Muriel Stuart

“ Because I have played the rose's part too long.
Who plays the rose must pay the rose's price,
And be a rose or nothing till it dies.
And even then sometimes the blood will answer fierce and strong
To the old hunger, to the old dance, old tune;
I shall feel cruel and passionate and mad
Though I have lost the look of June.
The fever of the past will burn my hands
As men who live long in intemperate lands
Feel the old ague wring them, far removed
From the old dreadful glitter of seas and sands.
The rose dies hard in women who have had
Lovers all their lives, and have been much loved. ”

“ The magic that we call the rose.
The gentle history of the rain
Has been unfolded, traced and lost
By the sharp finger-tips of frost;
Birds in the hawthorn build again;
The hare makes soft her secret house;
The wind at tourney comes and goes,
Spurring the green, unharnessed boughs;
The moon has waxed fierce and waned dim:
He knew the beauty of all those
Last year, and who remembers him?
Love sometimes walks the waters still,
Laughter throws back her radiant head;
Utterly beauty is not gone,
And wonder is not wholly dead.
The starry, mortal world rolls on ”

“ We weary not for love and lips to love us;
These have been ours too often and too long;
We have been hived too close; too sweet above us
Tastes the bee's mouth to our honey-wearied tongue.
Not love, not love! Love was our first undoing,
We have lived too long on heart-beats. None can tame
The mind's new hunger, famished and pursuing,
Unleashed, and crying its oppressor's name.
All that the world could give man's mind inherits:
Two paths were set us. ”

“ You are not such as these
"Who have striven for laurels, and never knew the shade
"Upon their brows, who would persuade the rose,
"And never have come near it; till the head
"Bows and the heart breaks, and the spirit knows
"Only its failure, dim and featureless,—
"Its weariness of all things dreamed and done,
"When love and grief alike seem emptiness
"And fame and man's unrecognition one." ”

“ We quest for beauty on Thy hills like hounds,
Let these poor rhymers babble as they will,
Filling their pipes with shrill and crazy sounds.
Poets still praise Thee, music still abounds,
And Beauty knows the hour of Thy return,
For the Gods live albeit temples burn,
Suffer the fools their folly, let them be,
Wreathing each other with their wreaths of straw,
Trailing their pageants of the mud; but we
Await Thy laurel on our brows with awe. ”

“ CHORUS OF FIRST WOMEN.
Oh sheltering arms that have bound you,
Oh hearts you have shaped to your will!
The lordliest lovers have crowned you,
They have knelt as they kneel to you still.
Why speak you so ill of such lovers,
Why question the will of such lords?
For your lips, for your laughter, Love offers
The world on a litter of swords,
They have borne for you death and disasters,
They have held you with kingdoms at stake.
The kings of the earth and the masters
Were poets and fools for your sake!
ANDROMEDA.
Was I made free for all their swords and songs? ”

“ Shall the hill-top outspread a pavilion more safe than our
palaces hold?
Without toil we are fed,
We have gold to our hire,
We have kings at our thrall,
And made smooth is our bed
For the fools of desire.
We falter the world with our eyelids, at our laughter men
scatter and fall.
What is freedom but danger,
And death and disaster?
We are safe: Fool, to crave
The unknown, the stranger!
More fettered the back than the burden; man bows ”

“ A foolish trick to make the rose more strangely gay
Is now a close-locked, mortal conflict of brain and blood—
A feud too old to settle or renounce.
I shall grow too tired to struggle, and the fight will end,
And they will enter in at last—
Nature and Time, long thwarted of their prey,
Those old grey two, more cruel for the lips that said them "Nay,"
For the bitterest foe is he who in the past
Has been repulsed when he would fain be friend. ”

“ Corrupt and fierce through Sparta's line.
Bred through me—bred through delicate hands
And wandering eyes and wanton lips,
Sighing after strange flesh as sighed these lips,
Straying after new sin as strayed these hands.
Mother of Helen! She whose breasts
To new desires unshaped the world;
Above Troy's summit towered these breasts,
Helen who wantoned with the world!
Helen is dead (she had love enough
To laugh at doom and mock at shrine)
And Clytemnestra, quiet enough
To-night beneath Apollo's shrine.
And I am left, the source, the spring
Of all their madness. ”

“ Her eyelids lifted wide again
In a blue, sudden stare.
Beneath my fierce, profane caress
The whole white length of body moved;
The drowsy bosom seemed to press
As if against a breast beloved,
Then fail for weariness.
No, not that anguish! Christ forbid
That I should raise such dead! I rose,
Stifled the mouth with lilies, hid
Those eyes, and drew the long hair close,
And shut the coffin lid.
My cold brow on the cold wood laid,
Quiet and close to-night we lie.
No cruel words her lips have said.
I shall not take nor she deny.
The dead is with the dead. ”

“ I am the Slave to whom sick masters pray.
I am the Mother. I am Magdalen.
I am the Dæmon, I drink at dead men's lips.
My Grail is blood at midnight. I am burned
In witchcraft. I am the Weal of the world's whips.
No age has risen that has not seen me scorned.
I am the Harlot, the Accursed Thing, the Prey;
Bartered for bread; like cattle willed away;
Sold at the shambles. I am the Chastity
Men breed for spoiling. I am the Soul at bay.
I am what men have made and marred of me.
CHORUS OF SECOND WOMEN.
Oh, behold, oh, beware,
Andromeda! ...
A wing on the air,
A step on the sands! ”

“ Greener leaves than yours are lost in every spring
Rubies far redder thrust their eager rays
Into the blindfold dark for many days
Before men chose them for a finger-ring.
Sing as you dare, not as men choose, receive not
The passing fashion's prize, for dole or due—
Men's summer-sweet unrecognition—grieve not:
Oh, stoop not to them! Better far that you
Should go unsung than sing as you believe not,
Should go uncrowned than to yourselves untrue. ”

“ When I am dead, nor turn your lips away
From Phryne's silver limbs and Faustine's kiss.
I need no pity. No word of pity say.
I have given a new sweet name and crown to this
That served men's lust and was Aspasia.
A SONG FOR OLD LOVE.
There shall be a song for both of us that day
Though fools say you have long outlived your songs,
And when, perhaps, because your hair is grey,
You go unsung, to whom all praise belongs,
And no men kiss your hands—your fragile hands
Folded like empty shells on sea-spurned sands. ”

“ Dripping with honey, and with syrups drowsed
To draw bee-murmurs from the dreaming lute—
Words gold and mad and headlong in pursuit
Of laughter; words that are too sweet to say
And fade, unsaid, upon some rose's mouth;—
Words soft as winds that ever blow one way,
The summer way, the long way from the south.
For such words have high lineage, and were known
Of Milton once, whose heart on theirs still beats;
Marlowe hurled forth huge stars to make them crown;
They are stained still with the dying lips of Keats;
As queens they trod the cloak in Shakespeare's streets ”

“ Burst from the dark root of our long frustration!
ANDROMEDA.
Did God but build this temple for desire
That man defraud my birthright with a kiss?
Did he not give me a spirit to aspire
Beyond man's fortunes and necessities?
Man chains the thing he fears, who fears the free;
No wildest beast was tamed as I was tamed,
No prey has been so tracked, no flesh so shamed;
Man hunts no quarry as he hunted me.
Of all the things created one alone
Rose from the earth his equal ”

“ With its hissing, furious hair, the eyelids burned
With the eyes' hate, slime where the lips have been,
That tumbled death upon him like a stone;
And in your name Medusa smiled and spurned
A dying face more dreadful than her own.
ANDROMEDA.
The shackled feet of centuries cannot keep
Pace yet with feet that have outstripped the world.
For the maimed even the riven way is steep. ”

“ With creatures lovely and wild and sane and free;
Till the Image of God arose from the dust and trod
Woman and beast and bird into slavery.
Who has wronged me? Man who all earth has wronged:
Who has mocked me? Man, who made mock of God. ”

“ And his poor hour of pride is waned and passed:
The rightful lord fears never to be just.
CHORUS OF SECOND WOMEN.
Stars, you run your course unchidden;
Sun, the sky puts forth no hand
To constrain you; unforbidden
Clouds in aery harness stand;
And unchallenged comes the moon up, bright and slow upon the land.
Dew, no shadow moves beside you
To avert your glittering;
Wind, your race is undenied you;
Lightning, you have room to spring!
For the great, free hand of Nature gives sweet leave to everything.
One great law controls their being,—
To their utmost bids them rise ”

“ Men crown the crow, they have given the jackal wings.
Slaves wear the peplum, beggars ride as kings.
They couple foolish words and look for birth
Of mighty emperor, Christ or Avatar,
They mate with slaves from whom no king comes forth;
No child is theirs who follow not the Star. ”

“ Or doing desperate things to lips and eyes.
They have so pitifully short a flowering time,
So suddenly sweet a story so soon told.
They only strive to keep what men have taught them most to prize—
Men who have longer, fuller lives to live,
Who are not stopped and broken in their prime,
With their faces still to summer, Men do not know
What Age says to a woman. ”

“ Has been for ever, and must for ever be.
Man seems the unstable thing,
Fevered and hurrying.
So free of joy, so prodigal of tears,
Yet he can hold his fevers seventy years,
Out-wear sun, rain and frost,
By which you are soon lost.
WORDS.
Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles!—
Usumcasane and Theridamas,
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?—MARLOWE.
Bring the great words that scourge the thundering line
With lust and slaughter—words that reek of doom
And the lost battle and the ruined shrine;—
Words dire and black as midnight on a tomb ”

“ I am now
Almost what you have called me, as things take
The colour of names men give them; as things grow
Fierce if dubbed fierce, and weak if branded weak,
And fools if given no name but foolishness. ”

“ And tremulous twilight, when each lonely one
To its last loneliness must creep away.
Your genius has won its rich repose,
Full laurelled, wearing still the unfaded rose.
And as those who bid good-bye at snowdrop time
Bear with them broken promises of Spring,
So you in triumph,—in the glory men had in you,
In Love's full worshipping,—
High summer thoughts, untouched of Winter's rime,
Went forth with honour, having fulfilled your Spring.
The hands that built you felt you flower from her prayer,
True to her vision true;
Fearless and fine, shaped from her fashioning ”