There is a music of immaculate love,
That beats within the virgin veins of Spring,—
And trillium blossoms, like the stars that cling
To fairies' wands; and, strung on sprays above,
White-hearts and mandrake blooms—that look enough
Like the elves' washing—white with laundering
Of May-moon dews; and all pale-opening
Wild-flowers of the woods are born thereof.
There is no sod Spring's white foot brushes but
Must feel the music that vibrates within,
And thrill to the communicated touch
Responsive harmonies, that must unshut
The heart of Beauty for Song's concrete kin,
Emotions—that are flowers—born of such.
THE SWASHBUCKLER
Squat-nosed and broad, of big and pompous port;
A tavern visage, apoplexy haunts,
All pimple-puffed: the Falstaff-like resort
Of fat debauchery, whose veined cheek flaunts
A flabby purple: rusty-spurred he stands
In rakehell boots and belt, and hanger that
Claps when, with greasy gauntlets on his hands,
He swaggers past in cloak and slouch-plumed hat.
Aggression marches armies in his words;
And in his oaths great deeds ride cap-à-pie;
His looks, his gestures breathe the breath of swords;
And in his carriage camp all wars to be:—
With him of battles there shall be no lack
While buxom wenches are and stoops of sack.
SIMULACRA
Dark in the west the sunset's sombre wrack
Unrolled vast walls the rams of war had split,
Along whose battlements the battle lit
Tempestuous beacons; and, with gates hurled back,
A mighty city, red with ruin and sack,
Through burning breaches, crumbling bit by bit,
Showed where the God of Slaughter seemed to sit
With Conflagration glaring at each crack.—
Who knows? perhaps as sleep unto us makes
Our dreams as real as our waking seems
With recollections time can not destroy,
So in the mind of Nature now awakes,
Haply, some wilder memory, and she dreams
The stormy story of the fall of Troy.
CAVERNS
WRITTEN OF COLOSSAL CAVE, KENTUCKY
Aisles and abysses; leagues no man explores,
Of rock that labyrinths and night that drips;
Where everlasting silence broods, with lips
Of adamant, o'er earthquake-builded floors.
Where forms, such as the Demon-World adores,
Laborious water carves; whence echo slips
Wild-tongued o'er pools where petrifaction strips
Her breasts of crystal from which crystal pours.—
Here where primordial fear, the Gorgon, sits
Staring all life to stone in ghastly mirth,
I seem to tread, with awe no tongue can tell,—
Beneath vast domes, by torrent-tortured pits,
'Mid wrecks terrific of the ruined Earth,—
An ancient causeway of forgotten Hell.
THE BLUE BIRD
From morn till noon upon the window-pane
The tempest tapped with rainy finger-nails,
And all the afternoon the blustering gales
Beat at the door with furious feet of rain.
The rose, near which the lily bloom lay slain,
Like some red wound dripped by the garden rails,
On which the sullen slug left slimy trails—
Meseemed the sun would never shine again.
Then in the drench, long, loud and full of cheer,—
A skyey herald tabarded in blue,—
A bluebird bugled ... and at once a bow
Was bent in heaven, and I seemed to hear
God's sapphire spaces crystallising through
The strata'd clouds in azure tremolo.