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Title: Mount Ida
Author: Alfred Noyes [
More Titles by Noyes]
[This poem commemorates an event of some years ago, when a young Englishman--still remembered by many of his contemporaries at Oxford--went up into Mount Ida and was never seen again.]
I
Not cypress, but this warm pine-plumage now
Fragrant with sap, I pluck; nor bid you weep,
Ye Muses that still haunt the heavenly brow
Of Ida, though the ascent is hard and steep:
Weep not for him who left us wrapped in sleep
At dawn beneath the holy mountain's breast
And all alone from Ilion's gleaming shore
Clomb the high sea-ward glens, fain to drink deep
Of earth's old glory from your silent crest,
Take the cloud-conquering throne
Of gods, and gaze alone
Thro' heaven. Darkling we slept who saw his face no more.
II
Ah yet, in him hath Lycidas a brother,
And Adonais will not say him nay,
And Thyrsis to the breast of one sweet Mother
Welcomes him, climbing by the self-same way:
Quietly as a cloud at break of day
Up the long glens of golden dew he stole
(And surely Bion called to him afar!)
The tearful hyacinths and the greenwood spray
Clinging to keep him from the sapphire goal,
Kept of his path no trace!
Upward the yearning face
Clomb the ethereal height, calm as the morning star.
III
Ah yet, incline, dear Sisters, or my song
That with the light wings of the skimming swallow
Must range the reedy slopes, will work him wrong!
And with some golden shaft do thou, Apollo,
Show the pine-shadowed path that none may follow;
For, as the blue air shuts behind a bird,
Round him closed Ida's cloudy woods and rills!
Day-long, night-long, by echoing height and hollow,
We called him, but our tumult died unheard:
Down from the scornful sky
Our faint wing-broken cry
Fluttered and perished among the many-folded hills.
IV
Ay, though we clomb each faint-flushed peak of vision,
Nought but our own sad faces we divined:
Thy radiant way still laughed us to derision,
And still revengeful Echo proved unkind;
And oft our faithless hearts half feared to find
Thy cold corse in some dark mist-drenched ravine
Where the white foam flashed headlong to the sea:
How should we find thee, spirits deaf and blind
Even to the things which we had heard and seen?
Eyes that could see no more
The old light on sea and shore,
What should they hope or fear to find? They found not thee;
V
For thou wast ever alien to our skies,
A wistful stray of radiance on this earth,
A changeling with deep memories in thine eyes
Mistily gazing thro' our loud-voiced mirth
To some fair land beyond the gates of birth;
Yet as a star thro' clouds, thou still didst shed
Through our dark world thy lovelier, rarer glow;
Time, like a picture of but little worth,
Before thy young hand lifelessly outspread,
At one light stroke from thee
Gleamed with Eternity;
Thou gav'st the master's touch, and we--we did not know.
VI
Not though we gazed from heaven o'er Ilion
Dreaming on earth below, mistily crowned
With towering memories, and beyond her shone
The wine-dark seas Achilles heard resound!
Only, and after many days, we found
Dabbled with dew, at border of a wood
Bedded in hyacinths, open and a-glow
Thy Homer's Iliad.... Dryad tears had drowned
The rough Greek type and, as with honey or blood,
One crocus with crushed gold
Stained the great page that told
Of gods that sighed their loves on Ida, long ago.
VII
See--_for a couch to their ambrosial limbs
Even as their golden load of splendour presses
The fragrant thyme, a billowing cloud up-swims
Of springing flowers beneath their deep caresses,
Hyacinth, lotus, crocus, wildernesses
Of bloom_ ... but clouds of sunlight and of dew
Dropping rich balm, round the dark pine-woods curled
That the warm wonder of their in-woven tresses,
And all the secret blisses that they knew,
Where beauty kisses truth
In heaven's deep heart of youth,
Might still be hidden, as thou art, from the heartless world.
VIII
Even as we found thy book, below these rocks
Perchance that strange great eagle's feather lay,
When Ganymede, from feeding of his flocks
On Ida, vanished thro' the morning grey:
Stranger it seemed, if thou couldst cast away
Those golden musics as a thing of nought,
A dream for which no longer thou hadst need!
Ah, was it here then that the break of day
Brought thee the substance for the shadow, taught
Thy soul a swifter road
To ease it of its load
And watch this world of shadows as a dream recede?
IX
We slept! Darkling we slept! Our busy schemes,
Our cold mechanic world awhile was still;
But O, their eyes are blinded even in dreams
Who from the heavenlier Powers withdraw their will:
Here did the dawn with purer light fulfil
Thy happier eyes than ours, here didst thou see
The quivering wonder-light in flower and dew,
The quickening glory of the haunted hill,
The Hamadryad beckoning from the tree.
The Naiad from the stream;
While from her long dark dream
Earth woke, trembling with life, light, beauty, through and through.
X
And the everlasting miracle of things
Flowed round thee, and this dark earth opposed no bar,
And radiant faces from the flowers and springs
Dawned on thee, whispering, _Knowest thou whence_ we _are_?
Faintly thou heardst us calling thee afar
As Hylas heard, swooning beneath the wave,
Girdled with glowing arms, while wood and glen
Echoed his name beneath that rosy star;
And thy farewell came faint as from the grave
For very bliss; but we
Could neither hear nor see;
And all the hill with _Hylas! Hylas!_ rang again.
XI
But there were deeper love-tales for thine ears
Than mellow-tongued Theocritus could tell:
Over him like a sea two thousand years
Had swept. They solemnized his music well!
Farewell! What word could answer but farewell,
From thee, O happy spirit, that couldst steal
So quietly from this world at break of day?
What voice of ours could break the silent spell
Beauty had cast upon thee, or reveal
The gates of sun and dew
Which oped and let thee through
And led thee heavenward by that deep enchanted way?
XII
Yet here thou mad'st thy choice: Love, Wisdom, Power,
As once before young Paris, they stood here!
Beneath them Ida, like one full-blown flower,
Shed her bloom earthward thro' the radiant air
Leaving her rounded fruit, their beauty, bare
To the everlasting dawn; and, in thy palm
The golden apple of the Hesperian isle
Which thou must only yield to the Most Fair;
But not to Juno's great luxurious calm,
Nor Dian's curved white moon,
Gav'st thou the sunset's boon,
Nor to foam-bosomed Aphrodite's rose-lipped smile.
XIII
Here didst thou make the eternal choice aright,
Here, in this hallowed haunt of nymph and faun,
They stood before thee in that great new light,
The three great splendours of the immortal dawn,
With all the cloudy veils of Time withdrawn
Or only glistening round the firm white snows
Of their pure beauty like the golden dew
Brushed from the feathery ferns below the lawn;
But not to cold Diana's morning rose,
Nor to great Juno's frown
Cast thou the apple down,
And, when the Paphian raised her lustrous eyes anew,
XIV
Thou from thy soul didst whisper--_in that heaven
Which yearns beyond us! Lead me up the height!
How should the golden fruit to one be given
Till your three splendours in that Sun unite
Where each in each ye move like light in light?
How should I judge the rapture till I know
The pain?_ And like three waves of music there
They closed thee round, blinding thy blissful sight
With beauty and, like one roseate orb a-glow,
They bore thee on their breasts
Up the sun-smitten crests
And melted with thee smiling into the Most Fair.
XV
Upward and onward, ever as ye went
The cities of the world nestled beneath
Closer, as if in love, round Ida, blent
With alien hills in one great bridal-wreath
Of dawn-flushed clouds; while, breathing with your breath
New heavens mixed with your mounting bliss. Deep eyes,
Beautiful eyes, imbrued with the world's tears
Dawned on you, beautiful gleams of Love and Death
Flowed thro' your questioning with divine replies
From that ineffable height
Dark with excess of light
Where the Ever-living dies and the All-loving hears.
XVI
For thou hadst seen what tears upon man's face
Bled from the heart or burned from out the brain,
And not denied or cursed, but couldst embrace
Infinite sweetness in the heart of pain,
And heardst those universal choirs again
Wherein like waves of one harmonious sea
All our slight dreams of heaven are singing still,
And still the throned Olympians swell the strain,
And, hark, the burden, of all--_Come unto Me!_
Sky into deepening sky
Melts with that one great cry;
And the lost doves of Ida moan on Siloa's hill.
XVII
I gather all the ages in my song
And send them singing up the heights to thee!
Chord by aeonian chord the stars prolong
Their passionate echoes to Eternity:
Earth wakes, and one orchestral symphony
Sweeps o'er the quivering harp-strings of mankind;
Grief modulates into heaven, hate drowns in love,
No strife now but of love in that great sea
Of song! I dream! I dream! Mine eyes grow blind:
Chords that I not command
Escape the fainting hand;
Tears fall. Thou canst not hear. Thou'rt still too far above.
XVIII
Farewell! What word should answer but farewell
From thee, O happy spirit, whose clear gaze
Discerned the path--clear, but unsearchable--
Where Olivet sweetens, deepens, Ida's praise,
The path that strikes as thro' a sunlit haze
Through Time to that clear reconciling height
Where our commingling gleams of godhead dwell;
Strikes thro' the turmoil of our darkling days
To that great harmony where, like light in light,
Wisdom and Beauty still
Haunt the thrice-holy hill,
And Love, immortal Love ... what answer but farewell?
[The end]
Alfred Noyes's poem: Mount Ida
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