VI
Be perfect—for I love thee more in thought
Than thou canst reach in every trivial day.
Since days are as the flowers on a wreath
That wither while we bind them each to each.
Only the soul is timeless, and no round of days
Can wall it in a little space of ground.
Sometimes our minds are cheated by the clock
And crave love, wisdom, joy within an hour,
But the patient spirit stands
Waiting the last fulfilment.
Around thy soul my thoughts are as garlands
Or as an endless rosary.
Be perfect! lest my psalm should falter
And my hands part from the unriveted faith
With Amen scarcely sighed.
1917
Bodies heaving like waves,
Sighing through the dishevelled tresses of foam,
The massive whiteness of limbs flung out of shadow,
Splashed with ecstasial moonlight,
Sculptured voluptuously in ephemeral marbles.
Lingering touch of fingers,
Cooler than the curving ringlets of spray
Fluting the new-blown petals of a shell,
And kisses murmuring as the lips of darkness
Against the ivory forehead of the moon.
1919
Your face to me is like a beautiful city
Dreaming forever by the rough wild sea,
And I the ship upon a wilderness of waves
Heavily laden with memories....
I roam over all the earth
Making rhymes of you, and singing songs,
Because your face will never let me rest,
Because I can not frame it in a star
Surrounded with my cloudy reveries,
Because I may not pluck it like a flower
To breathe the incense of its perfumed soul—
Your face is like the carved hilt of a sword
Whose sheath is in my breast!
1918
Oh! why will you not let me love you
Well enough?
You have plucked my blossoms,
Gathered the leaves
And revived them with water;
But all the tortuous roots
Delving for your spirit
In subterranean passions
With a blind unresting desire,
Have you felt them, have you known?
In the blackest night of sleep
Though I be sunk a thousand fathoms
In the cerulean depths of slow oblivion,
My soul still swims toward you
Against the envious pressure of the tide....
You who are so tired, so filled with sleep
That you would brush a rose-leaf from your cheek
Lest its heaviness should stir your rest,
How can you shoulder the weight of my great burden
That is too vast for me to bear alone?
I tell you
Love is no little thing,
No moth-winged Cupid painted on the air,
No thin flute music petaling the silence
As leaves that flutter from a cherry tree.
It is the thought that broods upon its death,
The dread of mountains looking to the storm
Ere shrieks of lightning cleave their breasts in twain.
It is the fire that pillars up the stars
To mix its flame with their eternal gold.
Oh, listen to me!
You shall hear my message sung from sphere to sphere
As star-dust pouring a path through Heaven.
You shall know me
In the pensive shadows of trees,
In the luminary phantoms
Reflected in the stillness of a lake;
In the arrows of sunlight shot through meshing leaves
And quivering in the moss;
In the abandoned play of breakers
Showering their crystals to the moon;
In the folly of rainbow dolphins.
I only ask of you
To be the diver in my deepest pool,
To bring from out its blue obscurity
The things my life has moulded unaware,
Treasures my passion and my hunger fashioned
In loneliness of prayer unlit by life,
Created out of nothing save myself
Within the blind fast silence of the soul.
1918
My devotion kneels to you,
Holding a candle to illumine your face.
My loneliness is your shadow
Along the solitary roads.
My passion is a book between your hands
Whose leaves are as the leaves of violets,
A volume of pressed flowers
Scenting your fingers though you read it not.
And my white faith
Is a silken surplice clothing you in peace.
1919
[ISLANDS]
As launched upon the loneliness of time
We float and dream of what the waves conceal,
Each like a thought that rolls with rapid zeal
Succeeded by a breaker of fierce crime,
Or curling passion, or a rhythm of rhyme,
Or indolent ripple sighing at the keel—
Beyond us, though our fretted longings reel,
The lulled horizon sleeps, the still hours climb—
So toss our weary ships, till from afar
Our visioned island rises suddenly,
Where palaces like cloudy colours are,
With scented gardens terraced to the sea,
The silver steps to our appointed star
Where gleam the spires that pierce eternity.
1917
Many things I'd find to charm you,
Books and scarves and silken socks,
All the seven rainbow colours
Black and white with 'broidered clocks.
Then a stick of polished whalebone
And a coat of tawny fur,
And a row of gleaming bottles
Filled with rose-water and myrrh.
Rarest brandy of the 'fifties,
Old liqueurs in leather kegs,
Golden Sauterne, copper sherry
And a nest of plover's eggs.
Toys of tortoise-shell and jasper,
Little boxes cut in jade;
Handkerchiefs of finest cambric,
Damask cloths and dim brocade.
Six musicians of the Magyar,
Madness making harmony;
And a bed austere and narrow
With a quilt from Barbary.
You shall have a bath of amber,
A Venetian looking-glass,
And a crimson-chested parrot
On a lawn of terraced grass.
Then a small Tanagra statue
Found anew in ruins old,
Or an azure plate from Persia,
Or my hair in plaits of gold;
Or my scalp that like an Indian
You shall carry for a purse,
Or my spilt blood in a goblet ...
Or a volume of my verse.
1916
[LAMPLIGHT AND STARLIGHT]
[LAMP-POSTS]
The eternal flame of laughter and desire
Breaks the long darkness with a little glance,
Till all the gloom is radiant in a dance
Of yellow hopefulness, reflecting fire
That dreams from Heaven's lamps as we aspire
Sadly toward their jubilance—Romance
Of faery glitter in the streets of chance—
Those beacon-trees that blossom from the mire
Within the fog of our despairing gloom;
In the glum alleys, down the haunted night
Through tunnelling of subterranean doom,
Among the grovelling shadows, kingly bright,
They bear their coronets of golden bloom
To front our anguish with their brave delight.
1917
[LONDON]
Richer than fields of corn that fire in summer,
Strange as the moon on forest rising sudden,
More fearful and beloved than peace or silence,
Heart with my heart at pace in throbbing fever,
Calling towards me with a voice incessant.
Thou that begot me: From whose streets triumphant
I, coloured fiercely with thy passion, wakened!
I sucked red wine, not milk, from thy gaunt bosom,
My senses in thy fearfulness found beauty,
And honey in thine oaths and lamentations.
I played about thy feet that know not resting
And bathed me in the sweat of thine endeavour.
When on thy gala-nights the thronged lamps glitter,
Sparkle like sequins, and the plumes of shadow
With curling smoke, with rain and rippling gutter
Are tossed in feathered gaiety about thee—
Thick grow the crowded streets in coloured pageant,
Kaleidoscope of people, circling, crossing,
Till the brain frenzies to a thousand patterns,
While the ears buzz with noises of their laughter;
Shouts hoarse and coarse and shrill in one great roaring,
As of the angry ocean in her travail ...
They haunt me in the tranquil of the forest,
Those faces pain has marked and toil has mangled;
Pangs greater than the lonely Crucifixion
Here crucified each day with lust and hunger,
Hung up unlovely in the open market;
Made gay with paper garlands, covered over
With tinsel loincloth, painted like a puppet,
Lest the elect in passing should be startled,
Lest they should smear the blameless brow of honour!
With bloody shoes and spinning-wheels of traffic
Vermilion-splashed, the city rushes onward,
And thorns of death and lust and fruitless labour
Lie underneath the feet forever dancing.
Gay tunes are rasped upon a weary fiddle,
Or voice of moaning in the tinkling cymbal,
Offspring of humour from disaster's bowels.
I love the bitter and the rude, the drunken,
The tramps and thieves that skulk among the shadows;
The faces red as fire and dead as ashes,
A million faces scattered like confetti,
All changing, whirling, trodden into nothing.
There Beauty wanders strange, an-hungered, weary,
Throned on a dust-heap, or triumphant reeling
In mad disorder from the couch of chaos.
O ragged Beauty, through the mournful houses,
How frail the feet that lead the dawn towards us,
Blushed in the sunrise with a great ambition,
Spent in the evening like a rose of fever,
Fainting before us paler than a lily.
While here each day self-satisfied and placid
Moves opulent among the groves of summer;
The larks delight, the laughter of the thrushes,
The kindly peasants in their ruddy orchard,
Please for a while until the spirit sickens
And turns her panting to her ancient lover.
Oh, well I know the quickening of the pulses,
Joy bursting through disgust as field and pasture
Grow fewer, paler, till the eager houses
Like hungry animals eat up the spaces
And close upon the miles that God created,
With triumph of man's greed. As warriors listening
To the far rhythm in the drums of battle,
As seamen hear the mighty tide-wave bursting,
I feel the scamper of your feet approaching
And your great starving arms and strangling fingers
That drag me back to my perverted Heaven!
1914
Slowly the pale feet of morning
Tread out the ashes of midnight still burning with feverous lamplight,
Colourless, cold, as the rainclad
Sleep-druggèd river that carries the wreckage of cities out sea-ward.
Slowly the fingers of dawn-light
Snuff out the candles that yearned to those Gods of delirium,
Sleep-huge as shadows grimacing
From niches made black with the smoke of a fire-spangled passion.
Smoothly the wild hair of darkness
Is plaited for rest, and the faces of visions are covered with sleep veils.
Patiently, Morning, the priestess
Drones out a psalm for the souls that we damned in the blackness,
Gashed with the daggers of street-lights,
Crushing the poisonous berries of sinister kisses,—
Morning with healing and kindness
Folds up the dresses dishevelled with terror and laughter,
Sweeps up the rags of our shadows
That danced in a red smoke of dreams on the walls of oblivion.
1919
What have I to do with them,
The red athletes in their snow-white clothes?
They are sun lovers and moon haters,
Toiling or playing in the fields
Whereon no shadows lie,
Pensively, whispering together—
They are space lovers and haters of the stars,
Soundly they sleep by night nor ever see
The tiaraed brows of darkness.
I weary of their striving upward and onward,
Away from the green hush of twilight,
Where silence drips from the trees,
Away from the solemn avenues
Where the ghosts blow by
Along with a drift of leaves.
Let us linger awhile
Far away from the frets and wars of the world,
From the strong men
With their strident hymning voices and marching feet—
Let us walk alone
For the love of our own shadows
Stretching their length on lawns of powdered silver,
With behind us the sky's grey curtain
Drawn backward from the moon....
Let us sit by the fireside
And hear the wind's shrill orchestras,
Fiddle and fife and flute,
And omened bagpipe screaming....
Let us lie abed and dream
Through the long summer's morning
Of trivial things, and beautiful....
Let us dance with Folly when midnight knocks on his golden gong;
Let us run through pools of wine
And be splashed with purple.
Let us, being sick, make merry,
And rejoice when we are weary.
Let us sit by our grave as at a banquet,
Drinking to Death.
What have we to do with them,
Sons of the sun and the soil,
Daughters of the hearth and the field?
They that remake the world
Melting our idols for silver,
Our goblets for gold;
Tearing our temples down
To build their red brick villages.
The doomed world faints into mist,
World of our indolence and dreams,
And the faces and bodies we love
Sink through oblivion, and are seen
Dimly, as divers through the waters.
Old worlds and new worlds!
Let us slip between them,
And float on the stream that floweth nowhither—
Our red ambitions burn
To a blue smoke of forgetting;
Our moonshine faints on the tide that goeth out,
As the sun leers to the tide that cometh in.
1918
Among the crumbling arches of decay
Where all around the red new buildings crept,
Where huge machines had rolled the past away,
And the dead princes lay accursed and slept;
Among the ruins I beheld a man
Who heeded not the engines as they neared,
Painting dead carnivals upon a fan,
He smiled and trifled with his pointed beard.
And here and there were flung a mess of things,
Tokens and fripperies and faded dresses,
Kept from the courtships of a thousand kings,
Tossed roses for the tossing of caresses.
A carven sabre hung upon the wall,
A toy thing, with no rust of blood upon it,
A tray of glasses, an embroidered shawl,
A muff, a bottle and a feathered bonnet.
And mirrors flashed their argent memories
Out of the shadows where they laughed and gleamed,
While ghostly faces of past vanities
Come back to dream there where they once had dreamed.
The stranger turned his head and bowed to me
And waved me vaguely to a gilded chair.
I spoke: "You are a connoisseur, I see,
You really have a fine collection there."
He bowed to me again, and in his hand
Dangled a string of gems, they caught my eye
With beckoning lights—I could not understand—
His fingers seemed to touch them like a sigh
So much he loved their frail inconsequence.
I spoke of progress conquering decay,
And tired the stillness with my common sense
Loud-spoken in the jargon of the day.
But I have never met so queer a man,
"I better love my memories," he said,
"Look at those painted figures on the fan,
How delicate and wistful are the dead."
1917
As a nun's face from her black draperies
So full of mystery the moon looks down.
She dreams of a passion that shall outlive time,
Of Beauty's face beheld unveiled and close,
Of God Who blows the worlds like bubbles up,
Smiling away, to watch them swell and die.
She dreams of music played among the stars
When the slow tongues of silence are unloosed.
Above the city glittering giddily,
Above the jostling heads of man she moves,
Strange as a dreamer walking in her sleep.
1912
The sun is lord of life and colour,
Blood of the rose and hyacinth,
Hair of the sea and forests,
Crown of the cornfields,
Body of the hills.
The moon is the harlot of Death,
Slaughterer of the Sun,
Priestess and poisoner she goes
With all her silver flock of wandering souls,
Her chant of wailing waters,
The bed of shimmering dust from which she comes
Bound all around with bandages of mist....
The living are as blossoms and fruit on the tree,
The dead are as lilies and wind on the marshes;
The living are as cherries that bow to the morning
Beckoning to the loitering stranger,
The wind, to sing them his eerie ballads.
The dead are as frozen skeleton branches
Whereon the stillness perches like an owl....
The dead are as snows on the cherry orchard.
1918