Contemporary Belgian Poetry. (continued 2)

WOMEN IN RESIGNATION. On Your poor hands pierced by the nail, With hope's long clinging, the old Women have rested their cold Souls without feeling and frail, In the hush You are dreaming in This night, good Lord! And they sing To the prodigals wandering In the wildernesses of sin: They are saying, these voices in pain, They must suffer long until The heavenly dawn shall fill Their songs with brightness again, That since You have wept above The sins of the mad human race, They must wash with tears their face, And pray to You long in love. On Your poor hands pierced by the nail, With hope's long clinging, the old Women have rested their cold Souls without feeling and frail. SOULS OF THE EVENING. While the spindle merrily sings, Old women sing your complaint, The gas-lamps are misty and faint, And the night to the water clings. Now Jesus walks where greens The dark, cobbled alley, and rests His poor, pierced hands on the breasts Of dreaming Magdalenes; And of every orphan child, And of houses holy with prayer, Mary Mother has care ... Sing, Jesus meek and mild Stands in your doorways' gloom, And hears your hymn beseech ... Let the honey of His speech Your desolate hearts perfume!— The Shepherd of straying sheep Shall lead you home to the fold ... But your soul, old women, must weep, Remembering its wounds of old, Love, and the heart's long burn, The wounds of hope ever sick, And childhood's dreams falling quick, Shed and dead turn by turn. Lord, on old women have pity, Whose soul, fair fragile toy, Touched by the kiss of the city, Dreams of the sun of joy!

THE SONG OF RUNNING WATER. "The light that my embanking meadow laves Over me like a purer billow glides. Naked in its limpid and transparent waves, It is the magnifying image wherein I Am the diaphanous shadow of the sky. O beam!... O dream of fire that fills me ... He, my heroic vow that with emotion thrills me, Comes!... but when his flame has lapped me wholly, From over me he rises, fleeing slowly, And in my being I can hear a being die. Beautiful is the forest, whose O'er-leaning leaves temper my languid heat, Stripped by the wind of gold he strews, And myriad leaves are from each other singled, Dancing to fall upon their glancing selves, And playfully to emulate the frivolous deceit Of a bird's pinion with my waters mingled. Breezes, trills of songbirds warbling with a breast that wells, All that lives and makes the forest ring retells The melody I murmur to my tall reed-grasses, Aery music that its spirit glasses. O forest! O sweet forest, thou invitest me to rest And linger in thy shade with moss and shavegrass dressed, Imprisoning me in swoon of soft caresses That o'er me droop thy dense and leafy tresses. But on I glide, I go, and, fretful, Pass under thee, gliding away my life forgetful. The evanescent soul, the soul where thou wert glassed, Fades, and leaves my sealed eyes nothing of the past. Far away from me are gone All the glimpses that upon me shone. To other forests and to other lights, Shaking my hair from fall to fall, from spate to spate, I glide with hands untied, and empty-eyed, With endless hours that fetter and control my fate. Wandering shadow of a reverie banked and pent, Sister of all those whom my waves entrap, Intangible as a soul, and, like a soul, Unfit to seize, I roll Garlands of scattered memories, whose scent Dies in a bitter sap. And neither who I am nor whence I am I know ... Under my fleeting images lives but one being, That winds with all my windings whither they are fleeing ... O thou whose tired feet I have bathed, and heavy brow, And the caress of avid hands,— O passer-by, my brother listening to me now!— Hast thou not seen, from the waste mountains' threshold to my far sea-sands, Born and reborn in me, strong as the whipped flood-tides of love's emotion, The broad, unbroken current rolling me to the ocean? Hast thou not seen, force without end, immortal rhythm and rhyme, Desire impelling me beyond the bounds of Time?" THE GOBLET. Every hand that touches me I greet With kisses welcoming, caresses sweet. Thus in my crystal's naked beauty, I— With nothing save a little gold as on my lips a dye— Give myself wholly to the mouth unknown That seeks the burning of my own. Queen of joy,—queen and slave,— Mistress that taken passes on again, Mocking the love she throws to still Desire, I have blown madness at my pleasure's will To the four winds that rave. Say you that I am vain? List! I am feeble, scarcely I exist ... Yet listen: for I can be everything. This mouth, that never any kiss could close, Capriciously in subtle fires it blows, The jewelled garlands of a shadowy blossoming. Tulip of gold or ruby, dense Corolla of dark purple opulence, Stem of a lilial diamond Flowered upon a limpid pond That nothing save the beak of wood-doves troubles, I am sparkling, I am singing,—and I laugh to see, Ascending in this colourless soul of me, As might a dream, a thousand iridescent bubbles. For the lover drunken on my lips that burn, Whether he pour in turn The wines of gold and flame or love's wave to my rim, Drinks from my soul for ever strange to him A queenly splendour or the radiance of the skies, Or fury scorching where the harmful ruby lies In the bitter counsel of my jealous topazes. And, tears or joy, delirium, daring drunkenness, From all this passion that to his is married Nothing of me will gush unto his arid Lips, save the simple and the limpid light Whose gleam is wedded to my empty chalice. What matter? I have given Desire his cloudland palace, And on my courtesan's bare breast Love lets the hope of his diaphanous flight Languish, and softly rest ... And I laugh, the fragile, frivolous sister of Eve! For me in nights of madness drunken hands upheave Higher than all foreheads to the constellated skies, And then I am the sudden star of lies, That into troubled joys darts deep its radiant gleam— The sweet, perfidious happiness of Dream. THE CHANDELIER. Jewels, ribbons, naked necks, And the living bouquet that the corsage decks; Women, undulating the soft melody Of gestures languishing, surrendering ... And the vain, scattered patter of swift words ... Silken vestures floating, faces bright, Furtive converse, gliding glances, futile kiss Of eyes that flitting round alight like birds, And flee, and come again coquettishly; Laughter, and lying ... and all flying away To the strains that spin the frivolous swarm around. Lo, here the burning beauty of a rose Has fallen ... And feeble in its wasted grace it lies, Exhaling its bruised loveliness, the while, Like Love among the smiles, It dies. Eddying skirts, gay giddiness ... the festival is closed. While somewhat of uneasiness still palpitates, No void subsists of vanished voices; And nothing on the stained boards has remained Except a stem, a chalice,—once a rose. But the forgotten chandelier, whose grandiose soul Unto the eyes of beauty dedicates Its glorious sheaf of fires without a goal, In halls deserted charms the solitude That nascent morning sheds his pure breeze o'er- And the dawn weaves afar its threads of light. * * * * * * * * * Know you that in the Orient, simple, earnest, bright, She whose burning soul immortal shows Arises ... O light! Down yonder, in the deeper solitude, She who is born, and dies, and is renewed. Life passionately rises under the sky! The fleeing wave has mirrored in its sheen The young smile of the golden morn, That comes across the plain where wheat and rye Grow green, and with the blonde dawn intertwine ... Behold: consumed under the ruby shine In which its glory's arid flame exhausts itself, The chandelier is paling at the breath of Death, And burns its throes out in the face of the Sun. THE ANGEL. Some one here has gone to sleep. While yet the sun is at the Heaven's rim, Under the shadows of domed ilex crests, Innocent, tired, upon the happy grass he rests, And the shadow, scarcely moving over him, Prolongs around his sleep the hem of night. Who is this child thus dawning on our sight? Is it to any one among you known Whence comes this adolescent, white Traveller, who has halted with us in the night? Comes he from seas afar, Where islands are? Or from unkempt Forests, or from sterile plains, Whose vastness never any man has dreamt? Naked and white is he. The stones that clot The road, his feet and knees have wounded not; There is upon his brow something we dread ... Whence comes he, with his beauty dight, He who has halted with us in the night? His hair is spread Like a wave of light; His closed hand holds a flower unknown; And all his white of an enchanted thing Is like a cloud-scape doubly shown In waters mirroring. O brothers, take Care that his sleep ye do not break! But what a snow is this that trembling gleams Frail on his flank, and buries him in our sight? And these strange beams, That like a white and scintillant raiment drape His limbs in folds of light? O brothers! I have seen ... It is a wing ... Look ye: this is, immortal shape, An angel slumbering. In the light morn, where the holm its shadow flings, The wanderer adown Heaven's azure steep Has closed his mystic wings: An angel here has gone to sleep! Never a movement quivers To trouble the transparent, limpid air: Not a leaf shivers ... It is an angel sleeping there. What silence! O what calm without an end! Whence did the stranger unto us descend? Did he, a weak, frail enemy advance Before the One who strikes, and wills us prone? Or were there monsters to be overthrown, Some day of courage blind, pierced with his lance, And then his wing grazed Death? But no, for with a smile his mouth uncloses; And in the silence he reposes. O let us whisper! Let the shadow's dome Lengthen the hour of sleep with its fresh gloam. Perchance his soul loved space, but tender And human still, grew weary of the bare And arid splendour of unvaulted air, And all this sun-swept ether limitless ... Sad was his heart one day, feebler his soul, His brow too heavy; and, without a goal, Wandering through deathless radiance loathing it, He closed his eyes above The dizzy vast of love, And, keeping at his flank his shamed wings, Down floating, on the earth alit. But when, awakening, to his feet he springs, Angered, his resistless wings will soar and fly, Resounding through the Azure they devour; And, virgin, with a supernatural, clear cry, He in the dawn will fade, in the infinite hour, Like the keen dream that darts through cosmos deeps, When a flaming meteor leaps, And lights the worlds between. THE MAN WITH THE LYRE. No man knows whence, from very far, Came a man who bore a lyre, And his eyes were as bright as a madman's are, And he sang a song of fire To the short strings of his lyre, The love of women, and vain, languishing desire, Upon his lyre. His lyre was frail, and flowered with roses pale; And so sweet rose the voice of his breath, That as far as a man's eye wandereth, From the mountain to the vale, From the valley to the forest, from the forest to the plain, Ran the young men, and the lasses sprang To hear the dulcet strain of pain he sang. "He's a proud man," said all the men. "Like a soul speaking is this voice of his, So sad and tender, fit to make you swoon, His voice is like a woman's kiss!"— "Ho!" they said—said all the lasses then— "He is a lover, with his lyre! Sweetly he speaks, so sweetly with his lyre, We fain would weep, and would be dying soon...." But now the singer's voice has changed, he sings Upon the long chords of his lyre The deeds of men, and dukes, and kings, Warring afar from Ophir to Cathay, And over all the earth in great array, And weapons shocked by which the soul is rocked,— And golden oriflammes spread to the breeze's breath To celebrate the joy of life in death. "O!" the men, "Alas!" the lasses said, "We understand no longer what you say. Your voice that soared, like any wing Freed but now from the great paradise, Has gone,—perhaps more proudly hovering,— We know not in what country now it flies." "O!" the men, "Alas!" the lasses said. And children, string by string, Cried under dazzled skies. Now for his grave man's voice the singer tries The greatest chord of all the lyre. And to the gravest chord of all he saith Hope that for very youth soars in a breath, And stretching like a wakened beast desire.... And lo! already, by the willows of the river, Beautiful Joy who passes binding crowns turns her aside. And suddenly tempestuous grief rings far and wide, Its strength awakening from the mystery of the chords Dream-voices that deliver.... And lo! our fists are clenched and leaping towards Death's iron gates, and bruised recoiling thence. "Holla!" the men said; and the lasses laughed. "Holla!" the men said, "surely he is daft! He sings, he comes we know not whence; What would he have from us? We have no pence." (And the lasses laughed.) "Follow," the lasses said, "the werwolf we have started." And men and maids stoned him with pebbles of the way, And, twining arms and waists, so glad and gay, Singing and laughing, all departed, Laughing and singing, laughing all the way. * * * * * * * * * But now the solitude is moulding A long music folding and unfolding. Is it an unseen angel's touch? As in the grey Silence might a phantom shape's, That comes, unrolls its raiment, and escapes, A voice flees, when the breeze has touched and passed, And glides within the singing chords.... As a light wind sings at a vessel's mast, The sweet breath mounting from the river towards The singer, binds a chant on the lyre's chords. It is a wing wrinkling the wave, and in it glassed: It is the vague word moving Nature through and through, And which the human lip shall never speak.... And now it bears a soul into the blue; And of a sudden all the melody Rings out with such a grave accord towards The skies, that in the radiant deeps of space the chords, Magnified, no man can fathom how, Have brushed God's viewless brow! SONG OF TEARS AND LAUGHTER. Two women on the hill-side stood, Where the long road winds through the wood, At dusk of day. One of them laughs, a-laughing glad and gay, One of them sings, mocking all grisly care; The other moans, and sighs in her despair, The other sobs, crying her heart away. "Ho!" (says the one) "sweet glides the breeze, My drunken heart upon it flees...." The other moans, "The wind blows chill, My heart is O! so sad and ill." One told her story to the grass-green hill: "Years and years gone my husband went from me, (Upon the breeze my laughter bounds and blows!) He went to sail upon the doleful sea, And God knows he has slain his thousand foes. But let the drunken breeze be blowing strong, He will come back with April's sun ere long, And we shall laugh at troubles o'er and done, Counting the golden booty he has won." So glad and gay, she laughs and sings her song. And the other moans in sorrow broken-hearted; The words are broken in her voice that grieves. "The wind groans; my soul with sorrow heaves; My lord, my lover he is far departed! His flesh with mine was one, His soul and mine were blent. And yet one day from me he went, And on my lips held out in vain, Like a drop hung on the rim Of passion's cup filled full for him, Is trembling still a kiss I gave not back again. Far, far away, upon the bloody plain, (O! in the wind the wailing wild of pain!) Perchance he fell and now he dies,—or some Woman has with her love his heart o'ercome, Some woman's eyes have robbed my happiness ... With pain and love my heart is all forlorn; I hear my sorrow and the wind's distress Blent in the baleful bluster of the corn. I know! Another woman's kisses sever His heart from mine! But what is this disgrace To me, the flesh of his flesh now and ever? Let him come back! I languish for his face. Let him come back to where his truelove lies, And every day my tears for him shall race Down on my pale hands from my withered eyes." "Ho!" says the one, (a-singing glad and gay), "Thy tears are at the wind's will borne away. See, in the valley greens the gracious spring; The warbling bird is gladdening the leaves! O let the breeze blow far thy voice that grieves, For the breeze is come, with perfumes on his wing And the meadows bloom under the April rain. Laughter! I know no more of tears and pain." "Ah!" says the other, "woe and lackaday!" "O!" says the one,—and laughing wends her way. Two women on the hill-side stood. And now, from the far fields and near the wood, Two wounded men come trailing up the way. No standard waves its joy before their face, No sturdy mule is bearing their array. Alone, and slowly, up the path they pace, And, drop by drop, blood marks their every trace. And of a sudden crying from the brant, The blended voices of two women pant;— And the wind may moan, and laugh the breeze, For grief and joy mingle their ecstasies. "It is my husband! God, scarce liveth he ... (My laugh is stifled dying in the breeze!) Alas! it is my husband, fainting, bruised, Drop by drop his blood has oozed ... Curst be the hour my husband went from me! Curst, curst be God who hears and sees!" Two cries of women, fury and caress, Cry without hope and cry of happiness ... "It is my lord, alive, my lover dear ... (My tears are dried, and on the breeze they flee!) O it is he indeed! My lord is here, Bruised, wounded, pitiful, with panting breath, But loyal to my heart that quivereth ... Blest be the day gives my true love to me!" And the wind may moan, and sing the breeze ... For joy and grief have blent their ecstasies. For mirrored in the evasive wave appears A double brow; an angel sleeps beside The waking angel; from the plaint that died Thanksgiving soars; and, mingling smiles with tears, Days with black jewels gem a diadem For glittering Night whence Death comes unto them. THE ETERNAL BRIDE. I have dreamt thee kind, and dreamt thy careful eyes, Sister unknown, eternal bride of mine. Wife of my thought, I have bent my mouth to thine, And slowly thou hast spoken,—in this wise: "I flash, I glitter, I fade. Enjoy my love ere it flees, But seek not where I have strayed, My trace is like sand on the breeze. My kiss falls on thy face.... But I am unseen, a shade That passes ... my kisses fade Like a wing that flits through space. Listen, and think! I am she Who opens thine eyes in dream. I am the wonderful beam Of a mystery unveiled to thee. I am hot as the sun at heaven's steep, And more than smoke I am light; And I glide through the odours of night To visit thee in thy sleep." THE BRIDE OF BRIDES. O thou who hauntest my nights, Spectre of Time, immense, Voiceless, eternal shadow, Monster for whose feet we hark, And peer for thy marrowless bones in vain through the darkness dense, I know thou art near me ... I tremble, and wait for thee in the dark. O shame! Am I stricken with terror? Absolve with the calm of thy scorn My soul that is dizzily whirling under thy piercing eyes! Yet once my forehead fancied, in its tender and radiant morn, That folded into thy bosom every sorrow dies. I have hated thee in my terror, O Priestess of Time, O Death. Thy fathomless anger swells and rolls a mournful sea, And the flesh in the shock of thy billows writhes, and with stifled breath Cries through the din of thy laughter, crying unto thee.... But come! ... O Bride of embraces twined like an octopus! I give to thy greedy heart a valiant and quiet heart,— Since it is true that Love soars out of Death as does A lily out of a coil of encircling serpents dart.

THE THISTLE. Rooted on herbless peaks, where its erect And prickly leaves, austerely cold and dumb, Hold the slow, scaly serpent in respect, The Gothic thistle, while the insects' hum Sounds far off, rears above the rock it scorns Its rigid virtue for the Heavens to see. The towering boulders guard it. And the bee Makes honey from the blossoms on its thorns. MUSHROOMS. Whether with hues of corpses or of blood,— Phallus obscene or volva as of glue— In the rank rotting of the underwood, And those that out of dead beasts' bodies grew, Fed by the effervescence Of poisonous putrescence, Flourish the saprophytes in mould and must. Plants without roots and with no leaves of green, Souls without faith or hope—they thrust Protuberances rank with lust, Inert, venene. And if there is not death in all of them, It is because some sect among them breeds From less putrescent wood fallen from the stem Of the Living Tree whose severed bough still feeds. In the autumnal thicket, thinned Along its mournful arches by the wind, No longer to dead twigs but sapwood quick, Corrupting trunks that time left whole, The reeking parasites in millions stick, Like to the carnal ill that gnaws the soul Of those who at the feet of women fawn. And Hell has blessed their countless spawn. And though they cannot reach the surging tops Of the unshaken columns of the Church, In spreading crops The parasites with poison smirch And mottle with strange stains the fruits The Monstrance ripens in the groves of Rome. Trusting that ancient orchard's sainted roots, Whoever of the leprous apples eats Shall feel his faith grow darkened with a gloam That filters heresy's corroding sweets. More hideous than saprophytes, And therefore for the sacrilege more fit, Upon the Corn and Vinestock sit Minute and miserable parasites; And o'er the Eucharist their tiny bellies, To cat and crimson it, have crept. Their occult plague has for three hundred years Eaten the very hope of mystic ears, Wherever the Christian Harvester has slept. And while, in the land of heavy, yellow beers, In the brewing-vat of barren exegeses Some new-found yeast for ever effervesces, The saints whose blood turns sick and rots, Waiting till a second Nero shall For their cremation light a golden carnival, Behold their bodies decked with livid spots.

WHAT USE IS SPEECH? What use is speech, what use is it to say Words that without an echo die away, And only leave vain sadness after? All a forest of shadow rings with laughter, If thou but move thy hand to grasp at life! My love, the path on which we laugh with life Pales in a doubt befogged with roads that leads not thorough; The night is triumphing with stars, towards to-morrow! In the night, thou sayest, shadowy terrors fall. Be undeceived, there is no night: There is only multiform, enormous light, And the stars are there, for thee to be drunk withal! THE SOURCE. Our feet kiss where the source is glistening In the glad gloaming softening the trees. Its waters murmur mysteries to the breeze, And we in ravishment are listening. The leaves are paling in the twilight chill: A mystic something in the air is swimming; Our eyes with happy tears are over-brimming; And now the source grows timid, and is still. The shadow makes the world so fair and frail; Wouldst thou not, like a banner on the gale, Be fain to shake thy heart out tenderly?— But no, say nothing: silence is a veil For fervent thoughts that utterance only mars. Let us sit hand in hand, and converse be Without a word under the peace of stars. THE FLESH. O carnal love, life's laughter! Under these Free Eden skies and on these blossomed leas, Thy kiss is on these budding lips of ours. The high grass is all gold, the drunken flowers Voluptuously languish, every one, Feverish as the earth is with the sun. My heart leaps like a beast of light, and rears And madly o'er the royal road careers, Where my desires' processional altars are. Your flesh is quivering and to mine replies, Dearest, and glassed within your great pale eyes Is Heaven immensely blue and deep and far. Kiss me! The hour is sweet, and pure our kiss. The deathless boon of living sings in us. Let us with ravishment delirious Possess each other, and in infinite bliss Be born again, knowing life's mysteries! Fold me and fill me with your hot caress, O human goddess naked, exquisite! I am drunken with your dazzling loveliness, O queen of grace and beauty dowered with your Young budding flesh so marvellously pure!

THE CHAPLET. Fiumina amem sylvasque inglorius.—VIRGIL. My forest, winter's captive, I have seen Softly awakening under warmer breezes: In bluer air my forest shimmering green Wafts down the wind the scent that in its trees is. An olden happiness, and yet unknown: Trembles my simple heart, these things beholding With pearls of dew the burgeoned boughs are strown Trembling, this morning hour, my woods unfolding, O Muses! if so passionate a love Survive these leaves in songs of mine that please ye, Seek not to soften to the wrinkles of My brow the oak's or laurel's bough uneasy. The leaves were quivering open, frail as flowers! O! let the light bough of this foliage, shining With the cold tears of Night's imprisoned hours, For ever be mine idle brows entwining! Re manlier brows by prouder fillets swathed! But I would live renownless, lonely-hearted, And to those virgin haunts return unscathed Whence my child's soul hath never yet departed. THE LILY OF THE VALLEY. I feel my heart for ever dying, bruised By all the love it never will have used, Dying in silence, and with angels by, As simply as in cradles infants die, Infants that have no speech. O God-given heart, Guarded by vigilant seraphim thou art! No thing shall soil thy natal raiment! Thou, Rest thee content with no kiss on thy brow, Save of maternal summer eves, and die In thy desire and thy virginity. Thy sacrifice hath made thee shy and proud; Thy life with very emptiness is bowed. Made to be loved, loved thou shalt never be, Though many maids would stretch their arms to thee, As to the Prince who through their fancies rides. Alas! and thou hast never known these brides; To thee they come not when calm evening falls, The pensive maids to whom thy longing calls; And thou art dying of thy love unused, Poor sterile heart, my heart for ever bruised! SOVRAN STATE. In nights impure moans one with fever stricken: "Lord! let a maiden bring me, for I sicken, Water and grapes, and quench my thirst with them. Spring water! Fruits of a virgin vine! And let Her fresh and virgin hands lie on the fret Of my King's brow burnt by its diadem." O pitiful crown upon a head so lowly! Does the unquiet night allegiance show thee? Thou King of beautiful lands that never were. "O stars among the trees! O waters pale! Comes the expected dawn in opal veil? Pity the tired and lonely sufferer: And grant me, Lord, after the night out-drawn, The sleep and boon of Thy forgiving dawn; And let Thy chosen heart no longer bleed!" But answer makes the Lord in stern denial: "Leave thou, for nobler verse, to pain and trial Thy heart, the open book the angels read." THE KISS OF SOULS. You who have died to me, you think you live! Living, your squandered gems and lilies shed! But since the dream you were is fugitive, Love, calm and sad, whispers that you are dead. She that you were survives in dreams: I press Her virgin hands, I hear the vows she swears. Hath not this evening that old loveliness? I seem to breathe the blossoms that she wears. Hearts had been beating long before they spoke, But eyes had speech, and tender voices ringing, Docile to love like perfect lyres, awoke The forest's wondering echo with their singing. A lovelier and a lonelier evening came; The sun behind the breathless forest set. Who was it hushed our voices? For in shame We bent our eyes down that by chance had met. The treasure of our hearts this one deep look Delivered up! Our secrets were in this One look exchanged that our two spirits took, And wedded in their first and only kiss. HER SWEET VOICE. Her sweet voice was a music in mine ear; And in the perfume of the atmosphere Which, in that eve, her shadowy presence shed, "Sister of mystery," trembling I said, "Too like an angel to be what you seem, Go not away too soon, beloved dream!" Then, smiling as a mother will, she seized My brow, and with soft hands my fever eased. "Still, thou poor child, this childish fear of me? Thy forehead furrowed by sad memory, Are these a shadow's hands that on it rest? A bright May morn is dawning in thy breast: Is it a phantom's voice that soothes thy grief? But if my beauty be beyond belief, Breathe its terrestrial odour! Part my hair, And take my veil away and make me bare! Thou canst not soil my wings, nor stain the snow Of these frail flowers that in my garden blow; Come, in so fair an evening, spend the treasure Of my veiled loveliness in thy heart's pleasure." Thus sang the tender voice that needs must fade! And in her kiss the soul was of a maid. But night came from the rim of autumn skies, Came from the forest's shallow, evil eyes. THE REFUGE. This is mine hour. Night falls upon my life. I must forego my part in men's keen strife. With conquered step resigned I reach the door, Beloved too late, where none awaits me more. An autumn shudder through the clear, cold sky Runs, interrupting the monotonous cry Shed by a horn astray and desolate, Making me, languidly, smile at my fate.... But all is said. Naught moves me, in the gloam, Save the uneasy hope of this dear home. She lives; my heart, and not mine eye, foresees. The sweetness of the moon, spread on the trees, Veils more and more this happy nook with peace And mystery that bids foreboding cease; A counsel of forgetfulness is cast Around me, something pensive, good, and vast. And every step I take the more it thrills My soul which yet that ancient quarrel fills. But what shall summer storms betoken, when She breathes the autumn calm she longed for then, And only trembles feeling memories stir Of hearts that loved her well and wounded her. NATURE. Slow falls the eve; the hour is grave, profound. The sweet, sad cuckoo makes the air resound With his two notes with springtide languor filled; And the tall pines, by eddying breezes thrilled, Tremble, as ocean echoes in a shell. Else all is hushed. I walk with heart unwell. Slowly the shadow on my path descends. I loiter o'er familiar forest bends, Whose calm grows deeper with the darkening west, O such a calm I feel my own unrest Melt in the peace of landscapes unforeseen; And in the east eve clothes with azure sheen The slender uplands with their billowing chain, Whose silhouettes shut in the distant plain; And on their tops their cloak of forests gleams Through the thin veil of mist that o'er them streams. And all is vague, the ideal form of things Shimmers divine in deep imaginings, Gladdening the eye with grace ineffable; Seeing them, in the enchanted world we dwell Of soulless, happy beings who possess The calm we cry for of forgetfulness, We who desire in desolate hearts that pine, This sovereign gift of peace that makes divine; And most at eve, when quiet nights of spring Enchant the sky, the forest, and the ling. The forest's darkness sways me at its will; And with a holy and unfathomed thrill I feel a dizzy longing grow in me: O not to think! nor wish! O not to be!... THE HUMBLE HOPE. Time goes, poor soul, and sterile are thy vows. After our outwatched nights and feverish brows, What do we know, save that we nothing know? Even as a child a butterfly will chase, Far have I strayed in many a flowering place, And here I tremble in the afterglow. Yet not despairing in my feebleness, But hoping that the Master still will bless The will to do good that my efforts show. ELEONORA D'ESTE. Does thy heart, Tasso, burn for thy Princess? Strive to refine this obscure tenderness, Of which she can accept the flower alone. Save it make nobler, I no love can own. Certes, among the gifts that fate bestows, And the least lovely, as a poet knows, Some are an offered prey that passions take. But there are others which, if seized, do break; And of these supreme gifts love is the best. If thou indeed dost love me, 'ware thee lest Thy heart forget the reverence it owes, Then may it love, and in love find repose. THE THINKER. O thinker! Thou whose heart hath not withstood, For the first time, Spring's beauty in the wood, And who thyself wilt therefore not forgive, Thy days have passed in pondering o'er the great Enigma man proposes to his fate, And books from life have made thee fugitive. What boots? Leave to the gods their secret yet, And, while thou livest, taste without regret The sweetness of this simple word: To live. A SAGE. He knows dreams never kept their promise yet. Henceforth without desire, without regret, He cons the page of sober tenderness In which some poet, skilled in life's distress, Breathed into olden, golden verse his sighs. Sometimes he lifts his head, and feeds his eyes, With all the wonderment that wise men know, On fields, and clouds that over forests go, And with their calmness sated is his thought. He knows how dearly fair renown is bought: He too, in earlier days of stinging strength, Sought that vain victory to find at length Sadness at his desire's precipitous brink.... Of what avail, he thought, to act and think, When human joy holds all in one rapt look? His mind at peace reads Nature like a book. He smiles, remembering his youth's unrest, And, though none know it, he is wholly blest. THEY WHO ARE WORN WITH LOVE. When, worn with unregenerate delights, The kisses of fair youths grow dull and sicken, They seek, fatigued with hope and outwatched nights, A bed of love that shall the senses quicken. White bed of love with pillows rich with lace, Caressing curtains sheltering dreamless blisses, And, to grow better from the bought embrace, Upon their wasted brows long trembling kisses. Calmer than autumn heavens the eyes they crave, In which the bitterness of theirs shall vanish, Lips of a speech impassionate, suave, Which their sick sorrows shall assuage and banish. Love should be night, and hushed forgetfulness, Never with follies of the past upbraided, Hope still renewed consoling the distress Of dreams come true and in fulfilment faded. Nor light, nor noise; but in the happy room, With tapestry the walls to sleep beguiling, To kiss the long hands of the mistress whom A plain gown clothes, and who is faintly smiling! Once they have seen her, and to hear her speak They hoped for her and Heaven, and knelt before her; But love's old burden makes their soul so weak That save with sighs they never dare implore her. THE CENTAUR. Oft on my rural youth I dwell in fancy. Ye gods who for our deepest feelings care, If fields and forests evermore entrance me, It is because you set my birthplace there. With what a love up-welling sweet and tender Upon the august face of earth mine eyes Lingered, and drank her solitary splendour, Bathed in the radiance of calm summer skies! All was excitement! Valleys richly rounded; The undulating, broadly breasted hills; The vast plains which the veiled horizon bounded, Lit by the silver flash of restless rills. But you, ye forests, filled me most with craving! The pang I felt still to my memory cleaves, When I beheld your endless tree-tops waving, As underneath the wind the ocean heaves! And at your wafted murmuring, I, to capture Your reachless vast, my arms would open dart, Crying in sudden, overpowering rapture: "The world is less immense than my own heart!..." Do not accuse of pride, O Nature! Mother! My fleeting youth. Not vain was my unrest: Of all thy mortal sons there is no other Hath strained himself more fondly to thy breast. The summer sun has scorched my skin, and daring Has chiselled on my face its stubborn force; In foaming floods I bathed, my body baring; And on the mountains braved the tempests hoarse. All manly pleasures that our being fashion In the rough shock of elements uncouth, All of them I have known with headlong passion; With lust of struggle pulsed my arduous youth. Intoxicating was the zest that thrilled me. What matter if I let the fervour seize My quivering soul? The bitter joy that filled me Whipped and exalted me, and left no lees. For I had dreamt all phases of existence! All that was frail and pent in me with scorn I cast aside, and looked towards the distance Where dawned the fate for which my mind was born. Was it a vain dream? O you centaurs smiting With roving hoofs your rocks and herbless sods, O you whose shape, a man's and beast's uniting, Shelters a secret fire that makes you gods! You who quaffed life with its abundance drunken! Your transports I have known in olden days, In evenings when, like you in silence sunken, I drove along the darkened forest ways! In me, ye savage gods, your strength was seething; And, when a sacred madness through me ran, In the pent breath the foliage was breathing I deemed me one of you, I mortal man.

THE OLD MASTERS. In smoky inns whose loft is reached by ladders, And with a grimy ceiling splashed by shocks Of hanging hams, black-puddings, onions, bladders, Rosaries of stuffed game, capons, geese, and cocks Around a groaning table sit the gluttons Before the bleeding viands stuck with forks, Already loosening their waistcoat buttons, With wet mouths when from flagons leap the cork Teniers, and Brackenburgh, and Brauwer, shaken With listening to Jan Steen's uproarious wit, Holding their bellies dithering with bacon, Wiping their chins, watching the hissing spit. Their heavy-bodied Hebes, with their curving Bosoms in linen white without a stain, Are going round, and in long jets are serving Wine that a sunbeam filters through the pane, Before it sets on fire the kettles' paunches The Queens of Tippling are these women, whom Their swearing lovers, greedy of their haunches, Belabour as befits their youth in bloom, With sweating temples, blazing eyes, and lolling Tongue that keeps singing songs obscenely gay, With brandished fists, bodies together rolling, Blows fit to bruise their carcases, while they, With mouth for songs aye ready, throat for bumpers, And blood for ever level with their skins, Dance fit to split the floor, they are such jumpers, And butt their dancer as around he spins, And lick his face in kisses endless seeming, Then fall with ransacked corsage, wet with heat. A smell of bacon fat is richly steaming From the huge platters charged with juicy meat; The roasts are passed around, in gravy swimming, Under the noses of the guests, and passed Around again, with fresh relays of trimming. And in the kitchen drudges wash up fast The platters to be sent back to the table; The dressers bulge, crowded with crockery; The cellars hold as much as they are able; And round the estrade where this agape In glowing red, from pegs hang baskets, ladles, Strainers, and saucepans, candlesticks, and flasks. Two monkeys in a corner show their navels, Throning, with glass in hand, on two twin casks; A mellow light on every angle glimmers, Shines on the door-knob, through the great keyhole, Clings to a pestle, filters through the skimmers, Is jewelled on the monster gala bowl, And slanting on the heated hearthstone sickens, Where, o'er the embers, turns to brown the flesh Of rosy sucking-pigs and fat cock-chickens, That whet the edge of appetite afresh. From dawn to eve, from eve to dawn, and after, The masters with their women revel hold— Women who play a farce of opulent laughter: Farce cynical, obscene, with sleeves uprolled, In corsage ript a flowering gorge not hiding, Belly that shakes with jollity, bright eyes. Noises of orgy and of rut are gliding, Rumbling, and hissing, till they end in cries; A noise of jammed iron and of vessels banging; Brauwer and Steen tilt baskets on their crowns; Brackenburgh is two lids together clanging; Others with pokers fiddle gridirons, clowns Are all of them, eager to show their mettle; They dance round those who lie with feet in air; They scrape the frying-pan, they scrape the kettle; And the eldest are the steadiest gluttons there, Keenest in kisses, and the last to tumble; With greasy nose they lick the casseroles; One of them makes a rusty fiddle grumble, Whose bow exhausts itself in cabrioles; Some are in corners vomiting, and others Are snoring with their arms hung round their seats Babies are bawling for their sweating mothers To stuff their little mouths with monster teats. Men, women, children, all stuffed full to bursting; Appetites ravening, and instincts rife, Furies of stomach, and of throats athirsting, Debauchery, explosion of rich life, In which these master gluttons, never sated, Too genuine for insipidities, Pitching their easels lustily, created Between two drinking-bouts a masterpiece. THE COWHERD. In neckerchief and slackened apron goes The girl to graze the cows at dawn's first peep; Under the willow shade herself she throws To finish out her sleep. Soon as she sinks she snores; around her brow And naked toes the seeded grasses rise; Her bulging arms are folded anyhow, And round them buzz the flies. The insects that all heated places love Come flitting o'er the grass to bask in swarms Upon the mossy patch she lies above, And by her sprawling warms. Sometimes her arm, with awkward empty sweep, Startles around her limbs the gratified Murmur of bees; but, greedy still of sleep, She turns to the other side. The heavy, fleshy flowers the cattle browse Frame in the sleeping woman as she dreams; She has the heavy slowness of her cows, Her eye with their peace gleams. Strength, that the trunk of oaks with knots embosses, Shines, as the sap does, in her; and her hair Is browner than barley in the fields that tosses, Or the sand in the pathways there. Her hands are raw, and red, and chapped; the blood That through her tanned limbs rolls its waves of heat, Lashes her throat, and lifts her breasts, as would The wind lift bending wheat. Noon with a kiss of gold her rest surprises, Low willow branches o'er her shoulders lean, And blend, while heavier slumber in her eyes is, With her brown hair their green. THE ART OF THE FLEMINGS. I. Art of the Flemings, thou didst know them, thou, Who well didst love them, wenches big of bone, With ruddy teats, and bodies like flowers blown; Thy proudest masterpieces tell us how. Whether a goddess glimmers from thy painting, Or nymphs with dripping hair a shepherd sees Rising among the lonely irides, Or sailors to the sirens' kisses fainting, Or females with full contours symbolizing The seasons beautiful, O glorious Art, These are the Masteries love-born in thy heart, The wenches of thy colours' gormandizing. And to create their bodies' carnal splendour, Naked, and fat, and unashamed, thy brush Under their clear and glossy skin made blush A fire of unimagined colours tender. They were a focussed light that flashed and glinted; Their eyes were kindled at the stars, and on Thy canvases their bosoms rose and shone, Like great bouquets of flesh all rosy-tinted. Sweating with love they rolled about a clearing 'Mid in the wood, or bathed their feet in springs, While in the thickets full of noise of wings, Satyrs were prowling and through branches leering, And hid their legs, salacious, shagged, distorted; Their eyes, like sparks holing the darkness, lit Some leafy corner, their long mouths were slit With greasy smiles, their lustful nostrils snorted, Till, dogs in rut, they leapt to their bitches; these Feign flight, and shiver coldly, blushing roses, Pushing the satyr off the part that closes, Squeezing their thighs together under his knees. And some, by madness more than his ignited, Rounding their naked haunches, and rich flesh Of glorious croups beneath a showering mesh Of golden hair, to wild assaults invited. II. You with the life with which yourselves abounded Conceived them, masters dear to fame, with red Brutalities of blood upon them shed, The bodies of your beauties richly rounded. No pallid women sunk in listless poses Morosely on your canvases are seen, As the moon's face shimmers in waters green, Mirroring their phthisis and chlorosis, With foreheads sad as is the day's declining, Sad as a dolorous music faints and dies, With heavy-lidded, sick and glassy eyes, In which consumption and despair are pining, And false, affected grace of bodies faded Upon the sofas where their time they pass, In scented dressing-gowns of taffetas, And in chemises with a dear lace braided. Nothing your brushes knew of painted faces, Nor of indecency, nor of the nice Hints of a cunning and perverted vice Which with its winking eye our art debases, Nor of the pedlar Venuses whose draping Of curtains of the cushioned chamber hints, Nor corners of a venal flesh that glints In nests out of the low-necked dress escaping, Pricking, suggestive themes you knew not, faintings Of shepherdesses in false pastorals, No, nor voluptuous beds in hollow walls— The pulsing women, masters, of your paintings, In landscapes bright, or waited on by pages Crimsonly clad in panelled halls with gold, Or in the purple sumptuousness unrolled Of the god-guarded, mellow classic ages, Your women sweated health; they were serenely Crimson with blood, and white with corpulence; Ruts they did hold in leashed obedience, And led them at their heels with gesture queenly. PEASANTS. Not Greuze's ploughmen made insipid in The melting colours of his pastorals, So neatly dressed, so rosy, that one laughs To see the sugared idyll chastening The pastels of a Louis Quinze salon, But dirty, gross, and bestial—as they are. Penned round some market town in villages, They know not them who traffic in the next, But hold them enemies to cheat and rogue. Their fatherland? Not one believes in it, Except that it makes soldiers of their sons, To steal their labour for a span of years. What is the fatherland to yokels? They See only, in a corner of their brains, Vaguely, the king, magnificent man of gold, In the braided velvet of his purple robes, A sceptre, and gemmed crowns escutcheoning The panelled walls of gilded palaces, Guarded by sentinels with tasselled swords. This do they know of power. It is enough. And for the rest their heavy feet would march In clogs through duty, liberty, and law. In everything by instinct ankylosed, A dirty almanac is all they read; And though they hear the distant cities roaring, So terrified are they by revolutions, That they are riveted to serfdom's chains, Fearing, if they should rear, the iron heel. Along the black roads hollowed out with ruts, Dung-heaps in front and cinder-heaps behind, Stretch with low roofs and naked walls their huts Under the buffeting wind and lashing rain. These are their farms. And yonder soars the church, Stained, to the north, with ooze of verdigris, And farther, squared with ditches, lie their fields, Fertile in patches, thanks to fat manure, And to the harrow's unrelenting teeth. There they keep tilling with their obstinate hands The black glebe mined by moles, and rotten with Detritus, pregnant with the autumn's sperm. With dripping brow they drive the spade in deep, Doubled above the furrows they must sow, Under the hail of March that whips their back. And in the summer, when the ripe rye rocks With golden glints under the pouring sun, Here, in the fire of long and torrid days, Their restless sickle shaves the vast wheat-field, While from their wrinkled foreheads runs the sweat, Opening their skin from shoulders down to hips; Noon darts its brazier rays upon their heads; So raw the heat is that in meslin fields The too dry ears burst open, and the beasts, Their necks with gadflies riddled, pant in the sun. And let November slow to die arrive, Rolling his hectic rattle through deaf woods, Howling his sobs and ending not his moans, Until his death-knell sounds—still runs their sweat. Always anew preparing future crops, Under a sky spouting from swollen clouds, While the north wind tears big holes in the woods, And sweeps the broken stubble from the fields, So that their bodies soon in ruin fall: Let them be young and comely, broadly built, Winter that chills, summer that calcines them, Makes their limbs loathsome and their lungs short-breathed; Or old, and bearing the down-weighing years, With blear eyes, broken backs, and useless arms, And horror stamped upon their hedgehog face, They stagger under the ruin-loving wind. And when Death opens unto them its doors; Their coffin sliding into the soft earth Seems only to contain a thing twice dead. II. On evenings when through eddying skies the wind Is whirling the swarming snow across the fields, Grey-headed farmers sit in reckonings lost, Near lamps from which a thread of smoke ascends. The kitchen is unkempt and slatternly: A string of dirty children by the stove Gorge the spilt remnants of the evening meal; Mangy and bony cats lick dishes clean; Cocks make their beaks ring upon pewter plates; Damp soaks the leprous walls; and on the hearth Four flickering logs are twisting meagre shanks Dying with listless tongues of pale red ray; The old men's heads are full of bitter thoughts. "For all the seasons unremitting toil, With all hands at the plough a hundred years, The farm has passed from father on to son, And, with good years and bad, remains the same, Jogging along upon the brink of ruin." This is what gnaws and bites them with slow tooth. So like an ulcer hate is in their hearts, Patient and cunning hate with smiling face. Their frank and loud good nature hatches rage; Wickedness glimmers in their icy looks; They stink of the rancorous gall that, age by age, Their sufferings have collected in their souls. Keen are they on the slightest gain, and mean; Since they can not enrich themselves by work, Stinginess makes their hearts hard, their hearts fetid; And black their mind is, set on petty things, And stupid and confounded before great; As they had never raised their eyes unto The sun, and seen magnificent sunsets Spread on the evening, like a crimson lake. III. But kermesse is for them a festival, Even for the dirtiest, the stingiest, There go the lads to keep the wenches warm. A huge meal, greased with bacon and hot sauces, Makes their throats salty and enflames their thirst. They roll in the inns, with rounded guts, and hearts Aflame, and break the jaws and necks of those Come from the neighbouring town, who try, by God! To lick the village girls too greedily, And gorge a plate of beef that is not theirs. Savings are squandered—for the girls must dance, And every chap must treat his mate, until The bottles strew the floor in ugly heaps. The proudest of their strength drain huge beer-mugs, Their faces fire-plated, darting fright, Horrid with bloodshot eyes and clammy mouth, In the dark rumbling revels kindle suns. The orgy grows. A stinking urine foams In a white froth along the causey chinks. Like slaughtered beasts are reeling topers floored. Some are with short steps steadying their gait; While others solo bawl a song's refrain, Hindered by hiccoughing and vomiting. In brawling groups they ramble through the town, Calling the wenches, catching hold of them, Hugging them, shoving at them, Letting them go, and pulling them back in rut, Throwing them down with flying skirts and legs. In the taverns—where the smoke curls like grey fog And climbs to the ceiling, where the gluing sweat Of heated, unwashed bodies, and their smells Dull window-panes and pewter-pots with steam— To see battalions of couples crowd In growing numbers round the painted tables, It looks as if their crush would smash the walls. More furiously still they go on swilling, Stamping and blustering and raging through The cries of the heavy piston and shrill flute. Yokels in blue smocks, old hags in white bonnets, And livid urchins smoking pipes picked up, All of them jostle, jump, and grunt like pigs. And sometimes sudden wedges of new-comers Crush in a corner the quadrille that looks, So unrestrained it is, like a mixed fight. Then try they who can bawl the loudest, who Can push the tidal wave back to the wall, Though with a knife's thrust he should stab his man. But the band now redoubles its loud din, Covers the quarrelling voices of the lads, And mingles all in leaping lunacy. They calm down, joke, touch glasses, drunk as lords. The women in their turn get hot and drunk, Lust's carnal acid in their blood corrodes, And in these billowing bodies, surging backs, Freed instinct grows to such a heat of rut, That to see lads and lasses wriggling and writhing, With jostling bodies, screams, and blows of fists, Crushing embraces, biting kisses, to see them Rolling dead drunk into the corners, wallowing Upon the floor, knocking themselves against The panels, sweating, and frothing at the lips, Their two hands, their ten fingers ransacking And emptying torn corsages, it seems— Lust is being lit at the black fire of rape. Before the sun burns with red flames, before The white mists fall in swaths, the reeking inns Turn the unsteady revellers out of doors. The kermesse in exhaustion ends, the crowd Wend their way homewards to their sleeping farms, Screaming their oaths of parting as they go. The aged farmers too, with hanging arms, Their faces daubed with dregs of wine and beer, Stagger with zigzag feet towards their farms Islanded in the billowing seas of wheat. FOGS. You melancholy fogs of winter roll Your pestilential sorrow o'er my soul, And swathe my heart with your long winding-sheet, And drench the livid leaves beneath my feet, While far away upon the heaven's bounds, Under the sleeping plain's wet wadding, sounds A tired, lamenting angelus that dies With faint, frail echoes in the empty skies, So lonely, poor, and timid that a rook, Hid in a hollow archstone's dripping nook, Hearing it sob, awakens and replies, Sickening the woeful hush with ghastly cries, Then suddenly grows silent, in the dread That in the belfry tower the bell is dead. ON THE COAST. A blustering wind the scattered vapour crowds And shakes the horizon, where the dawn bursts, by A charge that fills the ashen azure sky With rearing, galloping, mad, milky clouds. The whole, clear day, day without mist or rain, With leaping manes, gilt flanks, and fiery croups, In a flight of pallid silver and foam, their troops Career across the ether's azure plain. And still their ardour grows, until the eve's Black gesture cuts the vast of space, and heaves Their masses towards the squall that landward blares, While the ample sun of June, fallen from Heaven's vault, Writhes, bleeding, in their vehement assault, Like a red stallion in a rut of mares. HOMAGE. I. To heap in them your heavinesses fair, By double, frugal, savoury breasts embossed, The rosy skin by which your arms are glossed, Your belly's curly fleece of reddish hair, My verses I will weave as, at their doors Seated, old basket-makers curb and twine White and brown osiers in a clear design, Copying enamelled tesselated floors, Until your body's gold within them teems; And like a garland I will wear them, spun In massive blonde heaps on my head, in the sun, Haughtily proud, as a strong man beseems. II. Your rich flesh minds me of the centauresses, Whose arms Paul Rubens rounded in his dyes Of fire beneath a weight of sun-washed tresses, Pointing their breasts to lion-cubs' green eyes. Your blood was theirs, when in the mazy gloaming, Under some star that bit the brazen sky, They heard a stranger in the sea-fog roaming, And hailed some Hercules astray and shy; And when with quivering senses hot for kisses, And belly for the unknown gaping, their Arms they were twisting, calling to mad blisses Huge, swarthy eaters of rut on a body bare. CANTICLES. I. Like lissom lizards drinking the sun's fires Of gold, with great wide eyes and bronze-nailed feet, Crawl towards your body my long, green desires. In the full torrid noon of summer heat I have bedded you in a nook at a field's edge, Where the tanned meslin shoots a shivering wedge. Heat is suspended o'er us like a daïs; The sky prolongs the vast expanse, gold-plated; Afar the Scheldt a dwindling, silver way is; Lascivious, huge, you lie there yet unsated; Like lissom lizards drinking the sun's fires Of gold, crawl back to you my spent desires. II. My love shall be the gorgeous sun that robes With torrid summer and with idlenesses Your body's naked slopes and hilly globes, Showering its light upon you in caresses, And this new brazier's contact shall be in Tongues of an ambient gold that lick your skin. The tragic, rolling red of dawn and eve, And the day's beauty you shall be; with hues Of splendour you a billowy robe shall weave; Your flesh shall be like fabulous statues, Which in the desert sang, and shone like roses, When morning burned their blocks with apotheoses. III. I would not choose the sunflowers that unclose In daylight; nor the lily long of stem; Nor roses loving winds to fondle them; No, nor great nenuphars whose pulp morose, And wide, cold eyes, charged with eternity, Upon their imaging pond yawn idle-lipped Their stirless dreams; nor flowers despotic, whipped By wrath and wind along a hostile sea, To symbolize you. No, but shivering wet Under the dawn, with great red calyx leaves Mingling as jets of blood are fused in sheaves, A group of garden dahlias closely set, Which, in voluptuous days of autumn, bright With matter's hot maturity and heats, Like monstrous and vermilion women's teats, Grow stiff beneath the golden hands of light. DYING MEN. Sharp with their ills, and lonely in their dying, The sceptic sick watch by their chamber fire, With haggard eyes, the evening magnifying The house-fronts, and the blackening church-spire. The hour is dead where in some never-crowded City by time extinguished, desolate, They live immured in walls by mourning shrouded, And hear the monumental hinges grate. Haggard and lone, they gaze at Death unbeaten, Like grim old wolves, the hieratic sick; Life and its days identic they have eaten, Their hate, their fate, diseases clustering thick. But shaken in their cynical assurance, And in their haughtiness and pale disgust, They ask: "Is happiness not in endurance Of wilful suffering, suffering loved with lust?" Of old they felt their hearts go out to others; Benevolent, they pitied alien griefs; And, like apostles, loved their suffering brothers, And feared their pride, cabined in dead beliefs. But now they think that love is more cemented By cruelty than kindness, which is vain. What of the few, chance tears they have prevented? How many more have flowed? Decreed is pain. Empty the golden islands are, where lingers In golden mist Dream in a mantle spun Of purple, skimming foam with idle fingers From silent gold rained by a teeming sun. Broken the proud masts, and the waves are churning! Steer to extinguished ports the vessel's prow: No lighthouse stretches its immensely burning Arm to the great stars—dead the fires are now. Haggard and lone, they gaze at Death unbeaten, Like grim old wolves, the hieratic sick; Life and its days identic they have eaten, Their hate, their fate, diseases clustering thick. With nails of wood they beat hot foreheads. Cages Of bones for fevers are their bodies. Blind Their eyes, their lips like withered parchment pages. A bitter sand beneath their teeth they grind. Now in their extinct souls a longing blazes To sail, and in a new world live again, Whose sunset like a smoking tripod raises The God of shade and ebony in its brain; In a far land of tempests raging madly, In lands of fury hoarse and livid dreams, Where man can drown, ferociously and gladly, His soul and all his heart in fiery streams. They are the tragic sick sharp with diseases; Haggard and lone they watch the town fires fade; And pale façades are waiting till it pleases Their crumbling bodies have their coffins made. THE ARMS OF EVENING. While the cold night stories its terrace, gored And dying evening throws upon the heath, And forest fringed with marshes underneath, The gold of his armour and the flash of his sword, Which wave to wave go floating on, too soon Yet to have lost day's flaunting ardent glow, But kissed already by the shadowed, slow Lips of the pious, silver-handed moon, The lonely moon remembering the day, Whose brandished weapons made a golden glare, A pale wraith in the paleness of the air, The moon for ever pale and far away! THE MILL. Deep in the evening slowly turns the mill Against a sky with melancholy pale; It turns and turns, its muddy-coloured sail Is infinitely heavy, tired, and ill. Its arms, complaining arms, in the dawn's pink Rose, rose and fell; and in this o'ercast eve, And deadened nature's silence, still they heave Themselves aloft, and weary till they sink. Winter's sick day lies on the fields to sleep; The clouds are tired of sombre journeyings; And past the wood that gathered shadow flings The ruts towards a dead horizon creep. Around a pale pond huts of beechwood built Despondently squat near the rusty reeds; A lamp of brass hung from the ceiling bleeds Upon the wall and windows blots of gilt. And in the vast plain, with their ragged eyes Of windows patched, the suffering hovels watch The worn-out mill the bleak horizon notch,— The tired mill turning, turning till it dies. IN PIOUS MOOD.[1] The winter lifts its chalice of pure night to heaven. And I uplift my heart, my night-worn heart in turn, O Lord, my heart! to thy pale, infinite Inane, And yet I know that nought the implenishable urn May plenish, that nought is, whereof this heart dies fain; And I know thee a lie, and with my lips make prayer And with my knees; I know thy great, shut hands averse, Thy great eyes closed, to all the clamours of despair; It is I, who dream myself into the universe; Have pity on my wandering wits' entire discord; Needs must I weep my woe towards thy silence, Lord! The winter lifts its chalice of pure night to heaven. —OSMAN EDWARDS.

THE FERRYMAN. With hands on oars the ferryman Strove where the stubborn current ran, With a green reed between his teeth. But she who hailed him from the bank, Beyond the waves, among the rushes rank That rim the rolling heath, Into the mists receded more and more. The windows, with their eyes, And the dials of the towers upon the shore, Watched him, with doubled back, Straining and toiling at the oar, And heard his muscles crack. Of a sudden broke an oar, Which the current bore On heavy waves down to the sea. And she who hailed him from the mist, In the blustering wind, appeared More madly still her arms to twist, Towards him who never neared. The ferryman took to the oar remaining With such a might, That all his body cracked with straining, And his heart shook with feverish fright. A sudden shock, the rudder tore, And the current bore This remnant to the sea. The windows on the shore, Like eyes with fever great, And the dials of the towers, those widows straight That in their thousands throng A river bank, were obstinately staring At this mad fellow obstinately daring His crazy voyage to prolong. And she who hailed him there with chattering teeth, Howled and howled in the mists of night, With head stretched out in frantic fright To the unknown, the vast, and rolling heath. The ferryman, as a statue stands, Bronze in the storm that paled his blood, With the one oar firm in his hands, Beat the waves, and bit the flood. His old hallucinated eyes See the lit distances rejoice, Whence reaches him the lamentable voice, Under the freezing skies. His last oar breaks, His last oar the current takes, Like a straw, down to the sea. The ferryman exhausted sank Upon his bench, with sweat that poured, His loins with vain exertion sore, A high wave struck on the lee-board, He looked, behind him lay the bank: He had not left the shore. The windows and the dials gazed, With eyes they opened wide, amazed, Where all his strength to ruin ran; But the old, stubborn ferryman Kept all the same, for God knows when, The green reed in his teeth, even then. THE RAIN. As reeled from an exhaustless bobbin, the long rain, Interminably through the long gray day, Lines the green window pane With its long threads of gray, The reeled, exhaustless rain, The long rain, The rain. It has been ravelling out, since last sunset, Rags hanging soft and low From sulky skies of jet. Unravelling, patient, slow, Upon the roads, since last sunset, On roads and streets, Continual sheets. Along the leagues that wind Through quiet suburbs to the fields behind, Along the roads interminably bending, In funeral procession, drenched, resigned, Toiling, bathed in sweat and steam, Vehicles with tilted coverings are wending; In ruts so regular, And parallel so far By night to join the firmament they seem, The water drips hour after hour, The spouts gush, and the trees shower, With long rain wet, With rain tenacious yet. Rivers o'er rotten dikes are brimming Upon the meadows where drowned hay is swimming; The wind is whipping walnut trees and alders, And big black oxen wading stand Deep in the water of the polders, And bellow at the writhen sky; And evening is at hand, Bringing its shadows to enfold the plain, and lie Clustered at the washed tree's root; And ever falls the rain, The long rain, As fine and dense as soot. The long rain, The long rain falls afresh; And its identic thread Weaves mesh by mesh A raiment making naked shred by shred The cottages and farmyards gray Of hamlets crumbling fast away; A bunch of linen rags that hang down sick Upon a loosely planted stick; Here a blue dovecote to the roof that cleaves; Sinister window panes Plastered with paper rank with mildew stains; Dwellings whose regular eves Form crosses on their gable ends of stone; Uniform, melancholy mills, Standing like horns upon their hills; Chapels, and spires with ivy overgrown; The rain The long rain Winter-long beneath them burrows. The rain, in lines, The long, gray rain untwines Its watery tresses o'er its furrows, The long rain Of countries old, Torpid, eternally unrolled. THE FISHERMEN. Up from the sea a flaky, dank, Thickening fog rolls up, and chokes Windows and closed doors, and smokes Upon the slippery river bank. Drowned gleams of gas-lamps shake and fall Where rolls the river's carrion; The moon looks like a corpse, and on The heaven's rim its burial. But flickering lanterns now and then Light up and magnify the backs, Bent obstinately in their smacks, Of the old river fishermen, Who all the time, from last sunset, For what night's fishing none can know, Have cast their black and greedy net, Where silent, evil waters flow. Deep down beyond the reach of eye Fates of Evil gathering throng, Which lure the fishers where they lie To fish for them with patience strong, True to their task of simple toiling In contradictory fogs embroiling. And o'er them peal the minutes stark, With heavy hammers peal their knells, The minutes sound from belfry bells, The minutes hard of autumn dark, The minutes list. And the black fishers in their ships, In their cold ships, are clad in shreds; Down their cold nape their old hat drips And drop by drop in water sheds All the mist. Their villages are numb and freeze; Their huts are all in ruin sunk, And the willows and the walnut-trees The winds of the west have whipped and shrunk; And not a bark comes through the dark, And never a cry through the void midnight, That floated, humid ashes blight. And never helping one another, Never brother hailing brother, Never doing what they ought, For himself each fisher's thought: And the first draws his net, and seizes All the fry of his poverty; And the next drags up, as keen as he, The empty bottoms of diseases; Another opens out his net To griefs that on the surface swim; And another to his vessel's rim Pulls up the flotsam of regret. The river churns, league after league, Along the dikes, and runs away, As it has done so many a day, To the far horizon of fatigue; Upon its banks skins of black clay By night perspire a poison draught; The fogs are fleeces far to waft, And to men's houses journey they. Never a lantern streaks the dark, And nothing stirs in the fisher's bark, Save, nimbusing with halos of blood, The thick white felt of the clustering fogs, Silent Death, who with madness clogs The brains of the fishermen on the flood. Lonely at the fog's cold heart, Each sees not each, though side by side; Their arms are tired, their vessels ride By sandbanks marked on ruin's chart. Why in the dark do they not hail each other? Why does a brother's voice console not brother? No, numb and haggard they remain, With vaulted back and heavy brain, With, by their side, their little light Rigid in the river's night. Like blocks of shadow there they arc, And never pierce their eyes afar Beyond the acrid, spongy wet; And they suspect not that above, Luring them with a magnet's love, Stars immense are shining yet. These fishers in black torment tossed, They are the men immensely lost Among the knells and far aways And far beyonds where none can gaze; And in their souls' monotonous deeps The humid autumn midnight weeps. SILENCE. Since last the summer broke above her A flash of lightning from his thunder-sheath, Silence has never left her cover In the heather on the heath. Across her refuge peers the steeple, And with its fingers shakes its bells; Around her prowl the vehicles, Laden with uproarious people; Around her, where the fir-trees end, In its rut the cart-wheel grates; But never a noise has strength to rend The tense, dead space where silence waits. Since the last loud thunder weather, Silence has stirred not in the heather; And the heath, wherein the evenings sink, Beyond the endless thickets, and The purple mounds of hidden sand, Lengthens her haunts to heaven's brink. And even winds stir not the slim Larches at the marsh's rim, Where she will glass her abstract eyes In pools where wondering lilies rise; And only brushes her the clouds' Shadow when they rush in crowds, Or else the shadow of a flight Of hovering hawks at heavens' height. Since the last flash of lightning streaked the plain, Nothing has bitten, in her vast domain. And those who in her realm did roam, Whether it were in dawn or gloam, They all have felt their hearts held fast In spells of mystery she has cast. She, like an ample, final force, Keeps on the same unbroken course; Black walls of pinewoods gloom and bar The paths of hope that gleam afar; Clusters of dreamy junipers Frighten the feet of wanderers; Malignant mazes intertwine With paths of cunning curve and line, And the sun every moment shifts The goal to which confusion drifts. Since the lightning that the storm forged bit, The bitter silence at the corners four Of the heath, has changed no whit. The shepherds with their hundred years worn out, And the spent dogs that follow them about, See her, on golden dunes where shadows flit, Or in the noiseless moorland, sometimes sit, Immense, beneath the outspread wing of Night; Then waters on the wrinkled pond take fright; And the heather veils itself and palely glistens, And every leaf in every thicket listens, And the incendiary sunset stills The last cry of his light that o'er her thrills. And the hamlets neighbouring her, beneath Their thatch of hovels on the heath, Shiver with terror, feeling her Dominant, though she do not stir; Mournful, and tired, and helpless they Stand in her presence as at bay, And watch benumbed, and nigh to swoon, Fearing, when mists shall lift, to see, Suddenly opening under the moon, The silver eyes of her mystery. THE ROPE-MAKER. At the dike's foot that wearily Curves along the sinuous sea, The visionary, silver-haired Rope-maker with arms bared, Pulling backwards as he stands, Rolls together, with prudent hands, The twisting play of endless twine, Coming from the far sky-line. Down yonder in the sunset sheen, In the twilight tired and chill, A busy wheel is whizzing still, Moved by one who is not seen; But, parallel on stakes that space The road from equal place to place, The yellow hemp that the roper draws Runs in a chain that never flaws. With skilful fingers thin and old, Fearing to break the glint of gold That with his work the gliding light Blends by the houses growing dim, The visionary roper weaves Out of the heart of the eddying eves, And draws the horizons unto him. Horizons? Those of red sunsets: Furies, hatred, fights, regrets, Sobs of beings broken-hearted, Horizons of the days departed, Writhen, golden, overcast; Horizons of the living past. Of old—the life of strayed somnambulists, When the right hand of God to Canaans blue The road of gold through gloaming deserts drew, Through morns and evenings swayed with shifting mists. Of old—exasperated life careering Hanging from stallions' manes, lighting the dense Darkness with heels that flashed out gleams immense, Towards immensity immensely rearing. Of old—it was a life of burning leaven; When the Red Cross of Hell and Heaven's White Through miles of marshalled mail that shed the light Marched each through blood towards its victory's heaven. Of old—it was a foaming, livid life, Living and dead, with tocsin bells and crime, Edicts and massacres reddening the time, With mad and splendid death above the strife. Between the flax and osiers, On the road where nothing stirs, Along the houses growing dim, The visionary roper weaves Out of the heart of the eddying eves, And draws the horizon unto him. Horizons? There they linger yet: Toil, and science, struggle, fret. Horizons? There at even-chime, They in their mirrors show the mourning Image of the present time. Now, a mass of fires that belch defiance, Where wise men, leagued in mighty storm and stress, Hurl the gods down to change the nothingness Whereunto strives the force of human science. Now, lo! a room that ruthless thought has swept, Weighed and exactly measured, and men swear The firmament is arched by empty air; And Death is in glass bottles corked and kept. Now, lo! a glowing furnace, and resistance Of matter molten in fire's dragon dens; New strengths are forged, far mightier than men's, To swallow up the night, and time, and distance. Here, lo! a palace tiredly built, and lying Beneath a century's weight, bowed down and yellow, And whence, in terror, mighty voices bellow, Invoking thunder towards adventure flying. Upon the regular road, with eyes Fixed where the silent sunset dies, And leaves the houses drear and dim, The visionary roper weaves Out of the heart of the eddying eves, And draws the horizons unto him. Horizons? Where yon sunset beams: Combats, hopes, awakenings, gleams; The horizons he can see defined In the future of his mind, Far beyond the shores that swim Sketched in the sky of sunsets dim. Up yonder—in the calm skies hangs a red Staircase of double gold with steps of blue, With Dream and Science mounting it, the two Who separately climb to one stair-head. The lightning clash of contraries expires; Doubt's mournful fist its fingers opes, while wed Essential laws that had been wont to shed In horal doctrines their fragmentary fires. Up yonder—mind more strong and subtle darts Its violence past death and what is seen. And universal love sheds a serene And mighty silence over tranquil hearts. The God in every human heart, above, Unfolds, expands, and his own being sees In those who sometimes fell upon their knees To worship sacred grief and humble love. Up yonder—living peace is burning bright, And shedding on these lands, down evening's slope A bliss that kindles, like the brands of hope, In the air's ash the great stars of the night. At the dike's foot that wearily Curves along the sinuous sea Towards the distant eddying spaces, The visionary roper paces Along the houses growing dim, And drinks the horizons into him. SAINT GEORGE. By a broad flash the fog was split, And Saint George, with gold and jewels lit, Came down the slope of it, With feathers foaming from his crest, Riding a charger with a milky breast, And in its mouth no bit. With diamonds decked the two Made of their fall a path of pity to This earth of ours from Heaven's blue. Heroes with helpful virtues dowered, Sonorous with courage, heroes crystalline, O through my heart now let the radiance shine That from his aureolar sword is showered! O let me hear the silver prattle Of the wind around his coat of mail, And around his spurs in battle; Saint George, who shall prevail, He who has heard the cries of my distress, And comes to save from scaith My poor arms stretched unto his great prowess! Like a loud cry of faith, He holds his lance at rest, Saint George; He passes, I behold A victory as of a haggard gold, I see his forehead with the Chrism blessed: Saint George of duty, Bright with his heart's and his own beauty. Sound, all ye voices of my hope! Sound in myself, and on the sun-swept slope, And high roads, and the shaded avenue! And, gleams of silver between stones, be you Joy, and you pebbles white with waters ope Your eyes, and look Up through the brook Whose ripples o'er you roll, And, landscape with thy crimson lakes, be thou The mirror of the flights of flame that now Saint George takes to my soul! Against the black dragon's teeth, Against the pustules of a leprous skin He is the glaive and the miraculous sheath. Charity on his cuirass burns, and in His courage is the bounding overthrow Of instinct swart with sin. Fire golden-sifted, fire that wheels, And eddying stars in which his glory lies, Flashed from his charger's galloping heels, Dazzle my memory's eyes. The beautiful ambassador is he From the white country that with marble glows, Where in the parks, on the sea's strand, and on the tree Of goodness, kindness gently grows. The port, he knows it, where the vessels ride, With angels filled, upon a rippling tide; And the long evenings lighting islands fair But motionless upon their waters, where, And in eyes also, firmaments are seen. This kingdom hath the Virgin for its Queen, And St. George is the humble joy of her palace, In the air his falchion glimmers like a chalice; Saint George with his devouring light, Who like a fire of gold dispels my spirit's night. He knows how far my feet have wandered, He knows the strength that I have squandered, And with what fogs my brain has fought, He knows what keen assassin knives Have cut black crosses in my thought, He knows my scorn of rich men's lives, He knows the mask of wrath and folly Upon the dregs of my melancholy. I was a coward in my flight Out of the world in my sick, vain defiance; I have lifted, under the roofs of night, The golden marbles of a hostile science To the barred summits of black oracles; But the King of the Night is Death; And man but in the dawning's breath His enigmatic effort spells; When flowers unclose, prayer too uncloses, With the scent of prayer their lips are sweet, And the white sun on a nacreous water-sheet Is a kiss that on man's lips reposes; Dawn is a counsel to be bold, And he who hearkens is tenfold Saved from the marsh that never yet cleansed sin. Saint George in cuirass glittering With leaps of fire sprung Unto my soul through the fresh morning; He was beautiful with faith and young; And more to me he bent As he beheld me penitent; As from an intimate golden phial He filled me with his soaring; Though he was proud unto my sight, I laid the sweet flowers of my trial In his pale hand of blest restoring; Then signed he, ere he did depart, My brow with his lance's cross of gold, Bade me be of good cheer and bold, And soared, and bore to God my heart. IN THE NORTH. Two ancient mariners from the Northern Main One autumn eve came sailing home again, From Sicily and its deceitful islands, Carrying a shoal of sirens On board. Sharpened with pride they sail into their bay; Among the mists that mark the homeward way They cut their passage like a sword; Under a mournful and monotonous gale, One autumn evening of a sadness pale, Into their northern fjord they sail. From the safe shore the burghers of the haven Gaze listless, cold, and craven: And on the masts, and in the ropes, behold The sirens covered with gold Biting, like vines, Their bodies' sinuous lines. The burghers gaze with closed and sullen mouth, Nor see the ocean booty of the south, Brought in the fog's despite; The vessel seems a basket silver-white, Laden with flesh and fruit and gold for home, Advancing borne on wings of foam. The sirens sing, and in the cordage they With arms stretched out in lyres, And lifted breasts like fires, Sing and sing a lay Before the rolling eve, Which reaps upon the sea the lights of day; The sirens sing, and cleave Around the masts as curves the handle of the urn And still the citizens, uncouth and taciturn, Hear not the song. They do not know their friends away so long— The ancient mariners twain—nor understand The vessel is of their own land, Neither the foc-jibs of their own Making, nor the sails themselves have sewn; Of this deep dream they fathom naught, Which makes the sea glad with its journeyings, Since it was not the lie of all the things That in their village to their youth were taught. And the ship passes by the harbour mole, Luring them to the wonder of its soul, But none will gather them the fruits Of flesh and gold that load the trellised shoots. THE TOWN. Every road goes to the town. Under the mist that the sun illumes, She, where her terraces arise And taper to the terraced skies, Herself as from a dream exhumes. Yonder glimmer looking down, Bridges trimmed with iron lace, Leaps in air and caught in space; Blocks and columns like the head Of a Gorgon gashed and red; O'er the suburbs chimneys tower; Gables open like a flower, Under stagnant roofs that frown. This is the many-tentacled town, This is the flaming octopus, The ossuary of all of us. At the country's end she waits, Feeling towards the old estates. Meteoric gas-lamps line Docks where tufted masts entwine; Still they burn in noontides cold, Monster eggs of viscous gold; Never seems the sun to shine: Mouth as it is of radiance, shut By reeking smoke and driving smut. A river of pitch and naphtha rolls By wooden bridges, mortared moles; And the raw whistles of the ships Howl with fright in the fog that grips: With a red signal light they peer Towards the sea to which they steer. Quays with clashing buffers groan; Carts grate o'er the cobble-stone; Cranes are cubes of shadow raising, And slipping them in cellars blazing; Bridges opening lift a vast Gibbet till the ships have passed; Letters of brass inscribe the world, On roofs, and walls, and shop-fronts curled, Face to face in battle massed. Wheels file and file, the drosky plies, Trains are rolling, effort flies; And like a prow becalmed, the glare Of gilded stations here and there; And, from their platforms, ramified Rails beneath the city glide, In tunnels and in craters, whence They storm in network flashing thin Out into hubbub, dust, and din. This is the many-tentacled town. The street, with eddies tied like ropes Around its squares, runs out and gropes Along the city up and down, And runs back far enlaced, and lined With crowds inextricably twined, Whose mad feet beat the flags beneath, Whose eyes are filled with hate, whose teeth Snatch at the time they cannot catch. Dawn, eve, and night, lost in the press, They welter in their weariness, And cast to chance the bitter seed Of labour that no gain can breed. And dens black with inanity Where poisoned sits the clerk and fasts; And banks wide open to the blasts Of the winds of their insanity. Outside, in wadding of the damp, Red lights in streaks, like burning rags, Straggle from reeking lamp to lamp. And alcohol goads life that lags. The bar upon the causey masses Its tabernacle of looking-glasses, Reflecting drunken louts and hags. To and fro a young girl passes, And sells lights to the lolling men; Debauch buys famine in her den; And carnal lust ignited sallies To dance to death in rotten alleys. Lust roars and leaps from breast to breast, Whipped to a rage uproarious, To a blind crush of limbs in quest Of the pleasure of gold and phosphorus; And in and out wan women fare, With sexual symbols in their hair. The atmosphere of reeking dun At times recedes towards the sun, As though a loud cry called to Peace To bid the deafening noises cease; But all the city puffs and blows With such a violent snort and flush, That the dying seek in vain the hush Of silence that eyes need to close. Such is the day—and when the eves With ebony hammers carve the skies, Over the plain the city heaves Its shimmer of colossal lies; Her haunting, gilt desires arise; Her radiance to the stars is cast; She gathers her gas in golden sheaves; Her rails are highways flying fast To the mirage of happiness That strength and fortune seem to bless; Like a great army swell her walls; And all the smoke she still sends down Reaches the fields in radiant calls. This is the many-tentacled town, This is the burning octopus, The ossuary of all of us, The carcase with solemn candles lit. And all the long ubiquitous Roads and pathways reach to it. THE MUSIC-HALL. Under the enormous fog Whose wings the city arteries clog, 'Mid ringing plaudits, at the back Of a radiant hall their Orients they unpack. The acrobat on airy trestles poises; Great suns of strass shine o'er the scene; Clashing their fists stand cymbal-players, lean Breakers of cries and noises; And when the ballet-corps with painted faces In a thicket of perplexing steps appear, Tangling and disentangling labyrinthine paces, The hall, hung with its gorgeous chandelier, That o'er a surging sea of faces glares, The hall with heavy velvet clad, With balconies like pad on pad, Is like a belly that a woman bares. Swarming battalions of flesh and thighs March under arches flowered with thousand dyes; Lace, petticoats, throats, legs, and hips: Teams of rut whose breasts, though bridled, yet Are bounding, yoke by yoke the coiled dance trips, Blue with paint and raw with sweat. Hands, vainly opening, seem to seize Only invisible desire that flees; A dancer, darting legs her tights leave bare, Stiffens obscenity in the air; Another with swimming eyes and flanks that writhe Shrinks like a trampled beast above the loud Flare of the footlights swaying with the lithe Lust of the gloating crowd. O blasphemy vociferously hurled In crying gold on the Beauty of the world! Atrocious feint of Art, while Art sublime Is lying massacred and sunk in slime! O noisy pleasure singing as it treads On tortured ugliness that twists and cries; Pleasure against Joy's grain that nurtures heads With alcohol, with alcohol men's eyes; O pleasure whose rank mouth calls out for flowers, And vomits the vile ferment it devours! Pleasure of old, heroic, calm, and bare, Walked with calm hands and forehead clear as air; The wind and the sun danced in his heart, he pressed Divine, harmonious life, to his warm breast; His breast that breathed it in was Beauty's source; He knew no law that dared call Beauty coarse; Sunrise and sunset, springs with mosses grassed, And the green bough that brushed him as he passed, Thrilled to his deep soul through his flesh, and were The kiss of things that love makes lovelier. Now senile and debauched, he licks and eats Sin that beguiles him with her poisoned teats; Now in his garden of anomalies Bibles, codes, texts, and rules he multiplies, And ravishes the faith he then denies. His loves are gold. His hatreds? Flights unto Beauty that grows still lovelier, still more true, Opening in starry flowers in heavens blue. Look where he haunts these halls of monstrous art, Whose burning windows to the heavens dart A restlessness by gazing still renewed: Here is the beast transformed to a multitude. Filled with contagion thousand eyes deflect To find a million more they may infect; One mind to thousands casts its brazier fire, To be consumed the more in sick desire, To breed new vices, unimagined Hell. The conscience changes, and the brain as well; Another race is bred from putrid spawn, A writhen black totality, a sum Of ciphers spreading in a weltering scum, That outrages the healthfulness of Dawn. O shames and crimes of crowds that reek and stain The city like a bellowing hurricane; Gulfed in the plaster boxes tier on tier Of theatres and halls obscene and blear! The stage is like a fan unfurled. Enamelled minarets grotesquely curled. Houses and terraces and avenues. Under the limelight's changing hues, First in slow rhythms, then with violent sweep, Gathering swift kisses, touching breasts that leap, Meet the Bayadères with swaying hips; Negro boys, whose heads with plumes are tipped, With their foam-coloured teeth in lips Like a red vulva open ripped, Move all as pushed along in sluggish poses. A drum beats, an obstinate horn cries long, A raw fife tickles a stupid song, And at the last, for the final apotheosis, A mad assault over the boards is sweeping, Gold and throats and thighs in stages heaping In curled entanglements; and then all closes With garments splitting offering rounded shapes And vice half hid in flowers like tempting grapes. And the orchestra dies, or suddenly halts, And climbs, and swells, and rolls in whipped assaults; Out of the violins wriggle spasms dark; Lascivious dogs in the tempest seem to bark Of heavy brasses and of strong bassoons; A manifold desire swells, sickens, swoons, Revives, and with such heavy violence heaves, The sense cries out, and helpless reels, And prostitutes itself to a spasm that relieves. And midnight peals. The dense crowd pours and at the doors unfurls. The hall is closed—and on the black causeways, Gaudy beneath the gaslamps' leering gaze, Red in the fog like flesh, await the girls. THE BUTCHER'S STALL. Hard by the docks, soon as the shadows fold The dizzy mansion-fronts that soar aloft, When eyes of lamps are burning soft, The shy, dark quarter lights again its old Allurement of red vice and gold. Women, blocks of heaped, blown meat, Stand on low thresholds down the narrow street, Calling to every man that passes; Behind them, at the end of corridors, Shine fires, a curtain stirs And gives a glimpse of masses Of mad and naked flesh in looking-glasses. Hard by the docks. The street upon the left is ended by A tangle of high masts and shrouds that blocks A sheet of sky; Upon the right a net of grovelling alleys Falls from the town—and here the black crowd rallies To reel to rotten revelry. It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury, Time out of mind erected on the frontiers Of the city and the sea. Far-sailing melancholy mariners Who, wet with spray, through grey mists peer, Cradled among the rigging cabin-boys, and they who steer Hallucinated by the blue eyes of the vast sea-spaces, All dream of it, evoke it when the evening falls; Their raw desire to madness galls; The wind's soft kisses hover on their faces; The wave awakens rolling images of soft embraces; And their two arms implore, Stretched in a frantic cry towards the shore. And they of offices and shops, the city tribes, Merchants precise, keen reckoners, haggard scribes, Who sell their brains for hire, and tame their brows, When the keys of desks are hanging on the wall, Feel the same galling rut at even-fall, And run like hunted dogs to the carouse. Out of the depths of dusk come their dark flocks, And in their hearts debauch so rudely shocks Their ingrained greed and old accustomed care, That they are racked and ruined by despair. It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury, Time out of mind erected on the frontiers Of the city and the sea. Come from what far sea-isles or pestilent parts? Come from what feverish or methodic marts? Their eyes are filled with bitter, cunning hate, They fight their instincts that they cannot sate; Around red females who befool them, they Herd frenzied till the dawn of sober day. The panelling is fiery with lewd art; Out of the wall nitescent knick-knacks dart; Fat Bacchuses and leaping satyrs in Wan mirrors freeze an unremitting grin; Flowers sicken on the gaming-tables where The warming bowls twist fire of light blue hair; A pot of paint curds on an étagère; A cat is catching flies on cushioned seats; A drunkard lolls asleep on yielding plush, And women come, and o'er him bending, brush His closed, red lids with their enormous teats. And women with spent loins and sleeping croups Are piled on sofas and arm-chairs in groups, With sodden flesh grown vague, and black and blue With the first trampling of the evening's crew. One of them slides a gold coin in her stocking; Another yawns, and some their knees are rocking; Others by bacchanalia worn out, Feeling old age, and, sniffing them, Death's snout, Stare with wide-open eyes, torches extinct, And smooth their legs with hands together linked. It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury, Time out of mind erected on the frontiers Of the city and the sea. According to the jingle of the purses The women mingle promises with curses; A tranquil cynicism, a tired pleasure Is meted duly to the money's measure. The kiss grows weary, and the game grows tame. Often when fist with fist together clashes, In the wind of oaths and insults still the same, Some gaiety out of the blasphemy flashes, But soon sinks, and you hear, In the silence dank and drear, A halting steeple near Sounding, sick with pity, In the darkness over the city. Yet in those months by festivals sanctified, St. Peter in summer, in winter Christmastide, The ancient quarter of dirt and light Soars up to sin and pounces on its joys, Fermenting with wild songs and boisterous noise Window by window, flight by flight, With vice the house-fronts glow Down from the garret to the grids below. Everywhere rage roars, and couples heats. In the great hall to which the sailors throng, Pushing some jester of the streets, Convulsed in obscene mimicry, along, The wines of foam and gold leap from their sheath; Women fall underneath Mad, brawling drunkards; loosened ruts Flame, arms unite, and body body butts; Nothing is seen but instincts slaked and lit afresh, Breasts offered, bellies taken, and the fire Of haggard eyes in sheaves of brandished flesh. The frenzy climbs, and sinks to rise still higher, Rolls like exasperated tides, And backwards glides, Until the moment when dawn fills the port, And Death, tired of the sport, Back to ships and homesteads sweeps and harries The limp debauch and human weed That on the pavement tarries. It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury, Wherein Crime plants his knives that bleed, Where lightning madness stains Foreheads with rotting pains, Time out of mind erected on the frontiers that feed The city and the sea. A CORNER OF THE QUAY. When the wind sulks, and the dune dries, The old salts with uneasy eyes Hour after hour peer at the skies. All are silent; their hands turning, A brown juice from their lips they wipe; Never a sound save, in their pipe, The dry tobacco burning. That storm the almanac announces, Where is it? They are puzzled. The sea has smoothed her flounces. Winter is muzzled. The cute ones shake their pate, And cross their arms, and puff. But mate by mate they wait, And think the squall is late, But coming sure enough. With fingers slow, sedate Their finished pipe they fill; Pursuing, every salt, Without a minute's halt, The same idea still. A boat sails up the bay, As tranquil as the day; Its keel a long net trails, Covered with glittering scales. Out come the men: What ho? When will the tempest come? With pipe in mouth, still dumb, With bare foot on sabot, The salts wait in a row. Here they lounge about, Where all year long the stout Fishers' dames Sell, from their wooden frames, Herrings and anchovies, And by each stall a stove is, To warm them with its flames. Here they spit together, Spying out the weather. Here they yawn and doze; Backs bent with many a squall, Rubbing it in rows, Grease the wall. And though the almanac Is wrong about the squall, The old salts lean their back Against the wall, And wait in rows together, Watching the sea and the weather. MY HEART IS AS IT CLIMBED A STEEP. My heart is as it climbed a steep, To reach your kindness fathomlessly deep, And there I pray to you with swimming eyes. I came so late to where you arc, You with your pity more than prodigal's surmise; I came from very far Unto the two hands you were holding out, Calmly, to me who stumbled on in doubt! I had in me so much tenacious rust, That gnawed with its rapacious teeth My confidence in myself; I was so tired, I was so spent, I was so old with my mistrust, I was so tired, I was so spent With all the roads of my discontent. So little I deserved the joy how deep Of seeing your feet light up my wilderness, That I am trembling still with it, and nigh to weep, And lowly for ever is the heart you bless. WHEN I WAS AS A MAN THAT HOPELESS PINES. When I was as a man that hopeless pines, And pitfalls all my hours were, You were the light that welcomed home the wanderer, The light that from the frosted window shines On snow at dead of night. Your spirit's hospitable light Touched my heart, and hurt it not, Like a cool hand on one with fever hot! A element word of green, reviving hope Ran down the piled wrack of my heart's waste slope; Then came stout confidence and right good will, Frankness, and tenderness, and at the last, With hand in hand held fast, An evening of clear understanding and of storms grown still. Since, though the summer followed winter's chill, Both in ourselves and under skies whose deathless fires With gold all pathways of our thoughts adorn, Though love has grown immense, a great flower born Of proud desires, A flower that, without cease, to grow still more, In our hearts begins as e'er before, I still look at the little light Which first shone out on me in my soul's night. LEST ANYTHING ESCAPE FROM OUR EMBRACE. Lest anything escape from our embrace, Which is as sacred as a Temple's holy place, And so that the bright love pierce with light the body's mesh, Together we descend into the garden of your flesh. Your breasts are there like offerings made, You hold your hands out, mine to greet, And nothing can be worth the simple meat Of whisperings in the shade. The shadow of white boughs caresses Your throat and face, and to the ground The blossoms of your tresses Fall unbound. All of blue silver is the sky, The night is a silent bed of ease, The gentle night of the moon, whose breeze Kisses the lilies tall and shy. I BRING TO YOU AS OFFERING TO-NIGHT. I bring to you as offering to-night My body boisterous with the wind's delight; In floods of sunlight I have bathed my skin; My feet are clean as the grass they waded in; Soft are my fingers as the flowers they held; My eyes are brightened by the tears that welled Within them, when they looked upon the earth Strong without end and rich with festive mirth; Space in its living arms has snatched me up, And whirled me drunk as from the mad wine-cup; And I have walked I know not where, with pent Cries that would free my heart's wild wonderment; I bring to you the life of meadow-lands; Sweet marjoram and thyme have kissed my hands; Breathe them upon my body, all the fresh Air and its light and scents are in my flesh. IN THE COTTAGE WHERE OUR PEACEFUL LOVE REPOSES. In the cottage where our peaceful love reposes, With its dear old furniture in shady nooks, Where never a prying witness on us looks, Save through the casement panes the climbing roses, So sweet the days are, after olden trial, So sweet with silence is the summer time, I often stay the hour upon the chime In the clock of oak-wood with the golden dial. And then the day, the night is so much ours, That the hush of happiness around us starts To hear the beating of our clinging hearts, When on your face my kisses fall in showers. THIS IS THE GOOD HOUR WHEN THE LAMP IS LIT. This is the good hour when the lamp is lit. All is calm, and consoling, and dear, And the silence is such that you could hear A feather falling in it. This is the good hour when to my chair my love will flit, As breezes blow, As smoke will rise, Gentle, slow. She says nothing at first—and I am listening; I hear all her soul, I surprise Its gushing and glistening, And I kiss her eyes. This is the good hour when the lamp is lit. When hearts will say How they have loved each other through the day. And one says such simple things: The fruit one from the garden brings; The flower that one has seen Opening in mosses green; And the heart will of a sudden thrill and glow, Remembering some faded word of love Found in a drawer beneath a cast-off glove In a letter of a year ago. THE SOVRAN RHYTHM. Yet, after years and years, to Eve there came Impatience in her soul, and as a blight Of being the sapless, loveless flower of white And torrid happiness that cleaved the same; And once, when in the skies the tempest moved Fain had she risen and its lightning proved. Then did a sweet, broad shudder glide on her; And, in her deepest flesh to feel it, Eve Pressed her frail hands against her bosom's heave. The angel, when he felt the sleeper stir With violent abrupt awakening, And scattered air and arms, and body rocked, Questioned the night, but Eve remained unlocked, And silent. He in vain bespoke each thing That lived beside her by the naked sources, Birds, flowers, and mirrors of cold water-courses With which, perchance, her unknown thought arose Up from the ground; and one night when he bowed, And with his reverent fingers sought to close Her eyes, she leapt out of his great wing's shroud. O fertile folly in its sudden flare Beyond the too pure angel's baffled care! For while he stretched his arms out she was drifting Already far, and passionately lifting To braziers of the stars her body bare. And all the heart of Adam, seeing her so, Trembled. She willed to love, he willed to know. Awkward and shy he neared her, daring not To startle eyes that lost in reveries swam; From terebinths were fluttered scents, and from The soil's fermenting mounted odours hot. He tarried, as if waiting for her hests; But she snatched up his hands, and o'er them hung, And kissed them slowly, long, with kiss that clung, And guided them to cool erected breasts. But through her flesh they burned and burned. His mouth Had found the fires to set on flame his drouth, And his lithe fingers spread her streaming tresses O'er the long ardour of their first caresses. Stretched by the cool of fountains both were lying, Seen of their passion-gleaming eyes alone. And Adam felt a sudden thought unknown Well in his heart to her fast heart replying. Eve's body hid profound retreats as sweet As moss that by the noon's cool breeze is brushed; Gladly came sheaves undone to be their seat, Gladly the grass was by their loving crushed. And when the spasm leapt from them at last, And held them bruised in arms strained stiff and tight, All the great amorous and feline night Tempered its breeze as over them it passed. But on their vision burst A cloud far off at first, And whirling its dizziness with such a blast That it was all a miracle and a fright, Leapt from the dim horizon through the night. Adam raised Eve, and pressed unto him fast Her shivering body exquisitely wan. Livid and sulphurous the cloud came on, With thundering threats o'erflowing, and red lit. Suddenly on the spot Where the wild grass was hot With their two bodies that had loved on it, All the loud Rage of the dark, tremendous cloud Bit. And the voice of the Lord God in its shadow sounded, Fires from the flowers and nightly bushes bounded; And where the dark the turning paths submerged, With sword in hand flamboyant angels surged; Lions were roaring at the fateful skies, Eagles hailed death with hoarsely boding cries; And by the waters all the palm-trees bent Under the same hard wind of discontent That beat on Eve and Adam on that sward, And in the vasty darkness drove them toward New human worlds more fervent than the old. * * * * * * * * * Now felt the man a magnet manifold Draw out his strength and mingle it with all; Ends he divined, and knew what gave them birth; His lover's lips with words grew magical; And his unwritten simple heart loved earth, And serviceable water, trees that hold Authority, and stones that broken shine. Fruits tempted him to take their placid gold, And the bruised grapes of the translucent vine Kindled his thirst which they were ripe to still. The howling beasts he chased awoke the skill That in his hands had slept; and pride dowered him With vehement strengths that foam and over-brim, That he himself his destiny might build. And the woman, still more fair since by the man The marvellous shiver through her body ran, Lived in the woods of gold by perfumes filled And dawn, with all the future in her tears. In her awoke the first soul, made of pride And sweet strength blended with an unknown shame, At the hour when all her heart was shed in flame On the child sheltered in her naked side. And when the day burns glorious and is done, And feet of tall trees in the forests gleam, She laid her body full of her young dream On sloping rocks gilt by the setting sun; Her lifted breasts two rounded shadows showed Upon her skin as rosy as a shell, And the sun that on her pregnant body glowed Seemed to be ripening all the world as well. Valiant and grave she pondered, burning, slow, How by her love the lot of men should grow, And of the beautiful and violent will Fated to tame the earth. Ye sacred cares And griefs, she saw you, you she saw, despairs! And all the darkest deeps of human ill. And with transfigured face and statelier bearing She took your hands in hers and kissed your brow; But you as well, men's grandeur madly daring, You lifted up her soul, and she saw how The limitless sands of time should by your tide Be buried under billows singing pride; In you she hoped, ideas keen in quest, Fervour to love and to desire the best In valiant pain and anguished joy; and so, One evening roving in the after-glow, When she beheld, come to a mossy plot, The gates of Paradise thrown open wide, And the angel beckoning, she turned aside Without desire of it, and entered not.