A Singer Asleep

In this fair niche above the unslumbering sea,That sentrys up and down all night, all day,From cove to promontory, from ness to bay,The Fates have fitly bidden that he should be Pillowed eternally.

—It was as though a garland of red roses5Had fallen about the hood of some smug nunWhen irresponsibly dropped as from the sun,In fulth of numbers freaked with musical closes,Upon Victoria’s formal middle timeHis leaves of rhythm and rhyme.10

O that far morning of a summer dayWhen, down a terraced street whose pavements layGlassing the sunshine into my bent eyes,I walked and read with a quick glad surpriseNew words, in classic guise,⁠—15

The passionate pages of his earlier years,Fraught with hot sighs, sad laughters, kisses, tears;Fresh-fluted notes, yet from a minstrel whoBlew them not naïvely, but as one who knewFull well why thus he blew.20

I still can hear the brabble and the roarAt those thy tunes, O still one, now passed throughThat fitful fire of tongues then entered new!Their power is spent like spindrift on this shore;Thine swells yet more and more.25

—His singing-mistress verily was no otherThan she the Lesbian, she the music-motherOf all the tribe that feel in melodies;Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steepInto the rambling world-encircling deep30Which hides her where none sees.

And one can hold in thought that nightly hereHis phantom may draw down to the water’s brim,And hers come up to meet it, as a dimLone shine upon the heaving hydrosphere,35And mariners wonder as they traverse near,Unknowing of her and him.

One dreams him sighing to her spectral form:“O teacher, where lies hid thy burning line;Where are those songs, O poetess divine40Whose very arts are love incarnadine?”And her smile back: “Disciple true and warm,Sufficient now are thine.” . . .

So here, beneath the waking constellations,Where the waves peal their everlasting strains,45And their dull subterrene reverberationsShake him when storms make mountains of their plains⁠—Him once their peer in sad improvisations,And deft as wind to cleave their frothy manes⁠—I leave him, while the daylight gleam declines50Upon the capes and chines.