Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE GODDESS OF THE ISLANDERS, by VICTOR GUSTAVE PLARR


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE GODDESS OF THE ISLANDERS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: In the midmost page, the bookworm's pasturage
Last Line: And the opal's flame-fraught snows.
Subject(s): Goddesses & Gods; Islands; Mysticism; Mythology; Writing & Writers


In the midmost page, the bookworm's pasturage,
Of some folio by a curious traveller writ,
Hast thou read the story of the Mystic Island
And such as dwelt in it?

All the moons are brighter, so saith the travelled writer,
In that island than the sunlight of our Junes:
'Tis a land of midnight forests, poppied meadows,
And seaward-looming dunes.

And such as do possess it, and as gardeners dress it,
Are a sorrowful old tribe of little ease,—
Men with wistful faces, women drooping darkly
As weeds in their pale seas.

Endless wars oppress them, plagues and flames distress them:
Their best works are fruitless or surcharged with woe,
But they only whisper, 'It is the Great Goddess,
The Goddess wills it so!'

'Oh, but thou art glorious, wonderful, victorious,
Dear transcendent Queen to whom we bow!
Set the outlandish nations babbling of their godheads—
These art not thou, not thou!

'Subtile Arab trader, and Portingale invader,
With his firelocks and his god in anguish slain,
And the shy ascetic seeking his Nirvana,
These surely preach in vain.

'For thou art eternal, beyond dispute, infernal,
A fair woman with no heart in her great eyes,
As all day thou sittest at thy silvern mirror,
Alone in the great skies.

'Through thy mystic glass thou seëst all things pass,
As in some long pageant, changing hour by hour,
And amid their glory, squalor, laughter, sorrow,
Thy face shines a pure flower!'

As some woman will lean o'er her window-sill,
Watching every humour of a moving street,
So she views her mirror. 'Ah, but art thou helpless
In old and long defeat?

'Canst thou not befriend, refashion, or amend?
Art thou only watching some tremendous game
Like to Caracalla or to Nero, maddened
With art, or life, or shame?

Or art crazed through being so lonely and all-seeing,
Crazed through brooding on this world thy hands have made?'
Deaf she is and voiceless! She would never tell me,
Though evermore I prayed.

Silent still she muses, or braids her hair, or chooses
Gems from out their caskets for her brows sublime,
And behold, each stone is sentient, and half human,
A passion or a crime!

Yet the glories old of diamonds and gold
Scarcely do arrest her soft and dreamful gaze:
'Tis the complex agate and the cloudy moonstone
Which charm her through whole days,—

These and the verdure sterile of emerald, jade, and beryl,
And the topaz' mystic laughter, and the rose
Of the fleshlike onyx, and the fiery sardius,
And the opal's flame-fraught snows.





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