‘C’est l? le myst?re apr?s lequel soupirent toutes les ?mes exil?es, qui s’affligent sur les fleuves de Babylon en se souvenant de Sion.’ Bossuet.
A dream of many waters. I beheld,
And lo! a summer night in Babylon,
And the great river, even Euphrates, wash’d
The land of Shinar, somewhat swifter now,
When snows were melting on the Armenian hills.
So by the hundred gates, lintel and post
All polish’d brass, the waves went washing on.
And on the flood the osier barges rode,
Shield-shaped, with earthen jars of palm-tree wine
Heap’d on the deck, and dark shapes stretch’d around.
League upon league, through tracts of wheat and corn,
That look’d on boundless plains, like knightly hosts,
Far glimmering with pale and ghostly gold;
Through ranks of cedar, planted by the Lord,
Round the lign-aloes by the river-side,
Had they dropp’d down the flood. Now the tilth ceased,
And banks, like mountains, rose on either hand,
Worthy of wonderment, the work of kings;
And long canals stretch’d, lighted by the moon
And by the company of Chaldean stars;
Till there came houses, bastion’d fortresses,
With lion gonfalons, and a maze of streets.
I saw the terraced pyramid of Bel;
And a vast palace with its gardens hung
As by art-magic in the spic?d air,
Pencill’d like purple islands fast asleep.
But evermore-by all the gates of brass,
And where the barges floated down the stream,
And far along the sloping line of streets
Hung with a thousand cressets naphtha-lit,
And up among the garden terraces-
I heard the murmur of Euphrates’ flood.
Whenas I linger’d there, anon methought
The tide of life in that great city pent
Parted in twain and took its separate way.
For one moved upward by the basalt wall:
A host of fierce-eyed men with long black hair
Stream’d o’er white tunics, their dark faces wreath’d
With turbans white, in every hand a staff
Carven with lilies or with eagle head.
And haughty girls in gilded cars swept on
To the Assyrian Aphrodites’ fane,
With faces passion-flush’d or terror-pale,-
Red and white roses rich, but soon to fade.
High on the palace terraces above,
There walk’d a king-it made me fear to see
How like he was to those old sculptured kings,
Black-curl’d, black-bearded, full of state and woe,
Who sit the world out on their chairs of stone,
Staring for ever on the arrow-heads,
Wherein their bloody chronicles are writ.
There, too, I saw grey-beard astrologers,
Who read the silver horologue of heaven;
And them who shape the purpose shadow’d forth
In visions of the head upon the bed;
And priests who give attendance at the shrine
Well strewn, that hath no image of its God,
Or at that other where he sits eterne,
Statue, and throne, and pedestal of gold,
Grinning and glimmering thro’ the frankincense.
From all these diverse went another way
Another concourse gentler of regard.
And as a widow, when her son is dead,
Putteth her white lip down to the white shroud,
And communeth a little while with death,
So did the exiles commune with their past.
Psalms did they murmur-poesy of him,
Shepherd, king, saint, and penitent, who wore
The golden grief that gave the golden song,-
And later lamentations. For as when
A wandering man, beside an ocean shore
Belated, hears the waves upon the beach
Discoursing drearily, and night hangs black
On the black rocks, over the moaning sea-
But suddenly there circles in the gloom
A bird’s voice wailing, like a soul in pain,
Not dispossess’d of some immortal hope:
So Jeremiah wailed o’er Judah’s path,
Still round and round that strange old alphabet
Weaving his long funereal chant of woe,
Still singing sweetly of the seventy years!
I saw the exiles seek the river-side,
There where the willows grey grew in the midst
Of Babylon, and hang their harps thereon.
Thus evermore in ear of either throng
Sounded the voice of waters. It went up
Over the city, where the forests hang,
Sleepily parleying in the charm?d light
Round alabaster stairs and curious flowers
From Media brought, and sunny steeps of Ind.
How different to each!-To these it swept
On with a din of Oriental war.
It sounded an alarm that wakened up
Far echoes from far rivers all night long,
Angering the dragon in his lotos-bed,
And bringing Persian kings unto the brink
Of the Choaspes with their silver jars.
Like a soothsayer it denounced a woe
On Tigris, telling the predestined time
When he should wail along a waste of bricks
Painted with pine-cones and colossal bulls.
And like a divination it aroused
As it were gods ascending from the earth,
Disquieting old kings to bring them up,
Urukh and Ilgi, Iva, and the rest,
Whose politic alliances, fierce wars,
And love and hate have perished like themselves,
Forgotten in the city where they dwelt.
But to the other throng the river told
Things written in their great old Hebrew book.
It told how it had swept through Eden once,
A bright chord of the fourfold river-lyre.
And it had old-world songs of Abraham,
And him of Rehoboth who went to rule
Among the dark-eyed dukes on Seir’s red rocks,
And him of Pethor,
walking wrapped in thought.
Anon it seem’d to sing: ‘My waves flow past
A dungeon, and one bound with chains of brass,
A king, a crownless, childless, eyeless ghost!
on my surface lights and shadows play,
And moonlights quiver on the ripply lines,
The silver roll among my sighing reeds,
And the stars look into my silent depths,
But on the awful river of his thoughts,
Black as the waters of a mountain lake
What time the hills are powder’d white with snow,
Sunlight, and moon, and stars, are not at all:
Dark, dark, all draped with shadows of his life.’
There came another tale-a legend wild-
How the Ten Tribes, the banish’d of the Lord,
Took counsel with themselves, that they would leave
The multitude of heathen, and fare forth
To a far country where there never came
Oarsman or sail. A penitential host,
They enter’d the Euphrates by the ford.
And often hath the moon at midnight hung
Pillars of luminous silver o’er the wave,
But not a pillar half so broad and bright
As that which steered them on while the Most High
Held still the flood. And aye their way they took
Twice nine long months, until they reach’d the land
Arsareth.
There the mountains gird them in;
And o’er the gleaming granite pass white clouds,
That sail from awful waterfalls, and catch
And tear their silver fleeces on the pines.
And never hunter scaled those granite peaks,
And never wandering man hath heard the roar
Of cataracts soften’d through those folds of fir,
But a great temple hangs upon the hills.
And ever and anon rolls through its gates
A mighty music, washing through the pines,
And silver trumps still snarl at the new moon;
And all their life is sacrament, and psalm,
Vesper, or festival, and holy deed.
There do they dwell until the latter time,
When God Most High shall stay the springs again.
The waters changed their meaning. There came down
Some of the others to Euphrates’ brink,
And much they question’d why those harps hung there.
Saying, ‘Come, sing us one of Sion’s songs!’
How shall they sing God’s song in the strange land?
For it is native of the Temple, laid
Like a white flower on Moriah’s breast;
And it is not for Asia’s sealike plain,
But for the shadows of the purple hills;
Not for the broad and even-pulsing stream,
But for the land where Jordan passioneth
His poetry of waterfalls night and day,
Anger’d by cataracts, lull’d by nightingales,
Crown’d with white foam, and triumphing for ever,
That is to the Euphrates, as a saint
Full of sweet yearnings and of tears divine
Is to some cold and passionless idol god,
Imprison’d in its rigid marble lines.
Next, as from a far country, there came one.
Slow was his gait, his garment travel-stain’d,
And in his hand methought he held a scroll,
Written from right to left Semitic-wise.
And one said to him, ‘Wherefore art thou come?’
And he, ‘I come from him of Anathoth.’
Whereat he bound a stone upon the scroll,
And flung it far away into the flood;
When suddenly a trumpet-blast wax’d loud
Against Chaldea, rousing Ararat,
And Ashkenaz and Minni, kingdoms old.
Yea, instantaneously a mighty voice
Of Heaven, and earth, and all that is therein,
Sang over Babylon. And as far north
The ice-bound mariner looks up, and lo!
The sky is spann’d with the auroral arch,
And the Heav’n, full of glory, blossometh
With light unspeakable: so now, methought,
The sky grew radiant up above my head,
World upon world. Triumphantly I heard
Angels, archangels, and the company
Of Heav’n chanting unto golden harps
With exultation-‘Babylon the great
Is fallen, fallen’-and from earth below
Rose echo, ‘Fallen, fallen,’ back again.
Whereon I thought that I could hear far off
The cedars and the firs of Lebanon,
With a wind rustling all their odorous robes,
That shaped itself in long low syllables,
As if a happy thought went sighing through
Their dark green halls and sombre colonnades,
Saying, ‘No feller comes against us now,
Since they have laid thee low, O Babylon!’
And the great river sobb’d, ‘O Babylon!’
I beheld gods, and demigods, and kings,
Mere shadows upon unsubstantial thrones.
I saw the crowns upon their wither’d brows,
Like the thin circlet of the waning moon
Ring’d by a thin white cloud. Ranged were they all,
A royal consistory, row on row,
Sleeping their sleep. But now their ranks were stirred,
Like wan leaves, shrunken, scarcely substantive,
The chestnuts’ ashes, or the beeches’ fire-
Up-stirr’d in heaps, and a shrill murmuring went
Among them, like the wailing of the birds.
And they look’d narrowly on one that came
Into their company, and laugh’d, and said,
‘How art thou fallen, O thou Morning star!
For we are kings at least, and take our fill
Of rest, each one in glory on his bed,
Strewn with sweet odours, divers kinds of spice.
But thou art as a wanderer in our land,
Thy carcase trodden under foot of men-
Disrobed, dissceptred, dropp’d with blood, discrown’d!’
Thereat Heav’n and the abyss were mute once more,
And the curse fell upon broad walls, high gates,
Utterly broken, burn?d in the fire:
And the curse fell on garden-terraces,
Faded, all faded, like a golden cloud,
Or tumbled like a cliff in heaps of stones;
And the curse fell upon Euphrates last,
Fountain and flood and all his sea dried up.
Yet other shapes and sounds came to me still.
I saw a fire dark-red in the fierce sky,
Three shadowy figures flitting to and fro;
Far off I heard their Benedicite.
I saw a host, across the river’s bed,
Marching right onward to a palace-gate,
Whence from a great feast fled a thousand lords,
And dark sultanas dress’d in white symars.
And in the hall I saw a blaze of light
Round gold and silver cups of strange device,
And one mysterious figure, scarlet-robed,
Waiting unmoved, and on the das high
A king, the wine still red on his white lips.
And I beheld a barge upon the wave;
Lo! at its helm there was a godlike form,
A glittering tiar above his kausia.
Sitting the centre of a light of gems,
Shadow’d by silk-embroider’d sails, he steered
His pinnace to the dyke Pallakopas,
Keeping his royal court and state on deck,
As his yacht bore him to see the pictured graves
Of the old kings, that sleep world without end,
Where shadows are the only moving things.
And one kept court upon the deck as well,
A skeleton grim and stern, and that was Death.
And next a stately chamber, muffled round
With golden curtains, rose beside the stream:
And, his face cover’d with a silken veil,
Walked the Resch-Glutha among ag?d men,
Thin faces, pinch’d-up foreheads, narrow hearts,
Whereon the thoughts of God’s eternal book
Are stamp’d in petty legendary lore,
As the great waves with all their noble beat
Carve out thin feather’d lines along the strand.
And last I thought Euphrates was dried up,
And o’er his bed the kings of the Orient,
Saying with war’s full stream of clanging gold,
March’d to the battle of Almighty God.
Once more before me swept the moonlit stream
That had entranced me with its memories-
A thousand battles, and one burst of psalms,
Rolling his waters to the Indian Sea
Beyond Balsara and Elana far,
Nigh to two thousand miles from Ararat.
And his full music took a finer tone,
And sang me something of a ‘gentler stream’
That rolls for ever to another shore
Whereof our God Himself is the sole sea,
And Christ’s dear love the pulsing of the tide,
And His sweet Spirit is the breathing wind.
Something it chanted, too, of exiled men
On the sad bank of that strange river Life,
Hanging the harp of their deep heart desires
To rest upon the willow of the Cross,
And longing for the everlasting hills,
Mount Sion, and Jerusalem of God.
And then I thought I knelt, and kneeling heard
Nothing-save only the long wash of waves,
And one sweet psalm that sobbed for evermore.
(Archbishop William Alexander)
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