Classic Poem

Then the day came when Midianitish legions
Assembled where the Shunem hills commence,
And pitched thereon their desecrating tents,
And roamed and reveled through Gilboan regions.

And Saul, aroused from lethargy and sadness,
Grew strangely troubled and was sore afraid;
His god of promises refused him aid,
And in his eyes there gleamed the fires of madness.

Distrust and fitful omens overfilled him;
Blinded with doubt he could not see his way;
Too proud to die, too vacillant to pray,
Visions of death and of disaster chilled him.

Then I, the scorned, the baffled, the unheeded,
I, the poor outcast courtesan, the one
He would not pitifully look upon,
I, the frail harlot who had vainly pleaded,

Bribed with my gold and ill-begotten treasure
His falsest friends and made their households rich,
And he was bidden by them to seek a witch,
Consult the stars and brave his God's displeasure.

And he gave heed unto them, broken-hearted,
Weary of shallow nights and morbid days;
And through Manasseh, in quick, silent ways,
Unto En-dor I secretly departed.

There did I find, in wildernesses dismal,
A cave forsaken amid all solitude,
High in cold mountains where the eagles brood,
Above a precipice of depth abysmal,

Humid and dark, where noisome larvae shimmered,
Foul with dank reptiles and the stench of eft,
By dizzy lightning at the summit cleft,
And where the unwholesome moonbeams vaguely glimmered.

Now Saul had cast forth, by deluded fancy,
Each ill-reputed wizard from the land;
And torments terrible had long been planned
For all who dealt in charms and necromancy.

And for a space I deemed some foulest hater,
One I had bribed and pitilessly spurned
When for my kisses amorous he yearned,
Had broken all trust and turned on me a traitor.

But no! I heard his step, and doubt was shaken;
By night he came, and timorous, in disguise,
In great extremity, with wandering eyes,
Fasting and pale, and by his God forsaken!

I met him at the cave's bleak door, convulsive,
Wrinkled, in fetid rags, made foul by art,
And lulled the soft throbs of my leaping heart,
Crouching before him, squalid and repulsive.

But under all this filthy abomination;
Swathed in soft satin to my trembling knees,
My redolent body burned in tempting ease,
Perfumed and gemmed I stood in expectation.

And though my lust restrained and new ambition
Urged me to rush to him with arms outspread,
With cunning shrewd I simulated dread
And in shrill tones asked then his wish and mission.

He told me all in stammering consternation,
His vast desires, the longings of his soul,
And, in dire anguish beyond all control,
Implored the succor of my incantation.

And I, the artful pythoness, to alarm him
With subtle sorceries and hold him fast,
Did fill with miasmal herbs a cauldron vast,
While muttering foolish syllables to charm him.

And at his feet, by cautious care assembled,
I burned mephitic drugs and venoms dire,
With adder skins and pestilential briar,
While he, my Saul, the strong one, watched and trembled.

Then by swift, dextrous tricks and transpositions,
Before his credulous eyes I made pass by
Majestic shapes, like those of gods on high,
Grim, hollow ghosts and woeful apparitions!

My tutored slaves, obedient as I willed it,
Arose in glamoured mist and told to him
All I had taught them in my earliest whim,
And awed his dumb, attentive heart and chilled it.

And by my rapid signs admonitory,
Rising from doleful and phantasmal gloom,
Before him suddenly did largely loom
The angered prophet Samuel, grave and hoary.

And as Saul gazed, bewildered and pathetic,
With cold lips moving in unconscious prayer,
Of all my wiles perfidious unaware,
The spirit spake in sentences prophetic.

And he who heard these ominous tones, affrighted,
Fell prone unto the earth in livid fear,
While I rejoiced to know and feel him near,
And pressed his nerveless form to mine, delighted.