Sagas of Vaster Britain: Poems of the Race, the Empire and the Divinity of Man

by William Wilfred Campbell

 

PAN THE FALLEN

 
HE wandered into the market
    With pipes and goatish hoof;
He wandered in a grotesque shape,
     And no one stood aloof.
For the children crowded round him,
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    The wives and greybeards too,
To crack their jokes and have their mirth,
    And see what Pan would do.

The Pan he was they knew him,
    Part man but mostly beast,

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Who drank, and lied, and snatched what bones
    Men threw him from their feast;
Who seemed in sin so merry,
    So careless in his woe,
That men despised, scarce pitied him,
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    And still would have it so.

He swelled his pipes and thrilled them,
    And drew the silent tear;
He made the gravest clack with mirth
    By his sardonic leer.

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He blew his pipes full sweetly
    At their amused demands,
And caught the scornful, earth-flung pence
     That fell from careless hands.

He saw the mob’s derision,

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    And took it kindly too,
And when an epithet was flung,
    A coarser back he threw;
But under all the masking
    Of a brute, unseemly part,
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I looked, and saw a wounded soul,
    And a godlike, breaking heart.

And back of the elfin music,
    The burlesque, clownish play,
I knew a wail that the weird pipes made,

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    A look that was far away—
A gaze into some far heaven
    Whence a soul had fallen down;
But the mob only saw the grotesque beast
    And the antics of the clown.
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For scant-flung pence he paid them
    With mirth and elfin play,
Till, tired for a time of his antics queer,
    They passed and went their way;
Then there in the empty market
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    He ate his scanty crust,
And, tired face turned to heaven, down
    He laid him in the dust.

And over his wild, strange features
    A softer light there fell,

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And on his worn, earth-driven heart
    A peace ineffable.
And the moon rose over the market,
    But Pan the beast was dead;
While Pan the god lay silent there,
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    With his strange, distorted head.

And the people, when they found him,
    Stood still with awesome fear:
No more they saw the beast’s rude hoof,
    The furtive, clownish leer.
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But the lightest spirit in that throng
    Went silent from the place,
For they knew the look of a god released
    That shone from his dead face.