POEMS BY IRIS TREE

You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbs

With rights and wrongs and arguments of good,

You choke my songs and fill my mouth with hymns,

You stop my heart and turn it into wood.

I serve not God, but make my idol fair

From clay of brown earth, painted bright with blood,

Dressed in sweet flesh and wonder of wild hair

By Beauty's fingers to her changing mood.

The long line of the sea, the straight horizon,

The toss of flowers, the prance of milky feet,

And moonlight clear as glass my great religion,

And sunrise falling on the quiet street.

The coloured crowd, the unrestrained, the gay,

And lovers in the secret sheets of night

Trembling like instruments of music, till the day

Stands marvelling at their sleeping bodies white.

Age creeps upon your timid little faces

Beneath each black umbrella sly and slow,

Proud in the unimportance of your places

You sit in twilight prophesying woe.

So dim and false and grey, take my compassion,

I from my pageant golden as the day

Pity your littleness from all my passion,

Leave you my sins to weep and whine away!

We are the caretakers of empty houses,

The moon leans her slender body against the door,

But the lock is jarred with rust.

The sun looks in through the window,

But its closed shutters are as blinded eyes.

Our souls are full of dead and beautiful things

Like bowls of potpourri,

A dust of petals

Rustling through the tired fingers of a ghost.

From far away the lost adventures gleam,

The print of childhood's feet that dance and run,

The love of her who showed me to the sun

In triumph of creation, who did seem

With vivid spirit like a rainbow stream

To paint the shells, young blossoms, one by one

Each strange and delicate toy, whose hands have spun

The woven cloth of wonder like a dream ...

The row of soldiered books, authority

Sharp as the scales I strummed upon the keys,

The priest who damned the things I dared not praise,

Rebellion, love made sad with mystery—

And like a firefly through the twilit trees

Romance, the golden play-boy of my days.

Give me, O God, the power of laughter still,

I shall have need of humour, deftest foil

Against the army of infuriated pride,

Against the shields of reason, and the spears

Of savage moments, sharp-edged bitterness;

Against the blazoned armour of intolerance,

And all the flags of sentiment waved aloft....

Love, Humour, and Rebellion, go with me,

Three musketeers of faithful following.

We will fear nothing.—Is not laughter brave,

That unconcerned goes rippling through despair?

Is not rebellion brave, that fiercely moves

Against the buttressed prisons of the world?

And is not love the bravest of them all,

So frail to hold his white hands up to Heaven

While the red fists are threatening all around,

And hate is beating on the battledrums?

As d'Artagnan upon a starved grey horse

Goes singing ballads on adventurous roads,

I ride my fancy blithely into danger

To throw my gauntlet at the feet of pride

And stick my roses in the cap of Love....

Winding down the street in wearied gaiety, the barrel-organ dribbled out its song

Merged with the thud of feet forever dallying indifferent and indefinite along.

The houses stood like rows of cripples, some paralysed, some hunch-backed and some bent with age,

They seemed at war, their chimneys threatening, their brows hung heavy in a sombre rage.

Crab-like the children crawled, while always hammering above their heads the scolding shrewish tongue;

They grew as bloodless flowers unflourishing, waxen and pale from out the dust and dung.

Above I saw the strip of sunset fluttering, even as washed-out rags upon the line,

I listened to the sparrows twittering, and the hours ticking in a slow decline.

Then beaded on the hem of evening, the coloured lights were threaded here and there,

Till proud with sweets and plumes and oranges, the shops grew brilliant in the tinsel glare.

Grey was the death-bed of the twilight, shuddering the faint hands of the day stretched to the night,

Fending it off, or feebly wavering over the pallid glints of stolen light.

And grey the faces that were gathering among the fallen ashes of the day,

And red the faces, yellow, flickering, under the lamps upon the long highway.

And some were gashed with smiles, and quaint grimaces of hate and pain and hunger and despair,

And some wore coloured hats and meek frivolities, limp ribbons, and false pansies in their hair,

But all were cold, and all seemed passionless; there shone no zest or splendour in their lives,

Nor hope in anything but holidays, or watching funerals, or taking wives.

I dared not think, for truth rose horrible, slapping the face with coarse uncaring hand,

But like them cheated into merriment, I wilfully refused to understand;

Turned me away from wan-eyed poverty, trod pity underfoot, oh, danced on grief,

Bade the crowd sing and fill my desolation, bade them be glad and hide my disbelief.

Strange we so love the world—for presently, out of my window looking on the city,

I blessed the night, and the roofs slumbering all huddled, and I felt no shame nor pity

For all our dusty days of journeying amid the wreck and ruins of our dreams,

Meandering in a bleared forgetfulness, where lethe laps the wharf of sleeping streams.

I only breathed the air, intensified by the ascending breath of million lungs,

And heard the labouring metropolis, quickened by whispers of a million tongues;

And felt a king of splendid loneliness, and felt an atom of the peopled spaces,

And felt again my lordly egoism, one face distinct among the blur of faces.

Tranquility stirred by a sudden spasm,

Knives of rain that cut the silence,

Storms that rattle the bones of the forest,

Calm of the marble-terraced night

Charred with the spattering of rockets.

Drums will I hear and battles now,

And the long death howl of wolves by night,

Watching the moon on the forest tops,

Walking with delicate frightened steps

To the slaughter-house of a red sunrise.

I could explain

The complicated lore that drags the soul

From what shall profit him

To gild damnation with his choicest gold.

But you

Are poring over precious books and do not hear

Our plaintive, frivolous songs;

For we in stubborn vanity ascend

On ladders insecure,

Toward the tottering balconies

To serenade our painted paramours;

Caught by the lure of dangerous pale hands,

Oblivion's heavy lids on sleepless eyes

That cheat between unrest and false repose.

And we are haunted

By spectral Joy once murdered in a rage,

Now taking shape of Pleasure,

Disguised in many clothes and skilful masks.

I could disclose

The truth that hangs between our lies

And jostles sleep to semi-consciousness;

Truth, that stings like nettles

Our frail hands dare not pluck

From out our garden's terraced indolence.

We are not happy,

And you make us dumb with loving hands

Reproachful on our lips.

Nor can we sob our sorrows on your breast,

For we have bartered diamonds for glass,

Our tears for smiles,

Eternity for now.

I feel in me a manifold desire

From many lands and times and clamouring peoples,

And I the Queen

Of crowding vagabonds,

Ghosts of lost years in seeming fancy dress,

With pathos of torn laces

And broken swords;

Cut-throats and kings and poets

Who have loved me

In visions wild, not knowing

What I was.

In me no end

Even where the last content

Clasps on my head a crown

Of shining endurance—

I slip from all my robes

Into the rags of a tattered romance;

The stars crowd at the window,

Their jealous destiny

Raps at the door—

They bob and wink and leer,

And I must leave the lamplight for the road

To keep strange company.

Farewell and Hail!

Silence—

Somewhere on earth

There is a purpose that I miss or have forgotten.

The trees stand bolt upright

Like roofless pillars of a broken temple.

There is a purpose in Heaven,

But for me

Nothing.

I should like to say to the world:

I have launched my soul like a ship upon free waters;

Beautiful she stands in the docks with proud masts cutting the sky,

Perfectly poised, her white sails spreading like wings,

Her figurehead a woman with breasts that daunt the spray,

Her flag a flutter of coloured exuberance.

I should like to see her plunging out of the idle harbour

Where the sulky tide drifts scum, and the sailors wrangle and shout,

In a thunder of churning waves ramping before her like dappled stallions,

Blossoming behind her a field of etiolate lilies....

But to the mimicking, plotting, miserly, cynical,

To the rabble and gabble that dance and kill on the quay,

I can only say that my soul is a sleeping gondola

Lulled by a jester's mandolin, till night is atinkle with tunes

And lantern-lights, along the indolent backwaters.

You pass as in a drugged delirium

Wrought strange upon the mind's distraction;

You sing a blasphemous Te Deum

To harlot virgins, and a fraction

Of your fulginous colour passes,

Stains my spirit's great conception

As it dips into your glasses.

I that am the sole exception

To your stillborn, false devices,

I that know you, I that hate you,

I that drank now spit your vices

Through my loathing reinstate you;

Dive once more into the stagnance,

Kiss your cynic lips and drink you,

Concentrate your cruel fragrance,

Steal your flowers before I sink you,

Lift with hate instead of praises,

Show you honour of my scorning,

Garlanded you go to blazes

With my rhymes for your adorning!

O faces that look so coldly at me,

Colder than dawn through the windows of festival,

Colder than dawn with her grey nun's face.

You blame me, you curse me with your eyes,

While your lips are filled with flattering syllables,

With tinkling bells that harass my calm,

Disturb my silence and shatter my thoughts.

Your laughter waltzes like musical boxes,

How can I hear the triumphant symphonies?

The scarlet rhapsodies and beryl-cold sonatas? ...

Ah, strangers, ah, vacant tedious faces,

Bobbing beneath the feathery hats,

You have stolen the wings of birds for your garnishing,

And the stars and the dim pale petals of the sea

To make your breasts resplendent, to glitter your dress,—

How I might love you and weep for you,

Crowning your brows with a wreath of songs

If you could understand my singing,

If you could understand my love!

But you are waltzing with your marionettes

And marching to the music of the clock—

I cannot bear you to watch me

With those cold eyes through which I see,

Emptiness only and dust.

I see myself in many different dresses,

In many moods, and many different places;

All gold amid the grey where solemn faces

Are silence to my mirth—a flame that blesses

From yellow lamp the darkness which oppresses ...

Or mid the dancers in their trivial laces

Aloof, as in the ring a lion paces,

Disdainful of their slander or caresses.

I see myself the child of many races,

Poisoners, martyrs, harlots and princesses;

Within my soul a thousand weary traces

Of pain and joy and passionate excesses—

Eternal beauty that our brief love chases

With snatch of desperate hands and dying tresses.

There are songs enough of love, of joy, of grief:

Roads to the sunset, alleys to the moon;

Poems of the red rose and the golden leaf,

Fantastic faery and gay ballad tune.

The long road unto nothing I will sing,

Sing on one note, monotonous and dry,

Of sameness, calmness and the years that bring

No more emotion than the fear to die.

Grey house, grey house and after that grey house,

Another house as grey and steep and still:

An old cat tired of playing with a mouse,

A sick child tired of chasing down the hill.

Shuffle and hurry, idle feet, and slow,

Grim face and merry face, so ugly all!

Why do you hurry? Where is there to go?

Why are you shouting? Who is there to call?

Lovers still kissing, feverish to drain

Stale juices from the shrivelled fruit of lust:

A black umbrella held up in the rain,

The raindrops making patterns in the dust.

If this distaste I hold for fools is such,

Shall I not spit upon myself as well?

Do I not eat and drink and smile as much?

Do I not fatten also in this hell?

Sadness and joy—if they were melted up,

Things that were great—upon the fires of time

Drop but as soup in the accustomed cup,

Settle in stagnance, trickle into grime.

Faith, freedom, art that fire a man or two

And set him like a pilgrim on his way

With Beauty's face before him—what of you,

Priest, Butcher, Scholar, King, upon that day?

The dullard-masses that no god can save!

If I were God, to rise and strike you down

And break your churches in an angry wave

And make a furious bonfire of your town!

God in a coloured globe, alone and still,

Embroidering wonders with a fearless brain,

On loom of spaces measureless, to fill

The empty air with passion and with pain.

Emblazon all the heavens with desire

And Wisdom delved for in the depths of time—

Thoughts sculptured mountainous, and fancy's fire

Caught in the running swiftness of a rhyme.

Passion high-pedestalled, pangs turned to treasure,

Perfected and undone and built afresh

With concentrated agony and Pleasure ...

If I were God, and not a weight of flesh!

How often, when the thought of suicide

With ghostly weapon beckons us to die,

The ghosts of many foods alluring glide

On golden dishes, wine in purple tide

To drown our whim. Things danced before the eye

Like tasselled grapes to Tantalus: The sly

Blue of a curling trout, the battened pride

Of ham in frills, complacent quails that lie

Resigned to death like heroes—July peas,

Expectant bottles foaming at the brink—

White bread, and honey of the golden bees—

A peach with velvet coat, some prawns in pink,

A slice of beef carved deftly, Stilton cheese,

And cup where berries float and bubbles wink.

It is still something to have cheated God

And bored the Devil with so easy prey,

And in the midst of summer woods to raise

A leafless tree whose stark limbs mock at Heaven,

Flaunting an iron hatred in the midst of hope—

Yet sometimes in the loneliness of night

My buried longings blossom on the boughs,

My wistful longings come out star by star,

Till the great sky is light with my desire,

And on the winds my songs are galloping....

Ah, to what dismal greyness creeps the soul

Too weak, too tired, to struggle from the slough!

My weapons rust, my pen is in the dust,

The moulting feathers plucked from out my wings

Lie dangling in the hats I stole them for.

My heart is floating in a claret cup,

My brain is toppling drunken at the brim,

My life is drowned within the lurid dregs.

I turn and fold my hands in a last appeal,

What heaven shall I pray to and for what,

Now that my songs to penny tunes are set,

And nothing is to save of me but flesh?

What words that move on wings in a long drift

Can waft this silence into weary ears,

And steal into the veins and fingertips

Of restless bodies, like magnificent ships

Proud from the seas that calmly sail through fears,

Mean streets, and miseries, with passage swift.

What words pricked from the stars and shimmering together,

Or swept like little winds through leaves alert,

Can filter through the chinks of bolted doors

Deaf to the clamours knocking without pause,

Steeled with indifference against all hurt,

Deaf to the cry of man, and rack of weather:

To sing the hubbub of this glittering night,

Where all the lamps each with a separate soul

Throb to the ecstasies of dancing life;

And Beauty, gleaming high her magic knife

Cuts free the tethered heart from long control

And flings it like a ball with mad delight

Into the silver lap of the young moon.

What needles quick, what threads, what fingers fine

Can broider tapestries as rich as these,

Stranger than dreams and drifting melodies,

Transparent as the gods we half divine,

Frail as the thoughts that dwindle in a swoon

Ghostly before begetting. Tinged with pain

That glimmers pale on hands we cannot find,

And visioned faces that our dreams create

Born in the land forbidden us of fate

And longed for all our lives ... What words can bind

Forever Joy, that never comes again!

I think myself

The fool of tragedy strutting upon the stage

Where murder creeps and whispers.

The jester clad in piebald tights

Half black, half golden, with no company

Save bells that jingle,

And an effigy,

The grinning image painted like myself

Upon a stick....

I think myself

The fool of comedy mournfully straying

Amid the revellers,

Loving the moon and my own shadow

With its strange solemn gestures—

Loving the painted moon

That lets me play with shadows.

I am the jester on an empty stage

Playing a pantomime

To spectres in the stalls,

Listening at last

For ghostly mirth and phantom hands applauding,

And for some king with decadent tired fingers

To fling a white gardenia at my feet.

The adored, wild, strange, irresistible,

How they fail one at the last!

What is there in your faces

That we should worship with our souls?

Most lovable, perfidious,

Vague—

Molesting even our visions

With treacherous pathos.

O vulgarity, mediocrity, stupidity,

What is it in you that makes us lavish our love,

Covering your meagre bodies

With our passionate mantle, dyed with blood and dreams?

Life and its grey days, and time

Are a thin curtain through which you shadow,

Or a dim glass through which you peer.

You climb in at the windows of our souls

With ladders and stratagems,

You mope in corners with reproachful eyes.

But what do you do for us

Lute players, dancers, deceivers,

Other than lie with red lips

And cajole with tears of beryl?

People—

Men and women with laughable, tragic faces

Winking at love,

Treading our songs and illusions

Under petulant feet!

Like flocks of tired birds when autumn comes,

My spirit flags across the darkening fields

And melts into the drabness of the sky

And falls like dust upon the huddled corn.

But many wizened faces brown and sad

Peer from the bushes as I wander past,—

They tell me all those things that old men say

As youth looks up through tears with pallid cheek.

"When you are grey and crooked as ourselves,

When you have bowed before all other gods,

And found them false, then shall you come at last

To that dark King of grief, and he shall bless

Your bread with tears, and manacle your hands,

And call you slave and lover." ...

Shall not a child take Pain for company

And share her loneliness with him?

Does not a youth know tears

In the first bitterness of broken love?

Is Grief so proud a king that none shall come

To seek him save the blind, the halt, the lame? ...

He is a tramp, a beggar, and a clown,

He sits a jester at the feet of kings

And scurries with the leaves in Autumn's train.

He rides the wooden horses at a fair,

And dances with the jiggers on the stage.

Led by the violins of discontent

That whine their music to my listening soul,

I dance with him the dance of withered leaves,

We dance together to the tunes of rain

Played on one note upon the only string.

Oh, just beyond the curve of ideal quest

That changes as a sea wave to the wind,

Beyond the cloud that folds around a star,

And dawn, that stands ajar to let us in,

Lies that to which our loves and dreams have gone,

The paradise of all we might have been,

While we are washed back downwards in the dark

Where tides recede, to dwindle with the foam.

Ah! you, from the small high-walled acre of your lives,

Your windows only looking upon gardens,

Only perceiving love and death and truth

As facts that come to pass,

That pass and leave you still

Within your safe small prisons,

Older, duller,

To walk and talk among the evergreens.

You have never known

Delight of dying slowly,

Poisoned with raptures

In many hues from the slim-cut decanters of death—

The tunes

That dishevel and smooth,

Cajole and melancholize—

The dance

Which is a whirling of leaves

In their last scorn of sorrow

Flung upwards by the wind

Into the haggard face of winter—

Nor felt your souls go blowing like balloons

Tossed by impulsive hands;

Nor slid as skaters swiftly

Over the crackling crystals of perilous ice,

Buffeted with bouquets and blinded with confetti ...

You have not felt the abandon

Of light love

Dragged by the hair across a slippery floor....

Mouth of the dust I kiss, corruption absolute,

Worm, that shall come at last to be my paramour,

Envenomed, unseen wanderer who alone is mute,

Yet greater than gods or heroes that have gone before.

For you I sheave the harvest of my hair,

For you the whiteness of my flesh, my passion's valour,

For you I throw upon the grey screen of the air

My prism-like conceptions, my gigantic colour.

For you the delicate hands that fashion to make great

Clay, and white paper, plant a tongue in silence,

For you the battle-frenzy, and the might of hate,

Science for giving wounds, and healing science.

For you the heart's wild love, beauty, long care,

Virginity, passionate womanhood, perfected wholeness,

For you the unborn child that I prepare,

You, flabby, boneless, brainless, senseless, soulless!

The curtains are drawn as though it still were night,

A slip of dawn between them is a dangling silver ribbon;

And all about the room is quietness—Each patient chair

Erect, alert, in place. A letter on the table and a book

Lie as you left them, now bereft of purpose—

Garish a little in the room's sedateness, you

Returning dressed so frivolously in all your coloured clothes!

How grey and sober, full of placid wit

The furniture, the pictures on the wall;

How steely swift the light, stabbing you to the heart

As you stand at the window, bright as rushing blood.

Garish your hair, your shoes, your startling chalky face

And white, white gloves ...

What time is it? ... Still ticks the tireless clock,

With face grimacing ... nearly six it is....

Yet hurries not nor lingers, like our hearts,

For in its dial eternity is housed—

A cock should crow ... there are no cocks in town!

But a water cart with surly noise below

Grates unconcerned along the disconsolate street.

How cold and how familiar all these things,

To you so lonely in the enormous dawn

Slowly unfastening that vermilion dress ...

My pain has all the patience of a nun

Who kneels and prays for Heaven on the stone,

In some chill cellar where the amens moan,

Ave Maria, the long penance spun

Forever. And the tapers one by one

Stand like cold angels round the Virgin's throne.

My soul is tired from kneeling all alone,

Its little candles yearning to the sun.

Long have I dreamed of Paradise and seen

Bright mirages of glory on the grey

Of sad horizons; I have kept the green

Surprise of spring through winter and dismay,

Tasting within the bitter dregs of spleen

Drugs that bring peace, and wine that maketh gay.

The scandal-monger after all is right—

The old and cunning voice with weary repetition

Is justified in all dull words and warnings.

I see at last how you,

Spendthrift of passion

In love's bankruptcy,

Borrow new beauty from each passing face—

How being too lavish you did steal

From generous hands—

You are the idol builder and the robber of temples,

Praising with passionate psalms

The thing you cannot worship—

And yet your prayers have stirred

Belief in us—

We see beyond the false and weary face

Into your haggard soul and trust from pity—

We hear beyond the idle music of your voice,

A wisdom taught by cruelty

And a tired scorn of treachery and guile—

We see your wounds and weep,

You meet our pity with a traitor's kiss—

For, you are schooled in suffering and schooled

In teaching pain to others—

And all that mob of furious accusation

To which you turn the cheek, or curse so well,

Are but the ghosts of bodies you have murdered,

That drive you on in vengeance to fresh crime.

Woods of brown gloom sombring with the hush of death,

Wind's lassitude that sets the tired leaves shivering,

Starved yellow leaves sighing beneath the feet, a breath

Consumptive, old, and fever-red leaves quivering,

As with an earthward flutter like a ghostly butterfly

Listless they perish, wavering and hovering.

Skeleton branches where the rooks flap wings and cry,

Perched upon ribs and fingers; and the white mists covering

The far-off hills and bloodless visage of the sun.

No noise save the meandering dribble of a rivulet,

No noise save of the slow hours dropping one by one

As embers, no colour save Time's ashen coverlet....

How melancholy here the gayest tunes would sound

From shrill carousers riotous and merry all,

As echoes of lost joy their dancing feet upon the ground,

As funeral bagpipes at a burial.

And I who wander passionless and forlorn,

A leaf-forsaken tree symbolic of dejection,

In rags of old desires, dispirited and torn,

See in the stagnant glass of Time my soul's reflection.

I feel so much alone,

And yet I know that many hopes are storming

My shut heart;

For I am bolted fast in my own house.

I pace distracted through its corridors

To the music of Love's knocking hands

Against the gate,

Or silence when they sleep.

I cannot find the key to let them in,

I, my own host and guest and ghost,

Imprisoned in myself!

Shall we be christened poets, children of God,

For blowing sighs into the listeners' ears,

For tugging at the moaning bells of death,

And coming as the autumn grave-digger

To close the eyes of flowers, and shut the fingers

Of wind upon the rushes,

Of music upon silence?

Shall we be given wreathes of bay and laurel

For forcing tragedy into a rhyme

As a gaunt beggar in a spangled vest?

The poet ever wanders after Death,

The flunkey on a funeral chariot

Pouring the wine at feasts of burial;

And all the roses that he plucks from summer

Are carried to the crypts to deck a corpse....

How shall the world learn how to laugh again

When all its songs have only learnt to weep?

When I am weary at the antic chance,

The hobby-horses and the wooden lance,

The hope and fear in jugglery, and see

How starved the juggler, mean and miserly,

And life a laboured trick—the years advance

A shrilling chorus in affected dance

With lust of many eyes that watch and wink

Fixed on them; or a clown in feverish pink

Will draw gross laughter by a hideous prance—

Vulgarity and sin and souls askance,

Where fiddles squeal and all the follies spin—

Till, when the stage is empty, Harlequin

Through curtained silence trips as from a trance

With blushing flowers for Columbine—Romance.

Now is the evening dipped knee-deep in blood

And the dun hills stand fearful in their places.

Cunning in sin, we shuffle down the streets

With burdens of vainglory on our backs,

Spinning with spider-hands the miser's web

Or sitting placid, gay and fat with ease.

But out beyond, the armies of the world

March doomwards to the rhythm of the drum

Under the thirsting sun. Death holds his state:

His skeleton hands are filled with scarlet spoil:

He stands on flaming ramparts, waving high

The ensign of decay. All his bones are dressed

With livid roses; all his pillars black

Are girt in ashen poppies, and on dust

He raises up his awful golden throne.

Oh! your fierce shrieks have fainted on deaf ears;

Your tears have flowed on feet of carven stone;

Your blood is spilt for the boiling-pot of God

Where good and evil mix; and all your rage

Is but a thin smoke wafted in His face.

Blow upon blow they bruise the daylight wan,

Scar upon scar they rend the quiet shore;

They ride on furious, leaving every man

Crushed like a maggot by the hoofs of war:

Gods that grow tired of paradisial water

And fill their cups with steaming wine of slaughter.

I fear a thing more terrible than death:

The glamour of the battle grips us yet—

As crowds before a fire that hold their breath

Watching the burning houses, and forget

All they will lose, but marvel to behold

Its dazzling strength, the glamour of its gold.

I fear the time when slow the flame expires,

When this kaleidoscope of roaring color

Fades, and rage faints; and of the funeral-fires

That shone with battle, nothing left of valour

Save chill ignoble ashes for despair

To strew with widowed hands upon her hair.

Livid and damp unfolds the winding-sheet,

Hiding the mangled body of the Earth:

The slow grey aftermath, the limping feet

Of days that shall not know the sound of mirth,

But pass in dry-eyed patience, with no trust

Save to end living and be heaped with dust.

That stillness that must follow where Death trod,

The sullen street, the empty drinking-hall,

The tuneless voices cringing praise to God,

Deaf gods, that did not heed the anguished call,

Now to be soothed with humbleness and praise,

With fawning kisses for the hand that slays.

Across the world from out the fevered ground

Decay from every pore exhales its breath;

A cloak of penance winding close around

The bright desire of spring. And unto Death,

As to a conquering king, we yield the keys

Of Beauty's gates upon our bended knees.

The maiden loverless shall go her ways,

And child unfathered feed on crust and husk;

The sun that was the glory of our days

Shining as tinsel till the moody dusk

Into our starving outstretched arms shall lay

Her silent sleep, the only boon we pray.

A ragged drummer rides along the street,

And at his coming

The silence fills with tunes and rustling feet

And voices humming.

He rode a year ago from far away,

On charger prancing,

With bright new buttons and with ribbons gay,

And banners dancing.

Oh, he was fatter than the bursting drum

He bore so proudly,

His roaring music woke the silence dumb

To thunder loudly.

And by his side the old men and the young

Had followed cheering

Into the sunset smiling as they sung,

Nor thought of fearing.

They left their lovers and their mothers' lap,

Their homes demolish,

"For, look, I have a ribbon for my cap,

A sword to polish!"

And so the town was silent once again,

Though tunes of battle

Beat fearful in the wind, or in the rain

Ghost drums would rattle.

But at the chuckling dice or careful loom,

Or candled churches

A few forgot or prayed or followed doom

With drunken lurches....

Now loom and bar and church disgorge the throng,

In huddled masses

They stand aghast to hear the drummer's song

As back he passes—

Palsied and drear and bent he turns alone

In rags and tatters,

And on a soundless barrel with a bone

He beats and batters.

"Where march your feet so gaily, careless crowd,

That we may kiss them?

Where sound your little songs that rang so loud

To us that miss them?"

There are no songs, no happy marching feet,

No favours flying:

The drummer passes ... on the quiet street

The sun is dying.

Sun that must bleed to death so red and brave!...

Have done with weeping,

But put your ribbons on a soldier's grave

As he lies sleeping.

O flattery, imposture, battle show,

What banners have you woven from the parted raiment,

What crimes from Calvary, what endless flow

Of blood from blood, revenge, exacted payment!

How have you turned the simple truth to lies

Made capital from creeds and missed their beauty,

Exalted vainly with self-pitying sighs

The wrongs enacted in the name of duty.

And ever quoting God for your excuse,

Bribing divinity to cloak your shame,

You train the spirit for material use,

You sacrifice men's hearts to feed your flame.

When shall the world be rid of these bald priests,

Pig-snouted with their gilded wolfish ears,

The scarlet cardinals of drunken feasts

Whose hands are washed in blood, whose feet in tears?

What will happen to the beggar, and the sinner, and the sad,

And the drunk that drinks for sorrow, and the maimed, and mad;

What will happen to the starving, and the rebel run from drilling,

Cowardly, afraid of fighting, and the child who stole a shilling?

They shall go to prison black

With a striped shirt on the back,

Feast on bread and water there

In a cell, without a care.

They shall learn at least their duty,

Never tempted more of beauty—

They shall walk in rows and praise the Lord,

And one or two shall hang upon a cord—

And two or three shall die of grief alone—

(And this is well, for sinners should atone,)

And five or six shall curse the God that made them,

(And this is wicked, for the priests forbade them,)

And those that grew from dust shall go to dust

Downtrodden. Saith the preacher:—"God is just."

If I were what I would be, and could break

The buttressed fortress of stupidity

Where laws are sentinels, and lies the masonry,

Surrounded with inertia, weedy lake,

Where centuries of mud lie curdled, and the fake

Grandeur of cardboard turrets, solemn puppetry—

The gods are blinking at us sleepily,

Tired of our games, the muddles that we make,

The bloodshed, idol worshipping, the chess

Of king, queen, castle, bishop, knight and pawn—

The rigid squares of black and white, they dress

With their perpetual challenge—faded, worn,

Are all the creeds and praises you profess

To weary gods that stretch themselves and yawn.

How deeply nurtured is your foolishness,

Calling destruction great and slaughter brave,

Making large triumph of a little grave,

Imperial purple of a mourning dress,

The gun an emblem of your godliness—

A fluttering ribbon or a banner's wave,

A medal or a bayonet, or rave

Of singing, marching in the forward press

Of hatred to the banging of a band;

Your country's honour and the world's release.

Are they not strong in courage who withstand

The armies of your folly and shall cease

To tarnish with spilt life their motherland?

Cowards—or martyrs—crucified for peace.

Of all who died in silence far away

Where sympathy was busy with other things,

Busy with worlds, inventing how to slay,

Troubled with rights and wrongs and governments and kings.

The little dead who knew so large a love,

Whose lives were sweet unto themselves a shepherding

Of hopes, ambitions, wonders in a drove

Over the hills of time, that now are graves for burying.

Of all the tenderness that flowed to them,

A milky way streaming from out their mother's breast,

Stars were they to her night, and she the stem

From which they flowered—now barren and left unblessed.

Of all the sparkling kisses that they gave

Spangling a secret radiance on adoring hands,

Now stifled in the darkness of a grave

With kiss of loneliness and death's embracing bands.

No more!—And we, the mourners, dare not wear

The black that folds our hearts in secrecy of pain,

But must don purple and bright standards bear,

Vermilion of our honour, a bloody train.

We dare not weep who must be brave in battle—

"Another death—another day—another inch of land—

The dead are cheering and the ghost drums rattle" ...

The dead are deaf and dumb and cannot understand....

Of all who died in darkness far away

Nothing is left of them but LOVE, who triumphs now,

His arms held crosswise to the budding day,

The passion-red roses clustering his brow.

And afterwards, when honour has made good,

And all you think you fight for shall take place,

A late rejoicing to a crippled race;

The bulldog's teeth relax and snap for food,

The eagles fly to their forsaken brood,

Within the ravaged nest. When no disgrace

Shall spread a blush across the haggard face

Of anxious Pride, already flushed with blood.

In victory will you have conquered Hate,

And stuck old Folly with a bayonet

And battered down the hideous prison gate?

Or will the fatted gods be gloried yet,

Glutted with gold and dust and empty state,

The incense of our anguish and our sweat?

Pity the slain that laid away their lives,

Pity the prisoners mangled with gyves,

Thin little children and widowed wives,

And the broken soldier who survives.

Pity the woman whose body was sold

For a little bread or a little gold,

And a little fire to keep out the cold,

So tired, and fearful of growing old.

Pity the people in the grey street

Before the dawn trooping with listless feet

Down to their work in the dust and the heat,

For a little bread and a little meat.

Pity the criminal sentenced to die,

Loving life so, with the world in his eye,

In his ears and his heart, with the passionate cry

Of love that will call when he may not reply.

Pity them all, the imperative faces

That peer through the dark where we sleep in our laces,

Where we skulk among cushions in opulent places,

With indolent postures and frivolous graces.

Eyes that prick the darkness, fingers thin

Tearing at hypocrisy, and Sin

That batters the door and staggers in....

The streets surround with clamour and din,

Drowning our flutes, till the cries of the city

Flurry us, flutter us, force us to pity,

Force us to sigh and arrange a committee,

Tea-party charity danced to a ditty....

The scarlet ribbons flutter and wave,

A rebel flag on a rebel grave,

But to us the strong alone are brave,

And only the rich are worthy to save!

Yet who shall blame us, plaited and curled,

Where silk banners fly and the red flags are furled,

Flags that blow where the dead are hurled,

Tattered and dripping with blood of the world!

You have understood so little of me, and my adoration

That shone upon my forehead, like a crown of curious stones,

You turned into a cap and bells for Folly's coronation

And made a foolish tinkling from my laughter and my

moans.

You have led me through the market like an ass upon the halter,

You have fed me upon thistles; I was driven by the crowd;

But my faith in what I am, my conceit, you cannot alter;

I was proud in pomp and purple, as a clown I leave you proud!

A greater pride than sits upon a throne for mere adorning,

A fiercer strength than in the gods of wood that cannot bow;

I tore my purple into rags and knelt to bear your scorning,

And I am rebel leader to a band of beggars now.

In the twilight of my love I stand and strew the bitter ashes;

They are blown into my eyes again, the fires that shone for you;

In the blushing of the sunset their ghostly fervour flashes

As they sink for everlasting in the darkness and the dew.

Your heart is as a moonstone hieroglyphed with secret letters;

You have never read my passion, as I never learnt their sign,

But I praise your haunting beauty and I bear the bruise of fetters

And I reel from your remembrance as I spill the ancient wine.

All those women I have envied with their pink and foolish faces,

Moths that have out-distanced me in circling round your head,

For the strangeness of your kisses and the curse of your embraces

And the frenzy of pursuing where your despot feet have led.

I will shout, and tear the darkness; I will snuff the candles sacred

With the rage of my abasement, with the blast of my farewell;

I will smile with cynic softness, but my tears are dropping acrid

And sizzling in a gutter down the white-hot streets of Hell!

Lulled are the dazzling colours of the day,

And mild the heavens, burnt out like an ash.

Hungry and strange along the shadowed dusk

Walks Melancholy, and with bitter mouth

Sucks the last juices from the sun's ripe fruit.

Now can I sing the sickly lines of love

And of love's failure, spell my sorrows out

In the sad spaces of the gloaming night,

And stooping, huddled, hide me in the dark.

My words were fireless in the flaming sun,

And all the throats of flowers from their content

Puffed back my pinings proudly in my face

And bade me give them tunes to make them dance....

Lean, hungry, like my love the moon looks down

From the white solitudes of Heaven. All aghast

And sterile as the arms of my desire

She flings her light despairing on the sky.

The night is strange and still, for dropping tears,

Or burying hatred in a deep-dug grave.

Washed at my feet by the curded foam of sluggish waves,

As the rain splinters and the mud gleams with malicious light,

Like a frail shell, million tinged and quaintly wrought

The thought of you, which held against mine ear

Hums all the echoed melodies of your soul;

The sigh of wearied life, the ebbing sweet of love,

The little tunes of wine mixed with the chants of death,

The following of beauty's fugitive limbs

Whose classic feet, and rapturous pale breast

Gleam on the clouds and foam,

Call to her lovers.—

Thus standing in the blasting of the wind,

And numb with ceaseless drip of moments from the cloud

Of lowering hours, I toy with this strange relic of the sea,

Turned with such perfectness from her tumultuous wheels,

Thoughts of you million tinged and quaintly wrought.

My poems cannot laugh. They are the voice

Of birds that mourn and cry above the sea,

And this wild joy my love has brought to me

Lies dumb and knows not how it shall rejoice.

I am most weary of the petulant songs I sing,

Most tired of tunes that only learn to weep,

And long to turn my dreams from their pale sleep

Into a gentle minstrelsy with harp of silver string;

To fashion for my love one perfect verse

Symmetrically threaded by beauty word on word,

Flowing and flashing like the luted laughter of a bird

To bless the soul with music which I ravished with a curse.

But as a coward in the general gloom

I mimic fortune with my tunes of ill,

Nor pipe despite her wistful mirth and trill

Of love that moves with music into Doom;

Of love that thrills with joy the graveyard cold,

And like a gay canary in a cage

Mocks at his prison, and with flippant rage

Flaunts his bright wing to fill the gloom with gold.

On the hill there is a tavern, long-loved, well-remembered,

Where all the sleepy afternoon the little tables dream,

And the cool green bottles ranged, laugh and gleam with golden highlights,

And the waiters wrangle, and the flies, with murmurs merged and mixed.

We will go there, you and I, to wake the nodding contentment,

And toast our fancies reverently with red wine and with white wine,

And with eyes mesmerised to the horizon gazing,

Dream our iridescent dreams and sigh our shadowy sighs.

Oh canst thou not hear in my heart all its whispering fears

Whose wind-like voices

Flutter the leaves of my hope and bow them with tears

While the body rejoices.

Till all the pomp and beauty of day, the Cardinal Sun

Trailing his scarlet vesture

Leaves after light the pale hills sullen and dun,

Turns with a gesture

Colour and glory to smoke that is deathly and grey.

I follow the shadows of sorrow

That press so close to the dancing heels of the day

And darken the morrow.

The world turns pale and cold, for I seem to see

Beyond its golden visor

The leering skull that derides at our lives and me

Being older than life and wiser....

I hear the cry of the world that writhes to the lash of the whip

Beyond the sound of the treetops singing

To the wind's persuasive violins and bells of dews that drip,

Or rush of feathers winging....

Dost thou fear death as I? Ah no, but thy lips are against my cheek

Murmuring tenderly

The perfumed lies stolen from spring that wistfully through the bleak

Windows of frost so slenderly

Steals her little ghost's flute. Thou tellest of things that might be

If life were as kind as a lover,

If we were beloved of the world and the world of we.

Thy white words hover

Dove-like in rose leaf evenings over the nest

Silvering heaven

With rustle of lovers that nestle together for rest.

If I could have given

My tired lips to kisses and my body to sleep and to thee,

Ah then and then only

The dust were as gentleness mingling thy beauty with me

And death were not lonely.

As in the silence the clear moonlight drips

Among the fields that love her drowsily,

These passionate moments trickle on through time,

From soul to languorous soul.

Like mad musicians upon fretted harps,

The senses play upon the poignant nerves,—

And colours clothe our mood

As smoke against the light, as shimmering prisms

Irised with pallors of an opal's heart

In which the glittered pattern of desire

Smoulders and changes....

O love, thou nightingale-throated singer,

Thread on thy jewelled chords from start to star

And keep thy silver delicate delight

Out of the flush and lustre that makes mad.

Let thy fairy feet

Go tripping down a scarcely scented path,

Between an avenue of breathless flowers.

The hours glide by as swans across a lake,

Across the luminous waters of desire,

And beat as wings the rustle of soft words,

As love bends down,

Breathing his adoration on a fainting mouth.

I can but give thee unsubstantial things

Wrapt as in rose-leaves between thought and thought,

No gems or garments marvellously wrought

On ivory spools with rare embroiderings.

Nor for thy fingers precious, fabled rings

That cardinals have worn, and queens have bought

With blood and beauty. I have only sought

A song that hovers on illusive wings.

Accept from me a dream that hath no art,

I give my empty hands for thee to hold,

Take thou the gift of silence for my part,

With all the deeper things I have not told.

Yet if thou canst, decipher in my heart

Its passions writ in hieroglyphs of gold.

I have no other friend but thee,

But while I tell thee all my thought

Thine ears are buzzing with gossip of dreams,

Soothsayings and sighs, and little things—

How canst thou listen to me?

Bodies heaving like waves,

Sighing through the dishevelled tresses of foam,

The massive whiteness of limbs flung out of shadow,

Splashed with ecstasial moonlight,

Sculptured voluptuously in ephemeral marbles.

Lingering touch of fingers,

Cooler than the curving ringlets of spray

Fluting the new-blown petals of a shell,

And kisses murmuring as the lips of darkness

Against the ivory forehead of the moon.

Your face to me is like a beautiful city

Dreaming forever by the rough wild sea,

And I the ship upon a wilderness of waves

Heavily laden with memories....

I roam over all the earth

Making rhymes of you, and singing songs,

Because your face will never let me rest,

Because I can not frame it in a star

Surrounded with my cloudy reveries,

Because I may not pluck it like a flower

To breathe the incense of its perfumed soul—

Your face is like the carved hilt of a sword

Whose sheath is in my breast!

Oh! why will you not let me love you

Well enough?

You have plucked my blossoms,

Gathered the leaves

And revived them with water;

But all the tortuous roots

Delving for your spirit

In subterranean passions

With a blind unresting desire,

Have you felt them, have you known?

In the blackest night of sleep

Though I be sunk a thousand fathoms

In the cerulean depths of slow oblivion,

My soul still swims toward you

Against the envious pressure of the tide....

You who are so tired, so filled with sleep

That you would brush a rose-leaf from your cheek

Lest its heaviness should stir your rest,

How can you shoulder the weight of my great burden

That is too vast for me to bear alone?

I tell you

Love is no little thing,

No moth-winged Cupid painted on the air,

No thin flute music petaling the silence

As leaves that flutter from a cherry tree.

It is the thought that broods upon its death,

The dread of mountains looking to the storm

Ere shrieks of lightning cleave their breasts in twain.

It is the fire that pillars up the stars

To mix its flame with their eternal gold.

Oh, listen to me!

You shall hear my message sung from sphere to sphere

As star-dust pouring a path through Heaven.

You shall know me

In the pensive shadows of trees,

In the luminary phantoms

Reflected in the stillness of a lake;

In the arrows of sunlight shot through meshing leaves

And quivering in the moss;

In the abandoned play of breakers

Showering their crystals to the moon;

In the folly of rainbow dolphins.

I only ask of you

To be the diver in my deepest pool,

To bring from out its blue obscurity

The things my life has moulded unaware,

Treasures my passion and my hunger fashioned

In loneliness of prayer unlit by life,

Created out of nothing save myself

Within the blind fast silence of the soul.

My devotion kneels to you,

Holding a candle to illumine your face.

My loneliness is your shadow

Along the solitary roads.

My passion is a book between your hands

Whose leaves are as the leaves of violets,

A volume of pressed flowers

Scenting your fingers though you read it not.

And my white faith

Is a silken surplice clothing you in peace.

Many things I'd find to charm you,

Books and scarves and silken socks,

All the seven rainbow colours

Black and white with 'broidered clocks.

Then a stick of polished whalebone

And a coat of tawny fur,

And a row of gleaming bottles

Filled with rose-water and myrrh.

Rarest brandy of the 'fifties,

Old liqueurs in leather kegs,

Golden Sauterne, copper sherry

And a nest of plover's eggs.

Toys of tortoise-shell and jasper,

Little boxes cut in jade;

Handkerchiefs of finest cambric,

Damask cloths and dim brocade.

Six musicians of the Magyar,

Madness making harmony;

And a bed austere and narrow

With a quilt from Barbary.

You shall have a bath of amber,

A Venetian looking-glass,

And a crimson-chested parrot

On a lawn of terraced grass.

Then a small Tanagra statue

Found anew in ruins old,

Or an azure plate from Persia,

Or my hair in plaits of gold;

Or my scalp that like an Indian

You shall carry for a purse,

Or my spilt blood in a goblet ...

Or a volume of my verse.

Slowly the pale feet of morning

Tread out the ashes of midnight still burning with feverous lamplight,

Colourless, cold, as the rainclad

Sleep-druggèd river that carries the wreckage of cities out sea-ward.

Slowly the fingers of dawn-light

Snuff out the candles that yearned to those Gods of delirium,

Sleep-huge as shadows grimacing

From niches made black with the smoke of a fire-spangled passion.

Smoothly the wild hair of darkness

Is plaited for rest, and the faces of visions are covered with sleep veils.

Patiently, Morning, the priestess

Drones out a psalm for the souls that we damned in the blackness,

Gashed with the daggers of street-lights,

Crushing the poisonous berries of sinister kisses,—

Morning with healing and kindness

Folds up the dresses dishevelled with terror and laughter,

Sweeps up the rags of our shadows

That danced in a red smoke of dreams on the walls of oblivion.

What have I to do with them,

The red athletes in their snow-white clothes?

They are sun lovers and moon haters,

Toiling or playing in the fields

Whereon no shadows lie,

Pensively, whispering together—

They are space lovers and haters of the stars,

Soundly they sleep by night nor ever see

The tiaraed brows of darkness.

I weary of their striving upward and onward,

Away from the green hush of twilight,

Where silence drips from the trees,

Away from the solemn avenues

Where the ghosts blow by

Along with a drift of leaves.

Let us linger awhile

Far away from the frets and wars of the world,

From the strong men

With their strident hymning voices and marching feet—

Let us walk alone

For the love of our own shadows

Stretching their length on lawns of powdered silver,

With behind us the sky's grey curtain

Drawn backward from the moon....

Let us sit by the fireside

And hear the wind's shrill orchestras,

Fiddle and fife and flute,

And omened bagpipe screaming....

Let us lie abed and dream

Through the long summer's morning

Of trivial things, and beautiful....

Let us dance with Folly when midnight knocks on his golden gong;

Let us run through pools of wine

And be splashed with purple.

Let us, being sick, make merry,

And rejoice when we are weary.

Let us sit by our grave as at a banquet,

Drinking to Death.

What have we to do with them,

Sons of the sun and the soil,

Daughters of the hearth and the field?

They that remake the world

Melting our idols for silver,

Our goblets for gold;

Tearing our temples down

To build their red brick villages.

The doomed world faints into mist,

World of our indolence and dreams,

And the faces and bodies we love

Sink through oblivion, and are seen

Dimly, as divers through the waters.

Old worlds and new worlds!

Let us slip between them,

And float on the stream that floweth nowhither—

Our red ambitions burn

To a blue smoke of forgetting;

Our moonshine faints on the tide that goeth out,

As the sun leers to the tide that cometh in.

Among the crumbling arches of decay

Where all around the red new buildings crept,

Where huge machines had rolled the past away,

And the dead princes lay accursed and slept;

Among the ruins I beheld a man

Who heeded not the engines as they neared,

Painting dead carnivals upon a fan,

He smiled and trifled with his pointed beard.

And here and there were flung a mess of things,

Tokens and fripperies and faded dresses,

Kept from the courtships of a thousand kings,

Tossed roses for the tossing of caresses.

A carven sabre hung upon the wall,

A toy thing, with no rust of blood upon it,

A tray of glasses, an embroidered shawl,

A muff, a bottle and a feathered bonnet.

And mirrors flashed their argent memories

Out of the shadows where they laughed and gleamed,

While ghostly faces of past vanities

Come back to dream there where they once had dreamed.

The stranger turned his head and bowed to me

And waved me vaguely to a gilded chair.

I spoke: "You are a connoisseur, I see,

You really have a fine collection there."

He bowed to me again, and in his hand

Dangled a string of gems, they caught my eye

With beckoning lights—I could not understand—

His fingers seemed to touch them like a sigh

So much he loved their frail inconsequence.

I spoke of progress conquering decay,

And tired the stillness with my common sense

Loud-spoken in the jargon of the day.

But I have never met so queer a man,

"I better love my memories," he said,

"Look at those painted figures on the fan,

How delicate and wistful are the dead."

As a nun's face from her black draperies

So full of mystery the moon looks down.

She dreams of a passion that shall outlive time,

Of Beauty's face beheld unveiled and close,

Of God Who blows the worlds like bubbles up,

Smiling away, to watch them swell and die.

She dreams of music played among the stars

When the slow tongues of silence are unloosed.

Above the city glittering giddily,

Above the jostling heads of man she moves,

Strange as a dreamer walking in her sleep.

The sun is lord of life and colour,

Blood of the rose and hyacinth,

Hair of the sea and forests,

Crown of the cornfields,

Body of the hills.

The moon is the harlot of Death,

Slaughterer of the Sun,

Priestess and poisoner she goes

With all her silver flock of wandering souls,

Her chant of wailing waters,

The bed of shimmering dust from which she comes

Bound all around with bandages of mist....

The living are as blossoms and fruit on the tree,

The dead are as lilies and wind on the marshes;

The living are as cherries that bow to the morning

Beckoning to the loitering stranger,

The wind, to sing them his eerie ballads.

The dead are as frozen skeleton branches

Whereon the stillness perches like an owl....

The dead are as snows on the cherry orchard.

Laughter and singing come with the morning,

When Life doth mask his face with a gilded visor,

And dons his arrogant clothes.

But in the night,

When the unsheathed moon stands naked and pale,

We too put off our opulent disguise

And stand alone in the baffling darkness,

Fighting with our sins,

Weeping for our loneliness,

That moon-like gropes forever through the desolate air.

In the night I hear my loneliness calling

The long shrill note of the seabird's cry

Over the fuming spite of breakers,

Over the brumous, sulky tides.

All the ocean is craving Heavenward,

And the wild sky crushes downward toward the sea,

Where the clouds stoop their passionate bodies,

And the waves rear their supplicating hands.

Mine eyes grow tired of looking outward forever,

Away from the firelight and my sleeping idols,

To where the darkness is shattered with gusts of white,

Wings of ship, and bird, and cloud, and wave,

Flashing their signals of unrest.—

My longing is a warm thing in a cold street,

Taking refuge by the chinks of lighted doors—

My longing is a pale ghost stepping into the sunlight

That falls in golden curtains sumptuous and hushed—

My longing is a fiddler making a thin tune through the silence,

Through the heavy pauses of sleep.—

Ah! Stop up my ears lest I hear my longing call,

Lest I hear my loneliness crying!

The leaves are singing, and the sea,

And the sand in the wind,

Blown grass and hurrying people;

Full of melodious strings and lutes and flutes

Rustling and whispering forever.

The sad music of Life is in my ears,

Never ceasing, never asleep,

And my heart is strung between chord and chord

Like a crucifix in a rosary.

How soundly sleepeth the fool,

With profane snore taunting the solemn-pillared night—

He hath no dreams of restless, subtle forms

That shift across a feverish vacancy;

Nor doth he hear the drums of time

Beating against oblivion tunes of war,

Goading the crippled hours on their endless march—

But waketh to yawn in the face of the sun,

Then turneth back to sleep....

How soundly the wise man sleepeth,

Couched royally in the purple of the dark

With his white mistress, Peace—

And when the morning stealeth on his rest,

As a rose he doth pluck her from the spreading tree of days,

And reviveth his heart

With the perfume of the world....

But 'twixt the wise and the foolish

Many nights shed sorrow and fear,

And nets are spread for timid feet,

And the waves beat on the shifting sand....

Moonlit lilacs under the window,

And the pale smell of their falling blossoms,

And the white floating beams like luminous moths

Fluttering from bloom to bloom.

Sprays of lilac flowers

Frothing at the green verge of midnight waves,

Frozen to motionless icicles.

Moonlight flows over me,

Spreads her bright watery hair over my face,

Full of illicit, marvellous perfumes

Wreathed with syringa and plaited with hyacinths;

Hair of the moonlight falling about me,

Straight and cool as the drooping tresses of rain.

Old woman forever sitting

Alone in the large hotel under the fans,

Infinitely alone where around you spin

So many lives like painted tops,

Smearing the void a moment with their hues,

Giddily catching at balance as they pause.

What crime was yours, old woman,

What sin against the Earth

That she should give you now

A cap of dust and furrows on your cheeks,

And at the end

A hole dug in the mould?

Is death the promise of Fate's last rebound,

Revenge of Time that waits within the clock

And laughs awry at life,

For a kiss, for a dream, for a child that you bore,

For a fresh rose pinned to your bosom?

The owl is in your spirit,

Blinking through the oldest tree of wisdom—

And now your fingers are weaving

The cold pale invisible blossoms of death

Into a waxen wreath,

And Time

Sits down beside you knitting with quick hands

Grey counterpanes to cover up a grave!

Loneliness I love,

And that is why they have called me forth into the streets.

Loneliness I love,

But the crowd has clutched at me with fawning hands,...

My spirit speaks

In the scented quietness of a divine melancholy

Murmuring the tunes

For which my dreams are the delicate instruments.

The shadowy silences

Have made me beautiful and dressed me in velvet dignities,

And that is why

The noise of tambourines has maddened my soul into dancing,

And I am clad

In the lust-lipped whispering of furtive caresses.

Holiness I love,

And touching the virginal pierced feet of martyrs,

The crucified feet

Nestled among lilies and hallowing candles.

Holiness I love

And the melodious absolution falling on my sins.

But that is why

Blasphemous priests have forced my hands to tear

The vesture of secrecy

Which hides the human nakedness of God.

I met an Indian underneath a tree, under a ragged tree,

His face was yellow and wrinkled like some stone whereon a God had writ

And his emaciated fingers drew circles in the dust....

I bent my mouth to his ear, crying "O father, O Prophet!

I have wandered far over the earth troubled with doubts that will not let me rest,

Canst thou not tell me with all thy wizardries and meditations

The purpose of our lives upon this world,

The secret truth Earth shelters in her womb?"

But he was listening to the whispering of the mountains,

To the boom of God's paces on the rocks,

And the swishing steps of his followers in the rivers.

Then suddenly he pointed to the arched doorway in between the hills,

And the mysterious purple curtain of the dusk that drooped from cliff to cliff.

I saw in his eyes the vision of highborn ghosts,

Of divine ivory faces wreathed with the flowers of wisdom—

And I knew that he had found only the half-spoken promises of Heaven....

I saw a drunkard laughing in a tavern,

His cup was tilted and the wine spilt crimson on the sprawled arms and distracted hair of a woman fallen asleep,

I watched him there and wondered

If ever the bubbling goblins of wine had whispered him life's secret.

But he raised the cup of his carousals and gazed at emptiness,

Toasting some wild, irreverent dream,

Some flame-red salamander pirouetting among the dead waste ashes of time—

And I knew that he had found only the secrets of sleep....

A woman sat within a little house,

Scolding and singing ballads to her child,

And all around came the quarrel of children's voices.

Yet one boy sat apart within the furthest corner of the room

Painting an animal with coloured chalks.

I lingered by the fire thinking of life, its vanities and mysteries,

But the woman did not heed me,

Nor her pale son that sat so hunched and still,

Painting his visions with the broken chalks,

For they had discovered the absorbing painful secrets of giving birth....

It was evening as I wandered,

By a lake two lovers leaned, smiling to see their faces in the water,

For they had found within each other's souls

An argent flattering mirror wherein to gaze and see their faces change with all the moods and shadows of the day....

Not here should I discover the answer to bring light into my darkness,

Into the dim psychic crystals of my soul opalled with the changing colours of unrest—

So I went away into the loneliness, asking the forests and the mountains and the sea

The knowledge of life's baffling mysteries.

But they were roaring in a wind of memories,

Gathering the rain into their bodies to make them fierce and strong,

Heaving their shoulders upward to the morning,

Crowning their foreheads with sunlight.

And I knew that they were Life itself,

The pushing vehemence that rushes from the strangling arms of Death,

Nor could they guess

The purpose of God's beauty in their joy....

From the fathomless depth of my boredom, from the

last room of its emptiness, an elf has come to play

with me.

As comes a little gold spider to a prison cell teasing the

criminal from his darkness to tear at a thread of sunlight,

and kiss the mouth of a shy morning whispering through

the window.

An elf has come to dance with me, blown like a leaf on

the path of my autumn lassitude.

Sprightly one, dervish! You are the living adventure

born of my dead childhood, you are the small god in the

temples of my unbelief, you are the bird that nests in ruined

temples, laying your silver eggs by moonlight and singing

when the pagan birds are still.

You are the dream-sower in the fields of sleep, you have

jingled the star-bells on the hood of darkness, and from the

knarled, stark tree of time have flung me the apple of

eternal laughter.

Lolling in snow, like kings in ermine coats, the gilt-crowned

bottles lie.... Our thoughts are dangled in

a laughter of leaves as bunches of blue and yellow grapes

for faery beggars, for ragged fancies to pluck and taste.

Our music shall be the minstrelsy of ghostly ballad-mongers

that have stolen from the ashen banquets of death to bless

our revels.

Our spirits shall flit like those winged faces of cherubs

that never can alight, but swing forever on the azure ribbons

of the sky.

And all our dreams and kisses shall be as the rose-leaves

falling on ancient festivals, as the shadows of rose-leaves

falling on phantom lovers in the sleep-pillared temples of

our first archaic passion.

The roots of our longing are probing the heart of night,

delving and twining together that our ultimate truth

may grow out of the darkness that bewilders and nourishes.

Out of the earth, the dust, the crystals of frost that bind

themselves like a tight crown over our heads.

Through the mould and the frost our hair and fingers shall

prick their spears of pallor and flame, and in the green

ardour of our up-rushing leaves the red goblets of fire

shall open, and masses of white flowers, milky as the star-sprays

that droop over Heaven, shall splash their bright

foam from the darkness, as waves that rise and break into

a fountain of blossoms.

Starlit silences!

Breeding fears, swarming with sudden deaths,

With separations, burdens, and despairs,

Weaving slow eerie fancies in my brain ...

Forlorn shorn monks go down the cloisters of quietness

With tortured crucifixes cut in ivory

Clasped in their praying hands,

And psalmed with lips renunciate of kisses ...

Forgotten days are painted on the night

In parables and symbols of remorse

That jeer from out the wind-stirred tapestries.

The hangman's rope coils upward like a snake

Out of the death-coloured waters,

While the black barges pass

Funereal,

Carrying doom from mist to mist....

And madmen steal about the wintry parks

Under the high glum walls of an asylum,

With eyes lit up in phosphorescent ecstasies,

With fumbling hands

That grope for things invisibly obscene.

Even the clock

Grown idiot too from keeping madmen's time

Gibbers the hours away in irrelevant chimes....

Silence embalms the dead with scented bands

And is the watchman to deserted houses,

And draws the violet curtain on the day,

And fits a mask of silver to the moon.

Silence brings corpses from the crypts of memory

And sits them round us in the empty chairs,

Opens the secret chambers of our hopes

And shows us there in awful pantomime

Lust wreathing love with poppies and with ashes,

And Beauty dressing Sin for carnival,

And Peace made drunken with a cup of blood.

It winds as ivy round our listening thoughts

Shutting all sounds away, enclosing us

Within its stifled virid twilight....

Cry out, sing, make noises,

Bacchantes, revellers, clowns!

Bring myriad lamps in clusters, likening grapes

That spill the wine of light into our gloom;

Pressing against our lips

The red grape-kisses of pleasure.

Bring the hounds,

The garlanded white ones,

To bay and snarl and tear the flying rags

Of stillness shadowing away!

Lean over me, O Life,

And whisper all thy lying flatteries

That drag me back from Silence and her dead.

I have kept vigil on my soul too long

Within this vast cathedral of dim sleep,

Languidly gathering

The cold grey lilies of the stars

To slip between her passive waxen hands....

The mountain is an Emperor.

The clouds are his beard, and the stars his diadem;

His bauble is the moon;

He is dressed in silver forests, and the mist his train;

His feet are two white rivers.

I know what happiness is—

It is the negation of thought,

The shutting off

Of all those brooding phantoms that surround

As dank trees in a forest

Cutting the daylight into rags,

Caging the sun

In rusted prison bars.

Happiness loves to lie at a river's edge

And make no song,

But listen to the water's murmuring wisdom,

The kissing touch of leaves wind-bowed together,

The feathery swish of cloud wings on a hill;

Opening wide the violet-petalled doors

Of every shy and cloistered sense,

That all the scent and music of the world

May rush into the soul.

And happiness expands

The rainbow arch for a procession of dreams,

For moth-like fancies winged with evening,

For dove-breasted silences,

For shadowy reveries

And starry pilgrims....

I know what happiness is—

It is the giving back to Earth

Of all our furtive thefts,

The lurid jewels that we stole away

From passion, sin and pain,

Because they glittered strangely, luring us

With their forbidden beauty.

Because our childish fingers curiously

Crave the pale secrets of the moon

And grope for dangerous toys.

Happiness comes in giving back to Earth

The things we took from her with violent hands,

Remembering only

That her dust is our garment,

Her fruits our endeavour,

Her waters our priestess,

Her leaves our interpreters to God,

Her hills our infinite patience.

Long hath the pen lain idle in my hand,

Or traced slow sentences without a rhyme,

Words strung at random to beguile the time

As children threading beads upon a strand.

I have strayed far away from fairyland

Whose little hills grow steep and hard to climb;

I creep along the valleys in the slime,

Or hide me like an ostrich in the sand.

For I have sought a mellow idleness,

To be forever buried as a fly

Lies casketed in amber; where the stress

Of peril, hunger, Death can never cry

To wake me from my sanguine weariness,

Or cloud the lucid stillness with a sigh.

I laid my heart on a stone

And stood in the wood to watch.

Presently a priest came by;

He hid it in his cowl

And buried it in the graveyard.

Now is it grown into a cyclamen tree,

Clustering over the wall,

Beckoning far along the twilight road;

Nodding and singing where the cypress moans,

Ringing its little bells while the great bell tolls.

Whiter than ghosts are its flowers,

And its scent is sweeter than ghostly music—

All the men and priests that pass

In the night when the stars lean down,

Smell the heavy fragrance there

And feel the gentle touch of dripping dew.

Then they cross themselves and go

Hurriedly, warily,

Dreaming of pale women,

Under the pale stars.

The cold light steals into my soul

Revealing its emptiness,

The cold winds batter at my heart

And make its lonely tenant shake with fear—

The raindrops slide across the window-glass

Like sighs that fall from patient weariness;

And coldly smiling time

Peers with his clock-face, ticking in my brain

The pulse of a monotonous remorse.

The caravans of spring are in the town,

Lighting their brilliant torches in the park,

Dangling their bells, engirdling each stark

Black tree with coloured rings. The houses frown

Against the beryl sky, yet wear a crown

Of hazy dream, or flash a golden spark

Of sun-fire in their windows glum and dark;

The people blow like petals up and down.

But London tires at evening, each grey street

Mourns as the slow procession passes by,

Traffic and crowd, and Time on loitering feet.

Spring droops his lute, the slender echoes sigh,

And wistfully the jaded revellers meet,

Their pomp in tatters and their wreaths awry.

I dread the beauty of approaching spring

Now the old month is dead and the young moon

Has pierced my heart with her sharp silver horns.

My tired soul is startled out of sleep

By all the urging joy of bud and leaf,

And in the barren yard where I have paced

Content with prison and despair's monotony,

The trees break into music wild and shrill,

And flowers come out like stars amid the dust,

Bewildering my loneliness with beauty....

For winter with her melancholy face

Shone back my miseries as in a glass,

And wept and whined in harmony with me;

And I could listen by the withering ashes

To the ill-omened drum of dropping rain,

And sighing harken sighs and mute feel silence,

And cold stretch forth my hand into the snows,

And hating, hear the laughter of the wind

Whose mad hands tear the sky.

But now again the promise of the spring

Shall lift my martyred spirit from the dust,

To where the lilied altar shines with peace,

And the white priestess comes

Crowning each candle with a gold desire

Engirdling with pallors

The forehead of a divine ghost.

Ah, but they die, these gods, the candles dwindle

And spring is but a radiant beckoning

To death that follows slowly, silently....

O flitting swallows, fleeting laugh of wind,

O flash of silver in the wings of dawn

That are spread out and closed. O hush of night

Breathless with love, oh swish of whispering tide

That swells and shrinks upon the dreaming shore.

O gentle eyes of children wonder-wide

That grow too soon to weariness and close;

O scuttling run of rabbit on the hills,

And flight of lazy rooks above the elm;

O birds' eggs frail, tinged faintly, nestled close,

And mystery of flower in the bud.

O burning galaxy of buttercups,

And drone of bees above the pouting rose,—

O twilit lovers stilled with reverie

And footprints of them swerving on the sand

And darkness of them clasped against the sky!

I see beyond the glory of your days

The grey days marching one behind the other

To the bleak tunes of silence.

When mists shall smear the radiance of the moon

And the lean thief shall pass,

Snatching the glittering toys away from love,

Plucking the feathers from the wings of peace.

And Life herself, grown old and crooked now,

Shall go the way that her long shadow points,

Her long black shadow down the roads of sleep.

London grows sad at evening,

And we at the windows sit

To watch her moods,

Wearying with her.

Even a noise of laughter from the street

Sounds in our ears

Like something dropped and shattered on the stone.

Then her musician comes,

A wandering, malicious spirit;

The organ grinder, playing those old tunes

We know too well,

That hurt us with fatigue.

Till Hope like a harlequin,

His glitter hidden in a ragged coat,

The lamplighter, goes by,

Planting his pale flames in the dusk.

Ah! the spring,

Sudden, surprising,

Melting the iron scales around the heart

As the earliest sun

Melts the cold case of dew on leaves—

Ah! the streets like odorous rivers

Chanting the echoes of seas—

Ah! the flowers in shop-windows

Beseeching, persuasive,

Reluctant to let their beauty flow away

From thoughts that mirror them in passing—

Beautiful exiles

Fluttering in their chains,

Thrilled with the noise of bees,

The music of meadows

Still hovering around them—

Flower fingers, flower-touches,

Passional, reminiscent,

Rippling the soul's still waters—

Flower galaxies,

Enamelled bridges arching from dream to dream,

Garlands splashing over the eyes of satyrs,

The furtive woodland eyes,

The pointed inquisitive ears—

Pallid flowers foaming on hill-crests,

Gushing heavenwards

From a sea of stormy mountains—

Opening and shutting exquisite doors,

As the senses open to music,

Shut upon silence,

Open to beauty,

Close their caskets upon love—

Ah! the flowers in the windows,

Amorous of poets

Making a chaplet of song!