Richer than fields of corn that fire in summer,
Strange as the moon on forest rising sudden,
More fearful and beloved than peace or silence,
Heart with my heart at pace in throbbing fever,
Calling towards me with a voice incessant.
Thou that begot me: From whose streets triumphant
I, coloured fiercely with thy passion, wakened!
I sucked red wine, not milk, from thy gaunt bosom,
My senses in thy fearfulness found beauty,
And honey in thine oaths and lamentations.
I played about thy feet that know not resting
And bathed me in the sweat of thine endeavour.
When on thy gala-nights the thronged lamps glitter,
Sparkle like sequins, and the plumes of shadow
With curling smoke, with rain and rippling gutter
Are tossed in feathered gaiety about thee--
Thick grow the crowded streets in coloured pageant,
Kaleidoscope of people, circling, crossing,
Till the brain frenzies to a thousand patterns,
While the ears buzz with noises of their laughter;
Shouts hoarse and coarse and shrill in one great roaring,
As of the angry ocean in her travail ...
They haunt me in the tranquil of the forest,
Those faces pain has marked and toil has mangled;
Pangs greater than the lonely Crucifixion
Here crucified each day with lust and hunger,
Hung up unlovely in the open market;
Made gay with paper garlands, covered over
With tinsel loincloth, painted like a puppet,
Lest the elect in passing should be startled,
Lest they should smear the blameless brow of honour!
With bloody shoes and spinning-wheels of traffic
Vermilion-splashed, the city rushes onward,
And thorns of death and lust and fruitless labour
Lie underneath the feet forever dancing.
Gay tunes are rasped upon a weary fiddle,
Or voice of moaning in the tinkling cymbal,
Offspring of humour from disaster's bowels.
I love the bitter and the rude, the drunken,
The tramps and thieves that skulk among the shadows;
The faces red as fire and dead as ashes,
A million faces scattered like confetti,
All changing, whirling, trodden into nothing.
There Beauty wanders strange, an-hungered, weary,
Throned on a dust-heap, or triumphant reeling
In mad disorder from the couch of chaos.
O ragged Beauty, through the mournful houses,
How frail the feet that lead the dawn towards us,
Blushed in the sunrise with a great ambition,
Spent in the evening like a rose of fever,
Fainting before us paler than a lily.
While here each day self-satisfied and placid
Moves opulent among the groves of summer;
The larks delight, the laughter of the thrushes,
The kindly peasants in their ruddy orchard,
Please for a while until the spirit sickens
And turns her panting to her ancient lover.
Oh, well I know the quickening of the pulses,
Joy bursting through disgust as field and pasture
Grow fewer, paler, till the eager houses
Like hungry animals eat up the spaces
And close upon the miles that God created,
With triumph of man's greed. As warriors listening
To the far rhythm in the drums of battle,
As seamen hear the mighty tide-wave bursting,
I feel the scamper of your feet approaching
And your great starving arms and strangling fingers
That drag me back to my perverted Heaven!
1914
Slowly the pale feet of morning
Tread out the ashes of midnight still burning with feverous
lamplight,
Colourless, cold, as the rainclad
Sleep-druggèd river that carries the wreckage of cities out
sea-ward.
Slowly the fingers of dawn-light
Snuff out the candles that yearned to those Gods of delirium,
Sleep-huge as shadows grimacing
From niches made black with the smoke of a fire-spangled passion.
Smoothly the wild hair of darkness
Is plaited for rest, and the faces of visions are covered with sleep
veils.
Patiently, Morning, the priestess
Drones out a psalm for the souls that we damned in the blackness,
Gashed with the daggers of street-lights,
Crushing the poisonous berries of sinister kisses,--
Morning with healing and kindness
Folds up the dresses dishevelled with terror and laughter,
Sweeps up the rags of our shadows
That danced in a red smoke of dreams on the walls of oblivion.
1919
What have I to do with them,
The red athletes in their snow-white clothes?
They are sun lovers and moon haters,
Toiling or playing in the fields
Whereon no shadows lie,
Pensively, whispering together--
They are space lovers and haters of the stars,
Soundly they sleep by night nor ever see
The tiaraed brows of darkness.
I weary of their striving upward and onward,
Away from the green hush of twilight,
Where silence drips from the trees,
Away from the solemn avenues
Where the ghosts blow by
Along with a drift of leaves.
Let us linger awhile
Far away from the frets and wars of the world,
From the strong men
With their strident hymning voices and marching feet--
Let us walk alone
For the love of our own shadows
Stretching their length on lawns of powdered silver,
With behind us the sky's grey curtain
Drawn backward from the moon....
Let us sit by the fireside
And hear the wind's shrill orchestras,
Fiddle and fife and flute,
And omened bagpipe screaming....
Let us lie abed and dream
Through the long summer's morning
Of trivial things, and beautiful....
Let us dance with Folly when midnight knocks on his golden
gong;
Let us run through pools of wine
And be splashed with purple.
Let us, being sick, make merry,
And rejoice when we are weary.
Let us sit by our grave as at a banquet,
Drinking to Death.
What have we to do with them,
Sons of the sun and the soil,
Daughters of the hearth and the field?
They that remake the world
Melting our idols for silver,
Our goblets for gold;
Tearing our temples down
To build their red brick villages.
The doomed world faints into mist,
World of our indolence and dreams,
And the faces and bodies we love
Sink through oblivion, and are seen
Dimly, as divers through the waters.
Old worlds and new worlds!
Let us slip between them,
And float on the stream that floweth nowhither--
Our red ambitions burn
To a blue smoke of forgetting;
Our moonshine faints on the tide that goeth out,
As the sun leers to the tide that cometh in.
1918
Among the crumbling arches of decay
Where all around the red new buildings crept,
Where huge machines had rolled the past away,
And the dead princes lay accursed and slept;
Among the ruins I beheld a man
Who heeded not the engines as they neared,
Painting dead carnivals upon a fan,
He smiled and trifled with his pointed beard.
And here and there were flung a mess of things,
Tokens and fripperies and faded dresses,
Kept from the courtships of a thousand kings,
Tossed roses for the tossing of caresses.
A carven sabre hung upon the wall,
A toy thing, with no rust of blood upon it,
A tray of glasses, an embroidered shawl,
A muff, a bottle and a feathered bonnet.
And mirrors flashed their argent memories
Out of the shadows where they laughed and gleamed,
While ghostly faces of past vanities
Come back to dream there where they once had dreamed.
The stranger turned his head and bowed to me
And waved me vaguely to a gilded chair.
I spoke: "You are a connoisseur, I see,
You really have a fine collection there."
He bowed to me again, and in his hand
Dangled a string of gems, they caught my eye
With beckoning lights--I could not understand--
His fingers seemed to touch them like a sigh
So much he loved their frail inconsequence.
I spoke of progress conquering decay,
And tired the stillness with my common sense
Loud-spoken in the jargon of the day.
But I have never met so queer a man,
"I better love my memories," he said,
"Look at those painted figures on the fan,
How delicate and wistful are the dead."
1917
As a nun's face from her black draperies
So full of mystery the moon looks down.
She dreams of a passion that shall outlive time,
Of Beauty's face beheld unveiled and close,
Of God Who blows the worlds like bubbles up,
Smiling away, to watch them swell and die.
She dreams of music played among the stars
When the slow tongues of silence are unloosed.
Above the city glittering giddily,
Above the jostling heads of man she moves,
Strange as a dreamer walking in her sleep.
1912
The sun is lord of life and colour,
Blood of the rose and hyacinth,
Hair of the sea and forests,
Crown of the cornfields,
Body of the hills.
The moon is the harlot of Death,
Slaughterer of the Sun,
Priestess and poisoner she goes
With all her silver flock of wandering souls,
Her chant of wailing waters,
The bed of shimmering dust from which she comes
Bound all around with bandages of mist....
The living are as blossoms and fruit on the tree,
The dead are as lilies and wind on the marshes;
The living are as cherries that bow to the morning
Beckoning to the loitering stranger,
The wind, to sing them his eerie ballads.
The dead are as frozen skeleton branches
Whereon the stillness perches like an owl....
The dead are as snows on the cherry orchard.
1918