Aphrodite
I
Once, when as ever since the world began,
Dawn touched the silver level of the sea,
And like a golden shield of growing span
Crept on the land of twilight stealthily;
The Sun, yet sunk below his eastern lea,
Whence all the heavenly limits he could mark,
As Perseus through Medusa’s locks, in glee
Shot all his shining fingers through the Dark,
And once more laid the monster motionless and stark.
II
In that day for the inhabitants of Earth
And Heaven, moving in darkness heretofore,
A vision of high beauty came to birth
Amid the foam of Ocean’s eastern shore:
Such as the Gods, who tread their golden floor,
And mortals, dwellers in the orange grove
Domed with aerial blue, in all their lore
Feigned not in earth below or sky above,
Yet, seeing, made the queen and regent of their love.
III
For while the waves danced onward o’er the deep,
As at the first day bright and bluely clear,
And morning mounting up the saffron steep
In opaline pure splendour did appear
Pavilioning with flame the ocean-sphere,
A mist shot upward from the shining main,
A deep blush brightened through it, like a tear
That trembles on a rosebud after rain
And glows with heightened hue on what it cannot stain.
IV
One cloud-like moment in the air it hung;
And then the Sun, in eastern state confest,
Great level arms along the ocean flung,
Giving to each swart wave a golden crest,
And let one finger on the foambell rest,
Which like a hollow fretted crystalline
Of some rich secret rudely dispossessed,
Sundered and parted in the bright sunshine,
Showing the Foamborn in her beauty made divine.
V
A sunbow bent above her for a sign,
The spray embowered her in brilliant rain,
Her rosy feet upon the hyaline
Danced lightly like rose-petals o’er a plain;
Heaven was her canopy, a lofty fane
For incense and for music and high mirth,
Her laughing eyes, turned sunward, did detain
As in a mirror, all the smiles of Earth
Made happier because of beauty’s perfect birth.
VI
With one hand half uplifted did she hold
Her fair locks from her in a shining band,
As if to match the sunlight with their gold
Glittering with ocean-dew; the other hand
Sustained a robe sea-woven of glaucous strand,
Which veiled her limbs as softly as the moon
Glimmers where dawn-illumined mountains stand
Rosy in snow, or as in leafy June
The glowing foliage holds yet hides the hot midnoon.
VII
And where she stood the waves on every side
Fell from her into many a hollow space
And fair concavity, as though they tried
To keep the impress of her rounded grace
In inverse beauty; like a crystal case,
Broken to free some glory of art, they lay,
But shifting ever as to catch a trace
Of that fair model, till in fair dismay
They spread and died upon the distance far away.
VIII
For with divine consent from arm to arm,
From breast to brow, the lines of beauty run
And shift and flow with ever-changing charm
Which nothing can detain beneath the sun;
And like a silver fount that seems to shun
Even momentary rest, but ever flows
In wasteful beauty till the day is done,
Lovely in loss, since loveless in repose,
So rich in love’s regret fair Aphrodite rose.
IX
And Neptune’s children from the emerald gloom
Of ocean caverns, in a boisterous pack
Played round about her path of roseate bloom—
Sea-nymph and Triton in a foamy track,
With winds and water-sprites and cloudy rack
Of morning, and the mountains seen afar—
Orbed in one onward course which grew not slack
Till Venus, mounting on her dove-drawn car,
Went heavenward through the blue vault like a glistening star.
X
Therefore when Gorgon-headed Night was gone—
In labyrinthine marble calm and dread
Unearthly glitter, death to look upon—
Beauty arose to birth, and so was wed
To every dawn-lit dell and mountain-head
And dream of man; wherewith in flowing guise
Unto the heavenly lands she lightly sped,
To be Earth’s lovely envoy in the skies
And chosen Cynosure of Gods’ and mortals’ eyes.
Capri, 1873.