The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (40 page)

Elusive past the ever-changing palms;

And pittering moths with wide and ashen wings

Flit on before, and insects ember-hued,

Descending, hurtle through the gorgeous gloom

And quench themselves in crumbling thickets. Heard

Far off, the gong-like roar of beasts unknown

Resounds at measured intervals of time,

Shaking the riper trees to dust, that falls

In clouds of acrid perfume, stifling me

Beneath an irised pall.

Now the palmettoes

Grow far apart, and lessen momently

To shrubs a dwarf might topple. Over them

I see an empty desert, all ablaze

With amethysts and rubies, and the dust

Of garnets or carnelians. On I roam,

Treading the gorgeous grit, that dazzles me

With leaping waves of endless rutilance,

Whereby the air is turned to a crimson gloom

Through which I wander blind as any Kobold;

Till underfoot the grinding sands give place

To stone or metal, with a massive ring

More welcome to mine ears than golden bells

Or tinkle of silver fountains. When the gloom

Of crimson lifts, I stand upon the edge

Of a broad black plain of adamant that reaches,

Level as windless water, to the verge

Of all the world; and through the sable plain

A hundred streams of shattered marble run,

And streams of broken steel, and streams of bronze,

Like to the ruin of all the wars of time,

To plunge with clangor of timeless cataracts

Adown the gulfs eternal.

So I follow

Between a river of steel and a river of bronze,

With ripples loud and tuneless as the clash

Of a million lutes; and come to the precipice

From which they fall, and make the mighty sound

Of a million swords that meet a million shields,

Or din of spears and armor in the wars

Of half the worlds and eons. Far beneath

They fall, through gulfs and cycles of the void,

And vanish like a stream of broken stars

Into the nether darkness; nor the gods

Of any sun, nor demons of the gulf,

Will dare to know what everlasting sea

Is fed thereby, and mounts forevermore

In one unebbing tide.

What nimbus-cloud

Or night of sudden and supreme eclipse,

Is on the suns of opal? At my side

The rivers run with a wan and ghostly gleam

Through darkness falling as the night that falls

From spheres extinguished. Turning, I behold

Betwixt the sable desert and the suns,

The poisèd wings of all the dragon-rout,

Far-flown in black occlusion thousand-fold

Through stars, and deeps, and devastated worlds,

Upon my trail of terror! Griffins, rocs,

And sluggish, dark chimeras, heavy-winged

After the ravin of dispeopled lands,

And harpies, and the vulture-birds of hell,

Hot from abominable feasts, and fain

To cool their beaks and talons in my blood—

All, all have gathered, and the wingless rear,

With rank on rank of foul, colossal Worms,

Makes horrent now the horizon. From the van

I hear the shriek of wyvers, loud and shrill

As tempests in a broken fane, and roar

Of sphinxes, like relentless toll of bells

From towers infernal. Cloud on hellish cloud

They arch the zenith, and a dreadful wind

Falls from them like the wind before the storm,

And in the wind my riven garment streams

And flutters in the face of all the void,

Even as flows a flaffing spirit, lost

On the pit's undying tempest. Louder grows

The thunder of the streams of stone and bronze—

Redoubled with the roar of torrent wings

Inseparably mingled. Scarce I keep

My footing in the gulfward winds of fear,

And mighty thunders beating to the void

In sea-like waves incessant; and would flee

With them, and prove the nadir-founded night

Where fall the streams of ruin. But when I reach

The verge, and seek through sun-defeating gloom

To measure with my gaze the dread descent,

I see a tiny star within the depths—

A light that stays me while the wings of doom

Convene their thickening thousands: for the star

Increases, taking to its hueless orb,

With all the speed of horror-changèd dreams,

The light as of a million million moons;

And floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed

It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face

That fills the void and fills the universe,

And bloats against the limits of the world

With lips of flame that open. . . .

Thou comfortest me with the manna of thy love,

And the kisses of thy mouth are wine and sustenance;

They are grateful as fruit

In lonely orchards by the wayside of a ruinous land,

They are sweet as the purple grapes

On parching hills that confront the autumnal desert,

Or apples that the mad simoom hath spared

In a garden with walls of syenite.

Thy loosened hair is a veil

For the weariness of mine eyes and eyelids,

Which have known the redoubled sun

In a desert valley with slopes of the dust of white marble,

And have gazed on the mounded salt

In the marshes of a lake of dead waters.

Thy body is a secret Eden

Fed with lethean springs,

And the touch of thy flesh is like to the savor of lotos.

In thy hair is a perfume of ecstasy,

And a perfume of sleep;

Between thy thighs is a valley of delight,

And a valley of peace.

I met a witch with amber eyes

Who slowly sang a scarlet rune,

Shifting to an icy laughter

Like the laughter of the moon.

Red as a wanton's was her mouth,

And fair the breast she bade me take

With a word that clove and clung

Burning like a furnace-flake.

But from her bright and lifted bosom,

When I touched it with my hand,

Came the many-needled coldness

Of a glacier-taken land.

And, lo! the witch with eyes of amber

Vanished like a blown-out flame,

Leaving but the lichen-eaten

Stone that bore a blotted name.

We shall meet

Once again

In the strange and latter summers,

And recall,

Like olden mummers,

An old play of love and pain.

I shall greet

You not with kisses

Of the days aforetime, knowing

These would fall

Vain as those of phantoms blowing

Nightward to the last abysses.

Faint perfume

Will attend you

Like a scrine-imprisoned myrrh;

And my dreaming

Heart where fallen autumns stir

Half their fallen light will lend you.

From the tomb

Love shall rise

Mutely, in a spectre's fashion,

To the seeming

Lamps for ever bleak and ashen

Of our necromantic eyes.

But no tear

Shall we weep,

Knowing tears are void and vain,

Like the scattered

Drops of rain

On a desert's iron sleep.

Chill and sere,

Like the grass

Flaffing in a field of snow,

We shall know that nothing mattered,

As we tell our faded woe

Ere we pass.

Forgetting still what holier lilies bloom

Secure within the garden of lost years,

We water with the fitfulness of tears

Wan myrtles with an acrid sick perfume;

Lethean lotus, laurels of our doom,

Dark amarant with tall unswaying spears,

Await funereal autumn and its fears

In this grey land that sullen suns illume.

Ivy and rose and hellebore we twine.

Voluptuous as love, or keen as grief,

Some fleeing fragrance lures us in the gloom

To Paphian dells or vales of Proserpine. . . .
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But all the flowers, with dark or pallid leaf,

Become at last a garland for the tomb.

I

Farewell, a late farewell! Tearless and unforgetting,

Alone, aloof, I twine

Cypress and golden rose, plucked at the chill sunsetting,

Laurel, amaracus, and dark December vine

Into a garland wove not too unworthily

For thee who seekest now an asphodel divine.

Though immaterial the leaf and blossom be,

Haply they shall outlinger these the seasons bring,

The seasons take, and tell of mortal monody

Through many a mortal spring.

II

Once more, farewell! Naught is to do, naught is to say,

Naught is to sing but sorrow!

For grievous is the night, and dolorous the day

In this one hell of all the damned we wander thorough.

Thou hast departed—and the dog and swine abide,

The fetid-fingered ghouls will delve, on many a morrow

In charnel, urn and grave: the sun shall lantern these,

Oblivious, till they too have faltered and have died,

And are no more than pestilential breath that flees

On air unwalled and wide.

III

Let ape and pig maintain their council and cabal:

In ashes gulfward hurled,

Thou art gone forth with all of loveliness, with all

Of glory long withdrawn from a desertless world.

Now let the loathlier vultures of the soul convene:

They have no wings to follow thee, whose flight is furled

Upon oblivion's nadir, or some lost demesne

Of the pagan dead, vaulted with perfume and with fire,

Where blossoms immarcescible in verspertine

Strange amber air suspire.

IV

Peace, peace! for grief and bitterness avails not ever,

And sorrow wrongs thy sleep:

Better it is to be as thou, who art forever

As part and parcel of the infinite fair deep—

Who dwellest now in mystery, with days hesternal

And time that is not time: we have no need to weep,

For woe may not befall, where thou in ways supernal

Hast found the perfect love that is oblivion,

The poppy-tender lips of her that reigns, eternal,

In realms not of the sun.

V

Peace, peace! Idle is our procrastinating praise,

Hollow the harps of laud;

And not necessitous the half-begrudgèd bays

To thee, whose song forecrowned thee for a lyric god,

Whose name shall linger strangely, in the sunset years,

As music from a more enchanted period—

An echo flown upon the changing hemispheres,

Re-shaped with breath of alien maiden, alien boy,

Re-sung in future cities, mixed with future tears,

And with remoter joy.

VI

From Aphrodite thou hast turned to Proserpine:

No treason hast thou done,

For neither goddess is a goddess more divine,

And verily, my brother, are the twain not one?

We too, as thou, with hushed desire and silent paean,

Beyond the risen dark, beyond the fallen sun,

Shall follow her, whose pallid breasts, on shores Lethean,

Are favorable phares to barges of the world;

And we shall find her there, even as the Cytherean,
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In love and slumber furled.

Long since, I lived in lordly porches fronting

With thronged, enormous pillars to the tide,

Where day as in basaltic caverns died

With seaward gleams along the columns shunting.

The surges rolled the reflex of the skies

Before my portals, mystically blending

Their consonance of solemn chords unending

With the nacre and rose ignited in mine eyes.

I lay supine through days with amber scented,

Blue-litten by the vast and vagrant wave,

Nursing a sombre secret none could know:

On the full bosom of a golden slave

My feet reposed, and sable queens invented

Fantastic love to tease my weary woe.