“Look on the lives that you have made and marred,
Filing gray phantoms in a hapless train:
The stronger finds your heaven; the weaker finds
An endless pain.
“O God, within the hollow of whose hand
A million worlds are tossed to win or lose,
You choose the stronger for salvation, but
The damned I choose.
“I take my stand upon the weaker side,
I grasp the sinner’s hand, I share his fate;
The hell of those who failed, I choose, or those
Who win too late.”
God smiled: across the inky ether way,
A flash that lighted worlds supernal fell.
“It is the damned you look upon,” God said:
“The earth is hell.”
DEATH-IN-LIFE
When the blasts beat loud and the tempests shriek,
And the winds are smote as the chords of a lyre,
I curtain the cold where the corners leak,
Tossing the logs till the flames leap higher,
As I sit on the hearth while the rafters creak,
Feeding the fangs of the hungry fire.
(Hark! ’tis a child on the howling plain!
Nay, the fir-tree’s tap on the window pane.)
Do you hear her knock? Are her feet on the stones?
She may call in vain, for the storm is loud,
And her speech is the rattle of rigid bones.
Perchance she is lost where the thickets crowd;
It is far from the church where a vault she owns,
And for cover she has but a crumbling shroud.
(’Tis a mad soul clutched by a demon—hist!
Nay, nay, but the wail of the wind, I wist.)
She enters the door with a blast of cold—
She enters to me and to my embrace;
Her fingers are freed from their fleshly fold,
The veil is rent from her ashen face.
To her sheet there lingers a scent of mould,
Where the wily worms have woven a trace.
(Hark! is it Love on the writhing rack!
Nay, nay, but the wolves on a shepherd’s track.)
She has taken her seat at my board of pine,
We have poured the water and broken the bread,
I have pledged her health in the blood-red wine,
She has bowed to me with her spectral head.
I am hers forever, as she is mine,
I shall lie with her in her nuptial bed.
(Hark! ’tis a stroke on a coffin nail!
Nay, the beat of your heart as the pulses fail!)
From her fleshless lips I have felt her kiss
(The room is small, but the world is wide).
What matter the honours that I shall miss,
When I find her lying against my side?
From the reefs of Fate God has spared me this—
The love that is long and the breast of a bride.
(For bone of my bone I have chosen Death!
“Nay, nay—ah, love, I am Life,” she saith.)