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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=374294" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Orpheus</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Love will make men dare to die for their beloved. . . Of this<br>Alcestis is a monument . . . for she was willing to lay down her<br>life for her husband . . . and so noble did this appear to the gods<br>that they granted her the privilege of returning to earth . . . but<br>Orpheus, the son of OEagrus, they sent empty away. . .</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Plato: The Symposium</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Orpheus the Harper, coming to the gate<br>Where the implacable dim warder sate,<br>Besought for parley with a shade within,<br>Dearer to him than life itself had been,<br>Sweeter than sunlight on Illyrian sea,<br>Or bloom of myrtle, or murmur of laden bee,<br>Whom lately from his unconsenting breast<br>The Fates, at some capricious blind behest,<br>Intolerably had reft—Eurydice,<br>Dear to the sunlight as Illyrian sea,<br>Sweet as the murmur of bees, or myrtle bloom—<br>And uncompanioned led her to the tomb.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">There, solitary by the Stygian tide,<br>Strayed her dear feet, the shadow of his own,<br>Since, ’mid the desolate millions who have died,<br>Each phantom walks its crowded path alone;<br>And there her head, that slept upon his breast,<br>No more had such sweet harbour for its rest,<br>Nor her swift ear from those disvoiced throats<br>Could catch one echo of his living notes,<br>And, dreaming nightly of her pallid doom,<br>No solace had he of his own young bloom,<br>But yearned to pour his blood into her veins<br>And buy her back with unimagined pains.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">To whom the Shepherd of the Shadows said:<br>“Yea, many thus would bargain for their dead;<br>But when they hear my fatal gateway clang<br>Life quivers in them with a last sweet pang.<br>They see the smoke of home above the trees,<br>The cordage whistles on the harbour breeze;<br>The beaten path that wanders to the shore<br>Grows dear because they shall not tread it more,<br>The dog that drowsing on their threshold lies<br>Looks at them with their childhood in his eyes,<br>And in the sunset’s melancholy fall<br>They read a sunrise that shall give them all.”</div><div style="margin:10px 0">“Not thus am I,” the Harper smiled his scorn.<br>“I see no path but those her feet have worn;<br>My roof-tree is the shadow of her hair,<br>And the light breaking through her long despair<br>The only sunrise that mine eyelids crave;<br>For doubly dead without me in the grave<br>Is she who, if my feet had gone before,<br>Had found life dark as death’s abhorred shore.”</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The gate clanged on him, and he went his way<br>Amid the alien millions, mute and grey,<br>Swept like a cold mist down an unlit strand,<br>Where nameless wreckage gluts the stealthy sand,<br>Drift of the cockle-shells of hope and faith<br>Wherein they foundered on the rock of death.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">So came he to the image that he sought<br>(Less living than her semblance in his thought),<br>Who, at the summons of his thrilling notes,<br>Drew back to life as a drowned creature floats<br>Back to the surface; yet no less is dead.<br>And cold fear smote him till she spoke and said:<br>“Art thou then come to lay thy lips on mine,<br>And pour thy life’s libation out like wine?<br>Shall I, through thee, revisit earth again,<br>Traverse the shining sea, the fruitful plain,<br>Behold the house we dwelt in, lay my head<br>Upon the happy pillows of our bed,<br>And feel in dreams the pressure of thine arms<br>Kindle these pulses that no memory warms?<br>Nay: give me for a space upon thy breast<br>Death’s shadowy substitute for rapture—rest;<br>Then join again the joyous living throng,<br>And give me life, but give it in thy song;<br>For only they that die themselves may give<br>Life to the dead: and I would have thee live.”</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Fear seized him closer than her arms; but he<br>Answered: “Not so—for thou shalt come with me!<br>I sought thee not that we should part again,<br>But that fresh joy should bud from the old pain;<br>And the gods, if grudgingly their gifts they make,<br>Yield all to them that without asking take.”</div><div style="margin:10px 0">“The gods,” she said, “(so runs life’s ancient lore)<br>Yield all man takes, but always claim their score.<br>The iron wings of the Eumenides<br>When heard far off seem but a summer breeze;<br>But me thou’lt have alive on earth again<br>Only by paying here my meed of pain.<br>Then lay on my cold lips the tender ghost<br>Of the dear kiss that used to warm them most,<br>Take from my frozen hands thy hands of fire,<br>And of my heart-strings make thee a new lyre,<br>That in thy music men may find my voice,<br>And something of me still on earth rejoice.”</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Shuddering he heard her, but with close-flung arm<br>Swept her resisting through the ghostly swarm.<br>“Swift, hide thee ’neath my cloak, that we may glide<br>Past the dim warder as the gate swings wide.”<br>He whirled her with him, lighter than a leaf<br>Unwittingly whirled onward by a brief<br>Autumnal eddy; but when the fatal door<br>Suddenly yielded him to life once more,<br>And issuing to the all-consoling skies<br>He turned to seek the sunlight in her eyes,<br>He clutched at emptiness—she was not there;<br>And the dim warder answered to his prayer:<br>“Only once have I seen the wonder wrought.<br>But when Alcestis thus her master sought,<br>Living she sought him not, nor dreamed that fate<br>For any subterfuge would swing my gate.<br>Loving, she gave herself to livid death,<br>Joyous she bought his respite with her breath,<br>Came, not embodied, but a tenuous shade,<br>In whom her rapture a great radiance made.<br>For never saw I ghost upon this shore<br>Shine with such living ecstasy before,<br>Nor heard an exile from the light above<br>Hail me with smiles: Thou art not Death but Love!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">“But when the gods, frustrated, this beheld,<br>How, living still, among the dead she dwelled,<br>Because she lived in him whose life she won,<br>And her blood beat in his beneath the sun,<br>They reasoned: ‘When the bitter Stygian wave<br>The sweetness of love’s kisses cannot lave,<br>When the pale flood of Lethe washes not<br>From mortal mind one high immortal thought,<br>Akin to us the earthly creature grows,<br>Since nature suffers only what it knows.<br>If she whom we to this grey desert banned<br>Still dreams she treads with him the sunlit land<br>That for his sake she left without a tear,<br>Set wide the gates—her being is not here.’</div><div style="margin:10px 0">“So ruled the gods; but thou, that sought’st to give<br>Thy life for love, yet for thyself wouldst live.<br>They know not for their kin; but back to earth<br>Give, pitying, one that is of mortal birth.”</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Humbled the Harper heard, and turned away,<br>Mounting alone to the empoverished day;<br>Yet, as he left the Stygian shades behind,<br>He heard the cordage on the harbour wind,<br>Saw the blue smoke above the homestead trees,<br>And in his hidden heart was glad of these.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Edith+Wharton">Edith Wharton</a><div class=q>
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Alcestis is a monument . . . for she was willing to lay down her
life for her husband . . . and so noble did this appear to the gods
that they granted her the privilege of returning to ..."></div>
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