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TO NORA MAY FRENCH
Thou art stillAs they that sleep in the eldest pyramid—Or mounded with MesopotamiaAnd immemorial deserts! Thou hast partIn the wordless, dumb conspiracy of death—Silence wherein the warrior kings accord,And all the wrangling sages! If thy voiceIn any wise return, and word of thee,It is a lost, incognizable sigh,Upon the wind's oblivious woe, or blown,Antiphonal, from wave to plangent waveIn the vast, unhuman sorrow of the main,On tides that lave the city-laden shoresOf lands wherein the eternal vanitiesAre served at many altars; tides that washLemuria's unfathomable walls,And idly sway the weed-involvèd oarsAt wharves of lost Atlantis; tides that riseFrom coral-coffered bones of all the drowned,And sunless tombs of pearl that krakens guard.
II.
As none shall roam the sad Leucadian rock,Above the sea's immitigable moan,But in his heart a song that Sappho sang,And flame-like murmur of the muted lyresThat time hath not extinguished, and the cryOf nightengales two thousand years ago,Shall mix with those remorseful chords that breakTo endless foam and thunder; and he learnThe unsleeping woe that lives in MyteleneTill wave and deep are dumb with ice, and rimeHath paled the rose forever—even thus,Daughter of Sappho, passion-souled and fair,Whose face the lutes of Lesbos would have sung,And white Errina followed—even thus,The western wave is eloquent of thee,
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