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Tow’rd the azure world withdrawn,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
In the quest of her whom I had lost, I came at length to the shores
of Lethe, under the vault of an immense, empty, ebon sky, from which
all the stars had vanished one by one. Proceeding I knew not whence,
a pale, elusive light as of the waning moon, or the phantasmal
phosphorescence of a dead sun, lay dimly and without lustre on the
sable stream, and on the black, flowerless meadows. By this light, I
saw many wandering souls of men and women, who came, hesitantly or in
haste, to drink of the slow unmurmuring waters. But among all these,
there were none who departed in haste, and many who stayed to watch,
with unseeing eyes, the calm and waveless movement of the stream. At
length in the lily-tall and gracile form, and the still, uplifted face
of a woman who stood apart from the rest, I saw the one whom I had
sought; and, hastening to her side, with a heart wherein old memories
sang like a nest of nightingales, was fain to take her by the hand. But
in the pale, immutable eyes, and wan, unmoving lips that were raised
to mine, I saw no light of memory, nor any tremor of recognition. And
knowing now that she had forgotten, I turned away despairingly, and
finding the river at my side, was suddenly aware of my ancient thirst
for its waters, a thirst I had once thought to satisfy at many diverse
springs, but in vain. Stooping hastily, I drank, and rising again,
perceived that the light had died or disappeared, and that all the land
was like the land of a dreamless slumber, wherein I could no longer
distinguish the faces of my companions. Nor was I able to remember any
longer why I had wished to drink of the waters of oblivion.
THE CARAVAN
My dreams are like a caravan that departed long ago, with tumult of
intrepid banners and spears, and the clamour of bugles and brave
adventurous songs, to seek the horizons of perilous untried barbaric
lands, and kingdoms immense and vaguely rumoured, with cities beautiful
and opulent as the cities of paradise, and deep Edenic vales of palm
and cinnamon and myrrh, lying beneath skies of primeval azure silence.
For traffic in the realms of mystery and wonder, in the marts of
scarce-imaginable cities and metropoli a million leagues away, on the
last horizon of romance, my dreams departed, as a caravan with its
laden camels. Since then, the years are many, the days have flown as
the flocks of southering swallows; unnumbered moons have multiplied in
fugitive silver, uncounted suns in irretainable gold. But, alas, my
dreams have not returned. Have the swirling sands engulfed them, on a
noon of storm when the desert rose like a sea, and rolled its tawny
billows on the walled gardens of the green and fragrant lands? Or
perished they, devoured by the crimson demons of thirst, and the ghouls
and vultures? Or live they still, as captives in alien dungeons not to
be ascertained, or held by a wizard spell in palaces demon-built, and
cities baroque and splendid as the cities in a tale from the Thousand
and One Nights?
THE PRINCESS ALMEENA
From her balcony of pearl the princess Almeena, clad in a gown of
irisated silk, with her long and sable locks unbound, gazes toward
the sunset-flooded sea beyond a terrace of green marble that peacocks
guard. Below, in the tinted light, fantastic trees whose boles are
serpentine, train a fine and hair-like foliage, mingling with the
moon-shaped leaves of enormous lilies. Rainbow-coloured reeds cluster
about the pools and fountains of black water, that are rimmed with
carven malachite. But these the princess does not heed, but gazes upon
the far-off seas, where the golden ichors of the sun have gathered in
a vast lake overflowing the horizon. Ere long, a wind from the west,
from islands where palm trees blossom above the purple foam, brings
in its breath the odour of unknown flowers to mingle with the balms
of the garden, and the sweet suspiration of the princess—the princess
who dreams, listening to the wind, that her lover, the captain of the
emperor’s most redoubtable trireme of war, sailing the sky-blue seas
beyond the horizon and the sunset, has remembered her wild and royal
loveliness, and has breathed in his heart a secret sigh.
ENNUI