6.
The night is shrewd with storm and sleet;
Each loose-warped casement raps or groans;
I hear the wailing woodland beat
The tempest with long blatant moans,
Like one who fears defeat.
And sitting here beyond the storm,
Alone within the lonely house,
It seems of Sleep the Fairy charm
Weaves incantations; even the mouse
That scratched has come to harm.
And in this grave light, stolen o'er
Familiar objects, grown severe,
I 'm strange—as, opening a door,
One finds one's dead self standing near,
One knew not dead before.
The old stair rings with growling gusts;
Each hearth's flue gasps a gorgon throat
That snores and sleeps; the spectral dusts,
Which yonder Shawnee war-gear coat,
Whose quiver hangs and rusts,
Are shaken; till I feel that he,
Who wore it in the wild war-dance,
And died in it, fills shadowy
Its wampumed skins; its plume, perchance,
Shakes, scowling eyes at me.
And so the Swedenborge I toss
Aside, contented with the dark
That takes me. O'er the fire-light cross;
Pass where the andirons spit and spark,
And ponder o'er her loss.
Or from the flaw-splashed window yearn
Out toward the waste, where sway and dip
Dank, dark December boughs, where burn
Some late last leaves, that icy drip
No matter where you turn.
Where sodden soil, you scarce have trod,
Fills oozy footprints; and the night
So ugly that it mocks at God,
Creating monsters which the sight
Fancies, unseen, abroad.
The months I count: how long it seems
Since that bland summer when with her,
There on her porch, in rainy gleams
We watched the mellow lightning stir
In rain-clouds gray as dreams!
When all the west a torn gold sheet—
Swift openings of some Titan's forge—
Laid bald with storm; in quivering heat
Pitched precipice and nightmare gorge,
Where thunder torrents beat.
And strong the wind was as again
Storm lit the instant earth; and how
The wood sprang out one virent stain;
We read no more—lost is it now!—
In Romance of a Reign;
A tale of nowhere; then that we
Were reading till we heard the plunge
Of distant thunder sullenly,
And left to mark long lightnings lunge
Convulsions fiery.
What worlds love wrought us, dreaming there,
Of sorcery and necromance!
With spirits lustrous of the air,
A land like one great pearl, a trance
Of floods and forests fair.
Where white-faced flowers sang and thought;
Where fragrant birds flew, brilliant-blown,
In winging odors; feather-fraught
With light, where breathing colors shone,
On throbbing music brought.
Or built us some snug country home
Among the hills; with terraces
Vine-hung and orchared o'er the foam
Of the Ohio, far one sees
Wind crimson in the gloam.
And this! and this!—alone! alone!
To hear the sweep of winter rain,
The missiled sleet's sharp arrows blown;
Dark shadow on the freezing pane,
And on my heart a moan!
DAYS AND DREAMS.
He dreamed of hills so deep with woods
Storm-barriers on the summer sky
Are not more dark, where plunged loud floods
Down rocks of sullen dye.
Flat ways were his where sparsely grew
Gnarled, iron-colored oaks, with rifts,
Between dead boughs, of Eden-blue:
Ways where the speedwell lifts
Its shy appeal, and spreading far—
The gold, the fallen gold of dawn
Staining each blossom's balanced star—
Hollows of cowslips wan.
Where 'round the feet the lady-smock
And pearl-pale lady-slipper creep;
White butterflies upon them rock
Or seal-brown suck and sleep.
At eve the west shoots crooked fire
Athwart a half-moon leaning low;
While one white, arrowy star throbs higher
In curdled honey-glow.
Was it some elfin euphrasy
That purged his spirit so that there
Blue harebells, by those ways that be,
Seemed summoning to prayer?
For all the death within him prays;
Not he—his higher self, whose love
Fire-filled the flesh. Its light still stays
Touched by the soul above.
They found him dead his songs beside,
Six stairs above the din and dust
Of life: and that for which he died
Denied him even a crust.
DEITY.
No personal; a God divinely crowned
With gold and raised upon a golden throne
Deep in a golden glory, whence he nods
Man this or that—and little more than man!
And shalt thou see Him individual?
Not till the freed intelligence hath sought
Ten hundred hundred years to rise and love,
Piercing the singing cycles under God,—
Their iridescent evolutions orbed
In wild prismatic splendors,—shall it see—
Through God-propinquity become a god—
See, lightening out of spheric harmonies,
Resplendencies of empyrean light,
Prisms and facets of ten million beams
Starring a crystal of berainbowed rays,
And in this—eyes of burning sapphire, eyes
Deep as the music of the beautiful;
And o'er the eyes, limpid hierarchal brows,
As they were lilies of seraphic fire;
Lips underneath, of trembling ruby—lips
Whose tongue's a chord, and every sound a song:
Cherubic faces of intensity
In multiplying myriads to a word
Forming the unit—God; Supremity
Creative and ubiquitous.
From this
Thy intellect, detached, expelled and breathed
Exaltant into flesh endowed with soul,
One sparkle of the Essence clothed with clay.—
O high development! devolvings up
From matter to unmattered potencies,
Up to the source and fountain of all mind,
Beauty and truth, inviolable Love,
And so resumed and reabsorbed in God,
One more expression of eternity!
SELF.
A Sufi debauchee of dreams
Spake this:—From Sodomite to Peri
Earth tablets us; we live and are
Man's own long commentary.
Is one begat in Bassora,
One lies in Damietta dying—
The plausibilities of God
All possibles o'erlying.
But burns the lust within the flesh?—
Hell's but a homily to Heaven,—
Put then the individual first,
And of thyself be shriven.
Neither in adamant nor brass
The scrutinizing eye records it;
The arm is rooted in the heart,
The heart that rules and lords it.
Be that it is and thou art all;
And what thou art so thou hast written
Thee of the lutanists of Love,
Or of the torture-smitten.
SELF AND SOUL.
It came to me in my sleep,
And I rose from my sleep and went
Out in the night to weep,
Over the bristling bent.
With my soul, it seemed, I stood
Alone in a moaning wood.
And my soul said, gazing at me,
"Shall I show you another land
Than other this flesh can see?"
And took into hers my hand.—
We passed from the wood to a heath
As starved as the ribs of Death.
Three skeleton trees we pass,
Bare bones on an iron moor,
Where every leaf and the grass
Was a thorn and a thistle hoar.
And my soul said, looking on me,
"The past of your life you see."
And a swine-herd passed with his swine,
Deformed; and I heard him growl;
Two eyes of a sottish shine
Leered under two brows as foul.
And my soul said, "This is the lust
That soils my limbs with the dust."
And a goose wife hobbled by
On a crutch, with the devil's geese;
A-mumbling how life is a lie,
And cursing my soul without cease.
And my soul said, "This is desire;
The meaning of life is higher."
And we came to a garden, close
To a hollow of graves and tombs;
A garden as red as a rose
Hung over of obscene glooms;
The heart of each rose was a spark
That smouldered or splintered the dark.
And I was aware of a girl
With a wild-rose face, who came
With a mouth like a shell's split pearl,
Rose-clad in a robe of flame;
And she plucked the roses and gave,
And my flesh was her veriest slave.
She vanished. My lips would have kissed
The flowers she gave me with sighs,
But they writhed in my hands and hissed,
In their hearts were a serpent's eyes.
And my soul said, "Pleasure is she;
The joys of the flesh you see."
And I bowed with a heart too weary,
That longed for rest, for sleep;
And my eyes were heavy and teary,
And yearned for a way to weep.
And my soul smiled, "This may be!
Will you know me and follow me?"
THE DREAM OF DREAD.
I have lain for an hour or twain
Awake, and the tempest is beating
On the roof, and the sleet on the pane,
And the winds are three enemies meeting;
And I listen and hear it again,
My name, in the silence, repeating.
Then dumbness of death that must slay,
Till the midnight is burst like a bubble;
And out of the darkness a ray—
'T is she! the all beautiful double;
With a face like the breaking of day,
Eyes dark with the magic of trouble.
I move not; she lies with her lips
At mine; and I feel she is drawing
My life from my heart to their tips,
My heart where the horror is gnawing;
My life in a thousand slow sips,
My flesh with her sorcery awing.
She binds me with merciless eyes;
She drinks of my blood, and I hear it
Drain up with a shudder and rise
To the lips, like the serpent's, that steer it
And she lies and she laughs as she lies,
Saying, "Lo, thy affinitized spirit!"
Then I hear—as if torturing swords
Had shivered and torments had grated
Hoarse iron deep under; and words
As of sins that howled out and awaited
A fiend who lashed into their hords,
And a demon who lacerated.
And I shriek and lie clammy and stark,
As the curse of a devil mounts higher,
Up—out of damnation and dark,
Up—a hobble of hoofs that is dire;
I feel that his mouth is a spark,
His features, of filth and of fire.
"To thy body's corruption, thy grave!
Thy hell! from which thou hast stolen!"
And a blackness rolls down like a wave
With a clamor of tongues that are swollen—
And I feel that my flesh is the slave
Of a—vampire, diakka, eidolon?
DEATH IN LIFE.
Within my veins it beats
And burns within my brain;
For when the year is sad and sear
I dream the dream again.
Ah! over young am I
God knows! yet in this sleep
More pain and woe than women know
I know, and doubly deep!...
Seven towers of shaggy rock
Rise red to ragged skies,
Built in a marsh that, black and harsh,
To dead horizons lies.
Eternal sunset pours,
Around its warlock towers,
A glowing urn where garnets burn
With fire-dripping flowers.
O'er bat-like turrets high,
Stretched in a scarlet line,
The crimson cranes through rosy rains
Drop like a ruby wine.
Once in the banquet-hall
These scarlet storks are heard:—
I sit at board with men o' th' sword
And knights of noble word;
Cased all in silver mail;
But he, I love and fear,
In glittering gold beside me bold
Sits like a lover near.
Wild music echoes in
The hollow towers there;
Behind bright bars o' his visor, stars
Beam in his eyes and glare.
Wild music oozes from
Arched ceilings, caked with white
Groined pearl; and floors like mythic shores
That sing to seas of light.
Wild music and a feast,
And one's belovèd near
In burning mail—why am I pale,
So pale with grief and fear?
Red heavens and slaughter-red
The marsh to west and east;
Seven slits of sky, seven casements high,
Flare on the blood-red feast.
Our torches tall are these,
Our revel torches seven,
That spill from gold soft splendors old—
The hour of night—eleven.
No word. The sparkle aches
In cups of diamond-spar,
That prism the light of ruddy white
In royal wines of war.
No word. Rich plate that rays,
Splashes of splitting fires,
Off beryl brims; while sobs and swims
Enchantment of lost lyres.
I lean to him I love,
And in the silence say:
"Would thy dear grace reveal thy face,
If love should crave and pray?"
Grave Silence, like a king,
At that strange feast is set;
Grave Silence still as the soul's will,
That rules the reason yet.
But when I speak, behold!
The charm is snapped, for low
Speaks out the mask o' his golden casque,
"At midnight be it so!"
And Silence waits severe,
Till one sonorous tower,
Owl-swarmed, that looms in glaring glooms,
Sounds slow the midnight hour.
Three strokes; the knights arise,
The palsy from them flung,
To meward mock like some hoarse rock
When wrecking waves give tongue.
Six strokes; and wailing out
The music hoots away;
The fiery glimmer of eve dies dimmer,
The red grows ghostly gray.
Nine strokes; and dropping mould
The crumbling hall is lead;
The plate is rust, the feast is dust,
The banqueters are dead.
Twelve strokes pound out and roll;
The huge walls writhe and shake
O'er hissing things with taloned wings—
Christ Jesus, let me wake!
Then rattling in the night
His iron visor slips—
In rotting mail a death's-head pale
Kisses my loathing lips.
Two hell-fierce lusts its eyes,
Sharp-pointed like a knife,
That flaming seem to say, "No dream!
No dream! the truth of Life!"