Poem V

Now, scarce three paces measured from the mound,We stumbled on a stationary voice,And 'Stand, who goes?' 'Two from the palace' I.'The second two: they wait,' he said, 'pass on;His Highness wakes:' and one, that clashed in arms,By glimmering lanes and walls of canvas ledThreading the soldier-city, till we heardThe drowsy folds of our great ensign shakeFrom blazoned lions o'er the imperial tentWhispers of war.Entering, the sudden lightDazed me half-blind: I stood and seemed to hear,As in a poplar grove when a light wind wakesA lisping of the innumerous leaf and dies,Each hissing in his neighbour's ear; and thenA strangled titter, out of which there brakeOn all sides, clamouring etiquette to death,Unmeasured mirth; while now the two old kingsBegan to wag their baldness up and down,The fresh young captains flashed their glittering teeth,The huge bush-bearded Barons heaved and blew,And slain with laughter rolled the gilded Squire.

At length my Sire, his rough cheek wet with tears,Panted from weary sides 'King, you are free!We did but keep you surety for our son,If this be he,--or a dragged mawkin, thou,That tends to her bristled grunters in the sludge:'For I was drenched with ooze, and torn with briers,More crumpled than a poppy from the sheath,And all one rag, disprinced from head to heel.Then some one sent beneath his vaulted palmA whispered jest to some one near him, 'Look,He has been among his shadows.' 'Satan takeThe old women and their shadows! (thus the KingRoared) make yourself a man to fight with men.Go: Cyril told us all.'As boys that slinkFrom ferule and the trespass-chiding eye,Away we stole, and transient in a triceFrom what was left of faded woman-sloughTo sheathing splendours and the golden scaleOf harness, issued in the sun, that nowLeapt from the dewy shoulders of the Earth,And hit the Northern hills. Here Cyril met us.A little shy at first, but by and byWe twain, with mutual pardon asked and givenFor stroke and song, resoldered peace, whereonFollowed his tale. Amazed he fled awayThrough the dark land, and later in the nightHad come on Psyche weeping: 'then we fellInto your father's hand, and there she lies,But will not speak, or stir.'He showed a tentA stone-shot off: we entered in, and thereAmong piled arms and rough accoutrements,Pitiful sight, wrapped in a soldier's cloak,Like some sweet sculpture draped from head to foot,And pushed by rude hands from its pedestal,All her fair length upon the ground she lay:And at her head a follower of the camp,A charred and wrinkled piece of womanhood,Sat watching like the watcher by the dead.

Then Florian knelt, and 'Come' he whispered to her,'Lift up your head, sweet sister: lie not thus.What have you done but right? you could not slayMe, nor your prince: look up: be comforted:Sweet is it to have done the thing one ought,When fallen in darker ways.' And likewise I:'Be comforted: have I not lost her too,In whose least act abides the nameless charmThat none has else for me?' She heard, she moved,She moaned, a folded voice; and up she sat,And raised the cloak from brows as pale and smoothAs those that mourn half-shrouded over deathIn deathless marble. 'Her,' she said, 'my friend--Parted from her--betrayed her cause and mine--Where shall I breathe? why kept ye not your faith?O base and bad! what comfort? none for me!'To whom remorseful Cyril, 'Yet I prayTake comfort: live, dear lady, for your child!'At which she lifted up her voice and cried.

'Ah me, my babe, my blossom, ah, my child,My one sweet child, whom I shall see no more!For now will cruel Ida keep her back;And either she will die from want of care,Or sicken with ill-usage, when they sayThe child is hers--for every little fault,The child is hers; and they will beat my girlRemembering her mother: O my flower!Or they will take her, they will make her hard,And she will pass me by in after-lifeWith some cold reverence worse than were she dead.Ill mother that I was to leave her there,To lag behind, scared by the cry they made,The horror of the shame among them all:But I will go and sit beside the doors,And make a wild petition night and day,Until they hate to hear me like a windWailing for ever, till they open to me,And lay my little blossom at my feet,My babe, my sweet Aglaïa, my one child:And I will take her up and go my way,And satisfy my soul with kissing her:Ah! what might that man not deserve of meWho gave me back my child?' 'Be comforted,'Said Cyril, 'you shall have it:' but againShe veiled her brows, and prone she sank, and soLike tender things that being caught feign death,Spoke not, nor stirred.By this a murmur ranThrough all the camp and inward raced the scoutsWith rumour of Prince Arab hard at hand.We left her by the woman, and withoutFound the gray kings at parle: and 'Look you' criedMy father 'that our compact be fulfilled:You have spoilt this child; she laughs at you and man:She wrongs herself, her sex, and me, and him:But red-faced war has rods of steel and fire;She yields, or war.'Then Gama turned to me:'We fear, indeed, you spent a stormy timeWith our strange girl: and yet they say that stillYou love her. Give us, then, your mind at large:How say you, war or not?''Not war, if possible,O king,' I said, 'lest from the abuse of war,The desecrated shrine, the trampled year,The smouldering homestead, and the household flowerTorn from the lintel--all the common wrong--A smoke go up through which I loom to herThree times a monster: now she lightens scornAt him that mars her plan, but then would hate(And every voice she talked with ratify it,And every face she looked on justify it)The general foe. More soluble is this knot,By gentleness than war. I want her love.What were I nigher this although we dashedYour cities into shards with catapults,She would not love;--or brought her chained, a slave,The lifting of whose eyelash is my lord,Not ever would she love; but brooding turnThe book of scorn, till all my flitting chanceWere caught within the record of her wrongs,And crushed to death: and rather, Sire, than thisI would the old God of war himself were dead,Forgotten, rusting on his iron hills,Rotting on some wild shore with ribs of wreck,Or like an old-world mammoth bulked in ice,Not to be molten out.'And roughly spakeMy father, 'Tut, you know them not, the girls.Boy, when I hear you prate I almost thinkThat idiot legend credible. Look you, Sir!Man is the hunter; woman is his game:The sleek and shining creatures of the chase,We hunt them for the beauty of their skins;They love us for it, and we ride them down.Wheedling and siding with them! Out! for shame!Boy, there's no rose that's half so dear to themAs he that does the thing they dare not do,Breathing and sounding beauteous battle, comesWith the air of the trumpet round him, and leaps inAmong the women, snares them by the scoreFlattered and flustered, wins, though dashed with deathHe reddens what he kisses: thus I wonYou mother, a good mother, a good wife,Worth winning; but this firebrand--gentlenessTo such as her! if Cyril spake her true,To catch a dragon in a cherry net,To trip a tigress with a gossamerWere wisdom to it.''Yea but Sire,' I cried,'Wild natures need wise curbs. The soldier? No:What dares not Ida do that she should prizeThe soldier? I beheld her, when she roseThe yesternight, and storming in extremes,Stood for her cause, and flung defiance downGagelike to man, and had not shunned the death,No, not the soldier's: yet I hold her, king,True woman: you clash them all in one,That have as many differences as we.The violet varies from the lily as farAs oak from elm: one loves the soldier, oneThe silken priest of peace, one this, one that,And some unworthily; their sinless faith,A maiden moon that sparkles on a sty,Glorifying clown and satyr; whence they needMore breadth of culture: is not Ida right?They worth it? truer to the law within?Severer in the logic of a life?Twice as magnetic to sweet influencesOf earth and heaven? and she of whom you speak,My mother, looks as whole as some sereneCreation minted in the golden moodsOf sovereign artists; not a thought, a touch,But pure as lines of green that streak the whiteOf the first snowdrop's inner leaves; I say,Not like the piebald miscellany, man,Bursts of great heart and slips in sensual mire,But whole and one: and take them all-in-all,Were we ourselves but half as good, as kind,As truthful, much that Ida claims as rightHad ne'er been mooted, but as frankly theirsAs dues of Nature. To our point: not war:Lest I lose all.''Nay, nay, you spake but sense'Said Gama. 'We remember love ourselfIn our sweet youth; we did not rate him thenThis red-hot iron to be shaped with blows.You talk almost like Ida: she can talk;And there is something in it as you say:But you talk kindlier: we esteem you for it.--He seems a gracious and a gallant Prince,I would he had our daughter: for the rest,Our own detention, why, the causes weighed,Fatherly fears--you used us courteously--We would do much to gratify your Prince--We pardon it; and for your ingress hereUpon the skirt and fringe of our fair land,you did but come as goblins in the night,Nor in the furrow broke the ploughman's head,Nor burnt the grange, nor bussed the milking-maid,Nor robbed the farmer of his bowl of cream:But let your Prince (our royal word upon it,He comes back safe) ride with us to our lines,And speak with Arac: Arac's word is thriceAs ours with Ida: something may be done--I know not what--and ours shall see us friends.You, likewise, our late guests, if so you will,Follow us: who knows? we four may build some planFoursquare to opposition.'Here he reachedWhite hands of farewell to my sire, who growledAn answer which, half-muffled in his beard,Let so much out as gave us leave to go.

Then rode we with the old king across the lawnsBeneath huge trees, a thousand rings of SpringIn every bole, a song on every sprayOf birds that piped their Valentines, and wokeDesire in me to infuse my tale of loveIn the old king's ears, who promised help, and oozedAll o'er with honeyed answer as we rodeAnd blossom-fragrant slipt the heavy dewsGathered by night and peace, with each light airOn our mailed heads: but other thoughts than PeaceBurnt in us, when we saw the embattled squares,And squadrons of the Prince, trampling the flowersWith clamour: for among them rose a cryAs if to greet the king; they made a halt;The horses yelled; they clashed their arms; the drumBeat; merrily-blowing shrilled the martial fife;And in the blast and bray of the long hornAnd serpent-throated bugle, undulatedThe banner: anon to meet us lightly prancedThree captains out; nor ever had I seenSuch thews of men: the midmost and the highestWas Arac: all about his motion clungThe shadow of his sister, as the beamOf the East, that played upon them, made them glanceLike those three stars of the airy Giant's zone,That glitter burnished by the frosty dark;And as the fiery Sirius alters hue,And bickers into red and emerald, shoneTheir morions, washed with morning, as they came.

And I that prated peace, when first I heardWar-music, felt the blind wildbeast of force,Whose home is in the sinews of a man,Stir in me as to strike: then took the kingHis three broad sons; with now a wandering handAnd now a pointed finger, told them all:A common light of smiles at our disguiseBroke from their lips, and, ere the windy jestHad laboured down within his ample lungs,The genial giant, Arac, rolled himselfThrice in the saddle, then burst out in words.

'Our land invaded, 'sdeath! and he himselfYour captive, yet my father wills not war:And, 'sdeath! myself, what care I, war or no?but then this question of your troth remains:And there's a downright honest meaning in her;She flies too high, she flies too high! and yetShe asked but space and fairplay for her scheme;She prest and prest it on me--I myself,What know I of these things? but, life and soul!I thought her half-right talking of her wrongs;I say she flies too high, 'sdeath! what of that?I take her for the flower of womankind,And so I often told her, right or wrong,And, Prince, she can be sweet to those she loves,And, right or wrong, I care not: this is all,I stand upon her side: she made me swear it--'Sdeath--and with solemn rites by candle-light--Swear by St something--I forget her name--Her that talked down the fifty wisest men;She was a princess too; and so I swore.Come, this is all; she will not: waive your claim:If not, the foughten field, what else, at onceDecides it, 'sdeath! against my father's will.'

I lagged in answer loth to render upMy precontract, and loth by brainless warTo cleave the rift of difference deeper yet;Till one of those two brothers, half asideAnd fingering at the hair about his lip,To prick us on to combat 'Like to like!The woman's garment hid the woman's heart.'A taunt that clenched his purpose like a blow!For fiery-short was Cyril's counter-scoff,And sharp I answered, touched upon the pointWhere idle boys are cowards to their shame,'Decide it here: why not? we are three to three.'

Then spake the third 'But three to three? no more?No more, and in our noble sister's cause?More, more, for honour: every captain waitsHungry for honour, angry for his king.More, more some fifty on a side, that eachMay breathe himself, and quick! by overthrowOf these or those, the question settled die.'

'Yea,' answered I, 'for this wreath of air,This flake of rainbow flying on the highestFoam of men's deeds--this honour, if ye will.It needs must be for honour if at all:Since, what decision? if we fail, we fail,And if we win, we fail: she would not keepHer compact.' ''Sdeath! but we will send to her,'Said Arac, 'worthy reasons why she shouldBide by this issue: let our missive through,And you shall have her answer by the word.'

'Boys!' shrieked the old king, but vainlier than a henTo her false daughters in the pool; for noneRegarded; neither seemed there more to say:Back rode we to my father's camp, and foundHe thrice had sent a herald to the gates,To learn if Ida yet would cede our claim,Or by denial flush her babbling wellsWith her own people's life: three times he went:The first, he blew and blew, but none appeared:He battered at the doors; none came: the next,An awful voice within had warned him thence:The third, and those eight daughters of the ploughCame sallying through the gates, and caught his hair,And so belaboured him on rib and cheekThey made him wild: not less one glance he caughtThrough open doors of Ida stationed thereUnshaken, clinging to her purpose, firmThough compassed by two armies and the noiseOf arms; and standing like a stately PineSet in a cataract on an island-crag,When storm is on the heights, and right and leftSucked from the dark heart of the long hills rollThe torrents, dashed to the vale: and yet her willBred will in me to overcome it or fall.

But when I told the king that I was pledgedTo fight in tourney for my bride, he clashedHis iron palms together with a cry;Himself would tilt it out among the lads:But overborne by all his bearded lordsWith reasons drawn from age and state, perforceHe yielded, wroth and red, with fierce demur:And many a bold knight started up in heat,And sware to combat for my claim till death.

All on this side the palace ran the fieldFlat to the garden-wall: and likewise here,Above the garden's glowing blossom-belts,A columned entry shone and marble stairs,And great bronze valves, embossed with TomyrisAnd what she did to Cyrus after fight,But now fast barred: so here upon the flatAll that long morn the lists were hammered up,And all that morn the heralds to and fro,With message and defiance, went and came;Last, Ida's answer, in a royal hand,But shaken here and there, and rolling wordsOration-like. I kissed it and I read.

'O brother, you have known the pangs we felt,What heats of indignation when we heardOf those that iron-cramped their women's feet;Of lands in which at the altar the poor brideGives her harsh groom for bridal-gift a scourge;Of living hearts that crack within the fireWhere smoulder their dead despots; and of those,--Mothers,--that, with all prophetic pity, flingTheir pretty maids in the running flood, and swoopsThe vulture, beak and talon, at the heartMade for all noble motion: and I sawThat equal baseness lived in sleeker timesWith smoother men: the old leaven leavened all:Millions of throats would bawl for civil rights,No woman named: therefore I set my faceAgainst all men, and lived but for mine own.Far off from men I built a fold for them:I stored it full of rich memorial:I fenced it round with gallant institutes,And biting laws to scare the beasts of preyAnd prospered; till a rout of saucy boysBrake on us at our books, and marred our peace,Masked like our maids, blustering I know not whatOf insolence and love, some pretext heldOf baby troth, invalid, since my willSealed not the bond--the striplings! for their sport!--I tamed my leopards: shall I not tame these?Or you? or I? for since you think me touchedIn honour--what, I would not aught of false--Is not our case pure? and whereas I knowYour prowess, Arac, and what mother's bloodYou draw from, fight; you failing, I abideWhat end soever: fail you will not. StillTake not his life: he risked it for my own;His mother lives: yet whatsoe'er you do,Fight and fight well; strike and strike him. O dearBrothers, the woman's Angel guards you, youThe sole men to be mingled with our cause,The sole men we shall prize in the after-time,Your very armour hallowed, and your statuesReared, sung to, when, this gad-fly brushed aside,We plant a solid foot into the Time,And mould a generation strong to moveWith claim on claim from right to right, till sheWhose name is yoked with children's, know herself;And Knowledge in our own land make her free,And, ever following those two crownèd twins,Commerce and conquest, shower the fiery grainOf freedom broadcast over all the orbsBetween the Northern and the Southern morn.'

Then came a postscript dashed across the rest.'See that there be no traitors in your camp:We seem a nest of traitors--none to trustSince our arms failed--this Egypt-plague of men!Almost our maids were better at their homes,Than thus man-girdled here: indeed I thinkOur chiefest comfort is the little childOf one unworthy mother; which she left:She shall not have it back: the child shall growTo prize the authentic mother of her mind.I took it for an hour in mine own bedThis morning: there the tender orphan handsFelt at my heart, and seemed to charm from thenceThe wrath I nursed against the world: farewell.'

I ceased; he said, 'Stubborn, but she may sitUpon a king's right hand in thunder-storms,And breed up warriors! See now, though yourselfBe dazzled by the wildfire Love to sloughsThat swallow common sense, the spindling king,This Gama swamped in lazy tolerance.When the man wants weight, the woman takes it up,And topples down the scales; but this is fixtAs are the roots of earth and base of all;Man for the field and woman for the hearth:Man for the sword and for the needle she:Man with the head and woman with the heart:Man to command and woman to obey;All else confusion. Look you! the gray mareIs ill to live with, when her whinny shrillsFrom tile to scullery, and her small goodmanShrinks in his arm-chair while the fires of HellMix with his hearth: but you--she's yet a colt--Take, break her: strongly groomed and straitly curbedShe might not rank with those detestableThat let the bantling scald at home, and brawlTheir rights and wrongs like potherbs in the street.They say she's comely; there's the fairer chance:I like her none the less for rating at her!Besides, the woman wed is not as we,But suffers change of frame. A lusty braceOf twins may weed her of her folly. Boy,The bearing and the training of a childIs woman's wisdom.'Thus the hard old king:I took my leave, for it was nearly noon:I pored upon her letter which I held,And on the little clause 'take not his life:'I mused on that wild morning in the woods,And on the 'Follow, follow, thou shalt win:'I thought on all the wrathful king had said,And how the strange betrothment was to end:Then I remembered that burnt sorcerer's curseThat one should fight with shadows and should fall;And like a flash the weird affection came:King, camp and college turned to hollow shows;I seemed to move in old memorial tilts,And doing battle with forgotten ghosts,To dream myself the shadow of a dream:And ere I woke it was the point of noon,The lists were ready. Empanoplied and plumedWe entered in, and waited, fifty thereOpposed to fifty, till the trumpet blaredAt the barrier like a wild horn in a landOf echoes, and a moment, and once moreThe trumpet, and again: at which the stormOf galloping hoofs bare on the ridge of spearsAnd riders front to front, until they closedIn conflict with the crash of shivering points,And thunder. Yet it seemed a dream, I dreamedOf fighting. On his haunches rose the steed,And into fiery splinters leapt the lance,And out of stricken helmets sprang the fire.Part sat like rocks: part reeled but kept their seats:Part rolled on the earth and rose again and drew:Part stumbled mixt with floundering horses. DownFrom those two bulks at Arac's side, and downFrom Arac's arm, as from a giant's flail,The large blows rained, as here and everywhereHe rode the mellay, lord of the ringing lists,And all the plain,--brand, mace, and shaft, and shield--Shocked, like an iron-clanging anvil bangedWith hammers; till I thought, can this be heFrom Gama's dwarfish loins? if this be so,The mother makes us most--and in my dreamI glanced aside, and saw the palace-frontAlive with fluttering scarfs and ladies' eyes,And highest, among the statues, statuelike,Between a cymballed Miriam and a Jael,With Psyche's babe, was Ida watching us,A single band of gold about her hair,Like a Saint's glory up in heaven: but sheNo saint--inexorable--no tenderness--Too hard, too cruel: yet she sees me fight,Yea, let her see me fall! and with that I draveAmong the thickest and bore down a Prince,And Cyril, one. Yea, let me make my dreamAll that I would. But that large-moulded man,His visage all agrin as at a wake,Made at me through the press, and, staggering backWith stroke on stroke the horse and horseman, cameAs comes a pillar of electric cloud,Flaying the roofs and sucking up the drains,And shadowing down the champaign till it strikesOn a wood, and takes, and breaks, and cracks, and splits,And twists the grain with such a roar that EarthReels, and the herdsmen cry; for everythingGave way before him: only Florian, heThat loved me closer than his own right eye,Thrust in between; but Arac rode him down:And Cyril seeing it, pushed against the Prince,With Psyche's colour round his helmet, tough,Strong, supple, sinew-corded, apt at arms;But tougher, heavier, stronger, he that smoteAnd threw him: last I spurred; I felt my veinsStretch with fierce heat; a moment hand to hand,And sword to sword, and horse to horse we hung,Till I struck out and shouted; the blade glanced,I did but shear a feather, and dream and truthFlowed from me; darkness closed me; and I fell.

Home they brought her warrior dead:She nor swooned, nor uttered cry:All her maidens, watching, said,'She must weep or she will die.'

Then they praised him, soft and low,Called him worthy to be loved,Truest friend and noblest foe;Yet she neither spoke nor moved.

Stole a maiden from her place,Lightly to the warrior stept,Took the face-cloth from the face;Yet she neither moved nor wept.

Rose a nurse of ninety years,Set his child upon her knee--Like summer tempest came her tears--'Sweet my child, I live for thee.'