Who weeps the fall of Hydra's many heads?
The siren sings and sings, and virtuous men
Bind ears and eyes and sail resolved away
From all her pain that what she loves must die,
That her desire, though lovely in her song
Is mortal in her kiss to mortal men.
The feline Sphinx roamed free as air and smiled
In the dry desert at those foolish men
Who saw not that her crafted Riddle's clue
Was merely Man, bare man, no Mystery,
But when they found it out they spilt her blood
For her presumption and her Monstrous shape.
Man named Himself and thus assumed the Power
Over his Questioner, till then his Fate-
After, his Slave and victim.
And what was she, the Fairy Melusine?
Were these her kin, Echidna's gruesome brood,
Scaly devourers, or were those her kind
More kind, those rapid wanderers of the dark
Who in dreamlight, or twilight, or no light
Are lovely Mysteries and promise gifts-
Whiteladies, teasing dryads, shape-changers-
Like smiling clouds, or sparkling threads of streams
Bright monsters of the sea and of the sky
Who answer longing and who threaten not
But vanish in the light of rational day
Doomed by their own desire for human souls,
For settled hearths and fixed human homes.
Shall I presume to tell the Fairy's tale?
Meddle with doom and magic in my song
Or venture out into the shadowland
Beyond the safe and solid? Shall I dare?
Help me Mnemosyne, thou Titaness,
Thou ancient one, daughter of Heaven and Earth,
Mother of Muses, who inhabit not
In flowery mount or crystal spring, but in
The dark and confin'd cavern of the skull-
O Memory, who holds the thread that links
My modern mind to those of ancient days
To the dark dreaming Origins of our race,
When visible and invisible alike
Lay quietly, O thou, the source of speech
Give me wise utterance and safe conduct
From hearthside storytelling into dark
Of outer air, and back again to sleep,
In Christian comfort, in a decent bed.
BOOK I
A draggled knight came riding o'er the moor.
Behind him fear, before him empty space.
His horse, besprent with blood, dispirited,
Came slowly on, and stumbled as he came,
Feeling the rider's slackness, and the reins
Slack too, against his sweat-streaked neck. The day
Drew in, and on the moor small shadows stirred
And ate the heather-roots, and flowed in tongues
Of seal-skin soft and sly insidious shape
Between the hill's clefts and the dark gill's mouth
Whither, for lack of will, they two were drawn.
For all the moor, immense, characterless
Shrubby and shapeless, stretched about their feet
OfFring no point of hold, nor track to guide
Save witless wanderings of nibbling sheep.
Between the wild moor and the mother Sun
Is reciprocity of flash and frown.
When she is hid, the heather's knotted mat
Of purple bell-heather and pinker ling
Lies in an unreflective sullen gloom,
A rough black coat, indifferently cast o'er
The peat and grit and flints, extending on
As far as eye can see, to the high riggs.
But when she smiles, a thousand thousand lights
Gleam out from sprig and floret or from where
The white sand on the crow-stones in the peat
Glitters in tracery 'neath amber pools
Of shining rain, and all the moor is live
Basking and smiling up, as She smiles down.
And after rain, live vapours rise and play
Curvet and eddy over the live ling,
Current and counter-current, like a sea
Or, as the shepherds say, like summer colts
At play above a meadow, or like geese
Who skim the air and water in their flight.
So uniform, so various, is the Moor.
But he rode on, nor looked to right nor left
All lustreless, his first fine fury gone
With which he fled the boar-hunt and the death-
Death at his hand, and death at random dealt
To Aymeri, his kinsman and his Lord.
Defensive stroke working an unkind Fate
On him most kind, most genial and most brave
Whom most he loved and most he wished to spare.
Before his weary eyes a veil of blood
Beat, and his brain beat with its motion
Despair and die, for what is left to do?
Between two boulders bald the horse stepped down
Into a narrow track within a cleft
Whose flanks were wind-blown, clothed with juniper,
Bilberry and stunted thorn-trees. Water oozed
Out of the clammy rock-face, water brown
With juice of peat, and black with powdered soot
From ancient swidden. Neath the heavy hoofs