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You have understood so little of me, and my adoration
That shone upon my forehead, like a crown of curious stones,
You turned into a cap and bells for Folly's coronation
And made a foolish tinkling from my laughter and my
moans.
You have led me through the market like an ass upon the halter,
You have fed me upon thistles; I was driven by the crowd;
But my faith in what I am, my conceit, you cannot alter;
I was proud in pomp and purple, as a clown I leave you proud!
A greater pride than sits upon a throne for mere adorning,
A fiercer strength than in the gods of wood that cannot bow;
I tore my purple into rags and knelt to bear your scorning,
And I am rebel leader to a band of beggars now.
In the twilight of my love I stand and strew the bitter ashes;
They are blown into my eyes again, the fires that shone for
you;
In the blushing of the sunset their ghostly fervour flashes
As they sink for everlasting in the darkness and the dew.
Your heart is as a moonstone hieroglyphed with secret letters;
You have never read my passion, as I never learnt their sign,
But I praise your haunting beauty and I bear the bruise of
fetters
And I reel from your remembrance as I spill the ancient wine.
All those women I have envied with their pink and foolish faces,
Moths that have out-distanced me in circling round your head,
For the strangeness of your kisses and the curse of your embraces
And the frenzy of pursuing where your despot feet have led.
I will shout, and tear the darkness; I will snuff the candles
sacred
With the rage of my abasement, with the blast of my farewell;
I will smile with cynic softness, but my tears are dropping
acrid
And sizzling in a gutter down the white-hot streets of Hell!
1914
Lulled are the dazzling colours of the day,
And mild the heavens, burnt out like an ash.
Hungry and strange along the shadowed dusk
Walks Melancholy, and with bitter mouth
Sucks the last juices from the sun's ripe fruit.
Now can I sing the sickly lines of love
And of love's failure, spell my sorrows out
In the sad spaces of the gloaming night,
And stooping, huddled, hide me in the dark.
My words were fireless in the flaming sun,
And all the throats of flowers from their content
Puffed back my pinings proudly in my face
And bade me give them tunes to make them dance....
Lean, hungry, like my love the moon looks down
From the white solitudes of Heaven. All aghast
And sterile as the arms of my desire
She flings her light despairing on the sky.
The night is strange and still, for dropping tears,
Or burying hatred in a deep-dug grave.
1914
Washed at my feet by the curded foam of sluggish waves,
As the rain splinters and the mud gleams with malicious light,
Like a frail shell, million tinged and quaintly wrought
The thought of you, which held against mine ear
Hums all the echoed melodies of your soul;
The sigh of wearied life, the ebbing sweet of love,
The little tunes of wine mixed with the chants of death,
The following of beauty's fugitive limbs
Whose classic feet, and rapturous pale breast
Gleam on the clouds and foam,
Call to her lovers.--
Thus standing in the blasting of the wind,
And numb with ceaseless drip of moments from the cloud
Of lowering hours, I toy with this strange relic of the sea,
Turned with such perfectness from her tumultuous wheels,
Thoughts of you million tinged and quaintly wrought.
1916
My poems cannot laugh. They are the voice
Of birds that mourn and cry above the sea,
And this wild joy my love has brought to me
Lies dumb and knows not how it shall rejoice.
I am most weary of the petulant songs I sing,
Most tired of tunes that only learn to weep,
And long to turn my dreams from their pale sleep
Into a gentle minstrelsy with harp of silver string;
To fashion for my love one perfect verse
Symmetrically threaded by beauty word on word,
Flowing and flashing like the luted laughter of a bird
To bless the soul with music which I ravished with a curse.
But as a coward in the general gloom
I mimic fortune with my tunes of ill,
Nor pipe despite her wistful mirth and trill
Of love that moves with music into Doom;
Of love that thrills with joy the graveyard cold,
And like a gay canary in a cage
Mocks at his prison, and with flippant rage
Flaunts his bright wing to fill the gloom with gold.
1916
On the hill there is a tavern, long-loved, well-remembered,
Where all the sleepy afternoon the little tables dream,
And the cool green bottles ranged, laugh and gleam with golden
highlights,
And the waiters wrangle, and the flies, with murmurs merged and mixed.
We will go there, you and I, to wake the nodding contentment,
And toast our fancies reverently with red wine and with white
wine,
And with eyes mesmerised to the horizon gazing,
Dream our iridescent dreams and sigh our shadowy sighs.
1916
Oh canst thou not hear in my heart all its whispering fears
Whose wind-like voices
Flutter the leaves of my hope and bow them with tears
While the body rejoices.
Till all the pomp and beauty of day, the Cardinal Sun
Trailing his scarlet vesture
Leaves after light the pale hills sullen and dun,
Turns with a gesture
Colour and glory to smoke that is deathly and grey.
I follow the shadows of sorrow
That press so close to the dancing heels of the day
And darken the morrow.
The world turns pale and cold, for I seem to see
Beyond its golden visor
The leering skull that derides at our lives and me
Being older than life and wiser....
I hear the cry of the world that writhes to the lash of the
whip
Beyond the sound of the treetops singing
To the wind's persuasive violins and bells of dews that drip,
Or rush of feathers winging....
Dost thou fear death as I? Ah no, but thy lips are against my
cheek
Murmuring tenderly
The perfumed lies stolen from spring that wistfully through the
bleak
Windows of frost so slenderly
Steals her little ghost's flute. Thou tellest of things that might
be
If life were as kind as a lover,
If we were beloved of the world and the world of we.
Thy white words hover
Dove-like in rose leaf evenings over the nest
Silvering heaven
With rustle of lovers that nestle together for rest.
If I could have given
My tired lips to kisses and my body to sleep and to thee,
Ah then and then only
The dust were as gentleness mingling thy beauty with me
And death were not lonely.
1916
As in the silence the clear moonlight drips
Among the fields that love her drowsily,
These passionate moments trickle on through time,
From soul to languorous soul.
Like mad musicians upon fretted harps,
The senses play upon the poignant nerves,--
And colours clothe our mood
As smoke against the light, as shimmering prisms
Irised with pallors of an opal's heart
In which the glittered pattern of desire
Smoulders and changes....
O love, thou nightingale-throated singer,
Thread on thy jewelled chords from start to star
And keep thy silver delicate delight
Out of the flush and lustre that makes mad.
Let thy fairy feet
Go tripping down a scarcely scented path,
Between an avenue of breathless flowers.
The hours glide by as swans across a lake,
Across the luminous waters of desire,
And beat as wings the rustle of soft words,
As love bends down,
Breathing his adoration on a fainting mouth.
1917
I can but give thee unsubstantial things
Wrapt as in rose-leaves between thought and thought,
No gems or garments marvellously wrought
On ivory spools with rare embroiderings.
Nor for thy fingers precious, fabled rings
That cardinals have worn, and queens have bought
With blood and beauty. I have only sought
A song that hovers on illusive wings.
Accept from me a dream that hath no art,
I give my empty hands for thee to hold,
Take thou the gift of silence for my part,
With all the deeper things I have not told.
Yet if thou canst, decipher in my heart
Its passions writ in hieroglyphs of gold.
1917
I
I have no other friend but thee,
But while I tell thee all my thought
Thine ears are buzzing with gossip of dreams,
Soothsayings and sighs, and little things--
How canst thou listen to me?