Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, FRANCESCA, by OLIVE TILFORD DARGAN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

FRANCESCA, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Sweet of the dawn is she
Last Line: Alone, and know.
Alternate Author Name(s): Burke, Fielding
Subject(s): Beauty; Love


I.

Sweet of the dawn is she!
Sure of her garlands fair,
Sure of her morning brief,
With what an air
She hands Eternity
A bud, a leaf!

Far down a world wound-red
All unappalled she looks;
Where I stare barrenly,
She beauty plucks
From an untrampled bed,
Till suddenly I see.

Once more a star shall break
For me the crocus' mould;
The full year's end sleep in
A marigold;
And firs in the snow wind shake
Locks of genie and jinn.

Again over earth and me
Shall fall the coverlet
Spread by a godmother moon.
Till we forget
Night's thin, gold irony
That hid nor scar nor bone.

O, sweet with her to climb
Youth's high, unguided trail!
Along sky ledges haste,
Palms to the gale
That showers song and rhyme
As petals blow and waste!

And when in mothy light
Of trees and listening dusk,
I see her filmy go
To him, her knight,
What sap of bloom shall flow
Into dream's silvered husk!

What if, at her matron knee
In some yet covered year,
The bardling I never bore
Has sound of the hidden sea
That calls till a heart, or a sphere,
Is dumb or more?
My wand is she that smites
Open the prophet's wall;
My arrow in the sun,
Sped for no fall;
My bird along the heights
Where I shall never run.

II
She sleeps now.
Her hair, duskily nursing her cheek,
Fills me with strange music,
Like the dark flowing water of snow-fields.
Her brow, that was mere, frail porcelain,
Holding a child's few treasures,
In a pale, prophetic expanse
Over dreams that bide their vast venture.

I gaze long at her face,
Thinking at last I shall know her;
For awake she is always hiding
In ripples and pools of change.
Waves of April flow around her,
And she is my willow witch,
Weaving her web of winds
Above the blue water;
But she lifts her eyes,
Like two hours of June,
And is so nearly a rose
That to-morrow the dawn will be lapping
Gold from her open heart;
Then a laugh like Christmas day
Shuffles the seasons,
And I see chrysanthemums in a Southern garden;
White breasts in the dusk.

But now she sleeps; no stirs;
Stirs with the covetous fever
That armoured in silence creeps
By the wariest watch of lovers,
And the miracle bars of skill.
"Talk to me, Tifa, talk."
"Of what, dear Beauty?"
"Ah, that is it -- beauty."
I lose a whisper, and wait.
"The song -- the song we heard --"
And I know I must tell again
The story of the bird, the lowland rover
That high above our mountain orchard
Sang till a cadent coast
Rose on the unbodied air,
And all our outbound dreams put back
Where his music made a shore.

(Words, words! So soft
That they may fall on pain
And make it less! Softer than leaves
Tapping a forest sleeper; while the heart
Is like a swollen glacier crowding earth.)

Up he went singing; climbed a spiral chain
That linked his joy to heaven;
And circling, swerving as he rose, he built
An airy masonry of smoothest domes
And jetting minarets, as though he saw
From his blue height a city of the East
And in a music mirror set it fair
For his high rapture. Did we see it?
Slim, flowing alleys, streets that wound
To temples cool as shaded lakes;
Pure arches, pillars of piled notes;
Cornice and frieze and pendant flung
In rillets from one tiny heart
As prodigal as God's?

What, dearest? When you die
You'll stop and live there? Not go on
To Heaven?

No, you remember
Our city fell; came tumbling to the grass
With all its palaces and domes,
Not one note on another,
Where he, the breathless builder, fluttered,
Happy in ruin.

Yes, he panted so?
Tell you cool things?

(Words, words!
Running like water under leaves,
That they may fall on pain
And make it less!)

Cool, my heavenliest?
Then shall we walk again
Between the winter and the cliff
Where green things clung? -- the little venturers,
Lustrous and shyly brave, that feed on shade
And tug at scornful bowlders
Till they are gay and gentle?
They were all there; the fronds and tresses;
Fingers and baby's palm;
The curling tufts, the plumelets proudly niched,
And little unknown leaves
That make the cold their mother;
The hearts and lances and unpious spires;
The emerald gates to houses of the gnomes.
The fairy tents that vanish at a name;
Each greener than Spring's footprint when her track
Is bright as sea-wet beryl;
Yet wearing like an outer soul
A silvered breath of winter. There
They waited, magically caught
Within a crystal smile. A place, we thought,
Where one might listen, standing long,
Thinking to hear some secret
Earth tells but once to time.

They waited, pearled in eagerness, --
Small subject wonderers of a land
Whose king was out-o'-doors
And would betimes go by.
He came -- the sun!
The swift, old marvel of the sun!
For thirty midday seconds came the sun!
And you were still as every leaf he touched,
Long after his gold passing.

Yes? Your breath
Went all away into the shining?
God spoke too loud that time? Tell you --

Sleep holds her . . .
But sleep comes creeping, and takes
No sudden throne. If it be not sleep,
But the other? . . .

I sit in the folds of a dread
As in a husk that widens and swells
Till it strikes the sky.
Who is it standing, a fiend
Like a mountain darkening upward
Dropping and dropping and dropping
The ocean into a glass?
Why are the walls so near and so cold?
Wavering and greenish white?
Why are they rocking, and covered with shadows
That mightily grasp and fade?

. . . . . I know. We are under the sea.
Like a petal her face goes drifting;
A white rose petal that swirls away.
Far up is the water's clear surface;
High up, where the sky used to be;
And above it lies the good air.
We must climb . . . climb, my loveliest.
Climb . . . we cannot breathe . . . down here . . .
Under the sea.

III

If Death had taken my orange-tree,
Its gold-lit boughs, and magic birds
Singing for me,
I would not bear, though bright the dead,
This daunted head.

If Death had taken the one whose care
My fortune feeds, my roof endows, --
Leaving me bare, --
I'd meet the world from some kind door,
Gay as before.

If Death had taken my friend, the god,
Who walks among us masked as man,
Wearing the clod
To find his brother, I could live,
Love and forgive.

But she was Beauty; planets swing,
And ages toil, that one like her
May make dust sing;
And I, who held her hand, must go
Alone, and know.





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