ALBERT MOCKEL.
1866—.
Slender, and so virginal, but why not somewhat languid?—her casque of golden hair is starred sometimes with mellow sparks, and mellow is her mauve silk dress soft in its folds.
She is all music, in the music of her movements bathed, they also soft with pensive grace, and very slow with suppleness that undulatingly unrolls.
An evening party. She has danced, she dances still. Men dark and fair have come and led her off, under the chandeliers in this insipid music,—insipid, and amusing her. Much has she danced (O all this light!) and feels a little weary, weary. Yes, several waltzes; of her partners one could talk, or nearly could;—but he is ugly, and his fish eyes middle-class. The other, on her programme next, is far more handsome, surely: his keen eyes have metallic glints, his hair is glossy black; he is Italian, is he not, or else from Hungary?
Ah! here he comes.
Two heads incline, she takes an arm: they waltz.
This waltz, it rolls with a voluptuous rhythm, in harmony with the rhythm of the Girl, like convoluted masses, musically vaporous and very heavy, volutas without end and curve on curve. They dance, their curves leave traces of caresses in the air, their undulations are a most lascivious music. She? she is very tired, she has no strength as on her cavalier she leans! her thought is vague, so vague along the twining curves, vague in volutas without end, and with the contours of their curves. These curves are turning round lasciviously; she thinks no more, she turns, she turns, she undulates in air and in the music's kisses, tickled by something drunken, by this air which brushes her, this ball:—she shivers.
Now nothing more, her eyes see nothing; things that turn, vague things, volutas vague without an end, and curves that drag her on in velvet rhythms. But all the things around her turn too vaguely, too vaguely cycles turn barbaric, mad; all of it turning, turning; and if she look again she will be sure to fall!...
The waltz continues and lasciviously rolls, rolls in the dizziness of turning things, mad cycles, and all this softness, curves that languish fit to swoon! Feverishly and to flee the crazy dizziness of all these vague and circumambient things, as if to save her life she keeps her look on him.—He plunges his deep down into the great vague eyes before him, until he sets them shuddering ... This man, his eyes are shining; strangely beautiful, they shine with gleams fantastic, and from their fluid comes perverted charm, burning and dominating, almost animal, and with a glaucous glint that troubles her ...
This well-nigh bestial look upon a somewhat pensive, handsome face.... And it is she, she ... Ashamed, in spite of all her dizziness, she takes away her eyes from him who seeks to conquer her. But all is turning, all these things, these vague things turning, turning O too much! she shuts her eyes to see them not, she could not open them again, the rhythms bear her onward crossing one another, brushing some lascivious curve again, the vagueness, O such vagueness of the crazy cycles and lascivious curves that ravish her. Delicate titillation like a feather's sudden touch electrifies her, half-fainting and surrendering she floats like flotsam on his arm; this arm, that like a very soft and powerful billow bears and cradles her; sweetly, irresistibly caresses her, bearing her onward, circling her with a voluptuous embrace, and ... no, no! his eyes through her closed lids she feels them, and their glaucous flame that pierces, conquers her. This glaucous look, this virile and determined look, it weighs upon her, haunting the soft eddyings of the waltz,—and is not this a breath that brushes her, the stifled warmth of a desiring breath, man's breath on her neck....
But the waltz bears her on in whirling, vague, voluptuousness.
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.