Eight Harvard Poets/A Renaissance Picture

A RENAISSANCE PICTURE

CALM little figure, ivy-crowned,
How long beneath the barren tree
Where this pale, martyred god has found
Surcease from his long agony,
You watch with an untroubled gaze
Life move on its accustomed ways!

Within your childish heart there dwells
No sorrow that uprising dims
Your eye, whence not a teardrop wells
For pity of those writhen limbs,
Or for the travail of a race
Consummate in one lifeless face.

Though tinkling caravans go by
Forever over twilight sands,
With myrrh and cassia laden high
For other shrines in other lands,
No weight of grief thereat you know,
But softly on your pan-pipes blow.

From what dim mountain have you strayed,
Where, ringed by the Hellenic seas,
You dwelt in an untrodden glade

Sacred to woodland deities,
Along whose faint paths went at dawn
Endymion or a dancing faun?

From groves where sacrificing throngs
Called you by some fair Grecian name,
With ritual meet and choric songs,
Strange, that to this dark hill you came
To seek, unmindful of their loss,
A refuge underneath the cross.

There is some deeper secret lies
Hidden out of human sight
In keeping of those tranquil eyes
That shine with such immortal light,
And in their shadows gleam and glow
While still upon your pipes you blow.

All but inscrutable, your gaze
Declares your place is even here,
Sharing this martyr's cup of praise,
And year by sadly westering year,
Till the last altar lights grow dim,
Dividing sovereignty with him.