It is not only the stars that come out at night!
It is also the Gods, Nymphs, Dryads and Satyrs - who frolic until the morning star appears.
Edmund Gosse turns to Greek Mythology for inspiration.
Although typical of the the writing of his time, this poem will probably not appeal to many readers today.
OLD AND NEW
Come, Hesper, and ye Gods of mountain waters,
Come, nymphs and Dryades,
Come, silken choir of soft Pierian daughters,
And girls of lakes and seas,
Evoë! and evoë Io! crying,
Fill all the earth and air;
Evoë! till the quivering words, replying,
Shout back the echo there!
All day in soundless swoon or heavy slumber,
We lay among the flowers,
But now the stars break forth in countless number
To watch the dewy hours;
And now Iacchus, beautiful and glowing,
Adown the hill-side comes,
Mid tabrets shaken high, and trumpets blowing,
And resonance of drums.
The leopard-skin is round his smooth white shoulders,
The vine-branch round his hair,
Those eyes that rouse desire in maid-beholders
Are glittering, glowworm-fair;
Crowned king of all the provinces of pleasure,
Lord of a wide domain,
He comes, and brings delight that knows no measure,
A full Saturnian reign.
Take me, too, Maenads, to your fox-skin chorus,
Rose-lipped like volute-shells,
For I would follow where your host canorous
Roars down the forest-dells;
The sacred frenzy rends my throat and bosom!
I shout, and whirl where He,
Our Vine-God, tosses like some pale blood-blossom
Swept on a stormy sea.
Around his car, with streaming hair, and frantic,
The Maenads and wild gods
And shaggy fauns and wood-girls corybantic
Toss high the ivy-rods;
Brown limbs with white limbs madly intertwining
Whirl in a fiery dance,
Till, when at length Orion is declining,
We glide into a trance.
The satyr’s heart is faintly, faintly beating,
The choir of nymphs is mute;
Iacchus up the western slope is fleeting,
Uncheered by horn or flute;
Hushed, hushed are all the shouting and the singing,
The frenzy, the delight,
Since out into the cold grey air upspringing,
The morning-star shines bright.
Edmund Gosse
Biographical note: Edmund William Gosse ( 1849 – 1928) was an English poet, author, biographer, translator and critic.
He was lecturer in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge (1884–90) and librarian of the House of Lords (1904–14).
Gosse introduced English readers to Henrik Ibsen and other Scandinavian writers, as well as to some modern French writers and painters.
Among the many biographies he wrote were those of Gray (1882), Donne (1899), Sir Thomas Browne (1905), Ibsen (1907), Swinburne (1917), and Congreve.
His autobiographical 'Father and Son' (1907), his best work, describes his troubled relationship with his Plymouth Brethren father, Philip Henry Gosse, an English naturalist and author of zoological works.
Included among Edmund's several volumes of verse are On Viol and Flute (1873) and New Poems (1879).
He was knighted in 1925.
21/06/08 @ 19:55