The Road to the Spring: Collected Poems of Mary Austin

Not to You Only, O Pythian

310 Not to You Only, O Pythian Not to you only, O Pythian, Out of rock crevices, Out of earth’s sacred middle Where the ancient spore of the Sun Still works in her, Comes madness. Here, out of Arroyos Hondos, Between the prevailing Stiff stems of the junipers, Dream shaping vapors set back the moonlight, Here from the wine red rift of the rim-rock, Weighting the eyelids, Out of the Grand Canyon’s motionless unreality, Visions prophetic. Not to you only, the wish-colored Word Hieratic, Not solely at Delos, O Pythian, But here at the desert’s fire new edges, Inebriate of the earth, to the Sun corybantic, The god with my voice declaring What I discern not. Editor’s Notes Nation, December 8, 1926, 601. Pythian refers to the oracle at Delphi and to the temple of Apollo there. Delos is the island traditionally thought of as the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. Arroyos Hondos refers to the Arroyo Hondo Pueblo, at over a thousand inhabitants one of the single largest pueblos in the fourteenth century, located just southeast of Santa Fe, New 311 Mexico. The term may also suggest a landscape of “deep gullies” as inspiring as that of ancient Greece. ...