These curious looms where we have spun our fancies,
These intricate webs where our desires are threaded,
These weird trapezes that our passion frenzies
Strange acrobats to catch them dizzy headed.
These tightening strings upon our spirit's fiddles
Tuneful or out of tune where music hungers
From writhing bow, these intertwining riddles
Mazes and labyrinths and storms and languors.
These colours twinging on a prism's edges,
These speckled patterns of fanatic madness
From glittering eyeballs, these unresting dredges
For pearls within the depths of sadness and of gladness--
O tortuous thoughts, what are you seeking after
As flies around a carcass with a humming dreary,
Gibing the silent dead with treacherous laughter,
Molesting quietness and waking up the weary!
What then, what then, can sleep not crush you to forgetting
With all her body's beauty, cannot peace submerge you
O wrangling, juggling, jangling, pirouetting--
What hope can drag you from the small desires that urge you?
You have lassoed the moon and trapped the sun's bright lion,
And trodden out the red stars into ashes,
Destroyed night's temple and broken the pillars of iron,
And striped the snowy horses of the clouds with zebra gashes
...
You have debauched the world! And as I sit here weary,
Deafened with your demands and torn in tatters,
The world seems suddenly most passionless and dreary,
A poor bewildered clown--and nothing matters.
1916
My pain has all the patience of a nun
Who kneels and prays for Heaven on the stone,
In some chill cellar where the amens moan,
Ave Maria, the long penance spun
Forever. And the tapers one by one
Stand like cold angels round the Virgin's throne.
My soul is tired from kneeling all alone,
Its little candles yearning to the sun.
Long have I dreamed of Paradise and seen
Bright mirages of glory on the grey
Of sad horizons; I have kept the green
Surprise of spring through winter and dismay,
Tasting within the bitter dregs of spleen
Drugs that bring peace, and wine that maketh gay.
1917
The scandal-monger after all is right--
The old and cunning voice with weary repetition
Is justified in all dull words and warnings.
I see at last how you,
Spendthrift of passion
In love's bankruptcy,
Borrow new beauty from each passing face--
How being too lavish you did steal
From generous hands--
You are the idol builder and the robber of temples,
Praising with passionate psalms
The thing you cannot worship--
And yet your prayers have stirred
Belief in us--
We see beyond the false and weary face
Into your haggard soul and trust from pity--
We hear beyond the idle music of your voice,
A wisdom taught by cruelty
And a tired scorn of treachery and guile--
We see your wounds and weep,
You meet our pity with a traitor's kiss--
For, you are schooled in suffering and schooled
In teaching pain to others--
And all that mob of furious accusation
To which you turn the cheek, or curse so well,
Are but the ghosts of bodies you have murdered,
That drive you on in vengeance to fresh crime.
1917
Woods of brown gloom sombring with the hush of death,
Wind's lassitude that sets the tired leaves shivering,
Starved yellow leaves sighing beneath the feet, a breath
Consumptive, old, and fever-red leaves quivering,
As with an earthward flutter like a ghostly butterfly
Listless they perish, wavering and hovering.
Skeleton branches where the rooks flap wings and cry,
Perched upon ribs and fingers; and the white mists covering
The far-off hills and bloodless visage of the sun.
No noise save the meandering dribble of a rivulet,
No noise save of the slow hours dropping one by one
As embers, no colour save Time's ashen coverlet....
How melancholy here the gayest tunes would sound
From shrill carousers riotous and merry all,
As echoes of lost joy their dancing feet upon the ground,
As funeral bagpipes at a burial.
And I who wander passionless and forlorn,
A leaf-forsaken tree symbolic of dejection,
In rags of old desires, dispirited and torn,
See in the stagnant glass of Time my soul's reflection.
1916
I feel so much alone,
And yet I know that many hopes are storming
My shut heart;
For I am bolted fast in my own house.
I pace distracted through its corridors
To the music of Love's knocking hands
Against the gate,
Or silence when they sleep.
I cannot find the key to let them in,
I, my own host and guest and ghost,
Imprisoned in myself!
1917