Therefore one day, as all flesh must, she died,
Just as the mowers brought the last load in
From happy meadows warm with summer-tide,
And through the open casement, far and thin,
The nightingale’s first music did begin.
“Love is the sum of this world’s whole delight,
Love,” said the bird, “the ending of desire,
Love brought us, timid, forth to the lovely light,
Love the sole outlet, love, both toil and hire,
Love, with whose death the songs of life expire.”
Yet, as the limbs turned stone and bitter-cold,
Widowed Pygmalion sat beside the bed,
Huddling dry-eyed to see the new grown old
Again so strangely, and his clamorous head
Jarred him with discourse; and at length he said:
“Marble, my white girl, marble! Cyprian thighs
And amorous bosom all made chaste once more,
As though no lips had ever kissed thine eyes
To slumber--virgin as they were, before
The feet of Venus glowed along the floor!...
“Thy beauty should have made the workman blind
That found thee buried in the dust of thrones
Hereafter, when our pomps are left behind
Like some strange, sprawling scale of barbarous tones,
Our temples turned to curious heaps of stones;
“When by the highways merchant folk shall go
Three feet of earth above our walls and towers,
And other than Grecian ships bear to and fro
New wares, new men, and all as brief as flowers--
Thou hadst outlasted all that time devours.
“But thou art dead; thou art flesh and art dead;
The grave will be thy lover, thy round breast
Nourish the worm, while, shred by ghastly shred,
The mouth that laughed, the fingers that caressed,
Wither, O dearest of my works and best!...
“What have I gained? some mornings when my soul
Leaped out of me into the arms of day,
When the world, like a chariot, span in my own control,
Times when I saw the beech-tree leaves a-sway
And knew how green they were and far from grey.
“Say I learned joy--this was indeed a gain;
But can I face the reckoning unafraid?
For joy I bartered, first, that ancient pain
Which stabbed me into vision; next, betrayed
All that men looked for in me; thus I paid.
“Yea, I that rated at a small amount
That strange, cold jewel, purchased unawares,
Men’s gratitude--I that no longer count
For anything in any man’s affairs,
Am doubtful now; thus the gods grant our prayers.
“Ay me undone! The world cries out to me:
‘Pygmalion the sculptor, where art thou?’--
Buried indeed, O buried hopelessly
Fathom-deep under, fathom-deep under now--
The curious rootlets pry about his brow ...
“There is no remedy; what is changed is changed;
No skill can rub out wrinkles from the heart,
Nor even God knit friends that are estranged
As innocently again as at the start,
Since they must keep the memory of that smart
“For good or evil still. So I return
Never to that old quiet which asked no beat
Of answering pulse, content alone to burn,
While no fierce hand might fret thy bosom sweet,
Nor any lover come betwixt thy feet.
“I wrought thee for the world, and then thou wast
Immortal--and I wept uncomforted;
But since I made thee mine--O thou art lost
To me and all men. I was glad,” he said,
“But thou art dead, O thou art dead, art dead.”
_HELEN SIMPSON_
(_HOME STUDENT_)