Classic Poem

I

A PRIL on Martinique;
Day's end, and the moon,
Trimming her slender bows to ride
The soft clouds scarlet-strewn.
Two in a tropic shade
Above Saint Pierre's sickle
That reaps the breakers at their feet,
White breakers, Caribbean and sweet
With the foam's plunge and trickle.

Two in a tropic shade;
Sylvette, " the Nightingale,"
And Raymond dark with the sea's tan,
But both with love pale.
Sylvette, the Nightingale,
And he born to the sea
On the other side of Mont Pelee
Whose jungled slopes gave that day
No hint of destiny.

For long had the fair isle
Been held in a deep trance,
As if the sea clasping it round
Had found at last romance —
A mystic blue romance
So dear, in the embrace —
That like the yearning lovers there
It seemed no more to be aware
Of Pelee's scarry face.

And so, as the moon dipt
And rose and dipt again,
As all the odorous dusk
Swept through the clinging twain;
As all the tropic stir
Of passion trembling grew —
Sylvette lay in her lover's arms
And both were speechless with the charms
That night around them threw.

Until, " Sylvette," fell low
From Raymond's parted lips,
" My ship to-morrow, with the dawn,
Out of the roadstead slips."
He said no more, but gazed
Into her Creole eyes.
A pensive palm above them waved
One plume against the skies.
The want between them was the want
That ever in love lies.

So deep she gave it back,
His look of want, of passion.
Until a sudden terror shook
Her lips, that grew ashen.
And, " Non, Raymond," she said,
Loosing his hand that pressed
Too close around her tenderness,
Too near unto her breast,
" Non, non, ami! I love you, but — — "
Her throat refused the rest.

But his low voice went on,
" To-night! give me to-night!
Your mother sleeps, oh my petite.
Grant me this one delight.
Come with me through the hedge
Of sweet hibiscus flowers
To the little hidden chapel there
Amid deserted bowers —
Hidden and waiting for our love,
Nestled in the night hours."

His words were Nature's own,
Pleading with deep desire.
Yet she looking at Mont Pelee
Beheld it grow dire, —
Though no sign from it fell,
Above the city's sickle,
That lay studded with lights below:
So strength out of her seemed to flow
And fate within to trickle.

Till soon her full heart felt
That rather than refuse
Her lover love she would all life
And Life Eternal lose.
And how else could she choose?
For was not the wide night
One vast sweet mystery to make
All things that love does right?
She kissed him yieldingly, and went —
In dumb Mont Pelee's sight.

Yet scarcely had they slipt
Under the scented shade
To where the little chapel-roof
Blotted a purple glade;
Scarce had they trembled in,
Where none now ever came,
Than Pelee, long extinct, sent up
From a slow heart of flame
A slender omen-puff of smoke —
The first in a dread game.


II

The hours pass, it is dawn.
And on the sea's fairway
Sylvette is watching a silver ship
Through dark smoke drift away.
Sylvette at her window-sill,
With rose and jessamine sick —
Her soul tangled in the shame mesh
Of her remorseful guilty flesh,
Her brain with fears thick.

The hot sun finds her so.
And spent now is the spell.
Dread seems the little chapel-roof,
And dread the matin-bell.
For as the sweet sound quivers
Within her, resonant,
The earth beneath her faintly shivers
And out of Pelee dark smoke-rivers
Sudden and pale pant.

And somewhere under her
She hears a Creole cry.
Then a fear-murmur from the streets
That down below her lie.
And many an anxious eye
She sees turn to the north
Where Pelee writes upon the sky
A warning to the gazing throng
To fly, fly, fly!

A warning brief — and then
Seeming to pass away,
Though still a little dust falls
Volcanic day by day.
A pallid sift of dust
That turns the green to grey,
And that upon Sylvette's sick cheek
As on her heart, remorse-weak,
A terror seems to lay.

But still the city's sickle
Reaps the white breakers in,
And many mocking at all fear
Lift up a lavish din.
And these Sylvette passing
One day cries out against,
As a Cassandra sudden cries,
Out of her guilt's harassing,
" You know not what you do! Fly!
Or soon — be recompenst!

" For I" — she meant to tell
Her sin there in the chapel,
Since it was seeming now to her
As Eve's, after the Apple.
But their hot laughing lips
Hushed her, and as she went
They cried, " Old Pelee at his worst
Can only add dust to our thirst!"
And so they drank unspent.

But she, the night through, tossed
Upon her torrid bed.
For there had come into her heart
A thought, horror-fed.
A thought that she had sinned
Against the Holy Ghost —
There in the Shrine had taken love
Where men had sought the Host.
And she was strangled in the stain
As in a sea almost.

So when dawn rose again —
Dawn stifled with wan dust
Poured out of Pelee's poison throat
Whence lightnings now were thrust,
She cried, " I will! I must!
For Wrath on them is coming.
Because of this hot sin of mine
The hordes of Hell are humming.
To the people I will tell my shame,
Its awful guilt summing."

So out of doors she ran,
Half-clothed, her white breasts bare,
Snatching the dust of Pelee up
To strew her brow and hair,
And crazedly chanting, crying —
She once " the Nightingale" —
" Hear me, oh people, hear! and fly!
Or soon you will be dying,
For I have sinned the sin of sins,
On the altar of Christ lying!

" On the altar of Christ and Mary
Taking my love and lust!
God shall destroy the world for it,
See now His burning dust."
And they about her listened
And some with fear were grey
As her frenzied eyes glistened —
And some to Mont Pelee
Looked up as if to heed her word
And haste thence away.

But doom comes of delaying.
And doom came now — so swift
That with a groaning angry heave
The whole isle seemed to lift,
And from the side of Pelee
A hurricane tongue burst,
A swollen tongue of singeing gas —
A fiery thing accurst —
That swept them — and the city —
Ere they could moan " Alas!"

And it took Sylvette and strangled
Her little crying throat,
And all the thousands with her
And the few that heard her note
Of piteous mad repentance,
For in all Saint Pierre
But one was left to tell Raymond
What thing had happened there —
To tell him, when he staggered back,
Of Pelee's awful flare.

And now when April comes
And day's end, and the moon,
Still trimming slender bows to ride
The soft clouds scarlet-strewn,
You may see Raymond wander
Amid the ruined maze;
But no word has he for you —
Only a ruined gaze;
For he is seeking his Sylvette —
And so will seek, always.