# Maryland, my Maryland, and other poems/Isis

ISIS
My friend, the young artist, is clever and kind, With a broad Roman forehead and deep German heart; And though but a tyro, I cannot be blind To his whimsical skill and his exquisite art.
I laugh at his quips, as I lounge in his room, Where we gin the grum world with its duns and its debts, Till spun by philosophy out of the gloom, And Calle Obispo’s divine cigarettes.
Anon we play chess, with the odds of a pawn, On an arabesque baize full of goblins and Circes; You should see how he strangles a masculine yawn As I gasp out my last little spasm of verses.
’Tis the game of my life, this game of the squares, For my Queen of White Chessmen is coy as the stars; When a bishop, like Dunstan, snakes up unawares And soon there is nothing but death—or cigars!
Cotillions of smoke swirl the curtains and walls By a swart old Tertullian, all gnarled and knotty; And then in quadrilles, as it stifles and crawls On a muscular torso by Buonarotti.
Here Leviathan gores through a shock of harpoons— There, Lazarus mumbles his crust on the sod— Afar, in this carnival dance of cartoons, Hypatia glares on the crucified God!
Here, Scanderberg gashes the Ottemite van— There, the dulcimer damsel of Kubla is heard— Hard by, a neat sketch of the crafty old man We have sent to inveigle Napoleon the Third.
There are foils on the arras and shields on the stair, While an arquebuse bosses the lank balustrade; And trailing just over that worm-eaten chair Is a woman’s white dress with its bodice and braid.
The visions of youth are the wizards of thought, No matter how gusty, no matter how good; How many have married the woman they sought— How seldom we marry the woman we should!
I sprang from the couch, till I stood by the side Of my friend, as he gazed at the bodice and dress; “This way,” whispered he, “and I’ll show you a bride Not to wed but to worship—to sing not to bless.”
Dear God! as the picture the painter unsealed, The curtain was shrivelled away to a scroll— I felt that an Isis of Eld was revealed, That Isis I veiled in the crypt of my soul!
Those pure melting eyes float that mystical gauze, Which prophecy weaves on the sight and the hair Of those that peer down the death-vistas and pause O’er the slab and the violets waiting them there.
There’s a fountain of tears by the fountain of mirth, As twilights are thin ’twixt an old and new leaven; And if not a paladin hero of earth She could make me a passionate pilgrim of heaven.
Ah, the glove’s on the mantel, the rose in the glass, The name in the Bible upon the blank page, And the very same rosary fingered at mass Coiled by the canary bird—dead in its cage.
O beautiful child of a beautiful morn! There’s a beautiful bodice begemming thy breast, But it speaks of the cerement, that Seraphs have worn, And it tells of a nightingale slain in its nest.
And I gaze, and I gaze, and I gaze, ’till the moon, With its irised aureola, sleeps on her brow— My Isis! thy image departed too soon, For I gaze and I gaze on thy vacancy now.
O beautiful child of a beautiful day! There’s a beautiful song on thy Sibylline lip; But it sings of the breaker that boils in the bay, And it dirges the doom of a desolate ship.
Lost—lost, long ago! and she dreams o’er the sea, Where the rude Saxon daisies above her have blown; I know that the angels are angry with me, For the woman is dead that my spirit hath known!
New Orleans, 1861.