Read Online Collected Poems by William Alexander Percy - Free Book Online Page A

bloom for unknown eyes
                             To gaze upon in wistfulness.…
                             A little while to watch,
                             And then, together, home.
PHAON IN HADES
    To-day the very dead would love his face;
    And, loving them, I wish that to their place
    Of woe his feet might find awhile the way,
    And ease them with perfection for a space.
    His beauty is so beautiful to-day.
    As, when its freight of dew is blown away,
    The grass uprises, so would they uprise,
    Those ancient dead, and shake their anguish grey,
    Breathing his coolness and his glad surprise
    As ‘twere the blow and glittering of day.
    Ashine with clinging petals and late tears,
    Sweet with aroma of Sicilian green,
    I see the dear, dear dead make way and lean
    To catch the summer of his mouth, the sheen
    Of laughter in those eyes that wisdom fears.
    And, ah! Persephone! She hath forgot
    The pallor and the poppied heaviness —
    Upon her wine-red heart her hand is hot.
    If thus the very dead, ’twere sure excess
    Of blame, were I to love his beauty less!
GIRGENTI
    So many here have struggled, fought the fight!
        Life after life so many here have flung
    As incense to the gods, that served — for what
        Save Cerberus’ toll to nothingness?
        Of what avail to them, to us,
        Their gaunt resistance and their trust?
    Across the clear, sad light of centuries,
    Their epitaph reveals what line of comfort?
    Those that with lit, courageous eyes opposed
    The mean, the merely earth, the less than highest,
    Was recompense or special profit theirs?
        Did their names less profoundly plumb
                                            The chasms of oblivion
                             Than theirs that never fought,
                             But, lightly submissive, spread
                             The purple for their summer hearts
                                            Within the garden’s cool,
    Called for the golden cups, the snowy wine,
        The honey-comb, and Aphrodite’s flutes?
    To which was happiness the booner comrade?
    Sweeter than chaplets hold you sweat and blood!
                   Than easy pomp, strife and hot tears!
                             Which likelier served the gods?
                   Behold the gods of both in ambered death
                             Of fairy tales and poets’ guile!
                                            Which hold in heritage
        Elysian meadows and eternal May?
    Poor trade, indeed, hoped immortality
    For hot lips and the certain spring!
    Ah! but the nobler struggle did bequeath
        Impetus, blossom-bearing warmth unto
    That blind and mighty impulse to perfection —
        The race’s slow, incessant upward surge!
                             Dreams! dreams! About, about, behold
                                            Their bastard-souled successors,
                                                      Legitimate in blood alone!
    Here once were millions; gazing hence, one saw
    The high-hung walls, the teeming market place,
                   The colors and the colonnades,
    The curving city’s brilliant amplitude.…
        There hangs upon that northern crag,
        As some dirt-wasp had hovelled there,
        The drab inheritor of all that purpose;
    Slattern of villages, where sat the lily-crowned!
                                                      Golden Girgenti!
                   Of soft Sicilian cities