Part 7 (1/2)

THE ALCHEMY OF GRIEF

One, Nature! burns and makes thee bright, One gives thee weeds to mourn withal; And what to one is burial Is to the other life and light.

The unknown Hermes who a.s.sists And alway fills my heart with fear Makes me the mighty Midas' peer The saddest of the alchemists.

Through him I make gold changeable To dross, and paradise to h.e.l.l; Clouds for its corpse-cloths I descry.

A stark dead body I love well, And in the gleaming fields on high I build immense sarcophagi.

SPLEEN

When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid Upon the spirit aching for the light And all the wide horizon's line is hid By a black day sadder than any night;

When the changed earth is but a dungeon dank Where batlike Hope goes blindly fluttering And, striking wall and roof and mouldered plank, Bruises his tender head and timid wing;

When like grim prison-bars stretch down the thin, Straight, rigid pillars of the endless rain, And the dumb throngs of infamous spiders spin Their meshes in the caverns of the brain;--

Suddenly, bells leap forth into the air, Hurling a hideous uproar to the sky As 'twere a band of homeless spirits who fare Through the strange heavens, wailing stubbornly.

And hea.r.s.es, without drum or instrument, File slowly through my soul; crushed, sorrowful, Weeps Hope, and Grief, fierce and omnipotent, Plants his black banner on my drooping skull.

A VOYAGE TO CYTHERA

My heart was like a bird and took to flight, Around the rigging circling joyously; The s.h.i.+p rolled on beneath a cloudless sky Like a great angel drunken with the light.

”What is yon isle, sad and funereal?”

”Cythera famed in deathless song,” said they, ”The gay old bachelors' Eldorado-Nay, Look! 'tis a poor bare country after all!”

Isle of sweet secrets and heart banquetings!

The queenly shade of antique Venus thrills Scentlike above thy level seas and fills Our souls with languor and all amorous things.

Fair isle and of green myrtles and blown flowers Held holy by all men for evermore, Where the faint sighs of spirits that adore Float like rose-incense through the quiet hours,

And dovelike sounds each murmured orison:-- Cythera lay there barren 'neath bright skies, A rocky waste rent by discordant cries: Natheless I saw a curious thing thereon.

No shady temple was it, close enshrined I' the trees; no flower-crowned priestess. .h.i.ther came With her young body burnt by secret flame, Baring her breast to the caressing wind;

But when so close to the land's edge we drew Our canvas scared the sea-fowl--gradually We knew it for a three-branched gallows tree Like a black cypress stark against the blue.

A rotten carcase hung, whereon did sit A swarm of foul black birds; with writhe and shriek Each sought to pierce and plunge his knife-like beak Deep in the bleeding trunk and limbs of it.