Poems (Whitney)/Temur

by Anne Whitney

TEMUR.

 When Temur, chief of Omars, died,
God's angels bore his soul away
  Unto full-flowered Paradise:—
There, as the Persian prophets say,
   No flower shall feel decay—
  Perpetual are the splendid skies.

 But Temur was a tyrant fell:
And Seyd, whose fair first-born had known
  The terrors of the Despot's sway,
Murmured, as on his eyelids shone
   Rays from the burning throne,
  Whitherward oped the angel's way.

 But God, the just, who now and then
Speaks in the soul's emphatic dream,
  Took Seyd the murmurer, that night,
And led him to Kur's wakeful stream,
   Which lay in the moon's beam,
  Blooming with lilies of her light.

 There curved the mountain line away;
And there, the murmuring lapse of blue
  Let in between green silences,
To ripple the level smoothness through;—
   And 'mid soft light and dew,
  Temur's hushed palace rose into the skies.

 What life in every peaceful thing!
What trance of living, joyful might!
  The heavens may breathe it unto men,
And bulbuls by the charmed light
   Sing it to sacred night,
  But who may utter it again?

 Seyd saw the open, blooming heaven;
And the rich well-springs of the air
  Fresh'ning the overburthened world;
And o'er dark brows of guilt and care,
   The intermitted peace—God's fair,
  Soft-visioned Night of night unfurled.

 "All Beauty is of God the good;
Yon scarf of stars his angels wove,
  And earth is sweet of Paradise;"
He mused;—"O wretch, that would'st remove
   Aught from his saving love,
  Or stint his patient ministries!"