If like a thief
I stole away unseen, oh it was not
To spend that night in any rival’s arms!
Rock, hard and wind-swept, was my marriage bed;
The wilderness my bride; the starry sky
My roof; the distant, interrupted howl
Of beasts of prey my nuptial lullaby.
Before me lay the waste, strewn here and there
With ribs of men and camels, or the wreck
Of perished cities; yea, and thirst and pain
In vaguely measured sum. But in my soul
The voice of thunder cried: “Push on, push on
Into the waste, Porphyrion! thou art still
Too near to human haunts, too far from God!”
And I pushed on; and in an empty tomb
In a deserted city of the dead
I made my lair, alone with stones and God;
Living off locusts and such scanty herbs
As grew in clefts of rock and empty wells.
Oh what a silence, what a loneliness!
The temple columns and the huge carved stones
Cast long black shadows on the sun-baked sand
In endless rows; and through the livelong day
No moving shadow crossed them save my own,
As, like a leper whom his sores have doomed
To lead the lonely life, I prowled for food.
Oh, it was hard! For knowing that the Fiend
Would come ere long to scare and tempt me back
To human haunts, I sought with prayer, and scourge,
And thirst, and hunger, and restricted sleep
To arm myself against him and his strength;
And come he did. He prowled at first at night,
Shaped as a roaring lion, round and round
My lonely cell; but his re-echoing roar
Deterred me not, nor stopped a single prayer.
And then he came with soft insidious step
During my sleep, and strove to tempt the flesh
In woman’s guise--yea, in thy very shape--
And sought to lure me to caress and kiss,
Taking thy face, thy eyes, thy very voice
In all their beauty and their blandishment;
But I defied him, and he howling fled,
And changed his plan. He made the solid ground
Lurch ever and anon beneath my feet;
He made me shiver in the blazing sun
With mortal cold; and sometimes, in the dusk
He made the huge stone heads of sphinxes nod
And gibber as I passed them. Oh, for years
I wrestled with him in the awful waste;
But I o’ercame his strength.