Later Poems / by Bliss Carman [electronic text]

A Painter's Holiday

WE painters sometimes strangely keep These holidays. When life runs deep And broad and strong, it comes to make Its own bright-colored almanack. Impulse and incident divine Must find their way through tone and line; The throb of color and the dream Of beauty, giving art its theme From dear life's daily miracle, Illume the artist's life as well.

A bird-note, or a turning leaf, The first white fall of snow, a brief Wild song from the Anthology, A smile, or a girl's kindling eye,—And there is worth enough for him To make the page of history dim. Who knows upon what day may come The touch of that delirium Which lifts plain life to the divine, And teaches hand the magic line No cunning rule could ever reach, Where Soul's necessities find speech? None knows how rapture may arrive To be our helper, and survive Through our essay to help in turn All starving eager souls who yearn

Lightward discouraged and distraught. Ah, once art's gleam of glory caught And treasured in the heart, how thenWe walk enchanted among men, And with the elder gods confer! So art is hope's interpreter, And with devotion must conspire To fan the eternal altar fire. Wherefore you find me here to-day, Not idling the good hours away, But picturing a magic hour With its replenishment of power.

Conceive a bleak December day, The streets all mire, the sky all gray, And a poor painter trudging home Disconsolate, when what should come Across his vision, but a line On a bold-lettered play-house sign, A Persian Sun Dance.

In he turns. A step, and there the desert burns Purple and splendid; molten gold The streamers of the dawn unfold, Amber and amethyst uphurled Above the far rim of the world; The long-held sound of temple bells Over the hot sand steals and swells;

A lazy tom-tom throbs and dones In barbarous maddening monotones; While sandal incense blue and keen Hangs in the air. And then the scene Wakes, and out steps, by rhythm released, The sorcery of all the East, In rose and saffron gossamer, — A young light-hearted worshipper Who dances up the sun. She moves Like waking woodland flower that loves To greet the day. Her lithe, brown curve Is like a sapling's sway and swerve Before the spring wind. Her dark hair Framing a face vivid and rare, Curled to her throat and then flew wild, Like shadows round a radiant child. The sunlight from her cymbals played About her dancing knees, and made A world of rose-lit ecstasy, Prophetic of the day to be.

Such mystic beauty might have shone In Sardis or in Babylon, To bring a Satrap to his doom Or touch some lad with glory's bloom. And now it wrought for me, with sheer Enchantment of the dying year, Its irresistible reprieve From joylessness on New Year's Eve.