Classic Poem

When Death espoused her, she was fair …
They made a bright mask of her face,
With gold upon it here and there,
Before they swathed and laid her low
Within her carven mummy-case,
Four thousand years ago.

She dwelt where Memnon sang the dawn
In fiercer, brighter, franker years,
Before the cautious world grew wan
With thought and self-consuming fears …
Life, then, soared on a redder wing,
A cruel, less laggard, lewder thing …
Then, if a splendid dream of art
Stirred at some monarch's eager heart
He wrought it, lord-like, into stone;
A million men of baser clay,
A million slaves to lash and slay,
Was not too great a price to pay
If quick and bold his vision shone,
A marvel in the morning-glow,
Four thousand years ago.

She lies so still, so very still …
And yet, upon this woman's whim,
Her female and her regal will,
The tact and temper of her tongue,
“Tremendous trifles” may have hung …
So blurred, so buried, far away,
The life she loved and looked upon! …
And yet it was but yesterday
That from her palace roof at dawn,
Through rolling dust clouds red and dim,
She saw the chariots, lion-drawn,
And ranks of shaken spears go forth
To battle in the veilèd North
Beyond the desert's rim …
Perchance some warrior below
Clanged farewell to her, watching so,
Four thousand years ago.

Upon a beating night of stars,
That pulsed and throbbed in purple space,
And struck pale flame along the bars
That ribbed and ridged the loitering Nile,
She listened (with her woman's smile)
While the young Moses, face to face,
In her, with God and mystery,
Groped for his nobler destiny,
Thrilled to the brooding Ghost above
Glamour and woman, stars and love,
Mounted beyond his man's desire,
(And yet because of her!) was stirred
To grasp and stammer brokenly
His first conception of that Word
Which Sinai later sealed with fire …
Perchance these lacquered ears first heard
The heart of human history!
If so, I doubt she understood
That faint, first hint of brotherhood,
Or knew his dream, or cared to know,
Four thousand years ago.

Here lies she, like a lotos furled—
A petal hardened to a gem
That glimmers in Death's diadem—
Long dead! … But up and down the world
May fly some swift and winged thought,
May walk some living word she wrought …
Nay, she herself, in other clay,
May pass through these dim aisles some day!
May stand bemused beside this bier
The while a surmise, stumbling, blind,
Gropes through the chambers of her mind,
Till vague remembrance growing clear
Rings bell-like to her inner ear:
“This was my dust, that lieth here!”
And I … why should I dream and rhyme
And muse and murmur o'er her so? …
Was I some minstrel of her time
Who dared to love her and aspire,
Who died to compass his desire,
Four thousand years ago?