Page:Ballads, Stevenson, 1890.djvu/65

 For what though the oven smoke? And what though I die ere morn?

There was I nourished and tended, and there was Taheia born."

Noon was high on the High-place, the second noon of the feast;

And heat and shameful slumber weighed on people and priest;

And the heart drudged slow in bodies heavy with monstrous meals;

And the senseless limbs were scattered abroad like spokes of wheels;

And crapulous women sat and stared at the stones anigh

With a bestial droop of the lip and a swinish rheum in the eye.

As about the dome of the bees in the time for the drones to fall,

The dead and the maimed are scattered, and lie, and stagger, and crawl;

So on the grades of the terrace, in the ardent eye of the day,

The half-awake and the sleepers clustered and crawled and lay;

And loud as the dome of the bees, in the time of a swarming horde,

A horror of many insects hung in the air and roared.

Rua looked and wondered; he said to himself in his heart:

"Poor are the pleasures of life, and death is the better part."

But lo! on the higher benches a cluster of tranquil folk

Sat by themselves, nor raised their serious eyes, nor spoke:

Women with robes unruffled and garlands duly arranged,

Gazing far from the feast with faces of people estranged;

And quiet amongst the quiet, and fairer than all the fair,

Taheia, the well-descended, Taheia, heavy of hair.

And the soul of Rua awoke, courage enlightened his eyes,

And he uttered a summoning shout and called on the clan to rise. 53