The king is dead who planned these terraces;
The turf has grown to meadow-grass again;
The lake is rank beneath the untended trees,
And down the mouldering statues drips the rain.
The king is dead. Ay, he, with all his kind,
Is absolutely vanished, lost, and gone,
And not a trace of him remains behind;
But the forsaken palace lingers on.
How desolate! The weary waters drowned
In mist, the empty alleys chill and frore,
The vast and melancholy pleasure-ground
Where the forgotten monarch comes no more.
How like an older Folly, planned no less
For beauty, where a greater monarch trod,
And now, grown old, in its extreme distress
Abandoned by the long-departed God!
_Oct. 1888._
_Melancholia._
(_For an engraving by Albrecht Dürer._)
So many years I toiled like Caliban
To fetch the stones and earth to build my fane;
So many years I thought before the brain
Reluctant would divulge the final plan.
Years upon years to forge the invented tools
Novel, as all my temple should be new;
Years upon years to fashion and to hew
The stones that should astound a world of fools.
Now shall I build? _Cui bono?_—lo, the salt
Hath lost its savour and I have no will:
What reck I now of gate or dome or vault?
Among the ruins of the thing undone
I sit and ask myself _Cui bono?_ till
The sun sets, and a bat flies past the sun.
[Illustration]
_Under the Trees._
[Illustration]
I lay full length near lonely trees
Heart-full of sighing silences;
So far as eyes could see all round
There was no life, no stir, no sound.
I thought no more down in the grass
Of all that must be or that was;
My weary brain forgot to ache,
My heart was still and did not break.
So close I lay to earth’s large breast
I could have dreamed myself at rest;
Only that then the grass must be
Above instead of under me.
Wherefore, I thought, should I regain
My anxious life that is so vain?
Here will I lie, forgetting strife,
Till death shall end this death-in-life.
Ah, no: because, O coward will,
Thy destined work thou must fulfil,
Because no soul, be it great or small,
Can rise alone or lonely fall.
Therefore the old war must not cease,
The hard old inner war of peace,
With heart and body and mind and soul
Each striving for a different goal.
Therefore I will arise and bear
The burden all men everywhere
Have borne and must bear, and bear yet,
Till the end come when we forget.
_Fire-flies._
[Illustration]