilled the heart within

As the chill of an old sin that robs a man of rest,

Killing all delight in the silence of the night

And brooding black above till the heart dare not move

But lieth cold and numb ... and the dawn will not come.

'Yet to me a dawn came, new-kindled in cold flame,

Flinging the imminence of those inviolate snows

On the forest lawns below in a shadow more immense

Than their eternal vastness; and a new hope beyond reason,

Flamed in my heart's dark season, dazzled my pallid eyes,

Till, when the hot sun soared above the uttermost height,

A draught of keen delight into my body was poured,

For all that frozen fastness lay flowered with the spring:

Her starry blossoms broke beneath my bruised feet,

And their beauty was so sweet to me I kissed them where they lay;

Yea, I bent my weary hips and kissed them with dry lips,

Tenderly, only dreading lest their petals delicate

Should be broken by my treading, for I lived, I lived again,

And my heart would have been broken by a living creature's pain,

So I kissed them for a token of my joy in their new birth,

And I kissed the gentle earth. Slowly the shadows crept

To the bases of the crags, and I slept....

'Once, in another life, had I remembered sleep,

When tired children creep on to their mother's knees,

And there a dreamless peace more quietly descendeth

Than gentle evening endeth or ring-doves fold their wings,

Before the nightjar spins or the nightingale begins;

When the brooding hedgerow trees where they nest lie awake

And breathe so soft they shake not a single shuddering leaf

Lest the silence should break.

'Other sleep have I known,

Deeper, beyond belief, when straining limbs relax

After hot human toil in yellow harvest fields

Where the panting earth yields a smell of baked soil,

And the dust of dry stubbles blows over the whitening

Shocks of lank grain and bundles of flax,

And men fling themselves down forgetting their troubles,

Unheedful of the song that the landrail weaves along

Misty woodlands, or lightning that the pale sky laves

Like phosphorescent waves washing summer seas:

And, more beautiful than these, that sleep of dazed wonder

When love has torn asunder the veils of the sky

And raptured lovers lie faint in each other's arms

Beneath a heaven strewn with myriad starry swarms,

Where planets float like lonely gold-flowered nenuphars

In pools of the sky; yet, when they wake, they turn

From those burning galaxies seeking heaven only

In each other's eyes, and sigh, and sleep again;

For while they sleep they seem to forget the world's pain,

And when they wake, they dream....

'But other sleep was mine

As I had drunk of wine with bitter hemlock steep'd,

Or soused with the heaped milky poppyheads

A drowsy Tartar treads where slow waters sweep

Over red river beds, and the air is heavy with sleep.

So, when I woke at last, the labouring earth had rolled

Eastward under the vast dominion of night,

Funereal, forlorn as that unlighted chamber

Wherein she first was born, bereft of all starlight,

Pale silver of the moon, or the low sun's amber.

'Then to my queen I prayed, grave Ashtoreth, whose shade

Hallows the dim abyss of Heliopolis,

Where many an olive maid clashed kissing Syrian cymbals,

And silver-sounding timbrels shivered through the vale.

O lovely, and O white, under the holy night

Is their gleaming wonder, and their brows are pale

As the new risen moon, dancing till they swoon

In far forests under desolate Lebanon,

While the flame of Moloch's pyre reddens the sea-born cloud

That overshadows Tyre; so, when I cried aloud,

Behold, a torch of fire leapt on the mountain-side!

'O bright, O beautiful! for never kindlier light

Fell on the darkened sight of mortal eyes and dull

Since that devoted one, whom gloomy Caucasus

In icy silence lonely bound to his cruel shoulders,

Brought to benighted men in a hollow fennel-stem

Sparks of the torrid vapour that burned behind the bars

Of evening, broke dawn's rose, or smouldered in the stars,

Or lit the glowworm's taper, or wavered over the fen,

Or tipped the javelin of the far-ravening levin,

Lash of the Lord of Heaven and bitter scourge of sin.

O beautiful, O bright! my tired sinews strained

To this torch that flared and waned as a watery planet gloweth

And waneth in the night when a calm sea floweth

Under a misty sky spread with the tattered veils

Of rapid cloud driven over the deeps of heaven

By winds that range too high to sweep the languid sails.

On through the frozen night, like a blind moth flying

With battered wing and bruised bloom into a light,

I dragged my ragged limbs, cared not if I were dying,

Knew not if I were dead, where cavernous crevasses,

And stony desperate passes snared, waylaid my tread:

In the roar of broken boulders split from rocky shoulders,

In the thunder of snow sliding, or under the appalling

Rending of glacier ice or hoarse cataracts falling:

And I knew not what could save me but the unholy guiding

That some demon gave me. Thrice I fell, and thrice

In torrents of blue ice-water slipp'd and was toss'd

Like a dead leaf, or a ghost

Harried by thin bufferings of wind

Downward to Tartarus at daybreak,

Downward to the regions of the lost....

But the rushing waters ceased, and the bitter wind fell:

How I cannot tell, unless that I had come

To the hollow heart of the storm where the wind is dumb;

And there my gelid blood thawed, glowed, and grew warm,

While a black-hooded form caught at my arm, and stayed

And held me as I swayed, until, at last, I saw

In a strange unworldly awe, at the gate of light I stood:

And I entered, alone....

'Behold a cavern of stone carven, and in the midst

A brazier that hissed with tongued flames, leaping

Over whitened embers of gummy frankincense,

Into a fume of dense and fragrant vapour, creeping

Over the roof to spread a milky coverlet

Softer than the woof of webby spider's net.

But never spider yet spun a more delicate wonder

Than that which hung thereunder, drooping fold on fold,

Silks that glowed with fire of tawny Oxus gold,

Richer than ever flowed from the eager fancy of man

In his vain desire for beauty that endures:

And on the floor were spread by many a heaped daiwan

Carpets of Kurdistan, cured skins, and water-ewers

Encrusted with such gems as emperors of Hind

(Swart conquerors, long dead) sought for their diadems.

No other light was there but one torch, flaring

Against a square of sky possess'd by the wind,

And never another sound but the tongued flames creeping.

'At last, my eyes staring into the clouded gloom,

Saw that the caverned room with shadowy forms was strewn

In heavy sleep or swoon fallen, who did not move

But lay as mortals lie in the sweet release of love.

And stark between them stood huge eunuchs of ebony,

Mute, motionless, as they had been carven of black wood.

But these I scarcely saw, for, through the flame was seen

Another, a queen, with heavy closed eyes

White against the skies of that empurpled night

In her loveliness she lay, and leaned upon her hand:

And my blood leapt at the sight, so that I could not stand

But fell upon my knees, pleading, and cried aloud

For her white loveliness as Ixion for his cloud:

And my cry the silence broke, and the sleepers awoke

From their slumber, stirred, and rose every one,--save those

Mute eunuchs of ebony, those frowning caryatides.

Slowly she looked at me, and when I cried again

In yearning and in pain, she beckoned with her hand.

Then from my knees rose I, and greatly daring,

Through the hazy air, past the brazier flaring

And the hissing flame, crept, until I came

Unto the carven seat, and kissed her white feet;

And she smiled, but spake not.

When she smiled the sleepers wavered as the grass

Of a cornfield wavers when the ears are swept

By the breath of brown reapers singing as they pass,

Or grass of woody glades when a wind that has slept

Wakens, and invades their moonlit solitude,

When the hazels shiver and the birch is blown

To a billow of silver, but oaks in the wood

Stand firm nor quiver, stand firm as stone:

So, amid the sleepers, the black eunuchs stood.

When the sleepers stirred faintly in the heat

Of that painted room a silken sound I heard,

And a thin music, sweet as the brown nightingale

Sings in the jealous shade of a lonely spinney,

Stranger far than any music mortal made

Fell softer than the dew falleth when stars are pale.

Sweet it was, and clear as light, or as the tears

That sad Narcissus wears in the spring of the year

On barren mountain ranges where rain falls cool

And every lonely pool is sprayed with broken light:

So cool, so beautiful, and so divinely strange

I doubted if it came from any marshy reed

Or hollow fluting stem pluck'd by the hands of men,

Unless it were indeed that airy fugitive

Syrinx, who cried and ran before the laughing eyes

Of goat-footed Pan, and must for ever live

A shadowy green reed by an Arcadian river--

But never music made of Ladon's reedy daughter

Or singing river-water more sweet than that which stole,

Slow as amber honey wells from the honeycomb,

Into my weary soul with solace and strange peace.

So, trembling as I lay in a dream more desolate

Than is the darkened day of the mid-winter north,

I heard the voice of one who sang in a strange tongue,

And I know not what he sang save that he sang of love,

The while they led me forth unheeding, till we came

Unto a chamber lit with one slow-burning flame

That yellow horn bedims, and laid me down, and there

They soothed my bruised limbs, and combed my tangled hair,

And salved my limbs with rarely-mingled unguents pressed

By hands of holy ones who dream beneath the suns

Of Araby the Blest, and so, when they had bathed

My burning eyes with milk of dreamy anodyne

And cool'd my throat with wine,

In robings of cool silk my broken body they swathed,

Sandals of gold they placed upon my feet, and round

My sad sun-blistered brows a silver fillet bound--

Decking me with the pride of a bridegroom that goes

To the joy of his bride and is lovely in her eyes--

And led me to her side. Then, as a conquering prince,

I, who long since had been battered and tost

Like a dead leaf or ghost buffeted by wild storms,

Came to her white arms, conquering, and was lost,

Yet dared not gaze upon the beauty that I dreamed.

So, in my trance, it seemed that a shadowy soft dance

Coiled slowly and unwound, swayed, beckoned, and recovered

As hooded cobra bound by hollow spells of sound

Unto the piper sways; so silently they hovered

I only heard the beat of their naked feet,

And then, another sound....

A dull throb thrumming, a noise of faint drumming,

Threatening, coming nearer, piercing deeper

Than a dream lost in the heart of a sleeper

Into those deeps where the dark fire gloweth,

The secret flame that every man knoweth,

Embers that smoulder, fires that none can fan,

Terrible, older than the mind of man....

Before he crawled from his swamp and spurned

The life of the beast that dark fire burned

In the hidden deeps where no dream can come:

Only the throbbing of a drum

Can wake it from its smouldering--

Sightless, soundless, senseless, dumb--

Dumb as those blind seeds that lie

Drown'd in mud, and shuddering,

I knew that I was man no more,

But a throbbing core of flesh, that knew

Nor beauty, nor truth, nor anything

But the black sky and the slimy earth:

Roots of trees, and fear, and pain,

The blank of death, the pangs of birth,

An inhuman thing possess'd

By the throbbing of a drum:

And my lips were strange and numb,

But they kissed her white breast....

Then, being drunk with pride and splendour of love, I cried:

'"O spring of all delight, O mooned mystery,

O living marvel, white as the dead queen of night,

O flower, and O flame ... tell me at least thy name

That, from this desolate height, I may proclaim its wonder

To the lost lands hereunder before thy beauty dies

As fades the fire of dawn upon a peak of snow!"'

Then: "Look," she sighed, "into my eyes, and thou shalt know."

So, with her fingers frail, she pressed my brows, and so,

Slowly, at last, she raised my drooping eyelids pale,

And in her eyes I gazed.

'Then fear, than love more blind,

Caught at my heart and fast in chains of horror bound--

As one who in profound and midnight forest ways

Sees in the dark the burning eyes of a tiger barred

Or stealthy footed pard blaze in a solemn hate

And lust of human blood, yet cannot cry, nor turning

Flee from the huddled wood, but stands and sees his fate,

Or one who in a black night, groping for his track,

Clings to the dizzy verge of a cragged precipice,

Shrinks from the dim abyss, yet dare not venture back,

And no sound hears but the hiss of empty air

Swirling past his ears.... So, in a hideous

Abandonment of hope, I waited for her kiss.

Then the restless beat of the muttering drum

Rose to a frenzied heat; the naked dancers leapt

Insolent through the flame, laughing as they came

With parted lips; their cries deadened my ears, my eyes

Throbbed with the pattering of their rapid feet,

And the whirling dust of their dancing swept

Into my throat unslaked, dry-parched with love's drought,

Until my mouth was pressed upon her burning mouth

In a kiss most terrible.... Oh, was it pride, or shame

Unending, without name, or ecstasy, or pain

Or desperate desire? Alas! I cannot tell,

Save that it pierced my trembling soul and body with fire.

For, while her soft lips clove to mine in love, she drove

A flaming blade of steel into my breast, and I,

Rent with a bitter cry, slid from her side and fell

Clutching in dumb despair the dark unbraided hair

My passion had despoiled; while she, like serpent coiled,

Poised for another stroke, terribly, slowly, smiled,

Saying: "O stranger, red, red are my lips, and sweet

Unto those lips so red are the kisses of the dead:

Far hast thou wandered, far, for the kisses of Thamar."

Then a deep silence fell on the frenzy and the laughter;

The leaping dancers crept to the shadows where they had slept,

And the mute eunuchs stood forth, and hugely bent

Above my body, spent in its pool of blood,

And hove me with black arms, while the queen followed after

With stealthy steps, and eyes that burned into the night

Of my dying brain, till, with her hand, she bade

Them falter, and they stayed, while, eagerly, she propped

My listless head that dropped downward from my shoulders,

And slowly raised it up, raised it like a cup

Unto her lips again,

Then shuddered, trembled, shrunk, as though her mouth had drunk

A potion where the fell fire of poison smoulders.

And a darkness came, and I could see no more,

But in my ears the roar of lonely torrents swelled

And stilled my breath for ever, as though a wave appalling

Had broken in my brain, and deep to deep were calling:

And I felt my body falling down and down and down

Into a blank of death, where dumb waters roll

Endlessly, only knowing, that her dagger had stabbed my breast,

But her kiss had killed my soul.

And now I know no rest until again I stand

Where that lost city's towers rise from the dreamy sand,

Until I reach the gate where the lips of Asia wait,

Till I cross the desert's drought, and the rivers of the south,

And shiver through the night under those summits white

That soar above Cathay; until I see the light

Flame from those tyrannous glooms where, like a tired star

In stormy darkness, looms the castle of Thamar.'