LETHE
I flow beneath the columns that upbear
The world, and all the tracts of heaven and hell;
Foamless I sweep, where sounds nor glimmers tell
My motion nadir-ward; no moment's flare
Gives each to each the shapes that, unaware,
Commingle at my verge, to test the spell
Of waves intense with night, whose deeps compel
One face from pain, and rapture, and despair.
The fruitless earth's denied and cheated sons
Meet here, where fruitful and unfruitful cease.
And when their lords, the mightier, hidden Ones,
Have drained all worlds till being's wine is low,
Shall they not come, and from the oblivious flow
Drink at one draught a universe of peace?
ATLANTIS
Above its domes the gulfs accumulate
To where the sea-winds trumpet forth their screed;
But here the buried waters take no heed—
Deaf, and with closèd lips from press of weight
Imposed by ocean. Dim, inanimate,
On temples of an unremembered creed
Involved in long, slow tentacles of weed,
The dead tide lies immovable as Fate.
From out the ponderous-vaulted ocean-dome,
A clouded light is questionably shed
On altars of a goddess garlanded
With blossoms of some weird and hueless vine;
And wingèd, fleet, through skies beneath the foam,
Like silent birds the sea-things dart and shine.
THE UNREVEALED
How dense the glooms of Death, impervious
To aught of old memorial light! How strait
The sunless road, suspended, separate,
That leads to later birth! Untremulous
With any secret morn of stars, to us
The Past is closed as with division great
Of planet-girdling seas—unknown its gate,
Beyond the mouths of shadows cavernous.
Oh! may it be that Death in kindness strips
The soul of memory's raiment, rendering blind
Our vision, lest surmounted deeps appal,
As when on mountain peaks a glance behind
Betrays with knowledge, and the climber slips
Down gulfs of fear to some enormous fall?
THE ELDRITCH DARK
Now as the twilight's doubtful interval
Closes with night's accomplished certainty,
A wizard wind goes crying eerily;
And in the glade unsteady shadows crawl,
Timed to the trees, whose voices rear and fall
As with some dreadful witches' ecstasy,
Flung upward to the dark, whence glitters free
The crooked moon, impendent over all.
Twin veils of covering cloud and silence thrown
Across the movement and the sound of things,
Make blank the night, till in the broken west
The moon's ensanguined blade awhile is shown....
The night grows whole again.... The shadows rest,
Gathered beneath a greater shadow's wings.
THE CHERRY-SNOWS
The cherry-snows are falling now;
Down from the blossom-clouded sky
Of zephyr-troubled twig and bough,
In widely settling whirls they fly.
The orchard earth, unclothed and brown,
Is wintry-hued with petals bright;
E'en as the snow they glimmer down;
Brief as the snow's their stainless white.
FAIRY LANTERNS
'Tis said these blossom-lanterns light
The elves upon their midnight way;
That fairy toil and elfin play
Receive their beams of magic white.
I marvel not if it be true;
I know this flower has lighted me
Nearer to Beauty's mystery,
And past the veils of secrets new.
NIRVANA
Poised as a god whose lone, detachèd post,
An eyrie, pends between the boundary-marks
Of finite years, and those unvaried darks
That veil Eternity, I saw the host
Of worlds and suns, swept from the furthermost
Of night—confusion as of dust with sparks—
Whirl tow'rd the opposing brink; as one who harks
Some warning trumpet, Time, a withered ghost,
Fled with them; disunited orbs that late
Were atoms of the universal frame,
They passed to some eternal fragment-heap.
And, lo, the gods, from space discorporate,
Who were its life and vital spirit, came,
Drawn outward by the vampire-lips of Sleep!
THE NEMESIS OF SUNS
Lo, what are these, the gyres of sun and world,
Fulfilled with daylight by each toiling sun—
Lo, what are these but webs of radiance spun
Beneath the roof of Night, and torn or furled
By Night at will? All opposite powers upwhirled
Are less than chaff to this imperious one—
As wind-tossed chaff, until its sport be done,
Scattered, and lifted up, and downward hurled.
All gyres are held within the path unspanned
Of Night's aeonian compass—loosely pent
As with the embrace of lethal-tightening weight;
All suns are grasped within the hollow hand
Of Night, the godhead sole, omnipotent,
Whose other names are Nemesis and Fate.
WHITE DEATH
Methought the world was bound with final frost;
The sun, made hueless as with fear and awe,
Illumined yet the lands it could not thaw.
Then on my road, with instant evening crost,
Death stood, and in its shadowy films enwound,
Mine eyes forgot the light, until I came
Where poured the inseparate, unshadowed flame
Of phantom suns in self-irradiance drowned.
Death lay revealed in all its haggardness—
Immitigable wastes horizonless;
Profundities that held nor bar nor veil;
All hues wherewith the suns and worlds were dyed
In light invariable nullified;
All darkness rendered shelterless and pale.