THE frost has settled down upon the treesAnd ruthlessly strangled off the fantasiesOf leaves that have gone unnoticed, swept like oldRomantic stories now no more to be told.The trees down the boulevard stand naked inthought,Their abundant summery wordage silenced, caughtIn the grim undertow; naked the trees confrontImplacable winter's long, cross-questioning brunt.Has some hand balanced more leaves in the depthsof the twigs?Some dim little efforts placed in the threads of thebirch?—It is only the sparrows, like dead black leaves onthe sprigs,Sitting huddled against the cerulean, one flesh withtheir perch.The clear, cold sky coldly bethinks itself.Like vivid thought the air spins bright, and allTrees, birds, and earth, arrested in the after-thoughtAwaiting the sentence out from the welkin brought.
How different, in the middle of snows, the greatschool rises red!A red rock silent and shadowless, clung roundwith clusters of shouting lads,Some few dark-cleaving the doorway, souls thatcling as the souls of the deadIn stupor persist at the gates of life, obstinatedark monads.This new red rock in a waste of white rises againstthe dayWith shelter now, and with blandishment, sincethe winds have had their wayAnd laid the desert horrific of silence and snow onthe world of mankind,School now is the rock in this weary land the winterburns and makes blind.
WAVING slowly before me, pushed into the dark,Unseen my hands explore the silence, drawing thebarkOf my body slowly behind.Nothing to meet my fingers but the fleece of nightInvisible blinding my face and my eyes! What ifin their flightMy hands should touch the door!What if I suddenly stumble, and push the doorOpen, and a great grey dawn swirls over my feet,beforeI can draw back!What if unwitting I set the door of eternity wideAnd am swept away in the horrible dawn, am gonedown the tideOf eternal hereafter!Catch my hands, my darling, between your breasts.Take them away from their venture, before fatewrestsThe meaning out of them.
WHO do you think stands watchingThe snow-tops shining rosyIn heaven, now that the darknessTakes all but the tallest posy?Who then sees the two-wingedBoat down there, all aloneAnd asleep on the snow's last shadow,Like a moth on a stone?The olive-leaves, light as gad-flies,Have all gone dark, gone black.And now in the dark my soul to youTurns back.To you, my little darling,To you, out of Italy.For what is loveliness, my love,Save you have it with me!So, there's an oxen wagonComes darkly into sight:A man with a lantern, swingingA little light.What does he see, my darlingHere by the darkened lake?Here, in the sloping shadowThe mountains make?He says not a word, but passes,Staring at what he sees.What ghost of us both do you think he sawUnder the olive trees?All the things that are lovely—The things you never knew—I wanted to gather them one by oneAnd bring them to you.But never now, my darlingCan I gather the mountain-tipsFrom the twilight like half-shut liliesTo hold to your lips.And never the two-winged vesselThat sleeps below on the lakeCan I catch like a moth between my handsFor you to take.But hush, I am not regretting:It is far more perfect now.I'll whisper the ghostly truth to the worldAnd tell them howI know you here in the darkness,How you sit in the throne of my eyesAt peace, and look out of the windowsIn glad surprise.
IN another country, black poplars shake them-selves over a pond,And rooks and the rising smoke-waves scatter andwheel from the works beyond;The air is dark with north and with sulphur, thegrass is a darker green,And people darkly invested with purple movepalpable through the scene.Soundlessly down across the counties, out of theresonant gloomThat wraps the north in stupor and purple travelsthe deep, slow boomOf the man-life north-imprisoned, shut in the humof the purpled steelAs it spins to sleep on its motion, drugged dense inthe sleep of the wheel.Out of the sleep, from the gloom of motion, sound-lessly, somnambuleMoans and booms the soul of a people imprisoned,asleep in the ruleOf the strong machine that runs mesmeric, boomingthe spell of its wordUpon them and moving them helpless, mechanic,their will to its will deferred.Yet all the while comes the droning inaudible, outof the violet air,The moaning of sleep-bound beings in travail thattoil and are will-less thereIn the spell-bound north, convulsive now with adream near morning, strongWith violent achings heaving to burst the sleepthat is now not long.
I
AH, stern, cold man,How can you lie so relentless hardWhile I wash you with weeping water!Do you set your face against the daughterOf life? Can you never discardYour curt pride's ban?You masquerader!How can you shame to act this partOf unswerving indifference to me?You want at last, ah me!To break my heartEvader!You know your mouthWas always sooner to softenEven than your eyes.Now shut it liesRelentless, however oftenI kiss it in drouth.It has no breathNor any relaxing. Where,Where are you, what have you done?What is this mouth of stone?How did you dareTake cover in death!
Once you could see,The white moon show like a breast revealedBy the slipping shawl of stars.Could see the small stars trembleAs the heart beneath did wieldSystole, diastole.All the lovely macrocosmWas woman once to you,Bride to your groom.No tree in bloomBut it leaned you a newWhite bosom.And always and everSoft as a summering treeUnfolds from the sky, for your good,Unfolded womanhood;Shedding you down as a treeSheds its flowers on a river.I saw your browsSet like rocks beside a sea of gloom,And I shed my very soul down into yourthought;Like flowers I fell, to be caughtOn the comforted pool, like bloomThat leaves the boughs.
Oh, masquerader,With a hard face white-enamelled,What are you now?Do you care no longer howMy heart is trammelled,Evader?Is this you, after all,Metallic, obdurateWith bowels of steel?Did youneverfeel?—Cold, insensate,Mechanical!Ah, no!—you multiform,You that I loved, you wonderful,You who darkened and shone,You were many men in one;But never this nullThis never-warm!Is this the sum of you?Is it all nought?Cold, metal-cold?Are you all toldHere, iron-wrought?Isthiswhat's become of you?
SINCE this is the last night I keep you home,Come, I will consecrate you for the journey.Rather I had you would not go. Nay come,I will not again reproach you. Lie backAnd let me love you a long time ere you go.For you are sullen-hearted still, and lackThe will to love me. But even soI will set a seal upon you from my lip,Will set a guard of honour at each door,Seal up each channel out of which might slipYour love for me.I kiss your mouth. Ah, love,Could I but seal its ruddy, shining springOf passion, parch it up, destroy, removeIts softly-stirring crimson welling-upOf kisses! Oh, help me, God! Here at the sourceI'd lie for ever drinking and drawing inYour fountains, as heaven drinks from out theircourseThe floods.I close your ears with kissesAnd seal your nostrils; and round your neck you'llwear—Nay, let me work—a delicate chain of kisses.Like beads they go around, and not one missesTo touch its fellow on either side.And thereFull mid-between the champaign of your breastI place a great and burning seal of loveLike a dark rose, a mystery of restOn the slow bubbling of your rhythmic heart.Nay, I persist, and very faith shall keepYou integral to me. Each door, each mystic portOf egress from you I will seal and steepIn perfect chrism.Now it is done. The mortWill sound in heaven before it is undone.But let me finish what I have begunAnd shirt you now invulnerable in the mailOf iron kisses, kisses linked like steel.Put greaves upon your thighs and knees, and frailWebbing of steel on your feet. So you shall feelEnsheathed invulnerable with me, with sevenGreat seals upon your outgoings, and wovenChain of my mystic will wrapped perfectlyUpon you, wrapped in indomitable me.
SHE sits on the recreation groundUnder an oak whose yellow buds dot the paleblue sky.The young grass twinkles in the wind, and the soundOf the wind in the knotted buds in a canopy.So sitting under the knotted canopyOf the wind, she is lifted and carried away as ina balloonAcross the insensible void, till she stoops to seeThe sandy desert beneath her, the dreary platoon.She knows the waste all dry beneath her, in oneplaceStirring with earth-coloured life, ever turning andstirring.But never the motion has a human faceNor sound, save intermittent machinery whirring.And so again, on the recreation groundShe alights a stranger, wondering, unused to thescene;Suffering at sight of the children playing around,Hurt at the chalk-coloured tulips, and the even-ing-green.
ROUND the house were lilacs and strawberriesAnd foal-foots spangling the paths,And far away on the sand-hills, dewberriesCaught dust from the sea's long swaths.Up the wolds the woods were walking,And nuts fell out of their hair.At the gate the nets hung, balkingThe star-lit rush of a hare.In the autumn fields, the stubbleTinkled the music of gleaning.At a mother's knees, the troubleLost all its meaning.Yea, what good beginningsTo this sad end!Have we had our innings?God forfend!
RETURNING, I find her just the same,At just the same old delicate game.Still she says: "Nay, loose no flameTo lick me up and do me harm!Be all yourself!—for oh, the charmOf your heart of fire in which I look!Oh, better there than in any bookGlow and enact the dramas and dreamsI love for ever!—there it seemsYou are lovelier than life itself, till desireComes licking through the bars of your lipsAnd over my face the stray fire slips,Leaving a burn and an ugly smartThat will have the oil of illusion. Oh, heartOf fire and beauty, loose no moreYour reptile flames of lust; ah, storeYour passion in the basket of your soul,Be all yourself, one bonny, burning coalThat stays with steady joy of its own fire.But do not seek to take me by desire.Oh, do not seek to thrust on me your fire!For in the firing all my porcelainOf flesh does crackle and shiver and break in pain,My ivory and marble black with stain,My veil of sensitive mystery rent in twain,My altars sullied, I, bereft, remainA priestess execrable, taken in vain—"So the refrainSings itself over, and so the gameRe-starts itself wherein I am keptLike a glowing brazier faintly blue of flameSo that the delicate love-adeptCan warm her hands and invite her soul,Sprinkling incense and salt of wordsAnd kisses pale, and sipping the tollOf incense-smoke that rises like birds.Yet I've forgotten in playing this game,Things I have known that shall have no name;Forgetting the place from which I cameI watch her ward away the flame,Yet warm herself at the fire—then blameMe that I flicker in the basket;Me that I glow not with contentTo have my substance so subtly spent;Me that I interrupt her game.I ought to be proud that she should ask itOf me to be her fire-opal—.It is wellSince I am here for so short a spellNot to interrupt her?—Why should IBreak in by making any reply!
I
INTO the shadow-white chamber silts the whiteFlux of another dawn. The wind that all nightLong has waited restless, suddenly waftsA whirl like snow from the plum-trees and the pear,Till petals heaped between the window-shaftsIn a drift die there.A nurse in white, at the dawning, flower-foamedpaneDraws down the blinds, whose shadows scarcelystainThe white rugs on the floor, nor the silent bedThat rides the room like a frozen berg, its crestFinally ridged with the austere line of the deadStretched out at rest.Less than a year the fourfold feet had pressedThe peaceful floor, when fell the sword on their rest.Yet soon, too soon, she had him home againWith wounds between them, and suffering like aguestThat will not go. Now suddenly going, the painLeaves an empty breast.
A tall woman, with her long white gown aflowAs she strode her limbs amongst it, once moreShe hastened towards the room. Did she knowAs she listened in silence outside the silent door?Entering, she saw him in outline, raised on a pyreAwaiting the fire.Upraised on the bed, with feet erect as a bow,Like the prow of a boat, his head laid back like thesternOf a ship that stands in a shadowy sea of snowWith frozen rigging, she saw him; she drooped likea fernRefolding, she slipped to the floor as a ghost-whitepeony slipsWhen the thread clips.Soft she lay as a shed flower fallen, nor heardThe ominous entry, nor saw the other love,The dark, the grave-eyed mistress who thus daredAt such an hour to lay her claim, aboveA stricken wife, so sunk in oblivion, bowedWith misery, no more proud.
The stranger's hair was shorn like a lad's dark pollAnd pale her ivory face: her eyes would failIn silence when she looked: for all the wholeDarkness of failure was in them, without avail.Dark in indomitable failure, she who had lostNow claimed the host,She softly passed the sorrowful flower shedIn blonde and white on the floor, nor even turnedHer head aside, but straight towards the bedMoved with slow feet, and her eyes' flame steadilyburned.She looked at him as he lay with banded cheek,And she started to speakSoftly: "I knew it would come to this," she said,"I knew that some day, soon, I should find you thus.So I did not fight you. You went your way insteadOf coming mine—and of the two of usI died the first, I, in the after-lifeAm now your wife."
"'Twas I whose fingers did draw up the youngPlant of your body: to me you looked e'er sprungThe secret of the moon within your eyes!My mouth you met before your fine red mouthWas set to song—and never your song deniesMy love, till you went south.""'Twas I who placed the bloom of manhood onYour youthful smoothness: I fleeced where fleecewas noneYour fervent limbs with flickers and tendrils of newKnowledge; I set your heart to its stronger beat;I put my strength upon you, and I threwMy life at your feet.""But I whom the years had reared to be your bride,Who for years was sun for your shivering, shade foryour sweat,Who for one strange year was as a bride to you—youset me asideWith all the old, sweet things of our youth;—andnever yetHave I ceased to grieve that I was not great enoughTo defeat your baser stuff."V"But you are given back again to meWho have kept intact for you your virginity.Who for the rest of life walk out of care,Indifferent here of myself, since I am goneWhere you are gone, and you and I out thereWalk now as one.""Your widow am I, and only I. I dreamGod bows his head and grants me this supremePure look of your last dead face, whence now is goneThe mobility, the panther's gambolling,And all your being is given to me, so noneCan mock my struggling.""And now at last I kiss your perfect face,Perfecting now our unfinished, first embrace.Your young hushed look that then saw God ablazeIn every bush, is given you back, and weAre met at length to finish our rest of daysIn a unity."
FAR-OFF the lily-statues stand white-ranked in thegarden at home.Would God they were shattered quickly, the cattlewould tread them out in the loam.I wish the elder trees in flower could suddenly heave,and burstThe walls of the house, and nettles puff out fromthe hearth at which I was nursed.It stands so still in the hush composed of trees andinviolate peace,The home of my fathers, the place that is mine, myfate and my old increase.And now that the skies are falling, the world isspouting in fountains of dirt,I would give my soul for the homestead to fall withme, go with me, both in one hurt.
THE trees in trouble because of autumn,And scarlet berries falling from the bush,And all the myriad houseless seedsLoosing hold in the wind's insistent pushMoan softly with autumnal parturition,Poor, obscure fruits extruded out of lightInto the world of shadow, carried downBetween the bitter knees of the after-night.Bushed in an uncouth ardour, coiled at coreWith a knot of life that only bliss can unravel,Fall all the fruits most bitterly into earthBitterly into corrosion bitterly travel.What is it internecine that is locked,By very fierceness into a quiescenceWithin the rage? We shall not know till it burstOut of corrosion into new florescence.Nay, but how tortured is the frightful seedThe spark intense within it, all withoutMordant corrosion gnashing and champing hardFor ruin on the naked small redoubt.Bitter, to fold the issue, and make no sally;To have the mystery, but not go forth;To bear, but retaliate nothing, given to saveThe spark in storms of corrosion, as seeds fromthe north.The sharper, more horrid the pressure, the harderthe heartThat saves the blue grain of eternal fireWithin its quick, committed to hold and waitAnd suffer unheeding, only forbidden to expire.
WHERE the minnows traceA glinting web quick hid in the gloom of the brook,When I think of the placeAnd remember the small lad lying intent to lookThrough the shadowy faceAt the little fish thread-threading the watery nook—It seems to meThe woman you are should be nixie, there is a poolWhere we ought to be.You undine-clear and pearly, soullessly coolAnd waterlyThe pool for my limbs to fathom, my soul's lastschool.NarcissusVentured so long ago in the deeps of reflection.IllyssusBroke the bounds and beyond!—Dim recollectionOf fishesSoundlessly moving in heaven's other direction!BeUndine towards the waters, moving back;For meA pool! Put off the soul you've got, oh lackYour human self immortal; take the watery track.
THE sun sets out the autumn crocusesAnd fills them up a pouring measureOf death-producing wine, till treasureRuns waste down their chalices.All, all Persephone's pale cups of mouldAre on the board, are over-filled;The portion to the gods is spilled;Now, mortals all, take hold!The time is now, the wine-cup full and fullOf lambent heaven, a pledging-cup;Let now all mortal men take upThe drink, and a long, strong pull.Out of the hell-queen's cup, the heaven's pale wine—Drink then, invisible heroes, drink.Lips to the vessels, never shrink,Throats to the heavens incline.And take within the wine the god's great oathBy heaven and earth and hellish streamTo break this sick and nauseous dreamWe writhe and lust in, both.Swear, in the pale wine poured from the cups of thequeenOf hell, to wake and be freeFrom this nightmare we writhe in,Break out of this foul has-been.
ON that dayI shall put roses on roses, and cover your graveWith multitude of white roses: and since you werebraveOne bright red ray.So people, passing underThe ash-trees of the valley-road, will raiseTheir eyes and look at the grave on the hill, inwonder,Wondering mount, and put the flowers asunderTo see whose praiseIs blazoned here so white and so bloodily red.Then they will say: "'Tis long since she is dead,Who has remembered her after many days?"And standing thereThey will consider how you went your waysUnnoticed among them, a still queen lost in themazeOf this earthly affair.A queen, they'll say,Has slept unnoticed on a forgotten hill.Sleeps on unknown, unnoticed there, untilDawns my insurgent day.