The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid

Kusta ben Luka is my name, I writeTo Abd Al-Rabban; fellow roysterer once,Now the good Caliph’s learned Treasurer,And for no ear but his.Carry this letterThrough the great gallery of the Treasure HouseWhere banners of the Caliphs hang, night-colouredBut brilliant as the night’s embroidery,And wait war’s music; pass the little gallery;Pass books of learning from ByzantiumWritten in gold upon a purple stain,And pause at last, I was about to say,At the great book of Sappho’s song; but no,For should you leave my letter there, a boy’sLove-lorn, indifferent hands might come upon itAnd let it fall unnoticed to the floor.Pause at the Treatise of ParmenidesAnd hide it there, for Caliphs to world’s endMust keep that perfect, as they keep her songSo great its fame.When fitting time has passedThe parchment will disclose to some learned manA mystery that else had found no chroniclerBut the wild Bedouin. Though I approveThose wanderers that welcomed in their tentsWhat great Harun Al-Rashid, occupiedWith Persian embassy or Grecian war,Must needs neglect; I cannot hide the truthThat wandering in a desert, featurelessAs air under a wing, can give birds’ wit.In after time they will speak much of meAnd speak but phantasy. Recall the yearWhen our beloved Caliph put to deathHis Vizir Jaffer for an unknown reason;‘If but the shirt upon my body knew itI’d tear it off and throw it in the fire.’That speech was all that the town knew, but heSeemed for a while to have grown young again;Seemed so on purpose, muttered Jaffer’s friends,That none might know that he was conscience struck--But that’s a traitor’s thought. Enough for meThat in the early summer of the yearThe mightiest of the princes of the worldCame to the least considered of his courtiers;Sat down upon the fountain’s marble edgeOne hand amid the goldfish in the pool;And thereupon a colloquy took placeThat I commend to all the chroniclersTo show how violent great hearts can loseTheir bitterness and find the honey-comb.‘I have brought a slender bride into the house;You know the saying “Change the bride with Spring”,And she and I, being sunk in happiness,Cannot endure to think you tread these paths,When evening stirs the jasmine, and yetAre brideless.’‘I am falling into years.’‘But such as you and I do not seem oldLike men who live by habit. Every dayI ride with falcon to the river’s edgeOr carry the ringed mail upon my back,Or court a woman; neither enemy,Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice;And so a hunter carries in the eyeA mimicry of youth. Can poet’s thoughtThat springs from body and in body fallsLike this pure jet, now lost amid blue skyNow bathing lily leaf and fishes’ scale,Be mimicry?’‘What matter if our soulsAre nearer to the surface of the bodyThan souls that start no game and turn no rhyme!The soul’s own youth and not the body’s youthShows through our lineaments. My candle’s bright,My lantern is too loyal not to showThat it was made in your great father’s reign.’‘And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.’

‘Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech;You think that love has seasons, and you thinkThat if the spring bear off what the spring gaveThe heart need suffer no defeat; but IWho have accepted the Byzantine faith,That seems unnatural to Arabian minds,Think when I choose a bride I choose for ever;And if her eye should not grow bright for mineOr brighten only for some younger eye,My heart could never turn from daily ruin,Nor find a remedy.’‘But what if IHave lit upon a woman, who so sharesYour thirst for those old crabbed mysteries,So strains to look beyond our life, an eyeThat never knew that strain would scarce seem bright,And yet herself can seem youth’s very fountain,Being all brimmed with life.’‘Were it but trueI would have found the best that life can give,Companionship in those mysterious thingsThat make a man’s soul or a woman’s soulItself and not some other soul.’‘That loveMust needs be in this life and in what followsUnchanging and at peace, and it is rightEvery philosopher should praise that love.But I being none can praise its opposite.It makes my passion stronger but to thinkLike passion stirs the peacock and his mate,The wild stag and the doe; that mouth to mouthIs a man’s mockery of the changeless soul.’And thereupon his bounty gave what nowCan shake more blossom from autumnal chillThan all my bursting springtime knew. A girlPerched in some window of her mother’s houseHad watched my daily passage to and fro;Had heard impossible history of my past;Imagined some impossible historyLived at my side; thought time’s disfiguring touchGave but more reason for a woman’s care.Yet was it love of me, or was it loveOf the stark mystery that has dazed my sight,Perplexed her phantasy and planned her care?Or did the torchlight of that mysteryPick out my features in such light and shadeTwo contemplating passions chose one themeThrough sheer bewilderment? She had not pacedThe garden paths, nor counted up the rooms,Before she had spread a book upon her kneesAnd asked about the pictures or the text;And often those first days I saw her stareOn old dry writing in a learned tongue,On old dry faggots that could never pleaseThe extravagance of spring; or move a handAs if that writing or the figured pageWere some dear cheek.Upon a moonless nightI sat where I could watch her sleeping form,And wrote by candle-light; but her form moved,And fearing that my light disturbed her sleepI rose that I might screen it with a cloth.I heard her voice, ‘Turn that I may expoundWhat’s bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek’;And saw her sitting upright on the bed;Or was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?I say that a Djinn spoke. A live-long hourShe seemed the learned man and I the child;Truths without father came, truths that no bookOf all the uncounted books that I have read,Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot,Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths,Those terrible implacable straight linesDrawn through the wandering vegetative dream,Even those truths that when my bones are dustMust drive the Arabian host.The voice grew still,And she lay down upon her bed and slept,But woke at the first gleam of day, rose upAnd swept the house and sang about her workIn childish ignorance of all that passed.A dozen nights of natural sleep, and thenWhen the full moon swam to its greatest heightShe rose, and with her eyes shut fast in sleepWalked through the house. Unnoticed and unfeltI wrapped her in a heavy hooded cloak, and she,Half running, dropped at the first ridge of the desertAnd there marked out those emblems on the sandThat day by day I study and marvel at,With her white finger. I led her home asleepAnd once again she rose and swept the houseIn childish ignorance of all that passed.Even to-day, after some seven yearsWhen maybe thrice in every moon her mouthMurmured the wisdom of the desert Djinns,She keeps that ignorance, nor has she nowThat first unnatural interest in my books.It seems enough that I am there; and yetOld fellow student, whose most patient earHeard all the anxiety of my passionate youth,It seems I must buy knowledge with my peace.What if she lose her ignorance and soDream that I love her only for the voice,That every gift and every word of praiseIs but a payment for that midnight voiceThat is to age what milk is to a child!Were she to lose her love, because she had lostHer confidence in mine, or even loseIts first simplicity, love, voice and all,All my fine feathers would be plucked awayAnd I left shivering. The voice has drawnA quality of wisdom from her love’sParticular quality. The signs and shapes;All those abstractions that you fancied wereFrom the great treatise of Parmenides;All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight thingsAre but a new expression of her bodyDrunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.And now my utmost mystery is out.A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner;Under it wisdom stands, and I alone--Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone--Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lostIn the confusion of its night-dark folds,Can hear the armed man speak.