TH breath of thyme and bees that hum, Across the years you seem to come,Across the years with nymph-like head, And wind-blown brows unfilleted; A girlish shape that slips the bud In lines of unspoiled symmetry; A girlish shape that stirs the blood With pulse of Spring, Autonoë!
Where'er you pass,-where'er you go,
I hear the pebbly rillet flow;
Where'er you go,-where'er you pass,
There comes a gladness on the grass;
You bring blithe airs where'er you tread,—
Blithe airs that blow from down and sea;
You wake in me a Pan not dead,-
Not wholly dead !-Autonoë!
How sweet with you on some green sod
To wreathe the rustic garden-god;
How sweet beneath the chestnut's shade
With you to weave a basket-braid;
To watch across the stricken chords
Your rosy-twinkling fingers flee;
To woo you in soft woodland words,
With woodland pipe, Autonoë!
In vain,-in vain! The years divide :
Where Thamis rolls a murky tide,
I sit and fill my painful reams,
And see you only in my dreams ;—
A vision, like Alcestis, brought
From under-lands of Memory,—
A dream of Form in days of Thought,—
A dream,-a dream, Autonoë!
A VERSION SUGGESTED BY THE SO-NAMED PICTURE OF PIERO DI COSIMO, IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY.
ROCRIS, the nymph, had wedded Cephalus :He, till the spring had warmed to slow-winged days
Heavy with June, untired and amorous,
Named her his love; but now, in unknown ways, His heart was gone; and evermore his gaze Turned from her own, and ever farther ranged His woodland war; while she, in dull amaze, Beholding with the hours her husband changed, Sighed for his lost caress, by some hard god estranged.
So, on a day, she rose and found him not.
Alone, with wet, sad eye, she watched the shade
Brighten below a soft-rayed sun that shot
Arrows of light through all the deep-leaved glade;
Then, with weak hands, she knotted up the braid
Of her brown hair, and o'er her shoulders cast
Her crimson weed; with faltering fingers made
Her golden girdle's clasp to join, and past
Down to the trackless wood, full pale and overcast.
And all day long her slight spear devious flew,
And harmless swerved her arrows from their aim,
For ever, as the ivory bow she drew,
Before her ran the still unwounded game.
Then, at the last, a hunter's cry there came,
And, lo, a hart that panted with the chase;
Thereat her cheek was lightened as with flame,
And swift she gat her to a leafy place,
Thinking, “I yet may chance unseen to see his face.”
Leaping he went, this hunter Cephalus,
Bent in his hand his cornel bow he bare,
Supple he was, round-limbed and vigorous,
Fleet as his dogs, a lean Laconian pair.
He, when he spied the brown of Procris' hair
Move in the covert, deeming that apart
Some fawn lay hidden, loosed an arrow there;
Nor cared to turn and seek the speeded dart,
Bounding above the fern, fast following up the hart.
But Procris lay among the white wind-flowers,
Shot in the throat. From out the little wound
The slow blood drained, as drops in autumn showers
Drip from the leaves upon the sodden ground.
None saw her die but Lelaps, the swift hound,
That watched her dumbly with a wistful fear,
Till, at the dawn, the hornèd wood-men found
And bore her gently on a sylvan bier,
To lie beside the sea,-with many an uncouth tear.
THE PRAYER OF THE SWINE TO
UDDLING they came, with shag sides caked of mire,
With hoofs fresh sullied from the troughs o'erturned,
With wrinkling snouts,—yet eyes in which desire
Of some strange thing unutterably burned,
Unquenchable; and still where'er She turned
They rose about her, striving each o'er each,
With restless, fierce impórtuning that yearned
Through those brute masks some piteous tale to teach, Yet lacked the words thereto, denied the power of speech.
For these Eurylochus alone escaping
In truth, that small exploring band had been,
Whom wise Odysseus, dim precaution shaping,
Ever at heart, of peril unforeseen,
Had sent inland ;-whom then the islet-Queen,-
The fair disastrous daughter of the Sun,-
Had turned to likeness of the beast unclean,
With evil wand transforming one by one
To shapes of loathly swine, imbruted and undone.
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