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    Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse
    Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse
    Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse
    Ebook80 pages42 minutes

    Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse

    By Edith Wharton

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    About this ebook

    This vintage book contains a fantastic collection of verse written by Edith Wharton. Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937) was an American novelist, designer, and writer of short stories. She married her uniquely insightful experience of America's aristocracy with a natural wit, in order to construct humorous novels and short stories that boast uncanny understanding on a social and psychological level. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for her novel "The Age of Innocence". Contents include: "Artemis to Actaeon", "Life", "Vesalius in Zante", "Margaret of Cortona", "A Torchbearer", "The Mortal Lease", "Experience", "Grief", "Chartres", "Two Backgrounds", "The Tomb of Ilaria Giunigi", "The One Grief", "The Eumenides", "Orpheus", "An Autumn Over Tyringham", etcetera. Many texts such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateApr 15, 2014
    ISBN9781473393714
    Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse
    Author

    Edith Wharton

    Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Having grown up in an upper-class, tightly controlled society known as “Old New York” at a time when women were discouraged from achieving anything beyond a proper marriage, Wharton broke through these strictures to become one of that society’s fiercest critics as well as one of America’s greatest writers. The author of more than 40 books in 40 years, Wharton’s oeuvre includes classic works of American literature such as The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, and Ethan Frome, as well as authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel.

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      Book preview

      Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse - Edith Wharton

      MEETING

      I

      ARTEMIS TO ACTÆON

      THOU couldst not look on me and live: so runs

      The mortal legend—thou that couldst not live

      Nor look on me (so the divine decree)!

      That saw’st me in the cloud, the wave, the bough,

      The clod commoved with April, and the shapes

      Lurking ’twixt lid and eye-ball in the dark.

      Mocked I thee not in every guise of life,

      Hid in girls’ eyes, a naiad in her well,

      Wooed through their laughter, and like echo fled,

      Luring thee down the primal silences

      Where the heart hushes and the flesh is dumb?

      Nay, was not I the tide that drew thee out

      Relentlessly from the detaining shore,

      Forth from the home-lights and the hailing voices,

      Forth from the last faint headland’s failing line,

      Till I enveloped thee from verge to verge

      And hid thee in the hollow of my being?

      And still, because between us hung the veil,

      The myriad-tinted veil of sense, thy feet

      Refused their rest, thy hands the gifts of life,

      Thy heart its losses, lest some lesser face

      Should blur mine image in thine upturned soul

      Ere death had stamped it there. This was thy thought.

      And mine?

      The gods, they say, have all: not so!

      This have they—flocks on every hill, the blue

      Spirals of incense and the amber drip

      Of lucid honey-comb on sylvan shrines,

      First-chosen weanlings, doves immaculate,

      Twin-cooing in the osier-plaited cage,

      And ivy-garlands glaucous with the dew:

      Man’s wealth, man’s servitude, but not himself!

      And so they pale, for lack of warmth they wane,

      Freeze to the marble of their images,

      And, pinnacled on man’s subserviency,

      Through the thick sacrificial haze discern

      Unheeding lives and loves, as some cold peak

      Through icy mists may enviously descry

      Warm vales unzoned to the all-fruitful sun.

      So they along an immortality

      Of endless-vistaed homage strain their gaze,

      If haply some rash votary, empty-urned,

      But light of foot, with all-adventuring hand,

      Break rank, fling past the people and the priest,

      Up the last step, on to the inmost shrine,

      And there, the sacred curtain in his clutch,

      Drop dead of seeing—while the others prayed!

      Yea, this we wait for, this renews us, this

      Incarnates us, pale people of your dreams,

      Who are but what you make us, wood or stone,

      Or cold chryselephantine hung with gems,

      Or else the beating purpose of your life,

      Your sword, your clay, the note your pipe pursues,

      The face that haunts your pillow, or the light

      Scarce visible over leagues of labouring sea!

      O thus through use to reign again, to drink

      The cup of peradventure to the lees,

      For one dear instant disimmortalised

      In giving immortality!

      So dream the gods upon their listless thrones.

      Yet sometimes, when the votary appears,

      With death-affronting forehead and glad eyes,

      Too young, they rather muse, too frail thou art,

      And shall we rob some girl of saffron veil

      And nuptial garland for so slight a thing?

      And so to their incurious loves return.

      Not so with thee; for some indeed there are

      Who would behold the truth and then return

      To pine among the semblances—but I

      Divined in thee the questing foot that never

      Revisits the cold hearth of yesterday

      Or calls achievement home. I from afar

      Beheld thee fashioned for one hour’s high use,

      Nor meant to slake oblivion drop by drop.

      Long, long hadst thou inhabited my dreams,

      Surprising me as harts surprise a pool,

      Stealing to drink at midnight; I divined

      Thee rash to reach the heart of life, and lie

      Bosom to bosom in occasion’s arms,

      And said: Because I

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