Sun-aureoled lilies are your priestesses,
They stand like choirs in silver surplices,
Melodious streams of silence fill the room,
And pensive listeners lean within the gloom
Of purple quietness. A laughter full of holiness--
Like the wild bells of lilies ringing in the loneliness
Of star-reflected gardens walled with night,--
Thrills from your soul which empties its delight
As rain on lilies, or as sunlight falling slenderly
To gild their ivory temples, and as moonlight shutting tenderly
Their alabaster doors.... A white peace grows,
And love, within your spirit like a lily and a rose.
1918
Starlit silences!
Breeding fears, swarming with sudden deaths,
With separations, burdens, and despairs,
Weaving slow eerie fancies in my brain ...
Forlorn shorn monks go down the cloisters of quietness
With tortured crucifixes cut in ivory
Clasped in their praying hands,
And psalmed with lips renunciate of kisses ...
Forgotten days are painted on the night
In parables and symbols of remorse
That jeer from out the wind-stirred tapestries.
The hangman's rope coils upward like a snake
Out of the death-coloured waters,
While the black barges pass
Funereal,
Carrying doom from mist to mist....
And madmen steal about the wintry parks
Under the high glum walls of an asylum,
With eyes lit up in phosphorescent ecstasies,
With fumbling hands
That grope for things invisibly obscene.
Even the clock
Grown idiot too from keeping madmen's time
Gibbers the hours away in irrelevant chimes....
Silence embalms the dead with scented bands
And is the watchman to deserted houses,
And draws the violet curtain on the day,
And fits a mask of silver to the moon.
Silence brings corpses from the crypts of memory
And sits them round us in the empty chairs,
Opens the secret chambers of our hopes
And shows us there in awful pantomime
Lust wreathing love with poppies and with ashes,
And Beauty dressing Sin for carnival,
And Peace made drunken with a cup of blood.
It winds as ivy round our listening thoughts
Shutting all sounds away, enclosing us
Within its stifled virid twilight....
Cry out, sing, make noises,
Bacchantes, revellers, clowns!
Bring myriad lamps in clusters, likening grapes
That spill the wine of light into our gloom;
Pressing against our lips
The red grape-kisses of pleasure.
Bring the hounds,
The garlanded white ones,
To bay and snarl and tear the flying rags
Of stillness shadowing away!
Lean over me, O Life,
And whisper all thy lying flatteries
That drag me back from Silence and her dead.
I have kept vigil on my soul too long
Within this vast cathedral of dim sleep,
Languidly gathering
The cold grey lilies of the stars
To slip between her passive waxen hands....
1918
The mountain is an Emperor.
The clouds are his beard, and the stars his diadem;
His bauble is the moon;
He is dressed in silver forests, and the mist his train;
His feet are two white rivers.
1917
I know what happiness is--
It is the negation of thought,
The shutting off
Of all those brooding phantoms that surround
As dank trees in a forest
Cutting the daylight into rags,
Caging the sun
In rusted prison bars.
Happiness loves to lie at a river's edge
And make no song,
But listen to the water's murmuring wisdom,
The kissing touch of leaves wind-bowed together,
The feathery swish of cloud wings on a hill;
Opening wide the violet-petalled doors
Of every shy and cloistered sense,
That all the scent and music of the world
May rush into the soul.
And happiness expands
The rainbow arch for a procession of dreams,
For moth-like fancies winged with evening,
For dove-breasted silences,
For shadowy reveries
And starry pilgrims....
I know what happiness is--
It is the giving back to Earth
Of all our furtive thefts,
The lurid jewels that we stole away
From passion, sin and pain,
Because they glittered strangely, luring us
With their forbidden beauty.
Because our childish fingers curiously
Crave the pale secrets of the moon
And grope for dangerous toys.
Happiness comes in giving back to Earth
The things we took from her with violent hands,
Remembering only
That her dust is our garment,
Her fruits our endeavour,
Her waters our priestess,
Her leaves our interpreters to God,
Her hills our infinite patience.
1918
Long hath the pen lain idle in my hand,
Or traced slow sentences without a rhyme,
Words strung at random to beguile the time
As children threading beads upon a strand.
I have strayed far away from fairyland
Whose little hills grow steep and hard to climb;
I creep along the valleys in the slime,
Or hide me like an ostrich in the sand.
For I have sought a mellow idleness,
To be forever buried as a fly
Lies casketed in amber; where the stress
Of peril, hunger, Death can never cry
To wake me from my sanguine weariness,
Or cloud the lucid stillness with a sigh.
1918
I laid my heart on a stone
And stood in the wood to watch.
Presently a priest came by;
He hid it in his cowl
And buried it in the graveyard.
Now is it grown into a cyclamen tree,
Clustering over the wall,
Beckoning far along the twilight road;
Nodding and singing where the cypress moans,
Ringing its little bells while the great bell tolls.
Whiter than ghosts are its flowers,
And its scent is sweeter than ghostly music--
All the men and priests that pass
In the night when the stars lean down,
Smell the heavy fragrance there
And feel the gentle touch of dripping dew.
Then they cross themselves and go
Hurriedly, warily,
Dreaming of pale women,
Under the pale stars.
1918
The cold light steals into my soul
Revealing its emptiness,
The cold winds batter at my heart
And make its lonely tenant shake with fear--
The raindrops slide across the window-glass
Like sighs that fall from patient weariness;
And coldly smiling time
Peers with his clock-face, ticking in my brain
The pulse of a monotonous remorse.
1918
The caravans of spring are in the town,
Lighting their brilliant torches in the park,
Dangling their bells, engirdling each stark
Black tree with coloured rings. The houses frown
Against the beryl sky, yet wear a crown
Of hazy dream, or flash a golden spark
Of sun-fire in their windows glum and dark;
The people blow like petals up and down.
But London tires at evening, each grey street
Mourns as the slow procession passes by,
Traffic and crowd, and Time on loitering feet.
Spring droops his lute, the slender echoes sigh,
And wistfully the jaded revellers meet,
Their pomp in tatters and their wreaths awry.
1918
I dread the beauty of approaching spring
Now the old month is dead and the young moon
Has pierced my heart with her sharp silver horns.
My tired soul is startled out of sleep
By all the urging joy of bud and leaf,
And in the barren yard where I have paced
Content with prison and despair's monotony,
The trees break into music wild and shrill,
And flowers come out like stars amid the dust,
Bewildering my loneliness with beauty....
For winter with her melancholy face
Shone back my miseries as in a glass,
And wept and whined in harmony with me;
And I could listen by the withering ashes
To the ill-omened drum of dropping rain,
And sighing harken sighs and mute feel silence,
And cold stretch forth my hand into the snows,
And hating, hear the laughter of the wind
Whose mad hands tear the sky.
But now again the promise of the spring
Shall lift my martyred spirit from the dust,
To where the lilied altar shines with peace,
And the white priestess comes
Crowning each candle with a gold desire
Engirdling with pallors
The forehead of a divine ghost.
Ah, but they die, these gods, the candles dwindle
And spring is but a radiant beckoning
To death that follows slowly, silently....
O flitting swallows, fleeting laugh of wind,
O flash of silver in the wings of dawn
That are spread out and closed. O hush of night
Breathless with love, oh swish of whispering tide
That swells and shrinks upon the dreaming shore.
O gentle eyes of children wonder-wide
That grow too soon to weariness and close;
O scuttling run of rabbit on the hills,
And flight of lazy rooks above the elm;
O birds' eggs frail, tinged faintly, nestled close,
And mystery of flower in the bud.
O burning galaxy of buttercups,
And drone of bees above the pouting rose,--
O twilit lovers stilled with reverie
And footprints of them swerving on the sand
And darkness of them clasped against the sky!
I see beyond the glory of your days
The grey days marching one behind the other
To the bleak tunes of silence.
When mists shall smear the radiance of the moon
And the lean thief shall pass,
Snatching the glittering toys away from love,
Plucking the feathers from the wings of peace.
And Life herself, grown old and crooked now,
Shall go the way that her long shadow points,
Her long black shadow down the roads of sleep.
1918