RETROSPECT AND FORECAST
Turn round, O Life, and know with eyes aghast
The breast that fed thee—Death, disguiseless, stern;
Even now, within thy mouth, from tomb and urn,
The dust is sweet. All nurture that thou hast
Was once as thou, and fed with lips made fast
On Death, whose sateless mouth it fed in turn.
Kingdoms debased, and thrones that starward yearn,
All are but ghouls that batten on the past.
Monstrous and dread, must it fore'er abide,
This unescapable alternity?
Must loveliness find root within decay,
And night devour its flaming hues alway?
Sickening, will Life not turn eventually,
Or ravenous Death at last be satisfied?
SHADOW OF NIGHTMARE
What hand is this, that unresisted grips
My spirit as with chains, and from the sound
And light of dreams, compels me to the bound
Where darkness waits with wide, expectant lips?
Albeit thereat my footing holds, nor slips,
The threats of that Omnipotence confound
All days and hours of gladness, girt around
With sense of near, unswervable eclipse.
So lies a land whose noon is plagued with whirr
Of bats, than their own shadows swarthier,
Whose flight is traced on roofs of white abodes,
Wherein from court to court, from room to room,
In hieroglyphics of abhorrent doom,
Is slowly trailed the slime of crawling toads.
THE SONG OF A COMET
A plummet of the changing universe,
Far-cast, I flare
Through gulfs the sun's uncharted orbits bind,
And spaces bare
That intermediate darks immerse
By road of sun nor world confined.
Upon my star-undominated gyre
I mark the systems vanish one by one;
Among the swarming worlds I lunge,
And sudden plunge
Close to the zones of solar fire;
Or 'mid the mighty wrack of stars undone,
Flash, and with momentary rays
Compel the dark to yield
Their aimless forms, whose once far-potent blaze
In ashes chill is now inurned.
A space revealed,
I see their planets turned,
Where holders of the heritage of breath
Exultant rose, and sank to barren death
Beneath the stars' unheeding eyes.
Adown contiguous skies
I pass the thickening brume
Of systems yet unshaped, that hang immense
Along mysterious shores of gloom;
Or see—unimplicated in their doom—
The final and disastrous gyre
Of blinded suns that meet,
And from their mingled heat,
And battle-clouds intense,
O'erspread the deep with fire.
Through stellar labyrinths I thrid
Mine orbit placed amid
The multiple and irised stars, or hid,
Unsolved and intricate,
In many a planet-swinging sun's estate.
Ofttimes I steal in solitary flight
Along the rim of the exterior night
That grips the universe;
And then return,
Past outer footholds of sidereal light,
To where the systems gather and disperse;
And dip again into the web of things,
To watch it shift and burn,
Hearted with stars. On peaceless wings
I pierce, where deep-outstripping all surmise,
The nether heavens drop unsunned,
By stars and planets shunned.
And then I rise
Through vaulting gloom, to watch the dark
Snatch at the flame of failing suns;
Or mark
The heavy-dusked and silent skies,
Strewn thick with wrecked and broken stars,
Where many a fated orbit runs.
An arrow sped from some eternal bow,
Through change of firmaments and systems sent,
And finding bourn nor bars,
I flee, nor know
For what eternal mark my flight is meant.
THE RETRIBUTION
Old Egypt's gods, Osiris, Ammon, Thoth,
Came on my dream in thunder, and their feet
Revealed, were as the levin's fire and heat.
The hosts of Rome, the Arab and the Goth
Have left their altars dark, yet stern and wroth
In olden power they stood, whose wings were fleet,
And mighty as with strength of storms that meet
In mingled foam of clouds and ocean-froth.
Above my dream, with arch of dreaded wings,
In judgement and in sentence of what crime
I knew not, sate the gods outcast of time.
They passed, and lo, a plague of darkness fell,
Unsleeping, and accurst with nameless things,
And dreams that stood the ministers of Hell!
TO THE DARKNESS
Thou hast taken the light of many suns,
And they are sealed in the prison-house of gloom.
Even as candle-flames
Hast thou taken the souls of men,
With winds from out a hollow place;
They are hid in the abyss as in a sea,
And the gulfs are over them
As the weight of many peaks,
As the depth of many seas;
Thy shields are between them and the light;
They are past its burden and bitterness;
The spears of the day shall not touch them,
The chains of the sun shall not hale them forth.
Many men there were,
In the days that are now of thy realm,
That thou hast sealed with the seal of many deeps;
Their feet were as eagles' wings in the quest of Truth—
Aye, mightily they desired her face,
Hunting her through the lands of life,
As men in the blankness of the waste
That seek for a buried treasure-house of kings.
But against them were the veils
That hands may not rend nor sabers pierce;
And Truth was withheld from them,
As a water that is seen afar at dawn,
And at noon is lost in the sand
Before the feet of the traveller.
The world was a barrenness,
And the gardens were as the waste.
And they turned them to the adventure of the dark,
To the travelling of the land without roads,
To the sailing of the sea that hath no beacons.
Why have they not returned?
Their quest hath found end in thee,
Or surely they had fared
Once more to the place whence they came,
As men that have travelled to a fruitless land.
They have looked on thy face,
And to them it is the countenance of Truth.
Thy silence is sweeter to them than the voice of love,
Thine embrace more dear than the clasp of the beloved.
They are fed with the emptiness past the veil,
And their hunger is filled;
They have found the waters of peace,
And are athirst no more.
They know a rest that is deeper than the gulfs,
And whose seal is unbreakable as the seal of the void;
They sleep the sleep of the suns,
And the vast is a garment unto them.