Poetry · Empedocles on Etna (3/3) (2/2) (1/2)

Empedocles	Alone!⁠— On this charr’d, blacken’d, melancholy waste, Crown’d by the awful peak, Etna’s great mouth, Round which the sullen vapour rolls⁠—alone! Pausanias is far hence, and that is well, For I must henceforth speak no more with man. He has his lesson too, and that debt’s paid; And the good, learned, friendly, quiet man, May bravelier front his life, and in himself Find henceforth energy and heart; but I, The weary man, the banish’d citizen⁠— Whose banishment is not his greatest ill, Whose weariness no energy can reach, And for whose hurt courage is not the cure⁠— What should I do with life and living more? No, thou art come too late, Empedocles! And the world hath the day, and must break thee, Not thou the world. With men thou canst not live, Their thoughts, their ways, their wishes, are not thine; And being lonely thou art miserable, For something has impair’d thy spirit’s strength, And dried its self-sufficing fount of joy. Thou canst not live with men nor with thyself⁠— O sage! O sage!⁠—Take then the one way left; And turn thee to the elements, thy friends, Thy well-tried friends, thy willing ministers, And say:⁠—Ye servants, hear Empedocles, Who asks this final service at your hands! Before the sophist brood hath overlaid The last spark of man’s consciousness with words⁠— Ere quite the being of man, ere quite the world Be disarray’d of their divinity⁠— Before the soul lose all her solemn joys, And awe be dead, and hope impossible, And the soul’s deep eternal night come on⁠— Receive me, hide me, quench me, take me home!
	He advances to the edge of the crater. Smoke and fire break forth with a loud noise, and Callicles is heard below singing:⁠—
	The lyre’s voice is lovely everywhere! In the court of Gods, in the city of men, And in the lonely rock-strewn mountain glen, In the still mountain air. Only to Typho it sounds hatefully! To Typho only, the rebel o’erthrown, Through whose heart Etna drives her roots of stone, To imbed them in the sea. Wherefore dost thou groan so loud? Wherefore do thy nostrils flash, Through the dark night, suddenly, Typho, such red jets of flame?⁠— Is thy tortur’d heart still proud? Is thy fire-scath’d arm still rash? Still alert thy stone-crush’d frame? Doth thy fierce soul still deplore Thine ancient rout by the Cilician hills, And that curst treachery on the Mount of Gore?18 Do thy bloodshot eyes still weep The fight that crown’d thy ills, Thy last defeat in this Sicilian sea? Hast thou sworn, in thy sad lair, Where erst the strong sea-currents suck’d thee down, Never to cease to writhe, and try to sleep, Letting the sea-stream wander through thy hair? That thy groans, like thunder deep, Begin to roll, and almost drown The sweet notes, whose lulling spell Gods and the race of mortals love so well, When through thy caves thou hearest music swell? But an awful pleasure bland Spreading o’er the Thunderer’s face, When the sound climbs near his seat, The Olympian council sees; As he lets his lax right hand, Which the lightnings doth embrace, Sink upon his mighty knees. And the eagle, at the beck Of the appeasing gracious harmony, Droops all his sheeny, brown, deep-feather’d neck, Nestling nearer to Jove’s feet; While o’er his sovereign eye The curtains of the blue films slowly meet, And the white Olympus peaks Rosily brighten, and the sooth’d Gods smile At one another from their golden chairs, And no one round the charmèd circle speaks. Only the loved Hebe bears The cup about, whose draughts beguile Pain and care, with a dark store Of fresh-pull’d violets wreath’d and nodding o’er; And her flush’d feet glow on the marble floor.
Empedocles	He fables, yet speaks truth. The brave impetuous heart yields everywhere To the subtle, contriving head; Great qualities are trodden down, And littleness united Is become invincible. These rumblings are not Typho’s groans, I know! These angry smoke-bursts Are not the passionate breath Of the mountain-crush’d, tortured, intractable Titan king! But over all the world What suffering is there not seen Of plainness oppress’d by cunning, As the well-counsell’d Zeus oppress’d That self-helping son of earth! What anguish of greatness Rail’d and hunted from the world, Because its simplicity rebukes This envious, miserable age! I am weary of it!⁠— Lie there, ye ensigns Of my unloved preeminence In an age like this! Among a people of children, Who throng’d me in their cities, Who worshipp’d me in their houses, And ask’d, not wisdom, But drugs to charm with, But spells to mutter⁠— All the fool’s-armoury of magic!⁠—Lie there, My golden circlet! My purple robe!
Callicles	From below. As the sky-brightening south-wind clears the day, And makes the mass’d clouds roll, The music of the lyre blows away The clouds that wrap the soul. Oh, that Fate had let me see That triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre, That famous, final victory When jealous Pan with Marsyas did conspire When, from far Parnassus’ side, Young Apollo, all the pride Of the Phrygian flutes to tame, To the Phrygian highlands came! Where the long green reed-beds sway In the rippled waters grey Of that solitary lake Where Maeander’s springs are born; Whence the ridg’d pine-wooded roots Of Messogis westward break, Mounting westward, high and higher. There was held the famous strife; There the Phrygian brought his flutes, And Apollo brought his lyre; And, when now the westering sun Touch’d the hills, the strife was done, And the attentive Muses said: “Marsyas, thou art vanquished.” Then Apollo’s minister Hang’d upon a branching fir Marsyas, that unhappy Faun, And began to whet his knife. But the Maenads, who were there, Left their friend, and with robes flowing In the wind, and loose dark hair O’er their polish’d bosoms blowing, Each her ribbon’d tambourine Flinging on the mountain sod, With a lovely frighten’d mien Came about the youthful God. But he turn’d his beauteous face Haughtily another way, From the grassy sun-warm’d place Where in proud repose he lay, With one arm over his head, Watching how the whetting sped. But aloof, on the lake strand, Did the young Olympus stand, Weeping at his master’s end; For the Faun had been his friend. For he taught him how to sing, And he taught him flute-playing. Many a morning had they gone To the glimmering mountain lakes, And had torn up by the roots The tall crested water-reeds With long plumes, and soft brown seeds, And had carved them into flutes, Sitting on a tabled stone Where the shoreward ripple breaks. And he taught him how to please The red-snooded Phrygian girls, Whom the summer evening sees Flashing in the dance’s whirls Underneath the starlit trees In the mountain villages. Therefore now Olympus stands, At his master’s piteous cries Pressing fast with both his hands His white garment to his eyes, Not to see Apollo’s scorn; Ah, poor Faun, poor Faun! ah, poor Faun!
Empedocles	And lie thou there, My laurel bough! Scornful Apollo’s ensign, lie thou there! Though thou hast been my shade in the world’s heat⁠— Though I have loved thee, lived in honouring thee⁠— Yet lie thou there, My laurel bough! I am weary of thee! I am weary of the solitude Where he who bears thee must abide! Of the rocks of Parnassus, Of the gorge of Delphi, Of the moonlit peaks, and the caves. Thou guardest them, Apollo! Over the grave of the slain Pytho,20 Though young, intolerably severe; Thou keepest aloof the profane, But the solitude oppresses thy votary! The jars of men reach him not in thy valley⁠— But can life reach him? Thou fencest him from the multitude⁠— Who will fence him from himself? He hears nothing but the cry of the torrents, And the beating of his own heart. The air is thin, the veins swell⁠— The temples tighten and throb there⁠— Air! air! Take thy bough; set me free from my solitude! I have been enough alone! Where shall thy votary fly then? back to men?⁠— But they will gladly welcome him once more, And help him to unbend his too tense thought, And rid him of the presence of himself, And keep their friendly chatter at his ear, And haunt him, till the absence from himself, That other torment, grow unbearable; And he will fly to solitude again, And he will find its air too keen for him, And so change back; and many thousand times Be miserably bandied to and fro Like a sea-wave, betwixt the world and thee, Thou young, implacable God! and only death Can cut his oscillations short, and so Bring him to poise. There is no other way. And yet what days were those, Parmenides! When we were young, when we could number friends In all the Italian cities like ourselves, When with elated hearts we join’d your train, Ye Sun-born Virgins! on the road of truth.21 Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought Nor outward things were clos’d and dead to us, But we receiv’d the shock of mighty thoughts On simple minds with a pure natural joy; And if the sacred load oppress’d our brain, We had the power to feel the pressure eased, The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again, In the delightful commerce of the world. We had not lost our balance then, nor grown Thought’s slaves, and dead to every natural joy! The smallest thing could give us pleasure then! The sports of the country people, A flute-note from the woods, Sunset over the sea; Seed-time and harvest, The reapers in the corn, The vinedresser in his vineyard, The village-girl at her wheel! Fullness of life and power of feeling, ye Are for the happy, for the souls at ease, Who dwell on a firm basis of content!⁠— But he, who has outliv’d his prosperous days, But he, whose youth fell on a different world From that on which his exiled age is thrown, Whose mind was fed on other food, was train’d By other rules than are in vogue to-day, Whose habit of thought is fix’d, who will not change, But in a world he loves not must subsist In ceaseless opposition, be the guard Of his own breast, fetter’d to what he guards, That the world win no mastery over him; Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one; Who has no minute’s breathing space allow’d To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy⁠— Joy and the outward world must die to him, As they are dead to me!
	A long pause, during which Empedocles remains motionless, plunged in thought. The night deepens. He moves forward and gazes round him, and proceeds:⁠—
	And you, ye stars, Who slowly begin to marshal, As of old, in the fields of heaven, Your distant, melancholy lines! Have you, too, survived yourselves? Are you, too, what I fear to become? You, too, once lived! You too moved joyfully Among august companions, In an older world, peopled by Gods, In a mightier order, The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven! But now, you kindle Your lonely, cold-shining lights, Unwilling lingerers In the heavenly wilderness, For a younger, ignoble world; And renew, by necessity, Night after night your courses, In echoing unnear’d silence, Above a race you know not. Uncaring and undelighted, Without friend and without home; Weary like us, though not Weary with our weariness. No, no, ye stars! there is no death with you, No languor, no decay! Languor and death, They are with me, not you! ye are alive! Ye and the pure dark ether where ye ride Brilliant above me! And thou, fiery world, That sapp’st the vitals of this terrible mount Upon whose charr’d and quaking crust I stand, Thou, too, brimmest with life!⁠—the sea of cloud That heaves its white and billowy vapours up To moat this isle of ashes from the world, Lives!⁠—and that other fainter sea, far down, O’er whose lit floor a road of moonbeams leads To Etna’s Liparëan sister-fires And the long dusky line of Italy⁠— That mild and luminous floor of waters lives, With held-in joy swelling its heart!⁠—I only, Whose spring of hope is dried, whose spirit has fail’d⁠— I, who have not, like these, in solitude Maintain’d courage and force, and in myself Nursed an immortal vigour⁠—I alone Am dead to life and joy; therefore I read In all things my own deadness.
	A long silence. He continues:⁠—
	Oh, that I could glow like this mountain! Oh, that my heart bounded with the swell of the sea! Oh, that my soul were full of light as the stars! Oh, that it brooded over the world like the air! But no, this heart will glow no more! thou art A living man no more, Empedocles! Nothing but a devouring flame of thought⁠— But a naked, eternally restless mind!
	After a pause:⁠—