Pan the Fallen
Pan the Fallen
Original Text
William Wilfred Campbell, The Dread Voyage: Poems (Toronto: William Briggs, 1893), pp. 91-94. B-10 5840 Fisher Library.
2 With pipes and goatish hoof;
3He wandered in a grotesque shape,
4 And no one stood aloof.
5For the children crowded round him,
6 The wives and greybeards, too,
7To crack their jokes and have their mirth,
8 And see what Pan would do.
9The Pan he was they knew him,
10 Part man, but mostly beast,
11Who drank, and lied, and snatched what bones
12 Men threw him from their feast;
13Who seemed in sin so merry,
14 So careless in his woe,
15That men despised, scarce pitied him,
16 And still would have it so.
17He swelled his pipes and thrilled them,
18 And drew the silent tear;
19He made the gravest clack with mirth
20 By his sardonic leer.
21He blew his pipes full sweetly
22 At their amused demands,
23And caught the scornful, earth-flung pence
24 That fell from careless hands.
25He saw the mob's derision,
26 And took it kindly, too,
27And when an epithet was flung,
28 A coarser back he threw;
29But under all the masking
30 Of a brute, unseemly part,
31I looked, and saw a wounded soul,
32 And a god-like, breaking heart.
33And back of the elfin music,
34 The burlesque, clownish play,
35I knew a wail that the weird pipes made,
36 A look that was far away,—
37A gaze into some far heaven
38 Whence a soul had fallen down;
39But the mob only saw the grotesque beast
40 And the antics of the clown.
41For scant-flung pence he paid them
42 With mirth and elfin play,
43Till, tired for a time of his antics queer,
44 They passed and went their way;
45Then there in the empty market
46 He ate his scanty crust,
47And, tired face turned to heaven, down
48 He laid him in the dust.
49And over his wild, strange features
50 A softer light there fell,
51And on his worn, earth-driven heart
52 A peace ineffable.
53And the moon rose over the market,
54 But Pan the beast was dead;
55While Pan the god lay silent there,
56 With his strange, distorted head.
57And the people, when they found him,
58 Stood still with awesome fear.
59No more they saw the beast's rude hoof,
60 The furtive, clownish leer;
61But the lightest in that audience
62 Went silent from the place,
63For they knew the look of a god released
64 That shone from his dead face.
Notes
1] Pan is the Greek pastoral god of the (pan)pipes. Back to Line
Publication Start Year
1890
Publication Notes
Published in Atlantic Monthly.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
RPO 1998.