THE GIFT OF HARUN AL-RASHID
 
 KUSTA BEN LUKA is my name, I write
 To Abd Al-Rabban; fellow-roysterer once,
 Now the good Caliph's learned Treasurer,
 And for no ear but his.
 Carry this letter
 Through the great gallery of the Treasure House
 Where banners of the Caliphs hang, night-coloured
 But brilliant as the night's embroidery,
 And wait war's music; pass the little gallery;
 Pass books of learning from Byzantium
 Written in gold upon a purple stain,
 And pause at last, I was about to say,
 At the great book of Sappho's song; but no,
 For should you leave my letter there, a boy's
 Love-lorn, indifferent hands might come upon it
 And let it fall unnoticed to the floor.
 pause at the Treatise of parmenides
 And hide it there, for Caiphs to world's end
 Must keep that perfect, as they keep her song,
 So great its fame.
 When fitting time has passed
 The parchment will disclose to some learned man
 A mystery that else had found no chronicler
 But the wild Bedouin.  Though I approve
 Those wanderers that welcomed in their tents
 What great Harun Al-Rashid, occupied
 With Persian embassy or Grecian war,
 Must needs neglect, I cannot hide the truth
 That wandering in a desert, featureless
 As air under a wing, can give birds' wit.
 In after time they will speak much of me
 And speak but fantasy.  Recall the year
 When our beloved Caliph put to death
 His Vizir Jaffer for an unknown reason:
 "If but the shirt upon my body knew it
 I'd tear it off and throw it in the fire.'
 That speech was all that the town knew, but he
 Seemed for a while to have grown young again;
 Seemed so on purpose, muttered Jaffer's friends,
 That none might know that he was conscience-struck –
 But that s a traitor's thought.  Enough for me
 That in the early summer of the year
 The mightiest of the princes of the world
 Came to the least considered of his courtiers;
 Sat down upon the fountain's marble edge,
 One hand amid the goldfish in the pool;
 And thereupon a colloquy took place
 That I commend to all the chroniclers
 To show how violent great hearts can lose
 Their bitterness and find the honeycomb.
 "I have brought a slender bride into the house;
 You know the saying, ""Change the bride with spring.''
 And she and I, being sunk in happiness,
 Cannot endure to think you tread these paths,
 When evening stirs the jasmine bough, and yet
 Are brideless.'
 "I am falling into years.'
 "But such as you and I do not seem old
 Like men who live by habit.  Every day
 I ride with falcon to the river's edge
 Or carry the ringed mail upon my back,
 Or court a woman; neither enemy,
 Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice;
 And so a hunter carries in the eye
 A mimic of youth.  Can poet's thought
 That springs from body and in body falls
 Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky,
 Now bathing lily leaf and fish's scale,
 Be mimicry?'
 "What matter if our souls
 Are nearer to the surface of the body
 Than souls that start no game and turn no rhyme!
 The soul's own youth and not the body's youth
 Shows through our lineaments.  My candle's bright,
 My lantern is too loyal not to show
 That it was made in your great father's reign,
 And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.'
 "Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech:
 You think that love has seasons, and you think
 That if the spring bear off what the spring gave
 The heart need suffer no defeat; but I
 Who have accepted the Byzantine faith,
 That seems unnatural to Arabian minds,
 Think when I choose a bride I choose for ever;
 And if her eye should not grow bright for mine
 Or brighten only for some younger eye,
 My heart could never turn from daily ruin,
 Nor find a remedy.'
 "But what if I
 Have lit upon a woman who so shares
 Your thirst for those old crabbed mysteries,
 So strains to look beyond Our life, an eye
 That never knew that strain would scarce seem bright,
 And yet herself can seem youth's very fountain,
 Being all brimmed with life?'
 "Were it but true
 I would have found the best that life can give,
 Companionship in those mysterious things
 That make a man's soul or a woman's soul
 Itself and not some other soul.'
 "That love
 Must needs be in this life and in what follows
 Unchanging and at peace, and it is right
 Every philosopher should praise that love.
 But I being none can praise its opposite.
 It makes my passion stronger but to think
 Like passion stirs the peacock and his mate,
 The wild stag and the doe; that mouth to mouth
 Is a man's mockery of the changeless soul.'
 And thereupon his bounty gave what now
 Can shake more blossom from autumnal chill
 Than all my bursting springtime knew.  A girl
 Perched in some window of her mother's housc
 Had watched my daily passage to and fro;
 Had heard impossible history of my past;
 Imagined some impossible history
 Lived at my side; thought time's disfiguring touch
 Gave but more reason for a woman's care.
 Yet was it love of me, or was it love
 Of the stark mystery that has dazed my sight,
 perplexed her fantasy and planned her care?
 Or did the torchlight of that mystery
 Pick out my features in such light and shade
 Two contemplating passions chose one theme
 Through sheer bewilderment? She had not paced
 The garden paths, nor counted up the rooms,
 Before she had spread a book upon her knees
 And asked about the pictures or the text;
 And often those first days I saw her stare
 On old dry writing in a learned tongue,
 On old dry faggots that could never please
 The extravagance of spring; or move a hand
 As if that writing or the figured page
 Were some dear cheek.
 Upon a moonless night
 I sat where I could watch her sleeping form,
 And wrote by candle-light; but her form moved.
 And fearing that my light disturbed her sleep
 I rose that I might screen it with a cloth.
 I heard her voice, "Turn that I may expound
 What's bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek
 And saw her sitting upright on the bed;
 Or was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?
 I say that a Djinn spoke.  A livelong hour
 She seemed the learned man and I the child;
 Truths without father came, truths that no book
 Of all the uncounted books that I have read,
 Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot,
 Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths,
 Those terrible implacable straight lines
 Drawn through the wandering vegetative dream,
 Even those truths that when my bones are dust
 Must drive the Arabian host.
 The voice grew still,
 And she lay down upon her bed and slept,
 But woke at the first gleam of day, rose up
 And swept the house and sang about her work
 In childish ignorance of all that passed.
 A dozen nights of natural sleep, and then
 When the full moon swam to its greatest height
 She rose, and with her eyes shut fast in sleep
 Walked through the house.  Unnoticed and unfelt
 I wrapped her in a hooded cloak, and she,
 Half running, dropped at the first ridge of the desert
 And there marked out those emblems on the sand
 That day by day I study and marvel at,
 With her white finger.  I led her home asleep
 And once again she rose and swept the house
 In childish ignorance of all that passed.
 Even to-day, after some seven years
 When maybe thrice in every moon her mouth
 Murmured the wisdom of the desert Djinns,
 She keeps that ignorance, nor has she now
 That first unnatural interest in my books.
 It seems enough that I am there; and yet,
 Old fellow-student, whose most patient ear
 Heard all the anxiety of my passionate youth,
 It seems I must buy knowledge with my peace.
 What if she lose her ignorance and so
 Dream that I love her only for the voice,
 That every gift and every word of praise
 Is but a payment for that midnight voice
 That is to age what milk is to a child?
 Were she to lose her love, because she had lost
 Her confidence in mine, or even lose
 Its first simplicity, love, voice and all,
 All my fine feathers would be plucked away
 And I left shivering.  The voice has drawn
 A quality of wisdom from her love's
 Particular quality.  The signs and shapes;
 All those abstractions that you fancied were
 From the great Treatise of parmenides;
 All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things
 Are but a new expression of her body
 Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.
 And now my utmost mystery is out.
 A woman's beauty is a storm-tossed banner;
 Under it wisdom stands, and I alone –
 Of all Arabia's lovers I alone –
 Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost
 In the confusion of its night-dark folds,
 Can hear the armed man speak.