Part 5

Shall evermore dismay, nor lion, nor the lynx, With silken-sheathèd claws, and eyes of golden glede; Nor any griffin, from the gates of treasure freed To roam the gulf, nor any wild and wandering sphinx:—

Even thus, amid the waste of all fair things that were, Of high marmoreal dreams immense and overthrown, I wait forever, and about my face is blown The sand of crumbling cenotaph and sepulcher.

THE REFUGE OF BEAUTY

From regions of the sun’s half-dreamt decay, All day the cruel rain strikes darkly down; And from the night thy fatal stars shall frown— Beauty, wilt thou abide this night and day?

Roofless, at portals dark and desperate, Wilt thou a shelter unrefused implore, And past the tomb’s too-hospitable door, Evade thy lover, in eluding Hate?

* * * * *

Alas, for what have I to offer thee?— Chill halls of mind, dark rooms of memory Where thou shalt dwell with woes and thoughts infirm;

This rumour-throngèd citadel of Sense, Trembling before some nameless Imminence; And fellow-guestship with the glutless Worm.

NIGHTMARE

As though a thousand vampires, from the day Fleeing unseen, oppressed that nightly deep, The straitening and darkened skies of sleep Closed on the dreamland dale in which I lay.

Eternal tensions numbed the wings of Time, While through the unending narrow ways I sought Awakening; up precipitous gloom I thought To reach the dawn, far-pinnacled sublime.

Rejected at the closen gates of light I turned, and down new dreams and shadows fled, Where beetling Shapes of veiled, colossal dread With Gothic wings enormous arched the night.

THE MUMMY

From out the light of many a mightier day, From Pharaonic splendour, Memphian gloom, And from the night aeonian of the tomb They brought him forth, to meet the modern ray,— Upon his brow the unbroken seal of clay, While gods have gone to a forgotten doom, And desolation and the dust assume Temple and cot immingling in decay.

From out the everlasting womb sublime Of cyclopean death, within a land Of tombs and cities rotting in the sun, He is reborn to mock the might of time, While kings have built against Oblivion With walls and columns of the windy sand.

FORGETFULNESS

My life is less than any broken glass.**** My long and weary love, thy lips unwon— All, all is turned to mere oblivion, With the grey flowers and the fallen grass Of yesteryear. And on the winds that pass, Thy music and thy memory are one; For thy wan face, desired above the sun, Only some languid echo saith Alas.***

Love is no more, immemorably flown As any leaf or petal.***But to me, The very fields are still, and strange, and lone: The forest and the garden fail for breath, Where the dumb heavens hold implacably An autumn like the marble sleep of death.

FLAMINGOES

On skies of tropic evening, broad and beryl-green, Above a tranquil sea of molten malachite, With flare of scarlet wings, in long and level flight, The soundless, fleet flamingoes pass to isles unseen.

They pass and disappear, where darkening palms indent The horizon, underneath some high and tawny star— Lost in the sunset gulfs of glowing cinnabar, Where sinks the painted moon, with prows of orpiment.

THE CHIMAERA

O, who will slay the last chimaera, Time? Though Love and Death have many a cunning dart— Despite of these, and close-wrought webs of Art, And Slumber, with a slow Lethean lime—

Still, still, he lives; and though thy feet attain The lunar peaks of ice and crystal, he, Some night of agonized eternity With brazen teeth shall gnaw thy fretted brain.

Gorged with the dust of thrones and fanes destroyed— With lidless eyes like moons of adamant, And vaulted mouth emportalling the void,

He crouches like a passive sphinx before Some temple gate, or, grinning, moves to grant Thine entrance at the monarch’s golden door.

SATAN UNREPENTANT

Lost from those archangelic thrones that star, Fadeless and fixed, heaven’s light of azure bliss; Rejected of His splendour and depressed Beyond the birth of the first sun, and lower Than the last star’s decline, I here endure, Abased, majestic, fallen, beautiful, And unregretful in the doubted dark, Throneless, that greatens chaos-ward, albeit From chanting stars that throng the nave of night Lost echoes wander here, and of his praise, With ringing moons for cymbals dinned afar, And shouted from the flaming mouths of suns.

The shadows of impalpable blank deeps— Deep upon deep accumulate—close down, Around my head concentered, while above, In the lit, loftier blue, star after star Spins endless orbits betwixt me and heaven; And at my feet mysterious Chaos breaks, Abrupt, immeasurable. Round His throne Now throbs the rhythmic resonance of suns, Incessant, perfect, music infinite: I, throneless, hear the discords of the dark, And roar of ruin uncreate, than which Some vast cacophony of dragons, heard In wasted worlds, were purer melody.

The universe His tyranny constrains Turns on: In old and consummated gulfs The stars that wield His judgment wait at hand, And in new deeps Apocalyptic suns Prepare His coming: Lo, His mighty whim To rear and mar, goes forth enormously In nights and constellations! Darkness hears Enragèd suns that bellow down the deep God’s ravenous and insatiable will; And He is strong with change, and rideth forth In whirlwind clothed, with thunders and with doom, To the red stars: God’s throne is reared of change; Its myriad and successive hands support Like music His omnipotence, that fails If mercy or if justice interrupt The sequence of that tyranny, begun Upon injustice, and doomed evermore To stand thereby.

I, who with will not less Than His, but lesser strength, opposed to Him This unsubmissive brow and lifted mind, He holds remote, in nullity and night Doubtful between old Chaos and the deeps Betrayed by Time to vassalage. Methinks All tyrants fear whom they may not destroy, And I, that am of essence one with His, Though less in measure, He may not destroy, And but withstands in gulfs of dark suspense, A secret dread forever: For God knows This quiet will irrevocably set Against His own, and this mine old revolt Yet stubborn, and confirmed eternally. And with the hatred born of fear, and fed Ever thereby, God hates me, and His gaze Sees the bright menace of mine eyes afar, Through midnight, and the innumerable blaze Of servile suns: Lo, strong in tyranny, The despot trembles that I stand opposed! For fain am I to hush the anguished cries Of Substance, broken on the racks of change, Of Matter tortured into life; and God, Knowing this, dreads evermore some huge mishap— That in the vigils of Omnipotence, Once careless, I shall enter heaven, or He, Himself, with weight of some unwonted act, Thoughtless perturb His balanced tyranny, To mine advance of watchful aspiration.

With rumored thunder and enormous groan— (Burden of sound that heavens overborne Let slip from deep to deep, even to this, Where climb the huge cacophonies of Chaos) God’s universe moves on. Confirmed in pride, In patient majesty serene and strong, I wait the dreamt, inevitable hour, Fulfilled of orbits ultimate, when God, Whether through His mischance or mine own deed, Or rise of other and extremer Strength, Shall vanish, and the lightened universe No more remember Him than Silence does An ancient thunder. I know not if these, Mine all-indomitable eyes, shall see A maimed and dwindled Godhead cast among The stars of His creating, and beneath The unnumbered rush of swift and shining feet, Trodden into night; or mark the fiery breath Of His infuriate suns blaze forth upon And scorch that coarsened Essence; or His flame, Drawn through the windy halls of nothingness, A mightier comet, roar and redden down, Portentous unto Chaos. I but wait, In strong majestic patience equable, That hour of consummation and of doom, Of justice, and rebellion justified.

THE ABYSS TRIUMPHANT

The force of suns had waned beyond recall. Chaos was re-established over all, Where lifeless atoms through forgetful deeps Fled unrelated, cold, immusical.

Above the tumult heaven alone endured; Long since the bursting walls of hell had poured Demon and damned to peace erstwhile denied, Within the Abyss God’s might had not immured.

(He could but thwart it with creative mace.***) And now it rose above the heavenly base, Mordant at pillars rotten through and through Of Matter’s last, most firm abiding-place.

Bastion and minaret began to nod, Till all the pile, unmindful of His rod, Dissolved in thunder, and the void Abyss Caught like a quicksand at the feet of God!

THE MOTES

I saw a universe to-day: Through a disclosing bar of light The motes were whirled in gleaming flight That briefly dawned and sank away.

Each had its swift and tiny noon; In orbit-streams I marked them flit, Successively revealed and lit. The sunlight paled and shifted soon.

THE MEDUSA OF DESPAIR

I may not mask forever with the grace Of woven flow’rs thine eyes of staring stone: Ere fatally I front thee, fully known The guarded horror of thy haggard face, Thy visage carven from the heart long dead Of some white, frozen star; ere thou astound My life to thine own likeness, and confound— Depart, and curse more kindred things instead:

Triumphant, through what realms of elder doom Where even the swart vans of Time are stunned, Seek thou some fit, Cimmerian citadel, And mighty cities, desolate, unsunned, Whose walls of horrent and enormous gloom Make sharp the horizon of the light of hell!

LAUS MORTIS

The imperishable phantoms, Love and Fame, Nor Beauty, burning on the mist and mire A fugitive uncapturable fire, Nor God, that is a darkness and a name— Not these, not these my choric dreams acclaim, But Death, the last and ultimate desire, Great Death I praise with litany and lyre, And sombre pray’r implacably the same.

O, incommunicable hope that lies Deep in despair, as tapers that illume Some fearful fane’s arcanic, sacred gloom! O, solace of all weary hearts and wise!— The dream which Satan hath for anodyne, Which is to God a sweet and secret wine.

THE GHOUL AND THE SERAPH

Scene: A cemetery, by moonlight. The Ghoul emerges from the shade of a cypress, and sings.

THE SONG Ho, ho, the Pest is on the wing! Ha, ha, the sweet and crimson foam Upon the lips of churl and king! No worm but hath a feastful home: Ha, ha, the Pest is on the wing!

Ho, ho, his kiss incarnadines The brows of maiden, queen and whore! The nun to him her cheek resigns; Wan lips were never kissed before His ancient kiss incarnadines.

Good cheer to thee, white worm of death! The priest within the brothel dies, The bawd hath sickened from his breath! In grave half-dug the digger lies: Good cheer to thee, white worm of death!

The Seraph appears from among the trees, half-walking, half-flying with wings whose iris the moonlight has rendered faint, and pauses abruptly at sight of the Ghoul.

THE SERAPH What gardener in crudded fields of hell, Or scullion of the Devil’s house, art thou— To whom the filth of Malebolge clings, And reek of horrid refuse? Thou art gnurled And black as any Kobold from the mines Where demons delve for orichalch and steel To forge the racks of Satan! On thy face, Detestable and evil as might haunt The last delirium of a dying hag, Or necromancer’s madness, fall thy locks, Like sodden reeds that trail in Acheron From shores of night and horror! And thy hands, Like roots of cypresses uptorn in storm That still retain their grisly provender, Make the glad wine and manna of the skies Turn to a qualmish sickness in my veins!

THE GHOUL And who art thou?—Some white-faced fool of God, With wings that emulate the giddy bird, And bloodless mouth forever filled with psalms In lieu of honest victuals!*** Askest thou My name? I am the Ghoul Necromalor: In new-made graves I delve for sustenance, As Man within his turnip-fields: I take For table the uprooted slab, that bears The words, “In Pace;” black and curdled blood Of cadavers is all my cupless wine— Slow-drunken, as the dainty vampire drinks From pulses oped in never-ending sleep.

THE SERAPH O! foulness born as of the ninefold curse Of dragon-mouthed Apollyon, plumed with darts, And armed with horns of incandescent bronze! O, dark as Satan’s nightmare, or the fruit Of Belial’s rape on hell’s black hippogriff!*** What knowest THOU of Paradise, where grow The gardens of the manna-laden myrrh, And lotos never known to Ulysses, Whose fruit provides our long and sateless banquet? Where boundless fields, unfurrowed and unsown, Supply for God’s own appanage their foison Of amber-hearted grain, and sesame Sweeter than nard the Persian air compounds With frankincense from isles of India? Where flame-leaved forests infinitely teem With palms of tremulous opal, from whose top Ambrosial honeys fall forevermore In rains of nacred light! Where rise and rise Terrace on hyacinthine terrace, hills Hung with the grapes that drip cerulean wine, One draught whereof dissolves eternity In bliss oblivious and supernal dream!

THE GHOUL To all, the meat their bellies most commend, To all, the according wine: For me, I wot, The cates whereof thou braggest were as wind In halls where men had feasted yesterday, Or furbished bones the full hyena leaves: Tiger and pig have their apportioned glut, Nor lacks the shark his provender; the bird Is nourished with the worm of charnels; man, Or the grey wolf, will slay and eat the bird, Till wolf and man be carrion for the worm. What wouldst thou? As the elfin lily does, Or as the Paphian myrtle, pink with love, I draw me from the unreluctant dead The rightful meat my belly’s law demands.*** Eaters of death are all: Life shall not live, Save that its food be death; No atomy In any star, or heaven’s remotest moon, But hath a billion billion times been made The food of insatiable life, and food Of death insatiate: For all is change— Change, that hath wrought the chancre and the rose, And wrought the star, and wrought the sapphire-stone, And lit great altars, and the eyes of lions— Change, that hath made the very gods from slime Drawn from the pits of Python, and will fling Gods and their builded heavens back again To slime. The fruits of archangelic light Thou braggest of, and grapes of azure wine, Have been the dung of dragons, and the blood Of toads in Phlegethon; each particle That is their splendour, clomb in separate ways, Through suns, and worlds, and cycles infinite— Through burning brume of systems unbegun, Or manes of long-haired comets, that have lashed The night of space to fury and to fire; And in the core of cold and lightless stars, And in immalleable metals deep. Each atomy hath slept, or known the slime Of Cyclopean oceans turned to air Before the suns of Ophinchus rose; And they have known the interstellar night, And they have lain at root of sightless flowr’s In worlds without a sun, or at the heart Of monstrous-eyed and panting flow’rs of flesh, Or aeon-blooming amaranths of stone: And they have ministered within the brains Of sages and magicians, and have served To swell the pulse of kings or conquerors, And have been privy to the hearts of queens.

The Ghoul turns his back on the Seraph, and moves away singing.

THE SONG O condor, keep thy mountain-ways, Above the long Andean lands! Gier-eagle, guard the eastern sands Where the forsaken camel strays! Beetle and worm and I will ward The feastful graves of lout and lord.

O, warm and bright the blood that lies Upon the wounded lion’s trail! Hyena, laugh, and jackal, wail And ring him round, who turns and dies! Beetle and worm and I will ward The feastful graves of lout and lord.

Raven and kestrel, kite and crow, The swart patrol of northern lands, Gather your noisy, bickering bands— The reindeer bleeds upon the snow! Beetle and worm and I will ward The feastful graves of lout and lord.

Arms of a wanton girl are good, Or hands of harp-player and knight! Breasts of the nun be sweet and white, Sweet is the festive friar’s blood! Beetle and worm and I will ward The feastful graves of lout and lord.

AT SUNRISE

The moon declines in lonely gold Among the stars of ashen-grey— Veiling the pallors of decay With clouds and glories, fold on fold.

Within a crystal interlude, Stillness and twilight rest awhile Ere the bright snows, illumined, smile, From peaks where sullen purples brood;

And from the low Favonian bourn, A light wind blows so dulcetly It seems the futile silver sigh Breathed by the lingering moon forlorn.

THE LAND OF EVIL STARS

’Neath blue days, and gold, and green, Blooms the glorious land serene,— Flaming shields of dawns between; And the rapt white flowers suffice To illume With their bright eyes Fluctuant ecstatic gloom ’Twixt the fallen emerald sun, And the unrisen azure one.

But the season of the night Comes in all the suns’ despite; And, ah, gorgeous then their sorrows, At departure into morrows Of far, other lands forgot— Until now remembered not, For the lovelier flow’rs of this, And each lake’s pure lucency; And recalled regretfully, Regretfully, for leaving THIS.

In the star-possessèd night The land knows another light— All the small and evil rays Of the sorcerous orbs ablaze With ecstatical, intense Hate and still malevolence— Dwelling on the fields below From the ascendancy of even, Till the suns, re-entering heaven, Glorify with triple glow The dim flowers smitten low.

Ah, not cold, or kind, as ours, The stars of those remotest hours! Peace and pallor of the flow’rs They have fevered, they have marred, With the poison of their light, With distillèd bale and blight Of a red, accursed regard: All the toil of sunlight hours They undo With their wild eyes— Eldritch and ecstatic eyes, Stooping timeward from the skies, Burning redly in the dew.

THE HARLOT OF THE WORLD

O Life, thou harlot who beguilest all! Beautiful in thy house, the gorgeous world, Abidest thou, where Powers pinion-furled And flying Splendours follow to thy call.

Innumerous like the stars or like the dust, Nations and monarchs were thy thralls of yore: Unto the grave’s old womb forevermore Hast thou betrayed the passion and the lust.

Fair as the moon of summer is thy face, And mystical with cloudiness of hair.*** Only an eye, subornless by delight,

Shall find within thy phosphorescent gaze Those caverns of corruption and despair, Where the Worm toileth in the charnel night.

THE HOPE OF THE INFINITE

My hope is in the unharvestable deep, That shows with eve the treasure of the stars To mournful kings behind their palace-bars, And wanderers outworn, and boys who weep A shattered bauble—or above the sleep Of headsmen, and of men condemned to die, Pours out the moon’s white mercy from on high, Or hides with clement gloom the hours that creep Like death-worms to the grave.*** And I have ta’en From storming seas by sunset glorified, Or from the dawn of ashen wastes and wide, Some light re-gathered from the lamps that wane, And promise of a translunary Spain, Where loves forgone and forfeit dreams abide.

LOVE MALEVOLENT

I fain would love thee, but thy lips are fed With poison-honey, hivèd in a skull; They seem like scarlet poppies, beautiful For delving roots, deep-clenchèd in the dead.

Thine eyes are coloured like the nightshade-flow’r.*** Blent in the opiate perfume of thy breath Are dreams, and purple sleep, and scented death For him that is thy lover for an hour.

Mandragora, within the graveyard grown, Hath given thee its carnal root to eat, And vipers, born and nurstled in a tomb,

From fawning mouths drip venom at thy feet; Yet from thy lethal lips and thine alone, Love would I drink, as dew from poison-bloom.

PALMS

Palms in the sunset of a languid summer land! Sculpture of living green, on dreamy scarlet light Dividing as a wall the twilight from the night! How magically still and luminous they stand,

Inclining fretted leaves above some red lagoon— Careless alike, in mystic and immense repose, Of the flamingo-coloured, flying sun that goes, Or the slow coming of the lion-coloured moon.

MEMNON AT MIDNIGHT

(Dedicated to Albert M. Bender)

Methought upon the tomb-encumbered shore I stood, of Egypt’s lone, monarchal stream, And saw immortal Memnon, throned supreme In gloom as of that Memphian night of yore: Fold upon fold purpureal he wore, Beneath the star-borne canopy extreme— Carven of silence and colossal dream, Where waters flowed like sleep forevermore.

Lo, in the darkness, thick with dust of years, How many a ghostly god around his throne, With thronging winds that were forgotten Fames, Stood, ere the dawn restore to ancient ears The long-withholden thunder of their names, And music stilled to monumental stone.

EIDOLON

Chryselephantine, clear as carven flame, Before my gaze, thy soul’s eidolon stands, As on the threshold of the frozen lands A frozen sun forevermore the same.

All passion that the passive marbles make Imperishable in their shining sleep, Is thine; and all the wan despairs that weep With tears of ice and crystal, cannot break

The heart, which, like a ruby white and rare, In thy deep breast impenetrably gleams.*** More beautiful than any sphynx, and fair

As Aphrodite dead, thine image seems— Guarding forever, in its golden eyes, The treasure of intagliate memories.

THE KINGDOM OF SHADOWS

A crownless king who reigns alone, I live within this ashen land, Where winds rebuild from wandering sand My columns and my crumbled throne.

My sway is on the men that were, And wan sweet women, dear and dead; Beside a marble queen, my bed Is made within the sepulchre.

In gardens desolate to the sun, Faring alone, I sigh to find The dusty closes, dim and blind, Where winter and the spring are one.

My shadowy visage, grey with grief, In sunken waters walled with sand, I see,—where all mine ancient land Lies yellow like an autumn leaf.

My silver lutes of subtle string Are rust,—but on the grievous breeze, I hear what sobbing memories. And muted sorrows murmuring!

Across the broken monuments, Memorial of the dreams of old, The sunset flings a ghostly gold To mock mine ancient affluence.