Part 2

As none shall roam the sad Leucadian rock, Above the sea’s immitigable moan, But in his heart a song that Sappho sang, And flame-like murmur of the muted lyres That time hath not extinguished, and the cry Of nightingales two thousand years ago, Shall mix with those remorseful chords that break To endless foam and thunder; and he learn The unsleeping woe that lives in Mytelene Till wave and deep are dumb with ice, and rime Hath paled the rose forever—even thus, Daughter of Sappho, passion-souled and fair, Whose face the lutes of Lesbos would have sung, And white Errina followed—even thus, The western wave is eloquent of thee, And half the wine-like fragrance of the foam Is attar of thy spirit, and the pines From breasts of mournful, melancholy green, Release remembered echoes of thy song To airs importunate. No wraith of fog, Twice-ghostly with the Hecatean moon, Nor rack of blown, fantasmal spume shall rise, But I will dream thy spirit walks the sea, Unpacified with Lethe. Thou art grown A part of all sad beauty, and my soul Hath found thy buried sorrow in its own, Inseparable forever. Moons that pass, Immaculate, to solemn pyres of snow, And meres whereon the broken lotus dies, Are kin to thee, as wine-lipped autumn is, With suns of swift, irreparable change, And lucid evenings eager-starred. Of thee, The pearlèd fountains tell, and winds that take In one white swirl the petals of the plum, And leave the branches lonely. Royal blooms Of the magnolia, pale as Beauty’s brow, And foam-white myrtles, and the fiery, bright Pome-granate flow’rs, will subtly speak of thee While spring hath speech and meaning. Music hath Her fugitive and uncommanded chords, That thrill with tremors of thy mystery, Or turn the void thy fleeing soul hath left To murmurs inenarrable, that hold Epiphanies of blind, conceiveless vision, And things we dare not know, and dare not dream.

Note: Nora May French, the most gifted poet of her sex that America has produced, died by her own hand at Carmel in 1907. Her ashes were strewn into the sea from Point Lobos.

IN LEMURIA

Rememberest thou? Enormous gongs of stone Were stricken, and the storming trumpeteers Acclaimed my deed to answering tides of spears, And spoke the names of monsters overthrown— Griffins whose angry gold, and fervid store Of sapphires wrenched from marble-plungèd mines— Carnelians, opals, agates, almandines, I brought to thee some scarlet eve of yore.

In the wide fane that shrined thee, Venus-wise, The fallen clamours died.**** I heard the tune Of tiny bells of pearl and melanite, Hung at thy knees, and arms of dreamt delight; And placed my wealth before thy fabled eyes, Pallid and pure as jaspers from the moon.

RECOMPENSE

Ah, more to me than many days and many dreams And more than every hope, or any memory, This moment, when thy lips are laid immortally On mine, and death and time are shadows of old dreams.

Now all the crownless, ruined years have recompense: In one supreme, undying hour of light and fire, The many moons and suns have found their one desire— When in the hour of love, all life has recompense.

EXOTIQUE

Thy mouth is like a crimson orchid-flow’r, Whence perfume and whence poison rise unseen To moons aswim in iris or in green, Or mix with morning in an eastern bow’r.

Thou shouldst have known, in amaranthine isles, The sunsets hued like fire of frankincense, Or the long noons enfraught with redolence, The mingled spicery of purple miles.

Thy breasts, where blood and molten marble flow, Thy warm white limbs, thy loins of tropic snow— These, these, by which desire is grown divine,

Were made for dreams in mystic palaces, For love, and sleep, and slow voluptuousness, And summer seas a-foam like foaming wine.

TRANSCENDENCE

To look on love with disenamoured eyes; To see with gaze relentless, rendered clear Of hope or hatred, of desire and fear, The insuperable nullity that lies Behind the veils of various disguise Which life or death may haply weave; to hear Forevermore in flute and harp the mere And all-resolving silence; recognize The gules of autumn in the greening leaf, And in the poppy-pod the poppy-flow’r— This is to be the lord of love and grief, O’er Time’s illusion and thyself supreme, As, half-aroused in some nocturnal hour, The dreamer knows and dominates his dream.

SATIETY

Dear you were as is the tree of Being To the happy dead in heaven’s bow’rs.**** Whence and what, this evil spell that flings me Forth from love with loveless eyes unseeing?

Fair you were as nymph or queen of vision— Bosomed like the succubi of dreams.**** All your beauty turns to sad, ironic Weariness, and sorrowful derision.

Lo, of what avail our spent caresses,— Kisses that set the summer night aflame?**** Mute, enormous languor without cause— What is this my autumn heart confesses?

All your breast was fragrant like the flowers Of the grape on hills toward the south.**** Love is acrid now like staling asters, Sodden with the rain of autumn hours.

THE MINISTERS OF LAW

The glories and the perils of thy day Are one, O Man! Thou goest to thine end With Pow’rs, and for a little thou dost wend With marshalled Majesties upon their way: But thee the dread Necessities betray That nurse, and fearful Splendours that befriend; And thee shall alien Dominations rend.**** Deemest the triumph of the worlds to stay, Or step by step eternal, unsurpassed, Stride with the suns upon their road of awe? Thou travelest brief ways that end and sink— Urged by the hurrying planets; and the vast, Prone-rushing constellations of the Law, Thunder and press behind thee at the brink.

COLDNESS

Thy heart will not believe in love: Therefore is love become to me A dream, an empty mockery, And death and life are less than love.

O, bright and beautiful as flame Thy hair, and pale thy lips, and eyes Like seas wherein the waning skies Of autumn lie in paler flame.

Forevermore thy heart abides, A dreaming crystal, pure and cold, Amid whose visions manifold No shape nor any shade abides.

Thy days are void and vain as death: The moons and morrows weave for thee A sleep of light eternally, Where life is as a dream of death.

Chill as white jewels, or the moon, And virginal as ice or fire, Thou knowest life and life’s desire As a bright mirror knows the moon.

Lo, if thy heart believed in love, It were not more nor less to me: I know THY love a mockery, And all my dreams less vain than love.

THE DESERT GARDEN

Dreaming, I said, “When she is come, This desert garden that is me, For her shall offer mellowly Its myrrh and its olibanum— When she is come.

“The flowers of the moon for her, With blossoms of the sun shall bloom, The fading roses breathe perfume, The lightly fallen petals stir, And sigh to her.

“Her presence, like a living wind Each little leaf makes visible, Shall enter there, or like the spell (Upon the lulling leaves divined) Of silent wind.”

* * * * *

Alas! for she is come and gone, And in the garden, green for her, The flowers fall, the flowers stir Only to winds of night and dawn: For she is gone.

THE CRUCIFIXION OF EROS

Because of thee, immortal Love hath died: Because thy wilful heart will not believe, Thy hands and mine a thorny crown must weave, A thorny crown for Love the crucified.

Behold, how beautiful the limbs that bleed— The limbs that bleed, O stubborn heart, for us! Still are the lids so softly tremulous, And mute the mouth of our eternal need.

* * * * *

Though this thy fearful lips would now deny, Love is divine, and cannot wholly die: Draw forth the nails thy tender hands have driven—

And we will know the mercy infinite, Will find redemption in our own delight, And in each other’s heart the only heaven.

THE EXILE

Against my heart your heart is closed; you bid me go: What ways are left in all the world for Love to know? Desolate oceans, and the light of lonely plains, Dead moons that wander in the wastes of ice and snow—

These, these I fain would see, and find the splendid bourne Of sunset, or the brazen deserts of the morn, That I might lose this ever-aching loneliness In vaster solitude; and love be less forlorn,

Faring to seek with alien sun and alien star The strange, the veiled horizons infinite and far; Spaces of fire and night, the skies of steel and gold, Or sunset-haunted seas where foamless islands are.

AVE ATQUE VALE

Black dreams; the pale and sorrowful desire Whose eyes have looked on Lethe, and have seen, Deep in the sliding ebon tide serene, Their own vain light inverted; ashen fire, With wasted lilies, late and languishing; Autumnal roses blind with rain; slow foam From desert-sinking seas, with honeycomb Of aconite and poppy—these I bring With this my bitter, barren love to thee; And from the grievous springs of memory, Far in the great Maremma of my heart, I proffer thee to drink; and on thy mouth, With the one kiss wherein we meet and part, Leave fire and dust from quenchless leagues of drouth.

SOLUTION

The ghostly fire that walks the fen, Tonight thine only light shall be; On lethal ways thy soul shall pass, And prove the stealthy, coiled morass, With mocking mists for company.

On roads thou goest not again, To shores where thou hast never gone,— Fare onward, though the shuddering queach And serpent-rippled waters reach Like seepage-pools of Acheron,

Beside thee; and the twisten reeds, Close-raddled as a witch’s net, Enwind thy knees, and cling and clutch Like wreathing adders; though the touch Of the blind air be dank and wet,

As from a wounded Thing that bleeds In cloud and darkness overhead— Fare onward, where thy dreams of yore In splendour drape the fetid shore And pestilential waters dead.

And though the toads’ irrision rise, As grinding of Satanic racks, And spectral willows, gaunt and grey, Gibber along thy shrouded way, Where vipers lie with livid backs,

And watch thee with their sulphurous eyes,— Fare onward, till thy feet shall slip Deep in the sudden pool ordained, And all the noisome draught be drained, That turns to Lethe on the lip.

THE TEARS OF LILITH

O lovely demon, half-divine! Hemlock, and hydromel, and gall, Honey, and aconite, and wine, Mingle to make that mouth of thine—

Thy mouth I love: But most of all, It is thy tears that I desire— Thy tears, like fountain-drops that fall In gardens red, Satanical;

Or like the tears of mist and fire, Wept by the moon, that wizards use To secret runes, when they require Some silver philtre, sweet and dire.

A PRECEPT

With words of ivory, Of bronze, of ebony, Of alabaster, marble, steel, and gold, The beauty of the visible is told.

But how with these express The unseen Loveliness— Splendour and light, and harmony, and sound, The heart hath felt, the sense hath never found?

No shining words of stone— Shadow and cloud alone— These shall the poet seek eternally, Whose lines would carve the mask of Mystery.

REMEMBERED LIGHT

The years are a falling of snow, Slow, but without cessation, On hills, and mountains, and flowers and worlds that were; But snow, and the crawling night wherein it fell, May be washed away in one swifter hour of flame: Thus it was that some slant of sunset In the chasms of pilèd cloud— Transient mountains that made a new horizon, Uplifting the west to fantastic pinnacles— Smote warm in a buried realm of the spirit, Till the snows of forgetfulness were gone. Clear in the vistas of memory, The peaks of a world long unremembered, Soared further than clouds but fell not, Based on hills that shook not nor melted With that burden enormous, hardly to be believed.

Rent with stupendous chasms, Full of an umber twilight, I beheld that larger world; Bright was the twilight, sharp like ethereal wine Above, but low in the clefts it thickened, Dull as with duskier tincture. Like whimsical wings outspread but unstirring, Flowers that seemed spirits of the twilight That must pass with its passing— Too fragile for day or for darkness, Fed the dusk with more delicate hues than its own; Stars that were nearer, more radiant than ours, Quivered and pulsed in the clear thin gold of the sky.

These things I beheld Till the gold was shaken with flight Of fantastical wings like broken shadows, Forerunning the darkness; Till the twilight shivered with outcry of eldritch voices Like pain’s last cry ere oblivion.

SONG

I bring my weariness to thee, My bitter dreams I bring; Love with a wounded wing, And life consumed of memory, I bring to thee.

The haven of thy happy breast— Of this my dreams are fain: For all my weary pain, In all the world there is no rest, But on thy breast.

HAUNTING

There is no peace amid the moonlight and the pines; Deep in the windless gloom the lamplike thought of you Abides; and ah, what burning memories pursue My heart among the pallid marbles!*** Night assigns

Your silver face for wardress of the doors of Sleep; Beyond the wild, last bourn of dreamland, lo, your eyes Are on the lonesome, ultimate, undiscovered skies; Moonlike and dim, you wander ever in the deep

Which is the secret, innermost, unknown abyss Of my own soul, and in its night your spirit lives.**** Shall I not find the very draught that Lethe gives, Sweet with your tears, and warm with savour of your kiss?

THE HIDDEN PARADISE

Our passion is a secret Paradise— Eden of lotos and the fruitful date, With silence walled and held undesecrate By man or prying seraph: We are wise

As any god and goddess, who have wrung From roseal fruitage of a bough forbidden, The happy wine we drink, we drink unchidden, Deep in the vales where vernal leaves are young,

And the first poppies loiter.**** Though the breath Of all the gods a bolted storm prepare, And blood-red gloom of thunders blind the sun,

Shall we not turn, with clinging kisses there, And, laughing, quaff some dreamless wine of death— Triumphant still, in mere oblivion?

CLEOPATRA

Thy beauty is the warmth and languor and passion of a tropic autumn, Caressing all the senses,— With light from skies of heavy azure, With perfume from hidden orchids many-hued That burn in the berylline dusk of palms; With the balmy kiss of tropic wind and wave, And the songs of exotic birds that pass In vermilion-flashing flight from isle to isle on a cobalt sea.*** O, sweetness in the inmost sense, As of golden fruits that have grown by the waters of Lethe, Or fragrance of purple lilies, crushed by the limbs of lovers, In the shadow of a wood of cypress!*** Thou pervadest me with thy love, As the dawn pervadeth a valley among mountains, Or as opaline sunset filleth the amaranth-coloured sea; The desire of thy heart is upon me, As a myrtle-scented wind from the isle of Cythera, Where Aphrodite waits for Adonis, Lying naked among the flag lilies by a pool of chrysolite; I inhale thy love As the breath of hidden gardens of purple and scarlet, Where Circe wanders, Clad in a trailing gown whose colours are the gold of flame, And the azure of the skies of autumn.

ECSTASY

Blind with your softly fallen hair, I turn me from the twilight air; And, ah, the wordless tale of love My lips upon your lips declare!

High stars are on the shadowy south— Unseen, unknown: The urgent drouth Of desert years in one deep kiss, Would drain the sweetness of your mouth.

Our straining arms that clasp and close, Ache with an ecstasy that grows; And passion in our secret veins, Like burning amber, glows and glows.

This love is sweet to have and hold, Better than sandalwood or gold, After the barren, bitter loves, The mad and mournful loves of old.

This love is fortunate and fair, Behind its veil of fallen hair; This love hath soft and clinging arms, And a kind bosom, warm and bare.

UNION

As the fumes of myrrh that mix with the odour of sandalwood In a temple sacred to the goddess Lakme; As moonlight mingled with starlight In the lucent azure of an autumn lake; As the sunset-rays of gold and crimson That interlace on a couch of purple cloud— Even so, Beloved, Hath my love mingled with thine— Even so, our souls are one, Like two winds that meet in a valley of rose and lotus, And fall to rest, uniting As the still and fragrant air that lingers On a bed of falling petals.

PSALM

My beloved is a well of clear waters, To which I have come at noontide, From the land of the Abomination of Desolation, From the lion-dreaded waste, Where nothing dwelleth but the inconsolable crying of an evil wind, And the wandering realms and cities of the wide mirage; Where no one passeth except the sun, Who walked like a terrible god through the hell of the brazen skies; And the dreadful cohorts of the constellations, Who pass remote in alien years, And clad with icy azures of unattainable distance.

My beloved is a singing fountain, Set in a wide oasis, Between the frondage of the fruitful palm, And the branches of the flowering myrtle: The wind that bloweth thereon, Hath lain in a vale of cassia and myrrh, And caressed the vermilion blossoms of the pomegranate, Whose red is the red of the lips of Astarte; A thousand nightingales are gathered there, From all the gardens of lost romance; And plots of purple and silver lillies, More beautiful than the meadows of mirage, Revive the flowers of Sabean queens, And the blossoms worn by all the princesses of legend.*** Ah, suffer me to dwell Thereby, and forget the gilded cities of desire, The domes of spectral gold, That fled from horizon to horizon Before me, and left my feet in the sinking vales and shifting plains of the desert, Whose waters are green with corruption, And bitter with the dust and ashes of death. Ah, suffer me to sleep In the balsam-laden shadows of the palm and myrtle, By the ever-springing fountain!

IN NOVEMBER

With autumn and the flaring leaves our love must end— Ere flauntful spring shall mock thy tears and my despair With blossoms red or pale, some April bride may wear: Now, while the weary, grey, forgetful heavens bend

Above the grief and languor of the dying lands, In one last kiss shall meet and mingle and expire The muted, last, remembering sighs of our desire; And on my face the flower-like burden of thy hands

Shall rest a little, and be taken tenderly, And, ah, how lightly hence! And in thy golden eyes, Thy love, and all the ashen glory of the skies, Shall mingle, and as in a mirror lie for me.

SYMBOLS

No more of gold and marble, nor of snow, And sunlight, and vermilion, would I make My vision and my symbols, nor would take The auroral flame of some prismatic floe, Nor iris of the frail and lunar bow, Flung on the shafted waterfalls that wake The night’s blue slumber in a shadowy lake.*** To body forth my fantasies, and show Communicable mystery, I would find, In adamantine darkness of the earth, Metals untouched of any sun; and bring Black azures of the nether sea to birth— Or fetch the secret, splendid leaves, and blind, Blue lilies of an Atlantean spring.

THE HASHISH-EATER; or, THE APOCALYPSE OF EVIL

Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams; I crown me with the million-coloured sun Of secret worlds incredible, and take Their trailing skies for vestment, when I soar, Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume The spaceward-flown horizons infinite. Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut, The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise, By jealous moons maleficently urged To follow me forever; mountains horned With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued, Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain; And continents of serpent-shapen trees, With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league, Pursue my flight through ages spurned to fire By that supreme ascendance. Sorcerers And evil kings predominantly armed With scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin, whereon Are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame, Would stay me; and the sirens of the stars, With foam-light songs from silver fragrance wrought, Would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons Where viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell, With antic gnomes abominably wise, Heave up their icy horns across my way: But naught deters me from the goal ordained By suns, and aeons, and immortal wars, And sung by moons and motes; the goal whose name Is all the secret of forgotten glyphs, By sinful gods in torrid rubies writ For ending of a brazen book; the goal Whereat my soaring ecstacy may stand, In amplest heavens multiplied to hold My hordes of thunder-vested avatars, And Promethèan armies of my thought, That brandish claspèd levins. There I call My memories, intolerably clad In light the peaks of paradise may wear, And lead the Armageddon of my dreams, Whose instant shout of triumph is become Immensity’s own music: For their feet Are founded on innumerable worlds, Remote in alien epochs, and their arms Upraised, are columns potent to exalt With ease ineffable the countless thrones Of all the gods that are and gods to be, Or bear the seats of Asmadai and Set Above the seventh paradise.