Edith Wharton's Verse, 1879-1919, from various journals. Read online

  The pale high-altar. On the prayer-worn floor,

  By surging worshippers thick-thronged of yore,

  A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb,

  The stranded driftwood of Faith’s ebbing sea--

  For these alone the finials fret the skies,

  The topmost bosses shake their blossoms free,

  While from the triple portals, with grave eyes,

  Tranquil, and fixed upon eternity,

  The cloud of witnesses still testifies.

  The crimson panes like blood-drops stigmatize

  The western floor. The aisles are mute and cold.

  A rigid fetich in her robe of gold

  The Virgin of the Pillar, with blank eyes,

  Enthroned beneath her votive canopies,

  Gathers a meagre remnant to her fold.

  The rest is solitude; the church, grown old,

  Stands stark and gray beneath the burning skies.

  Wellnigh again its mighty frame-work grows

  To be a part of nature’s self, withdrawn

  From hot humanity’s impatient woes;

  The floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn,

  And in the east one giant window shows

  The roseate coldness of an Alp at dawn.

  "Life." Scribner’s Magazine 15 (June 1894): 739. By Edith Wharton.

  LIFE, like a marble block, is given to all,

  A blank, inchoate mass of years and days,

  Whence one with ardent chisel swift essays

  Some shape of strength or symmetry to call;

  One shatters it in bits to mend a wall;

  One in a craftier hand the chisel lays,

  And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia’s gaze,

  Carves it apace in toys fantastical.

  But least is he who, with enchanted eyes

  Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be,

  Muses which god he shall immortalize

  In the proud Parian’s perpetuity,

  Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies

  That the night cometh wherein none shall see.

  "An Autumn Sunset." Scribner’s Magazine 16 (Oct. 1894): 419. By Edith Wharton

  LEAGUERED in fire

  The wild black promontories of the coast extend

  Their savage silhouettes;

  The sun in universal carnage sets,

  And, halting higher,

  The motionless storm-clouds mass their sullen threats,

  Like an advancing mob in sword-points penned,

  That, balked, yet stands at bay.

  Mid-zenith hangs the fascinated day

  In wind-lustrated hollows crystalline,

  A wan valkyrie whose wide pinions shine

  Across the ensanguined ruins of the fray,

  And in her lifted hand swings high o’erhead,

  Above the waste of war,

  The silver torch-light of the evening star

  Wherewith to search the faces of the dead.

  Lagooned in gold,

  Seem not those jetty promontories rather

  The outposts of some ancient land forlorn,

  Uncomforted of morn,

  Where old oblivions gather,

  The melancholy, unconsoling fold

  Of all things that go utterly to death

  And mix no more, no more

  With life’s perpetually awakening breath?

  Shall Time not ferry me to such a shore,

  Over such sailless seas,

  To walk with hope’s slain importunities

  In miserable marriage? Nay, shall not

  All things be there forgot,

  Save the sea’s golden barrier and the black

  Closecrouching promontories?

  Dead to all shames, forgotten of all glories,

  Shall I not wander there, a shadow’s shade,

  A spectre self-destroyed,

  So purged of all remembrance and sucked back

  Into the primal void,

  That should we on that shore phantasmal meet

  I should not know the coming of your feet?

  "Jade." Century Magazine 49 (Jan. 1895): 391.

  THE patient craftsman of the East who made

  His undulant dragons of the veined jade,

  And wound their sinuous volutes round the whole

  Pellucid green redundance of the bowl,

  Chiseled his subtle traceries with the same

  Keen stone he wrought them in.

  Nor praise, nor blame,

  Nor gifts the years relinquish or refuse,

  But only a grief commensurate with thy soul,

  Shall carve it in a shape for gods to use.

  Edith Wharton.

  "Phaedra." Scribner’s Magazine 23 (Jan. 1898): 68. By Edith Wharton

  NOT that on me the Cyprian fury fell,

  Last martyr of my love-ensanguined race;

  Not that my children drop the averted face

  When my name shames the silence; not that hell

  Holds me where nevermore his glance shall dwell

  Nightlong between my lids, my pulses race

  Through flying pines the tempest of the chase,

  Nor my heart rest with him beside the well.

  Not that he hates me; not, O baffled gods--

  Not that I slew him!--yet, because your goal

  Is always reached, nor your rejoicing rods

  Fell ever yet upon insensate clods,

  Know, the one pang that makes your triumph whole

  Is, that he knows the baseness of my soul.

  "The One Grief." Scribner’s Magazine 24 (July 1898): 90. By Edith Wharton

  ONE grief there is, the helpmeet of my heart,

  That shall not from me till my days be sped,

  That walks beside me in sunshine and shade,

  And hath in all my fortunes equal part.

  At first I feared it, and would often start

  Aghast to find it bending o’er my bed,

  Till usage slowly dulled the edge of dread,

  And one cold night I cried: How warm thou art!

  Since then we two have travelled hand in hand,

  And, lo, my grief has been interpreter

  For me in many a fierce and alien land

  Whose speech young Joy had failed to understand,

  Plucking me tribute of red gold and myrrh

  From desolate whirlings of the desert sand.

  "Mould and Vase." Atlantic Monthly 88 (Sept. 1901): 343.

  GREEK POTTERY OF AREZZO.

  HERE in the jealous hollow of the mould,

  Faint, light-eluding, as templed in the breast

  Of some rose-vaulted lotus, see the best

  The artist had--the vision that unrolled

  Its flying sequence till completion’s hold

  Caught the wild round and bade the dancers rest--

  The mortal lip on the immortal pressed

  One instant, ere the blindness and the cold.

  And there the vase: immobile, exiled, tame,

  The captives of fulfillment link their round,

  Foot-heavy on the inelastic ground,

  How different, yet how enviously the same!

  Dishonoring the kinship that they claim,

  As here the written word the inner sound.

  Edith Wharton.

  "Uses." Scribner’s Magazine 31 (Feb. 1902): 180. By Edith Wharton

  AH, from the niggard tree of Time

  How quickly fall the hours!

  It needs no touch of wind or rime

  To loose such facile flowers.

  Drift of the dead year’s harvesting,

  They clog to-morrow’s way,

  Yet serve to shelter growths of Spring

  Beneath their warm decay.

  Or, blent by pious hands with rare

  Sweet savors of content,

  Surprise the soul’s December air

  With June’s forgotten scent.

  "Arte
mis to Actaeon." Scribner’s Magazine 31 (June 1902): 661-62. By Edith Wharton

  THOU couldst not look on me and live: so runs

  The mortal legend--thou that couldst not live

  Nor look on me (so the divine decree)!

  That sawst me in the cloud, the wave, the bough,

  The clod commoved with April, and the shapes

  Lurking ’twixt lid and eye-ball in the dark.

  Mocked I thee not in every guise of life,

  Hid in girls’ eyes, a naiad in her well,

  Wooed through their laughter, and like echo fled,

  Luring thee down the primal silences

  Where the heart hushes and the flesh is dumb?

  Nay, was not I the tide that drew thee out

  Relentlessly from the detaining shore,

  Forth from the home-lights and the hailing voices,

  Forth from the last faint headland’s failing line,

  Till I enveloped thee from verge to verge

  And hid thee in the hollow of my being?

  And still, because between us hung the veil,

  The myriad-tinted veil of sense, thy feet

  Refused their rest, thy hands the gifts of life,

  Thy heart its losses, lest some lesser face

  Should blur mine image in thine upturned soul

  Ere death had stamped it there. This was thy thought.

  And mine?

  The gods, they say, have all: not so!

  This have they--flocks on every hill, the blue

  Spirals of incense and the amber drip

  Of lucid honey-comb on sylvan shrines,

  First-chosen weanlings, doves immaculate,

  Twin-cooing in the osier-plaited cage,

  And ivy-garlands glaucous with the dew:

  Man’s wealth, man’s servitude, but not himself!

  And so they pale, for lack of warmth they wane,

  Freeze to the marble of their images,

  And, pinnacled on man’s subserviency,

  Through the thick sacrificial haze discern

  Unheeding lives and loves, as some cold peak

  Through icy mists may enviously descry

  Warm vales unzoned to the all-fruitful sun.

  So they along an immortality

  Of endless-vistaed homage strain their gaze,

  If haply some rash votary, empty-urned,

  But light of foot, with all-adventuring hand,

  Break rank, fling past the people and the priest,

  Up the last step, on to the inmost shrine,

  And there, the sacred curtain in his clutch,

  Drop dead of seeing--while the others prayed!

  Yea, this we wait for, this renews us, this

  Incarnates us, pale people of your dreams,

  Who are but what you make us, wood or stone,

  Or cold chryselephantine hung with gems,

  Or else the beating purpose of your life,

  Your sword, your clay, the note your pipe pursues,

  The face that haunts your pillow, or the light

  Scarce visible over leagues of laboring sea!

  O thus through use to reign again, to drink

  The cup of peradventure to the lees,

  For one dear instant disimmortalized

  In giving immortality!

  So dream the gods upon their listless thrones.

  Yet sometimes, when the votary appears,

  With death-affronting forehead and glad eyes,

  Too young, they rather muse, too frail thou art,

  And shall we rob some girl of saffron veil

  And nuptial garland for so slight a thing?

  And so to their incurious loves return.

  Not so with thee; for some indeed there are

  Who would behold the truth and then return

  To pine among the semblances--but I

  Divined in thee the questing foot that never

  Revisits the cold hearth of yesterday

  Or calls achievement home. I from afar

  Beheld thee fashioned for one hour’s high use,

  Nor meant to slake oblivion drop by drop.

  Long, long hadst thou inhabited my dreams,

  Surprising me as harts surprise a pool,

  Stealing to drink at midnight; I divined

  Thee rash to reach the heart of life, and lie

  Bosom to bosom in occasion’s arms,

  And said: Because I love thee thou shalt die!

  For immortality is not to range

  Unlimited through vast Olympian days,

  Or sit in dull dominion over time;

  But this--to drink fate’s utmost at a draught,

  Nor feel the wine grow stale upon the lip,

  To scale the summit of some soaring moment,

  Nor know the dulness of the long descent,

  To snatch the crown of life and seal it up

  Secure forever in the vaults of death!

  And this was thine: to lose thyself in me,

  Relive in my renewal, and become

  The light of other lives, a quenchless torch

  Passed on from hand to hand, till men are dust

  And the last garland withers from my shrine.

  "The Bread of Angels." Harper’s Magazine 105 (Sept. 1902): 583-85.

  AT that lost hour disowned of day and night,

  The after-birth of midnight, when life’s face

  Turns to the wall and the last lamp goes out

  Before the incipient irony of dawn--

  In that obliterate interval of time

  Between the oil’s last flicker and the first

  Reluctant shudder of averted day,

  Threading the city’s streets (like mine own ghost

  Wakening the echoes of dispeopled dreams),

  I smiled to see how the last light that fought

  Extinction was the old familiar glare

  Of supper tables under gas-lit ceilings,

  The same old stale monotonous carouse

  Of greed and surfeit nodding face to face

  O’er the picked bones of pleasure . . .

  So that the city seemed, at that waste hour,

  Like some expiring planet from whose face

  All nobler life had perished--love and hate,

  And labor and the ecstasy of thought--

  Leaving the eyeless creatures of the ooze,

  Dull offspring of its first inchoate birth,

  The last to cling to its exhausted breast.

  And threading thus the aimless streets that strayed

  Conjectural through a labyrinth of death,

  Strangely I came upon two hooded nuns,

  Hands in their sleeves, heads bent as if beneath

  Some weight of benediction, gliding by

  Punctual as shadows that perform their round

  Upon the inveterate bidding of the sun

  Again and yet again their ordered course

  At the same hour crossed mine: obedient shades

  Cast by some high-orbed pity on the waste

  Of midnight evil! and my wondering thoughts

  Tracked them from the hushed convent where there kin

  Lay hived in sweetness of their prayer built cells.

  What wind of fate had loosed them from the lee

  Of that dear anchorage where their sisters slept?

  On what emprise of heavenly piracy

  Did such frail craft put forth upon this world;

  In what incalculable currents caught

  And swept beyond the signal-lights of home

  Did their white coifs set sail against the night?

  At last, upon my wonder drawn, I followed

  The secret wanderers till I saw them pause

  Before the dying glare of those tall panes

  Where greed and surfeit nodded face to face

  O’er the picked bones of pleasure . . .

  And the door opened and the nuns went in.

  Again I met them, followed them
again.

  Straight as a thought of mercy to its goal

  To the same door they sped. I stood alone.

  And suddenly the silent city shook

  With inarticulate clamor of gagged lips,

  As in Jerusalem when the veil was rent

  And the dead drove the living from the streets.

  And all about me stalked the shrouded dead,

  Dead hopes, dead efforts, loves and sorrows dead,

  With empty orbits groping for their dead

  In that blind mustering of murdered faiths . . .

  And the door opened and the nuns came out.

  I turned and followed. Once again we came

  To such a threshold, such a door received them,

  They vanished, and I waited. The grim round

  Ceased only when the festal panes grew dark

  And the last door had shot its tardy bolt.

  "Too late!" I heard one murmur; and "Too late!"

  The other, in unholy antiphon.

  And with dejected steps they turned away.

  They turned, and still I tracked them, till they bent

  Under the lee of a calm convent wall

  Bounding a quiet street. I knew the street,

  One of those village byways strangely trapped

  In the city’s meshes, where at loudest noon

  The silence spreads like moss beneath the foot,

  And all the tumult of the town becomes

  Idle as Ocean’s fury in a shell.

  Silent at noon--but now, at this void hour,

  When the blank sky hung over the blank streets

  Clear as a mirror held above dead lips,

  Came footfalls, and a thronging of dim shapes

  About the convent door: a suppliant line

  Of pallid figures, ghosts of happier folk,

  Moving in some gray underworld of want

  On which the sun of plenty never dawns.

  And as the nuns approached I saw the throng

  Pale emanation of that outcast hour,

  Divide like vapor when the sun breaks through

  And take the glory on its tattered edge.

  For so a brightness ran from face to face,

  Faint as a diver’s light beneath the sea

  And as a wave draws up the beach, the crowd

  Drew to the nuns.

  I waited. Then those two

  Strange pilgrims of the sanctuaries of sin

  Brought from beneath their large conniving cloaks

  Two hidden baskets brimming with rich store

  Of broken viands--pasties, jellies, meats,

  Crumbs of Belshazzar’s table, evil waste