Alone!
On this charred, blackened, melancholy waste,
Crowned by the awful peak, Etna’s great mouth,
Round which the sullen vapor rolls,—alone!
Pausanias is far hence, and that is well,
For I must henceforth speak no more with man.
He has his lesson too, and that debt’s paid;
And the good, learned, friendly, quiet man,
May bravelier front his life, and in himself
Find henceforth energy and heart. But I,—
The weary man, the banished citizen,
Whose banishment is not his greatest ill,
Whose weariness no energy can reach,
And for whose hurt courage is not the cure,—
What should I do with life and living more?
No, thou art come too late, Empedocles!
And the world hath the day, and must break thee,
Not thou the world. With men thou canst not live:
Their thoughts, their ways, their wishes, are not thine.
And being lonely thou art miserable;
For something has impaired thy spirit’s strength,
And dried its self-sufficing fount of joy.
Thou canst not live with men nor with thyself,
O sage! O sage! Take, then, the one way left;
And turn thee to the elements, thy friends,
Thy well-tried friends, thy willing ministers,
And say: Ye servants, hear Empedocles,
Who asks this final service at your hands!
Before the sophist-brood hath overlaid
The last spark of man’s consciousness with words;
Ere quite the being of man, ere quite the world,
Be disarrayed of their divinity;
Before the soul lose all her solemn joys,
And awe be dead, and hope impossible,
And the soul’s deep eternal night come on,—
Receive me, hide me, quench me, take me home!
He advances to the edge of the crater. Smoke and fire
break forth with a loud noise, and CALLICLES is
heard below singing:—
The lyre’s voice is lovely everywhere;
In the court of gods, in the city of men,
And in the lonely rock-strewn mountain-glen,
In the still mountain air.
Only to Typho it sounds hatefully,—
To Typho only, the rebel o’erthrown,
Through whose heart Etna drives her roots of stone,
To embed them in the sea.
Wherefore dost thou groan so loud?
Wherefore do thy nostrils flash,
Through the dark night, suddenly,
Typho, such red jets of flame?
Is thy tortured heart still proud?
Is thy fire-scathed arm still rash?
Still alert thy stone-crushed frame?
Doth thy fierce soul still deplore
Thine ancient rout by the Cilician hills,
And that curst treachery on the Mount of Gore?
Do thy bloodshot eyes still weep
The fight which crowned thine ills,
Thy last mischance on this Sicilian deep?
Hast thou sworn, in thy sad lair,
Where erst the strong sea-currents sucked thee down,
Never to cease to writhe, and try to rest,
Letting the sea-stream wander through thy hair?
That thy groans, like thunder prest,
Begin to roll, and almost drown
The sweet notes whose lulling spell
Gods and the race of mortals love so well,
When through thy caves thou hearest music swell?
But an awful pleasure bland
Spreading o’er the Thunderer’s face,
When the sound climbs near his seat,
The Olympian council sees;
As he lets his lax right hand,
Which the lightnings doth embrace,
Sink upon his mighty knees.
And the eagle, at the beck
Of the appeasing, gracious harmony,
Droops all his sheeny, brown, deep-feathered neck,
Nestling nearer to Jove’s feet;
While o’er his sovran eye
The curtains of the blue films slowly meet.
And the white Olympus-peaks
Rosily brighten, and the soothed gods smile
At one another from their golden chairs,
And no one round the charmed circle speaks.
Only the loved Hebe bears
The cup about, whose draughts beguile
Pain and care, with a dark store
Of fresh-pulled violets wreathed and nodding o’er;
And her flushed feet glow on the marble floor.
EMPEDOCLES.
He fables, yet speaks truth!
The brave impetuous heart yields everywhere
To the subtle, contriving head;
Great qualities are trodden down,
And littleness united
Is become invincible.
These rumblings are not Typho’s groans, I know!
These angry smoke-bursts
Are not the passionate breath
Of the mountain-crushed, tortured, intractable Titan king;
But over all the world
What suffering is there not seen
Of plainness oppressed by cunning,
As the well-counselled Zeus oppressed
That self-helping son of earth!
What anguish of greatness,
Railed and hunted from the world,
Because its simplicity rebukes
This envious, miserable age!
I am weary of it.
—Lie there, ye ensigns
Of my unloved pre-eminence
In an age like this!
Among a people of children,
Who thronged me in their cities,
Who worshipped me in their houses,
And asked, not wisdom,
But drugs to charm with,
But spells to mutter
All the fool’s-armory of magic! Lie there,
My golden circlet,
My purple robe!
CALLICLES (from below).
As the sky-brightening south-wind clears the day,
And makes the massed clouds roll,
The music of the lyre blows away
The clouds which wrap the soul.
Oh that fate had let me see
That triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,
That famous, final victory
When jealous Pan with Marsyas did conspire!
When, from far Parnassus’ side,
Young Apollo, all the pride
Of the Phrygian flutes to tame,
To the Phrygian highlands came;
Where the long green reed-beds sway
In the rippled waters gray
Of that solitary lake
Where Mæander’s springs are born;
Where the ridged pine-wooded roots
Of Messogis westward break,
Mounting westward, high and higher.
There was held the famous strife;
There the Phrygian brought his flutes,
And Apollo brought his lyre;
And, when now the westering sun
Touched the hills, the strife was done,
And the attentive muses said,—
“Marsyas, thou art vanquishèd!”
Then Apollo’s minister
Hanged upon a branching fir
Marsyas, that unhappy Faun,
And began to whet his knife.
But the Mænads, who were there,
Left their friend, and with robes flowing
In the wind, and loose dark hair
O’er their polished bosoms blowing,
Each her ribboned tambourine
Flinging on the mountain-sod,
With a lovely frightened mien
Came about the youthful god.
But he turned his beauteous face
Haughtily another way,
From the grassy sun-warmed place
Where in proud repose he lay,
With one arm over his head,
Watching how the whetting sped.
But aloof, on the lake-strand,
Did the young Olympus stand,
Weeping at his master’s end;
For the Faun had been his friend.
For he taught him how to sing,
And he taught him flute-playing.
Many a morning had they gone
To the glimmering mountain lakes,
And had torn up by the roots
The tall crested water-reeds
With long plumes and soft brown seeds,
And had carved them into flutes,
Sitting on a tabled stone
Where the shoreward ripple breaks.
And he taught him how to please
The red-snooded Phrygian girls,
Whom the summer evening sees
Flashing in the dance’s whirls
Underneath the starlit trees
In the mountain villages.
Therefore now Olympus stands,
At his master’s piteous cries
Pressing fast with both his hands
His white garment to his eyes,
Not to see Apollo’s scorn.—
Ah, poor Faun, poor Faun! ah, poor Faun!
EMPEDOCLES.
And lie thou there,
My laurel bough!
Scornful Apollo’s ensign, lie thou there!
Though thou hast been my shade in the world’s heat,
Though I have loved thee, lived in honoring thee,
Yet lie thou there,
My laurel bough!
I am weary of thee.
I am weary of the solitude
Where he who bears thee must abide,—
Of the rocks of Parnassus,
Of the gorge of Delphi,
Of the moonlight peaks, and the caves.
Thou guardest them, Apollo!
Over the grave of the slain Pytho,
Though young, intolerably severe!
Thou keepest aloof the profane,
But the solitude oppresses thy votary.
The jars of men reach him not in thy valley,
But can life reach him?
Thou fencest him from the multitude:
Who will fence him from himself?
He hears nothing but the cry of the torrents,
And the beating of his own heart;
The air is thin, the veins swell,
The temples tighten and throb there—
Air! air!
Take thy bough, set me free from my solitude;
I have been enough alone!
Where shall thy votary fly, then? back to men?
But they will gladly welcome him once more,
And help him to unbend his too tense thought,
And rid him of the presence of himself,
And keep their friendly chatter at his ear,
And haunt him, till the absence from himself,
That other torment, grow unbearable;
And he will fly to solitude again,
And he will find its air too keen for him,
And so change back; and many thousand times
Be miserably bandied to and fro
Like a sea-wave, betwixt the world and thee,
Thou young, implacable god! and only death
Shall cut his oscillations short, and so
Bring him to poise. There is no other way.
And yet what days were those, Parmenides!
When we were young, when we could number friends
In all the Italian cities like ourselves;
When with elated hearts we joined your train,
Ye Sun-born Virgins! on the road of truth.
Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought
Nor outward things were closed and dead to us;
But we received the shock of mighty thoughts
On simple minds with a pure natural joy;
And if the sacred load oppressed our brain,
We had the power to feel the pressure eased,
The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,
In the delightful commerce of the world.
We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
Thought’s slaves, and dead to every natural joy.
The smallest thing could give us pleasure then,—
The sports of the country-people,
A flute-note from the woods,
Sunset over the sea;
Seed-time and harvest,
The reapers in the corn,
The vinedresser in his vineyard,
The village-girl at her wheel.
Fulness of life and power of feeling, ye
Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,
Who dwell on a firm basis of content!
But he who has outlived his prosperous days;
But he whose youth fell on a different world
From that on which his exiled age is thrown,—
Whose mind was fed on other food, was trained
By other rules than are in vogue to-day;
Whose habit of thought is fixed, who will not change,
But, in a world he loves not, must subsist
In ceaseless opposition, be the guard
Of his own breast, fettered to what he guards,
That the world win no mastery over him;
Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;
Who has no minute’s breathing-space allowed
To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy,—
Joy and the outward world must die to him,
As they are dead to me.
A long pause, during which EMPEDOCLES remains motionless,
plunged in thought. The night deepens.
He moves forward, and gazes around him, and proceeds:—
And yon, ye stars,
Who slowly begin to marshal,
As of old, in the fields of heaven,
Your distant, melancholy lines!
Have you, too, survived yourselves?
Are you, too, what I fear to become?
You too once lived;
You too moved joyfully,
Among august companions,
In an older world, peopled by gods,
In a mightier order,
The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent sons of heaven.
But now ye kindle
Your lonely, cold-shining lights,
Unwilling lingerers
In the heavenly wilderness,
For a younger, ignoble world;
And renew, by necessity,
Night after night your courses,
In echoing, unneared silence,
Above a race you know not,
Uncaring and undelighted,
Without friend and without home;
Weary like us, though not
Weary with our weariness.
No, no, ye stars! there is no death with you,
No languor, no decay! languor and death,
They are with me, not you! ye are alive,—
Ye, and the pure dark ether where ye ride
Brilliant above me! And thou, fiery world,
That sapp’st the vitals of this terrible mount
Upon whose charred and quaking crust I stand,—
Thou, too, brimmest with life! the sea of cloud,
That heaves its white and billowy vapors up
To moat this isle of ashes from the world,
Lives; and that other fainter sea, far down,
O’er whose lit floor a road of moonbeams leads
To Etna’s Lipareän sister-fires
And the long dusky line of Italy,—
That mild and luminous floor of waters lives,
With held-in joy swelling its heart: I only,
Whose spring of hope is dried, whose spirit has failed,
I, who have not, like these, in solitude
Maintained courage and force, and in myself
Nursed an immortal vigor,—I alone
Am dead to life and joy, therefore I read
In all things my own deadness.
A long silence. He continues:—
Oh that I could glow like this mountain!
Oh that my heart bounded with the swell of the sea!
Oh that my soul were full of light as the stars!
Oh that it brooded over the world like the air!
But no, this heart will glow no more; thou art
A living man no more, Empedocles!
Nothing but a devouring flame of thought,—
But a naked, eternally restless mind!
After a pause:—
To the elements it came from,
Every thing will return,—
Our bodies to earth,
Our blood to water,
Heat to fire,
Breath to air:
They were well born, they will be well entombed.
But mind?...
And we might gladly share the fruitful stir
Down in our mother earth’s miraculous womb;
Well would it be
With what rolled of us in the stormy main;
We might have joy, blent with the all-bathing air,
Or with the nimble, radiant life of fire.
But mind, but thought,
If these have been the master part of us,—
Where will they find their parent element?
What will receive them, who will call them home?
But we shall still be in them, and they in us;
And we shall be the strangers of the world;
And they will be our lords, as they are now,
And keep us prisoners of our consciousness,
And never let us clasp and feel the All
But through their forms, and modes, and stifling veils.
And we shall be unsatisfied as now;
And we shall feel the agony of thirst,
The ineffable longing for the life of life
Baffled forever; and still thought and mind
Will hurry us with them on their homeless march
Over the unallied unopening earth,
Over the unrecognizing sea; while air
Will blow us fiercely back to sea and earth,
And fire repel us from its living waves.
And then we shall unwillingly return
Back to this meadow of calamity,
This uncongenial place, this human life:
And in our individual human state
Go through the sad probation all again,
To see if we will poise our life at last,
To see if we will now at last be true
To our own only true, deep-buried selves,
Being one with which, we are one with the whole world;
Or whether we will once more fall away
Into the bondage of the flesh or mind,
Some slough of sense, or some fantastic maze
Forged by the imperious lonely thinking-power.
And each succeeding age in which we are born
Will have more peril for us than the last;
Will goad our senses with a sharper spur,
Will fret our minds to an intenser play,
Will make ourselves harder to be discerned.
And we shall struggle a while, gasp and rebel;
And we shall fly for refuge to past times,
Their soul of unworn youth, their breath of greatness;
And the reality will pluck us back,
Knead us in its hot hand, and change our nature.
And we shall feel our powers of effort flag,
And rally them for one last fight—and fail;
And we shall sink in the impossible strife,
And be astray forever.
Slave of sense
I have in no wise been; but slave of thought?
And who can say: I have been always free,
Lived ever in the light of my own soul?
I cannot; I have lived in wrath and gloom,
Fierce, disputatious, ever at war with man,
Far from my own soul, far from warmth and light;
But I have not grown easy in these bonds,
But I have not denied what bonds these were.
Yea, I take myself to witness,
That I have loved no darkness,
Sophisticated no truth,
Nursed no dlusion,
Allowed no fear!
And therefore, O ye elements! I know know—
Ye know it too—it hath been granted me
Not to die wholly, not to be all enslaved.
I feel it in this hour. The numbing cloud
Mounts off my soul; I feel it, I breathe free.
Is it but for a moment?
—Ah, boil up, ye vapors!
Leap and roar, thou sea of fire!
My soul glows to meet you.
Ere it flag, ere the mists
Of despondency and gloom
Rush over it again,
Receive me, save me!
[He plunges into the crater.
CALLICLES (from below).
Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts,
Thick breaks the red flame;
All Etna heaves fiercely
Her forest-clothed frame.
Not here, O Apollo!
Are haunts meet for thee;
But where Helicon breaks down
In cliff to the sea,—
Where the moon-silvered inlets
Send far their light voice
Up the still vale of Thisbe,—
Oh, speed, and rejoice!
On the sward at the cliff-top
Lie strewn the white flocks:
On the cliff-side the pigeons
Roost deep in the rocks.
In the moonlight the shepherds,
Soft lulled by the rills,
Lie wrapped in their blankets
Asleep on the hills.
—What forms are these coming
So white through the gloom?
What garments out-glistening
The gold-flowered broom?
What sweet-breathing presence
Out-perfumes the thyme?
What voices enrapture
The night’s balmy prime?
’Tis Apollo comes leading
His choir, the Nine.
The leader is fairest,
But all are divine.
They are lost in the hollows!
They stream up again!
What seeks on this mountain
The glorified train?
They bathe on this mountain,
In the spring by their road;
Then on to Olympus,
Their endless abode.
—Whose praise do they mention?
Of what is it told?
What will be forever,
What was from of old.
First hymn they the Father
Of all things; and then,
The rest of immortals,
The action of men.
The day in his hotness,
The strife with the palm;
The night in her silence,
The stars in their calm.