Bacchus is gone!
And with him dancing Folly—
Bacchus is dead—is dead—
Oh, Melancholy!
No! No! He is not dead; he has but fled
To kindlier lands he knew in days before
Men snatched the purple roses from his head.
He does but wanton by some liberal shore—
Sun kissed—
And wreathed with vine leaves as of old,
With spotted beasts and maidens by his car,
And sound of timbrels like a story told
Of youth and love and blood and wine and war.
TIGER LILIES.
They make me think of battlefields I saw
Where butterflies with wings of sulphurous gold
Crawled on gray faces death had made obscene
That stared with stolid dolls' eyes from the mold.
They make me think of pools of wimpled slime,
Where lizards bask upon the quaking crust,
And crumbling walls where hairy spiders weave
And snakes lie coupling in the summer dust.
I think it must have been along the Nile
That first these speckled membranes burst the pod,
Before the boy-flat breasts of some half-cat
Half-man and beryl-eyed Egyptian god.
Or first they grew about forgotten tombs
The apes inherit in hot jungles where
Like xanthic suns through aquid shade of leaves
A spotted leopard's dilate pupils stare.
These were the mottled blossoms of Gomorrah,
Wreathed on beast-gods by priestly Sodomites,
By Baal fires when the talking timbrel's sound
Fell from Astarte's groves on full moon nights.
They suck a yellow venom from the sun
And mid their reedy stocks there comes and goes
The forked, black lightning of a serpent's tongue
That hisses as his slippery body flows.
Such lilies bloom beside the gates of hell
And poison honey festers in their pods,
Olid as tales of lust told long ago
About the wanton mother of the gods.
And I would plant them by the lichened tomb
Of that veiled queen who died of leprosy
With two red princes smothered in her womb;
Their roots would feed on her in secrecy.
The First: Youth.
Youth is a vale afire with hollyhocks,
Robbed by those greedy publicans the bees,
Where cuckoos call like fairy story clocks
And blue-jays holla in the apple trees.
No thunderheads come up with black despair
To dim its arching orchard's leafy sheen,
But clouds like ivory towers pile in air
And gothic woods stand, cloistered, cool and green.