The osprey of the shore resigned her reign
Before the raven of the stricken plain,
And she before the vulture of the hills:
So far had Orpheus travelled: now the rills
More frequent glittered on the guttered clift,
And he arrived the vast Taenarian# rift:
Across his path the rapid serpent shot,
The bristling wolf with mouth all panting hot;
And now he stood upon the ruined base
Of Neptune's temple; 'twas an awful place,
Built long ago by men Cyclopian,
Now mouldered into ruin, wasted, wan,
Open to heaven, and beat by every storm.
There on the fragments lay the stony form
Of the great monarch of green waves, beside
A cavern deep, whose mouth his bulk did hide
Far stretched the desolate landscape from the height;
The nearer valleys hidden were from sight
By many a ridge with dwarfish copses clad;
And from each hollow rising white and sad
The mist crept up from where the ridges fell
In parallels of ruin toward the dell:
The river with its cold and wandering stream
All suddenly to sink in earth did seem,
Although afar its mazes serpentine
Wound languidly and with pale gleam did shine,
Where through the infirm plain it felt its way:
And on the utmost bound of sight there lay
What seemed the spectre of a city white;
But ah, as even then the wanderer's sight
Took comfort in the thought that men were there,
The cloudy cheat is scattered into air;
And in a moment, lightning-fraught, it sails
Tumultuous on the currents of the gales.
Whence had he come, that wanderer; seeking what,
That lightning answered him? Who knows not that?
Who knows not how among the dead he sought
Eurydice the dead? — With fiery thought,
In answer to that burst of cloudy fire,
He grasps the chords of his compelling lyre,
Draws in his hand, and flings upon the air
The first of that wild burden of despair
Where sorrow, anguish, pain, regret, became
An incantation of fine force to tame
Brute nature, crossing Jove, relentless Fate,
Life to transmute, death to reanimate.
Earth hath no more that magic; sorrow's art
Man long hath lost, though keeping sorrow's heart.
And, as arose that Orphic strain, began
A wondrous dew to fall around the man,
Seeming an element for harmony,
Which the sweet music summoned from the sky;
Such elemental dew as might contain
The four primaevals# in its purple grain;
Soft, aqueous-bodied, with ignescent gleams,
Toward earth it flutters and through air it teems:
And as it thickened, the descending flush
Invested all the earth; its ceaseless rush
Hummed resolutely, till uprose a sense
That nought could be impossible from hence
Which music or the soul of love would see;
That wonders from henceforth had power to be,
Nought inconsistent, nought repulsive, nought
Impossible, which man in music sought
Ah, so it still might be, could sorrow's soul
Commingle with the universal whole:
For then that sorrow, that large human dower,
Which is the best we keep, were made a power
To win us back our heaven: but sorrow's art
Man hath lost long; he keeps but sorrow's heart.
The music prospered, growing stern and strange
With thoughts of great successions, thoughts of change,
Thoughts about moonlit hills where shadows stretch;
About wild fires that chase the panting wretch;
About grim splintered forests on old mounts;
About the sea; about the eternal founts
Of light and darkness; Hyperborean tracts;
Riphoean summits; Pontic cataracts;
Concussions strange from inward labours brought
Of mother earth, or ocean overwrought,
Or bursting winds; when seas have yielded place
To earth, and islands sunk without a trace:
Creation moved in answer to the vast
Emotions of the mind on which 'tis massed
This was the lore of sorrow; sorrow's art
Man knows no more, though sorrow break his heart.
Anon the inspired thought did deeper draw
Upon the sources of eternal law;
And that was bruited on the thrilling strings
Which lies beneath the universe of things,
The unity which is the base of all,
Causing diversity with mystical
Resemblance, which is truth: in each there is
Conscience or self; the same in all is this;
This is eternal, this for aye inheres
In trodden clods as in the rolling spheres,
In beasts, in men, in gods; this makes all one,
Partakers of an awful unison,
Which from an ever-brimming fount of life
Procureth peace in spite of hate and strife,
And harmonizes, since all need must sway
With the essential motion, need must stay
With the eternal rest: nor bitter fate
Can shatter, frustrate, force, nor alienate
That argument of sorrow and that art
No more hath man; he hath but sorrow's heart
But now a mighty moving was begun
About that desert, neath the shadowed sun;
And presently in a fantastic rout
The creatures all enchanted came about;
The rabbit left his burrow; from his mound
The blind mole rolled, and cried upon the ground;
Large herds of deer tossed their convicted heads;
Wild horses circled round; the brakes, the beds
Of silent underwood rustled and spake
In various signs; the sloth was wide awake;
The very serpent left the covert's root,
Advancing his horned head toward the lute;
Her flank the stealthy wild-cat dared confide
Uncovered, by the open forest's side.
But what is this, when with prepared hand
The minstrel smites, as with a tenfold wand,
More mastery, more magic, art than art
More mighty, that hath turned e'en sorrow's heart
To use of life against usurping ill?
What is it that the very heavens doth fill
With sound that doth entrance them like the light
Of speeding suns, whose rippling lustre-flight
Confounds the clouds in glory? Is it now
The tumult of the secret's bubbling flow
Which underlies the awful heart of things,
Solving itself to those melodious strings?
What is it that so bows the mountain down,
And the great forest rocks from root to crown,
Which bids unthunderous lightnings come and go,
Like breath from the cloud-lips which hover so?
For now he sings of love; could he proceed,
And name not love, the inmost spirit's creed,
Who knew the heart of sorrow and the art?
Therefore behold now heaven and earth dispart
In momentary rhythm, when soul and sense
With blind extreme of ecstasy intense
Blended and interfused, avow things new
Each for the other, each in form and hue:
And all the moving air, with giddiness
Transported into light, doth now impress
A wondrous transformation on the earth:
Vast-shaped shadows issue into birth
At the still speeding of the silent winds,
And overhang with pomp the many kinds
Of fretted forest, mountain, plain, below;
Far off the land from heaven's rich overflow
Imbibes aerial tints; far off the light
Strikes into splendour distant glen or height;
But he, who lifts his keen face neath the vast
And heavy curtains of the sky o'ercast,
While from the chords his daring hand he stays,
Expects the consummation of amaze,
The sorrowing marvel of the solved skies.
A cold wind passes; and fierce shocks surprise
Those slow sublimities; a radiant flood
Of light supernal bursts o'er hill and wood,
And smites the eyeballs of the lifted face
Now might he gain the heaven, now might raise
Himself on pinions of eternal youth;
The latitude, the amplitude of truth
He might for ever now achieve, made nigh
To those serener regions of the sky
Above all change, where no time-cloud doth sail,
But an eternal zephyr waves the veil
Of changeless azure, and earth's days return
Like a faint blush below; ah, he might learn
Eternal joy and stillness. Shall he so?
Far other destiny doth Love bestow
Upon the children whom he honours most:
For at that mighty moment, when the coast
Of heaven he might in ecstasy attain,
Yawns the dread cave wherein the dead remain;
The sea-god's statue, like a giant bole
Uprooted, leaps from out the charnel-hole;
And Love, the exalter, is the summoner
To places all with writhing shades astir;
A peal of groans comes ringing on his ear,
And the distressful furrows toss with fear,
And he descends; whom not all sorrow's art
Could ransom from the pangs of sorrow's heart.