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

  Of that interminable nightly feast

  Of greed and surfeit, nodding face to face

  O’er the picked bones of pleasure . . .

  And piteous hands were stretched to take the bread

  Of this strange sacrament--this manna brought

  Out of the antique wilderness of sin.

  Each seized a portion, turning comforted

  From this new breaking of the elements;

  And while I watched the mystery of renewal

  Whereby the dead bones of old sins become

  The living body of the love of God,

  It seemed to me that a like change transformed

  The city’s self . . . a little wandering air

  Ruffled the ivy on the convent wall;

  A bird piped doubtfully; the dawn replied;

  And in that ancient gray necropolis

  Somewhere a child awoke and took the breast.

  "Vesalius in Zante. (1564)" North American Review 175 (Nov. 1902): 625-31. BY EDITH WHARTON

  SET wide the window. Let me drink the day.

  I loved light ever, light in eye and brain--

  No tapers mirrored in long palace floors,

  Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles,

  But just the common dusty wind-blown day

  That roofs earth’s millions.

  O, too long I walked

  In that thrice-sifted air that princes breathe,

  Nor felt the heaven-wide jostling of the winds

  And all the ancient outlawry of earth!

  Now let me breathe and see.

  This pilgrimage

  They call a penance--let them call it that!

  I set my face to the East to shrive my soul

  Of mortal sin? So be it. If my blade

  Once questioned living flesh, if once I tore

  The pages of the Book in opening it,

  See what the torn page yielded ere the light

  Had paled its buried characters--and judge!

  The girl they brought me, pinioned hand and foot

  In catalepsy--say I should have known

  That trance had not yet darkened into death,

  And held my scalpel. Well, suppose I knew?

  Sum up the facts--her life against her death.

  Her life? The scum upon the pools of pleasure

  Breeds such by thousands. And her death? Perchance

  The obolus to appease the ferrying Shade,

  And waft her into immortality.

  Think what she purchased with that one heart-flutter

  That whispered its deep secret to my blade!

  For, just because her bosom fluttered still,

  It told me more than many rifled graves;

  Because I spoke too soon, she answered me,

  Her vain life ripened to this bud of death

  As the whole plant is forced into one flower,

  All her blank past a scroll on which God wrote

  His word of healing--so that the poor flesh,

  Which spread death living, died to purchase life!

  Ah, no! The sin I sinned was mine, not theirs.

  Not that they sent me forth to wash away--

  None of their tariffed frailties, but a deed

  So far beyond their grasp of good or ill

  That, set to weigh it in the Church’s balance,

  Scarce would they know which scale to cast it in.

  But I, I know. I sinned against my will,

  Myself, my soul--the God within the breast:

  Can any penance wash such sacrilege?

  When I was young in Venice, years ago,

  I walked the hospice with a Spanish monk,

  A solitary cloistered in high thoughts,

  The great Loyola, whom I reckoned then

  A mere refurbisher of faded creeds,

  Expert to edge anew the arms of faith,

  As who should say, a Galenist, resolved

  To hold the walls of dogma against fact,

  Experience, insight, his own self, if need be!

  Ah, how I pitied him, mine own eyes set

  Straight in the level beams of Truth, who groped

  In error’s old deserted catacombs

  And lit his tapers upon empty graves!

  Ay, but he held his own, the monk--more man

  Than any laurelled cripple of the wars,

  Charles’s spent shafts; for what he willed he willed,

  As those do that forerun the wheels of fate,

  Not take their dust--that force the virgin hours,

  Hew life into the likeness of themselves

  And wrest the stars from their concurrences.

  So firm his mould; but mine the ductile soul

  That wears the livery of circumstance

  And hangs obsequious on its suzerain’s eye.

  For who rules now? The twilight-flitting monk,

  Or I, that took the morning like an Alp?

  He held his own, I let mine slip from me,

  The birthright that no sovereign can restore;

  And so ironic Time beholds us now

  Master and slave--he lord of half the earth,

  I ousted from my narrow heritage.

  For there’s the sting! My kingdom knows me not.

  Reach me that folio--my usurper’s title!

  Fallopius reigning, vice--nay, not so:

  Successor, not usurper. I am dead.

  My throne stood empty; he was heir to it.

  Ay, but who hewed his kingdom from the waste,

  Cleared, inch by inch, the acres for his sowing,

  Won back for man that ancient fief o’ the Church,

  His body? Who flung Galen from his seat,

  And founded the great dynasty of truth

  In error’s central kingdom?

  Ask men that,

  And see their answer: just a wondering stare,

  To learn things were not always as they are--

  The very fight forgotten with the fighter;

  Already grows the moss upon my grave!

  Ay, and so meet--hold fast to that, Vesalius.

  They only, who re-conquer day by day

  The inch of ground they camped on over-night,

  Have right of foothold on this crowded earth.

  I left mine own; he seized it; with it went

  My name, my fame, my very self, it seems,

  Till I am but the symbol of a man,

  The sign-board creaking o’er an empty inn.

  He names me--true! "Oh, give the door its due

  I entered by. Only, my masters, note,

  Had door been none, a shoulder-thrust of mine

  Had breached the crazy wall"--he seems to say.

  So meet--and yet a word of thanks, of praise,

  Of recognition that the clue was found,

  Seized, followed, clung to, by some hand now dust--

  Had this obscured his quartering of my shield?

  How the one weakness stirs again! I thought

  I had done with that old thirst for gratitude

  That lured me to the desert years ago.

  I did my work--and was not that enough?

  No; but because the idlers sneered and shrugged,

  The envious whispered, the traducers lied,

  And friendship doubted where it should have cheered,

  I flung aside the unfinished task, sought praise

  Outside my soul’s esteem, and learned too late

  That victory, like God’s kingdom, is within.

  (Nay, let the folio rest upon my knee.

  I do not feel its weight.) Ingratitude?

  The hurrying traveller does not ask the name

  Of him who points him on his way; and this

  Fallopius sits in the mid-heart of me,

  Because he keeps his eye upon the goal,

  Cuts a straight furrow to the end in view,

  Cares not who oped the fountain by the way,

  But drinks to draw fresh co
urage for his journey.

  That was the lesson that Ignatius taught--

  The one I might have learned from him, but would not--

  That we are but stray atoms on the wind,

  A dancing transiency of summer eves,

  Till we become one with our purpose, merged

  In that vast effort of the race which makes

  Mortality immortal.

  "He that loseth

  His life shall find it": so the Scripture runs.

  But I so hugged the fleeting self in me,

  So loved the lovely perishable hours,

  So kissed myself to death upon their lips,

  That on one pyre we perished in the end--

  A grimmer bonfire than the Church e’er lit!

  Yet all was well--or seemed so--till I heard

  That younger voice, an echo of my own,

  And, like a wanderer turning to his home,

  Who finds another on the hearth, and learns,

  Half-dazed, that other is his actual self

  In name and claim, as the whole parish swears,

  So strangely, suddenly, stood dispossessed

  Of that same self I had sold all to keep,

  A baffled ghost that none would see or hear!

  "Vesalius? Who’s Vesalius? This Fallopius

  It is who dragged the Galen-idol down,

  Who rent the veil of flesh and forced a way

  Into the secret fortalice of life"--

  Yet it was I that bore the brunt of it!

  Well, better so! Better awake and live

  My last brief moment, as the man I was,

  Than lapse from life’s long lethargy to death

  Without one conscious interval. At least

  I repossess my past, am once again

  No courtier med’cining the whims of kings

  In muffled palace-chambers, but the free

  Friendless Vesalius, with his back to the wall

  And all the world against him. O, for that

  Best gift of all, Fallopius, take my thanks--

  That, and much more. At first, when Padua wrote:

  "Master, Fallopius dead, resume again

  The chair even he could not completely fill,

  And see what usury age shall take of youth

  In honors forfeited"--why, just at first,

  I was quite simply credulously glad

  To think the old life stood ajar for me,

  Like a fond woman’s unforgetting heart.

  But now that death waylays me--now I know

  This isle is the circumference of my days,

  And I shall die here in a little while--

  So also best, Fallopius!

  For I see

  The gods may give anew, but not restore;

  And though I think that, in my chair again,

  I might have argued my supplanters wrong

  In this or that--this Cesalpinus, say,

  With all his hot-foot blundering in the dark,

  Fabricius, with his over-cautious clutch

  On Galen (systole and diastole

  Of Truth’s mysterious heart!)--yet, other ways,

  It may be that this dying serves the cause.

  For Truth stays not to build her monument

  For this or that co-operating hand,

  But props it with her servants’ failures--nay,

  Cements its courses with their blood and brains,

  A living substance that shall clinch her walls

  Against the assaults of time. Already, see,

  Her scaffold rises on my hidden toil,

  I but the accepted premiss whence must spring

  The airy structure of her argument;

  Nor could the bricks it rests on serve to build

  The crowning finials. I abide her law:

  A different substance for a different end--

  Content to know I hold the building up;

  Though men, agape at dome and pinnacles,

  Guess not, the whole must crumble like a dream

  But for that buried labor underneath.

  Yet, Padua, I had still my word to say!

  Let others say it!--Ah, but will they guess

  Just the one word--? Nay, Truth is many-tongued.

  What one man failed to speak, another finds

  Another word for. May not all converge

  In some vast utterance, of which you and I,

  Fallopius, were but halting syllables?

  So knowledge come, no matter how it comes!

  No matter whence the light falls, so it fall!

  Truth’s way, not mine--that I, whose service failed

  In action, yet may make amends in praise.

  Fabricius, Cesalpinus, say your word,

  Not yours, or mine, but Truth’s, as you receive it!

  You miss a point I saw? See others, then!

  Misread my meaning? Yet expound your own!

  Obscure one space I cleared? The sky is wide,

  And you may yet uncover other stars.

  For thus I read the meaning of this end:

  There are two ways of spreading light; to be

  The candle or the mirror that reflects it.

  I let my wick burn out--there yet remains

  To spread an answering surface to the flame

  That others kindle.

  Turn me in my bed.

  The window darkens as the hours swing round;

  But yonder, look, the other casement glows!

  Let me face westward as my sun goes down.

  EDITH WHARTON.

  Note.--Vesalius, the great anatomist, studied at Louvain and Paris, and was called by Venice to the chair of surgery in the University of Padua. He was one of the first physiologists to dissect the human body, and his great work "The Structure of the Human Body" was an open attack on the physiology of Galen. The book excited such violent opposition, not only in the Church, bu in the University, that in a fit of discouragement he burned his remaining manuscripts and accepted the post of physician at the Court of Charles V., and afterward of his son, Philip II. of Spain. This closed his life of free enquiry, for the Inquisition forbade all scientific research, and the dissection of corpses was prohibited in Spain. Vesalius sank into the rich and successful court physician, but regrets for his past life were never wholly extinguished, and in 1561 they were roused afresh by the reading of an anatomical treatise by Gabriel Fallopius, his successor in the chair at Padua. From that moment life in Spain became intolerable to Vesalius, and in 1563 he set out for the East. Tradition reports that this journey was a penance to which the Church condemned him for having opened the body of a woman before she was actually dead; but more probably Vesalius, sick of his long servitude, made the pilgrimage a pretext to escape from Spain. Fallopius had meanwhile died, and the Venetian Senate is said to have offered Vesalius his old chair; but on the way home from Jerusalem he was seized with illness, and died at Zante in 1564.]

  "A Torchbearer." Scribner’s Magazine 33 (April 1903): 504-05. (J. B. M., NOVEMBER 29, 1902) By Edith Wharton

  GREAT cities rise and have their fall; the brass

  That held their glories moulders in its turn,

  Hard granite rots like an uprooted weed,

  And ever on the palimpsest of earth

  Impatient Time rubs out the word he writ.

  But one thing makes the years its pedestal,

  Springs from the ashes of its pyre, and claps

  A skyward wing above its epitaph--

  The will of man willing immortal things.

  The ages are but baubles hung upon

  The thread of some strong lives--and one slight wrist

  May lift a century above the dust;

  For Time,

  The Sisyphean load of little lives,

  Becomes the globe and sceptre of the great.

  But who are these that, linking hand in hand,

  Transmit across the twilight waste of years

  The flying brigh
tness of a kindled hour?

  Not always, nor alone, the lives that search

  How they may snatch a glory out of heaven

  Or add a height to Babel; oftener they

  That in the still fulfilment of each day’s

  Pacific order hold great deeds in leash,

  That in the sober sheath of tranquil tasks

  Hide the attempered blade of high emprise,

  And leap like lightning to the clap of fate.

  So greatly gave he, nurturing ’gainst the call

  Of one rare moment all the daily store

  Of joy distilled from the acquitted task,

  And that deliberate rashness which bespeaks

  The pondered action passed into the blood;

  So swift to harden purpose into deed

  That, with the wind of ruin in his hair,

  Soul sprang full-statured from the broken flesh,

  And at one stroke he lived the whole of life,

  Poured all in one libation to the truth,

  A brimming cup whose drops shall overflow

  On deserts of the soul long beaten down

  By the brute hoof of habit, till they spring

  In manifold upheaval to the sun.

  Call here no high artificer to raise

  His wordy monument--such lives as these

  Make death a dull misnomer and its pomp

  An empty vesture. Let resounding lives

  Re-echo splendidly through high-piled vaults

  And make the grave their spokesman--such as he

  Are as the hidden streams that, underground,

  Sweeten the pastures for the grazing kine,

  Or as spring airs that bring through prison bars

  The scent of freedom; or a light that burns

  Immutably across the shaken seas,

  Forevermore by nameless hands renewed,

  Where else were darkness and a glutted shore.

  "The Old Pole Star." Scribner’s Magazine 43 (Jan. 1908): 68. By Edith Wharton

  BEFORE the clepsydra had bound the days

  Man tethered Change to his fixed star, and said:

  "The elder races, that long since are dead,

  Marched by that light; it swerves not from its base

  Though all the worlds about it wax and fade."

  When Egypt saw it, fast in reeling spheres,

  Her Pyramids shaft-centred on its ray

  She reared and said: "Long as this star holds sway

  In uninvaded ether, shall the years

  Revere my monuments--" and went her way.

  The Pyramids abide; but through the shaft

  That held the polar pivot, eye to eye,

  Look now--blank nothingness! As though Change laughed

  At man’s presumption and his puny craft,