|
ORACLES
The
Biography of an
Art
UNPUBLISHED FRAGMENTS OF THE WORK OF
ALEISTER CROWLEY
WITH
EXPLANATORY NOTES BY R. P. LESTER AND
THE AUTHOR
1905
Society for the Propagation of
Religious Truth
BOLESKINE, FOYERS, INVERNESS
TO EXPLAIN
Written in the desert, near the
Pyramids of Sakkarah.
These
are the very oracles of Cumæ.8 They are
called so because of the quotation from Vergil which I dis-remember,
but hope to find when I can borrow an Æneid.2
The sense is of old leaves swept into the dusty corners of
the mind, no part of the main current of my thought; yet
curious, not altogether bad, in a sense worth saving. Maybe
I had done better to entitle the book “Resurrection Pie”;
but all’s one.3 They are not completed,
and never will be, till they fall under the eyes of the
literary heir of the Chicago Professor who rewrote Keats.
I cannot complete them, for the
men are verily dead who wrote them;4 yet
respect for their memory forbids me to destroy them.5
But they cumber the case of stout
leather and royal vellum wherein they have long8
reposed, if writings can repose which evoke but disgust each
time the master’s eye7 falls saturnine
upon them.
The devil take them!8
so, lest I should be thought to swear—never9
a habit of mine!—to the “devil” they shall go.10
ALEISTER CROWLEY.
1 Admitted on all
hands to be worthless.
2 I can’t bother.
3 Cf. Spinoza,
Haeckel, and others.
4 Sakkya-ditthi,
Anatta.
5 First Precept.
6 More classically,
good-bye.
7 My eye—all mine.
8 Excusez, madame!
9 Well, hardly ever!
10 Joke.
CONTENTS
The
Death of the Drunkard
The
Balloon
Spoliaopima
Lines
on being invited to meet the Premier
in Wales,
September ’92
A Peep
behind the Scenes
The
Mrs O . . . .
. . N C . . . T
Elvina
A Welcome
to Jabez
The
Little Half-Sovereign
Adaptation
of “Onward
Christian Soldiers”
to the Brethren
Ode
to Sappho
In
a Lesbian
Meadow
“ ’Tis
Pity”
My
Wife Dies
All
Night
Ode
to Venus
Callipyge
The
Blood-Lotus
Translations
from Baudelaire
Invocation
A Litany
Call
of the Sylphs
Chaldean
Fools
Hermit's
Hymn to Solitude
The
Storm
Hymn
to Apollo
Venus
Assumpta
Canadia
Night
in the Valley
March
in the Tropics
Metempsychosis
Advice
of a Letter
On
Waikiki Beach
The
Dance of Shiva
Sonnet
for a Picture
The
House
Anima
Lunae
The
Triads of Despair
“Abbé
pi Dukkham”
Dhammapada
St
Patrick's Day
1902
The
Earl's Quest
Eve
The
Sibyl
La
Coureuse
To
“Elizabeth”
Sonnet
for a Picture
Rondels
(at Monte
Carlo)
In
the Great
Pyramid Ghizah
The
Hills
THE DEATH OF THE DRUNKARD
(This, the earliest poem ever
written by me, has perished save the following fragment. Its
date is 1886 or 1887.)
I
Terror,
and darkness, and horrid despair!
Agony painted upon the once fair
Brow of the man who refused to
give up
The love of the wine-filled, the
o’erflowing cup.
“Wine is a mocker, strong drink is
raging.”
No wine in death is his torment
assuaging.
II
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
Just what the parson had told me
when young:
Just what the people in chapel
have sung:
“Wine is a mocker, strong drink is
raging.”
. . . . . . .
Desunt cetera.
(It should be noted that this
fragment is of a wildly revolutionary tendency. It made him
the Ibsen of a school where a parson and a chapel were
considered with the rest of the non-Plymouth-Brethren world
as so many devils let loose from hell.—R. P. L.)
THE BALLOON
Written (at the age of fifteen,
and still unsurpassed) while in bed with measles at
Tonbridge in Kent.
Floating
in the summer air,
What is that for men to see?
Anywhere and everywhere,
Now a bullet, now a tree—
Till we all begin to swear:
What the devil can it be?
See its disproportioned head,
Tiny trunk and limbs lopped
bare,
Hydrocephalus the dread
With a surgeon chopping
there;
Chopping legs and arms all red
With the sticky lumps of
hair.
Like a man in this complaint
Floats this creature in the
sky,
Till the gaping rustics faint
And the smirking milkmaids
cry,
As the chord and silk and paint,
Wood and iron drifteth by.
Floating in the summer sky
Like a model of the moon:—
How supreme to be so high
In a treacherous balloon,
Like the Kings of Destiny,
All the earth for their
spittoon.
Toads are gnawing at my feet.
Take them off me quick, I
pray!
Worms my juicy liver eat.
Take the awful beasts away!
Vipers make my bowels their meat.
Fetch a cunning knife and
slay!
Kill the tadpoles in my lung,
And the woodlice in my spine,
And the beast that gnaws my
tongue,
And the weasel at my chine,
And the horde of adders young
That around mine entrails
twine!
Come, dissect me! Rip the skin!
Tear the bleeding flesh
apart!
See ye all my hellish grin
While the straining vitals
smart.
Never mind! Go in and win,
Till you reach my gory heart!
While my heart’s soft pulse did
go,
Devils had it in their bands.
Doctors keep it in a row,
Now, on varnished wooden
stands:
And I really do not know
If it is in different hands.
SPOLIA OPIMA *
My
home is set between two ivory towers,
Fresh with the fragrance of a
thousand flowers.
And the twin portals of a ruby
door,
Portcullissed with the pearls of
India’s shore,
Loosed with a smile and opened
with a kiss,
Bid me a joyous welcome there, I
wis.
My home is on the brink of
heaven’s delight,
But for that endless day a
lovelier night
Is in my home, that sunset’s arms
enfold,
Lit with the mellowness of autumn
gold.
. . . . . . .
Pillowed on linen of the purest
white,
Half-hidden by her locks’
luxurious night,
Maddened by those soft eyes of
melting glow,
Enamoured of that breast of
breathing snow,
Caught in the meshes of her
fine-spun hair,
Rocked by the beating of her bosom
fair,
Held by her lips too tempting and
too warm,
Bewitched by every beauty of her
form,
The blush upon her cheek is deeper
red,
Half glad, and half repenting what
she said.
A moment’s struggle, as her form I
press:—
One soft sad sigh. Love conquers.
I possess.
* From "Green Alps," a volume (luckily
burnt at the printers, and so dropped.—R. P. L.
LINES ON BEING INVITED TO MEET
THE
PREMIER IN WALES, SEPTEMBER
’92
I
will not shake
thy hand, old man,
I will not shake thy hand;
You bear a traitor’s brand, old
man,
You bear a liar’s brand.
Thy talents are profound and wide,
Apparent power to win;
It is not everyone has lied
A nation into sin.
And look thou not so black, my
friend,
Nor seam that hoary brow;
Thy deeds are seamier, my friend,
Thy record blacker now.
Your age and sex forbid, old man,
I need not tell you how,
Or else I’d knock you down, old
man,
Like that extremist cow.*
You’ve gained your every seat, my
friend,
By perjuring your soul;
You’ve climbed to Downing Street,
my friend,
A very greasy poll.
You bear a traitor’s brand, old
man,
You bear a liar’s brand;
I will not shake thy hand, old
man,
I will not shake thy hand.
[And I
didn’t.
* Mr Gladstone was attacked by a cow in
Hawarden Park in 1891.—R. P. L.
A PEEP BEHIND THE SCENES
Written by a student at King's
College Hospital.
In the hospital bed she lay,
Rotting away!
Cursing by night and cursing by
day,
Rotting away!
The lupus is over her face and
head,
Filthy and foul and horrid and
dread,
And her shrieks they would almost
wake the dead;
Rotting away!
In her horrible grave she lay,
Rotting away!
Rotting by night, and rotting by
day,
Rotting away!
In the place of her face is a gory
hole,
And the worms are gnawing the
tissues foul,
And the devil is gloating over her
soul,
Rotting away!
TO MRS O . . . . . . N
C . . . T
Written during the first session
of the Licensing Committee of the London County Council.
I
will not bring
abuse to point my pen,
Nor a sarcastic tongue.
Think only what you might be,
before men,
If you were young.
What fierce temptations might not
lovers bring
In London’s wicked city?
Perhaps you might yourself have
one wee fling,
If you were pretty.
What might not hard starvation
drive you to,
With Death so near and sure?
Perhaps it might drive even
virtuous you,
If you were poor.
But is it just, or grateful to the
One
That keeps even you from
wrong,
Or even humble to shriek, “Get you
gone,
For I am strong”?
Temptation has not touched you,
Mrs. C . . . t!
Forsooth, I do not lie there,
For you are only not the thing you
aren’t
Through being neither.
And since some fall in Life’s
tremendous storm,
And you are on your feet,
Were it not better with a bosom
warm
And accents sweet
To help to raise (and no man will
upbraid you)
Your sisters fallen far?
’Tis vain! God’s worst
omission—Heart—has made you
The thing you are!
ELVINA
Written at Eastbourne.
Tune—“German Evening Hymn.”
Was
thy fault to be too tender?
Was thine error to be weak?
Was my kiss the chief offender
Pressed upon thy blushing
cheek?
Was it sin to press and press thee
Till thy burning lips at last
Madly kissed me? How I bless thee,
Now, for that superb repast!
All-consuming, all-devouring,
All-absorbing, burnt the
flame;
Burnt unchecked till, hotly
showering,
Passion disregarded Shame!
Was it sin—that moonlight madness?
Was our passion so accurst?
Sweetness damned to mother
Sadness?
Satisfaction to bring Thirst?
Was our love to bring division?
Nay! ten thousand devils!
nay!
And a devil in a vision
Hisses as I slumber, “Yea!
“Heaven of your accurst creation
Shall become a hell of fire;
Death for kisses, and damnation
For your love shall God
require.”
A WELCOME TO JABEZ
Reprinted from the ‘Eastbourne
Chronicle.’
Great
Liberator, come again,
Thy country needs thee sadly;
In Scotland Yard they all complain
They “want” thee, oh! so
badly.
Thou canst not tell the signs and
sobs
That for thy presence yearn;
And the great heart of England
throbs
With joy at thy return.
For many a year prolong thy stay
By Portland’s shady harbour;
And all expenses we will pay—
Especially the barber.
A change of work is rest, they
say,
So honest toil shall rest
thee;
No fears that thou must go away
Need haunt thee and molest
thee.
We pray a level-headed set
Of fellow men, who know thee,
In some small measure grateful
yet,
May pay thee what is owed
thee.
The joys of single blessedness,
And undisturbed seclusion,
We envy for thee, we confess,
Until thy final fusion.
THE LITTLE HALF-SOVEREIGN
Red
is the angry sunset,
Murk is the even grey,
Heavy the clouds that hover
Over our Hell to-day.
“Say, in our dark Gomorrah,
Lord, can an angel find
Fifty, but fifty, righteous—
Body—I say not Mind.”
Sadly the angel turneth—
“Stay, ere thou fleest, stay;
Canst thou not find me twenty?”
“Nay is the answer,
“nay.”
“Are there not ten, bright spirit,
Hidden, nor quickly seen,
Somewhere in Hell’s dark alleys,
Somewhere in Walham Green?
“Speak, for I see thy forehead
Sadden in dark denial,
Is there not one that standeth
Tempter and longsome trial?
“Is not a candle burning
Somewhere amid the flame
Scorching the smoke of London
With its eternal shame?
“Is there no gate so stubborn
That shall not find a
key,
That with our Sovereign’s image
Graven in majesty?”
Why not the Devil’s portrait
Graven in Walham Green?
Why with the bare suggestion
Dare we insult our Queen?
Give me the golden trumpet
Blown at the judgment-day,
Closing the gate of mercy
Over the Cast Away.
Melt me its gold to money,
Coin me that small, small
ring
Stamped with the Hoof of Satan,
Bearing the name of King.
Then, in the murky midnight,
Silently lead me down,
Down into Hell’s dark portals,
Far in the West of Town.
Then to the shrieks of devils
Writhing in torments keen,
Sing me the song that tells me
Ever of Walham Green.
Sing of the little half-sovereign
Dancing in golden sheen;
Leave me in Hell—or, better,
Leave me in Walham Green.
[The occasion of this poem was the
meeting of the author with a fair and virtuous damsel of
pleasant address and conversation. She politely asked him to
call at her residence on the following Sunday: but, on his
doing so, she straightaway demanded half-a-sovereign, and
proffered a shameful equivalent. The indignant boy went off
and gave vent to his feeling in the above rhymes.—R. P. L.
ADAPTATION OF “ONWARD,
CHRISTIAN
SOLDIERS” TO THE NEEDS OF
BRETHREN
Preface
In
response to many suggestions from dear Brethren, I have
adapted a hymn to the wants of the Church. In view of the
grossly unscriptural nature of the original hymn (so-called)
many changes have been rendered necessary, but I hope and
trust that this has been effected without losing the
grandeur of the original.* To this effort of mine certain
“false brethren unawares brought in” have objected, saying,
“Touch not the accursed thing.” I pass over the blasphemy of
their thus adapting verses of Scripture to their own vile
ends.
Let me, however, tell these
“wolves in sheep’s clothing,” these “clouds without water”,
carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth,
with-out fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging
waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering
stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for
ever (Jude 12,13), that they are “dogs, and sorcerers, and
whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters” (Rev. xxii. 15),
and again, that they are “ fearful and unbelieving, and
abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and idolaters,
and all liars ” (Rev. xxi. 8), and that they “shall have
their part in the lake which burneth with fire and
brimstone, which is the second death” (Rev. xxi. 8), “where
their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark.
ix. 44).
Let me only add that they are “ a
herd of many swine feeding ” (Matt. viii. 30).
“Ye serpents, ye generation of
vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?” (Matt.
xxiii. 33).
And now, beloved brethren, with
every prayer that this adaptation may prove of lasting
blessing to You all, bringing forth “the fruits of the
Spirit” (Gal. v. 22), especially “faith, hope and charity.”
“But the greatest of these is charity” (1 Cor. xiii. 13).
“Onward,
Plymouth Brethren.”
Chorus
Onward,
Plymouth Brethren, marching as to war,
With the cross of jesus
trampled on the floor;
Kelly, Lowe or Jewell lead
against the foe,
Forward into battle, see
their followers go.
Onward, Plymouth Brethren,
marching as to war,
With the cross of jesus
trampled on the floor.
At the name of Barton, Raven’s
host doth flee,
On, M’Arthy’s following, on to
victory,
Stoney’s scoundrels shiver at Our
howls of rage,
Brothers, lift Your voices, Shriek
aloud, Rampage!
Like a mighty army moves the
Church of god.
Brothers, We are treading where
the saints have trod.
We are all divided, fifty bodies
We,
Fifty hopes and doctrines, nary
charity.
Church and chapel perish! Open
Plyms to hell!
But Our kind of Brethren still in
safety dwell.
Raven’s lot can never ’gainst the
lord prevail,
We are his brave followers, you
are Satan’s tail.
Come then, outside peoples, join
Our noble throng!
Blend with Ours your voices in the
triumph song!
Glory, praise and honour unto Us
alone!
Christians’ necks our footstool,
Heaven itself Our throne!
P.S.—Beloved
Brethren,—The
spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. For I, like
Balaam (in the old legend), was compelled to express our
real feelings and not our pretended ones. This, of course,
absolutely ruins the adaptation. In fact, I am not certain
as to whether it does not rather give us away!
Alas! we are only poor, weak,
failing creatures!
Your broken-hearted,
broken-winded, broken-kneed brother,
Judas
Caiaphas Truelove.**
[This astonishing piece of satire
was composed after some weeks in the house of a Plymouth
Brother whose children and friends had gone over to one of
the other kinds of Brethren at the great split of 1894.
Almost every phrase used therein is a quotation, not a
parody.—R. P. L.]
* See preface to “Hymns for the
Little Flock.”
** The man Truelove was at once
put out of fellow-ship. He will be certainly damned.—Pilate
Crosspatch.]
ODE TO SAPPHO
[This and the following poems up
to page 60 are from “Green Alps.”—R. P. L.
O Lesbian
maiden!
O plumèd and snowlike in
glory of whiteness!
O mystical brightness
With love-lyrics laden!
Joy’s fulness is fainting for
passion and sorrow.
To-night melts divine to the
dawn of to-morrow,
O Lesbian maiden!
The flame-tongue of passion
Is lambent and strong;
In mystical fashion
Sucks sweetness from
shade,
As the voice of thy song
In the halls of the
dead,
Breaking fitful and
wild,
Weird waking the
slumber of Venus, the sleep of her child,
O Lesbian maiden!
Thy tongue
reaches red
On that
pillar of might!
Flaming gold
from thy head
Is a
garland of light
On the
forehead of night,
As we lie and
behold
All the
wonders untold
That the
joys of desire
In their
secrets enfold,
As the
pillars of fire
On the ocean
of old!
O Lesbian
maiden!
The delight of
thy lips
Is the
voice of the Spring
That the
nightingales sing
Over Winter’s
eclipse,
While my
fingers enring
The
white limbs of thy sleep
And my lips
suck the lips
Of the
house of my dream,
And
press daintily deep,
Till the
joys are supreme
That thine
amorous mouth
On the
home of thy love
Would exhaust
the fierce drouth
Of the
rivers thereof,
Till thy white
body quiver
With
mystic emotion
As the
star-blossoms shiver
On silvery
river
Rushed
into the ocean!
O Lesbian
maiden!
IN A LESBIAN MEADOW
I
Under
the summer leaves
In the half-light
Love his old story weaves
Far out of sight.
Here we are lone, at last.
Heaven is overcast
Yet with no night.
Ere her immortal wings
Gather the thread of things
Into her might,
Up will the moon arise
Through the black-azure skies:
Birds shall sing litanies
Still of delight.
II
Let my lips wander where
Tender moss grows,
Where through their dusky air
Beams a red rose.
Where the bee honey sips
Let my desirous lips,
Kissing, unclose
Delicate lips and chaste,
Sweetness divine to taste
While the sun glows;
There in the dusk to dwell
By the sweet water-well
In the wood’s deepest dell
Where—my love knows.
III
Skies are grown redder far;
Tempest draws nigher;
Dark lowers a single star;
Mars, like the fire!
Fiercer our lips engage;
Limbs, eyes, ears gather rage;
Sharp grows desire.
Hear thy short bitter cries?
Pity thine agonies?
Loose, though love tire?
Nay, neither hear nor spare;
Frenzy shall mock at prayer;
Torture’s red torch shall flare
Till thou expire.
IV
Stars stud a cloudless sky;
Moon silvers blue;
Breeze is content to die;
Lightly falls dew.
Calm after strain and stress
Now to our weariness
Brings love anew.
Peace brings her balm to us,
Lying as amorous
Still, and as true,
Linked by new mystery,
Lovers confessed. A sigh
Sobs to the happy sky,
“Sorrow, go to!”
“ ’TIS PITY—”
—Ford.
Blow
on the flame!
The charcoal’s vaporous fume
Shall hide our shame!
Come, love, within the gloom!
For one last night, sweet sister,
be the same;
Come, nestle with me in sweet
Death’s hot womb!
Two sunny eyes!
And this is all my ruin!
Two gleaming thighs!
And all to my undoing!
Far-swelling curves in ivory
rapture rise
Warm and too white—bethink
you of the wooing!
A kiss of fire;
A touch of passionate
yearning
Steals higher and higher—
And kisses are returning!
The strong white grasp draws me
still nigher and nigher,
Our fusing forms in one
fierce furnace burning!
Fails to us speech
In Love’s exultant leaping!
Each merged in each
The golden fruit is reaping!
. . . . . . .
Wilt slumber, dear? One last kiss,
I beseech!
. . . . . . .
Come to us, Death! My love and I
are sleeping!
MY WIFE DIES
“Marriage and death and division
Make barren our lives.”—Swinburne.
The
sun of love shone through my love’s deep eyes
And made a rainbow of her
tender tears,
And on her cheeks I saw a blush
arise
When her lips opened to say,
loverwise,
“I love”—and light broke
through the cloud of fears
That hid her eyes.
The storm of passion woke in her
red lips,
When first they clung to mine
and rested there;
Lightnings of love were eager
to eclipse
That earlier sunshine, and her
whole soul clips
My soul—I kissed out life,
within her hair
Upon her lips.
We parted lips from lips and soul
from soul
To new strange passions in
unholy lands,
Where love’s breath chars and
scorches like a coal.
So she is dead to-day—the sweet
bells toll
A lost, lost soul, a soul in
Satan’s bands,
A lost, lost soul!
THE NATIVITY
Christmas
1897
The
Virgin lies at Bethlehem.
(Bring gold and frankincense
and myrrh!)
The root of David shoots a stem.
(O Holy Spirit, pity her!)
She lies alone amid the kine.
(Bring gold and frankincense
and myrrh!)
The straw is fragrant as with
wine.
(O Holy Spirit, pity her!)
Mine host protects an honest roof.
(Bring gold and frankincense
and myrrh!)
His spouse sniffs loud and holds
aloof.
(O Holy Spirit, pity her!)
The Angel has not come again.
(Bring gold and frankincense
and myrrh!)
Why did God deal her out such
pain?
(O Holy Spirit, pity her!)
Her love-hours held the Holy
Ghost.
(Bring gold and frankincense
and myrrh!)
Where is he now she needs him
most?
(O Holy Spirit, pity her!)
Joseph drinks deep outside the
inn.
(Bring gold and frankincense
and myrrh!)
She is half hated by her kin.
(O Holy Spirit, pity her!)
The agony increases fast.
(Bring gold and frankincense
and myrrh!)
Each spasm is a holocaust.
(O Holy Spirit, pity her!)
There are three kings upon the
road.
(Bring gold and frankincense
and myrrh!)
She hath thrice cursed the name of
God.
(O Holy Spirit, pity her!)
There stands her star above the
sky.
(Bring gold and frankincense
and myrrh!)
She hath thrice prayed that she
may die.
(O Holy Spirit, pity her!)
Her bitter anguish hath sufficed.
(Bring gold and frankincense
and myrrh!)
She is delivered of the Christ.
(The angels come to worship
her.)
THE CANNIBALS
All
night no change, no whisper. Scarce a breath,
But lips closed hard upon the cup
of death
To drain its sweetest poison.
Scarce a sigh
Beats the dead hours out; scarce a
melody
Of measured pulses quickened with
the blood
Of that desire which pours its
deadly flood
Through soul and shaken body;
scarce a thought,
But sense through spirit most
divinely wrought
To perfect feeling; only through
the lips
Electric ardour kindles, flashes,
slips
Through all the circle to her lips
again,
And thence, unwavering, flies to
mine, to drain
All pleasure in one draught. No
whispered sigh;
No change of breast; love’s
posture perfectly
Once gained, we change no more.
The fever grows
Hotter or cooler, as the night
wind blows
Fresh gusts of passion on the
outer gate.
But we, in waves of frenzy,
concentrate
Our thirsty mouths on that hot
drinking cup,
Whence we may never suck the
nectar up
Too often or too hard; fresh fire
invades
Our furious veins, and the unquiet
shades
Of night make noises in the
darkened room.
Yet, did I raise my head,
throughout the gloom
I might behold thine eyes as red
as fire
A tigress maddened with supreme
desire;
White arms that clasp me; fervent
breast that glides
An eager snake, about my breast
and sides;
Teeth keen to bite, red tongue
that never tires,
And lips ensaguine with unfed
desires,
A very beast of prey; hot hands
caress,
And violent breath that surfeits
not excess.
But raise no head! I know thee,
breast and thigh,
Lips, hair, and eyes, and mouth: I
will not die
But thou come with me o’er the
gate of death.
So, bloody and body furious with
breath
That pants through foaming kisses,
let us stay
Gripped hard together to kiss life
away,
Mouths drowned in murder, never
satiate,
Kissing away the hard decrees of
Fate,
Kissing insatiable in mad desire,
Kisses whose agony may never tire,
Kissing the gates of hell, the
sword of God,
Each unto each a serpent or a rod,
A well of wine and fire, each unto
each,
Whose lips are fain convulsively
to reach
A higher heaven, a deeper hell.
Ah! day
So soon to dawn, delight to snatch
away!
Damned day, whose sunlight finds
us as with wine
Drunken, with lust made manifest
divine
Devils of darkness, servants unto
hell—
Yea, king and queen of Sheol,
terrible
Above all fiends and furies,
hating more
The high Jehovah, loving Baal Peor,
Our father and our love and our
god!
Yea, though he lift his adamantine
rod
And pierce us through, how shall
his anger tame
Fire that glows fiercer for the
brand of shame
Thrust in it; so, we who are all
fire,
One dull red flare of devilish
desire,
The God of Israel shall not quench
with tears,
Nor blood of martyrs drawn from
myriad spheres,
Nor watery blood of Christ; that
blood shall boil
With all the fury of our hellish
toil;
His veins shall dry with heat; his
bones shall bleach
Cold and detested, picked of dogs,
on each
Dry separate dunghill of burnt
Golgotha.
But we will wrest from heaven a
little star,
The Star of Bethlehem, a lying
light
Fit for our candle, and by devils’
might
Fix in the vast concave of hell
for us
To lume its ghastly shadows
murderous,
That in the mirror of the lake of
fire
We may behold the image of Desire
Stretching broad wings upon us,
and may leap
Each upon other, till our bodies
weep
Thick sweet salt tears, till,
perfected of shames,
They burn to one another as the
flames
Of our hell fuse us into one wild
soul:
Then, one immaculate divinest
whole,
Plunge, fire, within all fire,
dive far to death;
Till, like king Satan’s
sympathetic breath,
Burn on us as a voice from far
above
Strange nameless elements of fire
and love;
And we, one mouth to kiss, one
soul to lure,
For ever wedded, one, divine,
endure
Far from sun, sea, and spring,
from love or light,
Imbedded in impenetrable night;
Deeper than ocean, higher than the
sky,
Vaster than petty loves that dream
and die,
Insatiate, angry, terrible for
lust,
Who shrivel God to adamantine dust
By our fierce gaze upon him, who
would strive
Under our wrath, to flee away, to
dive
Into the deep recesses of his
heaven.
But we, one joy, one love, one
shame for leaven,
Quit hope and life, quit fear and
death and love,
Implacable as God, desired above
All loves of hell or heaven,
supremely wed,
Knit in one soul in one delicious
bed
More hot than hell, more wicked
than all things,
Vast in our sin, whose unredeeming
wings
Rise o’er the world, and flap for
lust of death,
Eager as any one that travaileth;
So in our lust, the monstrous
burden borne
Heavy within the womb, we wait the
morn
Of its fulfilment. Thus eternity
Wheels vain wings round us, who
may never die
But cling as hard as serpent’s
wedlock is,
One writhing glory, an immortal
kiss.
ODE TO VENUS CALLIPYGE
Where
was light when the body came
Out of the womb of a perished
prayer?
Where was life when the
sultry air,
Hot with the lust of night and
shame,
Brooded on dust, when thy
shoulders bare
Shone on the sea with a sudden
flame
Into all Time to abundant fame?
Daughter of Lust by
the foam of the sea!
Mother of flame!
Sister of shame!
Tiger that Sin
nor her son cannot tame!
Worship to thee!
Glory to thee!
Venus Callipyge,
mother of me.
Fruitless foam of a sterile sea,
Wanton waves of a vain
desire,
Maddening billows flecked
with fire,
Storms that lash on the brine, and
flee,
Dead delights, insatiate ire
Broke like a flower to the birth
of thee,
Venus Callipyge, mother of me!
Deep wet eyes that are
violet-blue!
Haggard cheeks that may blush
no more!
Body bruised daintily, touch
of gore
Where the sharp fierce teeth have
bitten through
The olive skin that thy sons
adore,
That they die for daily, are slain
anew
By manifold hate; for their tale
is few.
Few are thy sons, but as fierce as
dawn.
Sweet are the seconds, weary
the days.
Nights? Ah! thine image a
thousand ways
Is smitten and kissed on the fiery
lawn
Where the wash of the waves
of thy native bays
Laps weary limbs, that of thee
have drawn
Laughter and fire for their souls
in pawn.
O thy strong sons! they are dark
as night,
Cruel and barren and false as
the sea.
They have cherished Hell for
the love of thee,
Filled with thy lust and abundant
might,
Filled with the phantom
desire to free
Body and soul from the sound and
sight
Of a world and a God that doth not
right.
O thy dark daughters! their
breasts are slack,
Their lips so large and as
poppies red;
They lie in a furious barren
bed;
They lie on their faces; their
eyelids lack
Tears, and their cheeks are
as roses dead;
White are their throats, but upon
the back
Red blood is clotted in gouts of
black.
All on their sides are the wounds
of lust
Wet, from the home of their
auburn hair
Down to the feet that we find
so fair;
Where the red sword has a secret
thrust,
Pain, and delight, and desire
they share.
Verily pain! and thy daughters
trust
Thou canst bid roses spring out of
dust.
Mingle, ye children of such a
queen,
Mingle, and meet, and sow
never a seed!
Mingle, and tingle, and kiss,
and bleed
With the blood of the life of the
Lampsacene,
With the teeth that know
never a pitiful deed
But fret and foam over with kisses
obscene—
Mingle and weep for what years
have been.
Never a son nor a daughter grow
From your waste limbs, lest
the goddess weep;
Fill up the ranks from the
babes that sleep
Far in the arms of a god of snow.
Conquer the world, that her
throne may keep
More of its pride, and its secret
woe
Flow through all earth as the
rivers flow.
Which of the gods is like thee,
our queen?
Venus Callipyge, nameless,
nude,
Thou with the knowledge of
all indued,
Secrets of life and the dreams
that mean
Loves that are not, as are
mortals’, hued
All rose and lily, but linger
unseen,
Passion-flowers purpled, garlands
of green!
Who like thyself shall command our
ways?
Who has such pleasures and
pains for hire?
Who can awake such a mortal
fire
In the veins of a man, that
deathly days
Have robbed of the masteries
of desire?
Who can give garlands of fadeless
bays
Unto the sorrow and pain we
praise?
Yea, we must praise, though the
deadly shade
Fall on the morrow, though
fires of hell
Harrow our vitals; a miracle
Springs at thy kisses, for thou
hast made
Anguish and sorrow desirable;
Torment of hell as the leaves that
fade
Quickly forgotten, despised,
decayed.
They are decayed, but thou
springest again,
Mother of mystery, barren,
who bearest
Flowers of most comeliest
children, who wearest
Wounds for delight, whose desire
shall stain
Star-space with blood as the
price thou sharest
Sweet with thy lovers, whose
passing pain
Ripens to marvellous after-gain.
Thou art the fair, the wise, the
divine!
Thou art our mother, our
goddess, our life!
Thou art our passion, our
sorrow, our strife!
Thou, on whose forehead no lights
ever shine,
Thou, our redeemer, our
mistress, our wife,
Thou, barren sister of deathlier
brine,
Venus Callipyge, mother of mine!
Daughter of lust by
the foam of the sea!
Mother of flame!
Sister of shame!
Tiger that Sin
nor her son cannot tame!
Worship to thee!
Glory to thee!
Venus Callipyge,
mother of me.
THE BLOOD-LOTUS
The
ashen sky, too sick for sleep, makes my face grey; my senses
swoon.
Here, in the glamour of the moon, will
not some pitying godhead weep
For cold grey anguish of her eyes, that
look to God, and look in vain,
For death, the anodyne of pain, for
sleep, earth’s trivial paradise?
Sleep I forget. Her silky breath no
longer fans my ears; I dream
I float on some forgotten stream that
hath a savour still of death,
A sweet warm smell of hidden flowers
whose heavy petals kiss the sun,
Fierce tropic poisons every one that
fume and sweat through forest hours.
They grow in darkness; heat beguiles
their sluggish kisses; in the wood
They breathe no murmur that is good,
and Satan in their blossom smiles.
They murder with the old perfume that
maddens all men’s blood; we die
Fresh from some corpse-clothed memory,
some secret redolence of gloom,
Some darkling murmurous song of lust
quite strange to man and beast and bird,
Silent in power, not overheard by any
snake that eats the dust.
No crimson-hooded viper knows; no
silver-crested asp has guessed
The strange soft secrets of my breast;
no leprous cobra shall disclose
The many-seated, multiform, divine,
essential joys that these
Dank odours bring, that starry seas
wash white in vain; intense and warm
The scents fulfil; they permeate all
lips, all arteries, and fire
New murmured music on the lyre that
throbs the horrors they create.
Omniscient blossom! Is thy red slack
bosom fresher for my kiss?
Are thy loves sharper? Hast thou bliss
in all the sorrow of the dead?
Why art thou paler when the moon grows
loftier in the troublous sky?
Why dost thou beat and heave when I
press lips of fire, hell’s princeliest boon,
To thy mad petals, green and gold like
angels’ wings, when as a flood
God’s essence fills them, and the blood
throughout their web grows icy cold?
To thy red centre are my eyes held fast
and fervent, as at night
Some sad miasma lends a light of
strange and silent blasphemies
To lure a soul to hell, to draw some
saint’s charred lust, to tempt, to win
Another sacrifice to sin, another
poet’s heart to gnaw
With dubious remorse. Ho! flame of
torturing flower-love! sacrament
Of Satan, triple element of mystery and
love and shame,
Green, gold, and crimson, in my heart
you strive with Jesus for its realm,
While Sorrow’s tears would overwhelm
the warriors of either part.
Jesus would lure me: from His side the
gleaming torrent of the spear
Withdraws, my soul with joy and fear
waits for sweet blood to pour its tide
Of warm delight—in vain! so cold, so
watery, so slack it flows,
It leaves me moveless as a rose, albeit
her flakes are manifold.
He hath no scent to drive men mad; no
mystic fragrance from his skin
Sheds a loose hint of subtle sin such
as the queen Faustina had.
Thou drawest me. Thy golden lips are
carven Cleopatra wise.
Large, full, and moist, within them
lies the silver rampart, whence there slips
That rosy flame of love, the spring of
blood at my light bidding spilt;
And thy desires, if aught thou wilt,
are softer at my suffering.
Fill up with Death Life’s loving-cup!
Give me the knowledge, me the power
For some new sin one little hour,
provoking Hell to belch us up.
So in some damned abyss of woe thy
chant should dazzle as of old,
Thy kisses burn like molten gold, thy
visions swing me to and fro.
Strange fascinations whirl and wind
about my spirit lying coils;
Thy charm enticeth, for the spoils of
victory, all an evil mind.
Thy perfume doth confound my thought,
new longings echo, and I crave
Doubtful liaisons with the grave and
loves of Parthia for sport.
I think perhaps no longer yet, but
dream and lust for stranger things
Than ever sucked the lips of kings, or
fed the tears of Mahomet.
Quaint carven vampire bats, unseen in
curious hollows of the trees,
Or deadlier serpents coiled at ease
round carcasses of birds unclean;
All wandering changeful spectre shapes
that dance in slow sweet measure round
And merge themselves in the profound,
nude women and distorted apes
Grotesque and hairy, in their rage more
rampant than the stallion steed;
There is no help: their horrid need on
these pale women they assuage.
Wan breasts too pendulous, thin hands
waving so aimlessly, they breathe
Faint sickly kisses, and inweave my
head in quiet burial-bands.
The silent troops recede; within the
fiery circle of their glance
Warm writhing woman-horses dance a
shameless Bacchanal of sin;
Foam whips their reeking lips, and
still the flower-witch nestles to my lips,
Twines her swart lissome legs and hips,
half serpent and half devil, till
My whole self seems to lie in her; her
kisses draw my breath; my face
Loses its lustre in the grace of her
quick bosom; sinister
The raving spectres reel; I see beyond
my Circe’s eyes no shape
Save vague cloud-measures that escape
the dance’s whirling witchery.
Their song is in my ears, that burn
with their melodious wickedness;
But in her heart my sorceress has songs
more sinful, that I learn
As she sings slowly all their shame,
and makes me tingle with delight
At new debaucheries, whose might
rekindles blood and bone to flame.
The circle gathers. Negresses howl in
the naked dance, and wheel
On poinard-blades of poisoned steel,
and weep out blood in agonies;
Strange beast and reptile writhe; the
song grows high and melancholy now;
The perfume savours every brow with
lust unutterable of wrong.
Clothed with my flower-bride I sit, a
harlot in a harlot’s dress,
And laugh with careless wickedness that
strews the broad road of the Pit
With vine and myrtle and thy flower, my
harlot-maiden, who for man
Now first forsakest thy leman, thy Eve,
my Lilith, in this bower
Which we indwell, a deathless three,
changeless and changing, as the pyre
Of earthly love becomes a fire to heat
us through eternity.
I have forgotten Christ at last; he may
look back, grown amorous,
And call across the gulf to us, and
signal kisses through the vast:
We shall disdain, clasp faster yet, and
mock his newer pangs, and call
With stars and voices musical, jeers
his touched heart shall not forget.
I would have pitied him. This flower
spits blood upon him; so must I
Cast ashes through the misty sky to
mock his faded crown of power,
And with our laughter’s nails refix his
torn flesh faster to the wood,
And with more cruel zest make good the
shackles of the Crucifix.
So be it! In thy arms I rest, lulled
into silence by the strain
Of sweet love-whispers, while I drain
damnation from thy tawny breast:
Nor heed the haggard sun’s eclipse,
feeling thy perfume fill my hair,
And all thy dark caresses wear sin’s
raiment on thy melting lips—
Nay, by the witchcraft of thy charms to
sleep, nor dream that God survive;
To wake, this only to contrive—fresh
passions in thy naked arms;
And, at that moment when thy breath
mixes with mine, like wine, to call
Each memory, one merged into all, to
kiss, to sleep, to mate with death!
TRANSLATIONS FROM BAUDELAIRE
Cain
et Abel
I
Seed
of Abel, eat, drink, sleep!
God shall smile
complaisantly.
Seed of Cain, in the muck-heap
Crawl and miserably die!
Seed of Abel, thine oblation
Sweet to Seraphim doth smell:
Seed of Cain, shall thy damnation
Ever find the bounds of Hell?
Race of Abel, see thy seed
And thy cattle flourish more!
Race of Cain, for hunger’s need,
Like a dog thy bowels roar.
Seed of Abel, warm thy paunch
At the patriarchal hall!
Seed of Cain, on shivering haunch
Squat in cave, despised
jackal!
Seed of Abel, love and swarm!
So thy gold shall also grow.
Seed of Cain, heart over-warm,
Guard thy lust and crush it
low!
Seed of Abel, grow, well-faring
Like the bugs in forest
beats!
Seed of Cain, at bay, despairing,
Throw thy children on the
streets!
II
Seed of Abel, carrion
Shall make fat the smoking
soil.
Seed of Cain, on thee has none
Laid sufficient woes of toil.
Seed of Abel, this thy shame—
To the boar-spear yields the
sword.
Seed of Cain, to heaven flame,
And to earth cast Heaven’s
Lord!
The
Litany of Satan
O thou, of Angels fairest and most
wise,
God by Fate’s treachery shorn of
liturgies!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
O Prince of Exile, Sufferer of
wrong,
Whose vengeance, conquered, rises
triply strong!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
Who knowest all, of under earth
the king,
Familiar healer of man’s
suffering!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
Who to the leper, even the cursed
pariah,
Hast taught by love the taste of
heavenly fire!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
Thou who on Death, thine old and
strong leman,
Begottest Hope—a charming
madwoman!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
Who knowest in which caves of
envious lands
God has hid precious stones with
jealous hands!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
Thou whose clear eye discerns the
arsenals deep,
Where the small folk of buried
metals sleep!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
Whose broad hand hides the giddy
precipice
From sleepers straying about some
edifice!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
Whose skill makes supple the old
bones, at needs,
Of the belated sot, ’mid surging
steeds!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
Who taught frail man, to make his
suffering lighter,
Consoling, to mix sulphur with
salt nitre!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
O subtle complice, who as blatant
Beast
Brandest vile Croesus, him that
pities least!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
Who in girls’ eyes and hearts
implantest deep
Lust for the wound, the twain that
wound bids weep!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
Staff of the exiled, the
inventor’s spark,
Confessor of hanged men and
plotters dark!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
Adopted sire of whom black wrath
and power
Of God the Father chased from Eden
Bower!
O Satan, have pity of my long
misery!
Femmes
Damnées
Like pensive cattle couched upon
the sand
They turn their eyes to
ocean’s distant ring;
Feet seek each other, hand desires
hand,
With langour sweet and bitter
shuddering.
Some, hearts love-captured with
long whispering,
Spell out the love of
timorous childhood,
Where babbles in deep dell the
gentle spring,
And dive among the young
trees of the green wood.
Other, like sisters, slowly, with
grave eyes,
Cross the rocks filled with
apparitions dim,
Where Antony beheld, like lavers,
rise
The nude empurpled breasts
that tempted him.
Some, by the dying torch-light
call thy name,
In the dumb hollow of old
pagan fanes,
To succour feverish shriekings of
fierce flame,
O Bacchus, soother of men’s
ancient pains.
Others, whose throat is thirsty
for breast-blood,
To hide a whip ’neath flowing
robes are fain,
Mingling in lonely night and
darksome wood
The foam of pleasure and the
tears of pain.
O virgins, demons, monsters, O
martyrs!
Great souls contemptuous of
reality!
Seekers for the Infinite, satyrs,
worshippers,
Now mad with cries, now torn
with agony!
You whom my soul has followed to
your hell,
Poor sisters, more beloved
than wept by me,
For your fierce woes, your lusts
insatiable,
And the urns of love that
fill the hearts of ye!
Carrion
Recall, my soul, the sight we
twain have looked upon
This summer morning soft and
sweet,
Beside the path, an infamous foul
carrion,
Stones for its couch a
fitting sheet.
Its legs stretched in the air,
like wanton whores
Burning with lust, and
reeking venom sweated,
Laid open, carelessly and
cynically, the doors
Of belly rank with
exhalations foetid.
Upon this rottenness the sun shone
deadly straight
As if to cook it to a turn,
And give back to great Nature
hundredfold the debt
That, joining it together,
she did earn.
The sky beheld this carcase most
superb outspread
As spreads a flower, itself,
whose taint
Stank so supremely strong, that on
the grass your head
You thought to lay, in sudden
faint.
The flies swarmed numberless on
this putrescent belly,
Whence issued a battalion
Of lavrae, black, that flowed, a
sluggish liquid jelly,
Along this living carrion.
All this was falling, rising as
the eager seas,
Or heaving with strange
crepitation—
Was’t that the corpse, swollen out
with a lascivious breeze,
Was yet alive by copulation?
And all the carcase now sounded
strange symphonies
Like wind, or running water
wan,
Or grain that winnower shakes and
turns, whene’er he plies
With motion rhythmical his
fan.
The shapes effaced themselves; no
more their images
Were aught but dreams, a
sketch too slow
To tint the canvas, that the
artist finishes
By memory that does not go.
Behind the rocks a bitch unquietly
gazed on
Ourselves with eye of
wrathful woe,
Watching her time to return unto
the skeleton
For tit-bits that she had let
go.
Yet you are like to it, this dung,
this carrion,
To this infection doubly
dire,
Star of my eyes that are, and
still my nature’s sun,
You, O my angel! You, my own
desire!
Yes! such will you be, queen, in
graces that surpass,
Once the last sacraments are
said;
When you depart beneath
wide-spreading blooms and grass
To rot amid the bones of many
dead.
Then, O my beauty! tell the worms,
who will devour
With kisses all of you to
dust;
That I have kept the form and the
essential power
Divine of my distorted lust.
The
Denial of St.
Peter
I
What
makes God then of all the curses deep
That daily reach his Seraphim
divine?
Like to a tyrant gorged with
meat and wine,
Our blasphemous music lulleth him
to sleep.
II
Tears of the martyrs, and saints
tortured,
Must prove intoxicating
symphonies,
Since, spite of blood-price
paid to gain them ease,
The heavens therewith are not yet
satiated.
III
Jesus! recall Gethsemane afresh,
Where thy simplicity his pity
sought
Who in his heaven heard, and
mocked for nought,
Coarse hangmen pierce with nails
thy living flesh.
IV
When on thy godhead spat the
virulence
Of scum of soldiery and
kitchen-knaves;
When thou didst feel the
thorns pierce bloody graves
Within thy brain where Manhood
burnt intense;
V
When thy bruised broken body’s
horrid weight
Racked thy stretched arms,
that sweat and blood enow
Coursed down the marble
paleness of thy brow,
Lift up on high, a butt for all
men’s hate:—
VI
Dreamedst thou then of those
triumphant hours
When, that the eternal
promise might abide,
Thy steed a mild she-ass,
thou once didst ride
On roads o’erstrewn with branches
and fresh flowers;
VII
When, thy heart beating high with
hope and pride,
Thou didst whip out those
merchants vile with force,
At last the master? Did not
keen remorse
Bite thy soul ere the spear had
pierced thy side?
VIII
I, certes, I shall gladly quit
this hell
Where dream and action walk
not hand-in-hand!
May I use the brand and
perish by the brand!
Saint Peter denied Jesus. He did
well.
Gloire
et Louange
Glory
and praise to thee, O Satan, in the height
Of Heaven, where thou didst rule,
and in the night
Of Hell, where conquered, dost
dream silently!
Grant that one day my soul ’neath
Knowledge-Tree
Rest near thine own soul, when
from thy forehead
Like a new temple all its branches
spread.
The
Fount of Blood
Sometimes
I think my blood in waves appears,
Springs as a fount with music in
its tears;
I hear it trickling with long
murmuring sound,
But search myself in vain to find
the wound.
Across the city, as in closed
meres,
Making the pavements isles, it
disappears;
In it all creatures’ thirst relief
hath found;
All nature in its scarlet hue is
drowned.
I have often prayed these fickle
wines to weep
For one day Lethe on my
threatening fear—
Wine makes the ear more sharp, the
eye more clear.
I have sought in Love
forgetfulness and sleep—
My love’s a bed of needles made to
pierce,
That drink be given to these women
fierce!
La
Beatrice
As
I one day to nature made lament
In burnt-up lands, calcined of
nutriment,
As in my musing thought’s vague
random dart
I slowly poised my dagger o’er my
heart,
I saw in full noon o’er my
forehead form
A deathly cloud far pregnant with
the storm,
That bore a flock of devils
vicious
Most like to dwarfs cruel and
curious.
Coldly they set themselves to gaze
on me,
Like passers-by a madman that they
see—
I heard them laugh and chuckle, as
I think,
Now interchange a signal, now a
wink.
“Let us at leisure view this
caricature,
This shade of Hamlet mimicking his
posture,
The doubting look and hair flung
wide to wind!
A pity, eh? to see this merry
hind,
This beggar, actor out of work,
this droll,
Because he plays artistically his
role,
Wishing to interest in his chanted
woes
Brooks, eagles, crickets, every
flower that blows,
And even to us the rubric old who
made
To howl out publicly his wild
tirade?”
I could have (for my pride is
mountains high,
And dominates cloud tops or
demon’s cry)—
I could have simply turned my
sovereign head,
Had I not seen, ’mid their obscene
herd led,
Crime, that the sun has not yet
brought to book,
Queen of my spirit with the
peerless look.
And she laughed with them at my
dark distress,
And turned them oft some dirtiest
caress.
Le
Vin du Solitaire
The
strange look of a woman of the town,
Who glides toward us like the rays
that slake
The wave-wrought moon within the
trembling lake,
Where she would dip her careless
beauty down;
The last crown unto which a
gambler’s fingers cling;
A libertine caress from hungry
Adeline;
The sound of music, lulling,
silver, clean,
Like the far cry of human
suffering:
All these, deep bottle! are of
little worth
Beside the piercing balm thy
fertile girth
Holds in the reverent poet’s
lifted soul;
To him thou givest youth, and
hope, and life,
And pride, this treasure of all
beggar’s strife
That gives us triumph, Godhead,
for its dole.
Epilogue
to “Green
Alps”
Farewell,
my book, whose words I have not given
One tithe of those fierce
fires that in me dwell!
Now, after these long nights that
I have striven,
Farewell!
My spirit burns to know, but may
not tell,
Whether thy leaves, by autumn
breezes driven,
Fly far away beyond the immutable;
Whether thy soul shall find its
home in heaven,
Or dart far-flaming through
the vaults of hell—
To him that loveth much is much
forgiven.
Farewell!
INVOCATION*
O Self
Divine! O Living Lord of Me!
Self-shining flame, begotten of
Beyond!
Godhead immaculate! Swift tongue
of fire,
Kindled from that immeasurable
light
The boundless, the immutable. Come
forth,
My God, my lover, spirit of my
heart,
Heart of my soul, white virgin of
the Dawn,
My Queen of all perfection, come
thou forth
From thine abode beyond the
Silences
To me the prisoner, me the mortal
man,
Shrined in this clay: come forth,
I say, to me,
Initiate my quickened soul; draw
near,
And let the glory of thy godhead
shine
Through all the luminous aethers
of the air
Even to earth, thy footstool; unto
me
Who by these sacred invocations
draw
The holy influence within myself,
To strengthen and to purify my
will
And holy aspiration to thy Life.
Purge me and consecrate until my
heart
Burn through the very limit of the
veil,
And rend it at the hour of
sacrifice
That even the secret pillar in the
midst
May be made manifest to mortal
eyes.
Behold upon my right hand and my
left
The mighty pillars of amazing
fire,
And terrible cloud. Their tops in
Heaven are veiled,
Whereon the everlasting lamps
rejoice.
Their pedestals upon the Universe
Are set in rolling clouds, in
thunder-gusts,
In vivid flame, and tempest: but
to me,
Balanced between them, burns the
holy light
Veilless, one liquid wheel of
sacred fire,
Whirling immutably within itself
And formulating in the splendid
sun
Of its white moony radiance, in
the light
Of its immaculate eternity,
Thy glorious vision! O thou
Starlight face,
And crownèd diamond of my self and
soul,
Thou Queenly Angel of my Higher
Will,
Form in my spirit a more subtle
fire
Of God, that I may comprehend the
more
The sacred purity of thy divine
Essence! O Queen, O Goddess of my
life,
Light unbegotten, Scintillating
spark
Of the All-Self! O holy, holy
Spouse
Of my most godlike thought, come
forth! I say,
And manifest unto thy worshipper
In more candescent fulgours! Let
the air
Ring with the passion of my holy
cry
Unto the Highest. For persistent
will
And the continual fervour of my
soul
Have led me to this hour of
victory,
This throne of splendour. O thou
Beauty’s Self,
Thou holiest Crown thus manifest
to me,
Come forth, I say, come forth!
With mightier cries
Than Jesus uttered on the
quivering cross:
“Eli, Eli, lamma sabachthani,”
Thee, thee, thee only I invoke! O
Soul
Of my own spirit, let thy fervid
eyes
Give me their light: for thou dost
stand, as God
Among the Holy Ones. Before the
gods
Thy music moves, coequal, coeterne,
Thou, Lord of Light and Life and
Love! Come forth!
I call thee in the holiest name of
Him
Lord of the Universe, and by His
Name,
Jesus, the Godhead passing through
the gates
Of Hell, that even there the
rescuers
Might find the darkness, and
proclaim the light;
For I invoke thee by the sacred
rites
And secret words of everlasting
power:
By the swift symbol of the Golden
Dawn
And all its promise, by the Cross
of Fire,
And by the Gleaming Symbol: by the
Rose
And Cross of Light and Life: the
holy Ankh,
The Rose of Ruby and the Cross of
Gold.
By these I say, Come forth! my
holy Spouse,
And make me one with thine
abundant ray
Of the vast ocean of the
unmanifest
Limitless Negativity of Light
Flowing, in Jesus manifest,
through space,
In equilibrium, upon the world
Illumined by the White Supernal
Gleam
Through the red Cross of Calvary:
Come forth,
My actual Self! Come forth, O
dazzling one,
Wrapped in the glory of the Holy
Place
Whence I have called thee: Come
thou forth to me,
And permeate my being, till my
face
Shine with thy light reflected,
till my brows
Gleam with thy starry symbol, till
my voice
Reach the Ineffable: Come forth, I
say,
And make me one with thee: that
all my ways
May glitter with the holy
influence,
That I may be found worthy at the
end
To sacrifice before the Holy Ones:
That in thy Glory, Strength, and
Majesty,
And by the Beauty and Harmony of
Heaven
That fills its fountains at the
Well of Life,
I may be mighty in the Universe.
Yea, come thou forth, I mightily
conjure
Thy radiant Perfection, to compel
All Spirits to be subject unto Me,
That every spirit of the Firmament
And of the Ether, and upon the
Earth
And under Earth, and of the stable
land,
Of water, of the whirling of the
air,
Of the all-rushing fire; and every
Spell
And scourge of God the Vast One
may be made
Obedient unto me, to the All-Good
And ultimate Redemption: Hear me,
thou!
Eca, zodacare, Iad, goho,
Torzodu odo kikale qaa!
Zodacare od zodameranu!
Zodorje, lape zodiredo Ol
Noco Mada, das Iadapiel!
Ilas! hoatahe Iaida!
O crowned with starlight! Winged
with emerald
Wider than Heaven! O profounder
blue
Of the abyss of water! O thou
flame
Flashing through all the caverns
of the night,
Tongues leaping from the
immeasurable
Up through the glittering Steeps
unmanifest
To the ineffable! O Golden Sun!
Vibrating glory of my higher self!
I heard thy voice resounding in
the Abyss:
“I am the only being in the deep
Of Darkness: let me rise and gird
myself
To tread the path of Darkness:
even so
I may attain the light. For from
the Abyss
I came before my birth: from those
dim halls
And silence of a primal sleep! And
He,
The voice of Ages, answered me and
said:
Behold! for I am He that
formulates
In darkness! Child of Earth! the
Light doth shine
In darkness, but the darkness
understands
No ray of that initiating light!”
Now, by Initiation’s dangerous
path
And groping aspiration, came I
forth
Where the White Splendour shone
upon the Throne,
Even to the Temple of the Holy
Ones:
Now, by that Light, come forth, I
say, to me,
My Lady of the Starlight and the
Moon!
Come and be absolute within my
mind,
That I may take no dim remembrance
back
To drown this glory with earth’s
quivering gloom.
But, O abide within Me! Every hour
I need the lofty and the limpid
stream
Of that White Brilliance: Leave me
not alone,
O Holy Spirit! Come to comfort me,
To draw me, and to make me
manifest,
Osiris to the weeping world; that
I
Be lifted up upon the cross of
Pain
And Sacrifice, to draw all human
kind
And every germ of matter that hath
life,
Even after me, to the ineffable
Kingdom of Light! O holy, holy
Queen!
Let thy wide pinions overshadow
me!
I am, the Resurrection and the
Life!
The Reconciler of the Light and
Dark.
I am the Rescuer of mortal things.
I am the Force in Matter manifest.
I am the Godhead manifest in
flesh.
I stand above, among the Holy
Ones.
I am all-purified through
suffering,
All-perfect in the mystic
sacrifice,
And in the knowledge of my
Selfhood made
One with the Everlasting Lords of
Life.
The Glorified through Trial is My
Name.
The Rescuer of Matter is My Name.
I am the Heart of Jesus girt about
With the Swift Serpent! I,
Osirified,
Stand in this Hall of Twofold
Truth and say:
Holy art Thou, Lord of the
Universe!
Holy art Thou, whom Nature hath
not formed!
Holy art Thou, O Vast and Mighty
One!
O Lord of Darkness and O Lord of
Light!
Holy art Thou, O Light above all
Gods!
O Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy King
Ineffable, O Consciousness Divine
I whose white Presence, even I, a
god,
A god of gods, prostrate myself
and say:
I am the spark of Thine abundant
flame.
I am the flower, and Thou the
splendid Sun
Wherefrom my Life is drawn! All
hail to Thee,
For Holy, Holy, Holy, is Thy Name!
Holy art Thou, O Universal Lord!
Holy art Thou, whom Nature hath
not formed!
Holy art Thou, the Vast and Mighty
One!
O Lord of Darkness and O Lord of
Light!
I see the Darkness fall as
lightning falls!
I watch the Ages like a torrent
roll
Past Me: and as a garment I shake
off
The clinging skirts of Time. My
place is fixed
In the abyss beyond all Stars and
Suns.
I AM, the Resurrection and the
Life!
Holy art Thou, Lord of the
Universe!
Holy art Thou, whom Nature hath
not formed!
Holy art Thou, the Vast and Mighty
One!
O Lord of Darkness and O Lord of
Light!
* Versified from the Manuscript called
“ שeof
שein
Z2.”
A LITANY
I
Black
thine abyss of noon
Flings forth the thunder-swoon.
Smite us, and slay, Amoun,
Amoun, Achiha!
II
Thoth, from the starry space
Flash out the splendid face!
Wisdom, immortal grace,
Thoth, turn to usward!
III
Deep, deep thy sombre Sea,
Spouse of eternity!
Mother, we cry to Thee:
Hear us, Maut, Mother!
IV
Sound, sistron, sound afar!
Shine, shine, O dawning Star!
Flame, flame, O meteor Car!
Isis, Our Lady!
V
Strike, strike the louder chord!
Draw, draw the flaming sword,
Crowned child and conquering Lord:
Horus, avenger.
VI
Dawn-star of flaming light,
Five rays in one unite,
Light, Life, Love, Mercy, Might,
Star of the Magi.
VII
Lift, lift the Cross of Light,
Rose, golden, green, and white,
Rise, rise athwart the night!
Mighty Aeshuri!
VIII
Flame, flame, thou Blazoned Sun!
Seal-Star of Solomon!
Seven Mysteries in One!
Godhead and Mankind!
IX
Beauty and life and love!
Let fly thy darling dove!
Bend to us from above,
Lady Ahathor!
X
Where light and darkness meet,
There shine thy flaming feet,
There is thy splendid seat;
Mighty Anubi!
XI
Swift-winged Stability,
Lifting the earth and sky,
Hold me up utterly,
Keep me, O Shuwe!
XII
Virginal Queen of Earth,
Late love, and last of birth,
Loose, loose the golden girth,
Nephthys, the crowned one!
XIII
Hail, crowned Harpocrates,
Show, show thy secrecies,
Lotus-throned silences,
Typhon’s replacer!
CALL OF THE SYLPHS
Behold,
I am; a circle on whose hands
The twelvefold Kingdom of my
Godhead stands.
Six are the mighty seats of living
breath,
The rest sharp sickles, or the
horns of death,
Which are, and are not, save in
mine own power.
Sleep they? They rise at mine
appointed hour.
I made ye stewards in the primal
day,
And set your thrones in my
celestial way.
I gave ye power above the moving
time
That all your vessels to my crown
might climb.
From all the corners of your
fortress caves
Ye might invoke me, and your wise
conclaves
Should pour the fires of increase,
life and birth,
Continual dewfall to the thirsty
earth.
Thus are ye made of Justice and of
Truth,
The Souls of Fury, and the Lords
of Ruth.
In His great Name, your God’s, I
say, arise!
Behold! His mercies murmur in the
skies.
His Name is mighty in us to the
end.
In Him we cry: Move, answer, and
descend!
Apply yourselves to us; arise! For
why?
We are the Wisdom of your God most
high!
This fragment is a paraphrase of
one of the elemental invocations given in Dr Dee's famous
record of magical working.
CHALDEAN FOOLS
Chaldean
fools, who prayed to stars and fires,
Believed there was a God who
punished liars.
These gods of theirs they
often would invoke,
Apparently with
excellent effect:
They trusted to escape the
penal smoke
By making Truth the
trade-mark of their sect.
How fortunate that we are
Christian Folk,
And know these notions to be
incorrect!
THE HERMIT’S HYMN TO SOLITUDE
Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato
Sammasambuddhasa. Venerable Lord and Best of Friends.
We, seeing the cycle in which Maha
Brahma is perhaps more a drifting buoy than ourselves,
knowing that it is called the walking in delusion, the
puppet show of delusion, the writing of delusion, the fetter
of delusion, are aware that the way out of the desert is
found by going into the desert. Will you, in your lonely
lamaserai, accept this hymn from me, who, in the centre of
civilisation, am perhaps more isolated than you in your
craggy fastness among the trackless steppes of your
Untrodden Land?
Aleister
Crowley.
Paris,
A.B. 2446.
I
Mightiest
self! Supreme in Self-contentment!
Sole Spirit gyring in its own
ellipse;
Palpable, formless, infinite
presentment
Of thine own light in thine own
soul’s eclipse!
Let thy chaste lips
Sweep through the empty aethers
guarding thee
(As in a fortress girded by the
sea
The raging winds and wings of air
Lift the wild waves and bear
Innavigable foam to seaward), bend
thee down,
Touch, draw me with thy kiss
Into thine own deep bliss,
Into thy sleep, thy life, thy
imperishable crown!
Let that young godhead in thine
eyes
Pierce mine, fulfil me of their
secrecies,
Thy peace, thy purity, thy soul
impenetrably wise.
II
All things which are complete are
solitary;
The circling moon, the inconscient
drift of stars,
The central systems. Burn they,
change they, vary?
Theirs is no motion beyond the
eternal bars.
Seasons and scars
Stain not the planets, the
unfathomed home,
The spaceless, unformed faces in
the dome
Brighter and blacker than all
things,
Borne under the eternal wings
No whither: solitary are the
winter woods
And caves not habited,
And that supreme grey head
Watching the groves: single the
foaming amber floods,
And O! most lone
The melancholy mountain shrine and
throne,
While far above all things God
sits, the ultimate alone!
III
I sate upon the mossy promontory
Where the cascade cleft not his
mother rock,
But swept in whirlwind lightning
foam and glory,
Vast circling with unwearying
luminous shock
To lure and lock
Marvellous eddies in its wild
caress;
And there the solemn echoes caught
the stress,
The strain of that impassive tide,
Shook it and flung it high and
wide,
Till all the air took fire from
that melodious roar;
All the mute mountains heard,
Bowed, laughed aloud, concurred,
And passed the word along, the
signal of wide war.
All earth took up the sound,
And, being in one tune securely
bound,
Even as a star became the soul of
silence most profound.
IV
Thus there, the centre of that
death that darkened,
I sat and listened, if God’s voice
should break
And pierce the hollow of my ear
that harkened,
Lest God should speak and find me
not awake—
For his own sake.
No voice, no song might pierce or
penetrate
That enviable universal state.
The sun and moon beheld, stood
still.
Only the spirit’s axis, will,
Considered its own soul and sought
a deadlier deep,
And in its monotone mood
Of supreme solitude
Was neither glad nor sad because
it did not sleep;
But with calm eyes abode
Patient, its leisure that glactic
load,
Abode alone, nor even rejoiced to
know that it was God.
V
All change, all motion, and all
sound, are weakness!
Man cannot bear the darkness which
is death.
Even that calm Christ, manifest in
meekness,
Cried on the cross and gave his
ghostly breath,
On the prick of death,
Voice, for his passion could not
bear nor dare
The interlunar, the abundant air
Darkened, and silence on the
shuddering
Hill, and the unbeating wing
Of the legions of His Father, and
so died.
But I, should I be still
Poised between fear and will?
Should I be silent, I, and be
unsatisfied?
For solitude shall bend
Self to all selffulness, and have
one friend,
Self, and behold one God, and be,
and look beyond the End.
VI
O Solitude! how many have mistaken
Thy name for Sorrow’s, or for
Death’s or Fear’s!
Only thy children lie at night and
waken—
How shouldst thou speak and say
that no man hears?
O Soul of Tears!
For never hath fallen as dew thy
word,
Nor is thy shape showed, nor as
Wisdom’s heard
Thy crying about the city
In the house where is no pity,
But in the desolate halls and
lonely vales of sand:
Not in the laughter loud,
Nor crying of the crowd,
But in the farthest sea, the yet
untravelled land.
Where thou hast trodden, I have
trod;
Thy folk have been my folk, and
thine abode
Mine, and thy life my life, and
thou, who art thy God, my God.
VII
Draw me with cords that are not;
witch me chanted
Spells never heard nor open to the
ear,
Woven of silence, moulded in the
haunted
Houses where dead men linger year
by year.
I have no fear
To tread thy far irremeable way
Beyond the paths and palaces of
day,
Beyond the night, beyond the
skies,
Beyond eternity’s
Tremendous gate; beyond the
immanent miracle.
O secret self of things!
I have nor feet nor wings
Except to follow far beyond Heaven
and Earth and Hell,
Until I mix my mood
And being in thee, as in my
hermit’s hood
I grow the thing I
contemplate—that selfless solitude!
THE STORM
Written on the North Atlantic Ocean.
In
the sorrow of the silence of the sunset, when the world’s
heart sinks to sleep,
And the waking wind arises from the
wedding of the aether and the deep,
There are perfumes through the saltness
of the even; there are hints of flowers afar;
And the God goes down lamented by the
lonely vesper star.
The monsters rise around us as we move
in moving mist,
Slow whales that swim as musing, and
lo! or ever we wist,
Looms northward in the grey, mysterious
ice, cathedral high,
Clad in transparent clouds of cold, as
a ghost in drapery.
The solemn dusk descending creeps
around us from the East;
Clouded as with the ungainly head of a
mysterious beast.
Long wisps of darkness (even as
fingers) reach and hold
The sobbing West toward them, clasp the
barred Hesperian gold.
Still pale a rose reflection lingers,
in pure soft blue;
Even above the tempest, where a lonely
avenue
Leads from the wan moon’s image,
shadowy in the air,
Waning, half hidden from the sun—and
yet her soul is there.
So stand I looking ever down to the
rolling sea,
Breast-heaves of a sleeping mother,
spouse of Eternity:
The dark deep ocean mother, that
another hath reviled,
Calling her bitter and barren—and am I
not her child?
O mother sea, O beautiful, more
excellent than earth,
How is thy travail understood, except
thou give me birth?
O waves of death, O saltness, O sorrow
manifold!
I see beneath thy darkness azure;
deeper still, the heart of gold.
Am I not true, O mother, who hast held
the lives of men
Sucked down to thy swart bosom—O render
not again!
Keep thou our life and mix it with
thine eternal sleep:
Rest, let us rest from passion there,
deep! O how deep!
Deep calleth unto deep, Amen! hast thou
no passion, thou?
Even now the white flames kindle on thy
universal brow.
I hear white serpents hiss and wild
black dragons roll;
And the storm of love is on thee—ah!
shall it touch thy soul?
Nay, O my mother, in eternal calm thy
virginal depths lie.
The peace of God, that passeth
understanding, that am I!
Even I, perceiving deeply beneath the
eyes of flame
The soul that, kindling, is not
kindled: I have known thy Name.
Awake, O soaring billows! Lighten the
raging dome,
Wrap the wide horizon in a single cloak
of flaming foam,
Leap in your fury! Beat upon the shores
un-seen! Devour your food,
The broken cliff, the crumbled bank,
the bar. I know the mood.
Even so I see the terror of universal
strife:
Murderous war, and murderous peace, and
miser-able life:
The pang of childbirth, and the pain of
youth, and the fear of age,
Life tossed and broken into dust in the
elemental rage.
Is not God part of every the tiniest
spark of man?
Is He not moulded also in His own
eternal plan?
Even so; as the woes of earth is the
angry crested sea.
Even so; as Her great peace abideth in
the deep—so He!
What wreck floats by us? What pale
corpse rolls horribly above,
Tossed on the unbewailing foam, cast
out of light and life and love?
The sea shall draw thee down, O
brother, to her breast of peace,
Her unimaginable springs, her bridal
secrecies.
Even so draw me in life, O mother, to
thy breast!
Below the storm, below the wind, to the
abiding rest!
That I may know thy purpose and
understand thy ways:
So, weeping always for the woe, also
the love to praise!
The darkness falls intensely: no light
invades the gloom.
Stillness drops dew-like from the
heaven’s unre-verberant womb.
Westward the ship is riding on the
sable wings of night,
I understand the darkness—why should I
seek the light?
HYMN TO APOLLO
Written in the Temple of Apollo.
God
of the golden face and fiery forehead!
Lord of the Lion’s house of
strength, exalted
In the Ram’s horns! O ruler of the
vaulted
Heavenly hollow!
Send out thy rays majestic, and
the torrid
Light of thy song! thy countenance
most splendid
Bend to the suppliant on his face
extended!
Hear me, Apollo!
Let thy fierce fingers sweep the
lyre forgotten!
Recall the ancient glory of thy
chanted
Music that thrilled the hearts of
men, and haunted
Life to adore thee!
Cleanse thou our market-places
misbegotten!
Fire in my heart and music to my
paean
Lend, that my song bow, past the
empyrean,
Phoebus, before thee!
All the old worship in this land
is broken;
Yet on my altar burns the ancient
censer,
Frankincense, saffron, galbanum,
intenser!
Ornaments glisten.
Robes of thy colour bind me for
thy token.
My voice is fuller in thine
adoration.
Thine image holds its
god-appointed station.
Lycian, listen!
My prayers more eloquent than
olden chants
Long since grown dumb on the soft
forgetful airs—
My lips are loud to herald thee:
my prayers
Keener to follow.
I do aspire, as thy long sunbeam
slants
Upon my crown; I do aspire to thee
As no man yet—I am in ecstasy!
Hear me, Apollo!
My chant wakes elemental flakes of
light
Flashing along the sandal-footed
floor.
All listening spirits answer and
adore
Thee, the amazing!
I follow to the eagle-baffling
sight,
Limitless oceans of abounding
space;
Purposed to bind myself, but know
thy face,
Phoebus, in gazing.
O hear me! hear me! hear me! for
my hands,
Dews deathly bathe them; sinks the
stricken song;
Eyes that were feeble have become
the strong,
See thee and glisten.
Blindness is mine; my spirit
understands,
Weighs out the offering, accepts
the pain,
Hearing the paean of the unprofane!
Lycian, listen!
God of the fiery face, the eyes
inviolate!
Lord of soundless thunders,
lightnings lightless!
Hear me now, for joy that I see
thee sightless,
Fervent to follow.
Grant one boon; destroy me, let me
die elate,
Blasted with light intolerant of a
mortal,
That the undying in me pass thy
portal!
Hear me, Apollo.
Hear me, or if about thy courts be
girded
Paler some purple softening the
sunlight
Merciful, mighty, O divide the one
light
Into a million
Shattered gems, that I mingle in
my worded
Measures some woven filament of
passion
Caught, Phoebus, from thy
star-girt crown, to fashion
Poet’s pavilion.
Let me build for thee an abiding
palace
Rainbow-hued to affirm thy light
divided,
Yet where starry words, by thy
soul guided,
Sing as they glisten,
Dew-drops diamonded from the
abundant chalice!
Swoons the prayer to silence; pale
the altar
lows at thy presence as the last
words falter—
ycian, listen!
VENUS
Written in the temple of the L.I.L.,
No. 9, Central America.
Mistress
and maiden and mother, immutable mutable soul!
Love, shalt thou turn to another?
Surely I give thee the whole!
Light, shall thou flicker or darken?
Thou and thy lover are met.
Bend from thy heaven and hearken! Life,
shalt thou fade or forget?
Surely my songs are gone down as leaves
in the dark that are blown;
Surely the laurel and crown have faded
and left me alone.
Vainly I cry in the sunlight; moon
pities my passion in vain.
Dark to my eyes is the one light,
aching in bosom and brain.
Surely, O mother, thou knowest! Have I
not followed thy star?
I have gone whither thou goest,
bitterly followed afar,
Buried my heart in thy sorrow, cast
down my soul at thy knees.
Thou, thou hast left me no morrow. Days
and de-sires, what are these?
Nay, I have torn from my breast passion
and love and despair:
Sought in thy palaces rest, sleep that
awaited me there;
Sleep that awaits me in vain: I have
done with the hope of things;
Passion and pleasure and pain have
stung me, and lost their stings.
Only abides there a hollow, void as the
heart of the earth.
Echo may find it and follow, dead from
the day of her birth.
Life, of itself not insatiate; death,
not presuming to be;
Share me intense and emaciate, waste
me, are nothing to me.
Still in the desolate place, still in
the bosom that was
Even as a veil for thy face, thy face
in a breathed-on glass,
Hangs there a vulture, and tears with a
beak of iron and fire.
I know not his name, for he wears no
feathers of my desire.
It is thou, it is thou, lone maiden! My
heart is a bird that flies
Far into the azure laden with love-lorn
songs and cries.
O Goddess of Nature and Love! Thyself
is the lover I see.
But thou art in the above, and thy kiss
is not for me.
Thou art all too far for my kiss; thou
art hidden past my prayer.
Thy wing too wide, and the bliss too
sweet for me to share.
Thou art Nature and God! I am broken in
the wheelings of thy car;
Thy love-song unheard or unspoken, and
I cannot see thy star.
Thou art not cold, but bitter is thy
burning cry to me.
My tiny heart were fitter for a mortal
than for thee.
But I cast away the mortal, and I
choose the tortured way,
And I stand before thy portal, and my
face is cold and grey.
Thou lovest me with a love more
terrible than death;
But thou art in the above, and my wings
feel no wind’s breath.
Thou art all to fierce and calm, too
bitter and sweet, alas!
Thou weavest a cruel charm on my soul
that is as glass.
I know thee not, who art naked; I lie
beneath thy feet
Who hast called till my spirit ached
with a pang too deathly sweet.
Thou has given thee to me dying, and
made thy bed to me.
I shiver, I shrink, and, sighing,
lament it cannot be.
I have no limbs as a God’s to close
thee in and hold:
Too brief are my periods, and my hours
are barren of gold.
I am not thewed as Jove to kill thee in
one caress!
Not a golden shower is my love, but a
child’s tear of distress.
Give me the strength of a panther, the
tiger’s strenuous sides,
The lion’s limbs that span there some
thrice the turn of the tides,
The mutinous fame, the terror of the
royal Mino-taur,
That our loves may make a mirror of the
dreadful soul of war!
For love is an equal soul, and shares
an equal breath.
I am nought—and thou the whole? It were
not love, but Death.
Give me thy life and strength, let us
struggle for mastery,
As the long shore’s rugged length that
battles with the sea.
I am thine, I am thine indeed! My form
is vaster grown,
And our limbs and lips shall bleed on
the starry solar throne.
My life is made as thine; my blessing
and thy curse
Beget, as foam on wine, a different
universe.
I foam and live and leap: thou laughest,
fightest, diest!
In agony swift as sleep thou hangest as
the Christ.
My nails are in thy flesh; my sweat is
on thy brow;
We are one, we are made afresh, we are
Love and Nature now.
I am swifter than the wind: I am wider
than the sea:
I am one with all mankind: and the
earth is made as we.
The stars are spangles bright on the
canopy of our bed,
And the sun is a veil of light for my
lover’s golden head.
O Goddess, maiden, and wife! Is the
marriage bed in vain?
Shall my heart and soul and life shrink
back to themselves again?
Be thou my one desire, my soul in day
as in night!
My mind the home of the Higher! My
heart the centre of Light!
ASSUMPTA CANIDIA
Written in Mexico City.
Waters
that weep upon the barren shore
Where some lone mystery of
man abides;
As if the wailing of forsaken
brides,
Rapt from the kiss of love for
evermore,
Impressed its memory on the
desolate
Sounds at its edge; on such a
strand of tears
I linger through the long
forgetful years,
My sin for mother, and my woe for
mate.
I am a soul lost
utterly—forbear!
I am unworthy both of tear
and prayer.
The mystic slumber of my sense
forlorn
Stirs only now and then; some
deeper pang
Reminds despair there is a
sharper fang,
Reminds my night of a tempestuous
morn.
For I am lost and lonely: in the
skies
I see no hope of any sun or
star;
On earth there blooms no
rose, no nenuphar;
No cross is set for hope of
sacrifice.
I cannot sleep, I cannot
wake; and death
Passes me by with his desired
breath.
No shadow in my mind to prove a
sun;
No sorrow to declare that joy
exists;
A cycle of dim spectres in
the mists
Moves just a little; lastly there
is One,
One central Being, one elusive
shape,
Not to aspire to, not to
love; alas!
Only a memory in the aged
mass
Of chained ones bound to me
without escape!
Oh, doom of God! Oh, brand
how worse than Cain’s!
Divided being, undivided
pains!
What is this life? (To call it
life that grows
No inch throughout all time.)
This bitterness
Too weak and hateful to be
called distress?
Slow memory working backward only
knows
There was some horror grown to it
for kin;
Some final leprous growth
that took my brain,
Weaving a labyrinth of
dullest pain
From the sweet scarlet threat I
thought was sin.
I cannot sin! Alas, one sin
were sweet!
But sin is living—and we
cannot meet!
So long ago, so miserably long!
I was a maiden—oh how rich
and rare
Seemed the soft sunshine
woven in my hair!
How keen the music of my body’s
song!
How white the blossom of my body’s
light!
How red the lips, how
languorous the eyes,
How made for pleasure, for
the sleepy sighs
Softer than sleep; amorous
dew-dreams of night
That draw out night in kisses
to the day!
So was I to my seeming as I
lay.
That soft smooth-moving ocean of
the west
Under the palm and cactus as
it rolled,
Immortal blue, fixed with
immortal gold,
Moving in rapture with my sleeping
breast!
The young delicious green, the
drunken smell
Of the fresh earth, the
luxury of the glow
Where many colours mingled
into snow,
Song-marvels in the air desirable.
So lazily I lay, and watched
my eyes
In the deep fountain’s
sun-stirred harmonies.
I loved myself! O Thou! (I cried)
divine
Woman more lovely than the
flowers of earth!
O Self-hood softer than the
babe at birth,
Sweeter than love, more amorous
than wine,
Where is thy peer upon the face of
life?
I love myself, the daughter
of the dawn.
Come, silken night, in your
deep wings with-drawn
Let me be folded, as a tender wife
In my own arms imagined! Let
me sleep,
Unwaking from the admirable
deep!
My arms fell lazily about the bed.
I lay in some delicious
trance. I fell
Deep through sleep’s chambers
to the gate of Hell,
And on that flaming portalice I
read
The legend, “Here is beauty, here
delight,
Here love made more desirable
than thine,
Fiercer than light, more
dolorous than wine.
Here the embraces of the Sons of
Night!
Come, sister, come; come,
lonely queen of breath!
Here are the lustres and the
flames of death.”
Hence I was whirled, as in a wind
of light,
Out to the fragrance of a
loftier air,
A keener scent, and rising
unaware
Out of the Palace of Luxurious
Night,
I came to where the Gate of Heaven
shone,
Battled with comet and with
meteor.
Behold within that crested
House of War,
One central glory of a sapphire
stone,
Whereon there breathed a
sense, a mist, a sun!
I stood and laughed upon the
Ancient One.
For He was silent as my body’s
kiss,
And sleeping as my many-coloured
hair,
And living as my eyes and
lips; and where
The vast creation round him cried
“He Is!”,
No murmur reached Him; He was set
alone,
Alone and central. Ah! my
eyes were dim.
I worshipped even; for I
envied Him.
So, moving upward to the azure
throne,
I spread my arms unto that
ambient mist;
Lifted my life and soul up to
be kissed!
A million million voices roared
aloud!
A million million sabres
flashed between!
Flamed the vast falchion!
Fiery Cherubim
Flung me astounded to the mist and
cloud.
A stone, flung downward through
eternal space,
I dropped. What bitter curses
and despair
Rang through wide aether! How
the trumpet blare
Cursed back at me! Thou canst not
see His Face!
Equal and Spouse? Bring forth
the Virgin Dower,
Eternal Wisdom and Eternal
Power!
I woke! and in a well’s untroubled
pool
I saw my face—and I was ugly
now!
Blood-spattered ebony eyelash
and white brow!
Blood on my lips, and hair, and
breast! “Thou fool!”
A horrid torture in my heart—and
then
I licked my lips: the tigress
tasted blood.
My changed features—wash them
in the flood
Of murder! This is power over men
And angels. I will lift the
twisted rod,
And make my power as the
power of God!
I made my beauty as it was before.
I learned strange secrets; by
my love and skill
I bent creation to my wanded
will.
I tuned the stars, I bound the
bitter shore
Beyond the Pleiads: until the
Universe
Moved at my mantra: Heaven
and Hell obeyed;
Creation at my orders stayed
or swayed.
“Take back,” I cried, “the mockery
of a curse!”
“I wield Thy Power.” With my
magic rod
Again I strode before the
Throne of God.
“Forgone my Virgin Splendour! I
aspire
No longer as a maiden to thy
Love.
We twain are set in majesty
above:
My cloud is mighty as thy mystic
Fire.”
Vanished the mist, the light, the
sense, the throne!
Vanished the written horror
of the curse;
Vanished the stars, the sun,
the Universe.
I was in Heaven, lost, alone.
Alone!
A new curse gathered as a
sombre breath:
“Power without Wisdom is the
Name of Death!”
And therefore from my devastating
hand
(for I was then unwilling to
be dead)
I loosed the lightning, and
in hate and dread
Despairing, did I break the royal
wand.
Mortal, a plaything for a thousand
fears,
I found the earth; I found a
lonely place
To gaze for ever on the
ocean’s face,
Lamenting through the lamentable
years;
Without a god, deprived of
life and death,
Sensible only to that sombre
breath.
Thus wait I on the
spring-forgotten shore;
Looking with vain unweeping
eyes, for aye
Into the wedding of the sea
and sky,
(That do not wed, ay me!) for
evermore
Hopeless, forgetting even to
aspire
Unto that Wisdom; miserably
dumb;
Waiting for the Impossible to
come,
Whether in mercy or damnation
dire—
I who have been all Beauty
and all Power!—
This is thine hour, Apollyon,
thine Hour!
I, who have twice beheld the awful
throne;
And, as it were the vision of
a glass,
Beheld the Mist be born
thereon, and pass;
I, who have stood upon the
four-square stone!
I, who have twice been One—! Woe,
woe is me!
Lost, lost, upon the
lifeless, deathless plane,
The desert desolate, the air
inane;
Fallen, O fallen to eternity!
I, who have looked upon the
Lord of Light;
I, I am Nothing, and
dissolved in Night!
(The
Spirit of God,
descending, assumeth
her into the Glory
of God.)
NIGHT IN THE VALLEY
I
lay within the
forest’s virgin womb
Tranced in the sweetness,
nuptial, indolent,
Of the faint breeze and tropical
perfume,
And all the music far lone
waters lent
Unto the masses of magnolia bloom,
Tall scarlet lilies, and the
golden scent
Shed by strange clusters of more
pallid flowers,
And purple lustre strewn amid the
twilight bowers.
Far, far the pastureless, the
unquiet sea
Moaned; far the stately
pyramid of cold
Shrouding the stars, arose: sweet
witchery
That brought them in the
drowsing eye, to fold
The picture in: with winged
imagery
That Hermes gathers with that
floral gold
Whose triple flower or flame or
pinioned light
Lends life to death, and love and
colour unto light.
How flames that scarlet stronger
than Apollo,
Too swift and warm to know
itself a bird!
How the light winds and waves of
moonlight follow,
Shot from the West, cadence
of Daylight’s word!
How flock the tribes of wings
within the hollow,
Even as darkness summons home
the herd!
The still slow water slackens into
sleep.
The rose-glow dies, leaves cold
Citlaltepetl’s steep.
The chattering voices of the day
depart.
Earth folds her limbs and
leans her loving breast
Even to all her children: the
great heart
Beats solemnly the requiem of
rest.
The sea keeps tune; the silent
stars upstart
Seeming to sentinel that
sombre crest
Where of old time burst out the
vulture fire
Cyclopean, that is dead, now, as a
man’s desire.
The drowsy cries of night birds,
then the song
Lovely and lovelorn in the
listening vale,
So wild and tender, swooping down
in long
Notes of despair, then
lifting the low tale
In golden notes to skyward in one
throng
Of clustered silver, so the
nightingale
Tunes the wild flute, as dryads he
would gather
To roof with music in the palace
of the weather,
With love despairing, dying as
music dies;
With lost souls’ weeping, and
the bitter muse
Of such as lift their hearts in
sacrifice
On some strange cross, or
shed Sicillian dews
Over a sadder lake than Sicily’s—
Hark! they are leaping from
the valley views
Into the light and laughter and
deep grief
Of that immortal heart that sings
beyond belief.
How pitiful, how beautiful, the
faces!
The long hair shed on
shoulders ivory white!
Each note shoots down the dim
arboreal spaces
Like amber or like hyaline
lit with light.
Each spirit glimmers in the
shadowy places
Like hyacinths or emeralds:
or the night
Shows them as shadows of some
antique gem
Where moonlight fills its cup and
flashes into them.
So, in the moony twilight and the
splendour
Of music’s light, the
desolate nightingale
Fills all the interlunar air with
tender
Kisses like song, or shrills
upon the scale,
Till quivering moonrays shake
again, to send her
Luminous tunes through every
sleepy vale,
While the slow dancers
rhythmically reap
The fairy amaranth, and silver
wheat of sleep.
Now over all that scythe of sleep
impending
Mows the pale flowers of
vision following;
Dryad and bird and fount and
valley blending
Into one dreamy consciousness
of spring;
And all the night and all the
world is ending,
And all the souls that weep
and hearts that sing!
So, as the dew hides in the lotus
blossom,
Sleep draws me with her kiss into
her bridal bosom.
Vera
Cruz, March
31, 1901.
MARCH IN THE TROPICS
What
ails thee, earth? Is not the breath of Spring
Exultant on thy breast? What
aileth thee,
O many-mooded melancholy sea?
Hear the swift rush of that
triumphant wing!
Listen! the world’s whole heart is
listening!
In England now the leaf leaps, and
the tree
Gleams dewy, and the bird woos
noisily.
Here in the tropics now is no such
thing.
Dull heavy heat burns through the
clouded sky,
And yet no promise of the latter
rains.
Earth bears her fruit, but
unrefreshed of death.
In winter is no sorrow, in the dry
Harsh spring no joy, while
pestilence and pains
Hover like wolves behind the
summer’s breath.
METEMPSYCHOSIS
Written at Vera Cruz.
Dim
goes the sun down there behind the tall
And mighty crest of Orizaba’s
snow:
Here, gathering at the nightfall,
to and fro,
Fat vultures, foul and carrion,
flap, and call
Their ghastly comrades to the
domed wall
That crowns the grey cathedral.
There they go—
The parasites of death, decay and
woe,
Gorged with the day’s indecent
festival.
I think these birds were once the
souls of priests.
They haunt by ancient habit the
old home
Wherein they held high mass in
days of old.
But now they soar above it—for
behold!
God hath looked mercifully down on
Rome,
Promoting thus her children to be
beasts.
ADVICE OF A LETTER
The
Wingèd Bull that dwelled in the north
Hath flown into the West, and
uttered forth
His thunders in the Mountains. He
shall come
Where blooms the sempiterne
chrysanthemum.
The wingèd Lion, that wrought dire
amaze
In the Dark Place, where Light
was, did his ways
Take fiery to enkindle a new
flame:
The Eagle of the High Lands yet
that came
By the red sunset to an eastern
sky
Shall plume himself and gather him
and fly
Even as a Man that rideth on a
Beast
Trained, to the Golden Dawn-sky of
the East.
Therefore his word shall seek the
Ivory Isle
By double winds and by the double
Style,
Twin doorways of the Sunset and
the Dawn.
And thou who tak’st it, shall be
subtly drawn
Into strange vigils, and shalt
surely see
The ancient form and memory of me,
Nor me distinct, but shining with
that Light
Wherein the Sphinx and Pyramid
unite.
[With a letter to Ceylon, sent
from Mexico in duplicate for certainty by way both of
England and Japan.]
ON WAIKIKI BEACH
Upheaved
from Chaos, through the dark sea hurled,
Through the cleft heart of
the amazed sea,
Sprang, ’mid deep thunderous
throats of majesty,
Titanic, in the waking of the
world;
Sprang, one vast mass of
spume and molten fire,
Lava, tremendous waves of
earth; sprang higher
Than the sea’s crest
volcano-torn, to be
Written in Cyclopean
charactery,
Hawaii. Here she
stands
Queen of all
laughter’s lands
That dance for dawn, lie
tranced in leisured noon,
Dreaming through
day towards night,
Craving the
perfumed light
Of the stars lustrous,
and the gem-born moon.
Dewy with clustered
diamond,
The long land swoons to sleep; the
sea sleeps and yet wakes beyond.
Here, in the crescent beach and
bay, the sea,
Curven and carven in warm
shapes of dream,
Answers the love-song of the
lilied stream,
And moves to bridal music. Stern
and free,
The lion-shapen headland
guards the shore;
The ocean, the bull-throated,
evermore
Roars; the vast wheel of
heaven turns above,
Its rim of pain, its
jewelled heart of love;
Sun-waved, the
eagle wing
Of the air of
feathered spring
Royally sweeps and on the
musical merge
Watches alone the
man.
O silvern shape and
span
Of moonlight, reaching over
the grey, large
Breast of the
surf-bound strand,
Life of the earth, God’s child,
Man’s bride, the light of the sweet land!
Are emeralds ever a spark of this
clear green,
Or sapphires hints of this
diviner blue,
Or rubies shadows of this
rosy hue,
Or light itself elsewhere so clear
and clean?
For all the sparkling dews of
heaven fallen far
Crystalline, fixed, forgotten
(as a star
Forgets its nebulous
virginity)
Are set in all the sky
and earth and sea.
Shining with solar
fire,
The single-eyed
desire
Of scent and sound and sight
and sense perfuses
The still and
lambent light
Of the essential
night;
And all the heart of me is
fain, and muses,
As if for ever
doomed to dream
Or pass in peace Lethean adown the
grey Lethean stream.
So deep the sense of beauty, and
so keen!
The calm abiding holiness of
love
Reigns; and so fallen from
the heights above
Immeasurable, the influence unseen
Of music and of spiritual
fire,
That the soul sleeps,
forgotten of desire,
Only remembering its
God-like birth
Reflected in the deity
of earth,
Becometh even as
God.
The pensive period
Of night and day beats like a
waving fan
No more, no more:
the years,
Reft of their joys
and fears,
Pass like pale faces, leave
the life of man
Untroubled of their
destines,
Leave him forgotten of life and
time, immortal, calm and wise.
Only the ceaseless surf on coral
towers,
The changeless change of the
unchanging ocean,
Laps the bright night, with
unsubstantial motion
Winnowing the starlight, plumed with feathery flowers
Of foam and phosphor glory,
the strange glow
Of the day’s amber fallen to
indigo,
Lit of its own depth in
some subtle wise,
A pavement for the
footsteps from the skies
Of angels walking
thus
Not all unseen of
us,
Nor all unknown, nor
unintelligible,
When with souls
lifted up
In the Cadmean cup,
As incense lifted in the
thurible,
We know that God is
even as we,
Light from the sky, and life on
earth, and love beneath the sea.
THE DANCE OF SHIVA
Written at the House of Sri Parananda
Swami, Ceylon.
With
feet set terribly dancing,
With eyelids filled of flame,
Wild lightnings from Him glancing,
Lord Shiva went and came.
The dancing of His feet was heard
And was the final word.
He danced the measure golden
On dead men . . .
His Saints and Rishis olden,
The yogins that . . .
He trampled them to dust and they
Were sparks and no more clay.
The dust thrown up around Him
In cycles whirled and twined,
Dim sparks that fled and found Him
Like mist beyond the mind.
The universe was peopled then
With little gods, and men.
In that ecstatic whirling
He saw not nor . . .
He knew not in his fervour
Creation’s sated sigh;
The groan of the Preserver,
Life’s miserable lie.
I broke that silence, and afraid
I knew not what I prayed
. . . . . . .
Let peace awaken for an hour
And manifest as power.
. . . . . . .
Cease not the dance unceasing,
The glance nor swerve nor
cease,
Thy peace by power increasing
In me by power to peace.
Desunt cetera.
[The MS. of this Hymn most
mysteriously disappeared twp days after being written. I can
remember no more of it than the above; nor will inspiration
return.]
SONNET FOR A PICTURE
Written in the woods above Kandy.
Inscribed to T. Davidson.
Lured
by the loud big-breasted courtesan
That plies trained lechery of
obedient eyes,
He sits, holds bed’s last
slattern-sweet surprise,
Late plucked from gutter to grace
groves of Pan.
The third one, ruddy as they twain
are wan,
Hungrily gazes, sees her
tower of lies
Blasted that instant in some
wizard wise—
The frozen look—the miserable man!
What sudden barb of what detested
dart
Springs from Apollo’s bowstring to
his heart?
On sense-dulled ears what Voice
rings the decree?
“For thee the women burn: the
wine is cool:
For thee the fresco and the
fruit—thou fool!
This night thy soul shall be
required of thee!”
THE HOUSE
A NIGHTMARE
Written at Anurahapura.
I
must be ready
for my friend to-night.
So, such pale flowers as winter bears
bedeck
The old oak walls: the wood-fire’s
cheerful light
Flashes upon the fire-dogs
silver-bright.
Wood? why, the jetsam of yon broken
wreck
Where the white sea runs o’er the sandy
neck
That joins my island to the land when
tides
Run low. What curious fancies through
my brain
Run, all so wild and all so pleasant!
Glides
No phantom creeping from the under
sides
Of the grey globe: no avatar of pain
Gathering a body from the wind and
rain.
So the night fell, and gently grew the
shades
In firelight fancies taking idle form;
Often a flashing May-day ring of maids,
Or like an army through resounding
glades
Glittering, with martial music,
trumpet, shawm,
Drum—so I build the echoes of the storm
Into a pageant of triumphant shapes.
So, as the night grows deeper, and no
moon
Stirs the black heaven, no star its
cloud escapes,
I sit and watch the fire: my musing
drapes
My soul in darker dreams; the storm’s
wild tune
Rolls ever deeper in my shuddering
swoon:
Whereat I start, shudder, and pull
together
My mind. Why, surely it must be the
hour!
My friend is coming through the wet
wild weather
Across the moor’s inhospitable heather
To the old stately tower—my own dear
tower.
He will not fail me for a sudden
shower!
My friend! How often have I longed to
see
Again his gallant figure and that face
Radiant—how long ago we parted!—we
The dearest friends that ever were! Ah
me!
I curse even now that hateful
parting-place.
But now—he comes! How glad I am! Apace
Fly the glad minutes—There he is at
last!
I know the firm foot on the marble
floor.
The hour-glass turns! What miseries to
cast
For ever to the limbo of the past!
He knocks—my friend! O joy for
ever-more!
He calls! “Open the door! Open the
door!”
You guess how gladly to the door I
rushed
And flung it wide. Why! no one’s there!
Arouse!
I am asleep. What horror came and
crushed
My whole soul’s life out as some shadow
brushed
My body and passed it? All sense allows
At last the fearful truth—This is the
house!
This is my old house on the marsh, and
here,
Here is the terror of the distant sea
Moaning, and here the wind that wails,
the drear
Groans like a ghost’s, the desolate
house of fear
Whence I fled once from my great enemy—
This is the house! O speechless misery!
Here the great silver candlesticks
illume
The aged book, the blackness blazoned
o’er
With golden characters and scarlet
bloom
Twined in the blue-tinged sigils
wrought for doom,
And dreadful names of necromancer’s
lore
Written therein; so stood my room
before
When the hissed whisper came, “Beware!
Beware!
They’re coming!” and “They’re coming!”
when the wind
Bore the blank echoes of their stealthy
care
To creep up silently and find me there,
Hid in the windowless old house, stark
blind
For fear—and then—what horrors lurked
behind
The door firm barred!—and thus they
cried in vain:
“Open the door!” Then crouched I mad
with fear
Till at the dawn their footsteps died
again.
They can do nothing to me—that is
plain—
While the door bars them! What is it
runs clear
Truth in my mind? Once more they may be
near?
And then came memory. Wide the portal
stood
And—what had brushed me as it passed?
What froze
My dream to this awakening—fearful
flood
Of horror loosed, loosing a sweat of
blood,
An agony of terror on these brows?
God! God! Indeed, indeed this is the
house!
The candles sputtered and went out. I
stood
Fettered by fear, and heard the lonely
wind
Lament across the marsh. A frenzied
flood
Of hate and loathing swept across my
mood,
And with a shudder I flung the door to.
Mind
And body sank a huddled wreck behind.
Nought stirred. Draws hither the grim
doom of Fate?
A long, long, while.
Now—in the central core
Of my own room what accent of keen
hate,
Triumphant malice, mockery satiate,
Rings in the voice above the storm’s
wild roar?
It cries “Open the door! Open the
door!”
ANIMA LUNAE
Written partly under the great rock
Sigiri, in Ceylon, partly in Arabia, near Aden.
Zôhra
the king by feathered fans
Slept lightly through the mid-day heat.
Swart giants with drawn yataghans
Guard, standing at his head and feet,
Zôhra, the mightiest of the khans!
Each slave Circassian like a moon
Sits smiling, burning with young bloom
Of dawn, and weaves an airy tune
Like a white bird’s song bright and bold
That dips a fiery plume.
So the song lulled, lazily rolled
In tubes of silver, lutes of gold;
And all that palace drowsed away
The hours that fanned with silken fold
The progress of the Lord of Day.
Yet, as he slept, a grey
Shadow of dream drew near, and stooped
And glided through the ranks of slaves,
Leaving no shadow where they drooped,
No echo in the architraves
As silent as the grave’s.
That shape vibrated to the tune
Of thought lulled low; the stirless swoon
Half felt its fellow gather close,
Yet stirred not: now the intruder moves,
Turns the tune slowlier to grave rows
Of palm trees, losing life in loves
Less turbid than the mildest dream
That ever stirred the stream
Whereon night floats, a shallop faint,
Ivory and silver bow and beam,
Dim-figured with the images
Divinely quaint
Of gold engraved, forth shadowing sorceries.
So the king dreamed of love: and passing on
The shape moved quicker, winnowing with faint fans
The soundless air of thought: the noonday sun
Seemed to the mightiest of a thousand khans
Like to a man’s
Brief life—a thousand such dream spans!—
And so he dreamed of life: and failing plumes
Wrought through ancestral looms
In the man’s brain: and so he dreamed of death.
And slower still the grey God wrought
Dividing consciousness from breath,
And life and death from thought.
So the king dreamed of Nought.
Yet subtly-shapen was this Nothingness,
Not mere negation, as before that dream
Drew back the veil of sleep;
But strange: the king turned idly, sought to press
The bosom where love lately burnt supreme,
And found no ivory deep.
He turned and sought out life; and nothing lived:
Death, and nought died. The king’s brow fell. Sore grieved
He rose, not knowing: and before his will
Swan’s throat, dove’s eyes, moon’s breast, and woman’s
mouth,
And form desirable
Of all the clustered love drew back: grew still
“O turn, my lover, turn thee to the South!”
The girl’s warm song of the Siesta’s hour.
Heedless of all that flower,
Eager to feel the strong brown fingers close
On the unshrinking rose
And pluck it to his breast to perish there;
With neither thought nor care
Nor knowledge he went forth: none stay, none dare
Proffer a pavid prayer.
There was a pavement bright with emerald
Glittering on malachite
Clear to the Sun: low battlements enwalled
With gold the ground enthralled,
Sheer to the sight
Of sun and city: thither in his trance
The king’s slow steps advance.
There stood he, and with eyes unfolded far
(Clouds shadowing a star
Or moonlight seen through trees—so came the lashes
Over—and strong sight flashes!)
Travelled in thought to life, and in its gleam
Saw but a doubtful dream.
His was a city crescent-shaped whose wall
Was brass and iron: in the thrall
Of the superb concave
Lay orbed a waveless wave.
Four moons of liquid light revolved and threw
Their silvery fountains forth, whose fruitful dew
Turned all the plain to one enamelled vale
Green as the serpent’s glory, and—how still!
—To where the distant hill
Shaped like an Oread’s breast arose beyond,
Across the starless pond
Silent and sleeping—O the waters wan
That seem the soul of man!—
Suddenly darkness strikes the horizon round
With an abyss profound
That blots the half-moon ere the sun be set.
A mountain of pure jet
Rears its sheer bulk to heaven; and no snows
Tinge evening with rose.
No blaze of noon invades those rocks of night,
Nor moon’s benignant might.
And looking downward he beheld his folk
Bound in no tyrant’s yoke;
Knowing no God, nor fearing any man;
Life’s enviable span
Free from disease and vice, sorrow and age.
Only death’s joys assuage
A gathering gladness at the thought of sleep.
Never in all the archives, scroll on scroll,
Reaching from aeons wrote they “ Women weep,
Men hate, the children suffer.” In the place
Where men most walked a table of fine brass
Was set on marble, with an iron style
That all might carve within that golden space
If one grief came—and still the people pass,
And since the city first began
None wrote one word thereon till one—a man
Witty in spite of happiness—wrote there:
“I grieve because the tablet is so fair
And still stands bare,
There being none to beautify the same
With the moon-curved Arabian character.”
Whereat the king, “Thy grief itself removes
In its own cry its cause.” And thence there came
Soft laughter that may hardly stir
The flowers that shake not in the City of Loves.
(For so men called the city’s name
Because the people were more mild than doves,
More beautiful than Gods of wood or river;
And so the city should endure for ever.)
But the king’s mood was otherwise this day.
Along time’s river, fifty years away,
There was a young man once
Ruddier than autumn suns
With gold hair curling like the spring sun’s gold,
And blue eyes where stars lurked for happiness,
And lithe with all a young fawn’s loveliness.
Such are the dwellers of the fire that fold
Fine wings in wanton ecstasy, and sleep
Where the thin tongues of glory leap
Up from the brazen hold
And far majestic keep
Of Djinn, the Lord of elemental light.
But he beheld some sight
Beyond that city’s joy: his gentle word
The old king gently heard.
(This king was Zôhra’s father) “Lord and king
Of love’s own city, give me leave to wing
A fervid flight to yonder hills of night.
Not that my soul is weary of the light
And lordship of thy presence; but in tender dream
I saw myself on the still stream
Where the lake goes toward the mountain wall.
These little lives and loves ephemeral
Seemed in that dream still sweet; yet even now
I turned the shallop’s prow
With gathering joy toward the lampless mountains.
I heard the four bright fountains
Gathering joy of music—verily
I cannot understand
How this can be,
Yet—I would travel to that land.”
So all they kissed him—and the boy was gone.
But when the full moon shone
A child cried out that he had seen that face
Limned with incomparable grace
Even in the shape of splendour as she passed.
The king’s thought turned at last
To that forgotten story: and desire
Filled all his heart with aureate fire
Whose texture was a woman’s hair; so fine
Bloomed the fair flower of pleasure:
Not the wild solar treasure
Of gleaming light, but the moon’s shadowy pearl,
The love of a young girl
Before she knows that love: so mused the king;
“I am not weary of the soul of spring,”
He said, “none happier in this causeless chain
Of life that bears no fruit of pain,
No seed of sorrow,” yet his heart was stirred,
And, wasting no weak word
On the invulnerable air, that had
No soul of memories sad,
He passed through all the palace: in his bowers
He stooped and kissed the flowers;
And in his hall of audience stayed awhile,
And with a glad strange smile
Bade a farewell to all those lords of his;
And greeted with a kiss
The virgins clustered in his halls of bliss.
Next, passing through the city, gave his hand
To many a joyous band
Flower-decked that wandered through the wanton ways
Through summer’s idle days.
Last, passing through the city wall, he came
Out to the living flame
Of lambent water and the carven quay,
Stone, like embroidery!
All the dear beauty of art’s soul sublime
He looked on the last time,
And trod the figured steps, and found the ledge
At the white water’s edge
Where the king’s pinnace lodged; but he put by
That shell of ivory,
And chose a pearl-inwoven canoe, whose prow
Bore the moon’s own bright brow
In grace of silver sculputred; and therein
He stepped; and all the water thin
Laughed to receive him; now the city faded
Little by little into many-shaded
Clusters of colour. So his boat was drawn
Subtly toward the dawn
With little labour; and the lake dropped down
From the orb’s utter crown
O’er the horizon; and the narrowing sides
Showed him the moving tides
And pearling waters of a tinier stream
Than in a maiden’s dream
She laves her silken limbs in, and is glad.
Then did indeed the fountains change their tune,
Sliding from gold sun-clad
To silver filigree wherethrough the moon
Shines—for the subtle soul
Of music takes on shape, and we compare
The cedar’s branching hair,
The comet’s glory, and the woman’s smile,
To strange devices otherwise not heard
Without the lute’s own word.
So on the soul of Zôhra grew
A fashioned orb of fiery dew;
Yet (as cool water on a leaf)
It touched his spirit not with grief,
Although its name was sorrow.
“O for a name to borrow”
(He mused) “some semblance for this subtle sense
Of new experience!
For on my heart, untouched, my mind not used
To any metre mused,
Save the one tranquil and continuous rhyme
Of joy exceeding time,
Here the joy changes, but abides for ever,
Here on the shining river
Where the dusk gathers, and tall trees begin
To wrap the shallop in,
Sweet shade not cast of sun or moon or star,
But of some light afar
Softer and sweeter than all these—what light
Burns past the wondrous night
Of yonder crags?—what riven chasm hides
In those mysterious sides?
Somewhere this stream must leap
Down vales divinely steep
Into some vain unprofitable deep!”
So mused the king. Mark you, the full moon shone!
Nay, but a little past the full, she rose
An hour past sunset: as some laughter gone,
After the bride’s night, lost in subtler snows
Rosy with wifehood. Now the shallop glides
On gloomier shadier tides,
While the long hair of willows bent and kissed
The stream, and drew its mist
Up through their silent atmosphere.
Some sorrow drawing near
That slow, dark river would for sympathy
Have found its home and never wandered out
Into the sunlight any more. A sigh
Stirred the pale waters where the moonlight stood
Upon the sleepy flood
In certain bough-wrought shapes of
mystic meaning,
As if the moon were weaning
The king her babe from milk of life and love
To milk new-dropped above
From her sweet breast in vaporous light
Into the willowy night
That lay upon the river. So the king
Heard a strange chant—the woods began to sing;
The river took the tune; the willows kept
Time; and the black skies wept
Those tears, those blossoms, those pearl drops of milk
That the moon shed: and looking up he saw
As if the willows were but robes of silk,
The moon’s face stoop and draw
Close to his forehead; at the tears she shed
He knew that he was dead!
Thus he feared not, nor wondered, as the stream
Grew darker, as a dream
Fades to the utter deep
Of dreamless sleep.
The stream grew darker, and the willows cover
(As lover from a lover
Even for love’s sake all the wealth of love)
The whole light of the skies: there came to him
Sense of some being dim
Bent over him, one colour and one form
With the dark leaves; but warm
And capable of some diviner air.
Her limbs were bare, her face supremely fair,
Her soul one shapely splendour,
Her voice indeed as tender
As very silence: so he would not speak,
But let his being fade: that all the past
Grew shadowy and weak,
And lost its life at last,
Being mere dream to this that was indeed
Life: and some utter need
Of this one’s love grew up in him: he knew
The spirit of that dew
In his own soul; and this indeed was love.
The faint girl bent above
With fixed eyes close upon him; oh! her face
Burned in the rapturous grace
Feeding on his; and subtly, without touch,
Grew as a flower that opens at the dawn
Their kiss: for touch of lips is death to love.
Even as the gentle plant one finger presses,
However soft the tress is
Of even the air’s profane caresses,
It closes, all its joy of light withdrawn;
The sun feels sadness in his skies above,
Because one flower is folded. Thus they floated
Most deathlessly devoted
Beyond the trees, and where the hills divide
To take the nighted tide
Into a darker, deeper, greener breast,
Maybe to find—what rest?
Now to those girdling mountains moon-exalted
Came through the hills deep-vaulted
That pearly shallop: there the rocks were rent,
And the pale element
Flowed idly in their gorges: there the night
Admits no beam of light;
Nor can the poet’s eye
One ray espy.
Therefore I saw not how the voyage ended,
Only wherethrough those cliffs were rended
I saw them pass: and ever closer bent
The lady and the lover; ever slower
Moved the light craft, and lower
Murmured the waters and the wind complained;
And ever the moon waned;
Not wheeling round the world,
But subtly curved an curled
In shapes not seen of men, abiding ever
Above the lonely river
Aloft: no more I saw than this,
The shadowy bending to the first sweet kiss
That surely could not end, though earth should end.
Therefore my shut eyes blend
With sleep’s own secret eyes and eyelashes,
Long and deep ecstasies,
Knowing as now I know—at last—how this
Foreshadows my own bliss
Of falling into death when life is tired.
For all things desired
Not one as death is so desirable,
Seeing all sorrows pass, all joys endure,
All lessons last. Not heaven and not hell
(My spirit is grown sure)
Await the lover
But death’s veil draws, life’s mother to discover,
Nature; no longer mother, but a bride!
Ay! there is none beside.
O brothers mightier than my mightiest word
In the least sob that stirred
Your lyres, bring me, me also to the end!
Be near to me, befriend
Me in the moonlit, moonless deeps of death,
And with exalted breath
Breathe some few flames into the embers dull
Of these poor rhymes and leave them beautiful.
THE TRIADS OF DESPAIR
Written off the Coast of Japan.
I
I
lie in liquid moonlight poured from the exalted orb.
Orion waves his jewelled sword; the tingling waves absorb
Into their lustre as they move the light of all the sky.
I am so faint for utter love I sigh and long to die.
Far on the misty ocean’s verge flares out the southern
Cross,
And the long billows on the marge of coral idly toss,
This night of nights! The stars disdain a lustre dusk or
dim.
Twin love-birds on the land complain, a wistful happy hymn.
I turn my face toward the main: I laugh and dive and swim.
Now fronts me foaming all the light of surf-bound waters
pent;
Now from the black breast of the night the South-ern Cross
is rent.
I top the might wall of fears; the dark wave rolls below.
A tall swift ship on wings appears, a cataract of snow
Plunging before the white east wind; she meets the eager sea
As forest green by thunder thinned meets fire’s emblazonry.
Then I sink back upon the breast of mighty-flinging foam,
Ride like a ghost upon the crest, the silver-rolling comb;
Float like a warrior to his rest, majestically home.
But oh! my soul, what seest thou, whose eyes are open wide?
What thoughts inspire me idling now, lone on the lonely
tide?
Here in the beauty of the place, hope laughs and says me
nay;
In nature’s bosom, in God’s face, I read “Decay, Decay.”
Here in the splendour of the Law that built the eternal
sphere,
Beauty and majesty and awe, I fail of any cheer.
Here, in caprice, in will divine, I see no perfect peace;
Here, in the Law’s impassive shrine, no hope is of release.
All things escape me, all repine, all alter, ruin, cease.
II
But thou, O Lord, O Apollo,
Must thou utterly change and pass?
Thy light be lost in the hollow?
Thy face as a maid’s in a glass
Go out and be lost and be broken
As the face of the maid is withdrawn,
And thy people with sorrow unspoken
Wait, wait for the dawn?
But thou, O Diana, our Lady,
Shall it be as if never had been?
The vales of the sea grown shady
And silver and amber and green
As thy light passed over and kissed them?
Shall thy people lament thee and swoon,
And we miss thee if thy love missed them,
Awaiting the moon?
But thou, who art Light, and above them,
Who art fire and above them as fire,
Shall thy sightless eyes not love them
Who are all of thine own desire?
Immaculate daughters of passion,
Shalt thou as they pass be past?
And thy people bewail thee, Thalassian,
Lost, lost at the last?
III
Nay, ere ye pass your people pass,
As snow on summer hills,
As dew upon the grass,
As one that love fulfils,
If he in folly wills
Love a lass.
Yet on this night of smiles and tears
A maiden is the theme.
The universe appears
An idle summer dream
Lost in the grey supreme
Mist of years.
For she is all the self I own,
And all I want of will.
She speaks not, and is known.
Her window shining chill
Whispers “He lingers still.
I am alone.”
IV
But to-night the lamp must be wasted,
And the delicate hurt must ache,
And the sweet lips moan untasted,
My lady lie lonely awake.
The night is taken from love, and love’s guerdon
Is like and its burden.
To-night if I turn to my lover
I must ask: If she be? who am I?
To-night if her heart I uncover
No heart in the night I espy.
I am grips with the question of eld, and the sphinx holds
fast
My eyes to the past.
Who am I, when I say I languish?
Who is she, if I call her mine?
And the fool’s and the wise man’s anguish
Are burnt in the bitter shrine.
The god is far as the stars, and the wine and fire
Salt with desire.
Desunt cetera.
“SABBE PI DUKKHAM”
(Everything is Sorrow)
A LESSON FROM EURIPIDES.
Written in Lamma Sayadaw Kyoung, Akyab.
Laughter in the faces of the people
Running round the theatre of music
When the cunning actors play the Bacchae,
Greets the gay attire and gait of Pentheus,
Pentheus by his blasphemy deluded,
Pentheus caught already in the meshes
Of the fate that means to catch and crush him,
Pentheus going forth with dance and revel,
Soon by Bassarids (wild joys of Nature)
To be hunted. Ai! the body mangled
By the fatal fury of the Maenads
Let by Agave his maddened mother
(Nature’s self) . But this the people guess not,
Only see the youth in woman’s raiment,
Feigned tresses drooping from his forehead,
Awkward with unwonted dress, rude waving
Aye the light spear tipped with mystic pine-cone;
Hear his boast who lifts the slender thyrsus:
“I could bear the mass of swart Cithaeron,
And themselves the Maenads on my shoulders.”
So the self-willed’s folly lights the laugher
Rippling round the theatre. But horror
Seizes on the heart of the judicious.
They see only madness and destruction
In the mockery’s self innate, implicit.
Horror, deeper grief, most dreadful musings
Theirs who penetrate the poet’s purpose!
So in all the passing joys of nature,
Joys of birth, and joys of life, in pleasures
Beautiful or innocent or stately,
May the wise discern the fact of being—
Change and death, the tragedy deep-lurking
Hidden in the laughter of the people,
So that laughter’s self grows gross and hateful.
Then the noble Truth of Sorrow quickens
Every heart, and, seeking out its causes,
Still the one task of the wise, their wisdom
Finds desire, and, seeking out its medicine,
Finds cessation of desire, and, seeking
How so fierce a feat may be accomplished,
Finds at first in Truth a right foundation,
Builds the walls of Rightful Life upon it,
Four-square, Word and Act and Aspiration
Folded mystically across each other,
Crowns that palace of enduring marble
With sky-piercing pinnacles of Will-power
Rightly carven, rightly pointed; strengthens
[Mind sole centred on the single object]
All against the lightning, earthquake, thunder,
Meteor, cyclone with strong Meditation.
There, the scared spot from wind well-guarded,
May the lamp, the golden lamp, be lighted
To illume the whole with final Rapture
And destroy the House of pain for ever,
Leave its laughter and its tears, and shatter
All the cause of its mockery, master
All the workings of its will, and vanish
Into peace and light and bliss, whose nature
Baffles so the little tongues of mortals
That we name it not, but from its threshold,
From the golden word upon its gateway,
Style “Cessation”; that whose self we guess not.
Thus the wise most mystically interpret
Into wisdom the worst folly spoken
By the mortal of a god deluded.
So, the last wise word rejected, Pentheus
Cries, “αγ ως ταχιστα, του χρονου δε
σοι φθονω”—“Why
waste we time in talking?
Let us now away unto the mountains!”
So the wise, enlightened by compassion,
Seeks that bliss for all the world of sorrow,
Swears the bitter oath of Vajrapani:
“Ere the cycle rush to utter darkness
Work I so that every living being
Pass beyond this constant chain of causes.
If I fail, may all my being shatter
Into millions of far-whirling pieces!”
Swears that oath, and works, and studies silence,
Takes his refuge in the triple jewel,
Strangles all desires in their beginning,
Leaves no egg of thought to hatch its serpent
Thrice detested for unnatural breeding—
Basilisk, to slay the maddened gazer.
Thus the wise man, for no glory-guerdon,
Hope of life or joy in earth or heaven,
Works, rejecting all the flowers of promise
Dew-lit that surround his path; but keepeth
Steady all his will to one endeavour,
Till the light, the might, the joy, the sorrow,
Life and death and love and hate are broken:
Work effaces work, avails the worker.
Strength, speed, ardour, courage and endurance
(Needed never more) depart for ever.
All dissolves, an unsubstantial phantom,
Ghost of morning seen before the sunrise,
Ghost of daylight seen beyond the sunset.
All hath past beyond the soul’s delusion.
All hath changed to the ever changeless.
Name and form in nameless and in formless
Vanish, vanish and are lost for ever.
DHAMMAPADA*
I
Antithesis. (The Twins)
All that we are from mind results, on mind is founded, built
of mind.
Who acts or speaks with evil thought, him doth pain follow
sure and blind:
So the ox plants his foot and so the car-wheel follows hard
behind.
[Blind, i.e.,
operated by law, not by caprice of a deity.]
All that we are from mind results, on mind is founded, built
of mind.
Who acts or speaks with righteous thought, him happiness
doth surely find.
So failing not, the shadow falls for ever in its place
assigned.
“Me he abused and me he beat, he robbed me, he defeated
me.”
In whom such thoughts no harbourage may find, will hatred
cease to be.
“The state of hate doth not abate by hate in any clime or
time,
But hate will cease if love increase,” so soothly runs the
ancient rhyme.
(I have imitated
the punning of the Pali by the repeated rhymes, which
further gives the flavor of the Old English proverbial
saw.)]
The truth that “here we all must die” those others do not
comprehend;
But some perceiving it, for them all discords fund an utter
end.
Sodden** with passion, unrestrained his senses (such an one we
see),
Immoderate in the food of sense, idle and void of energy:
Him surely Mara overcomes, as wind throws down the feeble
tree.
Careless of passion, well restrained his senses, such an one
we find
Moderate in pleasure, faithful, great in mighty energy of
mind:
Him Mara shakes not; are the hills thrown down by fury of
the wind?
He, void of temperance, and truth, from guilt, impurity,
and sin
Not free, the poor and golden robe he hath no worth to
clothe therein.***
Regarding temperance and truth, from guilt, impurity, and
sin
Freed, he the poor and golden robe indeed hath worth to
clothe therein.
They who see falsehood in the Truth, imagine Truth to lurk
in lies,
Never arrive to know the Truth, but follow eager vanities.
To whom in Truth the Truth is known, Falsehood in Falsehood
doth appear,
To them the Path of Truth is shown; right aspirations are
their sphere!
An ill-thatched house is open to the mercy of the rain and
wind.
So passion hath the power to break into an unreflecting
mind.
A well-thatched house is proof against the fury of the rain
and wind.
So passion hath no power to break into a rightly-ordered
mind.
Here and hereafter doth he mourn, him suffering doth doubly
irk,
Who doeth evil, seeing now at last how evil was his work.
The virtuous many rejoices here, hereafter doth he take
delight,
Both ways rejoices, both delights, as seeing that his work
was right.
Here and hereafter suffers he: the pains of shame his bosom
fill
Who thinks “I did the wrong,” laments his going on the Path
of Ill.
Here and hereafter hath he joy: in both the joy of rectitude
Who thinks “ I did the right ” and goes rejoicing on the
Path of Good.
A-many verses though he can recite of Law, the idle man who
doth it not
Is like an herd who numbereth cows of others, Priesthood him
allows nor part nor lot.
Who little of the Law can cite, yet knows and walks therein
aright, and shuns the snare
Of passion, folly, hate entwined: Right Effort liberates
his mind, he doth not care
For this course done or that to run: surely in Priesthood
such an one hath earned a share.
II
Earnestness
Amata’s path is Earnestness, Dispersion Death’s disciples
tread:
The earnest never die, the vain are even as already dead.
Who understand, have travelled far on concentration’s path,
delight
In concentration, have their joy, knowing the Noble Ones
aright.
In meditation firmly fixed, by constant strenuous effort
high,
They to Nibbana come at last, the incomparable security.
Whose mind is strenuous and reflects; whose deeds are
circumspect and pure,
His thoughts aye fixed on Law, the fame of that concentred
shall endure.
By Earnestness, by centred thought, by self-restraint, by
suffering long,
Let the wise man an island build against the fatal current
strong.
Fools follow after vanity, those men of evil wisdom’s sect;
But the wise man doth earnestness, a precious talisman,
protect.
Follow not vanity, nor seek the transient pleasures of the
sense:
The earnest one who meditates derives the highest rapture
thence.
When the wise man by Earnestness hath Vanity to chaos hurled
He mounts to wisdom’s palace, looks serene upon the
sorrowing world.
Mighty is wisdom: as a man climbs high upon the hills
ice-crowned,
Surveys, aloof, the toiling folk far distant on the dusty
ground.
Among the sleepers vigilant, among the thoughtless
eager-eyed
The wise speeds on; the racer so passes the hack with
vigorous stride.
By earnestness did Maghava attain of Gods to be the Lord.
Praise is one-pointed thought’s reward; Dispersion is a
thing abhorred.
The Bhikkhu who in Earnestness delights, who fears
dispersions dire,
His fetters all, both great and small, burning he moves
about the fire.
The Bhikkhu who in Earnestness delights, Disper-sion sees
with fear,
He goes not to Destruction; he unto Nibbana dra-weth near.
III
The Arrow
Just as the fletcher shapes his shaft straightly, so shapes
his thought the saint,
For that is trembling, weak, impatient of direction or
restraint.
Mara’s dominion to escape if thought impetuously tries
Like to a fish from water snatched thrown on the ground it
trembling lies.
Where’er it listeth runneth thought, the tameless trembling
consciousness.
Well is it to restrain:—a mind so stilled and tamed brings
happiness.
Hard to perceive, all-wandering, subtle and eager do they
press,
Thoughts; let the wise man guard his thoughts; well guarded
thoughts bring happiness.
Moving alone, far-travelling, bodiless, hidden i’th’ heart,
who trains
His thought and binds it by his will shall be re-leased from
Mara’s chains.
Who stills not thought, nor knows true laws; in whom
distraction is not dumb,
Troubling his peace of mind; he shall to perfect knowledge
never come.
His thoughts concentred, unperplexed his mind renouncing
good and ill.
Alike, for him there is no fear if only he be watchful
still.
Knowing this body to be frail, making this thought a
fortalice, do thou aright
Mara with wisdom’s shaft assail! Watch him when conquered.
Never cease thou from the fight.
Alas! ere long a useless log, this body on the earth will
lie.
Contemned of all, and void of sense and under-standing’s
unity.
What foe may wreak on fie, or hate work on the hated from
the hater,
Surely an ill directed mind on us will do a mischief
greater.
Father and mother, kith and kin, of these can none do
service kind
So great to us, as to ourselves the good direction of the
mind.
IV
Flowers
O who shall overcome this earth, the world of God’s and
Yama’s power!
Who find the well taught Path as skill of herbist finds the
proper flower?
The seeker shall subdue this earth, the world of God’s and
Yama’s power;
The seeker find that Path as skill of herbist finds the
proper flower.
Like unto foam this body whoso sees, its mirage-nature
comprehends aright,
Breaking dread Mara’s flower-pointed shaft he goes, Death’s
monarch shall not meet his sight.
Like one who strayeth gathering flowers, is he who Pleasure
lusteth on;
As the flood whelms the sleeping village, so Death snaps
him—he is gone.
Like one who strayeth gathering flowers is he whose thoughts
to Pleasure cling;
While yet unsatisfied with lusts, there conquereth him the
Iron King.
As the bee gathers nectar, hurts not the flower’s colour,
its sweet smell
In no wise injureth, so let the Sage within his ham-let
dwell.
To others’ failures, others’ sins done or good deeds undone
let swerve
Never the thought; thine own misdeeds, omissions,—these
alone observe.
Like to a lovely flower of hue bright, that hath yet no
odour sweet
So are his words who speaketh well, fruitless, by action
incomplete.
Like to a lovely flower of hue delightful and of odour sweet
So are his words who speaketh well, fruitful, by action made
complete.
As from a heap of flowers can men make many garlands, so,
once born,
A man a-many noble deeds by doing may his life adorn.
Travels the scent of flowers against the wind? Not Sandal,
Taggara, nor Jasmine scent!
But the odour of the good doth so, the good pervadeth unto
every element.
When Sandal, Lotus, Taggara and Vassiki their odour rare
Shed forth, their fragrant excellence is verily beyond
compare.
Yet little is this fragrance found of Taggara and Sandal
wood:
Mounts to the Gods, the highest, the scent of those whose
deeds are right and good.
Perfect in virtue, living lives of Earnestness, Right
Knowledge hath
Brought into liberty their minds, that Mara findeth not
their path.
As on a heap of rubbish thrown by the wayside the Lotus
flower
Will bloom sweet scented, delicate and excellent to think
upon;
So ’mid the slothful worthless ones, the Walkers in
Delusion’s power,
In glory of Wisdom, light of Buddha forth hath the True
Disciple shone.
Desunt cetera.
[The reader will kindly note such
important changes of metre as occur in the last two verses
of Chapter I. and elsewhere. The careless might suppose that
these do not scan; they do, following directly or by analogy
a similar change in the Pali.—R. P. L.]
* An attempt to translate this
noblest of the Buddhist books into the original metres. The
task soon tired.
** Sodden—the habitual—who
lives unrestrained, etc.
*** Alternative reading!—
Who is not free from
dirty taint, and temperate and truthful ain't,
He should not wear the
garment quaint that marks the Arahat of Saint.
ST. PATRICK’S DAY, 1902
Written at Delhi.
O
good St. Patrick, turn again
Thy mild eyes to the Western main!
Shalt thou be silent? thou forget?
Are there no snakes in Ireland yet?
Death to the Saxon! Slay nor spare!
O God of Justice, hear us swear!
The iron Saxon’s bloody hand
Metes out his murder on the land.
The light of Erin is forlorn.
The country fades: the people mourn.
Of land bereft, of right beguiled,
Starved, tortured, murdered, or exiled;
Of freedom robbed, of faith cajoled,
In secret councils bought and sold!
Their weapons are the cell, the law,
The gallows, and the scourge, to awe
Brave Irish hearts: their hates deny
The right to live—the right to die.
Our weapons—be they fire and cord,
The shell, the rifle, and the sword!
Without a helper or a friend
All means be righteous to the End!
Look not for help to wordy strife!
This battle is for death or life.
Melt mountains with a word—and then
The colder hearts of Englishmen!
Look not to Europe in your need!
Columbia’s but a broken reed!
Your own good hearts, your own strong hand
Win back at last the Irish land.
Won by the strength of cold despair
Our chance is near us—slay nor spare!
Open to fate the Saxons lie:—
Up! Ireland! ere the good hour fly!
Stand all our fortunes on one cast!
Arise! the hour is come at last.
One torch may fire the ungodly shrine—
O God! and may that torch be mine!
But, even when victory is assured,
Forget not all ye have endured!
Of native mercy dam the dyke,
And leave the snake no fang to strike!
They slew our women: let us then
At least annihilate their men!
Lest the ill race from faithless graves
Arise again to make us slaves.
Arise, O God, and stand, and smite
For Ireland’s wrong, for Ireland’s right!
Our Lady, stay the pitying tear!
There is no room for pity here!
What pity knew the Saxon e’er?
Arise, O God, and slay nor spare,
Until full vengeance rightly wrought
Bring all their house of wrong to nought!
Scorn, the catastrophe of crime,
These be their monuments through time!
And Ireland, green once more and fresh,
Draw life from their dissolving flesh!
By Saxon carcases renewed,
Spring up, O shamrock virgin-hued!
And in the glory of thy leaf
Let all forget the ancient grief!
Now is the hour! The drink is poured!
Wake! fatal and avenging sword!
Brave men of Erin, hand in hand,
Arise and free the lovely land!
Death to the Saxon! Slay nor spare!
O God of Justice, hear us swear!
THE EARL’S QUEST
Written at Camp Despair, 20,000 ft., Chogo Ri Lungma,
Baltistan.
So now the Earl was well a-weary of
The grievous folly of this wandering.
Had he been able to have counted Love
Or Power, or Knowledge as the sole strong thing
Fit to suffice his quest, his eyes had gleamed
With the success already grasped. The sting
Of all he suffered, was that he esteemed
His quest partook of all and yet of none.
So as he rode the woodlands out there beamed
The dull large spectre of a grim flat sun,
Red and obscure upon the leaden haze
That lapped and wrapped and rode the horizon.
The Earl rode steadily on. A crest caught rays
Of that abominable sunset, sharp
With needles of young pines, their tips ablaze.
Their feet dead black; the wind’s dark fingers warp
To its own time their strings, a sombre mode
Found by a ghost on a forgotten harp
Or (Still more terrible!) the lost dread ode
That used to all the dead knights to their chief
To the lone waters from the shadowy road.
So deemed the weary Earl of the wind’s grief,
And seemed to see about him form by form
Like mighty wrecks, wave-shattered on a reef,
Moulded and mastered by the shapeless storm
A thousand figures of himself the mist
Enlarged, distorted: yet without a qualm
(So sad was he) he mounted the last twist
Of the path’s hate, and faced the wind, and saw
The lead gleam to a surly amethyst
As the sun dipped, and Night put forth a paw
Like a black panther’s, and efface the East.
Then, with a sudden inward catch of awe
As if behind him sprang some silent beast,
So shuddered he, and spurred his horse, and found
A black path towards the water; he released
The bridle; so the way went steep, ill bound
On an accursed task, so dark it loomed
Amid its yews and cypresses, each mound
About each root, a grave, where Hell entombed
A vampire till the night broke sepulchre
And all its phantoms desperate and doomed
Began to gather flesh, to breathe, to stir.
Such was the path, yet hard should find the work
Glamour, to weave her web of gossamer
Over such eyesight as the Earl’s for murk.
He had watched for larvae by the midnight roads,
The stake-transpierced corpse, the caves where lurk
The demon spiders, and the shapeless toads
Fed by their lovers duly on the draught
That bloats and blisters, blackens and corrodes.
These had he seed of old; so now he laughed,
Not without bitterness deep-lying, that erst
He had esteemed such foolish devil’s craft
Part of his quest, his qest when fair and first
He flung the last, the strongest horsemen back
With such a buffet that no skill amerced
Its debt but headlong in his charger’s track
He must be hurled, rib-shatteredby the shock;
And the loud populace exclaimed “Alack!”,
Their favourite foiled. But oh! the royal stock
Of holy kings from Christ to Charlemagne
Hailed him, anointed him, fair lock by lock,
With oil that drew incalculable gain
From those six olives in the midst whereof
Christ prayed the last time, ere the fatal Wain
Stood in the sky reversed, and utmost Love
Entered the sadness of Gethsemane.
So did the king; so did the priest above
Place his old hands upon the Earl’s, decree
The splendid and the solemn accolade
That he should go forth to the world and be
Knight-errant; so did then the fairest maid
Of all that noble company keep hid
The love that melted her; she took the blade
Blessed by a mage, who slew the harmless kid
With solemn rite and water poured athwart
In stars and sigils,—fire leapt out amid,
And blazed upon the blade; and stark cold swart
Demons came hurtling to enforce the spell,
Until the exorcism duly wrought
Fixed in the living steel so terrible
A force nor man nor devil might assail,
Nay—might approach the wary warrior well,
So long as he was clothed in silver mail
Of purity, and iron-helmeted
With ignorance of fear: so through the hail
Of flowers, of cries, of looks, of white and red,
Fear, hatred, envy, love—nay, self-conceit
Of girls that preened itself and masqued instead
Of love—he rode with head deep bowed—too sweet,
Too solemn at that moment to respond,
Or even to lift his evening eyes to greet
The one he knew was nearest—too, too fond!
He dared not—not for his sake but for hers.
So he bent down, and passed away beyond
In space, in time. [The myriad ministers
Of God, seeing her soul, prayed God to send
One spirit yet to turn him—subtly stirs
The eternal gory of god’s mouth; “The end
Is not, nor the beginning.” Such the speech
Our language fashions down—to comprehend.]
The wood broke suddenly upon the beach,
Curved, flat; the water oozing on the sand
Stretched waveless out beyond where eye might reach,
A grey and shapeless place, a hopeless land!
Yet in that vast, that weary sad expanse
The Earl saw three strange objects on the strand
His keen eye noted at the firstborn glance,
And recognised as pointers for his soul;
So that his soul was fervid in the dance,
Knowing itself one step more near the goal,
Should he but make the perfect choice of these.
Farthest, loose tethered, at a stake’s control,
A shallop rocked before the sullen breeze.
Midway, a hermit’s hut stood solitary,
A dim light set therein. Near and at ease
A jolly well-lit inn—no phantom airy!
Solid and warm, short snatches of light song
Issuing cheery now and then. “Be
wary!
Quoth the wise Earl, “I wander very long
Far from my quest, assuredly to fall
Sideways each step towards the House of Wrong,
“Were but one choice demented. Choice is small
Here though. (A flash of insight in his mind)
Which of these three gets answer to its call?
“Yon shallop?—leave to Galahad! Resigned
Yon hermit to be welcome Lancelot!
For me—the inn—what fate am I to find?
“Who cares? Shall I seek ever—do ye wot?—
But in the outre, the obscure, the occult?
My Master is of might to lift me what
“Hangs, veil of glamour, on my ‘Quisque vult,’
The morion’s motto: to exhaust the cross,
Bidding it glow with roses—the result
“What way he will: may be adventure’s loss
Is gain to common sense; whereby I guess
Wise men have hidden Mount Biagenos
“And all its height from fools who looked no less
For snows to lurk beneath the roots of yew,
Or in the caverns grim with gloominess
“Hid deep i’ the forests they would wander through,
Instead of travelling the straightforward road.
I call them fools—well, I have been one too.
“Now then at least for the secure abode
And way of luck—knight-errantry once doffed,
The ox set kicking at his self-set goad,
“Here’s for the hostel and the light aloft!
Roderic, my lad! there’s pelf to pay the score
For ale and cakes and venison and a soft
“Bed we have missed this three months—now no more
Of folly! Avaunt, old Merlin’s nonsense lore!
Ho there! Travellers! Mine host! Open the door!”
[In the second part—joyous inn fireside—the Earl refuses
power, knowledge, and love (offered him by a guest) by the
symbolic drink of ale and the cherry cheeks of the maid.
In part three she, coming secretly to him, warns him he must
destroy the three vices, faith, hope, and charity. This he
does easily, save the love of the figure of the Crucified;
but at last conquering this, he attains. These were never
written.—R. P. L.]
EVE
Written in the Mosque of Omar.
Hers was the first sufficient sacrifice
That won us freedom, hers the generous gift
That turned herself upon the curse adrift
Sailless and rudderless, to pay the price
Of permanence with pain, of love with vice,
Like a tall ship swan-lovely, swallow-swift,
That makes upon the breakers. So the rift
Sprang and the flame roared. Farewell, Paradise!
How shall a man that is a man reward
Her priceless sacrifice, rebuke the Lord?
Why, there’s Convention’s corral; ring her round!
Here’s shame’s barbed wire; push out the unclean thing!
Here’s freedom’s falconry; quick, clip her wing!
There, labour’s danger—thrust her underground!
THE SIBYL
Written in the Land of Nod (chez
Homer).*
Crouched o’er the tripod the pale priestess moans
Ambiguous destiny, divided fate.
Sibylline oracles of woe create
Roars as of beasts, majestic monotones
Of wind, strong cries of elemental thrones,
All sounds of mystery of the Pythian state!
O woman without change or joy or date
I await thy oracle as the Delphian stone’s!
So thou to me: best lover of . . .
Thou who art love and pity and
clean art,
Wearing a rosebud on thy
blood-bright heart,
A lily on thy brows; I comprehend
Thy mystic utterance: read its
rune aright:
For . . . , love; for Aleister,
delight.
* So the schoolboy: Nemo sapit
omnibus horis—no one is safe in an omnibus with ladies.
LA COUREUSE
Written in the Quartier Latin, Paris.
A Faded skirt, a silken petticoat,
A little jacket, a small shapely shoe,
A toque. A symphony in gray and blue,
The child ripples, the conquering masternote
Sublety. Faint, stray showers of twilight float
In shadows round the well-poised head; dark, true,
Joyous the eyes laugh—and are weeping too,
or all the victory of her royal throat.
She showed her purse with tantalising grace:
Some sous, a franc, a key, some stuff, soft grey.
The mocking laughter trills upon her tongue:
“There’s all my fortune.” “And your pretty face!
What do you do?” Wearily, “I am gay.”
“What do you hope for? Simply, “To die young.”
TO “ELIZABETH”
WITH A COPY OF TANNHÄUSER.
Written in the Akasa.
The story of a fool. From love and death
Emancipate, he stands above. The goal
Is in the shrines of misty air: there roll
The voices and the songs of One who saith:
“There is no peace for him who lingereth.”
Love is a cinder now that was a coal:
Either were vain. The great magician’s soul
Is far too weak to risk Elizabeth.
All this is past and under me. Above,
Around, the magian tree of knowledge waves
Its rosy flowers and golden fruit. I know
Indeed that he is caught therein who craves;
But I, desiring not, accept the glow
And blossom of that Knowledge that is Love.
SONNET FOR A PICTURE
“ 'ποικιλοθρον'
, αθανατ' ' Αφροδιτα.”
Σαπφω.
“—We have seen
Gold tarnished, and the gray above—”
—Swinburne.
As some lone mountebank of the stage may tweak
The noses of his fellows, so Gavin
Tweaks with her brush-work the absurd obscene
Academicians. How her pictures speak!
Chiaroscuro Rembrandtesque, form Greek!
What values! What a composition clean!
Breadth shaming broadness! Manner epicine!
Texture superb! Magnificent technique!
Raphael, Velasquez, Michael Angelo,
Stare, gape, and splutter when they see thy colour,
Reds killing roses, greens blaspheming grass.
O thou art simply perfect, don’t you know?
Than thee all masters of old time are duller,
O artiste of the Quartier Montparnasse!
[This parody on the style of my
own poems on the Art of Rodin was written to furnish the
subject of it with a critical eulogium for domestic use. May
she forgive one who has not less a sincere admiration for
her work because he is capable of a jest at its expense!—A.C.]
RONDELS (AT MONTE CARLO)
Written in the Casino, Monte Carlo.
I
There is no hell but earth: O coil of fate
Binding us surely in the Halls of Birth,
The unsubstantial, the dissolving state!
There is no hell but earth.
Vain are the falsehoods that subserve to mirth.
Dust is to dust, create or uncreate.
The wheel is bounded by the world’s great girth.
By prayer and penance unregenerate,
Redeemed by no man’s sacrifice or worth,
We swing: no mortal knows his ultimate.
There is no hell but earth.
II
In all the skies the planets and the stars
Receive us, where our fate in order plies.
Somewhere we live between the savage bars
In all the skies.
Let God’s highest heaven receive the man who dies—
All hath an end: he falls: the stains and scars
Are his throughout unwatched eternities.
The roses and the scented nenuphars
Give hope—oh! monolith! oh house of lies!
We change and change and fade, strange avatars
In all the skies.
III
One way sets free. That way is not to tread
Through fire or earth or spirit, air or sea.
That secret is not gathered of the dead.
On way sets free.
Not to desire shall lead to not to be.
There is no hope within, none overhead,
None by the chance of fate’s august decree.
It is a path where tears are ever shed.
There is no joy—is that a path for me?
Yea! though I track the ways of utmost dread,
One way sets free.
IN THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GHIZEH
I
saw in a trance or a vision the web of the ages unfurled,
flung wide with a scream of derision, a mockery mute of the
world. As it spread over sky I mapped it fair on a sheet of
blue air with a hurricane pen. I copy it here for men.
First on the ghostly adytum of pale mist that was the abyss
of time and space (the stars all blotted out, poor faded nenuphars on the storm-sea of the infinite:) I wist
a shapeless figure arise and cover all, its cloak an ancient
pall, vaster and older than the skies of night, and blacker
than all broken years—aye! but it grew and held me in its
grasp so that I felt its flesh, not clean sweet flesh of man
but leprous white, and crawling with innumerable tears like
worms, and pains like a sword-severed asp, twitching, and loathlier than all mesh of hates and lusts, defiling; nor
any voice it had, nor any motion, it was infinite in its own
world of horror, irredeemably bad as everywhere sunlit,
being this world, forget not! being this world, this
universe, the sum of all existence; so that opposing fierce
resistance to the all-law, stood loves and joys, delicate
girls, and beautiful strong boys, and bearded men like gods,
and golden things, and bright desires with wings, all
beauties, and all truths of life poets have ever prized. So
showed the microscope, this agèd strife between all forms;
but seen afar, seen well drawn in a focus, synthesised, the
whole was sorrow and despair; agony biting through the fair;
meanness, contemptibility, enthroned; all purposeless, all unatoned; all putrid of an hope, all vacant of a soul. I
called upon its master, as who should call on God. Instead,
arose a shining form, sweet as a whisper of soft air kissing
the brows of a great storm; his face with light was molten,
musical with waves of his delight moving across: his
countenance utterly fair! then was my philosophic vision
shamed: conjecture at a loss; and my whole mind revolted;
then I blamed the vision as a lie; yet bid that vision speak
how he was named, being so wonderfully desirable. Whereat he
smiled upon me merrily, answering that whoso named him well,
being a poet, called him Love; or else being a lover of
wisdom, called him Force; or being a cynic, called him Lust;
or being a pietist, called him God. The last—thou seest!—(he
said), a lie of Hell’s, and all a partial course of the
great circle of whirling dust (stirred by the iron rod of
thought) that men call wisdom. So I looked deep in his
beauty, and beheld its truth. The life of that fair youth
was a whiz of violent little whirls, helical coils of
emptiness, grey curls of misty and impalpable stuff, torn,
crooked, all ways and none at once, but ever pressed in
idiot circles; and one thing he lacked, now I looked from
afar again, was rest. Thence I withdrew my sight, the
eyeballs cracked with stain of my endeavour, and my will
struck up with subtler skill than any man’s that in fair
Crete tracked through the labyrinth of Minos, and awoke the
cry to call his master; grew a monster whirlwind of
revolving smoke and then, mere nothing. But in me arose a
peace profounder than Himalayan snows cooped in their
crystalline ravines. I saw the ultimation of the one wise
law. I stood in the King’s Chamber, by the tomb of slain
Osiris, in the Pyramid and looked down the Great Gallery,
deep, deep into the hollow of earth; grand gloom burned royally
therein; I was well hid in the shadow; here I realised
myself to be in that sepulchral sleep wherein were mirrored
all these things of mystery. So the long passage steeply
sliding ever up to my feet where I stood in the emptiness;
at last a sure abiding only in absolute ceasing of all
sense, and all perceived or understood or knowable; thus,
purple and intense, I beheld the past that leads to peace,
from royal heights of mastery to sleep, from self-control
imperial to an end, therefore I shaped the seven tiers of
the ascending corridor into seven strokes of wisdom, seven
harvests fair to reap from seven bitter sowings. Here ascend
the armies of life’s universal war chasing the pious
pilgrim. First, his sight grew adamant, sun-bright, so that
he saw aright. Second, his heart was noble, that he would
live ever unto good. Third, in his speech stood tokens of
this will, so pitiful and pure he spake, nor ever from him
brake woe-winged words, nor slaver of the snake. Fourth, in
each noble act of life he taught crystalline vigour of
thought, so in each deed he was aright; well-wrought all the
man’s work; and fifth, this hero strife grew one with his
whole life, so harmonised to the one after-end his every
conscious and unconscious strain, his peace and pleasure and
pain, his reflex life, his deepest-seated deed of mere brute
muscle and nerve! Thence, by great Will new-freed, the
ardent life leaps, sixth, to Effort’s tower, invoking the occult,
the secret power, found in the void when all but Will is
lost; so, seventh, he bends it from its bodily station into
the great abyss of Meditation, whence the firm level is at
last his own and Rapture’s royal throne is more than
throne, sarcophagus! an end! an end! Resounds the echo in
the stone, incalculable myriads of tons poised in gigantic
balance overhead, about, beneath. O blend your voices,
angels of the awful earth! dogs! demons leaping into hideous
birth from the imprisoned deserts of the Nile! And thou, O
habitant most dread, disastrous crocodile, hear thou the
Law, and live, and win to peace!
[If this poem be repeatedly read
through, it falls into a subtly rhymed and metrical form.—R.
P. L.]
THE HILLS
TO OSCAR ECKENSTEIN.
Whence the black lands shudder and darken,
Whence the sea birds have empire to range,
Whence the moon and the meteor hearken
The perpetual rhythm of change,
On earth and in heaven deluded
With time, that the soul of us kills,
I have passed. I have brooded, fled far to the wooded
And desolate hills.
Not there is the changing of voices
That lament or regret or are sad,
But the sun in his strength rejoices,
The moon in her beauty is glad.
As timeless and deathless time passes,
And death is a hermit that dwells
By the imminent masses of ice, where the grasses
Abandon the fells.
There silence, arrayed as a spectre,
Is visible, tangible, near,
To the cup of the man pours nectar,
To the heart of the coward is fear:
Though the desolate waste be enchaunted
By a spell that bewilders and chills,
To me it is granted to worship the haunted
Delight of the hills.
To me all the blossoms are seedless,
Yet big with all manner of fruit:
And a voice in the waste is needless
Since my soul in its splendour is mute.
Though the height of the hill be deserted,
The soul of a man has its mate;
With the wide sky skirted his heart is reverted
To commune with Fate.
Far flings out the spur to the sunset;
Its help to the hope of the sun
That all be unfolded if one set,
That none be apart from the One;
And the sweep of the wings of the weather,
Marked bright with the silvery ghylls
For flickering feather, brings all things together
To nest in the hills.
Like a great bird poised in the aether,
The mountain keeps watch over earth,
On the child that lies sleeping beneath her
Wild-eyed from a terrible birth.
But by noise of the world unshaken,
By dance of the world not bedinned,
The hill bides forsaken, yet only to waken
Her lover, the wind.
Like a lion asleep in his fastness,
Or a warrior leant on his spear,
The hill stands up in the vastness,
And the stars grow strangely near;
For the secret of life and its gladness
Are hidden in strength that distils
A potion of madness from berries of sadness
Grown wild in the hills.
Though the earth be disparted and rended,
Thus only the great peaks change
That their image is moulded and blended
Into all that a fancy may range;
And the silence my song could refigure
To the note of a bird did I will,
Of glory or rigour, of passion or vigour—
The change were to ill!
For silence is better than singing
Though a Shelley wove songs in the sky,
And hovering is sweeter than winging;
To live is less good than to die.
The secret of secrets is hidden
Not in the lives nor in loves, but in wills
That are free and unchidden, that wander unbidden
To home in the hills.
A strength that is more than the summer
Is firm in that silence and rest,
Though stiller the rocks be and dumber
That the soul of its slumber oppressed.
For stronger control is than urging,
And mightier the heart of the sea
Than her waves deep-merging and striving and surging
That deem they are free.
In spirit I stand on the mountain,
My soul into God’s withdrawn
And look to the East like a fountain
That shoots up the spray of the dawn.
And the life of the mountain swims through me
(So the song of a thrush in me thrills)
And the dawn speaks to me, of old for it knew me
The soul of the hills.
I stand on the mountain in wonder
As the splendour springs up in the East,
As the cloud banks are rended asunder,
And the wings of the Night are released.
As in travail a maiden demented,
Afraid of the deed she hath done,
By no man lamented, springs up the sweet-scented
Pale flower of the sun.
So change not the heights and the hollows;
The hollows are one with the heights
In that pallid grave dawn of Apollo’s
Confusion of shadows and lights.
Unreal save to sense that can sense her
That maiden of sunrise refills
The air’s grey censer with perfumes intenser
The higher the hills.
So, vague as a ghost swift faded,
Steals dawn, and so sunset may see
How her long long locks deep-braided
Fall down to her breast and her knee.
So night and so sunrise discover
No light and no darkness to heed.
Night is above her, and brings her no lover;
And day, but no deed.
Such a sense is up and within me,
A tongue as of mystical fire!
Love, beauty, and holiness win me
To the end of the great desire,
Where I cease from the thirst and the labour,
As the land that no ploughman tills
Lest the robber his neighbour unloosen the sabre
From holds in the hills.
From love of my life and its burden
Set free in the silence remote,
Grows a sorrow divine for my guerdon,
A peace in my struggling note.
Compassion for earth far extended
Beneath me, the swords and the rods,
My spirit hath bended, bowed me and blended
My self into God’s.
But God—what divinity rises
To me in the mountainous place?
What sun beyond suns, and surprises
Mine eyes at the dawn of His face?
No God in this silence existing,
No heaven and no earth of Him skills,
Save the blizzards unresting, whirling and twisting
Adrift on the hills.
So witless and aimless and formless
I count the Creator to be;
Not strong as who rides on the stormless
And tames the untamable sea.
But motion and action distorted
Are marks of the paths He hath trod.
Hated or courted, aided or thwarted:—
Lo, He is your God!
But mine in the silence abideth;
Her strength is the strength of rest;
Not on thunders or clouds She rideth
But draweth me down to Her breast:
No maker of men, but dissolving
Their life from its burden of ills,
Ever resolving the circle revolving
To peace of the hills.
And dark is Her breast and unlighted;
But a warm sweet scent is expressed,
And a rose as of sunset excited
In the strength of Her sunless breast.
Her love is like pain, but enchanted:
Her kiss is an opiate breath
Amorously panted: her fervours last granted
Are sorrow, and death.
Nor death as ye name in derision
The change to a cycle of pain,
To a cycle of joy as a vision
Ye chase, and may capture in vain.
Endeth you peace, and your change is
Like the change in a measure that shrills
And slackens and ranges; your passion estranges
The love of the hills!
Nay! death is a portal of passing
To miseries other but sure.
Yet the snow on the hills amassing
The wind of an hour may endure;
But as day after day grows the summer
The crystals melt one after one.
The hill—shall they numb her? Their frost over-come her?
Demand of the sun!
That uttermost death of my lady
Revealed in the heart of the range
Is as light in the groves long shady
As peace in the halls of change.
The web of the world is rended;
Stayed are the causal mills;
Time is ended; space unextended.
And end of the hills! |