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.
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.