William Butler Yeats

The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid

  Kusta ben Luka is my name, I write
  To Abd Al-Rabban; fellow roysterer once,
  Now the good Caliph’s learned Treasurer,
  And for no ear but his.
                         Carry this letter
  Through the great gallery of the Treasure House
  Where banners of the Caliphs hang, night-coloured
  But brilliant as the night’s embroidery,
  And wait war’s music; pass the little gallery;
  Pass books of learning from Byzantium
  Written in gold upon a purple stain,
  And pause at last, I was about to say,
  At the great book of Sappho’s song; but no,
  For should you leave my letter there, a boy’s
  Love-lorn, indifferent hands might come upon it
  And let it fall unnoticed to the floor.
  Pause at the Treatise of Parmenides
  And hide it there, for Caliphs to world’s end
  Must keep that perfect, as they keep her song
  So great its fame.
                    When fitting time has passed
  The parchment will disclose to some learned man
  A mystery that else had found no chronicler
  But the wild Bedouin. Though I approve
  Those wanderers that welcomed in their tents
  What great Harun Al-Rashid, occupied
  With Persian embassy or Grecian war,
  Must needs neglect; I cannot hide the truth
  That wandering in a desert, featureless
  As air under a wing, can give birds’ wit.
  In after time they will speak much of me
  And speak but phantasy. Recall the year
  When our beloved Caliph put to death
  His Vizir Jaffer for an unknown reason;
  ‘If but the shirt upon my body knew it
  I’d tear it off and throw it in the fire.’
  That speech was all that the town knew, but he
  Seemed for a while to have grown young again;
  Seemed so on purpose, muttered Jaffer’s friends,
  That none might know that he was conscience struck--
  But that’s a traitor’s thought. Enough for me
  That in the early summer of the year
  The mightiest of the princes of the world
  Came to the least considered of his courtiers;
  Sat down upon the fountain’s marble edge
  One hand amid the goldfish in the pool;
  And thereupon a colloquy took place
  That I commend to all the chroniclers
  To show how violent great hearts can lose
  Their bitterness and find the honey-comb.
  ‘I have brought a slender bride into the house;
  You know the saying “Change the bride with Spring”,
  And she and I, being sunk in happiness,
  Cannot endure to think you tread these paths,
  When evening stirs the jasmine, and yet
  Are brideless.’
                 ‘I am falling into years.’
  ‘But such as you and I do not seem old
  Like men who live by habit. Every day
  I ride with falcon to the river’s edge
  Or carry the ringed mail upon my back,
  Or court a woman; neither enemy,
  Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice;
  And so a hunter carries in the eye
  A mimicry of youth. Can poet’s thought
  That springs from body and in body falls
  Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky
  Now bathing lily leaf and fishes’ scale,
  Be mimicry?’
              ‘What matter if our souls
  Are nearer to the surface of the body
  Than souls that start no game and turn no rhyme!
  The soul’s own youth and not the body’s youth
  Shows through our lineaments. My candle’s bright,
  My lantern is too loyal not to show
  That it was made in your great father’s reign.’

  ‘And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.’

  ‘Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech;
  You think that love has seasons, and you think
  That if the spring bear off what the spring gave
  The heart need suffer no defeat; but I
  Who have accepted the Byzantine faith,
  That seems unnatural to Arabian minds,
  Think when I choose a bride I choose for ever;
  And if her eye should not grow bright for mine
  Or brighten only for some younger eye,
  My heart could never turn from daily ruin,
  Nor find a remedy.’
                     ‘But what if I
  Have lit upon a woman, who so shares
  Your thirst for those old crabbed mysteries,
  So strains to look beyond our life, an eye
  That never knew that strain would scarce seem bright,
  And yet herself can seem youth’s very fountain,
  Being all brimmed with life.’
                               ‘Were it but true
  I would have found the best that life can give,
  Companionship in those mysterious things
  That make a man’s soul or a woman’s soul
  Itself and not some other soul.’
                                  ‘That love
  Must needs be in this life and in what follows
  Unchanging and at peace, and it is right
  Every philosopher should praise that love.
  But I being none can praise its opposite.
  It makes my passion stronger but to think
  Like passion stirs the peacock and his mate,
  The wild stag and the doe; that mouth to mouth
  Is a man’s mockery of the changeless soul.’
  And thereupon his bounty gave what now
  Can shake more blossom from autumnal chill
  Than all my bursting springtime knew. A girl
  Perched in some window of her mother’s house
  Had watched my daily passage to and fro;
  Had heard impossible history of my past;
  Imagined some impossible history
  Lived at my side; thought time’s disfiguring touch
  Gave but more reason for a woman’s care.
  Yet was it love of me, or was it love
  Of the stark mystery that has dazed my sight,
  Perplexed her phantasy and planned her care?
  Or did the torchlight of that mystery
  Pick out my features in such light and shade
  Two contemplating passions chose one theme
  Through sheer bewilderment? She had not paced
  The garden paths, nor counted up the rooms,
  Before she had spread a book upon her knees
  And asked about the pictures or the text;
  And often those first days I saw her stare
  On old dry writing in a learned tongue,
  On old dry faggots that could never please
  The extravagance of spring; or move a hand
  As if that writing or the figured page
  Were some dear cheek.
                       Upon a moonless night
  I sat where I could watch her sleeping form,
  And wrote by candle-light; but her form moved,
  And fearing that my light disturbed her sleep
  I rose that I might screen it with a cloth.
  I heard her voice, ‘Turn that I may expound
  What’s bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek’;
  And saw her sitting upright on the bed;
  Or was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?
  I say that a Djinn spoke. A live-long hour
  She seemed the learned man and I the child;
  Truths without father came, truths that no book
  Of all the uncounted books that I have read,
  Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot,
  Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths,
  Those terrible implacable straight lines
  Drawn through the wandering vegetative dream,
  Even those truths that when my bones are dust
  Must drive the Arabian host.
                              The voice grew still,
  And she lay down upon her bed and slept,
  But woke at the first gleam of day, rose up
  And swept the house and sang about her work
  In childish ignorance of all that passed.
  A dozen nights of natural sleep, and then
  When the full moon swam to its greatest height
  She rose, and with her eyes shut fast in sleep
  Walked through the house. Unnoticed and unfelt
  I wrapped her in a heavy hooded cloak, and she,
  Half running, dropped at the first ridge of the desert
  And there marked out those emblems on the sand
  That day by day I study and marvel at,
  With her white finger. I led her home asleep
  And once again she rose and swept the house
  In childish ignorance of all that passed.
  Even to-day, after some seven years
  When maybe thrice in every moon her mouth
  Murmured the wisdom of the desert Djinns,
  She keeps that ignorance, nor has she now
  That first unnatural interest in my books.
  It seems enough that I am there; and yet
  Old fellow student, whose most patient ear
  Heard all the anxiety of my passionate youth,
  It seems I must buy knowledge with my peace.
  What if she lose her ignorance and so
  Dream that I love her only for the voice,
  That every gift and every word of praise
  Is but a payment for that midnight voice
  That is to age what milk is to a child!
  Were she to lose her love, because she had lost
  Her confidence in mine, or even lose
  Its first simplicity, love, voice and all,
  All my fine feathers would be plucked away
  And I left shivering. The voice has drawn
  A quality of wisdom from her love’s
  Particular quality. The signs and shapes;
  All those abstractions that you fancied were
  From the great treatise of Parmenides;
  All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things
  Are but a new expression of her body
  Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.
  And now my utmost mystery is out.
  A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner;
  Under it wisdom stands, and I alone--
  Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone--
  Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost
  In the confusion of its night-dark folds,
  Can hear the armed man speak.