Eurydice (Lowell)

Heaven's cup held down to me I drain, The sunshine mounts and spurs my brain; Bathing in grass, with thirsty eye I suck the last drop of the sky; With each hot sense I draw to the lees The quickening out-door influences, And empty to each radiant comer A supernaculum of summer: Not, Bacchus, all thy grosser juice Could bring enchantment so profuse, Though for its press each grape-bunch had The white feet of an Oread. Through our coarse art gleam, now and then, The features of angelic men: 'Neath the lewd Satyr's veiling paint Glows forth the Sibyl, Muse, or Saint; The dauber's botch no more obscures The mighty master's portraitures. And who can say what luckier beam The hidden glory shall redeem, For what chance clod the soul may wait To stumble on its nobler fate, Or why, to his unwarned abode, Still by surprises comes the God? Some moment, nailed on sorrow's cross, May meditate a whole youth's loss, Some windfall joy, we know not whence, Redeem a lifetime's rash expense, And, suddenly wise, the soul may mark, Stripped of their simulated dark, Mountains of gold that pierce the sky, Girdling its valleyed poverty.

I feel ye, childhood's hopes, return, With olden heats my pulses burn,— Mine be the self-forgetting sweep, The torrent impulse swift and wild, Wherewith Taghkanic's rockborn child Dares gloriously the dangerous leap. And, in his sky-descended mood, Transmutes each drop of sluggish blood, By touch of bravery's simple wand, To amethyst and diamond, Proving himself no bastard slip, But the true granite-cradled one, Nursed with the rock's primeval drip, The cloud-embracing mountain's son!

Prayer breathed in vain I no wish's sway Rebuilds the vanished yesterday; For plated wares of Sheffield stamp We gave the old Aladdin's lamp; 'Tis we are changed; ah, whither went That undesigned abandonment, That wise, unquestioning content, Which could erect its microcosm Out of a weed's neglected blossom, Could call up Arthur and his peers By a low moss's clump of spears, Or, in its shingle trireme launched, Where Charles in some green inlet-branched, Could venture for the golden fleece And dragon-watched Hesperides, Or, from its ripple-shattered fate, Ulysses' chances re-create? When, heralding life's every phase, There glowed a goddess-veiling haze, A plenteous, forewarning grace, Like that more tender dawn that flies Before the full moon's ample rise? Methinks thy parting glory shines Through yonder grove of singing pines; At that elm-vista's end I trace Dimly thy sad leave-taking face, Eurydice! Eurydice! The tremulous leaves repeat to me Eurydice! Eurydice! No gloomier Orcus swallows thee Than the unclouded sunset's glow; Thine is at least Elysian woe; Thou hast Good's natural decay, And fadest like a star away Into an atmosphere whose shine With fuller day o'ermasters thine, Entering defeat as 't were a shrine; For us,—we turn life's diary o'er To find but one word,—Nevermore.