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diff --git a/old/53333-0.txt b/old/53333-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 7c8a61e..0000000 --- a/old/53333-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,4986 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ebony and Crystal, by Clark Ashton Smith - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - -Title: Ebony and Crystal - Poems in Verse and Prose - -Author: Clark Ashton Smith - -Release Date: October 21, 2016 [EBook #53333] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EBONY AND CRYSTAL *** - - - - -Produced by Mary Glenn Krause, Chris Curnow, Les Galloway -and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images -made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) - - - - - - - - - - Ebony and Crystal - - Poems in Verse and Prose - - BY - - CLARK ASHTON SMITH - - AUTHOR OF - - The Star-Treader and Other Poems - - Odes and Sonnets - - - - - Copyright 1922 - - by - - CLARK ASHTON SMITH - - - Printed by the - - AUBURN JOURNAL - - Auburn, Calif. - - - - - DEDICATION - - TO - - SAMUEL LOVEMAN - - - - - CONTENTS - - - PREFACE, by George Sterling. - - POEMS - - Arabesque 1 - - Beyond the Great Wall 2 - - To Omar Khayyam 3 - - Strangeness 5 - - The Infinite Quest 6 - - Rosa Mystica 7 - - The Nereid 8 - - In Saturn 9 - - Impression 10 - - Triple Aspect 11 - - Desolation 12 - - The Orchid 13 - - A Fragment 14 - - Crepuscle 15 - - Inferno 16 - - Mirrors 17 - - Belated Love 18 - - The Absence of the Muse 19 - - Dissonance 20 - - To Nora May French 21 - - In Lemuria 24 - - Recompense 25 - - Exotique 26 - - Transcendence 27 - - Satiety 28 - - The Ministers of Law 29 - - Coldness 30 - - The Desert Garden 31 - - The Crucifixion of Eros 32 - - The Exile 33 - - Ave Atque Vale 34 - - Solution 35 - - The Tears of Lilith 36 - - A Precept 37 - - Remembered Light 38 - - Song 39 - - Haunting 40 - - The Hidden Paradise 41 - - Cleopatra 42 - - Ecstasy 43 - - Union 44 - - Psalm 45 - - In November 47 - - Symbols 48 - - The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil 49 - - The Sorrow of the Winds 65 - - Artemis 66 - - Love is Not Yours, Love is Not Mine 67 - - The City in the Desert 68 - - The Melancholy Pool 69 - - The Mirrors of Beauty 70 - - Winter Moonlight 71 - - To the Beloved 72 - - Requiescat 73 - - Mirage 74 - - Inheritance 75 - - Autumnal 76 - - Chant of Autumn 77 - - Echo of Memnon 78 - - Twilight on the Snow 79 - - Image 80 - - The Refuge of Beauty 81 - - Nightmare 82 - - The Mummy 83 - - Forgetfulness 84 - - Flamingoes 85 - - The Chimaera 86 - - Satan Unrepentant 87 - - The Abyss Triumphant 90 - - The Motes 91 - - The Medusa of Despair 92 - - Laus Mortis 93 - - The Ghoul and the Seraph 94 - - At Sunrise 99 - - The Land of Evil Stars 100 - - The Harlot of the World 102 - - The Hope of the Infinite 103 - - Love Malevolent 104 - - Palms 105 - - Memnon at Midnight 106 - - Eidolon 107 - - The Kingdom of Shadows 108 - - Requiescat in Pace 110 - - Alexandrines 112 - - Ashes of Sunset 113 - - November Twilight 114 - - Sepulture 115 - - Quest 116 - - Beauty Implacable 117 - - A Vision of Lucifer 118 - - Desire of Vastness 119 - - Anticipation 120 - - A Psalm to the Best Beloved 121 - - The Witch in the Graveyard 122 - - - POEMS IN PROSE - - The Traveler 127 - - The Flower-Devil 129 - - Images 130 - - The Black Lake 131 - - Vignettes 132 - - A Dream of Lethe 134 - - The Caravan 135 - - The Princess Almeena 136 - - Ennui 137 - - The Statue of Silence 139 - - Remoteness 140 - - The Memnons of the Night 141 - - The Garden and the Tomb 142 - - In Cocaigne 143 - - The Litany of the Seven Kisses 144 - - From a Letter 145 - - From the Crypts of Memory 146 - - A Phantasy 148 - - The Demon, the Angel, and Beauty 149 - - The Shadows 151 - - - - -PREFACE - - -Who of us care to be present at the accouchment of the immortal? I -think that we so attend who are first to take this book in our hands. A -bold assertion, truly, and one demonstrable only in years remote from -these; and—dust wages no war with dust. But it is one of those things -that I should most “like to come back and see.” - -Because he has lent himself the more innocently to the whispers of his -subconscious daemon, and because he has set those murmurs to purer and -harder crystal than we others, by so much the longer will the poems of -Clark Ashton Smith endure. Here indeed is loot against the forays of -moth and rust. Here we shall find none or little of the sentimental fat -with which so much of our literature is larded. Rather shall one in -Imagination’s “misty mid-region,” see elfin rubies burn at his feet, -witch-fires glow in the nearer cypresses, and feel upon his brow a wind -from the unknown. The brave hunters of fly-specks on Art’s cathedral -windows will find little here for their trouble, and both the stupid -and the over-sophisticated would best stare owlishly and pass by: here -are neither kindergartens nor skyscrapers. But let him who is worthy by -reason of his clear eye and unjaded heart wander across these borders -of beauty and mystery and be glad. - - GEORGE STERLING. - - San Francisco, October 28, 1922. - - - - -[Illustration: Decoration] - - -ARABESQUE - - - Like arabesques of ebony, - The cypresses, in silhouette, - Fantastically cleave and fret - A moon of yellow ivory. - - The coldly colored rays illume - A leafy pattern manifold, - And all the field is overscrolled - With curiously figured gloom. - - Like arabesques of ebony, - Or like Arabian lattices, - Forever seem the cypresses - Before a moon of ivory. - - - - -BEYOND THE GREAT WALL - - - Beyond the far Cathayan wall, - A thousand leagues athwart the sky, - The scarlet stars and mornings die, - The gilded moons and sunsets fall. - - Across the sulphur-colored sands - With bales of silk the camels fare, - Harnessed with vermil and with vair, - Into the blue and burning lands. - - And, ah, the song the drivers sing, - To while the desert leagues away— - A song they sang in old Cathay, - Ere youth had left the eldest king,— - - Ere love and beauty both grew old, - And wonder and romance were flown - On fiery wings to worlds unknown, - To stars of undiscovered gold. - - And I their alien words would know, - And follow past the lonely Wall, - Where gilded moons and sunsets fall, - As in a song of long ago. - - - - -TO OMAR KHAYYAM - - - Omar, within thy scented garden-close, - When passed with eventide - The starward incense of the waning rose— - Too fair and dear and precious to abide - After the glad and golden death of spring— - Omar, thou heardest then, - Above the world of men, - The mournful rumour of an iron wing, - The sough and sigh of desolating years, - Whereof the wind is as the winds that blow - Out of a lonesome land of night and snow, - Where ancient winter weeps with frozen tears; - And in thy bodeful ears, - The brief and tiny lisp - Of petals curled and crisp, - Fallen at Eve in Persia’s mellow clime, - Was mingled with the mighty sound of time. - - Omar, thou knewest well - How the fair days are sorrowful and strange - With time’s inexorable mystery - And terror ineluctable of change: - Upon thine eyes the bleak and bitter spell - Of vision, thou didst see, - As in a magic glass, - The moulded mists and painted shadows pass— - The ghostly pomps we name reality. - And, lo, the level field, - With broken fane and throne, - And dust of old, unfabled cities sown, - In unremembering years was made to yield, - From out the shards of Pow’r, - The pillars frail and small - That lift for capital - The blood-like bubble of the poppy-flow’r; - And crowns were crumbled for the airy gold - The crocus and the daffodil should hold - As inalienable dow’r. - Before thy gaze, the sad unvaried green - The cypresses like robes funereal wear, - Was woven on the gradual looms of air, - From threadbare silk and tattered sendaline - That clothed some ancient queen; - And from the spoilt vermilion of her mouth, - The myrtles rose, and from her ruined hair, - And eyes that held the summer’s ardent drouth - In blown, forgotten bow’rs; - And amber limbs and breast, - Through ancient nights by sleepless love oppressed, - Or by the iron flight of loveless hours. - - Knowing the weary wisdom of the years, - The empty truth of tears; - The suns of June, that with some great excess - Of ardour slay the unabiding rose, - And grey-haired winter, wan and fervourless - For whom no flower grows; - Seeing the scarlet and the gold that pales, - On Orient snows untrod, - In magic morns that grant, - Across a land of common green and gray, - The disenchanted day; - Knowing the iron veils - And walls of adamant, - That ward the flaming verities of God— - Knowing these things, ah, surely thou wert wise, - Beneath the warm and thunder-dreaming skies, - To kiss on ardent breast and avid mouth, - Some girl whose sultry eyes - Were golden with the sun-beloved south— - To pluck the rose and drain the rose-red wine, - In gardens half-divine; - Before the broken cup - Be filled and covered up - In dusty seas of everlasting drouth. - - - - -STRANGENESS - - - O love, thy lips are bright and cold, - Like jewels carven curiously - To symbols of a mystery, - A secret dim, forgotten, old. - - Like woven amber, finely spun, - Thy hair, enwoofed with golden light, - Remembers yet the flaming flight - Of some unknown, archaic sun. - - Thine eyes are crystals green and chill, - Wherein, as in a shifting sea, - Wan fires and drowning splendours flee - To stealthy deeps forever still. - - Fallen across thy dreaming face, - The dawn is made a secret thing, - Like flame of crimson lamps that swing - At midnight, in a cavern-space. - - Thy smile is like the furtive gleam - Of fleeing moons a traveller sees - Through closing arms of cypress-trees, - In secret realms of night and dream. - - Sphinx-like, unsolved eternally, - Thy beauty’s riddle doth abide, - And love hath come, and love hath died, - Striving to read the mystery. - - - - -THE INFINITE QUEST - - - In years no vision shall aver, - In lands no dream may name, - Tow’rd alien things what longings were, - And thence what languors came! - - For each horizon straightly sought, - With fealty to the stars, - What death and weariness were bought, - What bitterness, what bars! - - * * * * * - - I waken unto years afar, - And find the quest made new - In Earth, that was perchance a star - Unto my former view. - - - - -ROSA MYSTICA - - - The secret rose we vainly dream to find, - Was blown in grey Atlantis long ago, - Or in old summers of the realms of snow, - Its attar lulled the pole-arisen wind; - Or once its broad and breathless petals pined - In gardens of Persepolis, aglow - With desert sunlight, and the fiery, slow - Red waves of sand, invincible and blind. - - On orient isles, or isles hesperian, - Through mythic days ere mortal time began, - It flowered above the ever-flowering foam; - Or, legendless, in lands of yesteryear, - It flamed among the violets—near, how near, - To unenchanted fields and hills of home! - - - - -THE NEREID - - - Her face the sinking stars desire. - Unto her place the slow deeps bring - Shadow of errant winds that wing - O’er sterile gulfs of foam and fire. - - Her beauty is the light of pearls. - All stars and dreams and sunsets die - To make the fluctuant glooms that lie - Around her, and low noonlight swirls - - Down ocean’s firmamental deep, - To weave for her who glimmers there, - Elusive visions, vague and fair; - And night is as a dreamless sleep: - - She has not known the night’s unrest, - Nor the white curse of clearer day; - The tremors of the tempest play - Like slow delight about her breast. - - Serene, an immanence of fire, - She dwells forever, ocean-thralled, - Soul of the sea’s vast emerald; - Her face the sinking stars desire. - - - - -IN SATURN - - - Upon the seas of Saturn I have sailed - To isles of high, primeval amarant, - Where the flame-tongued sonorous flow’rs enchant - The hanging surf to silence: All engrailed - - With ruby-colored pearls, the golden shore - Allured me; but as one whom spells restrain, - For blind horizons of the sombre main, - And harbors never known, my singing prore - - I set forthrightly: Formed of fire and brass, - Immenser skies divided, deep on deep - Before me,—till, above the darkling foam, - - With dome on cloudless adamantine dome, - Black peaks no peering seraph deems to pass, - Rose up from realms ineffable as Sleep! - - - - -IMPRESSION - - - The silver silence of the moon - Upon the sleeping garden lies; - The wind of evening dies, - As in forgetful dreams a ghostly tune. - - How white, how still, the flowers are, - As carved of pearl and ivory! - The pines are ebony, - A sombre frieze on heavens pale and far. - - Like mirrors made of lucid stone, - The pools lie calm, and bright, and cold, - Where moon and stars behold, - In some eternal trance, themselves alone. - - - - -TRIPLE ASPECT - - - Lo, for Earth’s manifest monotony - Of ordered aspect unto sun and star, - And single moon, I turn to years afar, - And ampler worlds ensphered in memory. - - There, to the zoned and iris-differing light - Of three swift suns in heavens of vaster range, - Transcendant Beauty knows a trinal change, - And dawn and eve are in the place of night. - - There, long ago, in mornings ocean-green, - I saw bright deserts dusky with the sky, - Or under yellow noons, wide waters lie - Like wrinkled bronze made hot with fires unseen. - - Strange flow’rs that bloom but to an azure sun, - I saw; and all complexities of light - That work fantastic magic on the sight, - Wrought unimagined marvels one by one. - - There, swifter shadows suffer gorgeous dooms— - Lost in an orange noon, an azure morn; - At twofold eve, large, winged lights are born, - Towering to meet the dawn, or briefest glooms - - Of chrysoberyl filled with wondering stars, - Draw from an emerald east to skies of gold. - Tow’rd jasper waters leaning to behold, - Vague moons are lost amid great nenuphars. - - - - -DESOLATION - - - It seems to me that I have lived alone— - Alone, as one that liveth in a dream: - As light on coldest marble, or the gleam - Of moons eternal on a land of stone, - The dawns have been to me. I have but known - The silence of a frozen land extreme— - A sole attending silence, all supreme - As is the sea’s enormous monotone. - - Upon the icy desert of my days, - No bright mirages are, but iron rays - Of dawn relentless, and the bitter light - Of all-revealing noon.**** Alone, I crave - The friendly clasp of finite arms, to save - My spirit from the ravening Infinite. - - - - -THE ORCHID - - - Beauty, thou orchid of immortal bloom, - Sprung from the fire and dust of perished spheres, - How art thou tall in these autumnal years - With the red rain of immemorial doom, - And fragrant where but lesser suns illume, - For sustenance of Life’s forgotten tears! - Ever thy splendour and thy light appears - Like dawn from out the midnight of the tomb. - - Colours, and gleams, and glamours unrecalled, - Richly thy petals intricate revive: - Blossom, whose roots are in Eternity, - The faithful soul, the sentience darkly thralled, - In dream and wonder evermore shall strive - At Edens lost of time and memory. - - - - -A FRAGMENT - - - Autumn far-off in memory, - That saw the crisping myrtles fade!**** - Aeons agone, my tomb was made, - Beside the moon-constrainèd sea. - - Ah, wonderful its portals were! - With carven doors of chrysolite, - And walls of sombre syenite, - They wrought mine olden sepulchre! - - About the griffin-guarded plinth, - White blossoms crowned the scarlet vine; - And burning orchids opaline - Illumed the palm and terebinth. - - On friezes of mine ancient fame, - The cypress wrought its writhen shade; - And through the boughs the ocean made - Moresques of blue and fretted flame. - - Poet or prince, I may not know - My perished name, nor bring to mind - Years that are one with dust and wind, - Nor songless love, and tongueless woe—: - - Only the tomb they made for me, - With carven doors of chrysolite, - And walls of sombre syenite, - Beside the moon-constrainèd sea. - - - - -CREPUSCLE - - - The sunset-gonfalons are furled - On plains of evening, broad and pale, - And, wov’n athwart the waning world, - The air is like a silver veil. - - Into the thin and trembling gloom, - That holds a hueless warp of light, - The murmuring wind on a slow loom, - Weaves the rich purples of the night. - - - - -INFERNO - - - Grey hells, or hells aglow with hot and scarlet flow’rs; - White hells of light and clamour; hells the abomination - Of breathless, deep sepulchral desolation - Oppresses ever—I have known them all, through hours - Tedious as dead eternity; where timeless pow’rs, - Leagued in malign, omnipotent persuasion— - Wearing the guise of love, despair and aspiration, - Forever drove, through ashen fields and burning bow’rs, - - My soul that found no sanctuary.**** For Lucifer, - And all the weary, proud, imperious, baffled ones - Made in his image, hell is anywhere: The ice - Of hyperboreal deserts, or the blowing spice - In winds from off Sumatra, for each wanderer - Preserves the jealous flame of sad, infernal suns. - - - - -MIRRORS - - - Mirrors of steel or silver, gold or glass antique! - Whether in melancholy marble palaces - In some long trance you drew the dreamy loveliness - Of Roman queens, or queens barbarical, or Greek; - Or, further than the bright and sun-pursuing beak - Of argosy might fare, beheld the empresses - Of lost Lemuria; or behind the lattices - Alhambran, have returned forbidden smiles oblique - - Of wan, mysterious women!—Mirrors, mirrors old, - Mirrors immutable, impassable as Fate, - Your bosoms held the perished beauty of the past - Nearer than straining love might ever hope to hold; - And fleeing faces, lips too phantom-frail to last, - Found in your magic depth a life re-duplicate. - - - - -BELATED LOVE - - - Ah, woe is me, for Love hath lain asleep, - Hath lain too long in some Morphean close,— - Till on his dreaming wings the ruined rose - Fell lightly, and the rose-red leaves were deep. - - Alas, alas, for Love is overlate! - Far-wandering, alone, we know not where, - He found the white and purple poppies fair, - Nor heard the Summer pass importunate. - - Ah, Love, can we forgive thy loitering? - The golden Summer, as a dream foregone - Is changed—till in our eyes the ashen dawn - Of Autumn kindles.**** We have heard thy wing - But with a sound of sighing; heart on heart, - In our own sighs we hear thy wing depart. - - - - -THE ABSENCE OF THE MUSE - - - O, Muse, where lingerest thou? In any land - Of Saturn, lit with moons and nenuphars? - Or in what high metropolis of Mars— - Hearing the gongs of dire, occult command, - And bugles blown from strand to unknown strand - Of continents embattled in old wars - That primal kings began? Or on the bars - Of ebbing seas in Venus, from the sand - Of shattered nacre with a thousand hues, - Dost pluck the blossoms of the purple wrack - And roses of blue coral for thy hair? - Or, flown beyond the roaring Zodiac, - Translatest thou the tale of earthly news - And earthly songs to singers of Altair? - - - - -DISSONANCE - - - The harsh, brief sob of broken horns; the sound - Of hammers, on some echoing sepulchre; - Lutes in a thunderstorm; a dulcimer - By sudden drums and clamouring bugles drowned; - Crackle of pearls, and gritting rubies, ground - Beneath an iron heel; the heavy whirr - Of battle wheels; a hungry leopard’s purr, - And sigh of swords withdrawing from the wound—: - - All, all are in thy dreadful fugue, O Life, - Thy dark, malign and monstrous music, spun - In hell, from a delirious Satan’s dream!*** - O! dissonance primordial and supreme— - The moan, the thunder, evermore at strife, - Beneath the unheeding silence of the sun! - - - - -TO NORA MAY FRENCH - - - Importunate, the lion-throated sea, - Blind with the mounting foam of winter, mourns - To cliffs where cling the wrenched and laboured roots - Of cypresses, and blossoms granite-grown - Lose in the gale their tattered petals, cast - On bleak, tumultuous cauldrons of the tide, - Where fell thy molten ashes.**** Past the bay, - The morning dunes a dust of marble seem— - Wrought from primeval fanes to Beauty reared, - And shattered by some vandal Titan’s mace - To more than Time’s own ruin. Woods of pine, - Above the dunes in Gothic gloom recede, - And climb the ridge that arches to the north - Long as a lolling dragon’s chine. The gulls, - Like ashen leaves far-off upon the wind, - Flutter above the broad and smouldering sea, - That lightens with the fire-white foam: But thou, - Of whom the sea is urn and sepulcher, - Who hast thereof a blown, tumultuous sleep, - And stormy peace in gulfs impacable— - What carest thou if Beauty loiter there, - Clad with the crystal noon? What carest thou - If sharp and sudden balsams of the pine - Mingle for her in the air’s bright thurible - With keener fragrance proffered by the deep - From riven gulfs resounding?*** Knowest thou - What solemn shores of crocus-colored light, - Reared by the sunset in its realm of change, - Will mock the dream-lost isles that sirens ward, - And charm the icy emerald of the seas - To unabiding iris? Knowest thou - The waxing of the wan December foam— - A thunder-cloven veil that climbs and falls - Upon the cliffs forever? - - Thou art still - As they that sleep in the eldest pyramid— - Or mounded with Mesopotamia - And immemorial deserts! Thou hast part - In the wordless, dumb conspiracy of death— - Silence wherein the warrior kings accord, - And all the wrangling sages! If thy voice - In any wise return, and word of thee, - It is a lost, incognizable sigh, - Upon the wind’s oblivious woe, or blown, - Antiphonal, from wave to plangent wave - In the vast, unhuman sorrow of the main, - On tides that lave the city-laden shores - Of lands wherein the eternal vanities - Are served at many altars; tides that wash - Lemuria’s unfathomable walls, - And idly sway the weed-involvèd oars - At wharves of lost Atlantis; tides that rise - From coral-coffered bones of all the drowned, - And sunless tombs of pearl that krakens guard. - - - II. - - As none shall roam the sad Leucadian rock, - Above the sea’s immitigable moan, - But in his heart a song that Sappho sang, - And flame-like murmur of the muted lyres - That time hath not extinguished, and the cry - Of nightingales two thousand years ago, - Shall mix with those remorseful chords that break - To endless foam and thunder; and he learn - The unsleeping woe that lives in Mytelene - Till wave and deep are dumb with ice, and rime - Hath paled the rose forever—even thus, - Daughter of Sappho, passion-souled and fair, - Whose face the lutes of Lesbos would have sung, - And white Errina followed—even thus, - The western wave is eloquent of thee, - And half the wine-like fragrance of the foam - Is attar of thy spirit, and the pines - From breasts of mournful, melancholy green, - Release remembered echoes of thy song - To airs importunate. No wraith of fog, - Twice-ghostly with the Hecatean moon, - Nor rack of blown, fantasmal spume shall rise, - But I will dream thy spirit walks the sea, - Unpacified with Lethe. Thou art grown - A part of all sad beauty, and my soul - Hath found thy buried sorrow in its own, - Inseparable forever. Moons that pass, - Immaculate, to solemn pyres of snow, - And meres whereon the broken lotus dies, - Are kin to thee, as wine-lipped autumn is, - With suns of swift, irreparable change, - And lucid evenings eager-starred. Of thee, - The pearlèd fountains tell, and winds that take - In one white swirl the petals of the plum, - And leave the branches lonely. Royal blooms - Of the magnolia, pale as Beauty’s brow, - And foam-white myrtles, and the fiery, bright - Pome-granate flow’rs, will subtly speak of thee - While spring hath speech and meaning. Music hath - Her fugitive and uncommanded chords, - That thrill with tremors of thy mystery, - Or turn the void thy fleeing soul hath left - To murmurs inenarrable, that hold - Epiphanies of blind, conceiveless vision, - And things we dare not know, and dare not dream. - -Note: Nora May French, the most gifted poet of her sex that America has -produced, died by her own hand at Carmel in 1907. Her ashes were strewn -into the sea from Point Lobos. - - - - -IN LEMURIA - - - Rememberest thou? Enormous gongs of stone - Were stricken, and the storming trumpeteers - Acclaimed my deed to answering tides of spears, - And spoke the names of monsters overthrown— - Griffins whose angry gold, and fervid store - Of sapphires wrenched from marble-plungèd mines— - Carnelians, opals, agates, almandines, - I brought to thee some scarlet eve of yore. - - In the wide fane that shrined thee, Venus-wise, - The fallen clamours died.**** I heard the tune - Of tiny bells of pearl and melanite, - Hung at thy knees, and arms of dreamt delight; - And placed my wealth before thy fabled eyes, - Pallid and pure as jaspers from the moon. - - - - -RECOMPENSE - - - Ah, more to me than many days and many dreams - And more than every hope, or any memory, - This moment, when thy lips are laid immortally - On mine, and death and time are shadows of old dreams. - - Now all the crownless, ruined years have recompense: - In one supreme, undying hour of light and fire, - The many moons and suns have found their one desire— - When in the hour of love, all life has recompense. - - - - -EXOTIQUE - - - Thy mouth is like a crimson orchid-flow’r, - Whence perfume and whence poison rise unseen - To moons aswim in iris or in green, - Or mix with morning in an eastern bow’r. - - Thou shouldst have known, in amaranthine isles, - The sunsets hued like fire of frankincense, - Or the long noons enfraught with redolence, - The mingled spicery of purple miles. - - Thy breasts, where blood and molten marble flow, - Thy warm white limbs, thy loins of tropic snow— - These, these, by which desire is grown divine, - - Were made for dreams in mystic palaces, - For love, and sleep, and slow voluptuousness, - And summer seas a-foam like foaming wine. - - - - -TRANSCENDENCE - - - To look on love with disenamoured eyes; - To see with gaze relentless, rendered clear - Of hope or hatred, of desire and fear, - The insuperable nullity that lies - Behind the veils of various disguise - Which life or death may haply weave; to hear - Forevermore in flute and harp the mere - And all-resolving silence; recognize - The gules of autumn in the greening leaf, - And in the poppy-pod the poppy-flow’r— - This is to be the lord of love and grief, - O’er Time’s illusion and thyself supreme, - As, half-aroused in some nocturnal hour, - The dreamer knows and dominates his dream. - - - - -SATIETY - - - Dear you were as is the tree of Being - To the happy dead in heaven’s bow’rs.**** - Whence and what, this evil spell that flings me - Forth from love with loveless eyes unseeing? - - Fair you were as nymph or queen of vision— - Bosomed like the succubi of dreams.**** - All your beauty turns to sad, ironic - Weariness, and sorrowful derision. - - Lo, of what avail our spent caresses,— - Kisses that set the summer night aflame?**** - Mute, enormous languor without cause— - What is this my autumn heart confesses? - - All your breast was fragrant like the flowers - Of the grape on hills toward the south.**** - Love is acrid now like staling asters, - Sodden with the rain of autumn hours. - - - - -THE MINISTERS OF LAW - - - The glories and the perils of thy day - Are one, O Man! Thou goest to thine end - With Pow’rs, and for a little thou dost wend - With marshalled Majesties upon their way: - But thee the dread Necessities betray - That nurse, and fearful Splendours that befriend; - And thee shall alien Dominations rend.**** - Deemest the triumph of the worlds to stay, - Or step by step eternal, unsurpassed, - Stride with the suns upon their road of awe? - Thou travelest brief ways that end and sink— - Urged by the hurrying planets; and the vast, - Prone-rushing constellations of the Law, - Thunder and press behind thee at the brink. - - - - -COLDNESS - - - Thy heart will not believe in love: - Therefore is love become to me - A dream, an empty mockery, - And death and life are less than love. - - O, bright and beautiful as flame - Thy hair, and pale thy lips, and eyes - Like seas wherein the waning skies - Of autumn lie in paler flame. - - Forevermore thy heart abides, - A dreaming crystal, pure and cold, - Amid whose visions manifold - No shape nor any shade abides. - - Thy days are void and vain as death: - The moons and morrows weave for thee - A sleep of light eternally, - Where life is as a dream of death. - - Chill as white jewels, or the moon, - And virginal as ice or fire, - Thou knowest life and life’s desire - As a bright mirror knows the moon. - - Lo, if thy heart believed in love, - It were not more nor less to me: - I know THY love a mockery, - And all my dreams less vain than love. - - - - -THE DESERT GARDEN - - - Dreaming, I said, “When she is come, - This desert garden that is me, - For her shall offer mellowly - Its myrrh and its olibanum— - When she is come. - - “The flowers of the moon for her, - With blossoms of the sun shall bloom, - The fading roses breathe perfume, - The lightly fallen petals stir, - And sigh to her. - - “Her presence, like a living wind - Each little leaf makes visible, - Shall enter there, or like the spell - (Upon the lulling leaves divined) - Of silent wind.” - - * * * * * - - Alas! for she is come and gone, - And in the garden, green for her, - The flowers fall, the flowers stir - Only to winds of night and dawn: - For she is gone. - - - - -THE CRUCIFIXION OF EROS - - - Because of thee, immortal Love hath died: - Because thy wilful heart will not believe, - Thy hands and mine a thorny crown must weave, - A thorny crown for Love the crucified. - - Behold, how beautiful the limbs that bleed— - The limbs that bleed, O stubborn heart, for us! - Still are the lids so softly tremulous, - And mute the mouth of our eternal need. - - * * * * * - - Though this thy fearful lips would now deny, - Love is divine, and cannot wholly die: - Draw forth the nails thy tender hands have driven— - - And we will know the mercy infinite, - Will find redemption in our own delight, - And in each other’s heart the only heaven. - - - - -THE EXILE - - - Against my heart your heart is closed; you bid me go: - What ways are left in all the world for Love to know? - Desolate oceans, and the light of lonely plains, - Dead moons that wander in the wastes of ice and snow— - - These, these I fain would see, and find the splendid bourne - Of sunset, or the brazen deserts of the morn, - That I might lose this ever-aching loneliness - In vaster solitude; and love be less forlorn, - - Faring to seek with alien sun and alien star - The strange, the veiled horizons infinite and far; - Spaces of fire and night, the skies of steel and gold, - Or sunset-haunted seas where foamless islands are. - - - - -AVE ATQUE VALE - - - Black dreams; the pale and sorrowful desire - Whose eyes have looked on Lethe, and have seen, - Deep in the sliding ebon tide serene, - Their own vain light inverted; ashen fire, - With wasted lilies, late and languishing; - Autumnal roses blind with rain; slow foam - From desert-sinking seas, with honeycomb - Of aconite and poppy—these I bring - With this my bitter, barren love to thee; - And from the grievous springs of memory, - Far in the great Maremma of my heart, - I proffer thee to drink; and on thy mouth, - With the one kiss wherein we meet and part, - Leave fire and dust from quenchless leagues of drouth. - - - - -SOLUTION - - - The ghostly fire that walks the fen, - Tonight thine only light shall be; - On lethal ways thy soul shall pass, - And prove the stealthy, coiled morass, - With mocking mists for company. - - On roads thou goest not again, - To shores where thou hast never gone,— - Fare onward, though the shuddering queach - And serpent-rippled waters reach - Like seepage-pools of Acheron, - - Beside thee; and the twisten reeds, - Close-raddled as a witch’s net, - Enwind thy knees, and cling and clutch - Like wreathing adders; though the touch - Of the blind air be dank and wet, - - As from a wounded Thing that bleeds - In cloud and darkness overhead— - Fare onward, where thy dreams of yore - In splendour drape the fetid shore - And pestilential waters dead. - - And though the toads’ irrision rise, - As grinding of Satanic racks, - And spectral willows, gaunt and grey, - Gibber along thy shrouded way, - Where vipers lie with livid backs, - - And watch thee with their sulphurous eyes,— - Fare onward, till thy feet shall slip - Deep in the sudden pool ordained, - And all the noisome draught be drained, - That turns to Lethe on the lip. - - - - -THE TEARS OF LILITH - - - O lovely demon, half-divine! - Hemlock, and hydromel, and gall, - Honey, and aconite, and wine, - Mingle to make that mouth of thine— - - Thy mouth I love: But most of all, - It is thy tears that I desire— - Thy tears, like fountain-drops that fall - In gardens red, Satanical; - - Or like the tears of mist and fire, - Wept by the moon, that wizards use - To secret runes, when they require - Some silver philtre, sweet and dire. - - - - -A PRECEPT - - - With words of ivory, - Of bronze, of ebony, - Of alabaster, marble, steel, and gold, - The beauty of the visible is told. - - But how with these express - The unseen Loveliness— - Splendour and light, and harmony, and sound, - The heart hath felt, the sense hath never found? - - No shining words of stone— - Shadow and cloud alone— - These shall the poet seek eternally, - Whose lines would carve the mask of Mystery. - - - - -REMEMBERED LIGHT - - - The years are a falling of snow, - Slow, but without cessation, - On hills, and mountains, and flowers and worlds that were; - But snow, and the crawling night wherein it fell, - May be washed away in one swifter hour of flame: - Thus it was that some slant of sunset - In the chasms of pilèd cloud— - Transient mountains that made a new horizon, - Uplifting the west to fantastic pinnacles— - Smote warm in a buried realm of the spirit, - Till the snows of forgetfulness were gone. - Clear in the vistas of memory, - The peaks of a world long unremembered, - Soared further than clouds but fell not, - Based on hills that shook not nor melted - With that burden enormous, hardly to be believed. - - Rent with stupendous chasms, - Full of an umber twilight, - I beheld that larger world; - Bright was the twilight, sharp like ethereal wine - Above, but low in the clefts it thickened, - Dull as with duskier tincture. - Like whimsical wings outspread but unstirring, - Flowers that seemed spirits of the twilight - That must pass with its passing— - Too fragile for day or for darkness, - Fed the dusk with more delicate hues than its own; - Stars that were nearer, more radiant than ours, - Quivered and pulsed in the clear thin gold of the sky. - - These things I beheld - Till the gold was shaken with flight - Of fantastical wings like broken shadows, - Forerunning the darkness; - Till the twilight shivered with outcry of eldritch voices - Like pain’s last cry ere oblivion. - - - - -SONG - - - I bring my weariness to thee, - My bitter dreams I bring; - Love with a wounded wing, - And life consumed of memory, - I bring to thee. - - The haven of thy happy breast— - Of this my dreams are fain: - For all my weary pain, - In all the world there is no rest, - But on thy breast. - - - - -HAUNTING - - - There is no peace amid the moonlight and the pines; - Deep in the windless gloom the lamplike thought of you - Abides; and ah, what burning memories pursue - My heart among the pallid marbles!*** Night assigns - - Your silver face for wardress of the doors of Sleep; - Beyond the wild, last bourn of dreamland, lo, your eyes - Are on the lonesome, ultimate, undiscovered skies; - Moonlike and dim, you wander ever in the deep - - Which is the secret, innermost, unknown abyss - Of my own soul, and in its night your spirit lives.**** - Shall I not find the very draught that Lethe gives, - Sweet with your tears, and warm with savour of your kiss? - - - - -THE HIDDEN PARADISE - - - Our passion is a secret Paradise— - Eden of lotos and the fruitful date, - With silence walled and held undesecrate - By man or prying seraph: We are wise - - As any god and goddess, who have wrung - From roseal fruitage of a bough forbidden, - The happy wine we drink, we drink unchidden, - Deep in the vales where vernal leaves are young, - - And the first poppies loiter.**** Though the breath - Of all the gods a bolted storm prepare, - And blood-red gloom of thunders blind the sun, - - Shall we not turn, with clinging kisses there, - And, laughing, quaff some dreamless wine of death— - Triumphant still, in mere oblivion? - - - - -CLEOPATRA - - - Thy beauty is the warmth and languor and passion of a tropic autumn, - Caressing all the senses,— - With light from skies of heavy azure, - With perfume from hidden orchids many-hued - That burn in the berylline dusk of palms; - With the balmy kiss of tropic wind and wave, - And the songs of exotic birds that pass - In vermilion-flashing flight from isle to isle on a cobalt sea.*** - O, sweetness in the inmost sense, - As of golden fruits that have grown by the waters of Lethe, - Or fragrance of purple lilies, crushed by the limbs of lovers, - In the shadow of a wood of cypress!*** - Thou pervadest me with thy love, - As the dawn pervadeth a valley among mountains, - Or as opaline sunset filleth the amaranth-coloured sea; - The desire of thy heart is upon me, - As a myrtle-scented wind from the isle of Cythera, - Where Aphrodite waits for Adonis, - Lying naked among the flag lilies by a pool of chrysolite; - I inhale thy love - As the breath of hidden gardens of purple and scarlet, - Where Circe wanders, - Clad in a trailing gown whose colours are the gold of flame, - And the azure of the skies of autumn. - - - - -ECSTASY - - - Blind with your softly fallen hair, - I turn me from the twilight air; - And, ah, the wordless tale of love - My lips upon your lips declare! - - High stars are on the shadowy south— - Unseen, unknown: The urgent drouth - Of desert years in one deep kiss, - Would drain the sweetness of your mouth. - - Our straining arms that clasp and close, - Ache with an ecstasy that grows; - And passion in our secret veins, - Like burning amber, glows and glows. - - This love is sweet to have and hold, - Better than sandalwood or gold, - After the barren, bitter loves, - The mad and mournful loves of old. - - This love is fortunate and fair, - Behind its veil of fallen hair; - This love hath soft and clinging arms, - And a kind bosom, warm and bare. - - - - -UNION - - - As the fumes of myrrh that mix with the odour of sandalwood - In a temple sacred to the goddess Lakme; - As moonlight mingled with starlight - In the lucent azure of an autumn lake; - As the sunset-rays of gold and crimson - That interlace on a couch of purple cloud— - Even so, Beloved, - Hath my love mingled with thine— - Even so, our souls are one, - Like two winds that meet in a valley of rose and lotus, - And fall to rest, uniting - As the still and fragrant air that lingers - On a bed of falling petals. - - - - -PSALM - - - My beloved is a well of clear waters, - To which I have come at noontide, - From the land of the Abomination of Desolation, - From the lion-dreaded waste, - Where nothing dwelleth but the inconsolable crying of an evil wind, - And the wandering realms and cities of the wide mirage; - Where no one passeth except the sun, - Who walked like a terrible god through the hell of the brazen skies; - And the dreadful cohorts of the constellations, - Who pass remote in alien years, - And clad with icy azures of unattainable distance. - - My beloved is a singing fountain, - Set in a wide oasis, - Between the frondage of the fruitful palm, - And the branches of the flowering myrtle: - The wind that bloweth thereon, - Hath lain in a vale of cassia and myrrh, - And caressed the vermilion blossoms of the pomegranate, - Whose red is the red of the lips of Astarte; - A thousand nightingales are gathered there, - From all the gardens of lost romance; - And plots of purple and silver lillies, - More beautiful than the meadows of mirage, - Revive the flowers of Sabean queens, - And the blossoms worn by all the princesses of legend.*** - Ah, suffer me to dwell - Thereby, and forget the gilded cities of desire, - The domes of spectral gold, - That fled from horizon to horizon - Before me, and left my feet in the sinking vales and shifting - plains of the desert, - Whose waters are green with corruption, - And bitter with the dust and ashes of death. - Ah, suffer me to sleep - In the balsam-laden shadows of the palm and myrtle, - By the ever-springing fountain! - - - - -IN NOVEMBER - - - With autumn and the flaring leaves our love must end— - Ere flauntful spring shall mock thy tears and my despair - With blossoms red or pale, some April bride may wear: - Now, while the weary, grey, forgetful heavens bend - - Above the grief and languor of the dying lands, - In one last kiss shall meet and mingle and expire - The muted, last, remembering sighs of our desire; - And on my face the flower-like burden of thy hands - - Shall rest a little, and be taken tenderly, - And, ah, how lightly hence! And in thy golden eyes, - Thy love, and all the ashen glory of the skies, - Shall mingle, and as in a mirror lie for me. - - - - -SYMBOLS - - - No more of gold and marble, nor of snow, - And sunlight, and vermilion, would I make - My vision and my symbols, nor would take - The auroral flame of some prismatic floe, - Nor iris of the frail and lunar bow, - Flung on the shafted waterfalls that wake - The night’s blue slumber in a shadowy lake.*** - To body forth my fantasies, and show - Communicable mystery, I would find, - In adamantine darkness of the earth, - Metals untouched of any sun; and bring - Black azures of the nether sea to birth— - Or fetch the secret, splendid leaves, and blind, - Blue lilies of an Atlantean spring. - - - - -THE HASHISH-EATER; or, THE APOCALYPSE OF EVIL - - - Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams; - I crown me with the million-coloured sun - Of secret worlds incredible, and take - Their trailing skies for vestment, when I soar, - Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume - The spaceward-flown horizons infinite. - Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut, - The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise, - By jealous moons maleficently urged - To follow me forever; mountains horned - With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed - With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued, - Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain; - And continents of serpent-shapen trees, - With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league, - Pursue my flight through ages spurned to fire - By that supreme ascendance. Sorcerers - And evil kings predominantly armed - With scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin, whereon - Are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame, - Would stay me; and the sirens of the stars, - With foam-light songs from silver fragrance wrought, - Would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons - Where viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell, - With antic gnomes abominably wise, - Heave up their icy horns across my way: - But naught deters me from the goal ordained - By suns, and aeons, and immortal wars, - And sung by moons and motes; the goal whose name - Is all the secret of forgotten glyphs, - By sinful gods in torrid rubies writ - For ending of a brazen book; the goal - Whereat my soaring ecstacy may stand, - In amplest heavens multiplied to hold - My hordes of thunder-vested avatars, - And Promethèan armies of my thought, - That brandish claspèd levins. There I call - My memories, intolerably clad - In light the peaks of paradise may wear, - And lead the Armageddon of my dreams, - Whose instant shout of triumph is become - Immensity’s own music: For their feet - Are founded on innumerable worlds, - Remote in alien epochs, and their arms - Upraised, are columns potent to exalt - With ease ineffable the countless thrones - Of all the gods that are and gods to be, - Or bear the seats of Asmadai and Set - Above the seventh paradise. - - Supreme - In culminant omniscience manifold, - And served by senses multitudinous, - Far-posted on the shifting walls of time, - With eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields - Of utter night and chaos, I convoke - The Babel of their visions, and attend - At once their myriad witness: I behold, - In Ombos, where the fallen Titans dwell, - With mountain-builded walls, and gulfs for moat, - The secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug - Beneath an alp-like buttress; and I list, - Too late, the clang of adamantine gongs, - Dinned by their drowsy guardians, whose feet - Have felt the wasp-like sting of little knives, - Embrued with slobber of the basilisk, - Or juice of wounded upas. And I see, - In gardens of a crimson-litten world - The sacred flow’r with lips of purple flesh, - And silver-lashed, vermilion-lidded eyes - Of torpid azure; whom his furtive priests - At moonless eve in terror seek to slay, - With bubbling grails of sacrificial blood - That hide a hueless poison. And I read, - Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx, - The annuling word a spiteful demon wrote - With gall of slain chimeras; and I know - What pentacles the lunar wizards use, - That once allured the gulf-returning roc, - With ten great wings of furlèd storm, to pause - Midmost an alabaster mount; and there, - With boulder-weighted webs of dragons’-gut, - Uplift by cranes a captive giant built, - They wound the monstrous, moonquake-throbbing bird, - And plucked, from off his sabre-taloned feet, - Uranian sapphires fast in frozen blood, - With amethysts from Mars. I lean to read, - With slant-lipped mages, in an evil star, - The monstrous archives of a war that ran - Through wasted aeons, and the prophecy - Of wars renewed, that shall commemorate - Some enmity of wivern-headed kings, - Even to the brink of time. I know the blooms - Of bluish fungus, freaked with mercury, - That bloat within the craters of the moon, - And in one still, selenic hour have shrunk - To pools of slime and fetor; and I know - What clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown, - Are proffered in Uranus to their gods - By mole-eyed peoples; and the livid seed - Of some black fruit a king in Saturn ate, - Which, cast upon his tinkling palace-floor, - Took root between the burnished flags, and now - Hath mounted, and become a hellish tree, - Whose lithe and hairy branches, lined with mouths, - Net like a hundred ropes his lurching throne, - And strain at starting pillars. I behold - The slowly-thronging corals, that usurp - Some harbour of a million-masted sea, - And sun them on the league-long wharves of gold— - Bulks of enormous crimson, kraken-limbed - And kraken-headed, lifting up as crowns - The octiremes of perished emperors, - And galleys fraught with royal gems, that sailed - From a sea-deserted haven. - Swifter grow - The visions: Now a mighty city looms, - Hewn from a hill of purest cinnabar, - To domes and turrets like a sunrise thronged - With tier on tier of captive moons, half-drowned - In shifting erubescence. But whose hands - Were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought - To semblance of prodigious blooms of old, - No eremite hath lingered there to say, - And no man comes to learn: For long ago - A prophet came, warning its timid king - Against the plague of lichens that had crept - Across subverted empires, and the sand - Of wastes that Cyclopean mountains ward; - Which, slow and ineluctable, would come, - To take his fiery bastions and his fanes, - And quench his domes with greenish tetter. Now - I see a host of naked giants, armed - With horns of behemoth and unicorn, - Who wander, blinded by the clinging spells - Of hostile wizardry, and stagger on - To forests where the very leaves have eyes, - And ebonies like wrathful dragons roar - To teaks a-chuckle in the loathly gloom; - Where coiled lianas lean, with serried fangs, - From writhing palms with swollen boles that moan; - Where leeches of a scarlet moss have sucked - The eyes of some dead monster, and have crawled - To bask upon his azure-spotted spine; - Where hydra-throated blossoms hiss and sing, - Or yawn with mouths that drip a sluggish dew, - Whose touch is death and slow corrosion. Then, - I watch a war of pigmies, met by night, - With pitter of their drums of parrot’s hide, - On plains with no horizon, where a god - Might lose his way for centuries; and there, - In wreathèd light, and fulgors all convolved, - A rout of green, enormous moons ascend, - With rays that like a shivering venom run - On inch-long swords of lizard-fang. - Surveyed - From this my throne, as from a central sun, - The pageantries of worlds and cycles pass; - Forgotten splendours, dream by dream unfold, - Like tapestry, and vanish; violet suns, - Or suns of changeful iridescence, bring - Their rays about me, like the coloured lights - Imploring priests might lift to glorify - The face of some averted god; the songs - Of mystic poets in a purple world, - Ascend to me in music that is made - From unconceivèd perfumes, and the pulse - Of love ineffable; the lute-players - Whose lutes are strung with gold of the utmost moon, - Call forth delicious languors, never known - Save to their golden kings; the sorcerers - Of hooded stars inscrutable to God, - Surrender me their demon-wrested scrolls, - Inscribed with lore of monstrous alchemies, - And awful transformations.*** If I will, - I am at once the vision and the seer, - And mingle with my ever-streaming pomps, - And still abide their suzerain: I am - The neophyte who serves a nameless god, - Within whose fane the fanes of Hecatompylos - Were arks the Titan worshippers might bear, - Or flags to pave the threshold; or I am - The god himself, who calls the fleeing clouds - Into the nave where suns might congregate, - And veils the darkling mountain of his face - With fold on solemn fold; for whom the priests - Amass their monthly hecatomb of gems— - Opals that are a camel-cumbering load, - And monstrous alabraundines, won from war - With realms of hostile serpents; which arise, - Combustible, in vapours many-hued, - And myrrh-excelling perfumes. It is I, - The king, who holds with scepter-dropping hand - The helm of some great barge of chrysolite, - Sailing upon an amethystine sea - To isles of timeless summer: For the snows - Of hyperborean winter, and their winds, - Sleep in his jewel-builded capital, - Nor any charm of flame-wrought wizardry, - Nor conjured suns may rout them; so he flees, - With captive kings to urge his serried oars, - Hopeful of dales where amaranthine dawn - Hath never left the faintly sighing lote - And fields of lisping moly. Or I fare, - Impanoplied with azure diamond, - As hero of a quest Achernar lights, - To deserts filled with ever-wandering flames, - That feed upon the sullen marl, and soar - To wrap the slopes of mountains, and to leap, - With tongues intolerably lengthening, - That lick the blenchèd heavens. But there lives - (Secure as in a garden walled from wind) - A lonely flower by a placid well, - Midmost the flaring tumult of the flames, - That roar as roars the storm-possessèd sea, - Implacable forever: And within - That simple grail the blossom lifts, there lies - One drop of an incomparable dew, - Which heals the parchèd weariness of kings, - And cures the wound of wisdom. I am page - To an emperor who reigns ten thousand years, - And through his labyrinthine palace-rooms, - Through courts and colonnades and balconies - Wherein immensity itself is mazed, - I seek the golden gorget he hath lost, - On which the names of his conniving stars - Are writ in little sapphires; and I roam - For centuries, and hear the brazen clocks - Innumerably clang with such a sound - As brazen hammers make, by devils dinned - On tombs of all the dead; and nevermore - I find the gorget, but at length I find - A sealèd room whose nameless prisoner - Moans with a nameless torture, and would turn - To hell’s red rack as to a lilied couch - From that whereon they stretched him; and I find, - Prostrate upon a lotus-painted floor, - The loveliest of all beloved slaves - My emperor hath, and from her pulseless side - A serpent rises, whiter than the root - Of some venefic bloom in darkness grown, - And gazes up with green-lit eyes that seem - Like drops of cold, congealing poison.*** - - Hark! - What word was whispered in a tongue unknown, - In crypts of some impenetrable world? - Whose is the dark, dethroning secrecy - I cannot share, though I am king of suns - And king therewith of strong eternity, - Whose gnomons with their swords of shadow guard - My gates, and slay the intruder? Silence loads - The wind of ether, and the worlds are still - To hear the word that flees me. All my dreams - Fall like a rack of fuming vapours raised - To semblance by a necromant, and leave - Spirit and sense unthinkably alone, - Above a universe of shrouded stars, - And suns that wander, cowled with sullen gloom, - Like witches to a Sabbath.*** Fear is born - In crypts below the nadir, and hath crawled - Reaching the floor of space and waits for wings - To lift it upward, like a hellish worm - Fain for the flesh of seraphs. Eyes that gleam, - But are not eyes of suns or galaxies, - Gather and throng to the base of darkness; flame - Behind some black, abysmal curtain burns, - Implacable, and fanned to whitest wrath - By raisèd wings that flail the whiffled gloom, - And make a brief and broken wind that moans, - As one who rides a throbbing rack. There is - A Thing that crouches, worlds and years remote, - Whose horns a demon sharpens, rasping forth - A note to shatter the donjon-keeps of time, - And crack the sphere of crystal.*** All is dark - For ages, and my tolling heart suspends - Its clamour, as within the clutch of death, - Tightening with tense, hermetic rigours. Then, - In one enormous, million-flashing flame, - The stars unveil, the suns remove their cowls, - And beam to their responding planets; time - Is mine once more, and armies of its dreams - Rally to that insuperable throne, - Firmed on the central zenith. - - Now I seek - The meads of shining moly I had found - In some remoter vision, by a stream - No cloud hath ever tarnished; where the sun, - A gold Narcissus, loiters evermore - Above his golden image: But I find - A corpse the ebbing water will not keep, - With eyes like sapphires that have lain in hell, - And felt the hissing embers; and the flow’rs - About me turn to hooded serpents, swayed - By flutes of devils in a hellish dance, - Meet for the nod of Satan, when he reigns - Above the raging Sabbath, and is wooed - By sarabands of witches. But I turn - To mountains guarding with their horns of snow - The source of that befoulèd rill, and seek - A pinnacle where none but eagles climb, - And they with failing pennons. But in vain - I flee, for on that pylon of the sky, - Some curse hath turned the unprinted snow to flame— - Red fires that curl and cluster to my tread, - Trying the summit’s narrow cirque. And now, - I see a silver python far beneath— - Vast as a river that a fiend hath witched, - And forced to flow remèant in its course - To fountains whence it issued. Rapidly - It winds from slope to crumbling slope, and fills - Ravines and chasmal gorges, till the crags - Totter with coil on coil incumbent. Soon - It hath entwined the pinnacle I keep, - And gapes with a fanged, unfathomable maw, - Wherein great Typhon, and Enceladus, - Were orts of daily glut. But I am gone, - For at my call a hippogriff hath come, - And firm between his thunder-beating wings, - I mount the sheer cerulean walls of noon, - And see the earth, a spurnèd pebble, fall - Lost in the fields of nether stars—and seek - A planet where the outwearied wings of time - Might pause and furl for respite, or the plumes - Of death be stayed, and loiter in reprieve - Above some deathless lily: For therein, - Beauty hath found an avatar of flow’rs— - Blossoms that clothe it as a coloured flame, - From peak to peak, from pole to sullen pole, - And turn the skies to perfume. There I find - A lonely castle, calm and unbeset, - Save by the purple spears of amaranth, - And tender-sworded iris. Walls upbuilt - Of flushèd marble, wonderful with rose, - And domes like golden bubbles, and minarets - That take the clouds as coronal—these are mine, - For voiceless looms the peaceful barbican, - And the heavy-teethed portcullis hangs aloft - As if to smile a welcome. So I leave - My hippogriff to crop the magic meads, - And pass into a court the lilies hold, - And tread them to a fragrance that pursues - To win the portico, whose columns, carved - Of lazuli and amber, mock the palms - Of bright, Aidennic forests—capitalled - With fronds of stone fretted to airy lace, - Enfolding drupes that seem as tawny clusters - Of breasts of unknown houris; and convolved - With vines of shut and shadowy-leavèd flow’rs, - Like the dropt lids of women that endure - Some loin-dissolving rapture. Through a door - Enlaid with lilies twined luxuriously, - I enter, dazed and blinded with the sun, - And hear, in gloom that changing colours cloud, - A chuckle sharp as crepitating ice, - Upheaved and cloven by shoulders of the damned - Who strive in Antenora. When my eyes - Undazzle, and the cloud of colour fades, - I find me in a monster-guarded room, - Where marble apes with wings of griffins crowd - On walls an evil sculptor wrought, and beasts - Wherein the sloth and vampire-bat unite, - Pendulous by their toes of tarnished bronze, - Usurp the shadowy interval of lamps - That hang from ebon arches. Like a ripple, - Borne by the wind from pool to sluggish pool - In fields where wide Cocytus flows his bound, - A crackling smile around that circle runs, - And all the stone-wrought gibbons stare at me - With eyes that turn to glowing coals. A fear - That found no name in Babel, flings me on, - Breathless and faint with horror, to a hall - Within whose weary, self-reverting round, - The languid curtains, heavier than palls, - Unnumerably depict a weary king, - Who fain would cool his jewel-crusted hands - In lakes of emerald evening, or the fields - Of dreamless poppies pure with rain. I flee - Onward, and all the shadowy curtains shake - With tremors of a silken-sighing mirth, - And whispers of the innumerable king, - Breathing a tale of ancient pestilence, - Whose very words are vile contagion. Then - I reach a room where caryatids, - Carved in the form of tall, voluptuous Titan women, - Surround a throne of flowering ebony - Where creeps a vine of crystal. On the throne, - There lolls a wan, enormous Worm, whose bulk, - Tumid with all the rottenness of kings, - O’erflows its arms with fold on creasèd fold - Of fat obscenely bloating. Open-mouthed - He leans, and from his throat a score of tongues, - Depending like to wreaths of torpid vipers, - Drivel with phosphorescent slime, that runs - Down all his length of soft and monstrous folds, - And creeping among the flow’rs of ebony, - Lends them the life of tiny serpents. Now, - Ere the Horror ope those red and lashless slits - Of eyes that draw the gnat and midge, I turn, - And follow down a dusty hall, whose gloom, - Lined by the statues with their mighty limbs, - Ends in a golden-roofed balcony - Sphering the flowered horizon. - Ere my heart - Hath hushed the panic tumult of its pulses, - I listen, from beyond the horizon’s rim, - A mutter faint as when the far simoon, - Mounting from unknown deserts, opens forth, - Wide as the waste, those wings of torrid night - That fling the doom of cities from their folds, - And musters in its van a thousand winds, - That with disrooted palms for besoms, rise - And sweep the sands to fury. As the storm, - Approaching, mounts and loudens to the ears - Of them that toil in fields of sesame, - So grows the mutter, and a shadow creeps - Above the gold horizon, like a dawn - Of darkness climbing sunward. Now they come, - A Sabbath of abominable shapes, - Led by the fiends and lamiae of worlds - That owned my sway aforetime! Cockatrice, - Python, tragelaphus, leviathan, - Chimera, martichoras, behemoth, - Geryon and sphinx, and hydra, on my ken - Arise as might some Afrite-builded city, - Consummate in the lifting of a lash, - With thundrous domes and sounding obelisks, - And towers of night and fire alternate! Wings - Of white-hot stone along the hissing wind, - Bear up the huge and furnace-hearted beasts - Of hells beyond Rutilicus; and things - Whose lightless length would mete the gyre of moons— - Born from the caverns of a dying sun, - Uncoil to the very zenith, half disclosed - From gulfs below the horizon; octopi - Like blazing moons with countless arms of fire, - Climb from the seas of ever-surging flame - That roll and roar through planets unconsumed, - Beating on coasts of unknown metals; beasts - That range the mighty worlds of Alioth, rise, - Aforesting the heavens with multitudinous horns, - Within whose maze the winds are lost; and borne - On cliff-like brows of plunging scolopendras, - The shell-wrought tow’rs of ocean-witches loom, - And griffin-mounted gods, and demons throned - On sable dragons, and the cockodrills - That bear the spleenful pygmies on their backs; - And blue-faced wizards from the worlds of Saiph, - On whom Titanic scorpions fawn; and armies - That move with fronts reverted from the foe, - And strike athwart their shoulders at the shapes - Their shields reflect in crystal; and eidola - Fashioned within unfathomable caves - By hands of eyeless peoples; and the blind - And worm-shaped monsters of a sunless world, - With krakens from the ultimate abyss, - And Demogorgons of the outer dark, - Arising, shout with multitudinous thunders, - And threatening me with dooms ineffable - In words whereat the heavens leap to flame, - Advance on the magic palace! Thrown before, - For league on league, their blasting shadows blight - And eat like fire the amaranthine meads, - Leaving an ashen desert! In the palace, - I hear the apes of marble shriek and howl. - And all the women-shapen columns moan, - Babbling with unknown terror. In my fear, - A monstrous dread unnamed in any hell, - I rise, and flee with the fleeing wind for wings, - And in a trice the magic palace reels, - And spiring to a single tow’r of flame, - Goes out, and leaves nor shard nor ember! Flown - Beyond the world, upon that fleeing wind, - I reach the gulf’s irrespirable verge, - Where fails the strongest storm for breath and fall, - Supportless, through the nadir-plunged gloom, - Beyond the scope and vision of the sun, - To other skies and systems. In a world - Deep-wooded with the multi-coloured fungi, - That soar to semblance of fantastic palms, - I fall as falls the meteor-stone, and break - A score of trunks to powder. All unhurt, - I rise, and through the illimitable woods, - Among the trees of flimsy opal, roam, - And see their tops that clamber, hour by hour, - To touch the suns of iris. Things unseen, - Whose charnel breath informs the tideless air - With spreading pools of fetor, follow me - Elusive past the ever-changing palms; - And pittering moths, with wide and ashen wings, - Flit on before, and insects ember-hued, - Descending, hurtle through the gorgeous gloom, - And quench themselves in crumbling thickets. Heard - Far-off, the gong-like roar of beasts unknown - Resounds at measured intervals of time, - Shaking the riper trees to dust, that falls - In clouds of acrid perfume, stifling me - Beneath a pall of iris. - Now the palms - Grow far apart and lessen momently - To shrubs a dwarf might topple. Over them - I see an empty desert, all ablaze - With amethysts and rubies, and the dust - Of garnets or carnelians. On I roam, - Treading the gorgeous grit, that dazzles me - With leaping waves of endless rutilance, - Whereby the air is turned to a crimson gloom, - Through which I wander, blind as any Kobold; - Till underfoot the griding sands give place - To stone or metal, with a massive ring - More welcome to mine ears than golden bells, - Or tinkle of silver fountains. When the gloom - Of crimson lifts, I stand upon the edge - Of a broad black plain of adamant, that reaches, - Level as a windless water, to the verge - Of all the world; and through the sable plain, - A hundred streams of shattered marble run, - And streams of broken steel, and streams of bronze, - Like to the ruin of all the wars of time, - To plunge, with clangour of timeless cataracts, - Adown the gulfs eternal. - So I follow, - Between a river of steel and a river of bronze, - With ripples loud and tuneless as the clash - Of a million lutes; and come to the precipice - From which they fall, and make the mighty sound - Of a million swords that meet a million shields, - Or din of spears and armour in the wars - Of all the worlds and aeons: Far beneath, - They fall, through gulfs and cycles of the void, - And vanish like a stream of broken stars, - Into the nether darkness; nor the gods - Of any sun, nor demons of the gulf, - Will dare to know what everlasting sea - Is fed thereby, and mounts forevermore - With mighty tides unebbing. - Lo, what cloud, - Or night of sudden and supreme eclipse, - Is on the suns of opal? At my side, - The rivers rail with a wan and ghostly gleam, - Through darkness falling as the night that falls - From mighty spheres extinguished! Turning now, - I see, betwixt the desert and the suns, - The poised wings of all the dragon-rout, - Far-flown in black occlusion thousand-fold - Through stars, and deeps, and devastated worlds, - Upon my trail of terror! Griffins, rocs, - And sluggish, dark chimeras, heavy-winged - After the ravin of dispeopled lands, - With harpies, and the vulture-birds of hell— - Hot from abominable feasts and fain - To cool their beaks and talons in my blood— - All, all have gathered, and the wingless rear, - With rank on rank of foul, colossal Worms, - Like pillars of embattled night and flame, - Looms on the wide horizon! From the van, - I hear the shriek of wyvers, loud and shrill - As tempests in a broken fane, and roar - Of sphinxes, like the unrelenting toll - Of bells from tow’rs infernal. Cloud on cloud, - They arch the zenith, and a dreadful wind - Falls from them like the wind before the storm. - And in the wind my cloven garment streams, - And flutters in the face of all the void, - Even as flows a flaffing spirit, lost - On the Pit’s undying tempest! Louder grows - The thunder of the streams of stone and bronze.— - Redoubled with the roar of torrent wings, - Inseparably mingled. Scarce I keep - My footing, in the gulfward winds of fear, - And mighty thunders, beating to the void - In sea-like waves incessant; and would flee - With them, and prove the nadir-founded night - Where fall the streams of ruin; but when I reach - The verge, and seek through sun-defeating gloom, - To measure with my gaze the dread descent, - I see a tiny star within the depths— - A light that stays me, while the wings of doom - Convene their thickening thousands: For the star - Increases, taking to its hueless orb, - With all the speed of horror-changèd dreams - The light as of a million million moons; - And floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed, - It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face, - That fills the void and fills the universe, - And bloats against the limits of the world - With lips of flame that open.**** - - - - -THE SORROW OF THE WINDS - - - O winds that pass uncomforted - Through all the peacefulness of spring, - And tell the trees your sorrowing, - That they must mourn till ye are fled! - - Think ye the Tyrian distance holds - The crystal of unquestioned sleep? - That those forgetful purples keep - No veiled, contentious greens and golds? - - Half with communicated grief, - Half that they are not free to pass - With you across the flickering grass, - Mourns each inclined bough and leaf. - - And I, with soul disquieted, - Shall find within the haunted spring - No peace, till your strange sorrowing - Is down the Tyrian distance fled. - - - - -ARTEMIS - - - In the green and flowerless garden I have dreamt, - Lying beneath perennial moons apart, - Whose cypress-builded bowr’s - And ivy-plighted myrtles none shall part; - - In the funereal maze of larch and laurel, - Across white lawns, athwart the spectral mountains, - Seen through the sighing haze - Of all the high and moon-suspended fountains; - - With feet enshaded by the fruitless green - Of summer trees that bear no summer blossom; - With wintry lusters laid - Upon the mounded marble of thy bosom, - - Thou dost await, O mournful, enigmatic - Image of love-bewildered Artemis, - Whose tender lips too late, - Or all too soon, have sought the wounding kiss. - - - - -LOVE IS NOT YOURS, LOVE IS NOT MINE - - - Love is not yours, love is not mine: - It is the tranquil twilight heaven - Through which our pauseless feet are driven - Into the vast and desert noon. - - Love is not mine, love is not yours: - It is a flying fire that passes, - Perishing on the blind morasses, - After the frail and perished moon. - - - - -THE CITY IN THE DESERT - - - In a lost land, that only dreams have known, - Where flaming suns walk naked and alone; - Among horizons bright as molten brass, - And glowing heavens like furnaces of glass, - It rears, with dome and tower manifold, - Rich as a dawn of amarant and gold, - Or gorgeous as the Phoenix, born of fire, - And soaring from an opalescent pyre, - Sheer to the zenith. Like some anademe - Of Titan jewels turned to flame and dream, - The city crowns the far horizon-light, - Over the flowered meads of damassin.*** - A desert isle of madreperl! wherein - The thurifer and opal-fruited palm, - And heaven-thronging minarets becalm - The seas of azure wind.**** - -NOTE: These lines were remembered out of a dream, and are given -verbatim. - - - - -THE MELANCHOLY POOL - - - Marked by that priesthood of the Night’s misrule, - The shadow-cowled, imprecatory trees— - Cypress that guarded woodland secrecies - And graves that waited the delaying ghoul, - Nathless I neared the melancholy pool, - Chief care of all, but closelier sentinelled - By those whose roots were deepest in dead Eld. - Where the thwart-woven boughs were wet and cool, - As with a mist of poison, I drew near, - To mark the tired stars peer dimly down - Through riven branches from the height of space, - And shudder in those waters with quick fear, - Where in black deeps the pale moon seemed to drown— - A haggard girl, with dead, despairing face. - - - - -THE MIRRORS OF BEAUTY - - - Beauty hath many mirrors: multifold - In ocean, or the foam, the gem, the dew, - Or well and rivulet, her eyes renew - With moon or sun their glories bright or cold,— - Whether in nights the ruby planets hold, - Or with the sombre light and icy hue - Of skies Decembral, or the autumn’s blue, - Or dawn or evening of the vernal gold. - - Often, upon the solitary sea, - She lieth, ere the wind shall gather breath— - One with the reflex of infinity. - In pools profounder for the twilight sky, - Her vision dwells, or in the poet’s eye, - Or the black crystal of the eyes of Death. - - - - -WINTER MOONLIGHT - - - The silence of the silver night - Lies visibly upon the pines; - In marble flame the moon declines - Where spectral mountains dream in light. - - And pale as with eternal sleep, - The enchanted valleys, far and strange, - Extend forever without change - Beneath the veiling splendours deep. - - Carven of steel or fretted stone, - One stark and leafless autumn tree - With shadows made of ebony, - Leans on the moon-ward field alone. - - - - -TO THE BELOVED - - - Green suns, and suns of garnet I have known— - Turning, with suns that mock the sapphire-gem, - The constellated moons that mirror them - To ever-changing opals. On the flown - Horizons I have followed, all alone, - To meadows of mirage the deserts hem, - And sought to break the ghostly, golden stem - Of roses of illusion, briefly blown - By evanescent waters. One by one, - The outward ways of wonder I have trod - Through alien lives ineffable. But none - Hath held the troublous marvel and surprise - That gleams and trembles in thy slightest nod, - Or sleeps between thy eyelids and thine eyes. - - - - -REQUIESCAT - - - What was Love’s worth, - Who lived with the roses?— - Love that is earth, - And with earth reposes! - - What was Love’s wonder?— - Scent of the flow’rs - After the thunder, - Thunder, and show’rs! - - What were the breathless - Words that he said?— - Love that was deathless, - Love that is dead! - - * * * * * - - Echo hath taken - The song, and flown; - None shall awaken - Music and moan. - - Buds and the flower, - All that Love found, - Last but an hour - Strewn on his mound. - - - - -MIRAGE - - - Deem ye the veiling vision will abide— - The marvel, and the glamour, and the dream, - Which lies in light upon the barren world? - - * * * * * - - The wings of Phoenix towering to the sun, - Nor opals, nor the morning foam, may hold - The hueful flame that as from faery moons - Is mirrored on the sand; where many a time, - From fields that hem with golden asphodel - A river like a dragon coiled in light, - Rise to the noon the hovering minarets - And soaring walls of cities Ilion-like, - Till the dim winds are hung with palaces - Of orient madreperl. - Forever lost— - Like sunset on a land of old romance,— - The splendour fails, and leaves the traveller - In endless deserts flaming to the day. - - - - -INHERITANCE - - - On all the sovereignty thine eyes obtain, - Thy grant of vision from the royal sun, - And all thine appanage of lordly dream, - The Dust, wherewith the worm is parcener, - Waits with perennial claim, nor will resign - Its right in thee: All glories and all gleams, - The seven splendours that inform the light, - And beauties immemorial as the moon, - Robing the barren world—all which thine eyes - Hold for inheritance, at length shall fill - The blindness and oblivion of the grave, - And leave it dark.**** - - With dustiness and night - Upon thy mouth of starry proud desire, - With slumber for thy dreams, thou wilt repose, - Nor startle when the lazy, loitering Worm - Is slow to leave the tavern of thy brain. - - - - -AUTUMNAL - - - In all the pleasances where Love was lord, - Blossom the mournful immortelles alone; - The fallen roses crumble, and are blown, - A snow of red, about the barren sward. - - The misty sun is grown a dimmer gold: - Only the leaves, the leaves forever seem - To tell and treasure, in a gorgeous dream, - The aureate fervour of the dawns of old. - - Only for us remains the memory - Of sultry moons and summer suns that were; - And we have found, where fallen roses stir, - The immortelles that flower mournfully. - - - - -CHANT OF AUTUMN - - - Like the voice of a golden star, - Heard from afar, - Perishing beauty calls - Out of the mist and rain; - Like the song of a silver wind, - When the night is blind, - Murmuring music falls, - Never to rise again. - - Voice of the leaves that die, - Whisper and sigh - Of ruinous gardens waning - Rose by ungathered rose! - Dolour of pines immortal, - That guard the portal - Of a lonely mead retaining - Blossoms that no man knows! - - Voices of love and the autumn sun— - In my heart ye are one! - Fairer the petals that fall, - Dearer the beauty that dies, - And the pyres of autumn burning, - Than a thousand springs returning.*** - O, perishing loves that call - In my heart and the hollow skies! - - - - -ECHO OF MEMNON - - - I wandered ere the dream was done - Where over Nilus’ nenuphars, - With all its ears of quivering stars, - The darkness listened for the sun. - - Ere shadows were, ere night was gone, - I found the one whom suns had sought, - And waiting at his feet, methought - Had speech with Memnon in the dawn.**** - - Sad as the last, lamenting star, - He sang, and clear as morning’s gold: - Unto his voice I saw unfold - The hesitant, pale nenuphar. - - But dolorous like the peal of dooms, - And proclamation of the night, - The waste returned that voice of light - With echo from its hollow tombs! - - - - -TWILIGHT ON THE SNOW - - - Before the hill’s high altar bowed - The trees are Druids, weird and white, - Facing the vision of the light - With ancient lips to silence vowed. - - No certain sound the woods aver, - Nor motion save of formless wings— - Filled with faint twilight flutterings, - With thronging gloom, and shadow-stir. - - And hidden in a hollow dell, - Lie all the winds that magic trees - Have lulled with crystal wizardries, - And bound about with Merlin-spell. - - - - -IMAGE - - - Calm as a long-forgotten marble god who smiles, - Colossal, in the grim serenity of stone, - Upon the broken pillars lying all alone, - Athwart the horizon’s infinite and yellow miles; - - Whom neither desert darkness nor the desert noon, - Nor dawns that render terrible the bare dead land, - Nor winds that wrap his mighty form in palls of sand, - Nor the Medusa of the dumb and stony moon, - - Shall evermore dismay, nor lion, nor the lynx, - With silken-sheathèd claws, and eyes of golden glede; - Nor any griffin, from the gates of treasure freed - To roam the gulf, nor any wild and wandering sphinx:— - - Even thus, amid the waste of all fair things that were, - Of high marmoreal dreams immense and overthrown, - I wait forever, and about my face is blown - The sand of crumbling cenotaph and sepulcher. - - - - -THE REFUGE OF BEAUTY - - - From regions of the sun’s half-dreamt decay, - All day the cruel rain strikes darkly down; - And from the night thy fatal stars shall frown— - Beauty, wilt thou abide this night and day? - - Roofless, at portals dark and desperate, - Wilt thou a shelter unrefused implore, - And past the tomb’s too-hospitable door, - Evade thy lover, in eluding Hate? - - * * * * * - - Alas, for what have I to offer thee?— - Chill halls of mind, dark rooms of memory - Where thou shalt dwell with woes and thoughts infirm; - - This rumour-throngèd citadel of Sense, - Trembling before some nameless Imminence; - And fellow-guestship with the glutless Worm. - - - - -NIGHTMARE - - - As though a thousand vampires, from the day - Fleeing unseen, oppressed that nightly deep, - The straitening and darkened skies of sleep - Closed on the dreamland dale in which I lay. - - Eternal tensions numbed the wings of Time, - While through the unending narrow ways I sought - Awakening; up precipitous gloom I thought - To reach the dawn, far-pinnacled sublime. - - Rejected at the closen gates of light - I turned, and down new dreams and shadows fled, - Where beetling Shapes of veiled, colossal dread - With Gothic wings enormous arched the night. - - - - -THE MUMMY - - - From out the light of many a mightier day, - From Pharaonic splendour, Memphian gloom, - And from the night aeonian of the tomb - They brought him forth, to meet the modern ray,— - Upon his brow the unbroken seal of clay, - While gods have gone to a forgotten doom, - And desolation and the dust assume - Temple and cot immingling in decay. - - From out the everlasting womb sublime - Of cyclopean death, within a land - Of tombs and cities rotting in the sun, - He is reborn to mock the might of time, - While kings have built against Oblivion - With walls and columns of the windy sand. - - - - -FORGETFULNESS - - - My life is less than any broken glass.**** - My long and weary love, thy lips unwon— - All, all is turned to mere oblivion, - With the grey flowers and the fallen grass - Of yesteryear. And on the winds that pass, - Thy music and thy memory are one; - For thy wan face, desired above the sun, - Only some languid echo saith Alas.*** - - Love is no more, immemorably flown - As any leaf or petal.***But to me, - The very fields are still, and strange, and lone: - The forest and the garden fail for breath, - Where the dumb heavens hold implacably - An autumn like the marble sleep of death. - - - - -FLAMINGOES - - - On skies of tropic evening, broad and beryl-green, - Above a tranquil sea of molten malachite, - With flare of scarlet wings, in long and level flight, - The soundless, fleet flamingoes pass to isles unseen. - - They pass and disappear, where darkening palms indent - The horizon, underneath some high and tawny star— - Lost in the sunset gulfs of glowing cinnabar, - Where sinks the painted moon, with prows of orpiment. - - - - -THE CHIMAERA - - - O, who will slay the last chimaera, Time? - Though Love and Death have many a cunning dart— - Despite of these, and close-wrought webs of Art, - And Slumber, with a slow Lethean lime— - - Still, still, he lives; and though thy feet attain - The lunar peaks of ice and crystal, he, - Some night of agonized eternity - With brazen teeth shall gnaw thy fretted brain. - - Gorged with the dust of thrones and fanes destroyed— - With lidless eyes like moons of adamant, - And vaulted mouth emportalling the void, - - He crouches like a passive sphinx before - Some temple gate, or, grinning, moves to grant - Thine entrance at the monarch’s golden door. - - - - -SATAN UNREPENTANT - - - Lost from those archangelic thrones that star, - Fadeless and fixed, heaven’s light of azure bliss; - Rejected of His splendour and depressed - Beyond the birth of the first sun, and lower - Than the last star’s decline, I here endure, - Abased, majestic, fallen, beautiful, - And unregretful in the doubted dark, - Throneless, that greatens chaos-ward, albeit - From chanting stars that throng the nave of night - Lost echoes wander here, and of his praise, - With ringing moons for cymbals dinned afar, - And shouted from the flaming mouths of suns. - - The shadows of impalpable blank deeps— - Deep upon deep accumulate—close down, - Around my head concentered, while above, - In the lit, loftier blue, star after star - Spins endless orbits betwixt me and heaven; - And at my feet mysterious Chaos breaks, - Abrupt, immeasurable. Round His throne - Now throbs the rhythmic resonance of suns, - Incessant, perfect, music infinite: - I, throneless, hear the discords of the dark, - And roar of ruin uncreate, than which - Some vast cacophony of dragons, heard - In wasted worlds, were purer melody. - - The universe His tyranny constrains - Turns on: In old and consummated gulfs - The stars that wield His judgment wait at hand, - And in new deeps Apocalyptic suns - Prepare His coming: Lo, His mighty whim - To rear and mar, goes forth enormously - In nights and constellations! Darkness hears - Enragèd suns that bellow down the deep - God’s ravenous and insatiable will; - And He is strong with change, and rideth forth - In whirlwind clothed, with thunders and with doom, - To the red stars: God’s throne is reared of change; - Its myriad and successive hands support - Like music His omnipotence, that fails - If mercy or if justice interrupt - The sequence of that tyranny, begun - Upon injustice, and doomed evermore - To stand thereby. - - I, who with will not less - Than His, but lesser strength, opposed to Him - This unsubmissive brow and lifted mind, - He holds remote, in nullity and night - Doubtful between old Chaos and the deeps - Betrayed by Time to vassalage. Methinks - All tyrants fear whom they may not destroy, - And I, that am of essence one with His, - Though less in measure, He may not destroy, - And but withstands in gulfs of dark suspense, - A secret dread forever: For God knows - This quiet will irrevocably set - Against His own, and this mine old revolt - Yet stubborn, and confirmed eternally. - And with the hatred born of fear, and fed - Ever thereby, God hates me, and His gaze - Sees the bright menace of mine eyes afar, - Through midnight, and the innumerable blaze - Of servile suns: Lo, strong in tyranny, - The despot trembles that I stand opposed! - For fain am I to hush the anguished cries - Of Substance, broken on the racks of change, - Of Matter tortured into life; and God, - Knowing this, dreads evermore some huge mishap— - That in the vigils of Omnipotence, - Once careless, I shall enter heaven, or He, - Himself, with weight of some unwonted act, - Thoughtless perturb His balanced tyranny, - To mine advance of watchful aspiration. - - With rumored thunder and enormous groan— - (Burden of sound that heavens overborne - Let slip from deep to deep, even to this, - Where climb the huge cacophonies of Chaos) - God’s universe moves on. Confirmed in pride, - In patient majesty serene and strong, - I wait the dreamt, inevitable hour, - Fulfilled of orbits ultimate, when God, - Whether through His mischance or mine own deed, - Or rise of other and extremer Strength, - Shall vanish, and the lightened universe - No more remember Him than Silence does - An ancient thunder. I know not if these, - Mine all-indomitable eyes, shall see - A maimed and dwindled Godhead cast among - The stars of His creating, and beneath - The unnumbered rush of swift and shining feet, - Trodden into night; or mark the fiery breath - Of His infuriate suns blaze forth upon - And scorch that coarsened Essence; or His flame, - Drawn through the windy halls of nothingness, - A mightier comet, roar and redden down, - Portentous unto Chaos. I but wait, - In strong majestic patience equable, - That hour of consummation and of doom, - Of justice, and rebellion justified. - - - - -THE ABYSS TRIUMPHANT - - - The force of suns had waned beyond recall. - Chaos was re-established over all, - Where lifeless atoms through forgetful deeps - Fled unrelated, cold, immusical. - - Above the tumult heaven alone endured; - Long since the bursting walls of hell had poured - Demon and damned to peace erstwhile denied, - Within the Abyss God’s might had not immured. - - (He could but thwart it with creative mace.***) - And now it rose above the heavenly base, - Mordant at pillars rotten through and through - Of Matter’s last, most firm abiding-place. - - Bastion and minaret began to nod, - Till all the pile, unmindful of His rod, - Dissolved in thunder, and the void Abyss - Caught like a quicksand at the feet of God! - - - - -THE MOTES - - - I saw a universe to-day: - Through a disclosing bar of light - The motes were whirled in gleaming flight - That briefly dawned and sank away. - - Each had its swift and tiny noon; - In orbit-streams I marked them flit, - Successively revealed and lit. - The sunlight paled and shifted soon. - - - - -THE MEDUSA OF DESPAIR - - - I may not mask forever with the grace - Of woven flow’rs thine eyes of staring stone: - Ere fatally I front thee, fully known - The guarded horror of thy haggard face, - Thy visage carven from the heart long dead - Of some white, frozen star; ere thou astound - My life to thine own likeness, and confound— - Depart, and curse more kindred things instead: - - Triumphant, through what realms of elder doom - Where even the swart vans of Time are stunned, - Seek thou some fit, Cimmerian citadel, - And mighty cities, desolate, unsunned, - Whose walls of horrent and enormous gloom - Make sharp the horizon of the light of hell! - - - - -LAUS MORTIS - - - The imperishable phantoms, Love and Fame, - Nor Beauty, burning on the mist and mire - A fugitive uncapturable fire, - Nor God, that is a darkness and a name— - Not these, not these my choric dreams acclaim, - But Death, the last and ultimate desire, - Great Death I praise with litany and lyre, - And sombre pray’r implacably the same. - - O, incommunicable hope that lies - Deep in despair, as tapers that illume - Some fearful fane’s arcanic, sacred gloom! - O, solace of all weary hearts and wise!— - The dream which Satan hath for anodyne, - Which is to God a sweet and secret wine. - - - - -THE GHOUL AND THE SERAPH - - -Scene: A cemetery, by moonlight. The Ghoul emerges from the shade of a -cypress, and sings. - - THE SONG - Ho, ho, the Pest is on the wing! - Ha, ha, the sweet and crimson foam - Upon the lips of churl and king! - No worm but hath a feastful home: - Ha, ha, the Pest is on the wing! - - Ho, ho, his kiss incarnadines - The brows of maiden, queen and whore! - The nun to him her cheek resigns; - Wan lips were never kissed before - His ancient kiss incarnadines. - - Good cheer to thee, white worm of death! - The priest within the brothel dies, - The bawd hath sickened from his breath! - In grave half-dug the digger lies: - Good cheer to thee, white worm of death! - -The Seraph appears from among the trees, half-walking, half-flying with -wings whose iris the moonlight has rendered faint, and pauses abruptly -at sight of the Ghoul. - - THE SERAPH - What gardener in crudded fields of hell, - Or scullion of the Devil’s house, art thou— - To whom the filth of Malebolge clings, - And reek of horrid refuse? Thou art gnurled - And black as any Kobold from the mines - Where demons delve for orichalch and steel - To forge the racks of Satan! On thy face, - Detestable and evil as might haunt - The last delirium of a dying hag, - Or necromancer’s madness, fall thy locks, - Like sodden reeds that trail in Acheron - From shores of night and horror! And thy hands, - Like roots of cypresses uptorn in storm - That still retain their grisly provender, - Make the glad wine and manna of the skies - Turn to a qualmish sickness in my veins! - - THE GHOUL - And who art thou?—Some white-faced fool of God, - With wings that emulate the giddy bird, - And bloodless mouth forever filled with psalms - In lieu of honest victuals!*** Askest thou - My name? I am the Ghoul Necromalor: - In new-made graves I delve for sustenance, - As Man within his turnip-fields: I take - For table the uprooted slab, that bears - The words, “In Pace;” black and curdled blood - Of cadavers is all my cupless wine— - Slow-drunken, as the dainty vampire drinks - From pulses oped in never-ending sleep. - - THE SERAPH - O! foulness born as of the ninefold curse - Of dragon-mouthed Apollyon, plumed with darts, - And armed with horns of incandescent bronze! - O, dark as Satan’s nightmare, or the fruit - Of Belial’s rape on hell’s black hippogriff!*** - What knowest THOU of Paradise, where grow - The gardens of the manna-laden myrrh, - And lotos never known to Ulysses, - Whose fruit provides our long and sateless banquet? - Where boundless fields, unfurrowed and unsown, - Supply for God’s own appanage their foison - Of amber-hearted grain, and sesame - Sweeter than nard the Persian air compounds - With frankincense from isles of India? - Where flame-leaved forests infinitely teem - With palms of tremulous opal, from whose top - Ambrosial honeys fall forevermore - In rains of nacred light! Where rise and rise - Terrace on hyacinthine terrace, hills - Hung with the grapes that drip cerulean wine, - One draught whereof dissolves eternity - In bliss oblivious and supernal dream! - - THE GHOUL - To all, the meat their bellies most commend, - To all, the according wine: For me, I wot, - The cates whereof thou braggest were as wind - In halls where men had feasted yesterday, - Or furbished bones the full hyena leaves: - Tiger and pig have their apportioned glut, - Nor lacks the shark his provender; the bird - Is nourished with the worm of charnels; man, - Or the grey wolf, will slay and eat the bird, - Till wolf and man be carrion for the worm. - What wouldst thou? As the elfin lily does, - Or as the Paphian myrtle, pink with love, - I draw me from the unreluctant dead - The rightful meat my belly’s law demands.*** - Eaters of death are all: Life shall not live, - Save that its food be death; No atomy - In any star, or heaven’s remotest moon, - But hath a billion billion times been made - The food of insatiable life, and food - Of death insatiate: For all is change— - Change, that hath wrought the chancre and the rose, - And wrought the star, and wrought the sapphire-stone, - And lit great altars, and the eyes of lions— - Change, that hath made the very gods from slime - Drawn from the pits of Python, and will fling - Gods and their builded heavens back again - To slime. The fruits of archangelic light - Thou braggest of, and grapes of azure wine, - Have been the dung of dragons, and the blood - Of toads in Phlegethon; each particle - That is their splendour, clomb in separate ways, - Through suns, and worlds, and cycles infinite— - Through burning brume of systems unbegun, - Or manes of long-haired comets, that have lashed - The night of space to fury and to fire; - And in the core of cold and lightless stars, - And in immalleable metals deep. - Each atomy hath slept, or known the slime - Of Cyclopean oceans turned to air - Before the suns of Ophinchus rose; - And they have known the interstellar night, - And they have lain at root of sightless flowr’s - In worlds without a sun, or at the heart - Of monstrous-eyed and panting flow’rs of flesh, - Or aeon-blooming amaranths of stone: - And they have ministered within the brains - Of sages and magicians, and have served - To swell the pulse of kings or conquerors, - And have been privy to the hearts of queens. - -The Ghoul turns his back on the Seraph, and moves away singing. - - THE SONG - O condor, keep thy mountain-ways, - Above the long Andean lands! - Gier-eagle, guard the eastern sands - Where the forsaken camel strays! - Beetle and worm and I will ward - The feastful graves of lout and lord. - - O, warm and bright the blood that lies - Upon the wounded lion’s trail! - Hyena, laugh, and jackal, wail - And ring him round, who turns and dies! - Beetle and worm and I will ward - The feastful graves of lout and lord. - - Raven and kestrel, kite and crow, - The swart patrol of northern lands, - Gather your noisy, bickering bands— - The reindeer bleeds upon the snow! - Beetle and worm and I will ward - The feastful graves of lout and lord. - - Arms of a wanton girl are good, - Or hands of harp-player and knight! - Breasts of the nun be sweet and white, - Sweet is the festive friar’s blood! - Beetle and worm and I will ward - The feastful graves of lout and lord. - - - - -AT SUNRISE - - - The moon declines in lonely gold - Among the stars of ashen-grey— - Veiling the pallors of decay - With clouds and glories, fold on fold. - - Within a crystal interlude, - Stillness and twilight rest awhile - Ere the bright snows, illumined, smile, - From peaks where sullen purples brood; - - And from the low Favonian bourn, - A light wind blows so dulcetly - It seems the futile silver sigh - Breathed by the lingering moon forlorn. - - - - -THE LAND OF EVIL STARS - - - ’Neath blue days, and gold, and green, - Blooms the glorious land serene,— - Flaming shields of dawns between; - And the rapt white flowers suffice - To illume - With their bright eyes - Fluctuant ecstatic gloom - ’Twixt the fallen emerald sun, - And the unrisen azure one. - - But the season of the night - Comes in all the suns’ despite; - And, ah, gorgeous then their sorrows, - At departure into morrows - Of far, other lands forgot— - Until now remembered not, - For the lovelier flow’rs of this, - And each lake’s pure lucency; - And recalled regretfully, - Regretfully, for leaving THIS. - - In the star-possessèd night - The land knows another light— - All the small and evil rays - Of the sorcerous orbs ablaze - With ecstatical, intense - Hate and still malevolence— - Dwelling on the fields below - From the ascendancy of even, - Till the suns, re-entering heaven, - Glorify with triple glow - The dim flowers smitten low. - - Ah, not cold, or kind, as ours, - The stars of those remotest hours! - Peace and pallor of the flow’rs - They have fevered, they have marred, - With the poison of their light, - With distillèd bale and blight - Of a red, accursed regard: - All the toil of sunlight hours - They undo - With their wild eyes— - Eldritch and ecstatic eyes, - Stooping timeward from the skies, - Burning redly in the dew. - - - - -THE HARLOT OF THE WORLD - - - O Life, thou harlot who beguilest all! - Beautiful in thy house, the gorgeous world, - Abidest thou, where Powers pinion-furled - And flying Splendours follow to thy call. - - Innumerous like the stars or like the dust, - Nations and monarchs were thy thralls of yore: - Unto the grave’s old womb forevermore - Hast thou betrayed the passion and the lust. - - Fair as the moon of summer is thy face, - And mystical with cloudiness of hair.*** - Only an eye, subornless by delight, - - Shall find within thy phosphorescent gaze - Those caverns of corruption and despair, - Where the Worm toileth in the charnel night. - - - - -THE HOPE OF THE INFINITE - - - My hope is in the unharvestable deep, - That shows with eve the treasure of the stars - To mournful kings behind their palace-bars, - And wanderers outworn, and boys who weep - A shattered bauble—or above the sleep - Of headsmen, and of men condemned to die, - Pours out the moon’s white mercy from on high, - Or hides with clement gloom the hours that creep - Like death-worms to the grave.*** And I have ta’en - From storming seas by sunset glorified, - Or from the dawn of ashen wastes and wide, - Some light re-gathered from the lamps that wane, - And promise of a translunary Spain, - Where loves forgone and forfeit dreams abide. - - - - -LOVE MALEVOLENT - - - I fain would love thee, but thy lips are fed - With poison-honey, hivèd in a skull; - They seem like scarlet poppies, beautiful - For delving roots, deep-clenchèd in the dead. - - Thine eyes are coloured like the nightshade-flow’r.*** - Blent in the opiate perfume of thy breath - Are dreams, and purple sleep, and scented death - For him that is thy lover for an hour. - - Mandragora, within the graveyard grown, - Hath given thee its carnal root to eat, - And vipers, born and nurstled in a tomb, - - From fawning mouths drip venom at thy feet; - Yet from thy lethal lips and thine alone, - Love would I drink, as dew from poison-bloom. - - - - -PALMS - - - Palms in the sunset of a languid summer land! - Sculpture of living green, on dreamy scarlet light - Dividing as a wall the twilight from the night! - How magically still and luminous they stand, - - Inclining fretted leaves above some red lagoon— - Careless alike, in mystic and immense repose, - Of the flamingo-coloured, flying sun that goes, - Or the slow coming of the lion-coloured moon. - - - - -MEMNON AT MIDNIGHT - -(Dedicated to Albert M. Bender) - - - Methought upon the tomb-encumbered shore - I stood, of Egypt’s lone, monarchal stream, - And saw immortal Memnon, throned supreme - In gloom as of that Memphian night of yore: - Fold upon fold purpureal he wore, - Beneath the star-borne canopy extreme— - Carven of silence and colossal dream, - Where waters flowed like sleep forevermore. - - Lo, in the darkness, thick with dust of years, - How many a ghostly god around his throne, - With thronging winds that were forgotten Fames, - Stood, ere the dawn restore to ancient ears - The long-withholden thunder of their names, - And music stilled to monumental stone. - - - - -EIDOLON - - - Chryselephantine, clear as carven flame, - Before my gaze, thy soul’s eidolon stands, - As on the threshold of the frozen lands - A frozen sun forevermore the same. - - All passion that the passive marbles make - Imperishable in their shining sleep, - Is thine; and all the wan despairs that weep - With tears of ice and crystal, cannot break - - The heart, which, like a ruby white and rare, - In thy deep breast impenetrably gleams.*** - More beautiful than any sphynx, and fair - - As Aphrodite dead, thine image seems— - Guarding forever, in its golden eyes, - The treasure of intagliate memories. - - - - -THE KINGDOM OF SHADOWS - - - A crownless king who reigns alone, - I live within this ashen land, - Where winds rebuild from wandering sand - My columns and my crumbled throne. - - My sway is on the men that were, - And wan sweet women, dear and dead; - Beside a marble queen, my bed - Is made within the sepulchre. - - In gardens desolate to the sun, - Faring alone, I sigh to find - The dusty closes, dim and blind, - Where winter and the spring are one. - - My shadowy visage, grey with grief, - In sunken waters walled with sand, - I see,—where all mine ancient land - Lies yellow like an autumn leaf. - - My silver lutes of subtle string - Are rust,—but on the grievous breeze, - I hear what sobbing memories. - And muted sorrows murmuring! - - Across the broken monuments, - Memorial of the dreams of old, - The sunset flings a ghostly gold - To mock mine ancient affluence. - - About the tombs of stone and brass - The silver lights of evening flee; - And slowly now, and solemnly, - I see the pomp of shadows pass. - Often, beneath some fervid moon, - With splendid spells I vainly strive - Dead loves imperial to revive, - And speak a heart-remembered rune:— - - But, ah, the lovely phantoms fail, - The faces fade to mist and light, - The vermeil lips of my delight - Are dim, the eyes are ashen-pale. - - A crownless king who reigns alone, - I live within this ashen land, - Where winds rebuild from wandering sand - My columns and my crumbled throne. - - - - -REQUIESCAT IN PACE - - - White iris on thy bier, - With the white rose, we strew, - And lotus pale or blue - As moonlight on the orient mountain-snows. - - Slumber, as they that sleep - In the slow sands unknown, - Or under seas that zone - With lulling foam the sealed, extremer lands. - - Slumber, with songless birds - That sang, and sang to death, - Giving their gladder breath - To lonely winds in one melodious pang. - - Sleep, with the golden queens - Of planets long forgot, - Whose fire-soft lips are not - Recalled by any sorcery of song. - - Sleep, with the flowers that were, - And any leaf that fell - On field or flowerless dell - In autumns lost of memory and grief. - - Pass, with the music flown - From ivory lyre, and lute - Of mellow string left mute - In cities desolate ere the dream of Tyre. - - Pass, with the clouds that sank - In sunset turned to grey - On some Edenic day - For which the exiled years have ever yearned. - - - White iris on thy bier, - With the white rose, we strew, - And lotus pale or blue - As moonlight on the orient mountain-snows. - - - - -ALEXANDRINES - - - Knowing the weariness of dreams, and days, and nights, - The great and grievous vanity of joy and pain; - Frail loves that pass, where languors infinite remain; - Fervours, and long despairs, and desperate, brief delights; - - Knowing how in the witless brains of them that were, - The drowsy, wiving worm hath prospered and hath died; - Knowing that, evermore, by moon and sun abide - The standing glooms made stagnant in the sepulchre; - - Knowing the vacillant leaves that tremble, flame, and fall, - The sweetly wasting rose, the dawns and stars that wane— - Knowing these things, the desolate heart and soul are fain - Of the one perfect sleep which filleth, foldeth all. - - - - -ASHES OF SUNSET - - - Who fares to find the sunset ere it fly, - Turning to light and fire the further west, - Shall have the veils of twilight for his quest, - And all the falling of an ashen sky. - - On lands he shall not know, the splendour lies— - A pharos on some alienated shore, - In foam and purple lost forevermore, - Where dreams are kindled in remoter eyes. - - - - -NOVEMBER TWILIGHT - - - November’s winy sunset leaves, - Deep in the silver heavens far, - One ruby-hearted star - That lit the summer’s moon-forsaken eves. - - Under its ray, remote, alone, - Ascends upon the ashen gloom - The ghostly, faint perfume - From autumn’s grey, forgotten roses flown. - - - - -SEPULTURE - - - Deep in my heart, as in the hollow stone - And silence of some olden sepulchre, - Thy silver beauty lies, and shall not stir— - Forgotten, incorruptible, alone: - Though altars darken, and a wind be blown - From starless seas on beacon-fires that were— - Within thy tomb, with oils of balm and myrrh, - Forever burn the onyx lamps unknown. - - And though the bleak, Novembral gardens yield - Rose-dust and ivy-leaf, nor any flow’r - Be found through vermeil forest or wan field— - Still, still the asphodel and lotos lie - Around thy bed, and hour by silent hour, - Exhale immortal fragrance like a sigh. - - - - -QUEST - - - All beneath a wintering sky - Follow the wastrel butterfly; - With vermilion leaf or bronze— - Tatters of gorgeous gonfalons— - With the winds that always hold - Echo of clarions lost and old,— - We must hasten, hasten on - Tow’rd the azure world withdrawn, - We must wander, wander so - Where the ruining roses go; - Where the poplar’s pallid leaves - Drift among the gathered sheaves - In that harvest none shall glean; - Where the twisted willows lean - In their strange, tormented woe, - Seeing, on the streamlet’s flow - Half their fragile leaves depart; - Where the secret pines at heart, - High, funereal, vespertine, - Guard eternal sorrows green:— - We shall follow, we shall find, - Haply, ere the light is blind, - The moulded place where Beauty lay, - Moon-beheld until the day, - In the woven windlestrae; - Or the pool of tourmaline, - Rimmed with golden reeds, that was - In the dawn a tiring-glass - For her undelaying mien. - - Ever wander, wander so, - Where the ruining roses go; - All beneath a wintering sky, - Follow the wastrel butterfly. - - - - -BEAUTY IMPLACABLE - - - White Beauty, bending from a throne sublime, - Hath claimed my lips with kisses keen as snow: - Now through my harp the tremors come and go - Of things not stirred with urgencies of Time. - Now from the lunar mountains, old and lone, - In dream I watch the neighboring world remote; - Or on the dim Uranian waters float - After a star-like sun from zone to zone. - - Lo! in her praise, the stern, the fearful one, - Whose love is as the light of snows afar, - Whose ways are difficult, what word shall be? - I, desolate with Beauty, and undone, - Say Death is not so strong to change or mar, - And Love and Life not so desired as she. - - - - -A VISION OF LUCIFER - - - I saw a shape with human form and face, - If such in apotheosis might stand: - Deep in the shadows of a desolate land - His burning feet obtained colossal base, - And spheral on the lonely arc of space, - His head, a menace unto heavens unspanned, - Arose with towered eyes that might command - The sunless, blank horizon of that place - - And straight I knew him for the mystic one - That is the brother, born of human dream, - Of man rebellious at an unknown rod; - The mind’s ideal, and the spirit’s sun; - A column of clear flame in lands extreme, - Set opposite the darkness that is God. - - - - -DESIRE OF VASTNESS - - - Supreme with night, what high mysteriarch— - The undreamt-of god beyond the trinal noon - Of elder suns empyreal—past the moon - Circling some wild world outmost in the dark— - Lays on me this unfathomed wish to hark - What central sea with plume-plucked midnight strewn, - Plangent to what enormous plenilune - That lifts in silence, hinderless and stark? - - The brazen comprehension of the waste, - The waste inclusion of the brazen sky— - These I desire, and all things wide and deep; - And, lifted past the level years, would taste - The cup of an Olympian ecstasy, - Titanic dream, and Cyclopean sleep. - - - - -ANTICIPATION - - - The thought of death to me - Is like a well of waters, deep and dim— - Cool-gleaming, hushed, and hidden gratefully - Among the palms asleep - At silver evening on the desert’s rim. - - Or as a couch of stone, - Whereon by moonlight, in a marble room, - Some fevered king reposes all alone— - So is the hope of sleep, - The inalienable surety of the tomb. - - - - -A PSALM TO THE BEST BELOVED - - - Thou comfortest me with the manna of thy love, - And the kisses of thy mouth are wine and sustenance; - Thy lips are grateful as fruit - In lonely orchards by the wayside of a ruinous land; - They are sweet as the purple grapes - On parching hills that confront the autumnal desert, - Or apples that the mad simoon hath spared - In a garden with walls of syenite. - Thy loosened hair is a veil - For the weariness of mine eyes and eyelids, - Which have known the redoubled sun - In a desert valley with slopes of the dust of white marble, - And have gazed on the mounded salt - In the marshes of a lake of dead waters. - Thy body is a secret Eden - Fed with lethean springs, - And the touch of thy flesh is like to the savour of lotos. - In thy hair is a perfume of ecstasy, - And a perfume of sleep, - Between thy thighs is a valley of delight, - And between thy breasts is a valley of peace. - - - - -THE WITCH IN THE GRAVEYARD - - -Scene: A forsaken graveyard, by moonlight. Enter two witches. - - FIRST WITCH: - Sit, sister, now that haggish Hecate - Appropriate and ghastly favour sheds, - And with wild light forwards our enterprise; - And watch the weighted eyelids of each grave - As never mother watched her babe, to mark, - At zenith of the necromantic moon - The stir of that disquiet, when the dead, - From suckling nightmares of the charnel dark - Or long insomnia on a mouldy couch, - Impelled like wan somnambulists, arise— - Constrained to emerge and walk, or seated each - On his own tombstone, shrouded council hold, - Or commerce with the sooty wings of Hell. - All omens of this influential hour - When all dark powers, thronging to the dark, - Promote enchantry with their wavèd wings, - And brim the wind with potency malign— - A dew of dread to aid our cauldron—these - Observe thou closely, while I seek afield - All requisite swart herbs of venefice, - And evil roots unto our usance ripe. - -(The first witch departs, leaving the other among the tombs, and -returns after a time, in the course of her search.) - - FIRST WITCH: - Sister, what seest or what hearest thou? - - SECOND WITCH: - I see - The moonlight, and the slowly moving gleam - That westers hour by hour on tomb and stone; - And shrivelled lilies, tossed i’ the winter’s breath, - With their attenuate shadows, as might dance - Phantom with flaffing phantom; at my side, - The white and shuddering grasses of the grave, - With nettles, and the parching fumitory, - Whose leaves, root-trellised on the bones of death, - Will rasp and bristle to the lightest wind. - -(The first witch moves on, and approaches again, after a long interval.) - - FIRST WITCH: - Sister, what seest or what hearest thou? - - SECOND WITCH: - I see - The mound-stretched gossamers, cradles to the dew; - Moon-wefted briers, and the cypress-trees - With shadow swathed, or cerements of the moon; - And corpse-lights borne from aisle to secret aisle - Within the footless forest.*** - Now I hear - The lich-owl, shrieking lethal prophecy; - And whimpering winds, the children of the air, - Lost in the glades of mystery and gloom. - -(The first witch disappears and passes again shortly.) - - FIRST WITCH: - Sister, what seest or what hearest thou? - - SECOND WITCH: - I see - The ghost-white owl, with huge sulphureous eyes, - That veers in prone, unwhispered flight, and hear - The small shriek of the moon-adventuring mole, - Gripped in mid-graveyard.*** And I see - Where some wild shadow shakes, though the pale wind - Of moonlight stirs far off***and hear - Curst mandragores that gibber to the moon, - Though no man treads anigh.*** - -(After an interval) - - Some predal hand doth halt the wandering air; - Now dies the throttled wind with rattling breath, - And round about a breathing Silence prowls. - -(After another interval) - - I hear the cheeping of the bat-lipped ghouls, - Aroused beneath the vaulted cypresses - Far-off; and lipless muttering of tombs, - With clash of bones bestirred in ancient charnels - Beneath their shroud of unclean light that crawls.*** - Earth shudders, and rank odours ’gin to rise - From tombs a-crack; and shaken out all at once - From mid-air, and directly neath the moon, - Meseems what hanging wing divides the light, - Like a black film of gloom, or thickest shadow; - But on the tombs there is no shadow! - - FIRST WITCH: - Enough! ’Twill be a prosperous night, methinks, - For commerce of the demons with the dead; - And for us, too, when every omen’s good, - And fraught with, promise of a potent brew. - - - - -POEMS IN PROSE - - - - -THE TRAVELLER - -(Dedicated to V. H.) - - -“Stranger, where goest thou, in the sad raiment of a pilgrim, with -shattered sandals retaining the dust and mire of so many devious ways! -With thy brow that alien suns have darkened, and thy hair made white -from the cold rime of alien moons? Wanderest thou in search of the -cities greater than Rome, with walls of opal and crystal, and fanes -more white than the summer clouds, or the foam of hyperboreal seas? -Or farest thou to the lands unpeopled and unexplored, to the sunless -deserts lit by the baleful and calamitous beacons of volcanoes? Or -seekest thou an extremer shore, where the red and monstrous lilies are -like a royal pageant, pausing with innumerable flambeaux held aloft on -the verge of the waveless waters?” - -“Nay, it is none of these that I seek, but forevermore I seek the city -and the land of my former home: In the quest thereof I have wandered -from the first immemorable years of my youth till now, and have mingled -the dust of many realms, of many highways, in my garments’ hem. I have -seen the cities greater than Rome, and the fanes more white than the -clouds of summer; the lands unpeopled and unexplored, and the land that -is thronged by the red and monstrous lilies. Even the far, aerial walls -of the cities of mirage, and the saffron meadows of sunset I have seen, -but nevermore the city and land of my former home.” - -“Where lieth the land of thine home? and by what name shall we know it, -and distinguish the rumour thereof, among the rumours of many lands?” - -“Alas! I know not where it lieth; nor in the broad, black scrolls of -geographers, and the charts of old seamen who have sailed to the marge -of the seventh sea, is the place thereof recorded. And its name I -have never learned, howbeit I have learned the name of empires lying -beneath stars to us invisible. In many languages have I spoken, in -barbarous tongues unknown to Babel; and I have heard the speech of many -men, even of them that inhabit the strange isles of the sea of fire -and the sea of snow. Thunder, and lutes, and battle-drums, the fine -unceasing querulousness of gnats, and the stupendous moaning of the -simoon; lyres of ebony, damascened with crystal, bells of malachite -with golden clappers; the song of exotic birds that sigh like women or -sob like fountains; whispers and shoutings of fire, the multitudinous -mutter of cities asleep, the manifold tumult of cities at dawn, and -the slow and weary murmur of desert-wandering streams—all, all have I -heard, but never, in any place, from any tongue, a sound or syllable -that resembled in the least the name I would learn.” - - - - -THE FLOWER-DEVIL - - -In a basin of porphyry, at the summit of a pillar of serpentine, the -thing has existed from primeval time, in the garden of the kings that -rule an equatorial realm of the planet Saturn. With black foliage, fine -and intricate as the web of some enormous spider; with petals of livid -rose, and purple like the purple of putrefying flesh; and a stem rising -like a swart and hairy wrist from a bulb so old, so encrusted with the -growth of centuries that it resembles an urn of stone, the monstrous -flower holds dominion over all the garden. In this flower, from the -years of the oldest legend, an evil demon has dwelt—a demon whose name -and whose nativity are known to the superior magicians and mysteriarchs -of the kingdom, but to none other. Over the half-animate flowers, the -ophidian orchids that coil and sting, the bat-like lilies that open -their ribbèd petals by night, and fasten with tiny yellow teeth on -the bodies of sleeping dragonflies; the carnivorous cacti that yawn -with green lips beneath their beards of poisonous yellow prickles; the -plants that palpitate like hearts, the blossoms that pant with a breath -of venomous perfume—over all these, the Flower-Devil is supreme, in -its malign immortality, and evil, perverse intelligence—inciting them -to strange maleficence, fantastic mischief, even to acts of rebellion -against the gardeners, who proceed about their duties with wariness and -trepidation, since more than one of them has been bitten, even unto -death, by some vicious and venefic flower. In places, the garden has -run wild from lack of care on the part of the fearful gardeners, and -has become a monstrous tangle of serpentine creepers, and hydra-headed -plants, convolved and inter-writhing in lethal hate or venomous love, -and horrible as a rout of wrangling vipers and pythons. - -And, like his innumerable ancestors before him, the king dares -not destroy the Flower, for fear that the devil, driven from its -habitation, might seek a new home, and enter into the brain or body -of one of the king’s subjects—or even the heart of his fairest and -gentlest, and most beloved queen! - - - - -IMAGES - - -TEARS - -Thy tears are not as mine: Thou weepest as a green fountain among palms -and roses, with lightly falling drops that bedew the flowery turf. My -tears are like a rain of marah in the desert, leaving a bitter pool -whose waters are fire and poison. - -THE SECRET ROSE - -My soul hath dreamt of a rose, whose marvellous and secret flower, -fraught with an unimaginable perfume, hath never grown in any garden. -Only in valleys of the shifting cloud, only among the palms and -fountains of a land of mirage, only in isles beyond the seas of -sunset, it blooms for a moment, and is gone. But ever the ghost of its -fragrance haunts the hall of slumber; and the women whom I meet in -dreams wear always its blossom for coronal. - -THE WIND AND THE GARDEN - -To thee my love is something strange and fantastical, and far away, -like the vast and desolate sighing of the desert wind to one who dwells -in a garden of palm and rose and lotus, filled by no louder sound -than the mellow lisp of a breeze of perfume, or the sigh of silvering -fountains. - -OFFERINGS - -Before thee, O goddess of my dreams, idol of my desires, I have burnt -amber and myrrh, frankincense, and all the strange and rich perfumes of -lands a thousand leagues beyond Araby or Taprobane. Strange and rich -offerings have I brought thee, the gems of unknown regions, and the -spoil of cities remoter than Caydon or Samarkand. But these delight -thee not, only the simple-scented flowers of spring, and the diamonds -and opals of dew, strung on the threads of the spider. - -A CORONAL - -The pale and flowerless poppies of Proserpine, the cold, blind lotus -of Lethe, and the strange, white sea-blooms that grow from the lips of -drowned men in the blue darkness of the nether sea,—these have I woven -as a coronal for my dead love. - - - - -THE BLACK LAKE - - -In a land where weirdness and mystery had strongly leagued themselves -with eternal desolation, the lake was out-poured at an undiscoverable -date of elder aeons, to fill some fathomless gulf far down amid the -shadows of snowless, volcanic mountains. No eye, not even the sun’s, -when he stared vertically upon it for a few hours at midday, seemed -able to divine its depths of sullen blackness and unrippled silence. It -was for this reason that I found a so singular pleasure in frequently -contemplating the strange lake. Sitting for I knew not how long on -its bleak basaltic shores, where grew but a few fleshly red orchids, -bent above the waters like open and thirsty mouths, I would peer with -countless fantastic conjectures and shadowy imaginings, into the -alluring mystery of its unknown and inexplorable gulf. - -It was at an hour of morning before the sun had surmounted the rough -and broken rim of the summits, when I first came, and clomb down -through the shadows which filled like some subtler fluid the volcanic -basin. Seen at the bottom of that stirless tincture of air and -twilight, the lake seemed as dregs of darkness. - -Peering for the first time, after the deep and difficult descent, into -the so dull and leaden waters, I was at length aware of certain small -and scattered gleams of silver, apparently far beneath the surface. -And fancying them the metal in some mysterious ledge, or the glints -of long-sunken treasure, I bent closer in my eagerness, and finally -perceived that what I saw was but the reflection of the stars, which, -tho the day was full upon the mountains and the lands without, were yet -visible in the depth and darkness of that enshadowed place. - - - - -VIGNETTES - - -BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS - -Surely, beyond the mountains there is peace—beyond the mountains that -lie so blue and still at the world’s extreme. Such ancient calm, such -infinite quietude is upon them, that surely, no toiling cities, no sea -whose foam a ship has ever cloven, can lie beyond, but valleys of azure -silence, where amaranthine flowers sleep and dream, untroubled of any -wind, by the hyalescense of tranquilly flowing streams unbroken as the -surface of a mirror. - - -THE BROKEN LUTE - -Because you are silent to my lyric prayers, deaf to the melodies I have -made from the sighs and murmurs of a wounded love, I have broken my -golden lute, and cast it away, tarnished and unstrung, among the red -leaves and faded roses of the September garden. Silence, the silver -dust of lilies, the mournful muted wind of autumn, and the fitfully -drifting leaves, have claimed it for their own. Seeing it there, as -you pass on your queenly way amid the crumbling roses, will you not -echo in your heart one sigh of the many sighs, which, as a music for -your pleasure, were breathed from its chords, during the summer’s -half-forgotten days? - - -NOSTALGIA OF THE UNKNOWN - -The nostalgia of things unknown, of lands forgotten or unfound, is -upon me at times. Often I long for the gleam of yellow suns upon -terraces of translucent azure marble, mocking the windless waters of -lakes unfathomably calm; for lost, legendary palaces of serpentine, -silver and ebony, whose columns are green stalactites; for the pillars -of fallen temples, standing in the vast purpureal sunset of a land -of lost and marvellous romance. I sigh for the dark-green depths of -cedar forests, through whose fantastically woven boughs, one sees at -intervals an unknown tropic ocean, like gleams of blue diamond; for -isles of palm and coral, that fret an amber morning, somewhere beyond -Cathay or Taprobana; for the strange and hidden cities of the desert, -with burning brazen domes and slender pinnacles of gold and copper, -that pierce a heaven of heated lazuli. - - -GREY SORROW - -Ofttimes, in the golden, sad, November days, I meet among the dead -roses of the garden the ghost of an old sorrow—a sorrow grey and dim as -the mist of autumn—as a wandering mist that was once a rain of tears. -There, through the long decline of afternoon, I walk among the roses -with the ghost of my sorrow, whose half-forgotten, half-invisible form -becomes dimmer and more indistinct, till I know its face no longer from -the twilight, nor its voice from the vesper wind. - - -THE HAIR OF CIRCE - -I am afraid of thy hair: Lustrous, heavily curled, it suggests the -coils of a golden snake; and half the fascination of thy painted lips, -of thy still and purple-lidded eyes, is due to the fear that it may -awake beneath my caresses. - - -THE EYES OF CIRCE - -Thine eyes are green and still as the lakes of the desert. They awake -in me the thirst for strange and bitter mysteries, the desire of -secrets that are deadly and sterile. - - - - -A DREAM OF LETHE - - -In the quest of her whom I had lost, I came at length to the shores -of Lethe, under the vault of an immense, empty, ebon sky, from which -all the stars had vanished one by one. Proceeding I knew not whence, -a pale, elusive light as of the waning moon, or the phantasmal -phosphorescence of a dead sun, lay dimly and without lustre on the -sable stream, and on the black, flowerless meadows. By this light, I -saw many wandering souls of men and women, who came, hesitantly or in -haste, to drink of the slow unmurmuring waters. But among all these, -there were none who departed in haste, and many who stayed to watch, -with unseeing eyes, the calm and waveless movement of the stream. At -length in the lily-tall and gracile form, and the still, uplifted face -of a woman who stood apart from the rest, I saw the one whom I had -sought; and, hastening to her side, with a heart wherein old memories -sang like a nest of nightingales, was fain to take her by the hand. But -in the pale, immutable eyes, and wan, unmoving lips that were raised -to mine, I saw no light of memory, nor any tremor of recognition. And -knowing now that she had forgotten, I turned away despairingly, and -finding the river at my side, was suddenly aware of my ancient thirst -for its waters, a thirst I had once thought to satisfy at many diverse -springs, but in vain. Stooping hastily, I drank, and rising again, -perceived that the light had died or disappeared, and that all the land -was like the land of a dreamless slumber, wherein I could no longer -distinguish the faces of my companions. Nor was I able to remember any -longer why I had wished to drink of the waters of oblivion. - - - - -THE CARAVAN - - -My dreams are like a caravan that departed long ago, with tumult of -intrepid banners and spears, and the clamour of bugles and brave -adventurous songs, to seek the horizons of perilous untried barbaric -lands, and kingdoms immense and vaguely rumoured, with cities beautiful -and opulent as the cities of paradise, and deep Edenic vales of palm -and cinnamon and myrrh, lying beneath skies of primeval azure silence. -For traffic in the realms of mystery and wonder, in the marts of -scarce-imaginable cities and metropoli a million leagues away, on the -last horizon of romance, my dreams departed, as a caravan with its -laden camels. Since then, the years are many, the days have flown as -the flocks of southering swallows; unnumbered moons have multiplied in -fugitive silver, uncounted suns in irretainable gold. But, alas, my -dreams have not returned. Have the swirling sands engulfed them, on a -noon of storm when the desert rose like a sea, and rolled its tawny -billows on the walled gardens of the green and fragrant lands? Or -perished they, devoured by the crimson demons of thirst, and the ghouls -and vultures? Or live they still, as captives in alien dungeons not to -be ascertained, or held by a wizard spell in palaces demon-built, and -cities baroque and splendid as the cities in a tale from the Thousand -and One Nights? - - - - -THE PRINCESS ALMEENA - - -From her balcony of pearl the princess Almeena, clad in a gown of -irisated silk, with her long and sable locks unbound, gazes toward -the sunset-flooded sea beyond a terrace of green marble that peacocks -guard. Below, in the tinted light, fantastic trees whose boles are -serpentine, train a fine and hair-like foliage, mingling with the -moon-shaped leaves of enormous lilies. Rainbow-coloured reeds cluster -about the pools and fountains of black water, that are rimmed with -carven malachite. But these the princess does not heed, but gazes upon -the far-off seas, where the golden ichors of the sun have gathered in -a vast lake overflowing the horizon. Ere long, a wind from the west, -from islands where palm trees blossom above the purple foam, brings -in its breath the odour of unknown flowers to mingle with the balms -of the garden, and the sweet suspiration of the princess—the princess -who dreams, listening to the wind, that her lover, the captain of the -emperor’s most redoubtable trireme of war, sailing the sky-blue seas -beyond the horizon and the sunset, has remembered her wild and royal -loveliness, and has breathed in his heart a secret sigh. - - - - -ENNUI - - -In the alcove whose curtains are cloth-of-gold, and whose pillars are -fluted sapphire, reclines the emperor Chan, on his couch of ebony set -with opals and rubies, and cushioned with the furs of unknown and -gorgeous beasts. With implacable and weary gaze, from beneath unmoving -lids that seem carven of purple-veined onyx, he stares at the crystal -windows, giving upon the infinite fiery azures of a tropic sky and sea. -Oppressive as nightmare, a formless, nameless fatigue, heavier than any -burden the slaves of the mines must bear, lies forever at his heart: -All deliriums of love and wine, the agonizing ecstasy of drugs, even -the deepest and the faintest pulse of delight or pain—all are proven, -all are futile, for the outworn but insatiate emperor. Even for a new -grief, or a subtler pang than any felt before, he thinks, lying on -his bed of ebony, that he would give the silver and vermilion of all -his mines, with the crowded caskets, the carcanets and crowns that -lie in his most immemorial treasure-vault. Vainly, with the verse of -the most inventive poets, the fanciful purple-threaded fabrics of the -subtlest looms, the unfamiliar gems and minerals from the uttermost -land, the pallid leaves and blood-like petals of a rare and venomous -blossom—vainly, with all these, and many stranger devices, wilder, more -wonderful diversions, the slaves and sultanas have sought to alleviate -the iron hours. One by one he has dismissed them with a weary gesture. -And now, in the silence of the heavily curtained alcove, he lies alone, -with the canker of ennui at his heart, like the undying mordant worm at -the heart of the dead. - -Anon, from between the curtains at the head of his couch, a dark -and slender hand is slowly extended, clasping a dagger whose blade -reflects the gold of the curtain in a thin and stealthily wavering -gleam: Slowly, in silence, the dagger is poised, then rises and falls -like a splinter of lightning. The emperor cries out, as the blade, -piercing his loosely folded robe, wounds him slightly in the side. In -a moment the alcove is filled with armed attendants, who seize and drag -forth the would-be assassin—a slave girl, the princess of a conquered -people, who has often, but vainly, implored her freedom from the -emperor. Pale and panting with terror and rage, she faces Chan and the -guardsmen, while stories of unimaginable monstrous tortures, of dooms -unnameable, crowd upon her memory. But Chan, aroused and startled only -for the instant, feels again the insuperable weariness, more strong -than anger or fear, and delays to give the expected signal. And then, -momentarily moved, perchance, by some ironical emotion, half-akin to -gratitude—gratitude for the brief but diverting danger, which has -served to alleviate his ennui for a little, he bids them free the -princess; and, with a regal courtesy, places about her throat his own -necklace of pearls and emeralds, each of which is the cost of an army. - - - - -THE STATUE OF SILENCE - - -I saw a statue, carven I knew not from what substance, nor with what -form or feature, because of the manifold drapery of black which fell -about it as a veil or a pall. Turning to Psyche, who was with me, I -said, “O thou who knowest by name and form the eidola of all things, -pray tell me what thing is this.” And she answered, “The name of it is -Silence, but neither god nor man nor demon knoweth the form thereof, -nor its entity. The seraphim pause often before it, waiting the day -when the shape shall be unveiled; and the gods and demons of the -universe are mute in its presence, half-hoping, half-fearing the time -when these lips shall speak, and deliver forth one dreameth not what, -of oracle, or query or judgment, or doom.” - - - - -REMOTENESS - - -There are days when all the beauty of the world is dim and strange; -when the sunlight about me seems to fall on a land remoter than the -poles of the moon. The roses in the garden surprise me, like the -monstrous orchids of unknown colour, blossoming in planets beyond -Aldebaran. And I am startled by the yellow and purple leaves of -October, as if the veil of some tremendous and awful mystery were -half-withdrawn for a moment. In such hours as these, O heart of my -heart, I fear to touch thee, I avoid thy caresses, dreading that thou -wilt vanish as a dream at dawn; or that I shall find thee a phantom, -the spectre of one who died and was forgotten many thousand years ago, -in a far-off land on which the sun no longer shines. - - - - -THE MEMNONS OF THE NIGHT - - -Ringed with a bronze horizon, which, at a point immensely remote, seems -welded with the blue brilliance of a sky of steel, they oppose the -black splendour of their porphyritic forms to the sun’s insuperable -gaze. Reared in the morning twilight of primeval time, by a race whose -towering tombs and cities are one with the dust of their builders in -the slow lapse of the desert, they abide to face the terrible latter -dawns, that move abroad in a starkness of fire, consuming the veils of -night on the vast and Sphinx-like desolations. Level with the light, -their tenebrific brows preserve a pride as of Titan kings. In their -lidless implacable eyes of staring stone, is the petrified despair of -those who have gazed too long on the infinite. - -Mute as the mountains from whose iron matrix they were hewn, their -mouths have never acknowledged the sovereignty of the suns, that -pass in triumphal flame from horizon unto horizon of the prostrate -land. Only at eve, when the west is like a brazen furnace, and the -far-off mountains smoulder like ruddy gold in the depth of the heated -heavens—only at eve, when the east grows infinite and vague, and the -shadows of the waste are one with the increasing shadow of night—then, -and then only, from the sullen throats of stone, a music rings to the -bronze horizon—a strong, a sombre music, strange and sonorous, like the -singing of black stars, or a litany of gods that invoke oblivion; a -music that thrills the desert to its heart of adamant, and trembles in -the granite of forgotten tombs, till the last echoes of its jubilation, -terrible as the trumpets of doom, are one with the black silence of -infinity. - - - - -THE GARDEN AND THE TOMB - - -I know a garden of flowers—flowers lovely and multiform as the orchids -of far, exotic worlds—as the flowers of manifold petal, whose colours -change as if by enchantment in the alter nation of the triple suns; -flowers like tiger lilies from the garden of Satan; like the paler -lilies of paradise, or the amaranths on whose perfect and immortal -beauty the seraphim so often ponder; flowers fierce and splendid like -the crimson or golden flowers of fire; flowers bright and cold as the -crystal flowers of snow; flowers whereof there is no likeness in any -world of any sun; which have no symbol in heaven or in hell. - -Alas! in the heart of the garden is a tomb—a tomb so trellised and -embowered with vine and blossom, that the sunlight reveals the ghastly -gleam of its marble to no careless or incurious scrutiny. But in the -night, when all the flowers are still, and their perfumes are faint as -the breathing of children in slumber—then, and then only, the serpents -bred of corruption crawl from the tomb, and trail the fetor and -phosphorescence of their abiding-place from end to end of the garden. - - - - -IN COCAIGNE - - -It was a windless afternoon of April, beneath skies that were tender as -the smile of love, when we went forth, you and I, to seek the fabulous -and fortunate realm of Cocaigne. Past leafing oaks with foliage of -bronze and chrysolite, through zones of yellow and white and red and -purple flowers, like a landscape seen through a prism, we fared with -hopeful and tremulous hearts, forgetting all save the dream we had -cherished.*** At last we came to the lonely woods, the pines with their -depth of balmy, cool, compassionate shadow, which are sacred to the -genius of that land. There, for the first time I was bold to take your -hand in mine, and led you to a slope where the woodland lilies, with -petals of white and yellow ivory, gleamed among the fallen needles. As -in a dream, I found that my arms were about you, as in a dream I kissed -your yielding lips, and the ardent pallor of your cheeks and throat. -Motionless, you clung to me, and a flush arose beneath my kisses like a -delicate stain, and lingered softly. Your eyes deepened to my gaze like -the brown pools of the forest at evening, and far within them, as in -immensity itself, trembled and shone the steadfast stars of your love. -As a ship that has wandered beneath stormy suns and disastrous moons, -but comes at last to the arms of the shielding harbour, my head lay on -the gentle heaving of your delicious breast, and I knew that we had -found Cocaigne. - - - - -THE LITANY OF THE SEVEN KISSES - - - I - -I kiss thy hands—thy hands, whose fingers are delicate and pale as the -petals of the white lotus. - - - II - -I kiss thy hair, which has the lustre of black jewels, and is darker -than Lethe, flowing by midnight through the moonless slumber of -poppy-scented lands. - - - III - -I kiss thy brow, which resembles the rising moon in a valley of cedars. - - - IV - -I kiss thy cheeks, where lingers a faint flush, like the reflection of -a rose upheld to an urn of alabaster. - - - V - -I kiss thine eyelids, and liken them to the purple-veinèd flowers that -close beneath the oppression of a tropic evening, in a land where the -sunsets are bright as the flames of burning amber. - - - VI - -I kiss thy throat, whose ardent pallor is the pallor of marble warmed -by the autumn sun. - - - VII - -I kiss thy mouth, which has the savour and perfume of fruits agleam -with spray from a magic fountain, in the secret Paradise that we alone -shall find; a Paradise whence they that come shall nevermore depart, -for the waters thereof are Lethe, and the fruit is the fruit of the -tree of Life. - - - - -FROM A LETTER - - -****Will you not join me in Atlantis, where we will go down through -streets of blue and yellow marble to the wharves of orichalch, and -choose us a galley with a golden Eros for figurehead, and sails -of Tyrian sendal? With mariners that knew Odysseus, and beautiful -amber-breasted slaves from the mountain-vales of Lemuria, we will -lift anchor for the unknown fortunate isles of the outer sea; and, -sailing in the wake of an opal sunset, will lose that ancient land in -the glaucous twilight, and see from our couch of ivory and satin the -rising of unknown stars and perished planets.*** Perhaps we will not -return, but will follow the tropic summer from isle to halcyon isle, -across the amaranthine seas of myth and fable: We will eat the lotos, -and the fruit of lands whereof Odysseus never dreamt; and drink the -pallid wines of faery, grown in a vale of perpetual moonlight. I will -find for you a necklace of rosy-tinted pearls, and a necklace of yellow -rubies, and crown you with precious corals that have the semblance of -sanguine-coloured blossoms. We will roam in the marts of forgotten -cities of jasper, and carnelian-builded ports beyond Cathay; and I will -buy you a gown of peacock azure damascened with copper and gold and -vermilion; and a gown of black samite with runes of orange, woven by -fantastic sorcery without the touch of hands, in a dim land of spells -and philtres. - - - - -FROM THE CRYPTS OF MEMORY - - -Aeons of aeons ago, in an epoch whose marvelous worlds have crumbled, -and whose mighty suns are less than shadow, I dwelt in a star whose -course, decadent from the high, irremeable heavens of the past, was -even then verging upon the abyss in which, said astronomers, its -immemorial cycle should find a dark and disastrous close. - -Ah, strange was that gulf-forgotten star—how stranger than any dream -of dreamers in the spheres of to-day, or than any vision that hath -soared upon visionaries, in their retrospection of the sidereal past! -There, through cycles of a history whose piled and bronze-writ records -were hopeless of tabulation, the dead had come to outnumber infinitely -the living. And built of a stone that was indestructible save in the -furnace of suns, their cities rose beside those of the living like the -prodigious metropli of Titans, with walls that overgloom the vicinal -villages. And over all was the black funereal vault of the cryptic -heavens—a dome of infinite shadows, where the dismal sun, suspended -like a sole, enormous lamp, failed to illumine, and drawing back its -fires from the face of the irresolvable ether, threw a baffled and -despairing beam on the vague remote horizons, and shrouded vistas -illimitable of the visionary land. - -We were a sombre, secret, many-sorrowed people—we who dwelt beneath -that sky of eternal twilight, pierced by the towering tombs and -obelisks of the past. In our blood was the chill of the ancient night -of time; and our pulses flagged with a creeping prescience of the -lentor of Lethe. Over our courts and fields, like invisible sluggish -vampires born of mausoleums, rose and hovered the black hours, with -wings that distilled a malefic languor made from the shadowy woe -and despair of perished cycles. The very skies were fraught with -oppression, and we breathed beneath them as in a sepulcher, forever -sealed with all its stagnancies of corruption and slow decay, and -darkness impenetrable save to the fretting worm. - -Vaguely we lived, and loved as in dreams—the dim and mystic dreams -that hover upon the verge of fathomless sleep. We felt for our women, -with their pale and spectral beauty, the same desire that the dead may -feel for the phantom lilies of Hadean meads. Our days were spent in -roaming through the ruins of lone and immemorial cities, whose palaces -of fretted copper, and streets that ran between lines of carven golden -obelisks, lay dim and ghastly with the dead light, or were drowned -forever in seas of stagnant shadow; cities whose vast and iron-builded -fanes preserved their gloom of primordial mystery and awe, from which -the simulacra of century-forgotten gods looked forth with unalterable -eyes to the hopeless heavens, and saw the ulterior night, the ultimate -oblivion. Languidly we kept our gardens, whose grey lilies concealed -a necromantic perfume, that had power to evoke for us the dead and -spectral dreams of the past. Or, wandering through ashen fields of -perennial autumn, we sought the rare and mystic immorteles, with sombre -leaves and pallid petals, that bloomed beneath willows of wan and -veil like foliage: or wept with a sweet and nepenthe-laden dew by the -flowing silence of Acherontic waters. - -And one by one we died and were lost in the dust of accumulated time. -We knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the -yielding of twilight unto night. - - - - -A PHANTASY - - -I have dreamt of an unknown land—a land remote in ulterior time, and -alien space not ascertainable: the desert of a long-completed past, -upon which has settled the bleak, irrevocable silence of infinitude; -where all is ruined save the stone of tombs and cenotaphs; and where -the sole peoples are the kingless, uncounted tribes of the subterranean -dead. - -Above this land of my dream, citied with tombs and cenotaphs, a red and -smouldering sun maintains a spectral day, in alternation with an ashen -moon through the black ether where the stars have long since perished. -And through the hush of the consummation of time, above the riven -monuments and crumbled records of alien history, flit in the final -twilight the mysterious wings of seraphim, sent to fulfill ineffable -errands, or confer with demons of the abyss; and black, gigantic -angels, newly returned from missions of destruction, pause amid the -sepulchers to sift from their gloomy and tremendous vans the pale ashes -of annihilated stars. - - - - -THE DEMON, THE ANGEL, AND BEAUTY - - -Of the Demon who standeth or walketh always with me at my left hand, -I asked: “Hast thou seen Beauty? Her that me-seemeth was the mistress -of my soul in Eternity? Her that is now beyond question set over me in -Time; even though I behold her not, and, it may be, have never beheld, -nor ever shall; her of whose aspect I am ignorant as noon is concerning -any star; her of whom as witness and testimony, I have found only the -hem of her shadow, or at most, her reflection in a dim and troubled -water. Answer, if thou canst, and tell me, is she like pearls, or like -stars? Does she resemble most the sunlight that is transparent and -unbroken, or the sunlight divided into splendour and iris? Is she the -heart of the day, or the soul of the night?” - -To which the Demon answered, after, as I thought, a brief space of -meditation: - -“Concerning this Beauty, I can tell thee but little beyond that which -thou knowest. Albeit, in those orbs to which the demons of my rank have -admission, there be greater adumbrations of some transcendent Mystery -than here, yet have I never seen that Mystery itself, and know not -if it be male or female. Aeons ago, when I was young and incautious, -when the world was new and bright, and there were more stars than -now, I, too was attracted by this Mystery, and sought after it in all -accessible spheres. But failing to find the thing itself, I soon grew -weary of embracing its shadows, and took to the pursuit of illusions -less insubstantial. Now I am become grey and ashen without, and red -like old fire within, who was fiery and flame-coloured all through, -back in the star-thronged aeons of which I speak: Heed me, for I am -as wise, and wary and ancient as the far-travelled and comet-scarred -sun; and I am become of the opinion that the thing Beauty itself does -not exist. Doubtless the semblance thereof is but a web of shadow and -delusion, woven by the crafty hand of God, that He may snare demons and -men therewith, for His mirth, and the laughter of His archangels.” - -The Demon ceased, and took to watching me as usual—obliquely, and with -one eye—an eye that is more red than Aldebaran, and inscrutable as the -gulfs beyond the Hyades. - -Then of the Angel, who walketh or standeth always with me at my right -hand, I asked, “Hast thou seen Beauty? Or hast thou heard any assured -rumour concerning Beauty?” - -To which the Angel answered, after, as I thought, a moment of -hesitation: - -“As to this Beauty, I can tell thee but little beyond that which thou -knowest. Albeit in all the heavens, this Mystery is a topic of the most -frequent and sublime speculation among the archangels, and a perennial -theme for the more inspired singers and harpists of the cherubim—yea, -despite all this, we are greatly ignorant as to its true nature, and -substance, and attributes. But sometimes there are mighty adumbrations -which cover even the superior seraphim from above their wing-tips, and -make unfamiliar twilight in heaven. And sometimes there is an echo -which fills the empyrean, and hushes the archangelic harps in the midst -of their praising of God. This is not often, and these visitations of -echo and shadow spread an awe over the assembled Thrones and Splendours -and Dominations, which at other times accompanies only the emanence or -appearance of God Himself. Thus are we assured as to the reality of -this Beauty. And because it remains a mystery to us, to whom naught -else is mysterious except God, we conjecture that it is the thing upon -which God meditateth, self-obscured and centred, and because of which -He hath held himself immanifest to us for so many aeons; that this is -the secret which God keepeth even from the seraphim.” - - - - -THE SHADOWS - - -There were many shadows in the palace of Augusthes. About the silver -throne that had blackened beneath the invisible passing of ages, they -fell from pillar and broken roof and fretted window in ever-shifting -multiformity. Seeming the black, fantastic spectres of doom and -desolation, they moved through the palace in a gradual, grave, and -imperceptible dance, whose music was the change and motion of suns and -moons. They were long and slender, like all other shadows before the -early light, and behind the declining sun; squat and intense beneath -the desert noontide, and faint with the withered moon; and in the -interlunar darkness, they were as myriad tongues hidden behind the shut -and silent lips of night. - -One came daily to that place of shadows and desolation, and sate upon -the silver throne, watching the shadows that were of desolation. King -nor slave disputed him there, in the palace whose kings and whose -slaves were powerless alike in the intangible dungeon of centuries. The -tombs of unnumbered and forgotten monarchs were white upon the yellow -desert roundabout. Some had partly rotted away, and showed like the -sunken eye-sockets of a skull—blank and lidless beneath the staring -heavens; others still retained the undesecrated seal of death, and were -as the closed eyes of one lately dead. But he who watched the shadows -from the silver throne, heeded not these, nor the fleet wind that dipt -to the broken tombs, and emerged shrilly, its unseen hands dark with -the dust of kings. - -He was a philosopher, from what land there was none to know or ask. -Nor was there any to ask what knowledge or delight he sought in the -ruined palace, with eyes alway upon the moving shadows; nor what were -the thoughts that moved through his mind in ghostly unison with them. -His eyes were old and sad with meditation and wisdom; and his beard was -long and white upon his long white robe. - -For many days he came with the dawn and departed with sunset; and his -shadow leaned from the shadow of the throne and moved with the others. -But one eve he departed not; and thereafter his shadow was one with the -shadow of the silver throne. Death found and left him there, where he -dwindled into dust that was as the dust of slaves or kings. - -But the ebb and refluence of shadows went on, in the days that were -before the end; ere the aged world, astray with the sun in strange -heavens, should be lost in the cosmic darkness, or, under the influence -of other and conflicting gravitations, should crumble apart and bare -its granite bones to the light of strange suns, and the granite, too, -should dissolve, and be as of the dust of slaves and kings. Noon was -encircled with darkness, and the depths of palace-dusk were chasmed -with sunlight. Change there was none, other than this, for the earth -was dead, and stirred not to the tottering feet of time. And in the -expectant silence before the twilight of the sun, the moving shadows -seemed but a mockery of change; a meaningless antic phantasmagoria of -things that were; an afterfiguring of forgotten time. - -And now the sun was darkened slowly in mid-heaven, as by some vast -and invisible bulk. And twilight hushed the shadows in the palace of -Augusthes, as the world itself swung down toward the long and single -shadow of irretrievable oblivion. - -[Illustration] - - - - - 500 copies of Ebony and Crystal have been printed. - - This is No. 283 - - [Illustration: Signature of Clark Ashton Smith] - - - * * * * * - - -Transcriber’s Notes - - -Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. All other -spelling and punctuation remains unchanged. - -This book was prepared from the author’s own copy which contained a -number of corrections in the author’s hand. These have been implemented -and the changes are (the original word is in brackets after): - - TO OMAR KHAYYAM - The cypresses like robes funereal (funeral) wear, - - THE MINISTERS OF LAW - And thee shall alien (aliend) Dominations rend.**** - - REMEMBERED LIGHT - Till the twilight shivered with (the deleted) outcry of eldritch - (eldrich) voices - - THE HASHISH-EATER; - Whose lightless length would mete (meet) the gyre of moons— - - Beyond the world, upon (beyond) that fleeing wind, - - SATAN UNREPENTANT - Lost from those (lost deleted) archangelic thrones that star, - - In wasted worlds, were purer (pure) melody. - - And in (in added) new deeps Apocalyptic suns - - ALEXANDRINES - Knowing the vacillant leaves that tremble, flame, (no comma) and fall, - - IN COCAIGNE - shone (shown) the steadfast stars of your love. As a ship that has - wandered - - THE LITANY OF THE SEVEN KISSES - I kiss thine eyelids, and liken them to the purple-veinèd (veined) - flowers - - A PHANTASY - mysterious wings of seraphim, sent to fulfill (fill) ineffable errands, - - THE SHADOWS - There were many shadows in the palace of Augusthes (Agusthes). 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