Five Sonnets

1 Now lift the burden of your pagan hair, And shame the sun; now stretch your eager hands, And with your lily-fingers fasten bands About me. I am Prometheus, and so dare. Your eyes are vultures and my heart their fare, But you are something no one understands, You are the spirit of the falling sands, You are the color that is lost in prayer. I am Prometheus, but your dreams conceive New subtle desolations for desire, Holding aloft the gold unbroken bowl. What wisdom of black art can so deceive? For though it is the guerdon of my soul, I cannot reach to steal that Titan fire. 2 Let the Hippolytuses make their prayers To altars of cold death, and let them take The dead results their clear libations make, Or with bowed head climb up the golden stairs. The glory of their dying is all theirs Who have found fire only about the stake,— It is a pity we should try to break The perfect symmetry of their despairs. But we who are the children of our birth Loving the clay we are, and are to be, Find more sufficient life wherein we spawn, And eat and drink, mere creatures of the earth, And so endure with less fragility The sun and starlight of the lonely dawn. 3 I cannot watch this dawn with humble eyes, Feel the wind on my forehead, and not feel My genius and my destiny reveal Themselves unto the surge of that surmise, Nor with a humdrum and dust-worn surprise Can I unveil the λόγος you conceal, Or praise the Potter or the Potter’s wheel For having made the beautiful that dies. It is with a new light I find my way, But you have given that; it is your light. And if I walked in darkness as of old, I should not blame the Gods, nor shall I say That they have changed into this day the night, Or fashioned of my crown of thorns this gold. 4 Could I foresee the Truth gleaming ahead Out of our common reach, but in my own, I should not go unto that perilous throne To lose myself among the famous dead. For in the glory where a martyr’s bled Lurks a renunciation of the known,— His wine is salty, and his bread a stone.... Mine is a sparkling wine, mine sweetened bread. I care not for a deathless imagery With you a living image by my side, Nor for a visioned truth with you the true. I need no Godhood save the gift of pride To make my idol my idolatry, And me insatiate of only you. 5 A moment hold that pose for my applause: My heart’s an artist; it would paint its fill. Let you the model be the test of skill Whether or not your eye or mine’s the cause. No need this moment for artistic laws; Lost in the poem is the prosaic will—, My art is lost in you. And do you kill The picture moving so?—A moment pause. So goes the brush on canvas, so the rhyme, And so mortality. What do we fear If there be only a moment, so that lives? The aeon passes, and no dream regives Its passion repetition in our time. Pause for a moment. There is beauty here. MAXWELL E. FOSTER.