The Lily of Malud

The lily of Malud is born in secret mud.It is breathed like a word in a little dark ravineWhere no bird was ever heard and no beast was ever seen,And the leaves are never stirred by the panther's velvet sheen.

It blooms once a year in summer moonlight,In a valley of dark fear full of pale moonlight:It blooms once a year, and dies in a night,And its petals disappear with the dawn's first light;And when that night has come, black small-breasted maids,With ecstatic terror dumb, steal fawn-like through the shadesTo watch, hour by hour, the unfolding of the flower.

When the world is full of night, and the moon reigns aloneAnd drowns in silver light the known and the unknown,When each hut is a mound, half blue silver and half black,And casts upon the ground the hard shadow of its back,When the winds are out of hearing and the tree-tops never shake,When the grass in the clearing is silent but awake'Neath a moon-paven sky: all the village is asleepAnd the babes that nightly cry dream deep:From the doors the maidens creep,Tiptoe over dreaming curs, soft, so soft, that not one stirs,And stand curved and a-quiver, like bathers by a river,Looking at the forest wall, groups of slender naked girls,Whose black bodies shine like pearls where the moonbeams fall.They have waked, they knew not why, at a summons from the night,They have stolen fearfully from the dark to the light,Stepping over sleeping men, who have moved and slept again:And they know not why they go to the forest, but they know,As their moth-feet pass to the shore of the grassAnd the forest's dreadful brink, that their tender spirits shrink:They would flee, but cannot turn, for their eyelids burnWith frenzy, and each maid, ere she leaves the moonlit space,If she sees another's face is thrilled and afraid.

Now like little phantom fawns they thread the outer lawnsWhere the boles of giant trees stand about in twos and threes,Till the forest grows more dense and the darkness more intense,And they only sometimes see in a lone moon-rayA dead and spongy trunk in the earth half-sunk,Or the roots of a tree with fungus grey,Or a drift of muddy leaves, or a banded snake that heaves.

And the towering unseen roof grows more intricate, and soonIt is featureless and proof to the lost forgotten moon.But they could not look above as with blind-drawn feet they moveOnwards on the scarce-felt path, with quick and desperate breath,For their circling fingers dread to caress some slimy head,Or to touch the icy shape of a hunched and hairy ape,And at every step they fear in their very midst to hearA lion's rending roar or a tiger's snore....And when things swish or fall, they shiver but dare not call.

O what is it leads the way that they do not stray?What unimagined arm keeps their bodies from harm?What presence concealed lifts their little feet that yieldOver dry ground and wet till their straining eyes are metWith a thinning of the darkness?And the foremost faintly cries in awed surprise:And they one by one emerge from the gloom to the vergeOf a small sunken vale full of moonlight pale.And they hang along the bank, clinging to the branches dank,A shadowy festoon out of sight of the moon;And they see in front of them, rising from the mudA single straight stem and a single pallid budIn that little lake of light from the moon's calm height.

A stem, a ghostly bud, on the moon-swept mudThat shimmers like a pond; and over there beyondThe guardian forest high, menacing and strange,Invades the empty sky with its wild black range.

And they watch hour by hour that small lonely flowerIn that deep forest place that hunter never found.It shines without sound, as a star in space.

And the silence all around that solitary placeIs like silence in a dream; till a sudden flashing gleamDown their dark faces flies; and their lips fall apartAnd their glimmering great eyes with excitement dartAnd their fingers, clutching the branches they were touching,Shake and arouse hissing leaves on the boughs.

And they whisper aswoon: Did it move in the moon?O it moved as it grew!It is moving, opening, with calm and gradual will,And their bodies where they cling are shadowed and stillAnd with marvel they mark that the mud now is darkFor the unfolding flower, like a goddess in her power,Challenges the moon with a light of her own,That lovelily grows as the petals unclose,Wider, more wide with an awful inward pride,Till the heart of it breaks, and stilled is their breath,For the radiance it makes is as wonderful as death.

The morning's crimson stain tinges their ashen browsAs they part the last boughs and slowly step againOn to the village grass, and chill and languid passInto the huts to sleep.Brief slumber, yet so deepThat, when they wake to day, darkness and splendour seemBroken and far away, a faint miraculous dream;And when those maidens rise they are as they ever wereSave only for a rare shade of trouble in their eyes.And the surly thick-lipped men, as they sit about their hutsMaking drums out of guts, grunting gruffly now and then,Carving sticks of ivory, stretching shields of wrinkled skin,Smoothing sinister and thin squatting gods of ebony,Chip and grunt and do not see.But each mother, silently,Longer than her wont stays shut in the dimness of her hut,For she feels a brooding cloud of memory in the air,A lingering thing there that makes her sit bowedWith hollow shining eyes, as the night-fire dies,And stare softly at the ember, and try to rememberSomething sorrowful and far, something sweet and vaguely seenLike an early evening star when the sky is pale green:A quiet silver tower that climbed in an hour,Or a ghost like a flower, or a flower like a queen:Something holy in the past that came and did not last.

But she knows not what it was.