ARABIAN NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS -To Elizabeth Robins Pennell 'O mes cheres Mille et Une Nuits!'--Fantasio.
Once on a time There was a little boy: a master-mage By virtue of a Book Of magic--O, so magical it filled His life with visionary pomps Processional! And Powers Passed with him where he passed. And Thrones And Dominations, glaived and plumed and mailed, Thronged in the criss-cross streets, The palaces pell-mell with playing-fields, Domes, cloisters, dungeons, caverns, tents, arcades, Of the unseen, silent City, in his soul Pavilioned jealously, and hid As in the dusk, profound, Green stillnesses of some enchanted mere. -
I shut mine eyes . . . And lo!
A flickering snatch of memory that floats Upon the face of a pool of darkness five And thirty dead years deep, Antic in girlish broideries And skirts and silly shoes with straps And a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walks Plain in the shadow of a church (St. Michael's: in whose brazen call To curfew his first wails of wrath were whelmed), Sedate for all his haste To be at home; and, nestled in his arm, Inciting still to quiet and solitude, Boarded in sober drab, With small, square, agitating cuts Let in a-top of the double-columned, close, Quakerlike print, a Book! . . .
What but that blessed brief Of what is gallantest and best In all the full-shelved Libraries of Romance?
The Book of rocs, Sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris, Cream-tarts, and lettered apes, and calendars, And ghouls, and genies--O, so huge They might have overed the tall Minster Tower Hands down, as schoolboys take a post!
In truth, the Book of Camaralzaman, Schemselnihar and Sindbad, Scheherezade The peerless, Bedreddin, Badroulbadour, Cairo and Serendib and Candahar, And Caspian, and the dim, terrific bulk -
Ice-ribbed, fiend-visited, isled in spells and storms -
Of Kaf! . . . That centre of miracles, The sole, unparalleled Arabian Nights!
Old friends I had a-many--kindly and grim Familiars, cronies quaint And goblin! Never a Wood but housed Some morrice of dainty dapperlings. No Brook But had his nunnery Of green-haired, silvry-curving sprites, To cabin in his grots, and pace His lilied margents. Every lone Hillside Might open upon Elf-Land. Every Stalk That curled about a Bean-stick was of the breed Of that live ladder by whose delicate rungs You climbed beyond the clouds, and found The Farm-House where the Ogre, gorged And drowsy, from his great oak chair, Among the flitches and pewters at the fire, Called for his Faery Harp. And in it flew, And, perching on the kitchen table, sang Jocund and jubilant, with a sound Of those gay, golden-vowered madrigals The shy thrush at mid-May Flutes from wet orchards flushed with the triumphing dawn;
Or blackbirds rioting as they listened still, In old-world woodlands rapt with an old-world spring, For Pan's own whistle, savage and rich and lewd, And mocked him call for call!
I could not pass The half-door where the cobbler sat in view Nor figure me the wizen Leprechaun, In square-cut, faded reds and buckle-shoes, Bent at his work in the hedge-side, and know Just how he tapped his brogue, and twitched His wax-end this and that way, both with wrists And elbows. In the rich June fields, Where the ripe clover drew the bees, And the tall quakers trembled, and the West Wind Lolled his half-holiday away Beside me lolling and lounging through my own, 'Twas good to follow the Miller's Youngest Son On his white horse along the leafy lanes;
For at his stirrup linked and ran, Not cynical and trapesing, as he loped From wall to wall above the espaliers, But in the bravest tops That market-town, a town of tops, could show:
Bold, subtle, adventurous, his tail A banner flaunted in disdain Of human stratagems and shifts:
King over All the Catlands, present and past And future, that moustached Artificer of fortunes, Puss-in-Boots!
Or Bluebeard's Closet, with its plenishing Of meat-hooks, sawdust, blood, And wives that hung like fresh-dressed carcases -
Odd-fangled, most a butcher's, part A faery chamber hazily seen And hazily figured--on dark afternoons And windy nights was visiting of the best.
Then, too, the pelt of hoofs Out in the roaring darkness told Of Herne the Hunter in his antlered helm Galloping, as with despatches from the Pit, Between his hell-born Hounds.
And Rip Van Winkle . . . often I lurked to hear, Outside the long, low timbered, tarry wall, The mutter and rumble of the trolling bowls Down the lean plank, before they fluttered the pins;
For, listening, I could help him play His wonderful game, In those blue, booming hills, with Mariners Refreshed from kegs not coopered in this our world.
But what were these so near, So neighbourly fancies to the spell that brought The run of Ali Baba's Cave Just for the saying 'Open Sesame,'
With gold to measure, peck by peck, In round, brown wooden stoups You borrowed at the chandler's? . . . Or one time Made you Aladdin's friend at school, Free of his Garden of Jewels, Ring and Lamp In perfect trim? . . . Or Ladies, fair For all the embrowning scars in their white breasts Went labouring under some dread ordinance, Which made them whip, and bitterly cry the while, Strange Curs that cried as they, Till there was never a Black Bitch of all Your consorting but might have gone Spell-driven miserably for crimes Done in the pride of womanhood and desire . . .
Or at the ghostliest altitudes of night, While you lay wondering and acold, Your sense was fearfully purged; and soon Queen Labe, abominable and dear, Rose from your side, opened the Box of Doom, Scattered the yellow powder (which I saw Like sulphur at the Docks in bulk), And muttered certain words you could not hear;
And there! a living stream, The brook you bathed in, with its weeds and flags And cresses, glittered and sang Out of the hearthrug over the nakedness, Fair-scrubbed and decent, of your bedroom floor! . . .
I was--how many a time! -
