Candles shriek up the scale,
Creaking down in a wail.
Hear how their protests fail!
Only cold, snakish flutes
Sound like the growing fruits
Out of slow hidden roots....
Strange eyes a moment stare,
Fruit-like and moon-like glare,
From the bright shutters where
Hail, falling in the lean
Street of Hell, sweeps it clean.
Tang the sharp mandoline!
FALSETTO SONG
WHEN I was young, in ages past,
My soul had cast
Man’s foolish shape,
And like a black and hairy ape—
My shadow, he
Now mimics me.
Follows slinking in my shade
Through the corridors of life
(Stifling ’twixt the walls I made
With the mud and murderous knife),
Takes the pulse of my black heart,
Never once controls my will,
Apes me selling in the mart
Song-birds hate did kill.
EVENTAIL
LOVELY Semiramis
Closes her slanting eyes:
Dead is she long ago.
From her fan, sliding slow,
Parrot-bright fire’s feathers,
Gilded as June weathers,
Plumes bright and shrill as grass
Twinkle down; as they pass
Through the green glooms in Hell
Fruits with a tuneful smell,
Grapes like an emerald rain,
Where the full moon has lain,
Greengages bright as grass,
Melons as cold as glass,
Piled on each gilded booth,
Feel their cheeks growing smooth.
Apes in plumed head-dresses
Whence the bright heat hisses,—
Nubian faces, sly
Pursing mouth, slanting eye,
Feel the Arabian
Winds floating from the fan:
Salesmen with gilded face
Paler grow, nod apace;
“Oh, the fan’s blowing
Cold winds ... It is snowing!”