DUCKWORTH
3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON, W.C.
First published in 1925
All rights reserved
Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London
CONTENTS
Lament for Adonis
NOW fogs enfold the sea
And berries fall from eaves,
The cat’s eyes glitter green into the dark.
The sloping hills of myrrh,
The trees with tender anise overweighed,
The pointed flag-leaves stir
Only to weep again,
Only to sob and mourn Adonis dead.
Throughout this dolorous night of cloudy jade
Even the hornless dragon of the sea,
The green and golden sequined basilisk,
The water-scorpion and the python-king
Like sad eclipses trail about the land.
The crane, the ibis and the mango-bird,
The jungle-fowl, the heron and the roc,
The badger and three-footed tortoise join
In pouring out their eyes.
O Cypris violet-stoled, O wrapped in purple woof
Arise and beat your azure-veined breasts!
Small jewelled nipples, bleed!
For I have seen you make that curved mouth
A bed of balsam, bed of crisp lush flowers,
Whose poor crushed frozen lips compactly closed
Lie, flakes of ice, where once were flakes of fire,
Their loveliness a thing of agony.
The moon has slanted off, and querulous ghosts
Hover along the brink of treacherous voids
And leap into this night of blinded eyes
(Blind now to pleasure’s lapping ecstasies);
This peacock-throated night whose stifling cries
Shudder and crack: ’tis Misery who calls
“Woe” to the black solemnities of sky
For loveliest Adonis—he is dead.
Low on the hills he lies, the lovely bleeding one,
His throat aflash with faint stunned strands of light.
Low on the hills he lies and breathes his life away
And from his thigh of milk-white agate gashed,
Slit by the cruel tusk,
The ruby blood drips down his skin of snow.
Beneath his brows stars set in crystal deep
(Once memories, hungers glinted in their pools),
Are glazed dim, opaque and lustreless,
The blue orbs burn no more beneath translucent lids.
His locks are wet with the clear drops of night,
The rose has fled his lip: the very kiss hangs dead,
The kiss that Cypris never will forego.
And when the bitter white wind breaks the morn,
His gathered hounds bay gloom about his corpse,
The green-haired Nereids of the marsh make moan,
Frail flowers dabble pollened cheeks with tears,
From vavicel to calyx petals weep....
Long spiral tufts of drooping galingale,
The shadowy deer-grass and the swallow-wort
Sob through their bat’s wing tissues tremulous,
The poplars weeping amber in the vales,
The orchises and sandal-trees, lament.