Renascence: A Book of Verse — The Sirens Three XXI - XL

XXII

But through the veil of night, around me there, Rose towering shapes clothed in the voiceless air, Like kings enthroned amid their powers’ decay— Statue, and ruined shrine, and temple bare: XXIII

Dolmen, and sphinx, and Greek or Gothic fane, The shattered caskets of man’s winged brain, Whose flight hath left them empty, desolate, Sublime in ruin on the crumbling plain.

XXIV

The perished bodies frail that once did house His restless soul, and heard his sacred vows To his own likeness, dressed in speech or stone, Ere he forswore them for some fairer spouse.

XXV

He sought for Truth, and cried, “Where dost thou dwell?

” Ten thousand tongues replied, but none could tell: They held their peace, and then the stones did cry— “Lo!

Truth sits naked by the wayside well.

” XXVI

She sitteth naked since they drove her out From Babel of the Creeds to wastes of Doubt;

There hath she wandered long in dens and caves, Through Custom’s winter, and through Reason’s drought.

XXVII

They would have cloaked her as a shameful thing;

Force brought her chains, and Fraud a marriage ring, But Truth, affrighted, fled the market place Where lies were coined in gold, and Craft was king.

XXVIII

And still she flies from sacred fount, and school, When man defiles, or doth his kind befool;

And still they wait, the halt, the lame, the blind, Though Truth, the angel, troubleth not the pool.

XXIX

A wandering spirit in this street of tombs, I sought her yet who still to travel dooms, From hostel unto hostel o’er the waste, Her votaries the fitful lamp illumes.

XXX

But ere the dawn stood trembling at night’s gate, Dark as the night, I reached a portal great, Wide to the homeless wind, defaced and bare, While yet it spake of power, and antique state, XXXI

Of pillared hall and chambers large and fair, Which Thought and Art had carven and made rare, As life by life was laid with stone on stone, Or flowed through marble veins the beams to bear;

XXXII

And flowered aloft in capital and frieze, As roof and wall high rose with years’ increase;

Withal did slow decay still gild and stain, Or like a stealthy robber climbed to seize.

XXXIII

Strange lights from windows glared, and stranger sound Of mingled mourners’ grief and revel round— Sad discords from a world’s disorder wrung— With music broke upon the desert bound.

XXXIV

A fountain in the forecourt sullen slept, One wintry tree beside it, wind beswept, And shorn of its last leaves, which strewed the stone, Like one above the water, drooped and wept.

XXXV

And at the threshold, on the shattered stair, In raiment sad one sate as cloaked in care;

There, too, her sister shape in vernal green, The lintel old did hang with garlands fair.

XXXVI

“Who,” then I would have cried, “art thou that weep?

And why with mourning festal garlands heap?

Why thus, though kindred, are your hearts in twain!

O Sisters weird this magic house who keep?

XXXVII

“This magic house, so fair, so disarrayed, What god, what demon first its foundings laid?

Who thus its treasure to Oblivion casts, Still hungering at the gate but never stayed?

” XXXVIII

And I was answered ere my thought found tongue, As pealing from the gate their voices rung, Like wailing harp and voice together heard;

With ear intent upon their speech I hung.

XXXIX

“Let no man ask, but he who doth not shrink To stand at gaze upon thought’s giddy brink, Where breaks the endless sea, and ebbs and flows The tides of life and death that Time doth drink.

XL

“Time’s very house is this, his daughters we, Ruin and Renovation, thou dost see, That sweep or garnish, and its chambers fit For grief or joy, or whatso guests may be.