The Story of Saville/Part 4
IV.
To women alone doth love, bright love, come as a perfect joy,
A lily uncankered, pure virgin gold, flawless and free from alloy,—
Faithfully, gladly they serve, who win, for tending the boy god’s flame,
Guerdon of agonized travail and death and often a pilloried shame,—
They, sweet souls, do rapturous leap at the sound of Love’s entering,
Ask not where he has hidden his lash, but worship and crown him king.
Men, it may be, have a loftier look, a glimpse of the anguish and tears,
And see in the baby’s bassinette the corpse of seventy years,
The rift that must come in the lute at last, the worm that works in the bud,—
However it be, I only know their love is a vice in the blood,
A season of poignant tormenting, of pleasure elusive and vague,
A maelstrom engulfing, to be forever dreaded and shunned like the plague,—
To men, pink palpitant Eros seems a skeleton earthily gaunt,
And their kindest word for the fluttering shape is “Horrible monster, avaunt!”
But when into Kyrle’s existence blank, arid as African sands,
Into the barrenness marred and vexed by alien tongues and hands,
An angel’s voice rang heavenly high, and a star in his pathway fell,
Welcomer ’twas to the lonely man than water in nethermost hell.
He troubled no more for his future weal than violets do in May,
For steadily, softly gleamed the star; sufficient from day to day
It was to hearken and ponder the words the Fairy Saville would say,
Though ever he questioned his dubious heart, “Can this great miracle be,—
Does this magnificent passion-flower blossom alone for me?
Or hath she served an apprenticeship and gilded her fancy’s pen
Coldly dipping it, artisan-wise, in the blood of a score of men?”—
But soon these petty misgivings fled,—what mattered it if she had won
Her bountiful largess of healing under a fostering sun,
Or rooted on some bleak headland, torn by the mistral harsh,
Or midst of the drooping cypresses and beaded moss of a marsh,—
For she spoke not alone with the cold precision and icy glitter of thought,
That of itself no poetry forms, but all of her speech was wrought
With fluctuant gleams of the light divine that never on sea or land
Doth shine, but only in vestal hearts that tremble and understand,
And whether she struck with a touch assured the silver strings of her lyre,
’Till the whole wood rang to a rhapsody as of a seraph choir,
Or whether she wailed in a minor key, sad as the coo of a dove,
Briny with tears as the ocean foam, a bittersweet story of love,
Or whether elegiac, organ-deep, she chanted a dirge-refrain,
Or of rivulets warbled and resinous buds and burgeon of meadow and plain,
Eloquent utterance, gracile as palms, poppies of fire and of dew,
Bloomed at his need like the manna of old, and grateful he listened and knew
That God, who forbade him to read a poem, was letting him live one through,
And his wing-clipt faith grew whole once more, spurning its shackles and bars,
And he soared on pinions steady and strong to the gracious accessible stars,
And man was honest and woman was true and the Infinite God was kind,
And the world was a fair pure world again, and only his eyes were blind,
And he bowed his head to the All-wise Will, embracing the doom assigned.
