Part 3

THE CHERRY-SNOWS

The cherry-snows are falling now; Down from the blossom-clouded sky Of zephyr-troubled twig and bough, In widely settling whirls they fly.

The orchard earth, unclothed and brown, Is wintry-hued with petals bright; E'en as the snow they glimmer down; Brief as the snow's their stainless white.

FAIRY LANTERNS

'Tis said these blossom-lanterns light The elves upon their midnight way; That fairy toil and elfin play Receive their beams of magic white.

I marvel not if it be true; I know this flower has lighted me Nearer to Beauty's mystery, And past the veils of secrets new.

NIRVANA

Poised as a god whose lone, detachèd post, An eyrie, pends between the boundary-marks Of finite years, and those unvaried darks That veil Eternity, I saw the host Of worlds and suns, swept from the furthermost Of night--confusion as of dust with sparks-- Whirl tow'rd the opposing brink; as one who harks Some warning trumpet, Time, a withered ghost, Fled with them; disunited orbs that late Were atoms of the universal frame, They passed to some eternal fragment-heap. And, lo, the gods, from space discorporate, Who were its life and vital spirit, came, Drawn outward by the vampire-lips of Sleep!

THE NEMESIS OF SUNS

Lo, what are these, the gyres of sun and world, Fulfilled with daylight by each toiling sun-- Lo, what are these but webs of radiance spun Beneath the roof of Night, and torn or furled By Night at will? All opposite powers upwhirled Are less than chaff to this imperious one-- As wind-tossed chaff, until its sport be done, Scattered, and lifted up, and downward hurled.

All gyres are held within the path unspanned Of Night's aeonian compass--loosely pent As with the embrace of lethal-tightening weight; All suns are grasped within the hollow hand Of Night, the godhead sole, omnipotent, Whose other names are Nemesis and Fate.

WHITE DEATH

Methought the world was bound with final frost; The sun, made hueless as with fear and awe, Illumined yet the lands it could not thaw. Then on my road, with instant evening crost, Death stood, and in its shadowy films enwound, Mine eyes forgot the light, until I came Where poured the inseparate, unshadowed flame Of phantom suns in self-irradiance drowned.

Death lay revealed in all its haggardness-- Immitigable wastes horizonless; Profundities that held nor bar nor veil; All hues wherewith the suns and worlds were dyed In light invariable nullified; All darkness rendered shelterless and pale.

RETROSPECT AND FORECAST

Turn round, O Life, and know with eyes aghast The breast that fed thee--Death, disguiseless, stern; Even now, within thy mouth, from tomb and urn, The dust is sweet. All nurture that thou hast Was once as thou, and fed with lips made fast On Death, whose sateless mouth it fed in turn. Kingdoms debased, and thrones that starward yearn, All are but ghouls that batten on the past.

Monstrous and dread, must it fore'er abide, This unescapable alternity? Must loveliness find root within decay, And night devour its flaming hues alway? Sickening, will Life not turn eventually, Or ravenous Death at last be satisfied?

SHADOW OF NIGHTMARE

What hand is this, that unresisted grips My spirit as with chains, and from the sound And light of dreams, compels me to the bound Where darkness waits with wide, expectant lips? Albeit thereat my footing holds, nor slips, The threats of that Omnipotence confound All days and hours of gladness, girt around With sense of near, unswervable eclipse.

So lies a land whose noon is plagued with whirr Of bats, than their own shadows swarthier, Whose flight is traced on roofs of white abodes, Wherein from court to court, from room to room, In hieroglyphics of abhorrent doom, Is slowly trailed the slime of crawling toads.

THE SONG OF A COMET

A plummet of the changing universe, Far-cast, I flare Through gulfs the sun's uncharted orbits bind, And spaces bare That intermediate darks immerse By road of sun nor world confined. Upon my star-undominated gyre I mark the systems vanish one by one; Among the swarming worlds I lunge, And sudden plunge Close to the zones of solar fire; Or 'mid the mighty wrack of stars undone, Flash, and with momentary rays Compel the dark to yield Their aimless forms, whose once far-potent blaze In ashes chill is now inurned. A space revealed, I see their planets turned, Where holders of the heritage of breath Exultant rose, and sank to barren death Beneath the stars' unheeding eyes. Adown contiguous skies I pass the thickening brume Of systems yet unshaped, that hang immense Along mysterious shores of gloom; Or see--unimplicated in their doom-- The final and disastrous gyre Of blinded suns that meet, And from their mingled heat, And battle-clouds intense, O'erspread the deep with fire.

Through stellar labyrinths I thrid Mine orbit placed amid The multiple and irised stars, or hid, Unsolved and intricate, In many a planet-swinging sun's estate. Ofttimes I steal in solitary flight Along the rim of the exterior night That grips the universe; And then return, Past outer footholds of sidereal light, To where the systems gather and disperse; And dip again into the web of things, To watch it shift and burn, Hearted with stars. On peaceless wings I pierce, where deep-outstripping all surmise, The nether heavens drop unsunned, By stars and planets shunned. And then I rise Through vaulting gloom, to watch the dark Snatch at the flame of failing suns; Or mark The heavy-dusked and silent skies, Strewn thick with wrecked and broken stars, Where many a fated orbit runs. An arrow sped from some eternal bow, Through change of firmaments and systems sent, And finding bourn nor bars, I flee, nor know For what eternal mark my flight is meant.

THE RETRIBUTION

Old Egypt's gods, Osiris, Ammon, Thoth, Came on my dream in thunder, and their feet Revealed, were as the levin's fire and heat. The hosts of Rome, the Arab and the Goth Have left their altars dark, yet stern and wroth In olden power they stood, whose wings were fleet, And mighty as with strength of storms that meet In mingled foam of clouds and ocean-froth.

Above my dream, with arch of dreaded wings, In judgement and in sentence of what crime I knew not, sate the gods outcast of time. They passed, and lo, a plague of darkness fell, Unsleeping, and accurst with nameless things, And dreams that stood the ministers of Hell!

TO THE DARKNESS

Thou hast taken the light of many suns, And they are sealed in the prison-house of gloom. Even as candle-flames Hast thou taken the souls of men, With winds from out a hollow place; They are hid in the abyss as in a sea, And the gulfs are over them As the weight of many peaks, As the depth of many seas; Thy shields are between them and the light; They are past its burden and bitterness; The spears of the day shall not touch them, The chains of the sun shall not hale them forth.

Many men there were, In the days that are now of thy realm, That thou hast sealed with the seal of many deeps; Their feet were as eagles' wings in the quest of Truth-- Aye, mightily they desired her face, Hunting her through the lands of life, As men in the blankness of the waste That seek for a buried treasure-house of kings. But against them were the veils That hands may not rend nor sabers pierce; And Truth was withheld from them, As a water that is seen afar at dawn, And at noon is lost in the sand Before the feet of the traveller. The world was a barrenness, And the gardens were as the waste. And they turned them to the adventure of the dark, To the travelling of the land without roads, To the sailing of the sea that hath no beacons. Why have they not returned? Their quest hath found end in thee, Or surely they had fared Once more to the place whence they came, As men that have travelled to a fruitless land. They have looked on thy face, And to them it is the countenance of Truth. Thy silence is sweeter to them than the voice of love, Thine embrace more dear than the clasp of the beloved. They are fed with the emptiness past the veil, And their hunger is filled; They have found the waters of peace, And are athirst no more. They know a rest that is deeper than the gulfs, And whose seal is unbreakable as the seal of the void; They sleep the sleep of the suns, And the vast is a garment unto them.

A DREAM OF BEAUTY

I dreamed that each most lovely, perfect thing That Nature hath, of sound, and form, and hue-- The winds, the grass, the light-concentering dew, The gleam and swiftness of the sea-bird's wing; Blueness of sea and sky, and gold of storm Transmuted by the sunset, and the flame Of autumn-colored leaves, before me came, And, meeting, merged to one diviner form.

Incarnate Beauty 'twas, whose spirit thrills Through glaucous ocean and the greener hills, And in the cloud-bewildered peaks is pent. Like some descended star she hovered o'er, But as I gazed, in doubt and wonderment, Mine eyes were dazzled, and I saw no more.

THE DREAM-BRIDGE

All drear and barren seemed the hours, That passed rain-swept and tempest-blown. The dead leaves fell like brownish notes Within the rain's grey monotone.

There came a lapse between the showers; The clouds grew rich with sunset gleams; Then o'er the sky a rainbow sprang-- A bridge unto the Land of Dreams.

A LIVE-OAK LEAF

How marvellous this bit of green I hold, and soon shall throw away! Its subtile veins, its vivid sheen, Seem fragment of a god's array.

In all the hidden toil of earth, Which is the more laborious part-- To rear the oak's enormous girth, Or shape its leaves with poignant art?

PINE NEEDLES

O little lances, dipped in grey, And set in order straight and clean, How delicately clear and keen Your points against the sapphire day!

Attesting Nature's perfect art Ye fringe the limpid firmament, O little lances, keenly sent To pierce with beauty to the heart!

TO THE SUN

Thy light is as an eminence unto thee, And thou are upheld by the pillars of thy strength. Thy power is a foundation for the worlds; They are builded thereon as upon a lofty rock Whereto no enemy hath access. Thou puttest forth thy rays, and they hold the sky As in the hollow of an immense hand. Thou erectest thy light as four walls, And a roof with many beams and pillars. Thy flame is a stronghold based as a mountain; Its bastions are tall, and firm like stone.

The worlds are bound with the ropes of thy will; Like steeds are they stayed and contrained By the reins of invisible lightnings. With bands that are stouter than iron manifold, And stronger than the cords of the gulfs, Thou withholdest them from the brink Of outward and perilous deeps, Lest they perish in the desolations of the night, Or be stricken of strange suns; Lest they be caught in the pitfalls of the abyss, Or fall into the furnace of Arcturus. Thy law is as a shore unto them, And they are restrained thereby as the sea.

Thou art food and drink to the worlds; Yea, by thy toil are they sustained, That they fail not upon the road of space, Whose goal is Hercules. When thy pillars of force are withdrawn, And the walls of thy light fall inward, Borne down by the sundering night, And thy head is covered with the Shadow, The worlds shall wander as men bewildered In the sterile and lifeless waste. Athirst and unfed shall they be, When the springs of thy strength are dust, And thy fields of light are black with dearth. They shall perish from the ways That thou showest no longer, And emptiness shall close above them.

THE FUGITIVES

O fugitive fragrances That tremble heavenward Unceasing, or if ye linger, Halt but as memories On the verge of forgetfulness, Why must ye pass so fleetly On wings that are less than wind, To a death unknowable? Soon ye are gone, and the air Forgets your faint unrest In the garden's breathlessness, Where fall the snows of silence.

AVERTED MALEFICE

Where mandrakes, crying from the moonless fen, Told how a witch, with gaze of owl or bat Found, and each root malevolently fat Pulled for her waiting cauldron, on my ken Upstole, escaping to the world of men, A vapor as of some infernal vat; Against the stars it clomb, and caught thereat As if their bright regard to veil again.

Despite the web, methought they saw, appalled, The stealthier weft in which all sound was still ... Then sprang, as if the night found breath anew, A wind whereby the stars were disenthralled ... Far off, I heard the cry of frustrate ill-- A witch that wailed above her curdled brew.

THE MEDUSA OF THE SKIES

Haggard as if resurgent from a tomb, The moon uprears her ghastly, shrunken head, Crowned with such light as flares upon the dead From pallid skies more death-like than the gloom. Now fall her beams till slope and plain assume The whiteness of a land whence life is fled; And shadows that a sepulcher might shed Move livid as the stealthy hands of doom.

O'er rigid hills and valleys locked and mute, A pallor steals as of a world made still When Death, that erst had crept, stands absolute-- An earth now frozen fast by power of eyes That malefice and purposed silence fill, The gaze of that Medusa of the skies.

A DEAD CITY

The twilight reigns above the fallen noon Within an ancient land, whose after-time Lies like a shadow o'er its ruined prime. Like rising mist the night increases soon Round shattered palaces, ere yet the moon On mute, unsentried walls and turrets climb, And touch with whiteness of sepulchral rime The desert where a city's bones are strewn.

She comes at last; unburied, thick, they show In all the hoary nakedness of stone. From out a shadow like the lips of Death Issues a wind, that through the stillness blown, Cries like a prophet's ghost with wailing breath The weirds of finished and forgotten woe.

THE SONG OF THE STARS

From the final reach of the upper night To the nether darks where the comets die, From the outmost bourn of the reigns of light To the central gloom of the midmost sky, In our mazeful gyres we fly. And our flight is a choral chant of flame, That ceaseless fares to the outer void, With the undersong of the peopled spheres, The voices of comet and asteroid, And the wail of the spheres destroyed. Forever we sing to a god unseen-- In the dark shall our voices fail? The void is his robe inviolate, The night is his awful veil-- How our fires grow dim and pale!

From the ordered gyres goes ever afar Our song of flame o'er the void unknown, Where circles nor world, nor comet, nor star. Shall it die ere it reach His throne?

On the shoreless deeps of the seas of gloom Sailing, we venture afar and wide, Where ever await the tempests of doom, Where the silent maelstroms lurk and hide, And the darkling reefs abide. And the change and ruin of stars is a song That rises and ebbs in a tide of fire-- A music whose notes are of dreadful flame, Whose harmonies ever leap high'r Where the suns and the worlds expire. Is such music not fit for a god? Yet ever the deep is a dark, And ever the night is a void, Nor brightens a word nor a mark To show if our God may hark.

From the gyres of change goes ever afar Our flaming chant o'er the deep unknown, The song of the death of planet and star. Shall it die ere it reach His throne?

In our shadows of light the planets sweep, And endure for the span of our prime-- Globed atoms that hazard the termless deep With races that bow to the law of Time, And yet cherish a dream sublime. And they cry to the god behind the veil. Yet how should their voices pass the night, The silence that waits in the rayless void, If he hear not our music of light, And the thundrous song of our might? And they strive in the gloom for truth-- Yet how should they pierce the veil, When we, with our splendors of flame, In the darkness faint and fail, Our fires how feeble and pale!

From the ordered gyres goes ever afar Our song of flame o'er the void unknown, Where circles nor world, nor comet, nor star, Shall it die ere it reach His throne?

COPAN

Around its walls the forests of the west Gloom, as about some mystery's final pale Might lie its multifold exterior veil. Sculptured with signs and meanings unconfessed, Its lordly fanes and palaces attest A past before whose wall of darkness fail Reason and fancy, finding not the tale Erased by time from history's palimpsest.

Within this place, that from the gloom of Eld Still meets the light, a people came and went Like whirls of dust between its columns blown-- An alien race, whose record, shadow-held, Is sealed with those of others long forespent That died in sunless planets lost and lone.

A SONG OF DREAMS

A voice came to me from the night, and said, What profit hast thou in thy dreaming Of the years that are set And the years yet unrisen? Hast thou found them tillable lands? Is there fruit that thou canst pluck therein, Or any harvest to be mown? Shalt thou dig aught of gold from the mines of the past, Or trade for merchandise In the years where all is rotten? Are they a sea that will bring thee to any shore, Or a desert that vergeth upon aught but the waste? Shalt thou drink from the springs that are emptied, Or find sustenance in shadows? What value hath the future given thee? Is there aught in the days yet dark That thou canst hold with thy hands? Are they a fortress That will afford thee protection Against the swords of the world? Is there justice in them To balance the world's inequity, Or benefit to outweigh its loss?

Then spake I in answer, saying, Of my dreams I have made a road, And my soul goeth out thereon To that unto which no eye hath opened, Nor ear become keen to hearken-- To the glories that are shut past all access Of the keys of sense; Whose walls are hidden by the air, And whose doors are concealed with clarity. And the road is travelled of secret things, Coming to me from far-- Of bodiless powers, And beauties without colour or form Holden by any loveliness seen of earth. And of my dreams have I builded an inn Wherein these are as guests. And unto it come the dead For a little rest and refuge From the hollowness of the unharvestable wind, And the burden of too great space.

The fields of the past are not void to me, Who harvest with the scythe of thought; Nor the orchards of future years unfruitful To the hands of visionings. I have retrieved from the darkness The years and the things that were lost, And they are held in the light of my dreams, With the spirits of years unborn, And of things yet bodiless. As in an hospitable house, They shall live while the dreams abide.

THE BALANCE

The world upheld their pillars for awhile-- Now, where imperial On and Memphis stood, The hot wind sifts across the solitude The sand that once was wall and peristyle, Or furrows like the main each desert mile, Where ocean-deep above its ancient food Of cities fame-forgot, the waste is nude, Traceless as billows of each sunken pile.

Lo! for that wrong shall vengeance come at last, When the devouring earth, in ruin one With royal walls and palaces undone, And sunk within the desolated past, Shall drift, and winds that wrangle through the vast Immingle it with ashes of the sun.

SATURN

Now were the Titans gathered round their king, In a waste region slipping tow'rd the verge Of drear extremities that clasp the world-- A land half-moulded by the hasty gods, And left beneath the bright scorn of the stars, Grotesque, misfeatured, blackly gnarled with stone; Or worn and marred from conflict with the deep Conterminate, of Chaos. Here they stood, Old Saturn midmost, like a central peak Among the lesser hills that guard its base. Defeat, that gloamed within each countenance Like the first tinge of death, upon a sun Gathering like some dusk vapor, found them cold, Clumsy of limb, and halting as with weight Of threatened worlds and trembling firmaments. A wind cried round them like a trumpet-voice Of phantom hosts--hurried, importunate, And intermittent with a tightening fear. Far off the sunset leapt, and the hard clouds, Molten among the peaks, seemed furnaces In which to make the fetters of the world.

Seared by the lightning of the younger gods, They saw, beyond the grim and crouching hills, Those levins thrust like spears into the heart Of swollen clouds, or tearing through the sky Like severing swords. Then, as the Titans watched, The night rose like a black, enormous mist Around them, wherein naught was visible Save the sharp levin leaping in the north; And no sound came, except of seas remote, That seemed like Chaos ravening past the verge Of all the world, fed with the crumbling coasts Of Matter.

Till the moon, discovering That harsh swart wilderness of sand and stone Tissued and twisted in chaotic weld, Lit with illusory fire each Titan's form, They sate in silence, mute as stranded orbs-- The wrack of Time, upcast on ruinous coasts, And in the slow withdrawal of the tide Safe for awhile. Small solace did they take From that frore radiance glistering on the dull Black desert gripped in iron silences, Like a false triumph o'er contestless fates, Or a mirage of life in wastes of Death. Yet were they moved to speak, and Saturn's voice Seeming the soul of that tremendous land Set free in sound, startled the haughty stars.