her wrath
may light among foes, not friends.”
From deeper in the house then came a wail deep-throated and wild as the cry of a
jungle beast.
My veins ran ice and I jerked up my arm to my face.
A shock
of pain flashed through me, innumerable bruises, and
I nearly revealed
my hiding place in the shadow of the black oak bed.
The slaves
listened to Medeia’s wail as if numbed. When the
old woman
could speak, she said: “Go to your room now quickly!
Be wary!
Do not provoke that violent heart! Hurry! Go swiftly!
The soul of her father is alive in her. This gathering
cloud
of tears and wailing will enkindle soon far stormier
flashes.
A spirit like hers, headstrong and bitterly stung by
affliction—
what wild and reckless deeds may it not dare thunder
on us?”
I glanced at the garden, my eyes in flight from the
anguish of the house,
and my heart leaped. There stood the goddess Artemis,
tall
as a stone tower, watching with burning eyes.
And then the sea-kings were gathered around me, Jason on
the dais, with Kreon,
and the princess rigid in her silver chair. The whole
wide hall,
so it seemed to me, was a-gleam with the light
of Artemis.
Paidoboron spoke, dark-bearded king
of barren moraine, debris of glaciers, in his gloomy eyes the stillness of tideless seas. The assembled kings
sat hushed.
At a dark door far from the dais, the slave Ipnolebes
watched,
his hand on the shoulder of a boy.
“Think back,” Paidoboron said, “on the days of old.” His voice had nothing alive in it— the voice of a clockwork doll, some old, artificial
monster—
and his slow, mechanical gestures enforced the same
effect,
mockery of life. ‘Think over the years and down
the ages.”
He pointed as if to the darkness of endless corridors. “
Nation on nation the gods have raised up, then
crushed again.
Again and again the bow of the mighty the gods have
broken,
and the feeble and oppressed they have girded with
strength. No law of the stars
is surer than this: Empires shall rise and fall forever till the day of the earth’s destruction. The cities of the
strong will burn
and the bones of the master be hurled on the
smouldering garbage mounds
beyond the city’s gates. Then he who was weak shall
be robed
in zibelline, and in place of his shackles
the greaves of a warrior king, and his slaves
shall be splendid nobles of the age just past—
till he too falls to the jackals.” He paused, looked hard
at Kreon.
“Has it not yet struck you, Corinthian king? Though
you watched Thebes burn
with your own two eyes — great Thebes whose outer
walls were oceans,
whose kingdom’s heart was all Ethiopia and Egypt,
city of Kadmos the Wanderer, noblest of dragon
slayers—
have you never been struck by the deadly regularity with which, like suns, great kingdoms rise and fall?
Is all this
accident? To the ends of the world the rubble stretches, the scattered orts of banquets, the fumets of
chariot-horses,
fortresses ruined, thrones, the occamy spangles of once-proud concubines. All human tongues record the same in their legendry: the dark agonals of kings. And still man’s heart inclines to power, to the wealth and ease,
rich art,
fine food, of the demon city. But I tell you the truth:
the earth
at our feet cries out its curse on that tumorous growth.
In the shade
of walls, earth dies; it stiffens, trampled by sandals,
and cracks.
The city’s wealth cries softly to marauders in the night,
like a whore
at the jalousie. Her mounds bring plagues, her discharge
insects,
dry rot, rats. Still the city grows, dark lure of ambition, hunger of the exiled spirit, abandoned forever by
the stars,
for the wombsoft slosh of fat. The corpus of law grows
bloated
like a corpse recovered from the sea; and those who
enforce the law
grow cynical and rich, foxy, wolfish, beyond inculpation by any man, till all but frampold devils are shackled in chains. Then like a thigh-wound festering, the city
overflows
her battlements and coigns — robs all the land
surrounding for victuals,
chops green-forested mountains for timber, quogs out
quarries,
to heave up monuments worthy of the devastating
power of her kings,
tombs for the slyest of her paracletes, the most
celebrated
of her enemy-smashers, deified dragon-men—
sky-high houses
staddled on broken-backed slaves. Consumes the land,
the clouds;
builds ships for trade, extends her scope; finds conquest
cheaper,
more durable. And so that hour arrives at last
when the city, towering like a mammoth oak — great
shining bartizans,
pennons of crimson and gold like leaves in autumn
on her high-
spired parapets — an oak majestic in its ignorant pride, rotten at the core — shudders suddenly at an odd
new wind,
and trembles, incredulous, shaken by the gale of
exploited men’s howls,
and to all the world’s astonishment, siles down.
So it’s gone
for a thousand, thousand years, and so it will continue.
“You may say, ‘Nevertheless, there is good in cities: Where else
can men
support great art? The complexity of music, the
intrinsicate craft
of poetry? Who else can pay for architecture,
the gifts of science, ennobling pleasure of philosophy?’
I answer this: To a hungry man, all food is food, sufficient to his need. Trembling with weakness, he
does not ask
for meats denatured by subtle rocamboles. But the
man well-fed,
as short of breath as a boar at the trough, dull-headed
with wine,
bloated on the blood of his workers’ children — that
man has tastes
more particular: not taste for food but for taste itself. An art has been born. So the poet whose hunger is
simply to speak—
tell truths, right wrongs — what need has he for the
lipogram,
for colors of rhetoric, antilibrations of phrase on phrase?
Only to the fool who believes all truths debatable, who believes true virtue resides not in men but
in eulogies,
true sorrow not in partings but in apopemptic hymns, and true thought nowhere but in atramentaceous
scrollery—
only to him is elegant style, mere scent, good food.
The city, bedded on the sorrows of the poor, compacts
new sweets
to incense the corpse of the weary rich.
“—And as for science, cure my disease and I’ll thank you for it. Yet I do
not think
you mix your potions and juleps for me. By the ebony
beds
of the old loud-snoring mighty you wring your hands
and spoon out
remedies — dole out health for the coin of convalescent
spiders
in a kingdom of hapless flies. For the spider, health itself becomes not need but taste, where the treatment of