The dark eyes of a queen,
A queen of Istakhar:
I seem to see her lean
More lovely than a star
Of mien.
A slave, I stand before
Her jeweled throne; I kneel,
And, in a song, once more
My love for her reveal;
How once I did adore
I feel.
Again her dark eyes gleam;
Again her red lips smile;
And in her face the beam
Of love that knows no guile;
And so she seems to dream
A while.
Out of her deep hair then
A rose she takes--and I
Am made a god 'mid men!
Her rose, that here did lie
When I, in th' wild-beasts' den,
Did die.
IV
Old paintings on its wainscots,
And, in its oaken hall,
Old arras; and the twilight
Of sorrow over all.
Old grandeur on its stairways;
And in its haunted rooms
Old souvenirs of greatness,
And ghosts of dead perfumes.
The winds are phantom voices
Around its carven doors;
The moonbeams, specter footsteps
Upon its polished floors.
Old cedars build around it
A solitude of sighs;
And the old hours pass through it
With immemorial eyes.
But more than this I know not;
Nor where the house may be;
Nor what its ancient secret
And ancient grief to me.
It seems my soul remembers,--
Of which this house is part,--
Once, in a former lifetime,
'Twas here I broke my heart.
V
In eons of the senses,
My spirit knew of yore,
I found the Isle of Circe
And felt her magic lore;
And still the soul remembers
What I was once before.
She gave me flowers to smell of
That wizard branches bore,
Of weird and wondrous beauty,
Whose stems dripped human gore--
Their scent when I remember
I know that world once more.
She gave me fruits to eat of
That grew beside the shore,
Of necromantic ripeness,
With human flesh at core--
Their taste when I remember
I know that life once more.
And then, behold! a serpent,
That glides my face before,
With eyes of tears and fire
That glare me o'er and o'er--
I look into its eyeballs,
And know myself once more.
VI
I have looked in the eyes of Poesy,
And sat in Song's high place;
And the beautiful Spirits of Music
Have spoken me face to face;
Yet here in my soul there is sorrow
They never can name or trace.
I have walked with the glamour Gladness,
And dreamed with the shadow Sleep;
And the presences, Love and Knowledge,
Have smiled in my heart's red keep;
Yet here in my soul there is sorrow
For the depth of their gaze too deep.
The love and the hope God grants me,
The beauty that lures me on,
And the dreams of folly and wisdom
That thoughts of the spirit don,
Are but masks of an ancient sorrow
Of a life long dead and gone.
Was it sin? or a crime forgotten?
Of a love that loved too well?
That sat on a throne of fire
A thousand years in Hell?
That the soul with its nameless sorrow
Remembers but can not tell?
SELF AND SOUL
It came to me in my sleep,
And I rose in my sleep and went
Out in the night to weep,
Out where the trees were bent.
With my soul, it seemed, I stood
Alone in a wind-swept wood.
And my soul said, gazing at me,
"I will show you another land
Different from that you see,"
And took into hers my hand.--
We passed from the wood to a heath
As starved as the ribs of Death.
There, every leaf and the grass
Was a thorn or a thistle hoar,
The rocks rose mass on mass,
Black bones on an iron moor.
And my soul said, looking at me,
"The past of your life you see."
And a swineherd passed with his swine,
Deformed, with the face of an owl;
Two eyes of a wolfish shine
Burned under his eyebrows foul.
And my soul said, "This is the Lust,
That soils my beauty with dust."
Then a goose-wife hobbled by,
On a crutch, with the devil's geese,
A-mumbling that God is a lie,
And cursing the world without cease.
And my soul said, "This is Unfaith
Who maketh me that which she saith."
Then we came to a garden, close
To a hollow of graves and tombs;
A garden as red as a rose,
Hung over of obscene glooms;
The heart of each rose was a spark
That smouldered or glared in the dark.
And I was aware of a girl
With a wild-rose face, who came,
With a mouth like a shell's split pearl,
Rose-clad in a robe of flame;
And she plucked the roses and gave,
And I was her veriest slave.
She vanished. My lips would have kissed
The flowers she gave me with sighs,
But they writhed from my hands and hissed,
In their hearts were a serpent's eyes.
And my soul said, "Pleasure is she.
The joys of the flesh you see."
Then I bowed with a heart too weary,
That longed to rest, to sleep;
And it seemed in the darkness dreary
I heard my sad heart weep;
And my soul to the silence say,--
"O God! for the break of day!"
THE OLD HOUSE BY THE MERE
Five rotting gables look upon
A garden rank with flowers and weeds;
Old iron gates on posts of stone,
From which the grass-grown roadway leads.
Five rotting gable-points appear
Above bleak yews and cedars sad,
Beneath which lies the sleepy mere
In lazy lilies clad.
At morn the slender dragon-fly,
A living ray of light, darts past;
The burly bee comes charging by
Winding a surly blast.
At noon amid the fervid leaves
The insects quarrel, harsh and hot;
In bitter briers the spider weaves
A web with silver shot.
At eve the hermit cricket rears
A plaintive prayer, and creaks and creaks;
The bat, like some wing'd elfin, veers
Beneath the sunset's streaks.
The caterpillar gnaws the leaf;
The mottled toad croaks drowsily;
And then the owl, like some dark grief,
Cries in the old beech-tree.
At night the blistering dew comes down
And lies as white as autumn frost
Upon the green, upon the brown--
You'd think each bush a ghost.
The crescent moon sheathes its white sword
Within a cloud; and, gray with fear,
One large blue star keeps stealthy guard
Above the house and mere.
The livid lilies rotting lie
On oozy beds of weltering leaves;
The will-o'-wisps go flickering by,--
And then the water heaves,
And, like some monstrous blossom there,
A maiden's corpse with staring eyes,
And naked breast and raven hair,
Slow in the mere doth rise.
And when the clock of some far town
Knells midnight, in that house of sins,
In haunted chambers, up and down,
The dance of death begins;
And stiff, stiff silks sweep, rustling,
And stately satins none may see;
And then soft sounds of music ring
In wildest melody.
And through the halls the demon dance
Whirls onward; and dark corridors
Resound with song and feet that glance
Along the falling floors.
Then suddenly, as if in fear,
The music ends, the dance is done;
And booming over house and mere
A far-off clock strikes one.
IN AN OLD GARDEN
The autumn glory fades
Upon the withered trees;
And over all the dead leaves fall
And whisper in the breeze.
The violets are dead,
And dead the hollyhocks,
That hang like rags by the wind-crushed flags
And tiger-lily stocks.
The wild gourd clambers free
Where the clematis was wont;
Where nenuphars bloomed thick as stars
Rank weeds fill up the fount.
Yet, as in dreams, I hear
A tinkling mandolin
In the dark-blue light of a fragrant night
Float in and out and in.
Till the dewy vine, that climbs
To a casement's lattice, sways;
And behind the vine, like stars that shine,
Two dark eyes gleam and gaze.
And now a perfume comes,
A swift Favonian gust;
And the shrivelled grass, where it doth pass,
Bows worshiping to the dust.
I seem to see her drift
From tree to moonlit tree,
In her jewelled shawl divinely tall,
A mist of drapery.
And one awaits her there
By the broken Psyche old;
And there they stand, pale hand in hand,
Her thin wrists hooped with gold.
But a wind sweeps overhead,
And the frosty leaves are strewn--
And nothing is there but a bough, blown bare,
And the light of the ghostly moon.
THE HAUNTED ROOM
Its casements, diamond-disked with glass,
Look down upon a terrace old,
Where urns, unkempt with ragged grass,
Foam o'er with hoary cold.
The snow rounds out each stair of stone;
The frozen fount is hooped with pearl;
Down desolate walks, like phantoms blown,
Thin, powdery snow-wreaths whirl.
And to each rose-tree's stem, that bends
With silvery snow-combs, glued with frost,
It seems each summer rosebud sends
Its airy, scentless ghost.
A stiff Elizabethan pile,
With bleakness chattering in its panes,
Where, rumbling down each chimney-file,
The mad wind shakes his reins.
* * * * *
Lone in the northern angle, dim
With immemorial dust, it lies;
Where each gaunt casement's stony rim
Stares eyelike at the skies.
Drear in the old pile's oldest wing,
Hung round with mouldering arras, where
Tall, shadowy Tristrams fight and sing
For shadowy Isolts fair.
Beside a crumbling cabinet
A tarnished lute lies on the floor;
A talon-footed chair is set,
Grotesquely, near the door.
A carven, testered bedstead stands
With rusty silks draped all about;
And, like a moon in murky lands,
A mirror glimmers out.
Neglected, locked that chamber, where
In dropping arras dimly clings
The drowsy moth; and, frightened there,
The lost wind sighs and sings
Adown the roomy flue, and takes
And swings the ghostly mirror till
It seems some unseen hand that shakes
Its frame then leaves it still.
A starving mouse forever gnaws
Behind a panel; and the vines,
That on the casement tap like claws,
Lattice the floor with lines.--
I have been there when blades of light
Stabbed each dull, stained, and dusty pane;
Once I was there at dead of night--
I dream of it again....
She grew upon my vision as
Heat grows that haunts the summer day;
In taffetas, like glimmering glass,
She stood there dim and gray.
And will-o'-wisp-like jewels bound
Faint points of light round neck and wrist;
And round her slender waist was wound
A zone of silver mist.
And icy as some winter land
Her pale, still face; o'er which the night
Hung of her raven hair; her hand
Was beautiful and white.
Before the mirror moaningly
She wrung her hands and palely pressed
Her brow.--And did I dream, or see,
That blood was on her breast?
And then she vanished.--Like a breath,
That o'er the limpid glass had passed,
Her presence passed; and cold as death
She left me and aghast.
Yes, I've been there when spears of light
Pierced thro' each stained and sunlit pane;
Once I was there at dead of night--
I dream of it again.
THE MIRROR
An ancient mirror hangs
Within an ancient Hall;
In a lonely room where th' arrased gloom
Scowls from the pictured wall.
A mystic mirror, framed
In ebon, wildly carved,
That seems to stare on the shadows there,
Like something lean and starved.
A mirror, where one sees
In the broad, good light of day,
Like crimson torches, at the window arches,
Red roses swing and sway.
And a part o' the garth is seen,
With its quaint stone-dial plate,
That, gray and old, green-stained with mold,
Stands near the lioned gate.
These it reflects all day,
And at night one star of blue,
That the nightingale, where the rose is pale,
Lifts its passionate love-song to.
The nightbird sings below;
The stars hang bright above;
And the roses soon in the sultry moon
Shall palpitate with love.
The nightbird sobs below;
The roses blow and bloom;
Through mullioned panes the moonlight rains
In the dim, unholy room.
Grim ancestors that stare,--
Stiff, starched and haughty,--down
From the oaken wall of the noble hall,
Put on a sterner frown.
The old, hoarse castle-clock
Coughs midnight overhead--
And the rose is wan and the bird is gone
When walk the shrouded dead.
Then from their frames, it seems,
The portraits' shadows flit;
By the mirror there they stand and stare
And weep or sigh to it.
In rare rich ermine, earls
And knights in gold and vair,
With a rapiered throng of courtiers long
Pass with a stately stare.
With jewels and perfumes,
In powder, ruff, and lace,
Tall ladies pass by the looking-glass
Each sighing at her face.
What secret does it hide,
This mirror, gaunt and tall,
In this lonely room, where th' arrased gloom
Scowls from the pictured wall?
THE HALL OF DARKNESS
Within her veins it beats
And burns within her brain,
As year by year more sad and sear
Grow barren hill and plain.
Ah! over young is she
Who bears within her breast
More pain and woe than women know,
And all of love's unrest.
Seven towers of shaggy rock
Rise black to ragged skies,
From out a fen where bones of men
Stare with their empty eyes.
Eternal sunset pours,
Around its warlock towers,--
From out its urn of beams that burn,--
Long fire-cloudy flowers.
On bat-like turrets high,
And owlet battlements,
Huge condors dream and vultures scream
As at the battle's scents.
Within the banquet-hall,
A bride, rich-robed and pale,
She sits at board with men o' the sword
Cased all in silver mail.
Their visors barred are drawn;
Their hands are gauntletéd;
And one, behold! in glittering gold
Sits at the table's head.
Wild music echoes through
The hollow-sounding air--
It seems, at least, a wedding feast
With richness everywhere.
Wild music oozes from
The ceiling, groined with white
Pure pearl, and floors, like mythic shores,
Of limpid chrysolite.
Silent they sit at feast,
And she, whom he sits near,--
He in gold mail,--why is she pale,
As one with grief and fear?
The heav'ns grow slaughter-red,
Grow blood-red west and east;
Seven casements high that frame the sky
Flare on the blood-red feast.
Gaunt torches tall they seem,
Red revel-torches seven;--
And then, behold! the hour is tolled;
A great bell strikes eleven.
Silence.--The light, that makes
Each plate a splash of fire,--
Gold-splintered,--dims; and softer swims
The music of each lyre.
Grave Silence, like a king,
At that strange feast has place;
Grave Silence still as God's own will
Within the deeps of space.
She leans to him in gold,
And to him seems to say--
"The night grows late, my love! Why wait?
Ah God! would it were day!
"Would it were day, ah God!
How long is it till dawn?--
Why wear this mask?--Undo thy casque!
The midnight hour comes on!"
Silent he sits, severe;
Then one sonorous tower,
Owl-swarmed, that looms in glaring glooms,
Tolls slow the midnight hour.
Three strokes; the knights arise,
The silence from them flung,
Like waves that mock some hoarse sea-rock,
Wild laughter moves each tongue.
Six strokes; and wailing out
The music hoots away;
The fiery glimmer of heaven grows dimmer,
The red turns ghostly gray.
Nine strokes; and, dropping mold,
The crumbling Hall is lead;
The plate is rust; the feast is dust;
The banqueters are dead.
Twelve strokes pound out and roll;
The vast Hall heaves and waves
With things that crawl from floor and wall--
Spawn of a thousand graves.
Then rattling in the night
_His_ golden visor slips--
In rotting mail a death's-head pale
Kisses her loathing lips.
Then over all a voice
Crying above the strife--
"Death is the Groom: this Hall, the Tomb:
The Bride, behold, is Life!"
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
I have lain for an hour or twain
Awake, and the tempest is beating
On the roof and the sleet on the pane,
And the winds are three enemies meeting;
And I listen and hear it again,
My name, in the silence, repeating.
Then dumbness of death; and, moon-gray,
In the darkness a light like a bubble,
From which, like a single white ray,
Comes a woman in loveliness double;
Her face is the breaking of day,
Her eyes are the night and its trouble.
I move not; she lies with her lips
At mine; and I feel she is drawing
My life from my heart to their tips,
My heart where the horror is gnawing;
My life in a hundred slow sips,
My soul with her gaze overawing.
She binds me with merciless eyes;
She drinks of my blood; and I hear it
Drain up with a shudder and rise
To the lips, like a serpent's, that steer it;
And she lies, and she laughs as she lies,
Saying, "Lo! thy affinitized spirit."
I pray--and a gate, as of swords,--
'Mid torments and tortures huge-grated,
Clangs iron deep under; and words
Are heard as of sins that awaited
A fiend who lashed into their hordes,
And a demon who lacerated.
I pray--and lie clammy and stark,
As a something mounts higher and higher,
Up, out of damnation and dark,
With hobbling of hoofs that is dire;
A devil, whose breath is a spark,
Whose face is of filth and of fire.
"To thy body's corruption! thy grave!
Thy hell! from which thou hast stolen!"
He snarls; and the night, like a wave,
Engulfs them with darkness wild swollen.--
Can it be that in sleep I'm a slave
Of a thing neither flesh nor eidolon?
THAT HOUR
When she was dead, a voice--she knew not whose--
Said to her: "Soul that fell,
To cheer thee there in Hell,
Of all thy life's lost happiness now choose.
"Ask what thou wilt, thou, who hast walked 'mid flowers
And songs the easy way
Of pleasure day by day,
Ask what thou wilt of all thy lived-out hours."
* * * * *
And then she thought: "Oh, shall it be when there,
A blameless maiden, I,
Dreaming, watched love draw nigh,
And felt his kiss rose-sweet on mouth and hair?
"Or shall it be when, that white night, his fingers
Smoothed from my brow the curls,
And fell, like unstrung pearls,
His words of passionate love whose memory lingers?
"Or shall it be when over earth and sea
I heard the sweet unrest
Within his ardent breast,
His heart that beat alone for me, for me?
"Or shall it be when, in his belting arms,
Soul gazed on kindred soul,
And love had won the goal
Of his desire, and his were all my charms?
"No! no! not these! that hour he left me lost!
Stunned, fallen and despised
Before the world he prized,
When--God forgive me!--when I loved him most!"
EPILOGUE
Beyond the moon, within a land of mist,
Lies the dim Garden of all Dead Desires,
Walled round with morning's clouded amethyst,
And haunted of the sunset's shadowy fires;
There all lost things we loved hold ghostly tryst--
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.
Sad are the stars that day and night exist
Above the Garden of all Dead Desires;
And sad the roses that within it twist
Deep bow'rs; and sad the wind that through it quires;
But sadder far are they who there hold tryst--
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.
There, like a dove upon the twilight's wrist,--
Soft in the Garden of all Dead Desires,--
Sleep broods; and there, where never a serpent hissed,
On the wan willows music hangs her lyres,
Æolian dials by which phantoms tryst--
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.
There you shall hear low voices; kisses kissed,
Faint in the Garden of all Dead Desires,
By lips the anguish of vain song makes whist;
And meet with shapes that art's despair attires;
And gaze in eyes where all sweet sorrows tryst--
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.
Thither we go, dreamer and realist,
Bound for the Garden of all Dead Desires,
Where we shall find, perhaps, all Life hath missed,
All Life hath longed for when the soul aspires;
All Earth's elusive loveliness at tryst--
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.
POEMS OF MYTH AND ROMANCE
TO MY FRIEND WILLIAM WARWICK THUM
_PROEM_
_There is no rhyme that is half so sweet
As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat;
There is no metre that's half so fine
As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine;
And the loveliest lyric I ever heard
Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird.--
If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach
My heart their beautiful parts of speech,
And the natural art that they say these with,
My soul would sing of beauty and myth
In a rhyme and a metre that none before
Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore,
And the world would be richer one poet the more._
MYTH AND ROMANCE
I
When I go forth to greet the glad-faced Spring,
Just at the time of opening apple-buds,
When brooks are laughing, winds are whispering,
On babbling hillsides, or in warbling woods,
There is an unseen presence that eludes:--
Perhaps a Dryad, in whose tresses cling
The loamy odors of old solitudes,
Who from her beechen doorway calls, and leads
My soul to follow; now with dimpling words
Of leaves; and now with syllables of birds;
While here and there--is it her limbs that swing?
Or restless sunlight on the moss and weeds?
II
Or, haply 'tis a Naiad now who slips,
Like some white lily, from her fountain's glass,
While from her dripping hair and breasts and hips
The moisture rains cool music on the grass.
Her have I heard and followed, yet, alas!
Have seen no more than the wet ray that dips
The shivered waters, wrinkling where I pass;
But in the liquid light, where she doth hide,
I have beheld the azure of her gaze
Smiling; and, where the orbing ripple plays,
Among her minnows I have heard her lips,
Bubbling, make merry by the waterside.
III
Or now it is an Oread--whose eyes
Are constellated dusk--who stands confessed,
As naked as a flow'r; her heart's surprise,
Like morning's rose, mantling her brow and breast:
She, shrinking from my presence, all distressed
Stands for a startled moment ere she flies,
Her deep hair blowing, up the mountain crest,
Wild as a mist that trails along the dawn.
And is 't her footfalls lure me? or the sound
Of airs that stir the crisp leaf on the ground?
And is 't her body glimmers on yon rise?
Or dogwood blossoms snowing on the lawn?
IV
Now 'tis a Satyr piping serenades
On a slim reed. Now Pan and Faun advance
Beneath green-hollowed roofs of forest glades,
Their feet gone mad with music: now, perchance,
Sylvanus sleeping, on whose leafy trance
The Nymphs stand gazing in dim ambuscades
Of sun-embodied perfume.--Myth, Romance,
Where'er I turn, reach out bewildering arms,
Compelling me to follow. Day and night
I hear their voices and behold the light
Of their divinity that still evades,
And still allures me in a thousand forms.
REVERIE
What ogive gates from gold of Ophir wrought,
What walls of Parian, whiter than a rose,
What towers of crystal, for the eyes of thought,
Hast builded on dim Islands of Repose?
Thy cloudy columns, vast, Corinthian,
Or huge, Ionic, colonnade the heights
Of Dreamland, looming o'er the soul's deep seas;
Piled melodies of marble, that no man
Has ever reached, except in fancy's flights,
Templing the presence of perpetual ease.
Oft, where o'er plastic frieze and plinths of spar,--
In glimmering solitudes of pillared stone,--
The twilight blossoms with one violet star,
With thee, O Reverie, I have stood alone,
And there beheld, from out the Mythic Age,
The rosy breasts of Cytherea--fair,
Full-cestused, and suggestive of what loves
Immortal!--rise; and heard the lyric rage
Of sunburnt Poesy, whose throat breathes bare
O'er leopard skins, fluting among his groves.
Oft, where thy castled peaks and templed vales
Cloud--like convulsive sunsets--shores that dream,
Myrrh-fragrant, over siren seas whose sails
Gleam white as lilies on a lilied stream,
My soul has stood. Or by thy sapphire sea,
In thy arcaded gardens, in the shade
Of breathing sculpture, oft has walked with thought,
And bent, in shadowy attitude, its knee
Before the shrine of Beauty that must fade
And leave no memory of the mind that wrought.
Who hath beheld thy caverns where, in heaps,
The wine of Lethe and Love's witchery,
In sealéd amphoræ a sibyl keeps?
World-old, a grape filled with the soul of thee.
No wine of Xeres or of Syracuse!
No fine Falernian and no vile Sabine!
The stolen fire of a demigod,
Whose bubbled purple heavenly feet did bruise
In crusted vats of vintage, when the green
Flamed into autumn, on the Samian sod.
Oh, for the deep enchantment of one draught!
The reckless ecstasy of classic earth!--
To make me godlike as the gods that laughed
In eyes of mortal brown, a mighty mirth
Of deity delirious with desire!
To make me one with roses of the shrines,
The splashing wine-libation or the blood,
And all the young priest's dreaming! To inspire
My very soul with beauty till it shines
Star-like amid life's starry brotherhood!
Would I might slumber in the old-world shades,
Where poesy could touch me, as some bold
Wild-bee a pulpy lily of the glades,
Barbaric-covered with the kerneled gold;
And feel the glory of the Golden Age
Less godly than my purpose, strong to dare
Death with the young immortal lips of Love:
Less lovely than my soul's ideal rage
To mate itself with Music and declare
Itself part meaning of the stars above.
LETHE
I
There is a scent of roses and spilt wine
Between the moonlight and the laurel-coppice;
The marble idol glimmers on its shrine,
White as a star, among a heaven of poppies.
Here all my life lies like a spilth of wine.
There is a mouth of music like a lute,
A nightingale that singeth to one flower;
Between the falling flower and the fruit,
Where love hath died, the music of an hour.
II