Posthumous Poems/Memorial Ode on the Death of Leconte de Lisle
MEMORIAL ODE ON THE
DEATH OF LECONTE DE LISLE
On the first of June 1885, the greatest poet of the nineteenth century was borne to his rest amid the lamentations and the applause of his countrymen, and of all to whom either the example of a noble life or the triumph of a genius inaccessible and unapproachable seemed worthy of honour and regard. Many earnest and cordial and admirable words of tribute and thanksgiving and farewell were uttered over the hearse of Victor Hugo; none more memorable than those in which a great poet became the spokesman of all his kind in honour of the greatest of them all. Short and simple as was the speech of M. Leconte de Lisle, none of the longer and more elaborate orations was more genuinely eloquent, more seriously valuable, than the admirably terse and apt expression of gratitude and reverence with which he bade "farewell and hail" in the name of all surviving poets to their beloved and beneficent master. Nor could a fitter and a worthier spokesman have been imagined or desired by the most exacting or the most ambitious devotion or design.—A.C.S.
Beside the lordliest grave in all the world,
A singer crowned with golden years and fame
Spake words more sweet than wreaths of incense curled,
That bade an elder yet and mightier name
Hail, for whose love the wings of time were furled,
And death that heard it died of deadlier shame.
Hugo, supreme on earth, had risen above
Earth, as the sun soars noonward: grief and wrong
Had yielded up their part in him to love;
And one man's word came forth upon the throng
Brief as the brooding music of the dove.
Being silent, speaks forever. He, whose word
Reverberate made the gloom whereon he gazed
Radiant with sound whose song in his we heard,
Stands far from us as they whose souls he raised
Again, and darkness carolled like a bird.
Golden eastern waters rocked the cradle where he slept
Songless, crowned with bays to be of sovereign song,
Breathed upon with balm and calm of bounteous seas that kept
Secret all the blessing of his birthright, strong,
Soft, severe, and sweet as dawn when first it laughed and leapt
Forth of heaven, and clove the clouds that wrought it wrong.
All night long till night wax weary, shone the soul
Crowned and girt with light, sublime in peace and sure in power,
Sunlike, over tidal years and changes; whole,
Full, serene, superb as time that kindles fruit from flower,
Lord alike of waves that rest and waves that roll.
Lulled not overlong a spirit of strength to strive
Right against the winds that stormier times heard strain and sweep
Round the rocks whereon man crucified alive
Man, and bade the soul of manhood cower and chant and weep,
Strong in vain to soar and seek, to delve and dive.
Time and change and death made music as of life and strife and doom
When his lyric spell bade ope the graves of ages dead as dust.
Cain, a shadow like a sunrise clad in fire whose light was gloom,
Towered above the deepening deluge, crying on justice held unjust,
Whence his giant sons should find the world their throne become their tomb,
And a wider world of waters hide the strongholds of their trust.
Spake for Naboth slain the sentence of the judgment of the Lord:
Age on ruining age and year as rolling thunder crashed on year
Down the measures of the mighty song that glittered like a sword:
Truth and legend strange and fierce as truth or dreams of faith and fear
Made their lightnings one to crown it, flashed from stormy chord to chord.
Whence to give again the grace of golden gifts or hands long dead,
Now the deep clear soul that all the lore of time could scarce fulfil,
Now the sovereign voice that spake it, now the radiant eye that read,
Seem to sleep as sleeps the indomitable imperishable will
Here, that haply lives and sleeps not, though its word on earth be said.