Part 6

About the tombs of stone and brass The silver lights of evening flee; And slowly now, and solemnly, I see the pomp of shadows pass. Often, beneath some fervid moon, With splendid spells I vainly strive Dead loves imperial to revive, And speak a heart-remembered rune:—

But, ah, the lovely phantoms fail, The faces fade to mist and light, The vermeil lips of my delight Are dim, the eyes are ashen-pale.

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

REQUIESCAT IN PACE

White iris on thy bier, With the white rose, we strew, And lotus pale or blue As moonlight on the orient mountain-snows.

Slumber, as they that sleep In the slow sands unknown, Or under seas that zone With lulling foam the sealed, extremer lands.

Slumber, with songless birds That sang, and sang to death, Giving their gladder breath To lonely winds in one melodious pang.

Sleep, with the golden queens Of planets long forgot, Whose fire-soft lips are not Recalled by any sorcery of song.

Sleep, with the flowers that were, And any leaf that fell On field or flowerless dell In autumns lost of memory and grief.

Pass, with the music flown From ivory lyre, and lute Of mellow string left mute In cities desolate ere the dream of Tyre.

Pass, with the clouds that sank In sunset turned to grey On some Edenic day For which the exiled years have ever yearned.

White iris on thy bier, With the white rose, we strew, And lotus pale or blue As moonlight on the orient mountain-snows.

ALEXANDRINES

Knowing the weariness of dreams, and days, and nights, The great and grievous vanity of joy and pain; Frail loves that pass, where languors infinite remain; Fervours, and long despairs, and desperate, brief delights;

Knowing how in the witless brains of them that were, The drowsy, wiving worm hath prospered and hath died; Knowing that, evermore, by moon and sun abide The standing glooms made stagnant in the sepulchre;

Knowing the vacillant leaves that tremble, flame, and fall, The sweetly wasting rose, the dawns and stars that wane— Knowing these things, the desolate heart and soul are fain Of the one perfect sleep which filleth, foldeth all.

ASHES OF SUNSET

Who fares to find the sunset ere it fly, Turning to light and fire the further west, Shall have the veils of twilight for his quest, And all the falling of an ashen sky.

On lands he shall not know, the splendour lies— A pharos on some alienated shore, In foam and purple lost forevermore, Where dreams are kindled in remoter eyes.

NOVEMBER TWILIGHT

November’s winy sunset leaves, Deep in the silver heavens far, One ruby-hearted star That lit the summer’s moon-forsaken eves.

Under its ray, remote, alone, Ascends upon the ashen gloom The ghostly, faint perfume From autumn’s grey, forgotten roses flown.

SEPULTURE

Deep in my heart, as in the hollow stone And silence of some olden sepulchre, Thy silver beauty lies, and shall not stir— Forgotten, incorruptible, alone: Though altars darken, and a wind be blown From starless seas on beacon-fires that were— Within thy tomb, with oils of balm and myrrh, Forever burn the onyx lamps unknown.

And though the bleak, Novembral gardens yield Rose-dust and ivy-leaf, nor any flow’r Be found through vermeil forest or wan field— Still, still the asphodel and lotos lie Around thy bed, and hour by silent hour, Exhale immortal fragrance like a sigh.

QUEST

All beneath a wintering sky Follow the wastrel butterfly; With vermilion leaf or bronze— Tatters of gorgeous gonfalons— With the winds that always hold Echo of clarions lost and old,— We must hasten, hasten on Tow’rd the azure world withdrawn, We must wander, wander so Where the ruining roses go; Where the poplar’s pallid leaves Drift among the gathered sheaves In that harvest none shall glean; Where the twisted willows lean In their strange, tormented woe, Seeing, on the streamlet’s flow Half their fragile leaves depart; Where the secret pines at heart, High, funereal, vespertine, Guard eternal sorrows green:— We shall follow, we shall find, Haply, ere the light is blind, The moulded place where Beauty lay, Moon-beheld until the day, In the woven windlestrae; Or the pool of tourmaline, Rimmed with golden reeds, that was In the dawn a tiring-glass For her undelaying mien.

Ever wander, wander so, Where the ruining roses go; All beneath a wintering sky, Follow the wastrel butterfly.

BEAUTY IMPLACABLE

White Beauty, bending from a throne sublime, Hath claimed my lips with kisses keen as snow: Now through my harp the tremors come and go Of things not stirred with urgencies of Time. Now from the lunar mountains, old and lone, In dream I watch the neighboring world remote; Or on the dim Uranian waters float After a star-like sun from zone to zone.

Lo! in her praise, the stern, the fearful one, Whose love is as the light of snows afar, Whose ways are difficult, what word shall be? I, desolate with Beauty, and undone, Say Death is not so strong to change or mar, And Love and Life not so desired as she.

A VISION OF LUCIFER

I saw a shape with human form and face, If such in apotheosis might stand: Deep in the shadows of a desolate land His burning feet obtained colossal base, And spheral on the lonely arc of space, His head, a menace unto heavens unspanned, Arose with towered eyes that might command The sunless, blank horizon of that place

And straight I knew him for the mystic one That is the brother, born of human dream, Of man rebellious at an unknown rod; The mind’s ideal, and the spirit’s sun; A column of clear flame in lands extreme, Set opposite the darkness that is God.

DESIRE OF VASTNESS

Supreme with night, what high mysteriarch— The undreamt-of god beyond the trinal noon Of elder suns empyreal—past the moon Circling some wild world outmost in the dark— Lays on me this unfathomed wish to hark What central sea with plume-plucked midnight strewn, Plangent to what enormous plenilune That lifts in silence, hinderless and stark?

The brazen comprehension of the waste, The waste inclusion of the brazen sky— These I desire, and all things wide and deep; And, lifted past the level years, would taste The cup of an Olympian ecstasy, Titanic dream, and Cyclopean sleep.

ANTICIPATION

The thought of death to me Is like a well of waters, deep and dim— Cool-gleaming, hushed, and hidden gratefully Among the palms asleep At silver evening on the desert’s rim.

Or as a couch of stone, Whereon by moonlight, in a marble room, Some fevered king reposes all alone— So is the hope of sleep, The inalienable surety of the tomb.

A PSALM TO THE BEST BELOVED

Thou comfortest me with the manna of thy love, And the kisses of thy mouth are wine and sustenance; Thy lips are grateful as fruit In lonely orchards by the wayside of a ruinous land; They are sweet as the purple grapes On parching hills that confront the autumnal desert, Or apples that the mad simoon hath spared In a garden with walls of syenite. Thy loosened hair is a veil For the weariness of mine eyes and eyelids, Which have known the redoubled sun In a desert valley with slopes of the dust of white marble, And have gazed on the mounded salt In the marshes of a lake of dead waters. Thy body is a secret Eden Fed with lethean springs, And the touch of thy flesh is like to the savour of lotos. In thy hair is a perfume of ecstasy, And a perfume of sleep, Between thy thighs is a valley of delight, And between thy breasts is a valley of peace.

THE WITCH IN THE GRAVEYARD

Scene: A forsaken graveyard, by moonlight. Enter two witches.

FIRST WITCH: Sit, sister, now that haggish Hecate Appropriate and ghastly favour sheds, And with wild light forwards our enterprise; And watch the weighted eyelids of each grave As never mother watched her babe, to mark, At zenith of the necromantic moon The stir of that disquiet, when the dead, From suckling nightmares of the charnel dark Or long insomnia on a mouldy couch, Impelled like wan somnambulists, arise— Constrained to emerge and walk, or seated each On his own tombstone, shrouded council hold, Or commerce with the sooty wings of Hell. All omens of this influential hour When all dark powers, thronging to the dark, Promote enchantry with their wavèd wings, And brim the wind with potency malign— A dew of dread to aid our cauldron—these Observe thou closely, while I seek afield All requisite swart herbs of venefice, And evil roots unto our usance ripe.

(The first witch departs, leaving the other among the tombs, and returns after a time, in the course of her search.)

FIRST WITCH: Sister, what seest or what hearest thou?

SECOND WITCH: I see The moonlight, and the slowly moving gleam That westers hour by hour on tomb and stone; And shrivelled lilies, tossed i’ the winter’s breath, With their attenuate shadows, as might dance Phantom with flaffing phantom; at my side, The white and shuddering grasses of the grave, With nettles, and the parching fumitory, Whose leaves, root-trellised on the bones of death, Will rasp and bristle to the lightest wind.

(The first witch moves on, and approaches again, after a long interval.)

FIRST WITCH: Sister, what seest or what hearest thou?

SECOND WITCH: I see The mound-stretched gossamers, cradles to the dew; Moon-wefted briers, and the cypress-trees With shadow swathed, or cerements of the moon; And corpse-lights borne from aisle to secret aisle Within the footless forest.*** Now I hear The lich-owl, shrieking lethal prophecy; And whimpering winds, the children of the air, Lost in the glades of mystery and gloom.

(The first witch disappears and passes again shortly.)

FIRST WITCH: Sister, what seest or what hearest thou?

SECOND WITCH: I see The ghost-white owl, with huge sulphureous eyes, That veers in prone, unwhispered flight, and hear The small shriek of the moon-adventuring mole, Gripped in mid-graveyard.*** And I see Where some wild shadow shakes, though the pale wind Of moonlight stirs far off***and hear Curst mandragores that gibber to the moon, Though no man treads anigh.***

(After an interval)

Some predal hand doth halt the wandering air; Now dies the throttled wind with rattling breath, And round about a breathing Silence prowls.

(After another interval)

I hear the cheeping of the bat-lipped ghouls, Aroused beneath the vaulted cypresses Far-off; and lipless muttering of tombs, With clash of bones bestirred in ancient charnels Beneath their shroud of unclean light that crawls.*** Earth shudders, and rank odours ’gin to rise From tombs a-crack; and shaken out all at once From mid-air, and directly neath the moon, Meseems what hanging wing divides the light, Like a black film of gloom, or thickest shadow; But on the tombs there is no shadow!

FIRST WITCH: Enough! ’Twill be a prosperous night, methinks, For commerce of the demons with the dead; And for us, too, when every omen’s good, And fraught with, promise of a potent brew.

POEMS IN PROSE

THE TRAVELLER

(Dedicated to V. H.)

“Stranger, where goest thou, in the sad raiment of a pilgrim, with shattered sandals retaining the dust and mire of so many devious ways! With thy brow that alien suns have darkened, and thy hair made white from the cold rime of alien moons? Wanderest thou in search of the cities greater than Rome, with walls of opal and crystal, and fanes more white than the summer clouds, or the foam of hyperboreal seas? Or farest thou to the lands unpeopled and unexplored, to the sunless deserts lit by the baleful and calamitous beacons of volcanoes? Or seekest thou an extremer shore, where the red and monstrous lilies are like a royal pageant, pausing with innumerable flambeaux held aloft on the verge of the waveless waters?”

“Nay, it is none of these that I seek, but forevermore I seek the city and the land of my former home: In the quest thereof I have wandered from the first immemorable years of my youth till now, and have mingled the dust of many realms, of many highways, in my garments’ hem. I have seen the cities greater than Rome, and the fanes more white than the clouds of summer; the lands unpeopled and unexplored, and the land that is thronged by the red and monstrous lilies. Even the far, aerial walls of the cities of mirage, and the saffron meadows of sunset I have seen, but nevermore the city and land of my former home.”

“Where lieth the land of thine home? and by what name shall we know it, and distinguish the rumour thereof, among the rumours of many lands?”

“Alas! I know not where it lieth; nor in the broad, black scrolls of geographers, and the charts of old seamen who have sailed to the marge of the seventh sea, is the place thereof recorded. And its name I have never learned, howbeit I have learned the name of empires lying beneath stars to us invisible. In many languages have I spoken, in barbarous tongues unknown to Babel; and I have heard the speech of many men, even of them that inhabit the strange isles of the sea of fire and the sea of snow. Thunder, and lutes, and battle-drums, the fine unceasing querulousness of gnats, and the stupendous moaning of the simoon; lyres of ebony, damascened with crystal, bells of malachite with golden clappers; the song of exotic birds that sigh like women or sob like fountains; whispers and shoutings of fire, the multitudinous mutter of cities asleep, the manifold tumult of cities at dawn, and the slow and weary murmur of desert-wandering streams—all, all have I heard, but never, in any place, from any tongue, a sound or syllable that resembled in the least the name I would learn.”

THE FLOWER-DEVIL

In a basin of porphyry, at the summit of a pillar of serpentine, the thing has existed from primeval time, in the garden of the kings that rule an equatorial realm of the planet Saturn. With black foliage, fine and intricate as the web of some enormous spider; with petals of livid rose, and purple like the purple of putrefying flesh; and a stem rising like a swart and hairy wrist from a bulb so old, so encrusted with the growth of centuries that it resembles an urn of stone, the monstrous flower holds dominion over all the garden. In this flower, from the years of the oldest legend, an evil demon has dwelt—a demon whose name and whose nativity are known to the superior magicians and mysteriarchs of the kingdom, but to none other. Over the half-animate flowers, the ophidian orchids that coil and sting, the bat-like lilies that open their ribbèd petals by night, and fasten with tiny yellow teeth on the bodies of sleeping dragonflies; the carnivorous cacti that yawn with green lips beneath their beards of poisonous yellow prickles; the plants that palpitate like hearts, the blossoms that pant with a breath of venomous perfume—over all these, the Flower-Devil is supreme, in its malign immortality, and evil, perverse intelligence—inciting them to strange maleficence, fantastic mischief, even to acts of rebellion against the gardeners, who proceed about their duties with wariness and trepidation, since more than one of them has been bitten, even unto death, by some vicious and venefic flower. In places, the garden has run wild from lack of care on the part of the fearful gardeners, and has become a monstrous tangle of serpentine creepers, and hydra-headed plants, convolved and inter-writhing in lethal hate or venomous love, and horrible as a rout of wrangling vipers and pythons.

And, like his innumerable ancestors before him, the king dares not destroy the Flower, for fear that the devil, driven from its habitation, might seek a new home, and enter into the brain or body of one of the king’s subjects—or even the heart of his fairest and gentlest, and most beloved queen!

IMAGES

TEARS

Thy tears are not as mine: Thou weepest as a green fountain among palms and roses, with lightly falling drops that bedew the flowery turf. My tears are like a rain of marah in the desert, leaving a bitter pool whose waters are fire and poison.

THE SECRET ROSE

My soul hath dreamt of a rose, whose marvellous and secret flower, fraught with an unimaginable perfume, hath never grown in any garden. Only in valleys of the shifting cloud, only among the palms and fountains of a land of mirage, only in isles beyond the seas of sunset, it blooms for a moment, and is gone. But ever the ghost of its fragrance haunts the hall of slumber; and the women whom I meet in dreams wear always its blossom for coronal.

THE WIND AND THE GARDEN

To thee my love is something strange and fantastical, and far away, like the vast and desolate sighing of the desert wind to one who dwells in a garden of palm and rose and lotus, filled by no louder sound than the mellow lisp of a breeze of perfume, or the sigh of silvering fountains.

OFFERINGS

Before thee, O goddess of my dreams, idol of my desires, I have burnt amber and myrrh, frankincense, and all the strange and rich perfumes of lands a thousand leagues beyond Araby or Taprobane. Strange and rich offerings have I brought thee, the gems of unknown regions, and the spoil of cities remoter than Caydon or Samarkand. But these delight thee not, only the simple-scented flowers of spring, and the diamonds and opals of dew, strung on the threads of the spider.

A CORONAL

The pale and flowerless poppies of Proserpine, the cold, blind lotus of Lethe, and the strange, white sea-blooms that grow from the lips of drowned men in the blue darkness of the nether sea,—these have I woven as a coronal for my dead love.

THE BLACK LAKE

In a land where weirdness and mystery had strongly leagued themselves with eternal desolation, the lake was out-poured at an undiscoverable date of elder aeons, to fill some fathomless gulf far down amid the shadows of snowless, volcanic mountains. No eye, not even the sun’s, when he stared vertically upon it for a few hours at midday, seemed able to divine its depths of sullen blackness and unrippled silence. It was for this reason that I found a so singular pleasure in frequently contemplating the strange lake. Sitting for I knew not how long on its bleak basaltic shores, where grew but a few fleshly red orchids, bent above the waters like open and thirsty mouths, I would peer with countless fantastic conjectures and shadowy imaginings, into the alluring mystery of its unknown and inexplorable gulf.

It was at an hour of morning before the sun had surmounted the rough and broken rim of the summits, when I first came, and clomb down through the shadows which filled like some subtler fluid the volcanic basin. Seen at the bottom of that stirless tincture of air and twilight, the lake seemed as dregs of darkness.

Peering for the first time, after the deep and difficult descent, into the so dull and leaden waters, I was at length aware of certain small and scattered gleams of silver, apparently far beneath the surface. And fancying them the metal in some mysterious ledge, or the glints of long-sunken treasure, I bent closer in my eagerness, and finally perceived that what I saw was but the reflection of the stars, which, tho the day was full upon the mountains and the lands without, were yet visible in the depth and darkness of that enshadowed place.

VIGNETTES

BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS

Surely, beyond the mountains there is peace—beyond the mountains that lie so blue and still at the world’s extreme. Such ancient calm, such infinite quietude is upon them, that surely, no toiling cities, no sea whose foam a ship has ever cloven, can lie beyond, but valleys of azure silence, where amaranthine flowers sleep and dream, untroubled of any wind, by the hyalescense of tranquilly flowing streams unbroken as the surface of a mirror.

THE BROKEN LUTE

Because you are silent to my lyric prayers, deaf to the melodies I have made from the sighs and murmurs of a wounded love, I have broken my golden lute, and cast it away, tarnished and unstrung, among the red leaves and faded roses of the September garden. Silence, the silver dust of lilies, the mournful muted wind of autumn, and the fitfully drifting leaves, have claimed it for their own. Seeing it there, as you pass on your queenly way amid the crumbling roses, will you not echo in your heart one sigh of the many sighs, which, as a music for your pleasure, were breathed from its chords, during the summer’s half-forgotten days?

NOSTALGIA OF THE UNKNOWN

The nostalgia of things unknown, of lands forgotten or unfound, is upon me at times. Often I long for the gleam of yellow suns upon terraces of translucent azure marble, mocking the windless waters of lakes unfathomably calm; for lost, legendary palaces of serpentine, silver and ebony, whose columns are green stalactites; for the pillars of fallen temples, standing in the vast purpureal sunset of a land of lost and marvellous romance. I sigh for the dark-green depths of cedar forests, through whose fantastically woven boughs, one sees at intervals an unknown tropic ocean, like gleams of blue diamond; for isles of palm and coral, that fret an amber morning, somewhere beyond Cathay or Taprobana; for the strange and hidden cities of the desert, with burning brazen domes and slender pinnacles of gold and copper, that pierce a heaven of heated lazuli.

GREY SORROW

Ofttimes, in the golden, sad, November days, I meet among the dead roses of the garden the ghost of an old sorrow—a sorrow grey and dim as the mist of autumn—as a wandering mist that was once a rain of tears. There, through the long decline of afternoon, I walk among the roses with the ghost of my sorrow, whose half-forgotten, half-invisible form becomes dimmer and more indistinct, till I know its face no longer from the twilight, nor its voice from the vesper wind.

THE HAIR OF CIRCE

I am afraid of thy hair: Lustrous, heavily curled, it suggests the coils of a golden snake; and half the fascination of thy painted lips, of thy still and purple-lidded eyes, is due to the fear that it may awake beneath my caresses.

THE EYES OF CIRCE

Thine eyes are green and still as the lakes of the desert. They awake in me the thirst for strange and bitter mysteries, the desire of secrets that are deadly and sterile.

A DREAM OF LETHE