On down the weltering world we sped;
Across the lonely, drifting noon;
Along the wreathëd tides we fled
Beneath the memoried moon.
Sad love pursued where sorrow led;
And beauty, waiting to be dead,
Kissed under the dead moon.
Love, speechless, yearned in hopeless eyes;
And hearts that hungered craved in vain.
Dumb pity heard sad pity's sighs;
And grief soothed grief again.
Fond smile to smile sent faint replies,
And faded back to pain.
Entangled in the toils of fate,
Two stood at Eden's open gate—
Banned, in a world found desolate ...
And love made league with hate ...
All time's long woe since man's wet eyes
Peered toward a promised paradise
Pressed home,—the weight of smothered cries,
Dead dreams, and hopeless pain
Of souls in silence slain.
We saw the loathsome waste of death;
Sad soul at war with sense;
And suffering doomed to lingering breath;
And slandered innocence;
And beauty ravished at the bloom;
Saw strength flung prostrate; fall
The brave, life-worsted from the womb;
White truth made criminal:
Impotent, passionate, counting all,
We kissed——across a tomb ...
The lustrous clouds trailed proudly by:
And through a rift of dazzling sky
I cursed God with a dreary cry ...
The silence of the starry night;
The silver of the moonlit sea;
And loud in secret, stern, and trite,
The pulse of destiny.
Ah sadness scourged with doomed delight!
Ah wondrous misery!
Pale topsails in the offing shone,
And faded into foam:
And down the noontide, one by one,
The pale, proud ships would roam;
Each sailor to his love went on;
Each wanderer to his home.
And, ceasing not, death's nearing knell
Tolled in a heart that dreamed no more.
Our lips shook, sad as lips in hell;
But, fearful of the rending shore,
To fill all time with sad farewell
We would have sailed for evermore!
For pleasantly a song she'd croon,
And feign the world a kindly place;
And tender was the haunting tune
To match her haunting grace;
And tenderly the witching moon
Toyed with her feeling face ...
Our love was like the scent of flowers
To her who watches by the bed
Of one that dies in the dark hours,
The one her youth had wed:
At dawn she scares her tears away,
And through the cloud-enamelled day
Jests bravely for their bread.