George Sterling
Reading edition
A LEGEND OF THE DOVE
Soft from the linden’s bough,
Unmoved against the tranquil afternoon,
Eve’s dove laments her now:
“Ah, gone! long gone! shall not I find thee soon?”
That yearning in his voice
Told not to Paradise a sorrow’s tale:
As other birds rejoice
He sang, a brother to the nightingale.
By twilight on her breast
He saw the flower sleep, the star awake;
And calling her from rest,
Made all the dawn melodious for her sake.
318And then the Tempter’s breath,
The sword of exile and the mortal chain—
The heritage of death
That gave her heart to dust, his own to pain....
In Eden desolate
The seraph heard his lonely music swoon,
As now, reiterate;
“Ah, gone! long gone! shall not I find thee soon?”
KINDRED
Musing, between the sunset and the dark,
As Twilight in unhesitating hands
Bore from the faint horizon’s underlands,
Silvern and chill, the moon’s phantasmal ark,
I heard the sea, and far away could mark
Where that unalterable waste expands
In sevenfold sapphire from the mournful sands,
And saw beyond the deep a vibrant spark.
There sank the sun Arcturus, and I thought:
Star, by an ocean on a world of thine,
May not a being, born like me to die,
Confront a little the eternal Naught
And watch our isolated sun decline—
Sad for his evanescence, even as I?
OMNIA EXEUNT IN MYSTERIUM
The stranger in my gates—lo! that am I,
And what my land of birth I do not know,
Nor yet the hidden land to which I go.
One may be lord of many ere he die,
And tell of many sorrows in one sigh,
But know himself he shall not, nor his woe,
Nor to what sea the tears of wisdom flow;
Nor why one star is taken from the sky.
319An urging is upon him evermore,
And though he bide, his soul is wanderer,
Scanning the shadows with a sense of haste—
Where fade the tracks of all who went before:
A dim and solitary traveller
On ways that end in evening and the waste.
THE LAST DAYS
The russet leaves of the sycamore
Lie at last on the valley floor—
By the autumn wind swept to and fro
Like ghosts in a tale of long ago.
Shallow and clear the Carmel glides
Where the willows droop on its vine-walled sides.
The bracken-rust is red on the hill;
The pines stand brooding, somber and still;
Gray are the cliffs, and the waters gray,
Where the seagulls dip to the sea-born spray.
Sad November, lady of rain,
Sends the goose-wedge over again.
Wilder now, for the verdure’s birth,
Falls the sunlight over the earth;
Kildees call from the fields where now
The banding blackbirds follow the plow;
Rustling poplar and brittle weed
Whisper low to the river-reed.
Days departing linger and sigh:
Stars come soon to the quiet sky;
Buried voices, intimate, strange,
Cry to body and soul of change;
Beauty, eternal fugitive,
Seeks the home that we cannot give.
320