Poems (Whitney)/The ceyba and the taguet
THE CEYBA AND THE YAGUEY.
Know you the land?With its cestus of summer waves, and its oceanOf young, soft air, with a vernal motionAll through its golden tides? which caressesAnd busies itself about you, and blessesAll that it bathes with life ineffable,A breathing of infinite love, as wellAs of courage and youth? That joy of the sunWhere heaven in all its beauty is wonTo the arms of the new-made earth—do you know it?That land of hope—that land of the poet?
There in that isle, as you shall hear,The Ceyba grows—of godlike cheer; A sad and singular historyIs that of the beautiful Ceyba-tree,And what I recount of one alone,Is true of a thousand as of one.
Grand and alone the giant stood,The Ceyba-tree of royal mood.It stood so great that the careless MonteroOf the sunny Partido de Sumidero,Cheering his mules with song and whistle,Winding about those mountains that bristleWith cactus outré, and pine, and yucca,And soften as well with twining bejuca,And the delicate weft of the tamarindAfloat on the sunny tropic wind,Seeing afar in the freshening skies,This beacon of silent centuries,Touched his cap in the way of his nation,Making his morning salutation.The giant, I said, of royal heart, Kept with his sky and his earth apart.Truly, it mattered not if beneathThe laurel upwafted proud, full breath,And the spiked aloe's wondrous bloomEnriched the warm, deep under gloom,—Far and forgetful the whispering JoveSwayed in the mighty Joy above!The cedar dwarfed in his ancient face,The queenly Palms, from their azure dais,Looked upward unto the Ceyba—tree;Chestnut and mango dreamilyHeaved their soft billows in mid air,The cypress companioned with them there,But over them, an under skyOf shifting emerald, airilyThe Ceyba's coronal tossed and swung.
Proud songs the lofty minstrel sung!Awful it was when the southern blastFrom the sea, drove inland gray and fast, And heavy with its terrible rainFrom the chaos of the heavens and main,(After the weary, weary drouth,The gush of the burning-hearted south!)To hear the inspired monarch TreeRoar its giant hymn of Liberty:As if it saw red morn beneathThe dim horizon's misty wreath,Coming the dank old gloom to fuse,And dripping with its crimson dews,And to the world sang o'er and o'er"Her fiery drops earth counts no more!The hearts you shut from hope and light,And Beauty and the Infinite,Into the air, into the day,Will burst their wild, indignant way!"Then in the calm, the light, the glory,Most tender was its rhymed story;When distant and faint the unweary seaRolled landward its vast harmony, And the Ceyba listened by stars and moon,And softly answered it rune for rune.
But alas for the stately Tree! indeedAlas for it! a little seedBedded itself in the cloven bark,Nor did the generous Ceyba markWhat life it gave, what strength went forthInto the thing of little worth!
Soon under the leaves might you espy,Gliding and creeping silentlyForward from its buried root,A wavering, young and snakelike shoot,That little by little, day after day,Twists and winds its quiet way,'Mid shrinking leaves and buds that pine,—And so, with many a hideous twineRound tender twig, and bough, and branch,Till one by one they bare and blanch, While downward it drops an hundred feet,And as many arms coil up and meetAnd clasp the giant, neck and limb,And strain him in their embrace with grimAnd deadly love; and here and thereUnder the sick'ning foliage, peerKeen heads like serpents' heads, intent,And new, strange hues flop insolentFrom bough to bough, till one might seeHow ill it fared with the noble tree!How, breathless and with eager strain,Out of its falling mantle, in vainIt lifted its hundred wasted handsTo the sun and the winds, and the journeying bandsOf sky-immortals; 'las! the dead moon shoneOn the peering serpents' heads alone,Or flecked it with many a ghastly fleck—The sun glared in on the spectral wreckUnmindful, and fierce, and wonderingly:And then the life-blood drearily Curdled within its veins and stopt;While over it the Yaguey droptIts mocking wreaths of gaudy hue,Flaunting triumphant in the blue,Sweet breath of heaven, and all was done;And so of a thousand as of one.