Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, DAPHNE, by PATRICK REGINALD CHALMERS


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

DAPHNE, by                    
First Line: Here's a tale from times called olden, further / qualified as golden
Last Line: Not a laurel, but a wall-flower—which is not an evergreen!
Subject(s): Beauty; Goddesses & Gods; Love - Unrequited; Mythology


HERE'S a tale from times called olden, further qualified as golden,
When the gods on high Olympus smacked of earth and sunburnt tan,
With their far from formal Dryads, and their Oreads and Naiads,
And the questionable doings of the forest Courts of Pan.

At the era that I write on, in the whole of Greece no chiton
Hid a contour more alluring or revealed so fair a cheek
As the one which draped the figure, in its folded classic rigour,
Of a charming girl called Daphne, of a type divinely Greek.

I perhaps may also mention that her eyes were bluest gentian,
While her hair was like the sunshine on the rippling waves of wheat,
And her face supplied a thesis for the shepherds' pastoral pieces,
And they laid their choicest garlands at her little sandalled feet.

But, in spite of rustic sheep's eyes and bucolic winks and deep sighs,
Daphne shunned alike the pastorals and posies of the herds
For the lonely woodland places or for high and windy spaces,
For the music of the mountains or the singing of the birds.

And if Bacchus and his leopards roused the neighbouring nymphs and shepherds,
When the Bassarid and Mænad made the Vale of Tempe ring
With their light and larky revels on the misty moonlit levels,
Well, I rather fancy Daphne would avoid that kind of thing.

So the empty weeks that passed her left her cold as alabaster,
Till one dark day by Peneus where the laurel thickets are,
With a certain shy ignition, Daphne met a tall musician
Who in fact was young Apollo who had loved her from afar.

Now, although his reputation gave some cause for conversation,
Still I think that had she waited he'd have won her at his ease,
But, when he declared his title, in alarm at his recital
She forsook his further wooing for the butterflies and bees.

Like the summer wind that passes, Daphne fled o'er flowers and grasses,
For she heard the rushing footsteps race across the scented thyme,
And in sudden panic ardour, she implored the gods to guard her
From the words she vowed were nonsense and the kiss she called a crime!

And at once her lithe form faltered and grew rigid, and she altered
To a bush of gleaming laurel in its dark perennial green;
And she grows beside the river where the rushes thrill and shiver
With an everlasting murmur of the things which might have been!

And when autumn days are dying and the wood is full of sighing,
When there's sobbing in the pine tops and a murmur in the firs,
Do we tax imagination if we say its lamentation
Is our little Daphne crying for the love that was not hers?

Should we want to pin a moral to this legend of the laurel
For the use of any dèbutante on reaching seventeen,
It is: Don't he too unbending, or you'll run the risk of ending
Not a laurel, but a wall-flower—which is not an evergreen!





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