C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Mary Ashley Townsend (1836–1901)
From ‘Down the Bayou’
W
My Love, my Summer Love, and I,
Far out of sight of all the town;
The old cathedral sinking down,
With spire and cross, from view, below
The borders of St. John’s Bayou,
As toward the ancient Spanish Fort,
With steady prow and helm a-port,
We drifted down, my Love and I,
Beneath an azure April sky,
My Love and I, my Love and I,
Just at the hour of noon.
My Love, my Summer Love, and I,
Beyond the Creole part of town,
Its red-tiled roofs, its stucco walls,
Its belfries with their sweet bell-calls;
The Bishop’s Palace, which enshrines
Such memories of the Ursulines;
Past balconies where maidens dreamed
Behind the shelter of cool vines;
Past open doors where parrots screamed;
Past courts where mingled shade and glare
Fell through pomegranate boughs, to where
The turbaned negress, drowsy grown,
Sat nodding in her ample chair;
Beyond the joyance and the stress,
Beyond the greater and the less,
Beyond the tiresome noonday town,
The parish prison’s cupolas,
The bridges with their creaking draws,
And many a convent’s frown,—
We drifted on, my Love and I,
Beneath the semi-tropic sky,
While from the clock-towers in the town
Spake the meridian bells that said—
Time flies—and soon
Night follows noon.
Prepare! Beware!
Take care! Take care!
For soon—so soon—
Night follows noon,—
Dark night the noon,—
Noon! noon! noon! noon!…
We lightly swept from shore to shore,—
The hither and the thither shore,—
With scarce the lifting of an oar;
While far beyond, in distance wrapped,
The city’s lines lay faintly mapped:
Its antique courts, its levee’s throngs,
Its rattling floats, its boatmen’s songs,
Its lowly and its lofty roofs,
Its tramp of men, its beat of hoofs,
Its scenes of peace, its brief alarms,
Its narrow streets, its old Place d’Armes,
Whose tragic soil of long ago
Now sees the modern roses blow,—
All these in one vast cloud were wound,
Of blurred and fainting sight and sound,
As on we swept, my Love and I,
Beneath the April sky together,
In all the bloomy April weather,—
My Love, my Summer Love, and I,
In all the blue and amber weather.
My Love, my Summer Love, and I;
We passed the reeds and brakes among,
Beneath the smilax vines we swung;
We grasped at lilies whitely drooping
Mid the rank growth of grass and sedge,
Or bending toward the water’s edge,
As for their own reflection stooping.
Then talked we of the legend old
Wherein Narcissus’s fate is told;
And turned from that to grander story
Of heroed past or modern glory,
Till the quaint town of New Orleans,
Its Spanish and its French demesnes,
Like some vague mirage of the mind,
In Memory’s cloudlands lay defined;
And back and backward seemed to creep
Commerce, with all her tangled tongues,
Till Silence smote her lusty lungs,
And Distance lulled Discord to sleep….
Some aged negro, ’neath his load
Of gathered moss and latanier,
Went shuffling on his homeward way;
While purple, cool, beneath the blue
Of that hot noontide, bravely smiled,
With bright and iridescent hue,
Whole acres of the blue-flag flower,
The breathy Iris, sweet and wild,
That floral savage unsubdued,
The gipsy April’s gipsy child.
An Indian woman darts before
The light bow of our idle boat,
In which, like figures in a dream,
My Love—my Summer Love—and I
Adown the sluggish bayou float;
While she, in whose still face we see
Traits of a chieftain ancestry,
Paddles her pirogue down the stream
Swiftly, and with the flexile grace
Of some dusk Dian in the chase.
Where the wild mango weaves its boughs,
And early willows stoop their hair
To meet the sullen bayou’s kiss;
Where the luxuriant “creeper” throws
Its eager clasp round rough and fair
To climb toward the coming June;
Where the sly serpent’s sudden hiss
Startles sometimes the drowsy noon,—
There the rude hut, banana-thatched,
Stands with its ever open door;
Its yellow gourd hung up beside
The crippled crone who, half asleep,
In garments most grotesquely patched,
Grim watch and ward pretends to keep
Where there is naught to be denied….
For half a dozen miles or more,
Past leagues and leagues of lilied marsh,
The murky bayou swerved and slid,
Was lost, and found itself again,
And yet again was quickly hid
Among the grasses of the plain.
As gazed we o’er the sedgy swerves,
The wild and weedy water curves
Toward sheets of shining canvas spread
High o’er the lilies blue and red,
So low the shores on either hand,
The sloops seemed sailing on the land.
As drifted on my Love and I,
Were groups of idling negro girls,
Half hid behind the swaying hedge
Of wild rice nodding in the breeze.
Barefooted by the bayou’s edge,
Just where the water swells and swirls,
They watched the passing of our boat.
Some stood like caryatides
With arms upraised to burdened heads;
Some, idly grouped among the weeds,
With arms about their naked knees,
Or full length on the grasses cast,
Grew into pictures as we passed.
Our aimless course they idly noted;
Then out across the lowlands floated
Rude snatches of plantation songs,
In that sweet cadence which belongs
To their full-lipped, full-lungèd race.
We heard the rustle of the grass
They parted wide to see us pass;
Our boat so neared their resting-place,
We heard their murmurs of surprise,
And glanced into their shining eyes;
Then caught the rich, mellifluous strain
That fell and rose, and fell again;
And listened, listened, till the last
Clear note was mingled with the past….
We saw the buzzard rock and swing;
That sturdy sailor of the air,
Whose agile pinions have a grace
That prouder plumes might proudly wear,
And claim it for a kinglier race.
The voicy mocking-bird gave song,—
That plagiarist whose note is known
As every bird’s, yet all his own.
As shuttles of the Persian looms
Catch all of Nature’s subtlest blooms,
Alike her bounty and her dole,
To weave in one bewildering whole,
So has this subtile singer caught
All sweetest songs, and deftly wrought
Them into one entrancing score
From his rejoicing heart to pour….
When we had reached the bayou’s mouth,
My Love—my Summer Love—and I.
It laden came with rare perfumes,—
With spice of bays, and orange blooms,
And mossy odors from the glooms
Of cypress swamps. Now and again,
Upon the fair Lake Pontchartrain,
White sails went nodding to the main;
And round about the painted hulls
Darted the sailing, swooping gulls,
Wailing and shrieking, as they flew
Unrestingly ’twixt blue and blue,
Like ghosts of drownèd mariners
Rising from deep-sea sepulchres,
To warn, with weird and woeful lips,
Who go down to the sea in ships….
Bends o’er me like some vast blue bell;
When piping birds are in the reeds,
And earth is fed on last year’s seeds;
When newly is the live-oak’s tent
With tender green and gray besprent;
When wailing gulls are on the lake,
And woods are fair for April’s sake;
When grassy plains their secrets tell,
And lilies with white wonder look
At other lilies by the brook;
When thrills the wild rice in the wind,
And cries the heron shrill and harsh
Along the lush and lonely marsh;
When in the grove the mocker sings,
And earth seems full of new-made things,
And Nature to all youth is kind,—
Once more, as in a vision, seem
To rise before me lake and stream;
Once more a semi-tropic noon,
A boat upon a long lagoon;
Two figures there, as in a dream,
Come, strangely dear and strangely nigh,
To touch me, and to pass me by;
And as they pass, once more I seem
To see, beneath the April sky,
In all the blue and silver weather,
My Love—my Summer Love—and I
Drift down the long lagoon together!