III. Captain Craig, Etc.   
17. Variations of Greek Themes   
     
I
A HAPPY MAN
(Carphyllides)


WHEN these graven lines you see,      
Traveler, do not pity me;      
Though I be among the dead,      
Let no mournful word be said.      
   
Children that I leave behind,           5   
And their children, all were kind;      
Near to them and to my wife,      
I was happy all my life.      
   
My three sons I married right,      
And their sons I rocked at night;          10   
Death nor sorrow ever brought      
Cause for one unhappy thought.      
   
Now, and with no need of tears,      
Here they leave me, full of years,—      
Leave me to my quiet rest          15   
In the region of the blest.      
   
II
A MIGHTY RUNNER
(Nicarchus)


THE DAY when Charmus ran with five      
In Arcady, as I’m alive,      
He came in seventh.—“Five and one      
Make seven, you say? It can’t be done.”—          20   
Well, if you think it needs a note,      
A friend in a fur overcoat      
Ran with him, crying all the while,      
“You’ll beat ’em, Charmus, by a mile!”      
And so he came in seventh.          25   
Therefore, good Zoilus, you see      
The thing is plain as plain can be;      
And with four more for company,      
He would have been eleventh.      
   
III
THE RAVEN
(Nicarchus)


THE GLOOM of death is on the raven’s wing,          30   
  The song of death is in the raven’s cries:      
But when Demophilus begins to sing,      
  The raven dies.      
   
IV
EUTYCHIDES
(Lucilius)


EUTYCHIDES, who wrote the songs,      
Is going down where he belongs.          35   
O you unhappy ones, beware:      
Eutychides will soon be there!      
For he is coming with twelve lyres,      
And with more than twice twelve quires      
Of the stuff that he has done          40   
In the world from which he’s gone.      
Ah, now must you know death indeed,      
For he is coming with all speed;      
And with Eutychides in Hell,      
Where’s a poor tortured soul to dwell?          45   
   
V
DORICHA
(Posidippus)


SO now the very bones of you are gone      
Where they were dust and ashes long ago;      
And there was the last ribbon you tied on      
To bind your hair, and that is dust also;      
And somewhere there is dust that was of old          50   
A soft and scented garment that you wore—      
The same that once till dawn did closely fold      
You in with fair Charaxus, fair no more.      
   
But Sappho, and the white leaves of her song,      
Will make your name a word for all to learn,          55   
And all to love thereafter, even while      
It’s but a name; and this will be as long      
As there are distant ships that will return      
Again to your Naucratis and the Nile.      
   
VI
THE DUST OF TIMAS
(Sappho)


THIS dust was Timas; and they say          60   
That almost on her wedding day      
She found her bridal home to be      
The dark house of Persephone.      
   
And many maidens, knowing then      
That she would not come back again,          65   
Unbound their curls; and all in tears,      
They cut them off with sharpened shears.      
   
VII
ARETEMIAS
(Antipater of Sidon)


I’M sure I see it all now as it was,      
When first you set your foot upon the shore      
Where dim Cocytus flows for evermore,          70   
And how it came to pass      
That all those Dorian women who are there      
In Hades, and still fair,      
Came up to you, so young, and wept and smiled      
When they beheld you and your little child.          75   
And then, I’m sure, with tears upon your face      
To be in that sad place,      
You told of the two children you had borne,      
And then of Euphron, whom you leave to mourn.      
“One stays with him,” you said,          80   
“And this one I bring with me to the dead.”      
   
VIII
THE OLD STORY
(Marcus Argentarius)


LIKE many a one, when you had gold      
Love met you smiling, we are told;      
But now that all your gold is gone,      
Love leaves you hungry and alone.          85   
   
And women, who have called you more      
Sweet names than ever were before,      
Will ask another now to tell      
What man you are and where you dwell.      
   
Was ever anyone but you          90   
So long in learning what is true?      
Must you find only at the end      
That who has nothing has no friend?      
   
IX
TO-MORROW
(Macedonius)


TO-MORROW? Then your one word left is always now the same;      
And that’s a word that names a day that has no more a name.          95   
To-morrow, I have learned at last, is all you have to give:      
The rest will be another’s now, as long as I may live.      
You will see me in the evening?—And what evening has there been,      
Since time began with women, but old age and wrinkled skin?      
   
X
LAIS TO APHRODITE
(Plato)


WHEN I, poor Lais, with my crown         100   
Of beauty could laugh Hellas down,      
Young lovers crowded at my door,      
Where now my lovers come no more.      
   
So, Goddess, you will not refuse      
A mirror that has now no use;         105   
For what I was I cannot be,      
And what I am I will not see.      
   
XI
AN INSCRIPTION BY THE SEA
(Glaucus)


NO dust have I to cover me,      
  My grave no man may show;      
My tomb is this unending sea,         110   
  And I lie far below.      
My fate, O stranger, was to drown;      
And where it was the ship went down      
  Is what the sea-birds know.

III. Captain Craig, Etc.   
18. The Field of Glory   
     
WAR shook the land where Levi dwelt,      
And fired the dismal wrath he felt,      
That such a doom was ever wrought      
As his, to toil while others fought;      
To toil, to dream—and still to dream,           5   
With one day barren as another;      
To consummate, as it would seem,      
The dry despair of his old mother.      
   
Far off one afternoon began      
The sound of man destroying man;          10   
And Levi, sick with nameless rage,      
Condemned again his heritage,      
And sighed for scars that might have come,      
And would, if once he could have sundered      
Those harsh, inhering claims of home          15   
That held him while he cursed and wondered.      
   
Another day, and then there came,      
Rough, bloody, ribald, hungry, lame,      
But yet themselves, to Levi’s door,      
Two remnants of the day before.          20   
They laughed at him and what he sought;      
They jeered him, and his painful acre;      
But Levi knew that they had fought,      
And left their manners to their Maker.      
   
That night, for the grim widow’s ears,          25   
With hopes that hid themselves in fears,      
He told of arms, and fiery deeds,      
Whereat one leaps the while he reads,      
And said he’d be no more a clown,      
While others drew the breath of battle.—          30   
The mother looked him up and down,      
And laughed—a scant laugh with a rattle.      
   
She told him what she found to tell,      
And Levi listened, and heard well      
Some admonitions of a voice          35   
That left him no cause to rejoice.—      
He sought a friend, and found the stars,      
And prayed aloud that they should aid him;      
But they said not a word of wars,      
Or of a reason why God made him.          40   
   
And who’s of this or that estate      
We do not wholly calculate,      
When baffling shades that shift and cling      
Are not without their glimmering;      
When even Levi, tired of faith,          45   
Beloved of none, forgot by many,      
Dismissed as an inferior wraith,      
Reborn may be as great as any.

IV. Merlin   
I   
     
“GAWAINE, GAWAINE, what look ye for to see,      
So far beyond the faint edge of the world?      
D’ye look to see the lady Vivian,      
Pursued by divers ominous vile demons      
That have another king more fierce than ours?           5   
Or think ye that if ye look far enough      
And hard enough into the feathery west      
Ye’ll have a glimmer of the Grail itself?      
And if ye look for neither Grail nor lady,      
What look ye for to see, Gawaine, Gawaine?”          10   
   
So Dagonet, whom Arthur made a knight      
Because he loved him as he laughed at him,      
Intoned his idle presence on a day      
To Gawaine, who had thought himself alone,      
Had there been in him thought of anything          15   
Save what was murmured now in Camelot      
Of Merlin’s hushed and all but unconfirmed      
Appearance out of Brittany. It was heard      
At first there was a ghost in Arthur’s palace,      
But soon among the scullions and anon          20   
Among the knights a firmer credit held      
All tongues from uttering what all glances told—      
Though not for long. Gawaine, this afternoon,      
Fearing he might say more to Lancelot      
Of Merlin’s rumor-laden resurrection          25   
Than Lancelot would have an ear to cherish,      
Had sauntered off with his imagination      
To Merlin’s Rock, where now there was no Merlin      
To meditate upon a whispering town      
Below him in the silence.—Once he said          30   
To Gawaine: “You are young; and that being so,      
Behold the shining city of our dreams      
And of our King.”—“Long live the King,” said Gawaine.—      
“Long live the King,” said Merlin after him;      
“Better for me that I shall not be King;          35   
Wherefore I say again, Long live the King,      
And add, God save him, also, and all kings—      
All kings and queens. I speak in general.      
Kings have I known that were but weary men      
With no stout appetite for more than peace          40   
That was not made for them.”—“Nor were they made      
For kings,” Gawaine said, laughing.—“You are young,      
Gawaine, and you may one day hold the world      
Between your fingers, knowing not what it is      
That you are holding. Better for you and me,          45   
I think, that we shall not be kings.”      
   
        Gawaine,      
Remembering Merlin’s words of long ago,      
Frowned as he thought, and having frowned again,      
He smiled and threw an acorn at a lizard:          50   
“There’s more afoot and in the air to-day      
Than what is good for Camelot. Merlin      
May or may not know all, but he said well      
To say to me that he would not be King.      
Nor more would I be King.” Far down he gazed          55   
On Camelot, until he made of it      
A phantom town of many stillnesses,      
Not reared for men to dwell in, or for kings      
To reign in, without omens and obscure      
Familiars to bring terror to their days;          60   
For though a knight, and one as hard at arms      
As any, save the fate-begotten few      
That all acknowledged or in envy loathed,      
He felt a foreign sort of creeping up      
And down him, as of moist things in the dark,—          65   
When Dagonet, coming on him unawares,      
Presuming on his title of Sir Fool,      
Addressed him and crooned on till he was done:      
“What look ye for to see, Gawaine, Gawaine?”      
   
“Sir Dagonet, you best and wariest          70   
Of all dishonest men, I look through Time,      
For sight of what it is that is to be.      
I look to see it, though I see it not.      
I see a town down there that holds a king,      
And over it I see a few small clouds—          75   
Like feathers in the west, as you observe;      
And I shall see no more this afternoon      
Than what there is around us every day,      
Unless you have a skill that I have not      
To ferret the invisible for rats.”          80   
   
“If you see what’s around us every day,      
You need no other showing to go mad.      
Remember that and take it home with you;      
And say tonight, ‘I had it of a fool—      
With no immediate obliquity          85   
For this one or for that one, or for me.’”      
Gawaine, having risen, eyed the fool curiously:      
“I’ll not forget I had it of a knight,      
Whose only folly is to fool himself;      
And as for making other men to laugh,          90   
And so forget their sins and selves a little,      
There’s no great folly there. So keep it up,      
As long as you’ve a legend or a song,      
And have whatever sport of us you like      
Till havoc is the word and we fall howling.          95   
For I’ve a guess there may not be so loud      
A sound of laughing here in Camelot      
When Merlin goes again to his gay grave      
In Brittany. To mention lesser terrors,      
Men say his beard is gone.”         100   
   
        “Do men say that?”      
A twitch of an impatient weariness      
Played for a moment over the lean face      
Of Dagonet, who reasoned inwardly:      
“The friendly zeal of this inquiring knight         105   
Will overtake his tact and leave it squealing,      
One of these days.”—Gawaine looked hard at him:      
“If I be too familiar with a fool,      
I’m on the way to be another fool,”      
He mused, and owned a rueful qualm within him:         110   
“Yes, Dagonet,” he ventured, with a laugh,      
“Men tell me that his beard has vanished wholly,      
And that he shines now as the Lord’s anointed,      
And wears the valiance of an ageless youth      
Crowned with a glory of eternal peace.”         115   
   
Dagonet, smiling strangely, shook his head:      
“I grant your valiance of a kind of youth      
To Merlin, but your crown of peace I question;      
For, though I know no more than any churl      
Who pinches any chambermaid soever         120   
In the King’s palace, I look not to Merlin      
For peace, when out of his peculiar tomb      
He comes again to Camelot. Time swings      
A mighty scythe, and some day all your peace      
Goes down before its edge like so much clover.         125   
No, it is not for peace that Merlin comes,      
Without a trumpet—and without a beard,      
If what you say men say of him be true—      
Nor yet for sudden war.”      
   
        Gawaine, for a moment,         130   
Met then the ambiguous gaze of Dagonet,      
And, making nothing of it, looked abroad      
As if at something cheerful on all sides,      
And back again to the fool’s unasking eyes:      
“Well, Dagonet, if Merlin would have peace,         135   
Let Merlin stay away from Brittany,”      
Said he, with admiration for the man      
Whom Folly called a fool: “And we have known him;      
We knew him once when he knew everything.”      
   
“He knew as much as God would let him know         140   
Until he met the lady Vivian.      
I tell you that, for the world knows all that;      
Also it knows he told the King one day      
That he was to be buried, and alive,      
In Brittany; and that the King should see         145   
The face of him no more. Then Merlin sailed      
Away to Vivian in Broceliande,      
Where now she crowns him and herself with flowers      
And feeds him fruits and wines and many foods      
Of many savors, and sweet ortolans.         150   
Wise books of every lore of every land      
Are there to fill his days, if he require them,      
And there are players of all instruments—      
Flutes, hautboys, drums, and viols; and she sings      
To Merlin, till he trembles in her arms         155   
And there forgets that any town alive      
Had ever such a name as Camelot.      
So Vivian holds him with her love, they say,      
And he, who has no age, has not grown old.      
I swear to nothing, but that’s what they say.         160   
That’s being buried in Broceliande      
For too much wisdom and clairvoyancy.      
But you and all who live, Gawaine, have heard      
This tale, or many like it, more than once;      
And you must know that Love, when Love invites         165   
Philosophy to play, plays high and wins,      
Or low and loses. And you say to me,      
‘If Merlin would have peace, let Merlin stay      
Away from Brittany.’ Gawaine, you are young,      
And Merlin’s in his grave.”         170   
   
        “Merlin said once      
That I was young, and it’s a joy for me      
That I am here to listen while you say it.      
Young or not young, if that be burial,      
May I be buried long before I die.         175   
I might be worse than young; I might be old.”—      
Dagonet answered, and without a smile:      
“Somehow I fancy Merlin saying that;      
A fancy—a mere fancy.” Then he smiled:      
“And such a doom as his may be for you,         180   
Gawaine, should your untiring divination      
Delve in the veiled eternal mysteries      
Too far to be a pleasure for the Lord.      
And when you stake your wisdom for a woman,      
Compute the woman to be worth a grave,         185   
As Merlin did, and say no more about it.      
But Vivian, she played high. Oh, very high!      
Flutes, hautboys, drums, and viols,—and her love.      
Gawaine, farewell.”      
   
        “Farewell, Sir Dagonet,         190   
And may the devil take you presently.”      
He followed with a vexed and envious eye,      
And with an arid laugh, Sir Dagonet’s      
Departure, till his gaunt obscurity      
Was cloaked and lost amid the glimmering trees.         195   
“Poor fool!” he murmured. “Or am I the fool?      
With all my fast ascendency in arms,      
That ominous clown is nearer to the King      
Than I am—yet; and God knows what he knows,      
And what his wits infer from what he sees         200   
And feels and hears. I wonder what he knows      
Of Lancelot, or what I might know now,      
Could I have sunk myself to sound a fool      
To springe a friend.… No, I like not this day.      
There’s a cloud coming over Camelot         205   
Larger than any that is in the sky,—      
Or Merlin would be still in Brittany,      
With Vivian and the viols. It’s all too strange.”      
   
And later, when descending to the city,      
Through unavailing casements he could hear         210   
The roaring of a mighty voice within,      
Confirming fervidly his own conviction:      
“It’s all too strange, and half the world’s half crazy!”—      
He scowled: “Well, I agree with Lamorak.”      
He frowned, and passed: “And I like not this day.”         215

   
IV. Merlin   
II   
     
SIR LAMORAK, the man of oak and iron,      
Had with him now, as a care-laden guest,      
Sir Bedivere, a man whom Arthur loved      
As he had loved no man save Lancelot.      
Like one whose late-flown shaft of argument         220   
Had glanced and fallen afield innocuously,      
He turned upon his host a sudden eye      
That met from Lamorak’s an even shaft      
Of native and unused authority;      
And each man held the other till at length         225   
Each turned away, shutting his heavy jaws      
Again together, prisoning thus two tongues      
That might forget and might not be forgiven.      
Then Bedivere, to find a plain way out,      
Said, “Lamorak, let us drink to some one here,         230   
And end this dryness. Who shall it be—the King,      
The Queen, or Lancelot?”—“Merlin,” Lamorak growled;      
And then there were more wrinkles round his eyes      
Than Bedivere had said were possible.      
“There’s no refusal in me now for that,”         235   
The guest replied; “so, ‘Merlin’ let it be.      
We’ve not yet seen him, but if he be here,      
And even if he should not be here, say ‘Merlin.’”      
They drank to the unseen from two new tankards,      
And fell straightway to sighing for the past,         240   
And what was yet before them. Silence laid      
A cogent finger on the lips of each      
Impatient veteran, whose hard hands lay clenched      
And restless on his midriff, until words      
Were stronger than strong Lamorak:         245   
   
        “Bedivere,”      
Began the solid host, “you may as well      
Say now as at another time hereafter      
That all your certainties have bruises on ’em,      
And all your pestilent asseverations         250   
Will never make a man a salamander—      
Who’s born, as we are told, so fire won’t bite him,—      
Or a slippery queen a nun who counts and burns      
Herself to nothing with her beads and candles.      
There’s nature, and what’s in us, to be sifted         255   
Before we know ourselves, or any man      
Or woman that God suffers to be born.      
That’s how I speak; and while you strain your mazard,      
Like Father Jove, big with a new Minerva,      
We’ll say, to pass the time, that I speak well.         260   
God’s fish! The King had eyes; and Lancelot      
Won’t ride home to his mother, for she’s dead.      
The story is that Merlin warned the King      
Of what’s come now to pass; and I believe it      
And Arthur, he being Arthur and a king,         265   
Has made a more pernicious mess than one,      
We’re told, for being so great and amorous:      
It’s that unwholesome and inclement cub      
Young Modred I’d see first in hell before      
I’d hang too high the Queen or Lancelot;         270   
The King, if one may say it, set the pace,      
And we’ve two strapping bastards here to prove it.      
Young Borre, he’s well enough; but as for Modred,      
I squirm as often as I look at him.      
And there again did Merlin warn the King,         275   
The story goes abroad; and I believe it.”      
   
Sir Bedivere, as one who caught no more      
Than what he would of Lamorak’s outpouring,      
Inclined his grizzled head and closed his eyes      
Before he sighed and rubbed his beard and spoke:         280   
“For all I know to make it otherwise,      
The Queen may be a nun some day or other;      
I’d pray to God for such a thing to be,      
If prayer for that were not a mockery.      
We’re late now for much praying, Lamorak,         285   
When you and I can feel upon our faces      
A wind that has been blowing over ruins      
That we had said were castles and high towers—      
Till Merlin, or the spirit of him, came      
As the dead come in dreams. I saw the King         290   
This morning, and I saw his face. Therefore,      
I tell you, if a state shall have a king,      
The king must have the state, and be the state;      
Or then shall we have neither king nor state,      
But bones and ashes, and high towers all fallen:         295   
And we shall have, where late there was a kingdom,      
A dusty wreck of what was once a glory—      
A wilderness whereon to crouch and mourn      
And moralize, or else to build once more      
For something better or for something worse.         300   
Therefore again, I say that Lancelot      
Has wrought a potent wrong upon the King,      
And all who serve and recognize the King,      
And all who follow him and all who love him.      
Whatever the stormy faults he may have had,         305   
To look on him today is to forget them;      
And if it be too late for sorrow now      
To save him—for it was a broken man      
I saw this morning, and a broken king—      
The God who sets a day for desolation         310   
Will not forsake him in Avilion,      
Or whatsoever shadowy land there be      
Where peace awaits him on its healing shores.”      
   
Sir Lamorak, shifting in his oaken chair,      
Growled like a dog and shook himself like one:         315   
“For the stone-chested, helmet-cracking knight      
That you are known to be from Lyonnesse      
To northward, Bedivere, you fol-de-rol      
When days are rancid, and you fiddle-faddle      
More like a woman than a man with hands         320   
Fit for the smiting of a crazy giant      
With armor an inch thick, as we all know      
You are, when you’re not sermonizing at us.      
As for the King, I say the King, no doubt,      
Is angry, sorry, and all sorts of things,         325   
For Lancelot, and for his easy Queen,      
Whom he took knowing she’d thrown sparks already      
On that same piece of tinder, Lancelot,      
Who fetched her with him from Leodogran      
Because the King—God save poor human reason!—         330   
Would prove to Merlin, who knew everything      
Worth knowing in those days, that he was wrong.      
I’ll drink now and be quiet,—but, by God,      
I’ll have to tell you, Brother Bedivere,      
Once more, to make you listen properly,         335   
That crowns and orders, and high palaces,      
And all the manifold ingredients      
Of this good solid kingdom, where we sit      
And spit now at each other with our eyes,      
Will not go rolling down to hell just yet         340   
Because a pretty woman is a fool.      
And here’s Kay coming with his fiddle face      
As long now as two fiddles. Sit ye down,      
Sir Man, and tell us everything you know      
Of Merlin—or his ghost without a beard.         345   
What mostly is it?”      
   
        Sir Kay, the seneschal,      
Sat wearily while he gazed upon the two:      
“To you it mostly is, if I err not,      
That what you hear of Merlin’s coming back         350   
Is nothing more or less than heavy truth.      
But ask me nothing of the Queen, I say,      
For I know nothing. All I know of her      
Is what her eyes have told the silences      
That now attend her; and that her estate         355   
Is one for less complacent execration      
Than quips and innuendoes of the city      
Would augur for her sin—if there be sin—      
Or for her name—if now she have a name.      
And where, I say, is this to lead the King,         360   
And after him, the kingdom and ourselves?      
Here be we, three men of a certain strength      
And some confessed intelligence, who know      
That Merlin has come out of Brittany—      
Out of his grave, as he would say it for us—         365   
Because the King has now a desperation      
More strong upon him than a woman’s net      
Was over Merlin—for now Merlin’s here,      
And two of us who knew him know how well      
His wisdom, if he have it any longer,         370   
Will by this hour have sounded and appraised      
The grief and wrath and anguish of the King,      
Requiring mercy and inspiring fear      
Lest he forego the vigil now most urgent,      
And leave unwatched a cranny where some worm         375   
Or serpent may come in to speculate.”      
   
“I know your worm, and his worm’s name is Modred—      
Albeit the streets are not yet saying so,”      
Said Lamorak, as he lowered his wrath and laughed      
A sort of poisonous apology         380   
To Kay: “And in the meantime, I’ll be gyved!      
Here’s Bedivere a-wailing for the King,      
And you, Kay, with a moist eye for the Queen.      
I think I’ll blow a horn for Lancelot;      
For by my soul a man’s in sorry case         385   
When Guineveres are out with eyes to scorch him:      
I’m not so ancient or so frozen certain      
That I’d ride horses down to skeletons      
If she were after me. Has Merlin seen him—      
This Lancelot, this Queen-fed friend of ours?”         390   
   
Kay answered sighing, with a lonely scowl:      
“The picture that I conjure leaves him out;      
The King and Merlin are this hour together,      
And I can say no more; for I know nothing.      
But how the King persuaded or beguiled         395   
The stricken wizard from across the water      
Outriddles my poor wits. It’s all too strange.”      
   
“It’s all too strange, and half the world’s half crazy!”      
Roared Lamorak, forgetting once again      
The devastating carriage of his voice.         400   
“Is the King sick?” he said, more quietly;      
“Is he to let one damned scratch be enough      
To paralyze the force that heretofore      
Would operate a way through hell and iron,      
And iron already slimy with his blood?         405   
Is the King blind—with Modred watching him?      
Does he forget the crown for Lancelot?      
Does he forget that every woman mewing      
Shall some day be a handful of small ashes?”      
   
“You speak as one for whom the god of Love         410   
Has yet a mighty trap in preparation.      
We know you, Lamorak,” said Bedivere:      
“We know you for a short man, Lamorak,—      
In deeds, if not in inches or in words;      
But there are fens and heights and distances         415   
That your capricious ranging has not yet      
Essayed in this weird region of man’s love.      
Forgive me, Lamorak, but your words are words.      
Your deeds are what they are; and ages hence      
Will men remember your illustriousness,         420   
If there be gratitude in history.      
For me, I see the shadow of the end,      
Wherein to serve King Arthur to the end,      
And, if God have it so, to see the Grail      
Before I die.”         425   
   
        But Lamorak shook his head:      
“See what you will, or what you may. For me,      
I see no other than a stinking mess—      
With Modred stirring it, and Agravaine      
Spattering Camelot with as much of it         430   
As he can throw. The Devil got somehow      
Into God’s workshop once upon a time,      
And out of the red clay that he found there      
He made a shape like Modred, and another      
As like as eyes are to this Agravaine.         435   
‘I never made ’em,’ said the good Lord God,      
‘But let ’em go, and see what comes of ’em.’      
And that’s what we’re to do. As for the Grail,      
I’ve never worried it, and so the Grail      
Has never worried me.”         440   
   
        Kay sighed. “I see      
With Bedivere the coming of the end,”      
He murmured; “for the King I saw today      
Was not, nor shall he ever be again,      
The King we knew. I say the King is dead;         445   
The man is living, but the King is dead.      
The wheel is broken.”      
   
        “Faugh!” said Lamorak;      
“There are no dead kings yet in Camelot;      
But there is Modred who is hatching ruin,—         450   
And when it hatches I may not be here.      
There’s Gawaine too, and he does not forget      
My father, who killed his. King Arthur’s house      
Has more divisions in it than I like      
In houses; and if Modred’s aim be good         455   
For backs like mine, I’m not long for the scene.”

IV. Merlin   
III   
     
KING ARTHUR, as he paced a lonely floor      
That rolled a muffled echo, as he fancied,      
All through the palace and out through the world,      
Might now have wondered hard, could he have heard         460   
Sir Lamorak’s apathetic disregard      
Of what Fate’s knocking made so manifest      
And ominous to others near the King—      
If any, indeed, were near him at this hour      
Save Merlin, once the wisest of all men,         465   
And weary Dagonet, whom he had made      
A knight for love of him and his abused      
Integrity. He might have wondered hard      
And wondered much; and after wondering,      
He might have summoned, with as little heart         470   
As he had now for crowns, the fond, lost Merlin,      
Whose Nemesis had made of him a slave,      
A man of dalliance, and a sybarite.      
   
“Men change in Brittany, Merlin,” said the King;      
And even his grief had strife to freeze again         475   
A dreary smile for the transmuted seer      
Now robed in heavy wealth of purple silk,      
With frogs and foreign tassels. On his face,      
Too smooth now for a wizard or a sage,      
Lay written, for the King’s remembering eyes,         480   
A pathos of a lost authority      
Long faded, and unconscionably gone;      
And on the King’s heart lay a sudden cold:      
“I might as well have left him in his grave,      
As he would say it, saying what was true,—         485   
As death is true. This Merlin is not mine,      
But Vivian’s. My crown is less than hers,      
And I am less than woman to this man.”      
   
Then Merlin, as one reading Arthur’s words      
On viewless tablets in the air before him:         490   
“Now, Arthur, since you are a child of mine—      
A foster-child, and that’s a kind of child—      
Be not from hearsay or despair too eager      
To dash your meat with bitter seasoning,      
So none that are more famished than yourself         495   
Shall have what you refuse. For you are King,      
And if you starve yourself, you starve the state;      
And then by sundry looks and silences      
Of those you loved, and by the lax regard      
Of those you knew for fawning enemies,         500   
You may learn soon that you are King no more,      
But a slack, blasted, and sad-fronted man,      
Made sadder with a crown. No other friend      
Than I could say this to you, and say more;      
And if you bid me say no more, so be it.”         505   
   
The King, who sat with folded arms, now bowed      
His head and felt, unfought and all aflame      
Like immanent hell-fire, the wretchedness      
That only those who are to lead may feel—      
And only they when they are maimed and worn         510   
Too sore to covet without shuddering      
The fixed impending eminence where death      
Itself were victory, could they but lead      
Unbitten by the serpents they had fed.      
Turning, he spoke: “Merlin, you say the truth:         515   
There is no man who could say more to me      
Today, or say so much to me, and live.      
But you are Merlin still, or part of him;      
I did you wrong when I thought otherwise,      
And I am sorry now. Say what you will.         520   
We are alone, and I shall be alone      
As long as Time shall hide a reason here      
For me to stay in this infested world      
Where I have sinned and erred and heeded not      
Your counsel; and where you yourself—God save us!—         525   
Have gone down smiling to the smaller life      
That you and your incongruous laughter called      
Your living grave. God save us all, Merlin,      
When you, the seer, the founder, and the prophet,      
May throw the gold of your immortal treasure         530   
Back to the God that gave it, and then laugh      
Because a woman has you in her arms …      
Why do you sting me now with a small hive      
Of words that are all poison? I do not ask      
Much honey; but why poison me for nothing,         535   
And with a venom that I know already      
As I know crowns and wars? Why tell a king—      
A poor, foiled, flouted, miserable king—      
That if he lets rats eat his fingers off      
He’ll have no fingers to fight battles with?         540   
I know as much as that, for I am still      
A king—who thought himself a little less      
Than God; a king who built him palaces      
On sand and mud, and hears them crumbling now,      
And sees them tottering, as he knew they must.         545   
You are the man who made me to be King—      
Therefore, say anything.”      
   
        Merlin, stricken deep      
With pity that was old, being born of old      
Foreshadowings, made answer to the King:         550   
“This coil of Lancelot and Guinevere      
Is not for any mortal to undo,      
Or to deny, or to make otherwise;      
But your most violent years are on their way      
To days, and to a sounding of loud hours         555   
That are to strike for war. Let not the time      
Between this hour and then be lost in fears,      
Or told in obscurations and vain faith      
In what has been your long security;      
For should your force be slower then than hate,         560   
And your regret be sharper than your sight,      
And your remorse fall heavier than your sword,—      
Then say farewell to Camelot, and the crown.      
But say not you have lost, or failed in aught      
Your golden horoscope of imperfection         565   
Has held in starry words that I have read.      
I see no farther now than I saw then,      
For no man shall be given of everything      
Together in one life; yet I may say      
The time is imminent when he shall come         570   
For whom I founded the Siege Perilous;      
And he shall be too much a living part      
Of what he brings, and what he burns away in,      
To be for long a vexed inhabitant      
Of this mad realm of stains and lower trials.         575   
And here the ways of God again are mixed:      
For this new knight who is to find the Grail      
For you, and for the least who pray for you      
In such lost coombs and hollows of the world      
As you have never entered, is to be         580   
The son of him you trusted—Lancelot,      
Of all who ever jeopardized a throne      
Sure the most evil-fated, saving one,      
Your son, begotten, though you knew not then      
Your leman was your sister, of Morgause;         585   
For it is Modred now, not Lancelot,      
Whose native hate plans your annihilation—      
Though he may smile till he be sick, and swear      
Allegiance to an unforgiven father      
Until at last he shake an empty tongue         590   
Talked out with too much lying—though his lies      
Will have a truth to steer them. Trust him not,      
For unto you the father, he the son      
Is like enough to be the last of terrors—      
If in a field of time that looms to you         595   
Far larger than it is you fail to plant      
And harvest the old seeds of what I say,      
And so be nourished and adept again      
For what may come to be. But Lancelot      
Will have you first; and you need starve no more         600   
For the Queen’s love, the love that never was.      
Your Queen is now your Kingdom, and hereafter      
Let no man take it from you, or you die.      
Let no man take it from you for a day;      
For days are long when we are far from what         605   
We love, and mischief’s other name is distance.      
Let hat be all, for I can say no more;      
Not even to Blaise the Hermit, were he living,      
Could I say more than I have given you now      
To hear; and he alone was my confessor.”         610   
   
The King arose and paced the floor again.      
“I get gray comfort of dark words,” he said;      
“But tell me not that you can say no more:      
You can, for I can hear you saying it.      
Yet I’ll not ask for more. I have enough—         615   
Until my new knight comes to prove and find      
The promise and the glory of the Grail,      
Though I shall see no Grail. For I have built      
On sand and mud, and I shall see no Grail.”—      
“Nor I,” said Merlin. “Once I dreamed of it,         620   
But I was buried. I shall see no Grail,      
Nor would I have it otherwise. I saw      
Too much, and that was never good for man.      
The man who goes alone too far goes mad—      
In one way or another. God knew best,         625   
And he knows what is coming yet for me.      
I do not ask. Like you, I have enough.”      
   
That night King Arthur’s apprehension found      
In Merlin an obscure and restive guest,      
Whose only thought was on the hour of dawn,         630   
When he should see the last of Camelot      
And ride again for Brittany; and what words      
Were said before the King was left alone      
Were only darker for reiteration.      
They parted, all provision made secure         635   
For Merlin’s early convoy to the coast,      
And Arthur tramped the past. The loneliness      
Of kings, around him like the unseen dead,      
Lay everywhere; and he was loath to move,      
As if in fear to meet with his cold hand         640   
The touch of something colder. Then a whim,      
Begotten of intolerable doubt,      
Seized him and stung him until he was asking      
If any longer lived among his knights      
A man to trust as once he trusted all,         645   
And Lancelot more than all. “And it is he      
Who is to have me first,” so Merlin says,—      
“As if he had me not in hell already.      
Lancelot! Lancelot!” He cursed the tears      
That cooled his misery, and then he asked         650   
Himself again if he had one to trust      
Among his knights, till even Bedivere,      
Tor, Bors, and Percival, rough Lamorak,      
Griflet, and Gareth, and gay Gawaine, all      
Were dubious knaves,—or they were like to be,         655   
For cause to make them so; and he had made      
Himself to be the cause. “God set me right,      
Before this folly carry me on farther,”      
He murmured; and he smiled unhappily,      
Though fondly, as he thought: “Yes, there is one         660   
Whom I may trust with even my soul’s last shred;      
And Dagonet will sing for me tonight      
An old song, not too merry or too sad.”      
   
When Dagonet, having entered, stood before      
The King as one affrighted, the King smiled:         665   
“You think because I call for you so late      
That I am angry, Dagonet? Why so?      
Have you been saying what I say to you,      
And telling men that you brought Merlin here?      
No? So I fancied; and if you report         670   
No syllable of anything I speak,      
You will have no regrets, and I no anger.      
What word of Merlin was abroad today?”      
   
“Today have I heard no man save Gawaine,      
And to him I said only what all men         675   
Are saying to their neighbors. They believe      
That you have Merlin here, and that his coming      
Denotes no good. Gawaine was curious,      
But ever mindful of your majesty.      
He pressed me not, and we made light of it.”         680   
   
“Gawaine, I fear, makes light of everything,”      
The King said, looking down. “Sometimes I wish      
I had a full Round Table of Gawaines.      
But that’s a freak of midnight,—never mind it.      
Sing me a song—one of those endless things         685   
That Merlin liked of old, when men were younger      
And there were more stars twinkling in the sky.      
I see no stars that are alive tonight,      
And I am not the king of sleep. So then,      
Sing me an old song.”         690   
   
        Dagonet’s quick eye      
Caught sorrow in the King’s; and he knew more,      
In a fool’s way, than even the King himself      
Of what was hovering over Camelot.      
“O King,” he said, “I cannot sing tonight.         695   
If you command me I shall try to sing,      
But I shall fail; for there are no songs now      
In my old throat, or even in these poor strings      
That I can hardly follow with my fingers.      
Forgive me—kill me—but I cannot sing.”         700   
Dagonet fell down then on both his knees      
And shook there while he clutched the King’s cold hand      
And wept for what he knew.      
   
        “There, Dagonet;      
I shall not kill my knight, or make him sing.         705   
No more; get up, and get you off to bed.      
There’ll be another time for you to sing,      
So get you to your covers and sleep well.”      
Alone again, the King said, bitterly:      
“Yes, I have one friend left, and they who know         710   
As much of him as of themselves believe      
That he’s a fool. Poor Dagonet’s a fool.      
And if he be a fool, what else am I      
Than one fool more to make the world complete?      
‘The love that never was!’ … Fool, fool, fool, fool!”         715   
   
The King was long awake. No covenant      
With peace was his tonight; and he knew sleep      
As he knew the cold eyes of Guinevere      
That yesterday had stabbed him, having first      
On Lancelot’s name struck fire, and left him then         720   
As now they left him—with a wounded heart,      
A wounded pride, and a sickening pang worse yet      
Of lost possession. He thought wearily      
Of watchers by the dead, late wayfarers,      
Rough-handed mariners on ships at sea,         725   
Lone-yawning sentries, wastrels, and all others      
Who might be saying somewhere to themselves,      
“The King is now asleep in Camelot;      
God save the King.”—“God save the King, indeed,      
If there be now a king to save,” he said.         730   
Then he saw giants rising in the dark,      
Born horribly of memories and new fears      
That in the gray-lit irony of dawn      
Were partly to fade out and be forgotten;      
And then there might be sleep, and for a time         735   
There might again be peace. His head was hot      
And throbbing; but the rest of him was cold,      
As he lay staring hard where nothing stood,      
And hearing what was not, even while he saw      
And heard, like dust and thunder far away,         740   
The coming confirmation of the words      
Of him who saw so much and feared so little      
Of all that was to be. No spoken doom      
That ever chilled the last night of a felon      
Prepared a dragging anguish more profound         745   
And absolute than Arthur, in these hours,      
Made out of darkness and of Merlin’s words;      
No tide that ever crashed on Lyonnesse      
Drove echoes inland that were lonelier      
For widowed ears among the fisher-folk,         750   
Than for the King were memories tonight      
Of old illusions that were dead for ever.

IV. Merlin   
IV   
     
THE TORTURED King—seeing Merlin wholly meshed      
In his defection, even to indifference,      
And all the while attended and exalted         755   
By some unfathomable obscurity      
Of divination, where the Grail, unseen,      
Broke yet the darkness where a king saw nothing—      
Feared now the lady Vivian more than Fate;      
For now he knew that Modred, Lancelot,         760   
The Queen, the King, the Kingdom, and the World,      
Were less to Merlin, who had made him King,      
Than one small woman in Broceliande.      
Whereas the lady Vivian, seeing Merlin      
Acclaimed and tempted and allured again         765   
To service in his old magnificence,      
Feared now King Arthur more than storms and robbers;      
For Merlin, though he knew himself immune      
To no least whispered little wish of hers      
That might afflict his ear with ecstasy,         770   
Had yet sufficient of his old command      
Of all around him to invest an eye      
With quiet lightning, and a spoken word      
With easy thunder, so accomplishing      
A profit and a pastime for himself—         775   
And for the lady Vivian, when her guile      
Outlived at intervals her graciousness;      
And this equipment of uncertainty,      
Which now had gone away with him to Britain      
With Dagonet, so plagued her memory         780   
That soon a phantom brood of goblin doubts      
Inhabited his absence, which had else      
Been empty waiting and a few brave fears,      
And a few more, she knew, that were not brave,      
Or long to be disowned, or manageable.         785   
She thought of him as he had looked at her      
When first he had acquainted her alarm      
At sight of the King’s letter with its import;      
And she remembered now his very words:      
“The King believes today as in his boyhood         790   
That I am Fate,” he said; and when they parted      
She had not even asked him not to go;      
She might as well, she thought, have bid the wind      
Throw no more clouds across a lonely sky      
Between her and the moon,—so great he seemed         795   
In his oppressed solemnity, and she,      
In her excess of wrong imagining,      
So trivial in an hour, and, after all      
A creature of a smaller consequence      
Than kings to Merlin, who made kings and kingdoms         800   
And had them as a father; and so she feared      
King Arthur more than robbers while she waited      
For Merlin’s promise to fulfil itself,      
And for the rest that was to follow after:      
“He said he would come back, and so he will.         805   
He will because he must, and he is Merlin,      
The master of the world—or so he was;      
And he is coming back again to me      
Because he must and I am Vivian.      
It’s all as easy as two added numbers:         810   
Some day I’ll hear him ringing at the gate,      
As he rang on that morning in the spring,      
Ten years ago; and I shall have him then      
For ever. He shall never go away      
Though kings come walking on their hands and knees         815   
To take him on their backs.” When Merlin came,      
She told him that, and laughed; and he said strangely:      
“Be glad or sorry, but no kings are coming.      
Not Arthur, surely; for now Arthur knows      
That I am less than Fate.”         820   
   
  Ten years ago      
The King had heard, with unbelieving ears      
At first, what Merlin said would be the last      
Reiteration of his going down      
To find a living grave in Brittany:         825   
“Buried alive I told you I should be,      
By love made little and by woman shorn,      
Like Samson, of my glory; and the time      
Is now at hand. I follow in the morning      
Where I am led. I see behind me now         830   
The last of crossways, and I see before me      
A straight and final highway to the end      
Of all my divination. You are King,      
And in your kingdom I am what I was.      
Wherever I have warned you, see as far         835   
As I have seen; for I have shown the worst      
There is to see. Require no more of me,      
For I can be no more than what I was.”      
So, on the morrow, the King said farewell;      
And he was never more to Merlin’s eye         840   
The King than at that hour; for Merlin knew      
How much was going out of Arthur’s life      
With him, as he went southward to the sea.      
   
Over the waves and into Brittany      
Went Merlin, to Broceliande. Gay birds         845   
Were singing high to greet him all along      
A broad and sanded woodland avenue      
That led him on forever, so he thought,      
Until at last there was an end of it;      
And at the end there was a gate of iron,         850   
Wrought heavily and invidiously barred.      
He pulled a cord that rang somewhere a bell      
Of many echoes, and sat down to rest,      
Outside the keeper’s house, upon a bench      
Of carven stone that might for centuries         855   
Have waited there in silence to receive him.      
The birds were singing still; leaves flashed and swung      
Before him in the sunlight; a soft breeze      
Made intermittent whisperings around him      
Of love and fate and danger, and faint waves         860   
Of many sweetly-stinging fragile odors      
Broke lightly as they touched him; cherry-boughs      
Above him snowed white petals down upon him,      
And under their slow falling Merlin smiled      
Contentedly, as one who contemplates         865   
No longer fear, confusion, or regret,      
May smile at ruin or at revelation.      
   
A stately fellow with a forest air      
Now hailed him from within, with searching words      
And curious looks, till Merlin’s glowing eye         870   
Transfixed him and he flinched: “My compliments      
And homage to the lady Vivian.      
Say Merlin from King Arthur’s Court is here,      
A pilgrim and a stranger in appearance,      
Though in effect her friend and humble servant.         875   
Convey to her my speech as I have said it,      
Without abbreviation or delay,      
And so deserve my gratitude forever.”      
“But Merlin?” the man stammered; “Merlin? Merlin?”—      
“One Merlin is enough. I know no other.         880   
Now go you to the lady Vivian      
And bring to me her word, for I am weary.”      
Still smiling at the cherry-blossoms falling      
Down on him and around him in the sunlight,      
He waited, never moving, never glancing         885   
This way or that, until his messenger      
Came jingling into vision, weighed with keys,      
And inly shaken with much wondering      
At this great wizard’s coming unannounced      
And unattended. When the way was open         890   
The stately messenger, now bowing low      
In reverence and awe, bade Merlin enter;      
And Merlin, having entered, heard the gate      
Clang back behind him; and he swore no gate      
Like that had ever clanged in Camelot,         895   
Or any other place if not in hell.      
“I may be dead; and this good fellow here,      
With all his keys,” he thought, “may be the Devil,—      
Though I were loath to say so, for the keys      
Would make him rather more akin to Peter;         900   
And that’s fair reasoning for this fair weather.”      
   
“The lady Vivian says you are most welcome,”      
Said now the stately-favored servitor,      
“And are to follow me. She said, ‘Say Merlin—      
A pilgrim and a stranger in appearance,         905   
Though in effect my friend and humble servant—      
Is welcome for himself, and for the sound      
Of his great name that echoes everywhere.’”—      
“I like you and I like your memory,”      
Said Merlin, curiously, “but not your gate.         910   
Why forge for this elysian wilderness      
A thing so vicious with unholy noise?”—      
“There’s a way out of every wilderness      
For those who dare or care enough to find it,”      
The guide said: and they moved along together,         915   
Down shaded ways, through open ways with hedgerows.      
And into shade again more deep than ever,      
But edged anon with rays of broken sunshine      
In which a fountain, raining crystal music,      
Made faery magic of it through green leafage,         920   
Till Merlin’s eyes were dim with preparation      
For sight now of the lady Vivian.      
He saw at first a bit of living green      
That might have been a part of all the green      
Around the tinkling fountain where she gazed         925   
Upon the circling pool as if her thoughts      
Were not so much on Merlin—whose advance      
Betrayed through his enormity of hair      
The cheeks and eyes of youth—as on the fishes.      
But soon she turned and found him, now alone,         930   
And held him while her beauty and her grace      
Made passing trash of empires, and his eyes      
Told hers of what a splendid emptiness      
Her tedious world had been without him in it      
Whose love and service were to be her school,         935   
Her triumph, and her history: “This is Merlin,”      
She thought; “and I shall dream of him no more.      
And he has come, he thinks, to frighten me      
With beards and robes and his immortal fame;      
Or is it I who think so? I know not.         940   
I’m frightened, sure enough, but if I show it,      
I’ll be no more the Vivian for whose love      
He tossed away his glory, or the Vivian      
Who saw no man alive to make her love him      
Till she saw Merlin once in Camelot,         945   
And seeing him, saw no other. In an age      
That has no plan for me that I can read      
Without him, shall he tell me what I am,      
And why I am, I wonder?” While she thought,      
And feared the man whom her perverse negation         950   
Must overcome somehow to soothe her fancy,      
She smiled and welcomed him; and so they stood,      
Each finding in the other’s eyes a gleam      
Of what eternity had hidden there.      
   
“Are you always all in green, as you are now?”         955   
Said Merlin, more employed with her complexion,      
Where blood and olive made wild harmony      
With eyes and wayward hair that were too dark      
For peace if they were not subordinated;      
“If so you are, then so you make yourself         960   
A danger in a world of many dangers.      
If I were young, God knows if I were safe      
Concerning you in green, like a slim cedar,      
As you are now, to say my life was mine:      
Were you to say to me that I should end it,         965   
Longevity for me were jeopardized.      
Have you your green on always and all over?”      
   
“Come here, and I will tell you about that,”      
Said Vivian, leading Merlin with a laugh      
To an arbored seat where they made opposites:         970   
“If you are Merlin—and I know you are,      
For I remember you in Camelot,—      
You know that I am Vivian, as I am;      
And if I go in green, why, let me go so,      
And say at once why you have come to me         975   
Cloaked over like a monk, and with a beard      
As long as Jeremiah’s. I don’t like it.      
I’ll never like a man with hair like that      
While I can feed a carp with little frogs.      
I’m rather sure to hate you if you keep it,         980   
And when I hate a man I poison him.”      
   
“You’ve never fed a carp with little frogs,”      
Said Merlin; “I can see it in your eyes.”—      
“I might then, if I haven’t,” said the lady;      
“For I’m a savage, and I love no man         985   
As I have seen him yet. I’m here alone,      
With some three hundred others, all of whom      
Are ready, I dare say, to die for me;      
I’m cruel and I’m cold, and I like snakes;      
And some have said my mother was a fairy,         990   
Though I believe it not.”      
   
        “Why not believe it?”      
Said Merlin; “I believe it. I believe      
Also that you divine, as I had wished,      
In my surviving ornament of office         995   
A needless imposition on your wits,      
If not yet on the scope of your regard.      
Even so, you cannot say how old I am,      
Or yet how young. I’m willing cheerfully      
To fight, left-handed, Hell’s three headed hound         1000   
If you but whistle him up from where he lives;      
I’m cheerful and I’m fierce, and I’ve made kings;      
And some have said my father was the Devil,      
Though I believe it not. Whatever I am,      
I have not lived in Time until to-day.”         1005   
A moment’s worth of wisdom there escaped him,      
But Vivian seized it, and it was not lost.      
   
Embroidering doom with many levities,      
Till now the fountain’s crystal silver, fading,      
Became a splash and a mere chilliness,         1010   
They mocked their fate with easy pleasantries      
That were too false and small to be forgotten,      
And with ingenious insincerities      
That had no repetition or revival.      
At last the lady Vivian arose,         1015   
And with a crying of how late it was      
Took Merlin’s hand and led him like a child      
Along a dusky way between tall cones      
Of tight green cedars: “Am I like one of these?      
You said I was, though I deny it wholly.”—         1020   
“Very,” said Merlin, to his bearded lips      
Uplifting her small fingers.—“O, that hair!”      
She moaned, as if in sorrow: “Must it be?      
Must every prophet and important wizard      
Be clouded so that nothing but his nose         1025   
And eyes, and intimations of his ears,      
Are there to make us know him when we see him?      
Praise heaven I’m not a prophet! Are you glad?”—      
   
He did not say that he was glad or sorry;      
For suddenly came flashing into vision         1030   
A thing that was a manor and a castle,      
With walls and roofs that had a flaming sky.      
Behind them, like a sky that he remembered,      
And one that had from his rock-sheltered haunt      
Above the roofs of his forsaken city         1035   
Made flame as if all Camelot were on fire.      
The glow brought with it a brief memory      
Of Arthur as he left him, and the pain      
That fought in Arthur’s eyes for losing him,      
And must have overflowed when he had vanished.         1040   
But now the eyes that looked hard into his      
Were Vivian’s, not the King’s; and he could see,      
Or so he thought, a shade of sorrow in them.      
She took his two hands: “You are sad,” she said.—      
He smiled: “Your western lights bring memories         1045   
Of Camelot. We all have memories—      
Prophets, and women who are like slim cedars;      
But you are wrong to say that I am sad.”—      
“Would you go back to Camelot?” she asked,      
Her fingers tightening. Merlin shook his head.         1050   
“Then listen while I tell you that I’m glad,”      
She purred, as if assured that he would listen:      
“At your first warning, much too long ago,      
Of this quaint pilgrimage of yours to see      
‘The fairest and most orgulous of ladies’—         1055   
No language for a prophet, I am sure—      
Said I, ‘When this great Merlin comes to me,      
My task and avocation for some time      
Will be to make him willing, if I can,      
To teach and feed me with an ounce of wisdom.’         1060   
For I have eaten to an empty shell,      
After a weary feast of observation      
Among the glories of a tinsel world      
That had for me no glory till you came,      
A life that is no life. Would you go back         1065   
To Camelot?”—Merlin shook his head again,      
And the two smiled together in the sunset.      
   
They moved along in silence to the door,      
Where Merlin said: “Of your three hundred here      
There is but one I know, and him I favor;         1070   
I mean the stately one who shakes the keys      
Of that most evil sounding gate of yours,      
Which has a clang as if it shut forever.”—      
“If there be need, I’ll shut the gate myself,”      
She said. “And you like Blaise? Then you shall have him.         1075   
He was not born to serve, but serve he must,      
It seems, and be enamoured of my shadow.      
He cherishes the taint of some high folly      
That haunts him with a name he cannot know,      
And I could fear his wits are paying for it.         1080   
Forgive his tongue, and humor it a little.”—      
“I knew another one whose name was Blaise,”      
He said; and she said lightly, “Well, what of it?”—      
“And he was nigh the learnedest of hermits;      
His home was far away from everywhere,         1085   
And he was all alone there when he died.”—      
“Now be a pleasant Merlin,” Vivian said,      
Patting his arm, “and have no more of that;      
For I’ll not hear of dead men far away,      
Or dead men anywhere this afternoon.         1090   
There’ll be a trifle in the way of supper      
This evening, but the dead shall not have any.      
Blaise and this man will tell you all there is      
For you to know. Then you’ll know everything.”      
She laughed, and vanished like a humming-bird.         1095

IV. Merlin   
V   
     
THE SUN went down, and the dark after it      
Starred Merlin’s new abode with many a sconced      
And many a moving candle, in whose light      
The prisoned wizard, mirrored in amazement,      
Saw fronting him a stranger, falcon-eyed,         1100   
Firm-featured, of a negligible age,      
And fair enough to look upon, he fancied,      
Though not a warrior born, nor more a courtier.      
A native humor resting in his long      
And solemn jaws now stirred, and Merlin smiled         1105   
To see himself in purple, touched with gold,      
And fledged with snowy lace.—The careful Blaise,      
Having drawn some time before from Merlin’s wallet      
The sable raiment of a royal scholar,      
Had eyed it with a long mistrust and said:         1110   
“The lady Vivian would be vexed, I fear,      
To meet you vested in these learned weeds      
Of gravity and death; for she abhors      
Mortality in all its hues and emblems—      
Black wear, long argument, and all the cold         1115   
And solemn things that appertain to graves.”—      
And Merlin, listening, to himself had said,      
“This fellow has a freedom, yet I like him;”      
And then aloud: “I trust you. Deck me out,      
However, with a temperate regard         1120   
For what your candid eye may find in me      
Of inward coloring. Let them reap my beard,      
Moreover, with a sort of reverence,      
For I shall never look on it again.      
And though your lady frown her face away         1125   
To think of me in black, for God’s indulgence,      
Array me not in scarlet or in yellow.”—      
And so it came to pass that Merlin sat      
At ease in purple, even though his chin      
Reproached him as he pinched it, and seemed yet         1130   
A little fearful of its nakedness.      
He might have sat and scanned himself for ever      
Had not the careful Blaise, regarding him,      
Remarked again that in his proper judgment,      
And on the valid word of his attendants,         1135   
No more was to be done. “Then do no more,”      
Said Merlin, with a last look at his chin;      
“Never do more when there’s no more to do,      
And you may shun thereby the bitter taste      
Of many disillusions and regrets.         1140   
God’s pity on us that our words have wings      
And leave our deeds to crawl so far below them;      
For we have all two heights, we men who dream,      
Whether we lead or follow, rule or serve.”—      
“God’s pity on us anyhow,” Blaise answered,         1145   
“Or most of us. Meanwhile, I have to say,      
As long as you are here, and I’m alive,      
Your summons will assure the loyalty      
Of all my diligence and expedition.      
The gong that you hear singing in the distance         1150   
Was rung for your attention and your presence.”—      
“I wonder at this fellow, yet I like him,”      
Said Merlin; and he rose to follow him.      
   
The lady Vivian in a fragile sheath      
Of crimson, dimmed and veiled ineffably         1155   
By the flame-shaken gloom wherein she sat,      
And twinkled if she moved, heard Merlin coming,      
And smiled as if to make herself believe      
Her joy was all a triumph; yet her blood      
Confessed a tingling of more wonderment         1160   
Than all her five and twenty worldly years      
Of waiting for this triumph could remember;      
And when she knew and felt the slower tread      
Of his unseen advance among the shadows      
To the small haven of uncertain light         1165   
That held her in it as a torch-lit shoal      
Might hold a smooth red fish, her listening skin      
Responded with a creeping underneath it,      
And a crinkling that was incident alike      
To darkness, love, and mice. When he was there,         1170   
She looked up at him in a whirl of mirth      
And wonder, as in childhood she had gazed      
Wide-eyed on royal mountebanks who made      
So brief a shift of the impossible      
That kings and queens would laugh and shake themselves;         1175   
Then rising slowly on her little feet,      
Like a slim creature lifted, she thrust out      
Her two small hands as if to push him back—      
Whereon he seized them. “Go away,” she said;      
“I never saw you in my life before,”—         1180   
“You say the truth,” he answered; “when I met      
Myself an hour ago, my words were yours.      
God made the man you see for you to like,      
If possible. If otherwise, turn down      
These two prodigious and remorseless thumbs         1185   
And leave your lions to annihilate him.”—      
   
“I have no other lion than yourself,”      
She said; “and since you cannot eat yourself,      
Pray do a lonely woman, who is, you say,      
More like a tree than any other thing         1190   
In your discrimination, the large honor      
Of sharing with her a small kind of supper.”—      
“Yes, you are like a tree,—or like a flower;      
More like a flower to-night.” He bowed his head      
And kissed the ten small fingers he was holding,         1195   
As calmly as if each had been a son;      
Although his heart was leaping and his eyes      
Had sight for nothing save a swimming crimson      
Between two glimmering arms. “More like a flower      
To-night,” he said, as now he scanned again         1200   
The immemorial meaning of her face      
And drew it nearer to his eyes. It seemed      
A flower of wonder with a crimson stem      
Came leaning slowly and regretfully      
To meet his will—a flower of change and peril         1205   
That had a clinging blossom of warm olive      
Half stifled with a tyranny of black,      
And held the wayward fragrance of a rose      
Made woman by delirious alchemy.      
She raised her face and yoked his willing neck         1210   
With half her weight; and with hot lips that left      
The world with only one philosophy      
For Merlin or for Anaxagoras,      
Called his to meet them and in one long hush      
Of capture to surrender and make hers         1215   
The last of anything that might remain      
Of what was now their beardless wizardry.      
Then slowly she began to push herself      
Away, and slowly Merlin let her go      
As far from him as his outreaching hands         1220   
Could hold her fingers while his eyes had all      
The beauty of the woodland and the world      
Before him in the firelight, like a nymph      
Of cities, or a queen a little weary      
Of inland stillness and immortal trees.         1225   
“Are you to let me go again sometime,”      
She said,—“before I starve to death, I wonder?      
If not, I’ll have to bite the lion’s paws,      
And make him roar. He cannot shake his mane,      
For now the lion has no mane to shake;         1230   
The lion hardly knows himself without it,      
And thinks he has no face, but there’s a lady      
Who says he had no face until he lost it.      
So there we are. And there’s a flute somewhere,      
Playing a strange old tune. You know the words:         1235   
‘The Lion and the Lady are both hungry.’”      
   
Fatigue and hunger—tempered leisurely      
With food that some devout magician’s oven      
Might after many failures have delivered,      
And wine that had for decades in the dark         1240   
Of Merlin’s grave been slowly quickening,      
And with half-heard, dream-weaving interludes      
Of distant flutes and viols, made more distant      
By far, nostalgic hautboys blown from nowhere,—      
Were tempered not so leisurely, may be,         1245   
With Vivian’s inextinguishable eyes      
Between two shining silver candlesticks      
That lifted each a trembling flame to make      
The rest of her a dusky loveliness      
Against a bank of shadow. Merlin made,         1250   
As well as he was able while he ate,      
A fair division of the fealty due      
To food and beauty, albeit more times than one      
Was he at odds with his urbanity      
In honoring too long the grosser viand.         1255   
“The best invention in Broceliande      
Has not been over-taxed in vain, I see,”      
She told him, with her chin propped on her fingers      
And her eyes flashing blindness into his:      
“I put myself out cruelly to please you,         1260   
And you, for that, forget almost at once      
The name and image of me altogether.      
You needn’t, for when all is analyzed,      
It’s only a bird-pie that you are eating.”      
   
“I know not what you call it,” Merlin said;         1265   
“Nor more do I forget your name and image,      
Though I do eat; and if I did not eat,      
Your sending out of ships and caravans      
To get whatever ’tis that’s in this thing      
Would be a sorrow for you all your days;         1270   
And my great love, which you have seen by now,      
Might look to you a lie; and like as not      
You’d actuate some sinewed mercenary      
To carry me away to God knows where      
And seal me in a fearsome hole to starve,         1275   
Because I made of this insidious picking      
An idle circumstance. My dear fair lady—      
And there is not another under heaven      
So fair as you are as I see you now—      
I cannot look at you too much and eat;         1280   
And I must eat, or be untimely ashes,      
Whereon the light of your celestial gaze      
Would fall, I fear me, for no longer time      
Than on the solemn dust of Jeremiah—      
Whose beard you likened once, in heathen jest,         1285   
To mine that now is no man’s.”      
   
        “Are you sorry?”      
Said Vivian, filling Merlin’s empty goblet;      
“If you are sorry for the loss of it,      
Drink more of this and you may tell me lies         1290   
Enough to make me sure that you are glad;      
But if your love is what you say it is,      
Be never sorry that my love took off      
That horrid hair to make your face at last      
A human fact. Since I have had your name         1295   
To dream of and say over to myself,      
The visitations of that awful beard      
Have been a terror for my nights and days—      
For twenty years. I’ve seen it like an ocean,      
Blown seven ways at once and wrecking ships,         1300   
With men and women screaming for their lives;      
I’ve seen it woven into shining ladders      
That ran up out of sight and so to heaven,      
All covered with white ghosts with hanging robes      
Like folded wings,—and there were millions of them,         1305   
Climbing, climbing, climbing, all the time;      
And all the time that I was watching them      
I thought how far above me Merlin was,      
And wondered always what his face was like.      
But even then, as a child, I knew the day         1310   
Would come some time when I should see his face      
And hear his voice, and have him in my house      
Till he should care no more to stay in it,      
And go away to found another kingdom.”—      
“Not that,” he said; and, sighing, drank more wine;         1315   
“One kingdom for one Merlin is enough.”—      
“One Merlin for one Vivian is enough,”      
She said. “If you care much, remember that;      
But the Lord knows how many Vivians      
One Merlin’s entertaining eye might favor,         1320   
Indifferently well and all at once,      
If they were all at hand. Praise heaven they’re not.”      
   
“If they were in the world—praise heaven they’re not—      
And if one Merlin’s entertaining eye      
Saw two of them, there might be left him then         1325   
The sight of no eye to see anything—      
Not even the Vivian who is everything,      
She being Beauty, Beauty being She,      
She being Vivian, and so on for ever.”—      
“I’m glad you don’t see two of me,” she said;         1330   
“For there’s a whole world yet for you to eat      
And drink and say to me before I know      
The sort of creature that you see in me.      
I’m withering for a little more attention,      
But, being woman, I can wait. These cups         1335   
That you see coming are for the last there is      
Of what my father gave to kings alone,      
And far from always. You are more than kings      
To me; therefore I give it all to you,      
Imploring you to spare no more of it         1340   
Than a small cockle-shell would hold for me      
To pledge your love and mine in. Take the rest,      
That I may see tonight the end of it.      
I’ll have no living remnant of the dead      
Annoying me until it fades and sours         1345   
Of too long cherishing; for Time enjoys      
The look that’s on our faces when we scowl      
On unexpected ruins, and thrift itself      
May be a sort of slow unwholesome fire      
That eats away to dust the life that feeds it.         1350   
You smile, I see, but I said what I said.      
One hardly has to live a thousand years      
To contemplate a lost economy;      
So let us drink it while it’s yet alive      
And you and I are not untimely ashes.         1355   
My last words are your own, and I don’t like ’em.”—      
A sudden laughter scattered from her eyes      
A threatening wisdom. He smiled and let her laugh,      
Then looked into the dark where there was nothing:      
“There’s more in this than I have seen,” he thought,         1360   
“Though I shall see it.”—“Drink,” she said again;      
“There’s only this much in the world of it,      
And I am near to giving all to you      
Because you are so great and I so little.”      
   
With a long-kindling gaze that caught from hers         1365   
A laughing flame, and with a hand that shook      
Like Arthur’s kingdom, Merlin slowly raised      
A golden cup that for a golden moment      
Was twinned in air with hers; and Vivian,      
Who smiled at him across their gleaming rims,         1370   
From eyes that made a fuel of the night      
Surrounding her, shot glory over gold      
At Merlin, while their cups touched and his trembled.      
He drank, not knowing what, nor caring much      
For kings who might have cared less for themselves,         1375   
He thought, had all the darkness and wild light      
That fell together to make Vivian      
Been there before them then to flower anew      
Through sheathing crimson into candle-light      
With each new leer of their loose, liquorish eyes.         1380   
Again he drank, and he cursed every king      
Who might have touched her even in her cradle;      
For what were kings to such as he, who made them      
And saw them totter—for the world to see,      
And heed, if the world would? He drank again,         1385   
And yet again—to make himself assured      
No manner of king should have the last of it—      
The cup that Vivian filled unfailingly      
Until she poured for nothing. “At the end      
Of this incomparable flowing gold,”         1390   
She prattled on to Merlin, who observed      
Her solemnly, “I fear there may be specks.”—      
He sighed aloud, whereat she laughed at him      
And pushed the golden cup a little nearer.      
He scanned it with a sad anxiety,         1395   
And then her face likewise, and shook his head      
As if at her concern for such a matter:      
“Specks? What are specks? Are you afraid of them?”      
He murmured slowly, with a drowsy tongue;      
“There are specks everywhere. I fear them not.         1400   
If I were king in Camelot, I might      
Fear more than specks. But now I fear them not.      
You are too strange a lady to fear specks.”      
   
He stared a long time at the cup of gold      
Before him but he drank no more. There came         1405   
Between him and the world a crumbling sky      
Of black and crimson, with a crimson cloud      
That held a far off town of many towers.      
All swayed and shaken, till at last they fell,      
And there was nothing but a crimson cloud         1410   
That crumbled into nothing, like the sky      
That vanished with it, carrying away      
The world, the woman, and all memory of them,      
Until a slow light of another sky      
Made gray an open casement, showing him         1415   
Faint shapes of an exotic furniture      
That glimmered with a dim magnificence,      
And letting in the sound of many birds      
That were, as he lay there remembering,      
The only occupation of his ears         1420   
Until it seemed they shared a fainter sound,      
As if a sleeping child with a black head      
Beside him drew the breath of innocence.      
   
One shining afternoon around the fountain,      
As on the shining day of his arrival,         1425   
The sunlight was alive with flying silver      
That had for Merlin a more dazzling flash      
Than jewels rained in dreams, and a richer sound      
Than harps, and all the morning stars together,—      
When jewels and harps and stars and everything         1430   
That flashed and sang and was not Vivian,      
Seemed less than echoes of her least of words—      
For she was coming. Suddenly, somewhere      
Behind him, she was coming; that was all      
He knew until she came and took his hand         1435   
And held it while she talked about the fishes.      
When she looked up he thought a softer light      
Was in her eyes than once he had found there;      
And had there been left yet for dusky women      
A beauty that was heretofore not hers,         1440   
He told himself he must have seen it then      
Before him in the face at which he smiled      
And trembled. “Many men have called me wise,”      
He said, “but you are wiser than all wisdom      
If you know what you are.”—“I don’t,” she said;         1445   
“I know that you and I are here together;      
I know that I have known for twenty years      
That life would be almost a constant yawning      
Until you came; and now that you are here,      
I know that you are not to go away         1450   
Until you tell me that I’m hideous;      
I know that I like fishes, ferns, and snakes,—      
Maybe because I liked them when the world      
Was young and you and I were salamanders;      
I know, too, a cool place not far from here,         1455   
Where there are ferns that are like marching men      
Who never march away. Come now and see them,      
And do as they do—never march away.      
When they are gone, some others, crisp and green,      
Will have their place, but never march away.”—         1460   
He smoothed her silky fingers, one by one:      
“Some other Merlin, also, do you think,      
Will have his place—and never march away?”—      
Then Vivian laid a finger on his lips      
And shook her head at him before she laughed:         1465   
“There is no other Merlin than yourself,      
And you are never going to be old.”      
   
Oblivious of a world that made of him      
A jest, a legend, and a long regret,      
And with a more commanding wizardry         1470   
Than his to rule a kingdom where the king      
Was Love and the queen Vivian, Merlin found      
His queen without the blemish of a word      
That was more rough than honey from her lips,      
Or the first adumbration of a frown         1475   
To cloud the night-wild fire that in her eyes      
Had yet a smoky friendliness of home,      
And a foreknowing care for mighty trifles.      
“There are miles and miles for you to wander in,”      
She told him once: “Your prison yard is large,         1480   
And I would rather take my two ears off      
And feed them to the fishes in the fountain      
Than buzz like an incorrigible bee      
For always around yours, and have you hate      
The sound of me; for some day then, for certain,         1485   
Your philosophic rage would see in me      
A bee in earnest, and your hand would smite      
My life away. And what would you do then?      
I know: for years and years you’d sit alone      
Upon my grave, and be the grieving image         1490   
Of lean remorse, and suffer miserably;      
And often, all day long, you’d only shake      
Your celebrated head and all it holds,      
Or beat it with your fist the while you groaned      
Aloud and went on saying to yourself:         1495   
‘Never should I have killed her, or believed      
She was a bee that buzzed herself to death,      
First having made me crazy, had there been      
Judicious distance and wise absences      
To keep the two of us inquisitive.’”—         1500   
“I fear you bow your unoffending head      
Before a load that should be mine,” said he;      
“If so, you led me on by listening.      
You should have shrieked and jumped, and then fled yelling;      
That’s the best way when a man talks too long.         1505   
God’s pity on me if I love your feet      
More now than I could ever love the face      
Of any one of all those Vivians      
You summoned out of nothing on the night      
When I saw towers. I’ll wander and amend.”—         1510   
At that she flung the noose of her soft arms      
Around his neck and kissed him instantly:      
“You are the wisest man that ever was,      
And I’ve a prayer to make: May all you say      
To Vivian be a part of what you knew         1515   
Before the curse of her unquiet head      
Was on your shoulder, as you have it now,      
To punish you for knowing beyond knowledge.      
You are the only one who sees enough      
To make me see how far away I am         1520   
From all that I have seen and have not been;      
You are the only thing there is alive      
Between me as I am and as I was      
When Merlin was a dream. You are to listen      
When I say now to you that I’m alone.         1525   
Like you, I saw too much; and unlike you      
I made no kingdom out of what I saw—      
Or none save this one here that you must rule,      
Believing you are ruled. I see too far      
To rule myself. Time’s way with you and me         1530   
Is our way, in that we are out of Time      
And out of tune with Time. We have this place,      
And you must hold us in it or we die.      
Look at me now and say if what I say      
Be folly or not; for my unquiet head         1535   
Is no conceit of mine. I had it first      
When I was born; and I shall have it with me      
Till my unquiet soul is on its way      
To be, I hope, where souls are quieter.      
So let the first and last activity         1540   
Of what you say so often is your love      
Be always to remember that our lyres      
Are not strung for Today. On you it falls      
To keep them in accord here with each other,      
For you have wisdom, I have only sight         1545   
For distant things—and you. And you are Merlin.      
Poor wizard! Vivian is your punishment      
For making kings of men who are not kings;      
And you are mine, by the same reasoning,      
For living out of Time and out of tune         1550   
With anything but you. No other man      
Could make me say so much of what I know      
As I say now to you. And you are Merlin!”      
   
She looked up at him till his way was lost      
Again in the familiar wilderness         1555   
Of night that love made for him in her eyes,      
And there he wandered as he said he would;      
He wandered also in his prison-yard,      
And, when he found her coming after him,      
Beguiled her with her own admonishing         1560   
And frowned upon her with a fierce reproof      
That many a time in the old world outside      
Had set the mark of silence on strong men—      
Whereat she laughed, not always wholly sure,      
Nor always wholly glad, that he who played         1565   
So lightly was the wizard of her dreams:      
“No matter—if only Merlin keep the world      
Away,” she thought. “Our lyres have many strings,      
But he must know them all, for he is Merlin.”      
   
And so far years, till ten of them were gone,—         1570   
Ten years, ten seasons, or ten flying ages—      
Fate made Broceliande a paradise,      
By none invaded, until Dagonet,      
Like a discordant, awkward bird of doom,      
Flew in with Arthur’s message. For the King,         1575   
In sorrow cleaving to simplicity,      
And having in his love a quick remembrance      
Of Merlin’s old affection for the fellow,      
Had for this vain, reluctant enterprise      
Appointed him—the knight who made men laugh,         1580   
And was a fool because he played the fool.      
   
“The King believes today, as in his boyhood,      
That I am Fate; and I can do no more      
Than show again what in his heart he knows,”      
Said Merlin to himself and Vivian:         1585   
“This time I go because I made him King,      
Thereby to be a mirror for the world;      
This time I go, but never after this,      
For I can be no more than what I was,      
And I can do no more than I have done.”         1590   
He took her slowly in his arms and felt      
Her body throbbing like a bird against him:      
“This time I go; I go because I must.”      
   
And in the morning, when he rode away      
With Dagonet and Blaise through the same gate         1595   
That once had clanged as if to shut for ever,      
She had not even asked him not to go;      
For it was then that in his lonely gaze      
Of helpless love and sad authority      
She found the gleam of his imprisoned power         1600   
That Fate withheld; and, pitying herself,      
She pitied the fond Merlin she had changed,      
And saw the Merlin who had changed the world.

IV. Merlin   
VI   
     
“NO kings are coming on their hands and knees,      
Nor yet on horses or in chariots,         1605   
To carry me away from you again,”      
Said Merlin, winding around Vivian’s ear      
A shred of her black hair. “King Arthur knows      
That I have done with kings, and that I speak      
No more their crafty language. Once I knew it,         1610   
But now the only language I have left      
Is one that I must never let you hear      
Too long, or know too well. When towering deeds      
Once done shall only out of dust and words      
Be done again, the doer may then be wary         1615   
Lest in the complement of his new fabric      
There be more words than dust.”      
   
        “Why tell me so?”      
Said Vivian; and a singular thin laugh      
Came after her thin question. “Do you think         1620   
That I’m so far away from history      
That I require, even of the wisest man      
Who ever said the wrong thing to a woman,      
So large a light on what I know already—      
When all I seek is here before me now         1625   
In your new eyes that you have brought for me      
From Camelot? The eyes you took away      
Were sad and old; and I could see in them      
A Merlin who remembered all the kings      
He ever saw, and wished himself, almost,         1630   
Away from Vivian, to make other kings,      
And shake the world again in the old manner.      
I saw myself no bigger than a beetle      
For several days, and wondered if your love      
Were large enough to make me any larger         1635   
When you came back. Am I a beetle still?”      
She stood up on her toes and held her cheek      
For some time against his, and let him go.      
   
“I fear the time has come for me to wander      
A little in my prison-yard,” he said.—         1640   
“No, tell me everything that you have seen      
And heard and done, and seen done, and heard done,      
Since you deserted me. And tell me first      
What the King thinks of me.”—“The King believes      
That you are almost what you are,” he told her:         1645   
“The beauty of all ages that are vanished,      
Reborn to be the wonder of one woman.”—      
“I knew he hated me. What else of him?”—      
“And all that I have seen and heard and done,      
Which is not much, would make a weary telling;         1650   
And all your part of it would be to sleep,      
And dream that Merlin had his beard again.”—      
“Then tell me more about your good fool knight,      
Sir Dagonet. If Blaise were not half-mad      
Already with his pondering on the name         1655   
And shield of his unshielding nameless father,      
I’d make a fool of him. I’d call him Ajax;      
I’d have him shake his fist at thunder-storms,      
And dance a jig as long as there was lightning,      
And so till I forgot myself entirely.         1660   
Not even your love may do so much as that.”—      
“Thunder and lightning are no friends of mine,”      
Said Merlin slowly, “more than they are yours;      
They bring me nearer to the elements      
From which I came than I care now to be.”—         1665   
“You owe a service to those elements;      
For by their service you outwitted age      
And made the world a kingdom of your will.”—      
He touched her hand, smiling: “Whatever service      
Of mine awaits them will not be forgotten,”         1670   
He said; and the smile faded on his face.—      
“Now of all graceless and ungrateful wizards—”      
But there she ceased, for she found in his eyes      
The first of a new fear. “The wrong word rules      
Today,” she said; “and we’ll have no more journeys.”         1675   
   
Although he wandered rather more than ever      
Since he had come again to Brittany      
From Camelot, Merlin found eternally      
Before him a new loneliness that made      
Of garden, park, and woodland, all alike,         1680   
A desolation and a changelessness      
Defying reason, without Vivian      
Beside him, like a child with a black head,      
Or moving on before him, or somewhere      
So near him that, although he saw it not         1685   
With eyes, he felt the picture of her beauty      
And shivered at the nearness of her being.      
Without her now there was no past or future,      
And a vague, soul-consuming premonition      
He found the only tenant of the present;         1690   
He wondered, when she was away from him,      
If his avenging injured intellect      
Might shine with Arthur’s kingdom a twin mirror,      
Fate’s plaything, for new ages without eyes      
To see therein themselves and their declension.         1695   
Love made his hours a martyrdom without her;      
The world was like an empty house without her,      
Where Merlin was a prisoner of love      
Confined within himself by too much freedom,      
Repeating an unending exploration         1700   
Of many solitary silent rooms,      
And only in a way remembering now      
That once their very solitude and silence      
Had by the magic of expectancy      
Made sure what now he doubted—though his doubts,         1705   
Day after day, were founded on a shadow.      
   
For now to Merlin, in his paradise,      
Had come an unseen angel with a sword      
Unseen, the touch of which was a long fear      
For longer sorrow that had never come,         1710   
Yet might if he compelled it. He discovered,      
One golden day in autumn as he wandered,      
That he had made the radiance of two years      
A misty twilight when he might as well      
Have had no mist between him and the sun,         1715   
The sun being Vivian. On his coming then      
To find her all in green against a wall      
Of green and yellow leaves, and crumbling bread      
For birds around the fountain while she sang      
And the birds ate the bread, he told himself         1720   
That everything today was as it was      
At first, and for a minute he believed it.      
“I’d have you always all in green out here,”      
He said, “if I had much to say about it.”—      
She clapped her crumbs away and laughed at him:         1725   
“I’ve covered up my bones with every color      
That I can carry on them without screaming,      
And you have liked them all—or made me think so.”—      
“I must have liked them if you thought I did,”      
He answered, sighing; “but the sight of you         1730   
Today as on the day I saw you first,      
All green, all wonderful” … He tore a leaf      
To pieces with a melancholy care      
That made her smile.—“Why pause at ‘wonderful’?      
You’ve hardly been yourself since you came back         1735   
From Camelot, where that unpleasant King      
Said things that you have never said to me.”—      
He looked upon her with a worn reproach:      
“The King said nothing that I keep from you.”—      
“What is it then?” she asked, imploringly;         1740   
“You man of moods and miracles, what is it?”—      
He shook his head and tore another leaf:      
“There is no need of asking what it is;      
Whatever you or I may choose to name it,      
The name of it is Fate, who played with me         1745   
And gave me eyes to read of the unwritten      
More lines than I have read. I see no more      
Today than yesterday, but I remember.      
My ways are not the ways of other men;      
My memories go forward. It was you         1750   
Who said that we were not in tune with Time;      
It was not I who said it.”—“But you knew it;      
What matter then who said it?”—“It was you      
Who said that Merlin was your punishment      
For being in tune with him and not with Time—         1755   
With Time or with the world; and it was you      
Who said you were alone, even here with Merlin;      
It was not I who said it. It is I      
Who tell you now my inmost thoughts.” He laughed      
As if at hidden pain around his heart,         1760   
But there was not much laughing in his eyes.      
They walked, and for a season they were silent:      
“I shall know what you mean by that,” she said,      
“When you have told me. Here’s an oak you like,      
And here’s a place that fits me wondrous well         1765   
To sit in. You sit there. I’ve seen you there      
Before; and I have spoiled your noble thoughts      
By walking all my fingers up and down      
Your countenance, as if they were the feet      
Of a small animal with no great claws.         1770   
Tell me a story now about the world,      
And the men in it, what they do in it,      
And why it is they do it all so badly.”—      
“I’ve told you every story that I know,      
Almost,” he said.—“O, don’t begin like that.”—         1775   
“Well, once upon a time there was a King.”—      
“That has a more commendable address;      
Go on, and tell me all about the King;      
I’ll bet the King had warts or carbuncles,      
Or something wrong in his divine insides,         1780   
To make him wish that Adam had died young.”      
   
Merlin observed her slowly with a frown      
Of saddened wonder. She laughed rather lightly,      
And at his heart he felt again the sword      
Whose touch was a long fear for longer sorrow.         1785   
“Well, once upon a time there was a king,”      
He said again, but now in a dry voice      
That wavered and betrayed a venturing.      
He paused, and would have hesitated longer,      
But something in him that was not himself         1790   
Compelled an utterance that his tongue obeyed,      
As an unwilling child obeys a father      
Who might be richer for obedience      
If he obeyed the child: “There was a king      
Who would have made his reign a monument         1795   
For kings and peoples of the waiting ages      
To reverence and remember, and to this end      
He coveted and won, with no ado      
To make a story of, a neighbor queen      
Who limed him with her smile and had of him,         1800   
In token of their sin, what he found soon      
To be a sort of mongrel son and nephew—      
And a most precious reptile in addition—      
To ornament his court and carry arms,      
And latterly to be the darker half         1805   
Of ruin. Also the king, who made of love      
More than he made of life and death together,      
Forgot the world and his example in it      
For yet another woman—one of many—      
And this one he made Queen, albeit he knew         1810   
That her unsworn allegiance to the knight      
That he had loved the best of all his order      
Must one day bring along the coming end      
Of love and honor and of everything;      
And with a kingdom builded on two pits         1815   
Of living sin,—so founded by the will      
Of one wise counsellor who loved the king,      
And loved the world and therefore made him king      
To be a mirror for it,—the king reigned well      
For certain years, awaiting a sure doom;         1820   
For certain years he waved across the world      
A royal banner with a Dragon on it;      
And men of every land fell worshipping      
The Dragon as it were the living God,      
And not the living sin.”         1825   
   
        She rose at that,      
And after a calm yawn, she looked at Merlin:      
“Why all this new insistence upon sin?”      
She said; “I wonder if I understand      
This king of yours, with all his pits and dragons;         1830   
I know I do not like him.” A thinner light      
Was in her eyes than he had found in them      
Since he became the willing prisoner      
That she had made of him; and on her mouth      
Lay now a colder line of irony         1835   
Than all his fears or nightmares could have drawn      
Before today: “What reason do you know      
For me to listen to this king of yours?      
What reading has a man of woman’s days,      
Even though the man be Merlin and a prophet?”         1840   
   
“I know no call for you to love the king,”      
Said Merlin, driven ruinously along      
By the vindictive urging of his fate;      
“I know no call for you to love the king,      
Although you serve him, knowing not yet the king         1845   
You serve. There is no man, or any woman,      
For whom the story of the living king      
Is not the story of the living sin.      
I thought my story was the common one,      
For common recognition and regard.”         1850   
   
“Then let us have no more of it,” she said;      
“For we are not so common, I believe,      
That we need kings and pits and flags and dragons      
To make us know that we have let the world      
Go by us. Have you missed the world so much         1855   
That you must have it in with all its clots      
And wounds and bristles on to make us happy—      
Like Blaise, with shouts and horns and seven men      
Triumphant with a most unlovely boar?      
Is there no other story in the world         1860   
Than this one of a man that you made king      
To be a moral for the speckled ages?      
You said once long ago, if you remember,      
‘You are too strange a lady to fear specks’;      
And it was you, you said, who feared them not.         1865   
Why do you look at me as at a snake      
All coiled to spring at you and strike you dead?      
I am not going to spring at you, or bite you;      
I’m going home. And you, if you are kind,      
Will have no fear to wander for an hour.         1870   
I’m sure the time has come for you to wander;      
And there may come a time for you to say      
What most you think it is that we need here      
To make of this Broceliande a refuge      
Where two disheartened sinners may forget         1875   
A world that has today no place for them.”      
   
A melancholy wave of revelation      
Broke over Merlin like a rising sea,      
Long viewed unwillingly and long denied.      
He saw what he had seen, but would not feel,         1880   
Till now the bitterness of what he felt      
Was in his throat, and all the coldness of it      
Was on him and around him like a flood      
Of lonelier memories than he had said      
Were memories, although he knew them now         1885   
For what they were—for what this eyes had seen,      
For what his ears had heard and what his heart      
Had felt, with him not knowing what it felt.      
But now he knew that his cold angel’s name      
Was Change, and that a mightier will than his         1890   
Or Vivian’s had ordained that he be there.      
To Vivian he could not say anything      
But words that had no more of hope in them      
Than anguish had of peace: “I meant the world …      
I meant the world,” he groaned; “not you—not me.”         1895   
   
Again the frozen line of irony      
Was on her mouth. He looked up once at it.      
And then away—too fearful of her eyes      
To see what he could hear now in her laugh      
That melted slowly into what she said,         1900   
Like snow in icy water: “This world of yours      
Will surely be the end of us. And why not?      
I’m overmuch afraid we’re part of it,—      
Or why do we build walls up all around us,      
With gates of iron that make us think the day         1905   
Of judgment’s coming when they clang behind us?      
And yet you tell me that you fear no specks!      
With you I never cared for them enough      
To think of them. I was too strange a lady.      
And your return is now a speckled king         1910   
And something that you call a living sin—      
That’s like an uninvited poor relation      
Who comes without a welcome, rather late,      
And on a foundered horse.”      
   
        “Specks? What are specks?”         1915   
He gazed at her in a forlorn wonderment      
That made her say: “You said, ‘I fear them not.’      
‘If I were king in Camelot,’ you said,      
‘I might fear more than specks.’ Have you forgotten?      
Don’t tell me, Merlin, you are growing old.         1920   
Why don’t you make somehow a queen of me,      
And give me half the world? I’d wager thrushes      
That I should reign, with you to turn the wheel,      
As well as any king that ever was.      
The curse on me is that I cannot serve         1925   
A ruler who forgets that he is king.”      
   
In this bewildered misery Merlin then      
Stared hard at Vivian’s face, more like a slave      
Who sought for common mercy than like Merlin:      
“You speak a language that was never mine,         1930   
Or I have lost my wits. Why do you seize      
The flimsiest of opportunities      
To make of what I said another thing      
Than love or reason could have let me say,      
Or let me fancy? Why do you keep the truth         1935   
So far away from me, when all your gates      
Will open at your word and let me go      
To some place where no fear or weariness      
Of yours need ever dwell? Why does a woman,      
Made otherwise a miracle of love         1940   
And loveliness, and of immortal beauty,      
Tear one word by the roots out of a thousand,      
And worry it, and torture it, and shake it,      
Like a small dog that has a rag to play with?      
What coil of an ingenious destiny         1945   
Is this that makes of what I never meant      
A meaning as remote as hell from heaven?”      
   
“I don’t know,” Vivian said reluctantly,      
And half as if in pain; “I’m going home.      
I’m going home and leave you here to wander,         1950   
Pray take your kings and sins away somewhere      
And bury them, and bury the Queen in also.      
I know this king; he lives in Camelot,      
And I shall never like him. There are specks      
Almost all over him. Long live the king,         1955   
But not the king who lives in Camelot,      
With Modred, Lancelot, and Guinevere—      
And all four speckled like a merry nest      
Of addled eggs together. You made him King      
Because you loved the world and saw in him         1960   
From infancy a mirror for the millions.      
The world will see itself in him, and then      
The world will say its prayers and wash its face,      
And build for some new king a new foundation.      
Long live the King! … But now I apprehend         1965   
A time for me to shudder and grow old      
And garrulous—and so become a fright      
For Blaise to take out walking in warm weather—      
Should I give way to long considering      
Of worlds you may have lost while prisoned here         1970   
With me and my light mind. I contemplate      
Another name for this forbidden place,      
And one more fitting. Tell me, if you find it,      
Some fitter name than Eden. We have had      
A man and woman in it for some time,         1975   
And now, it seems, we have a Tree of Knowledge.”      
She looked up at the branches overhead      
And shrugged her shoulders. Then she went away;      
And what was left of Merlin’s happiness,      
Like a disloyal phantom, followed her.         1980   
   
He felt the sword of his cold angel thrust      
And twisted in his heart, as if the end      
Were coming next, but the cold angel passed      
Invisibly and left him desolate,      
With misty brow and eyes. “The man who sees         1985   
May see too far, and he may see too late      
The path he takes unseen,” he told himself      
When he found thought again. “The man who sees      
May go on seeing till the immortal flame      
That lights and lures him folds him in its heart,         1990   
And leaves of what there was of him to die      
An item of inhospitable dust      
That love and hate alike must hide away;      
Or there may still be charted for his feet      
A dimmer faring, where the touch of time         1995   
Were like the passing of a twilight moth      
From flower to flower into oblivion,      
If there were not somewhere a barren end      
Of moths and flowers, and glimmering far away      
Beyond a desert where the flowerless days         2000   
Are told in slow defeats and agonies,      
The guiding of a nameless light that once      
Had made him see too much—and has by now      
Revealed in death, to the undying child      
Of Lancelot, the Grail. For this pure light         2005   
Has many rays to throw, for many men      
To follow; and the wise are not all pure,      
Nor are the pure all wise who follow it.      
There are more rays than men. But let the man      
Who saw too much, and was to drive himself         2010   
From paradise, play too lightly or too long      
Among the moths and flowers, he finds at last      
There is a dim way out; and he shall grope      
Where pleasant shadows lead him to the plain      
That has no shadow save his own behind him.         2015   
And there, with no complaint, nor much regret,      
Shall he plod on, with death between him now      
And the far light that guides him, till he falls      
And has an empty thought of empty rest;      
Then Fate will put a mattock in his hands         2020   
And lash him while he digs himself the grave      
That is to be the pallet and the shroud      
Of his poor blundering bones. The man who saw      
Too much must have an eye to see at last      
Where Fate has marked the clay; and he shall delve,         2025   
Although his hand may slacken, and his knees      
May rock without a method as he toils;      
For there’s a delving that is to be done—      
If not for God, for man. I see the light,      
But I shall fall before I come to it;         2030   
For I am old. I was young yesterday.      
Time’s hand that I have held away so long      
Grips hard now on my shoulder. Time has won.      
Tomorrow I shall say to Vivian      
That I am old and gaunt and garrulous,         2035   
And tell her one more story: I am old.”      
   
There were long hours for Merlin after that,      
And much long wandering in his prison-yard,      
Where now the progress of each heavy step      
Confirmed a stillness of impending change         2040   
And imminent farewell. To Vivian’s ear      
There came for many days no other story      
Than Merlin’s iteration of his love      
And his departure from Broceliande,      
Where Merlin still remained. In Vivian’s eye,         2045   
There was a quiet kindness, and at times      
A smoky flash of incredulity      
That faded into pain. Was this the Merlin—      
This incarnation of idolatry      
And all but supplicating deference—         2050   
This bowed and reverential contradiction      
Of all her dreams and her realities—      
Was this the Merlin who for years and years      
Before she found him had so made her love him      
That kings and princes, thrones and diadems,         2055   
And honorable men who drowned themselves      
For love, were less to her than melon-shells?      
Was this the Merlin whom her fate had sent      
One spring day to come ringing at her gate,      
Bewildering her love with happy terror         2060   
That later was to be all happiness?      
Was this the Merlin who had made the world      
Half over, and then left it with a laugh      
To be the youngest, oldest, weirdest, gayest,      
And wisest, and sometimes the foolishest         2065   
Of all the men of her consideration?      
Was this the man who had made other men      
As ordinary as arithmetic?      
Was this man Merlin who came now so slowly      
Towards the fountain where she stood again         2070   
In shimmering green? Trembling, he took her hands      
And pressed them fondly, one upon the other,      
Between his:      
   
        “I was wrong that other day,      
For I have one more story. I am old.”         2075   
He waited like one hungry for the word      
Not said; and she found in his eyes a light      
As patient as a candle in a window      
That looks upon the sea and is a mark      
For ships that have gone down. “Tomorrow,” he said;         2080   
“Tomorrow I shall go away again      
To Camelot; and I shall see the King      
Once more; and I may come to you again      
Once more; and I shall go away again      
For ever. There is now no more than that         2085   
For me to do; and I shall do no more.      
I saw too much when I saw Camelot;      
And I saw farther backward into Time,      
And forward, than a man may see and live,      
When I made Arthur king. I saw too far,         2090   
But not so far as this. Fate played with me      
As I have played with Time; and Time, like me,      
Being less than Fate, will have on me his vengeance.      
On Fate there is no vengeance, even for God.”      
He drew her slowly into his embrace         2095   
And held her there, but when he kissed her lips      
They were as cold as leaves and had no answer;      
For Time had given him then, to prove his words,      
A frozen moment of a woman’s life.      
   
When Merlin the next morning came again         2100   
In the same pilgrim robe that he had worn      
While he sat waiting where the cherry-blossoms      
Outside the gate fell on him and around him      
Grief came to Vivian at the sight of him;      
And like a flash of a swift ugly knife,         2105   
A blinding fear came with it. “Are you going?”      
She said, more with her lips than with her voice;      
And he said, “I am going. Blaise and I      
Are going down together to the shore,      
And Blaise is coming back. For this one day         2110   
Be good enough to spare him, for I like him.      
I tell you now, as once I told the King,      
That I can be no more than what I was,      
And I can say no more than I have said.      
Sometimes you told me that I spoke too long         2115   
And sent me off to wander. That was good.      
I go now for another wandering,      
And I pray God that all be well with you.”      
   
For long there was a whining in her ears      
Of distant wheels departing. When it ceased,         2120   
She closed the gate again so quietly      
That Merlin could have heard no sound of it.

IV. Merlin   
VII   
     
BY Merlin’s Rock, where Dagonet the fool      
Was given through many a dying afternoon      
To sit and meditate on human ways         2125   
And ways divine, Gawaine and Bedivere      
Stood silent, gazing down on Camelot.      
The two had risen and were going home:      
“It hits me sore, Gawaine,” said Bedivere,      
“To think on all the tumult and affliction         2130   
Down there, and all the noise and preparation      
That hums of coming death, and, if my fears      
Be born of reason, of what’s more than death.      
Wherefore, I say to you again, Gawaine,—      
To you—that this late hour is not too late         2135   
For you to change yourself and change the King:      
For though the King may love me with a love      
More tried, and older, and more sure, may be,      
Than for another, for such a time as this      
The friend who turns him to the world again         2140   
Shall have a tongue more gracious and an eye      
More shrewd than mine. For such a time as this      
The King must have a glamour to persuade him.”      
   
“The King shall have a glamour, and anon,”      
Gawaine said, and he shot death from his eyes;         2145   
“If you were King, as Arthur is—or was—      
And Lancelot had carried off your Queen,      
And killed a score or so of your best knights—      
Not mentioning my two brothers, whom he slew      
Unarmored and unarmed—God save your wits!         2150   
Two stewards with skewers could have done as much,      
And you and I might now be rotting for it.”      
   
“But Lancelot’s men were crowded,—they were crushed;      
And there was nothing for them but to strike      
Or die, not seeing where they struck. Think you         2155   
They would have slain Gareth and Gaheris,      
And Tor, and all those other friends of theirs?      
God’s mercy for the world he made, I say,      
And for the blood that writes the story of it.      
Gareth and Gaheris, Tor and Lamorak,—         2160   
All dead, with all the others that are dead!      
These years have made me turn to Lamorak      
For counsel—and now Lamorak is dead.”      
   
“Why do you fling those two names in my face?      
’Twas Modred made an end of Lamorak,         2165   
Not I; and Lancelot now has done for Tor.      
I’ll urge no king on after Lancelot      
For such a two as Tor and Lamorak:      
Their father killed my father, and their friend      
Was Lancelot, not I. I’ll own my fault—         2170   
I’m living; and while I’ve a tongue can talk,      
I’ll say this to the King: ‘Burn Lancelot      
By inches till he give you back the Queen;      
Then hang him—drown him—or do anything      
To rid the world of him.’ He killed my brothers,         2175   
And he was once my friend: Now damn the soul      
Of him who killed my brothers! There you have me.”      
   
“You are a strong man, Gawaine, and your strength      
Goes ill where foes are. You may cleave their limbs      
And heads off, but you cannot damn their souls;         2180   
What you may do now is to save their souls,      
And bodies too, and like enough your own.      
Remember that King Arthur is a king,      
And where there is a king there is a kingdom.      
Is not the kingdom any more to you         2185   
Than one brief enemy? Would you see it fall      
And the King with it, for one mortal hate      
That burns out reason? Gawaine, you are king      
Today. Another day may see no king      
But Havoc, if you have no other word         2190   
For Arthur now than hate for Lancelot.      
Is not the world as large as Lancelot?      
Is Lancelot, because one woman’s eyes      
Are brighter when they look on him, to sluice      
The world with angry blood? Poor flesh! Poor flesh!         2195   
And you, Gawaine,—are you so gaffed with hate      
You cannot leave it and so plunge away      
To stiller places and there see, for once,      
What hangs on this pernicious expedition      
The King in his insane forgetfulness         2200   
Would undertake—with you to drum him on?      
Are you as mad as he and Lancelot      
Made ravening into one man twice as mad      
As either? Is the kingdom of the world,      
Now rocking, to go down in sound and blood         2205   
And ashes and sick ruin, and for the sake      
Of three men and a woman? If it be so,      
God’s mercy for the world he made, I say,—      
And say again to Dagonet. Sir Fool,      
Your throne is empty, and you may as well         2210   
Sit on it and be ruler of the world      
From now till supper-time.”      
   
        Sir Dagonet,      
Appearing, made reply to Bedivere’s      
Dry welcome with a famished look of pain,         2215   
On which he built a smile: “If I were King,      
You, Bedivere, should be my counsellor;      
And we should have no more wars over women.      
I’ll sit me down and meditate on that.”      
Gawaine, for all his anger, laughed a little,         2220   
And clapped the fool’s lean shoulder; for he loved him      
And was with Arthur when he made him knight.      
Then Dagonet said on to Bedivere,      
As if his tongue would make a jest of sorrow:      
“Sometime I’ll tell you what I might have done         2225   
Had I been Lancelot and you King Arthur—      
Each having in himself the vicious essence      
That now lives in the other and makes war.      
When all men are like you and me, my lord,      
When all are rational or rickety,         2230   
There may be no more war. But what’s here now?      
Lancelot loves the Queen, and he makes war      
Of love; the King, being bitten to the soul      
By love and hate that work in him together,      
Makes war of madness; Gawaine hates Lancelot,         2235   
And he, to be in tune, makes war of hate;      
Modred hates everything, yet he can see      
With one damned illegitimate small eye      
His father’s crown, and with another like it      
He sees the beauty of the Queen herself;         2240   
He needs the two for his ambitious pleasure,      
And therefore he makes war of his ambition;      
And somewhere in the middle of all this      
There’s a squeezed world that elbows for attention.      
Poor Merlin, buried in Broceliande!         2245   
He must have had an academic eye      
For woman when he founded Arthur’s kingdom,      
And in Broceliande he may be sorry.      
Flutes, hautboys, drums, and viols. God be with him!      
I’m glad they tell me there’s another world,         2250   
For this one’s a disease without a doctor.”      
   
“No, not so bad as that,” said Bedivere;      
The doctor, like ourselves, may now be learning;      
And Merlin may have gauged his enterprise      
Whatever the cost he may have paid for knowing.         2255   
We pass, but many are to follow us,      
And what they build may stay; though I believe      
Another age will have another Merlin,      
Another Camelot, and another King.      
Sir Dagonet, farewell.”         2260   
   
        “Farewell, Sir Knight,      
And you, Sir Knight: Gawaine, you have the world      
Now in your fingers—an uncommon toy,      
Albeit a small persuasion in the balance      
With one man’s hate. I’m glad you’re not a fool,         2265   
For then you might be rickety, as I am,      
And rational as Bedivere. Farewell.      
I’ll sit here and be king. God save the King!”      
   
But Gawaine scowled and frowned and answered nothing      
As he went slowly down with Bedivere         2270   
To Camelot, where Arthur’s army waited      
The King’s word for the melancholy march      
To Joyous Gard, where Lancelot hid the Queen      
And armed his host, and there was now no joy,      
As there was now no joy for Dagonet         2275   
While he sat brooding, with his wan cheek-bones      
Hooked with his bony fingers: “Go, Gawaine,”      
He mumbled: “Go your way, and drag the world      
Along down with you. What’s a world or so      
To you if you can hide an ell of iron         2280   
Somewhere in Lancelot, and hear him wheeze      
And sputter once or twice before he goes      
Wherever the Queen sends him? There’s a man      
Who should have been a king, and would have been,      
Had he been born so. So should I have been         2285   
A king, had I been born so, fool or no:      
King Dagonet, or Dagonet the King;      
King-Fool, Fool-King; ’twere not impossible.      
I’ll meditate on that and pray for Arthur,      
Who made me all I am, except a fool.         2290   
Now he goes mad for love, as I might go      
Had I been born a king and not a fool.      
Today I think I’d rather be a fool;      
Today the world is less than one scared woman—      
Wherefore a field of waving men may soon         2295   
Be shorn by Time’s indifferent scythe, because      
The King is mad. The seeds of history      
Are small, but given a few gouts of warm blood      
For quickening, they sprout out wondrously      
And have a leaping growth whereof no man         2300   
May shun such harvesting of change or death,      
Or life, as may fall on him to be borne      
When I am still alive and rickety,      
And Bedivere’s alive and rational—      
If he come out of this, and there’s a doubt,—         2305   
The King, Gawaine, Modred, and Lancelot      
May all be lying underneath a weight      
Of bloody sheaves too heavy for their shoulders      
All spent, and all dishonored, and all dead;      
And if it come to be that this be so,         2310   
And it be true that Merlin saw the truth,      
Such harvest were the best. Your fool sees not      
So far as Merlin sees: yet if he saw      
The truth—why then, such harvest were the best.      
I’ll pray for Arthur; I can do no more.         2315   
   
“Why not for Merlin? Or do you count him,      
In this extreme, so foreign to salvation      
That prayer would be a stranger to his name?”      
   
Poor Dagonet, with terror shaking him,      
Stood up and saw before him an old face         2320   
Made older with an inch of silver beard,      
And faced eyes more eloquent of pain      
And ruin than all the faded eyes of age      
Till now had ever been, although in them      
There was a mystic and intrinsic peace         2325   
Of one who sees where men of nearer sight      
See nothing. On their way to Camelot,      
Gawaine and Bedivere had passed him by,      
With lax attention for the pilgrim cloak      
They passed, and what it hid: yet Merlin saw         2330   
Their faces, and he saw the tale was true      
That he had lately drawn from solemn strangers.      
   
“Well, Dagonet, and by your leave,” he said,      
“I’ll rest my lonely relics for a while      
On this rock that was mine and now is yours.         2335   
I favor the succession; for you know      
Far more than many doctors, though your doubt      
Is your peculiar poison. I foresaw      
Long since, and I have latterly been told      
What moves in this commotion down below         2340   
To show men what it means. It means the end—      
If men whose tongues had less to say to me      
Than had their shoulders are adept enough      
To know; and you may pray for me or not,      
Sir Friend, Sir Dagonet.”         2345   
   
        “Sir fool, you mean,”      
Dagonet said, and gazed on Merlin sadly:      
“I’ll never pray again for anything,      
And last of all for this that you behold—      
The smouldering faggot of unlovely bones         2350   
That God has given to me to call Myself.      
When Merlin comes to Dagonet for prayer,      
It is indeed the end.”      
   
        “And in the end      
Are more beginnings, Dagonet, than men         2355   
Shall name or know today. It was the end      
Of Arthur’s insubstantial majesty      
When to him and his knights the Grail foreshowed      
The quest of life that was to be the death      
Of many, and the slow discouraging         2360   
Of many more. Or do I err in this?”      
“No,” Dagonet replied; “there was a Light;      
And Galahad, in the Siege Perilous,      
Alone of all on whom it fell, was calm;      
There was a Light wherein men saw themselves         2365   
In one another as they might become—      
Or so they dreamed. There was a long to-do,      
And Gawaine, of all forlorn ineligibles,      
Rose up the first, and cried more lustily      
Than any after him that he should find         2370   
The Grail, or die for it,—though he did neither;      
For he came back as living and as fit      
For new and old iniquity as ever.      
Then Lancelot came back, and Bors came back,—      
Like men who had seen more than men should see,         2375   
And still come back. They told of Percival      
Who saw too much to make of this worn life      
A long necessity, and of Galahad,      
Who died and is alive. They all saw Something.      
God knows the meaning or the end of it,         2380   
But they saw Something. And if I’ve an eye,      
Small joy has the Queen been to Lancelot      
Since he came back from seeing what he saw;      
For though his passion hold him like hot claws,      
He’s neither in the world nor out of it.         2385   
Gawaine is king, though Arthur wears the crown;      
And Gawaine’s hate for Lancelot is the sword      
That hangs by one of Merlin’s fragile hairs      
Above the world. Were you to see the King,      
The frenzy that has overthrown his wisdom,         2390   
Instead of him and his upheaving empire,      
Might have an end.”      
   
        “I came to see the King,”      
Said Merlin, like a man who labors hard      
And long with an importunate confession.         2395   
“No, Dagonet, you cannot tell me why,      
Although your tongue is eager with wild hope      
To tell me more than I may tell myself      
About myself. All this that was to be      
Might show to man how vain it were to wreck         2400   
The world for self if it were all in vain.      
When I began with Arthur I could see      
In each bewildered man who dots the earth      
A moment with his days a groping thought      
Of an eternal will, strangely endowed         2405   
With merciful illusions whereby self      
Becomes the will itself and each man swells      
In fond accordance with his agency.      
Now Arthur, Modred, Lancelot, and Gawaine      
Are swollen thoughts of this eternal will         2410   
Which have no other way to find the way      
That leads them on to their inheritance      
Than by the time-infuriating flame      
Of a wrecked empire, lighted by the torch      
Of woman, who, together with the light         2415   
That Galahad found, is yet to light the world.”      
   
A wan smile crept across the weary face      
Of Dagonet the fool: “If you knew that      
Before your burial in Broceliande,      
No wonder your eternal will accords         2420   
With all your dreams of what the world requires.      
My master, I may say this unto you      
Because I am a fool, and fear no man;      
My fear is that I’ve been a groping thought      
That never swelled enough. You say the torch         2425   
Of woman and the light that Galahad found      
Are some day to illuminate the world?      
I’ll meditate on that. The world is done      
For me; and I have been, to make men laugh,      
A lean thing of no shape and many capers.         2430   
I made them laugh, and I could laugh anon      
Myself to see them killing one another      
Because a woman with corn-colored hair      
Has pranked a man with horns. ’Twas but a flash      
Of chance, and Lancelot, the other day         2435   
That saved this pleasing sinner from the fire      
That she may spread for thousands. Were she now      
The cinder the King willed, or were you now      
To see the King, the fire might yet go out;      
But the eternal will says otherwise.         2440   
So be it; I’ll assemble certain gold      
That I may say is mine and get myself      
Away from this accurst unhappy court,      
And in some quiet place where shepherd clowns      
And cowherds may have more respondent ears         2445   
Than kings and kingdom-builders, I shall troll      
Old men to easy graves and be a child      
Again among the children of the earth.      
I’ll have no more kings, even though I loved      
King Arthur, who is mad, as I could love         2450   
No other man save Merlin, who is dead.”      
   
“Not wholly dead, but old. Merlin is old.”      
The wizard shivered as he spoke, and stared      
Away into the sunset where he saw      
Once more, as through a cracked and cloudy glass,         2455   
A crumbling sky that held a crimson cloud      
Wherein there was a town of many towers      
All swayed and shaken, in a woman’s hand      
This time, till out of it there spilled and flashed      
And tumbled, like loose jewels, town, towers, and walls,         2460   
And there was nothing but a crumbling sky      
That made anon of black and red and ruin      
A wild and final rain on Camelot.      
He bowed, and pressed his eyes: “Now by my soul,      
I have seen this before—all black and red—         2465   
Like that—like that—like Vivian—black and red;      
Like Vivian, when her eyes looked into mine      
Across the cups of gold. A flute was playing—      
Then all was black and red.”      
   
        Another smile         2470   
Crept over the wan face of Dagonet,      
Who shivered in his turn. “The torch of woman”      
He muttered, “and the light that Galahad found,      
Will some day save us all, as they saved Merlin.      
Forgive my shivering wits, but I am cold,         2475   
And it will soon be dark. Will you go down      
With me to see the King, or will you not?      
If not, I go tomorrow to the shepherds.      
The world is mad, and I’m a groping thought      
Of your eternal will; the world and I         2480   
Are strangers, and I’ll have no more of it—      
Except you go with me to see the King.”      
   
“No, Dagonet, you cannot leave me now,”      
Said Merlin, sadly. “You and I are old;      
And, as you say, we fear no man. God knows         2485   
I would not have the love that once you had      
For me be fear of me, for I am past      
All fearing now. But Fate may send a fly      
Sometimes, and he may sting us to the grave.      
So driven to test our faith in what we see.         2490   
Are you, now I am coming to an end,      
As Arthur’s days are coming to an end,      
To sting me like a fly? I do not ask      
Of you to say that you see what I see,      
Where you see nothing; nor do I require         2495   
Of any man more vision than is his;      
Yet I could wish for you a larger part      
For your last entrance here than this you play      
Tonight of a sad insect stinging Merlin.      
The more you sting, the more he pities you;         2500   
And you were never overfond of pity.      
Had you been so, I doubt if Arthur’s love,      
Or Gawaine’s, would have made of you a knight.      
No, Dagonet, you cannot leave me now,      
Nor would you if you could. You call yourself         2505   
A fool, because the world and you are strangers.      
You are a proud man, Dagonet; you have suffered      
What I alone have seen. You are no fool;      
And surely you are not a fly to sting      
My love to last regret. Believe or not         2510   
What I have seen, or what I say to you,      
But say no more to me that I am dead      
Because the King is mad, and you are old,      
And I am older. In Broceliande      
Time overtook me as I knew he must;         2515   
And I, with a fond overplus of words,      
Had warned the lady Vivian already,      
Before these wrinkles and this hesitancy      
Inhibiting my joints oppressed her sight      
With age and dissolution. She said once         2520   
That she was cold and cruel; but she meant      
That she was warm and kind, and over-wise      
For woman in a world where men see not      
Beyond themselves. She saw beyond them all,      
As I did; and she waited, as I did,         2525   
The coming of a day when cherry-blossoms      
Were to fall down all over me like snow      
In springtime. I was far from Camelot      
That afternoon; and I am farther now      
From her. I see no more for me to do         2530   
Than to leave her and Arthur and the world      
Behind me, and to pray that all be well      
With Vivian, whose unquiet heart is hungry      
For what is not, and what shall never be      
Without her, in a world that men are making,         2535   
Knowing not how, nor caring yet to know      
How slowly and how grievously they do it,—      
Though Vivian, in her golden shell of exile,      
Knows now and cares, not knowing that she cares,      
Nor caring that she knows. In time to be,         2540   
The like of her shall have another name      
Than Vivian, and her laugh shall be a fire,      
Not shining only to consume itself      
With what it burns. She knows not yet the name      
Of what she is, for now there is no name;         2545   
Some day there shall be. Time has many names,      
Unwritten yet, for what we say is old      
Because we are so young that it seems old.      
And this is all a part of what I saw      
Before you saw King Arthur. When we parted.         2550   
I told her I should see the King again,      
And, having seen him, might go back again      
To see her face once more. But I shall see      
No more the lady Vivian. Let her love      
What man she may, no other love than mine         2555   
Shall be an index of her memories.      
I fear no man who may come after me,      
And I see none. I see her, still in green,      
Beside the fountain. I shall not go back.      
We pay for going back; and all we get         2560   
Is one more needless ounce of weary wisdom      
To bring away with us. If I come not,      
The lady Vivian will remember me,      
And say: ‘I knew him when his heart was young,      
Though I have lost him now. Time called him home,         2565   
And that was as it was; for much is lost      
Between Broceliande and Camelot.’”      
   
He stared away into the west again,      
Where now no crimson cloud or phantom town      
Deceived his eyes. Above a living town         2570   
There were gray clouds and ultimate suspense,      
And a cold wind was coming. Dagonet,      
Now crouched at Merlin’s feet in his dejection,      
Saw multiplying lights far down below,      
Where lay the fevered streets. At length he felt         2575   
On his lean shoulder Merlin’s tragic hand      
And trembled, knowing that a few more days      
Would see the last of Arthur and the first      
Of Modred, whose dark patience had attained      
To one precarious half of what he sought:         2580   
“And even the Queen herself may fall to him,”      
Dagonet murmured.—“The Queen fall to Modred?      
Is that your only fear tonight?” said Merlin;      
“She may, but not for long.”—“No, not my fear;      
For I fear nothing. But I wish no fate         2585   
Like that for any woman the King loves,      
Although she be the scourge and the end of him      
That you saw coming, as I see it now.”      
Dagonet shook, but he would have no tears,      
He swore, for any king, queen, knave, or wizard—         2590   
Albeit he was a stranger among those      
Who laughed at him because he was a fool.      
“You said the truth, I cannot leave you now,”      
He stammered, and was angry for the tears      
That mocked his will and choked him.         2595   
   
        Merlin smiled,      
Faintly, and for the moment: “Dagonet,      
I need your word as one of Arthur’s knights      
That you will go on with me to the end      
Of my short way, and say unto no man         2600   
Or woman that you found or saw me here.      
No good would follow, for a doubt would live      
Unstifled of my loyalty to him      
Whose deeds are wrought for those who are to come;      
And many who see not what I have seen,         2605   
Or what you see tonight, would prattle on      
For ever, and their children after them,      
Of what might once have been had I gone down      
With you to Camelot to see the King.      
I came to see the King,—but why see kings?         2610   
All this that was to be is what I saw      
Before there was an Arthur to be king,      
And so to be a mirror wherein men      
May see themselves, and pause. If they see not,      
Or if they do see and they ponder not,—         2615   
I saw; but I was neither Fate nor God.      
I saw too much; and this would be the end,      
Were there to be end. I saw myself—      
A sight no other man has ever seen;      
And through the dark that lay beyond myself         2620   
I saw two fires that are to light the world.”      
   
On Dagonet the silent hand of Merlin      
Weighed now as living iron that held him down      
With a primeval power. Doubt, wonderment,      
Impatience, and a self-accusing sorrow         2625   
Born of an ancient love, possessed and held him      
Until his love was more than he could name,      
And he was Merlin’s fool, not Arthur’s now:      
“Say what you will, I say that I’m the fool      
Of Merlin, King of Nowhere; which is Here.         2630   
With you for king and me for court, what else      
Have we to sigh for but a place to sleep?      
I know a tavern that will take us in;      
And on the morrow I shall follow you      
Until I die for you. And when I die…”—         2635   
“Well, Dagonet, the King is listening.”—      
And Dagonet answered, hearing in the words      
Of Merlin a grave humor and a sound      
Of graver pity, “I shall die a fool.”      
He heard what might have been a father’s laugh,         2640   
Faintly behind him; and the living weight      
Of Merlin’s hand was lifted. They arose,      
And, saying nothing, found a groping way      
Down through the gloom together. Fiercer now,      
The wind was like a flying animal         2645   
That beat the two of them incessantly      
With icy wings, and bit them as they went.      
The rock above them was an empty place      
Where neither seer nor fool should view again      
The stricken city. Colder blew the wind         2650   
Across the world, and on it heavier lay      
The shadow and the burden of the night;      
And there was darkness over Camelot.


THE END

V. The Town Down the River   
1. The Master   
     
(LINCOLN)


A FLYING word from here and there      
Had sown the name at which we sneered,      
But soon the name was everywhere,      
To be reviled and then revered:      
A presence to be loved and feared,           5   
We cannot hide it, or deny      
That we, the gentlemen who jeered,      
May be forgotten by and by.      
   
He came when days were perilous      
And hearts of men were sore beguiled;          10   
And having made his note of us,      
He pondered and was reconciled.      
Was ever master yet so mild      
As he, and so untamable?      
We doubted, even when he smiled,          15   
Not knowing what he knew so well.      
   
He knew that undeceiving fate      
Would shame us whom he served unsought;      
He knew that he must wince and wait—      
The jest of those for whom he fought;          20   
He knew devoutly what he thought      
Of us and of our ridicule;      
He knew that we must all be taught      
Like little children in a school.      
   
We gave a glamour to the task          25   
That he encountered and saw through,      
But little of us did he ask,      
And little did we ever do.      
And what appears if we review      
The season when we railed and chaffed?          30   
It is the face of one who knew      
That we were learning while we laughed.      
   
The face that in our vision feels      
Again the venom that we flung,      
Transfigured to the world reveals          35   
The vigilance to which we clung.      
Shrewd, hallowed, harassed, and among      
The mysteries that are untold,      
The face we see was never young      
Nor could it wholly have been old.          40   
   
For he, to whom we had applied      
Our shopman’s test of age and worth,      
Was elemental when he died,      
As he was ancient at his birth:      
The saddest among kings of earth,          45   
Bowed with a galling crown, this man      
Met rancor with a cryptic mirth,      
Laconic—and Olympian.      
   
The love, the grandeur, and the fame      
Are bounded by the world alone;          50   
The calm, the smouldering, and the flame      
Of awful patience were his own:      
With him they are forever flown      
Past all our fond self-shadowings,      
Wherewith we cumber the Unknown          55   
As with inept, Icarian wings.      
   
For we were not as other men:      
’Twas ours to soar and his to see;      
But we are coming down again,      
And we shall come down pleasantly;          60   
Nor shall we longer disagree      
On what it is to be sublime,      
But flourish in our perigee      
And have one Titan at a time.