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Grande Sicilienne
This is
Where the river
Runs down into the sea,
Listen to its music, hear this mystery !
The waves and the river
Make two choirs together,
Answering one another on the yellow sands,
In soft breath, slow antiphony ;
This is the level dancing floor
At the joining of the waters,
The sun is setting, and the Sicilienne begins ;
The shepherd’s toys, the flutes and pipes are here,
With hautboys, clarinets, bassoons,
Who play, and jump, and are the hollow voices,
The wind in the cave mouth, the whistling in the corn.
The Sicilienne,
Sicilienne,
Slides in slow measure,
Like a strewing hand,
Sifting through its fingers, letting fall, so slow,
Blossom after blossom, as if sowing grain,
And the flowers rise a little from the hand that throws them,
As if it were a fountain spray
And they climbed with that fountain foot
And fled along the airs.
It is the dance beginning
And the nymphs of the river
Like the naked waters move and mix together,
Flowing, flowing,
Or in the sweet curves bending
On the firm hard sand ;
Their bodies are burned dark
To apricot and nectarine, as ripe as that ;
These are the river nymphs
And the sea nymphs join them,
In girdles of shells and pretty belts of coral,
Soon slipped down their limbs and laid upon the sand,
In delicious journey down their legs and arms,
For girdles and oral belts slide like snow
Till the nymphs of the hot sea
Shiver and are cool.
They are a chorus of the salt and sweet
For Melete, Lydia and Antiope,
Whose forms make the patterns to this subtle music
In lovely geometry on the low, sweet air ;
Sometimes in a flowering ross, its straight lines broken
By their wrists or ankles, in flower upon its edges,
Or the tracery of a window in a rose’s petals
With saffron or red sky joining up their bodies.
Such are Melete, Lydia and Antipoe
And the others are chorus to their posturings,
They dance in a ring to the Sicilienne
And their fingers linked and but lightly held
Are lily holding lily,
Or are the butterflies who mate along the wind.
The goatish bagpipes and the reeds keep playing
While hautboy, clarinet, bassoon are sounding ;
It is an elegy, a lamentation,
Of sweetbreath lawns and shepherd kings
A though this idyllic hour could have no end ;
But it quickens to a running and a headlong leaping
Of shepherds, down a hillside, when their flocks are
panicked,
This is a battle shade, a shadow or an echo,
It is dashing and impetuous like a warrior’s charge,
And falls back again into flower dropping languours.
This very sand, this dancing floor
Has heroes and virgins buried in it,
It has gold from the riverbed,
And gold from every harvest of the bearded corn ;
This is its keen freshness, why it keeps their feet
Yet suffers the marks of them to fade before the eyes.
Now the dance is slow again,
Is slow and languorous,
It falls like flowers from the dancers’ hands,
So it rattles like a dying throat,
Or like winds in the rocks when they're pent up in a valley.
. . . . .
That is where the dancers went,
To some dead valley,
To another beach of sand upon a riverbank
Where the Sicilienne is danced before the fountain,
And the chorus, lily hand in lily,
Dance for Melete, Lydia and Antiope
Till they climb to their feet and dance to the bassoon,
While clarinet, hautboy, every bumpkin joins
And reeds and bagpipes have their fill of breath ;
Everything is gay but the Sicilienne.
For that can never be, the Sicilienne must be sad,
A dropping of blossoms to be trampled on,
It has always angry rocks and just the sound of foam,
Though you cannot look beyond that, for the wreathéd
flowers.
But see this in the crystal, by the fountain brim,
A white cumulus of cloud,
And Melete, Lydia and Antiope
On tiptoe ;
So thick is the blossom that no stem is seen ;
The cloud is an apple tree
And proud Antiope,
Melete and Lydia,
With many lovely bends
Climb into its branches to our ravishment.
This is greater beauty than was ever seen
In apricot or nectarine
On the naked sands,
For they lift themselves and bend across the loaded boughs,
So you know not where to look most
While they leave the sand,
At Melete, Lydia or Antiope,
Their grace is all manifest who climb like that.
And so the Sicilienne has its end again,
Dying in beauty like flowers upon their stems ;
The reeds wither and the bagpipe drones,
Nothing is left of the Sicilienne
But a ravishment of air and all our senses ravished.
Let drop some flowers, and let that white cloud fade,
It carries those nymphs
And they may fall in rain ;
Oh ! May we be thirsty, then,
And come out from the shade,
And may the ghosts of music fill our eyes and cool us.
Sacheverell Sitwell