How beautiful is the world's delight,
How trivial, yet as sweet as a passing dream
That makes the harassed sleeper in the night
Smile, and on waking sigh. Forever the stream
Of time moves onward; as in coloured boats
A thousand souls go sailing,
And stilly down the tide my spirit floats
Singing or wailing
To the tune the waters make. Here we forget a space
The crawling sins of man that sting and gloat,
The pain and fear that haggers every face,
But vaguely and remote
The strident trumpet and the clamorous voices sound--
Grief doth forget to curse her Gods or pray,
While pagan follies squander all around
Their brief gay hours in holiday;
For all prayers die when laughter is on the lips.--
How frail the moods of joy, how sweet to see them pass
Like bubbles on the tide, like coloured ships
Sailing on glass!
1918
The leaves are singing, and the sea,
And the sand in the wind,
Blown grass and hurrying people;
Full of melodious strings and lutes and flutes
Rustling and whispering forever.
The sad music of Life is in my ears,
Never ceasing, never asleep,
And my heart is strung between chord and chord
Like a crucifix in a rosary.
1918
How soundly sleepeth the fool,
With profane snore taunting the solemn-pillared night--
He hath no dreams of restless, subtle forms
That shift across a feverish vacancy;
Nor doth he hear the drums of time
Beating against oblivion tunes of war,
Goading the crippled hours on their endless march--
But waketh to yawn in the face of the sun,
Then turneth back to sleep....
How soundly the wise man sleepeth,
Couched royally in the purple of the dark
With his white mistress, Peace--
And when the morning stealeth on his rest,
As a rose he doth pluck her from the spreading tree of days,
And reviveth his heart
With the perfume of the world....
But 'twixt the wise and the foolish
Many nights shed sorrow and fear,
And nets are spread for timid feet,
And the waves beat on the shifting sand....
1918
Moonlit lilacs under the window,
And the pale smell of their falling blossoms,
And the white floating beams like luminous moths
Fluttering from bloom to bloom.
Sprays of lilac flowers
Frothing at the green verge of midnight waves,
Frozen to motionless icicles.
Moonlight flows over me,
Spreads her bright watery hair over my face,
Full of illicit, marvellous perfumes
Wreathed with syringa and plaited with hyacinths;
Hair of the moonlight falling about me,
Straight and cool as the drooping tresses of rain.
1918
Old woman forever sitting
Alone in the large hotel under the fans,
Infinitely alone where around you spin
So many lives like painted tops,
Smearing the void a moment with their hues,
Giddily catching at balance as they pause.
What crime was yours, old woman,
What sin against the Earth
That she should give you now
A cap of dust and furrows on your cheeks,
And at the end
A hole dug in the mould?
Is death the promise of Fate's last rebound,
Revenge of Time that waits within the clock
And laughs awry at life,
For a kiss, for a dream, for a child that you bore,
For a fresh rose pinned to your bosom?
The owl is in your spirit,
Blinking through the oldest tree of wisdom--
And now your fingers are weaving
The cold pale invisible blossoms of death
Into a waxen wreath,
And Time
Sits down beside you knitting with quick hands
Grey counterpanes to cover up a grave!
1918
Loneliness I love,
And that is why they have called me forth into the streets.
Loneliness I love,
But the crowd has clutched at me with fawning hands,...
My spirit speaks
In the scented quietness of a divine melancholy
Murmuring the tunes
For which my dreams are the delicate instruments.
The shadowy silences
Have made me beautiful and dressed me in velvet dignities,
And that is why
The noise of tambourines has maddened my soul into dancing,
And I am clad
In the lust-lipped whispering of furtive caresses.
Holiness I love,
And touching the virginal pierced feet of martyrs,
The crucified feet
Nestled among lilies and hallowing candles.
Holiness I love
And the melodious absolution falling on my sins.
But that is why
Blasphemous priests have forced my hands to tear
The vesture of secrecy
Which hides the human nakedness of God.
* * * * *
1918
I met an Indian underneath a tree, under a ragged tree,
His face was yellow and wrinkled like some stone whereon a God had
writ
And his emaciated fingers drew circles in the dust....
I bent my mouth to his ear, crying "O father, O Prophet!
I have wandered far over the earth troubled with doubts that will not
let me rest,
Canst thou not tell me with all thy wizardries and meditations
The purpose of our lives upon this world,
The secret truth Earth shelters in her womb?"
But he was listening to the whispering of the mountains,
To the boom of God's paces on the rocks,
And the swishing steps of his followers in the rivers.
Then suddenly he pointed to the arched doorway in between the
hills,
And the mysterious purple curtain of the dusk that drooped from cliff
to cliff.
I saw in his eyes the vision of highborn ghosts,
Of divine ivory faces wreathed with the flowers of wisdom--
And I knew that he had found only the half-spoken promises of
Heaven....
* * * * *
I saw a drunkard laughing in a tavern,
His cup was tilted and the wine spilt crimson on the sprawled arms
and distracted hair of a woman fallen asleep,
I watched him there and wondered
If ever the bubbling goblins of wine had whispered him life's
secret.
But he raised the cup of his carousals and gazed at emptiness,
Toasting some wild, irreverent dream,
Some flame-red salamander pirouetting among the dead waste ashes of
time--
And I knew that he had found only the secrets of sleep....
* * * * *
A woman sat within a little house,
Scolding and singing ballads to her child,
And all around came the quarrel of children's voices.
Yet one boy sat apart within the furthest corner of the room
Painting an animal with coloured chalks.
I lingered by the fire thinking of life, its vanities and mysteries,
But the woman did not heed me,
Nor her pale son that sat so hunched and still,
Painting his visions with the broken chalks,
For they had discovered the absorbing painful secrets of giving
birth....
* * * * *
It was evening as I wandered,
By a lake two lovers leaned, smiling to see their faces in the
water,
For they had found within each other's souls
An argent flattering mirror wherein to gaze and see their faces
change with all the moods and shadows of the day....
Not here should I discover the answer to bring light into my
darkness,
Into the dim psychic crystals of my soul opalled with the changing
colours of unrest--
So I went away into the loneliness, asking the forests and the
mountains and the sea
The knowledge of life's baffling mysteries.
But they were roaring in a wind of memories,
Gathering the rain into their bodies to make them fierce and
strong,
Heaving their shoulders upward to the morning,
Crowning their foreheads with sunlight.
And I knew that they were Life itself,
The pushing vehemence that rushes from the strangling arms of
Death,
Nor could they guess
The purpose of God's beauty in their joy....
1918
From the fathomless depth of my boredom, from the
last room of its emptiness, an elf has come to play
with me.
As comes a little gold spider to a prison cell teasing the
criminal from his darkness to tear at a thread of sunlight,
and kiss the mouth of a shy morning whispering through
the window.
An elf has come to dance with me, blown like a leaf on
the path of my autumn lassitude.
Sprightly one, dervish! You are the living adventure
born of my dead childhood, you are the small god in the
temples of my unbelief, you are the bird that nests in ruined
temples, laying your silver eggs by moonlight and singing
when the pagan birds are still.
You are the dream-sower in the fields of sleep, you have
jingled the star-bells on the hood of darkness, and from the
knarled, stark tree of time have flung me the apple of
eternal laughter.
1919
Lolling in snow, like kings in ermine coats, the gilt-crowned
bottles lie.... Our thoughts are dangled in
a laughter of leaves as bunches of blue and yellow grapes
for faery beggars, for ragged fancies to pluck and taste.
Our music shall be the minstrelsy of ghostly ballad-mongers
that have stolen from the ashen banquets of death to bless
our revels.
Our spirits shall flit like those winged faces of cherubs
that never can alight, but swing forever on the azure ribbons
of the sky.
And all our dreams and kisses shall be as the rose-leaves
falling on ancient festivals, as the shadows of rose-leaves
falling on phantom lovers in the sleep-pillared temples of
our first archaic passion.
1918
The roots of our longing are probing the heart of night,
delving and twining together that our ultimate truth
may grow out of the darkness that bewilders and nourishes.
Out of the earth, the dust, the crystals of frost that bind
themselves like a tight crown over our heads.
Through the mould and the frost our hair and fingers shall
prick their spears of pallor and flame, and in the green
ardour of our up-rushing leaves the red goblets of fire
shall open, and masses of white flowers, milky as the star-sprays
that droop over Heaven, shall splash their bright
foam from the darkness, as waves that rise and break into
a fountain of blossoms.
1919