THE morning drums upon the window-pane,
The evening drums upon the window-pane,
I wait and wait and fumble in my brain....
All night I’ve lain with soul that could not rest.
At dusk strange hands were tearing at my heart
In a prim polar silence.
The stags and does may frolic in the woods
And leap beyond the stars, for aught I care,
Beyond those furbished clots of frigid light,
Abstract and sad detached identities,
Where they may anguish, fossilize or freeze.
All night I’ve lain upon the charming rack
You manufactured: I shall not despair,
Or coax a courteous isolated tear.
But I shall hear my agonizing laughter
Echoing far from floor to trembling rafter
In brittle carillons like metal bells,
And hear my bleached emaciated yells
Burgeon in petalled peals, flamboyant, bright
As merry moons in petticoats of white
To hide their cancer and their leprosy.
Then: “Patience, rebel, calm!” the darkness said,
“You’ll never choke time’s throat of beaten lead.”
I did not heed.... I knew that my heart bled.
Near the pellucid lake—ah God, there stirred
No animalculus, and an absurd
Decorous silence humped its back and purred.
On the Theme of Ophelia’s Madness
“AND will he not come again?”
Ophelia wanders out into the rain
That makes soft music on her yellow hair.
“O, shall I then surrender to despair?”
In vain she begs the strutting chanticleer
And Tullia’s intellectual marmosyte,
King Oberon a-lying on his bier
And Leda’s downy swan.
Throughout the night
She listens to the noise of dead men’s bones,
Sad subterranean murmurs drowned in sea-weed,
Slow-drifting down jade silences....
—She hopes to screw some answer from their groans!
But there’s a seal upon their lipless mouths.
“By all the moons that in the peacock’s tail
Rival the heaven’s moon,
I conjure a reply; has any seen
My lover’s sandal-shoon?
He wears a fluted cockle-hat,
A staff of briar-wood,
His hair’s coiled thick in a flaxen mat,
And like a river in flood
The crisp locks tumble on his poll.”
She cried but there came no answer at all
Save, God ha’ mercy on his soul!
“By molewarp’s brain and by pismire’s gall,
Will he whom I love return again?”
The pale grey rain
For pity’s sake,
Breathed her asleep in a lullaby,
Till slothful Charon in his barge rowed by
And ferried her gently over the Stygian lake.