Perhaps the time hasn’t come for him to return,
for him to appear before the world again;
or metamorphosed, perhaps, he goes among us
unrecognized.—But he’ll appear again
as he was, teaching the Right Way. And surely then
he’ll reinstate the worship of our gods,
and our exquisite Hellenic ceremonies.”
So he daydreamed in his threadbare lodging—
after a reading of Philostratus’s
“Life of Apollonius of Tyana”—
one of the few pagans, the very few
who had stayed. Otherwise—an insignificant
and timid man—he, too, outwardly
played the Christian and would go to church.
It was the period during which there reigned,
with the greatest piety, the old man Justin,
and Alexandria, a god-fearing city,
showed its abhorrence of those poor idolators.
[1897; 1910; 1920; 1920]
Young Men of Sidon (400 A.D.)
The actor whom they’d brought to entertain them
declaimed, as well, a few choice epigrams.
The salon opened onto the garden;
and had a delicate fragrance of blooms
that was mingled together with the perfumes
of the five sweetly scented Sidonian youths.
Meleager, and Crinagoras, and Rhianus were read.
But when the actor had declaimed
“Here lies Euphorion’s son, Aeschylus, an Athenian—”
(stressing, perhaps, more than was necessary
the “valour far-renowned,” the “Marathonian lea”),
at once a spirited boy sprang up,
mad for literature, and cried out:
“Oh, I don’t like that quatrain, not at all.
Expressions like that somehow seem like cowardice.
Give—so I proclaim—all your strength to your work,
all your care, and remember your work once more
in times of trial, or when your hour finally comes.
That’s what I expect from you, and what I demand.
And don’t dismiss completely from your mind
the brilliant Discourse of Tragedy—
that Agamemnon, that marvelous Prometheus,
those representations of Orestes and Cassandra,
that Seven Against Thebes—and leave, as your memorial,
only that you, among the ranks of soldiers, the masses—
that you too battled Datis and Artaphernes.”
[1920; 1920]
That They Come—
One candle is enough. Its faint light
is more fitting, will be more winsome
when come Love’s— when its Shadows come.
One candle is enough. Tonight the room
can’t have too much light. In reverie complete,
and in suggestion’s power, and with that little light—
in that reverie: thus will I dream a vision
that there come Love’s— that its Shadows come.
[?; 1920]
Darius
The poet Phernazes is working on
the crucial portion of his epic poem:
the part about how the kingdom of the Persians
was seized by Darius, son of Hystaspes. (Our
glorious king is descended from him:
Mithridates, Dionysus and Eupator.) But here
one needs philosophy; one must explicate
the feelings that Darius must have had:
arrogance and intoxication, perhaps; but no—more
like an awareness of the vanity of grandeur.
Profoundly, the poet ponders the matter.
But he’s interrupted by his servant, who comes
running and delivers the momentous intelligence:
The war with the Romans has begun.
Most of our army has crossed the border.
The poet stays, dumbfounded. What a disaster!
How, now, can our glorious king,
Mithradates, Dionysus and Eupator,
be bothered to pay attention to Greek poems?
In the middle of a war—imagine, Greek poems.
Phernazes frets. What bad luck is his!
Just when he was sure, with his “Darius,”
to make his name, and to reduce his critics,
those envious men, to silence at long last.
What a setback, what a setback for his plans!
And if it had only been a setback: fine.
But
