Sonett-Forum

I

Northward, he dream'd, in Judah's vine-clad hills,
of gold and gems, earth's jealous-hoarded flower,
garner'd within Jehovah's temple-sills:
and sterile wisdom crown'd his brow with power.

Where burnt Arabia, named the Happy, spills
above the silken seas that gird her bower
rich heat of spice her chymic sun distils,
she dwelt, and lonely beauty was her dower.

The desert lay between them; yet they knew
each one of each, and love and longing grew:
she came: and desert blossom'd where she came.

And now their tale beguiles a wandering race
where, parch'd by the hard sun's indifferent flame,
one yellow desert billows o'er their place.

II.

Because he felt against his hundred years
the beating of the wings of Azrael,
the Master, he that watch'd o'er Afrit fears
building the Temple incorruptible,

palm-propt on guile of cedarn wands, uprears
his dreadful stature in the crystal cell
that thence, tho' death unsaint their magian spheres,
erect, his eyes might dwell, implacable.

So, when at last the worm-pierc'd cedar snapt
and, at the sound of his great fall, the Jinn
sail'd clamorously towards Eblis, disabused,

long since his temple-tomb stood builded apt
where we might feel the night that haunts our sin
vaster, that once a mighty spirit mused.

III

Where Soliman-ben-Daoud sleeps, unshown
to mortal eye, the vaulted bay of gloom
stagnates, aloft, into the pendent stone,
his Temple's roots, long wither'd in his tomb.

Chin-high against his flaming sword, alone,
brooding far hence in heaven's untarnish'd bloom,
a seraph bars all passage to the throne
where, priestly dight, the Master bides the doom.

Dully his mitre blazes o'er his brow
whereunder the dead eyes, wide-set, avow
the terror of the day that he awaits:

and, o'er his mitre's peak, his word of might,
figured in solid fire, irradiates
its sterile secret into oblivious night.

IIII

In Eblis' ward now fall'n, where wisdom rose,
beyond the East and past the fane-strown sands,
are jasper caverns hewn of Afrit hands,
whereover Caf hath hung its huge repose.

There, in the limpid pave, a cloudy rose
mirrors eternal agony, in bands
of saddening purple shed from shrouded strands
where the snared sun a fix'd disaster glows.

A ruby of harden'd flame, an ice-bound woe,
burns in their crystal breast whose wizard brow
was gemm'd with name of Soliman long before

him shaped that pluck'd the golden apple low:
they royal with this only magic now
that, dying, they die not for evermore.