As Dmitri Karamazoff sang on the way to Chaos

EIGHT days without a sun: but I am calm And cultivate my tulips fixedly, I watch them flick their flighty freckled tongues Mocking and sweetly monstrous blares of time. (We weep to see you haste away so soon!) The gas is near extinct upon the plush, Like the last birds its flares have ebbed away. Blue witness of the Second Empire, gas!— In cabriolets we echoed through the night And caracoled with busselled courtesans— You lit the boulevards and avenues, While Paul Verlaine, a candle in his hand, Would totter up to bed and watch the moon Comme un point sur un i—so orotund.... Through fumes and crapulous velleities. But now the batteries like headaches beat Against the temples of humanity; A network of pure electricity Installed for quick transmission through the world Pours a perpetual electric day. Men plough their fields by searchlights from the skies, By searchlights blatant, geometrical, As fingers from each god-like aeroplane Pointed to each created mass of flesh Accusing and forewarning. O empresses of jade who slumber on your cushions, Who slumber delicately on your cushions! If we were moulded of a subtle stone Instead of being merely flesh and bone, We’d imitate your cool and elegant curves. To chill green jade our hot and shattered nerves Would clot or petrify or fossilize— And moss to moist the finnèd lids of eyes, Lush velvet soaking on the irises Looped round with tiredness and its swollen reds Would grow about our damask four-post beds. We would be green, an ecstasy of green! As small sea-violets, virgin forest’s green, Where trees like coral sponges dab the air, And through each weft you hear a piece of wind, A tiny concertina-push of sound And then an inrush, sobbing gently inward. Why do we drown in customs, why become Lost dying flames and strangers to the skies Whose beams with clouds like wingèd chariots fly? Why do we climb the towers which break our knees, Horrible towers from which, when we look down We wish to hurl ourselves? O, then the ant-like herd below would feel A gentle spray of entrails—they’d recoil!— Perhaps one woman faints: we do not care, The worm has not become our paramour, The worm has not yet pierced our winding-sheets. Then why not, like Empedocles, Lower our limbs into volcano-craters, And make the world believe that mighty God Translated us into His company On dolphins’ backs across a nectar lake, To share the glory of His attributes, His love like myrrh and incense and the fruits That dangle from exotic herbs and trees All gold and ripe as from Hesperides? An architect of ruin onion-eyed Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry Has cast the die of quick finality Among the cheese-mites in this gap of time. Through Chaos: murmurs, stumblings, hordes that rend The fabric which is called reality. The light, which was a sluice of molten gold, The crystal winds, disperse in empty air. The deep red empty holes which were our eyes Sense only burstings of electric globes. Louder the heat, like vitriol, wounds our ears Burning with dull blue thunder. And then—a tune upon the piccolo, One of the musical Unemployed, I know, Or some stray angel with pink sugar wings Trying to see the cheerful side of things!