ARETHUSA

Still Arethusa keeps her course,

For, though the corporal dark of earth

Stifle, like an unconscious nurse,

The impulse for her second birth,

Yet her true will must ever be

These captive waves that shall be free.

So the forgotten water ever

With withdrawn life and hid emotion

Moves on in darkness, still a river,

Towards a sun upon an ocean;

And the found place there will not cease

To be the river's, not the sea's.

So keeps she, under the void dark

Of her oppressed seclusion still

Her careful self, whose soul shall work

Towards the outlet from the hill,

Past hived vaults and humid walls

And her dropped noise of waterfalls.

Uncaught throughout the spell of caves,

Forlorn under the mother stone,

Still the great destined river craves

Its purpose, liquid and alone,

And more, yet less, under the hills

Its unresisting motion wills.

And ever, while time frets the rocks

And space shuts dark the godless flow,

She runs, a will in waves that flocks

Around a darkness for a glow;

And onward still, because it is

What shall be, and the Gods are this.

And, still remembering to forget,

Still onward because Fate inclines,

Veiled Arethusa still doth wet

With purpose the weird cavern shrines,

Where, past their blind, dead, solid being,

Her watery will moves on to seeing.

Dim under phosphorescent zones

Of darkness wronged and stalactites,

Or complete darkness, where the moans

Of waters wail for destined sights,

Her course, that knows no day, doth still

Work out to day its nightly will.

Till, bright at last in the aired arms

Of the lone rocks laid in the sea,

Bare Arethusa free her charms

To light and to its panic glee,

And the sea clasp her, as she were

Venus there born and mistress there.