University of Virginia Library

THE gold of sunset flickers on the rim
Of the gray deep and in the Western sky
I see the funeral torches of the day
Flare tow'rd extinction. In the twilight-calm
I lie and feel the burden of the years
Weigh down my spirit to the eternal shades
And see the stern Fates beckon from the gloom
With their unswerving fingers. Yet my soul
Lingers within these weary weeds of flesh,
Held in the links of an impalpable chain.

The pale dusk hovers o'er the sullen sea
And in the West the purple pall of night,
Spangled with silver, covers up the corpse
Of the dead day. I smell the night-flowers' scent,
A sweetness as of death, and in the air,
Hazed with the subtle colours of the gloom,
A living silence wavers. One by one,
The pale stars glitter through the purple mists
And their grave eyes, so dreadly fair to me,
That looked upon Mount Ida in the heart
Of that enchanted summer, when my life
Flowered with the ardours of a heavenly love,
Gaze down upon the dying gray-haired man
With the same loveless pity as of yore,
When he, a youth, sought in their cold serene
Of light some sympathy with his hot dreams
Of passionate ecstasy and sought in vain.
And lo! she comes, upon her radiant car,
Herald of night and morn. I feel her rays
Of cold keen splendour smite upon my heart
And stir my spirit to the old unrest.
O star of eve, hast thou forgotten all,
All that thy lips once breathed to me of love,
All that thine eyes once looked of passionate bliss?
Hast thou no memory of the vanished time
When I, a boy, that dared look up to heaven
And daring, captived an immortal's love,
Lay on the flower-wrought broidery of the grass
And watched the golden sparkles of the sun
Fade from the rippled azure of the sky?
(Ah me, how laggard seemed the thought-swift dusk
To me whose day dawned in the blank of night!)
Hast thou forgotten how I used to wait,
Stretched out upon the clustered hyacinths,
And tore the star-cups from the spangled grass,
In my hot longing, till the purple gloom
Flowered with the sudden splendour of thy face
And all the air grew fragrant with thy breath?
How thou wouldst fall into mine eager arms,
As apple-blossoms fall on Spring-green sward,
And all my soul drank rapture from thy kiss,
Fatal and sweet? O cruel that thou wast
To lift me to the glory of thy love,
To make a God of me with thine embrace,
Then let me lapse from that hot heaven of bliss
Into the cheerless cold of mortal wont
And dull mean sameness of the loveless world!

Three deaths before the body's death I die;
The death of hope, the death of hopeless love
And (worst of all) the death of memory,
That mystic consort of the undying soul,
That, dying, lives in death an awful life.
O snow-white splendour of encircling arms,
Warm ivy that did cluster round my neck!
O rose-mouth in the rose-time that wast wont
To lavish kisses on my thirsting lips!
O dew-soft deeps of amethystine eyes,
Wherein my spirit saw its mirrored self,
Transfigured as with an immortal joy!
I have no memory of you; all my pains,
My weary, longing pains may not suffice
To win one glimpse of your divine delights
From the grim shadow of the pitiless Night.
O star of eve, that wast my light-bringer!
O Hesperus, that wast my Phosphorus!
O queen of love! The inexorable years
Have blotted out thy beauty with the films
Of their fast-falling silences. I yearn
To drink once more the fatal brilliance
Of that bright face, those starry, lustrous eyes,
And weary in the fruitless strife to shape
My agonizing longing into form.

And yet I would not murmur at my doom,
Did but the memory of the bygone pain
Shrink from me with the unremembered bliss.
Alas! the agony of that fatal night,
When through the dragging midnight hours I lay
And waited for thy coming, that was ne'er
Again to bless my vision, through the mists
Of years is present to me in its fierce,
Unsparing clearness as of yesterday.
Each night I dream again the old despair;
Each night I lie and feel the chill slow hours
Drag onward through the darkness and my hope
Grow hourly colder, see the cold grey dawn
Come creeping up across the Eastern slopes,
The hills flush purple with the unseen sun
And the dull heavens flame golden with the day,
As when, in the bright mockery of that morn,
The shadow of my endless night of woe
Darkened the dawnlight. See, my life fades out
In the grey shadow of the dying day
And all my footsteps tend toward the dusk.
Hast thou no pity? Can it be those sweet,
Honey-sweet words, wherewith thou fedst my hope,
Were no more meaningful than mortal vows?
Can it be true, what I have heard folk say,
That love of Gods is like the eternal fire,
Which burns but him who handles it, itself,
Changeless and vivid, freezes in the flame?
I cannot think that thou wilt let me sink
Into the cold and gloomy deeps of death,
Without one token of thine ancient love,
One symbol of thy still compassionate care.
Let me but gather once more from thy lips
The honey of thy kisses, drink again
From out thine eyes their philtres of sweet death,
Once more renew, though but a moment's space,
The unattainted memory of old bliss,
And then dead love shall slay me with the sting
Of its undying poison. Let me press
My withered lips to thine immortal ones
And feel the warm white girdle of thine arms
Once more about my neck, — but touch thy hand
And touching, welcome death!

Ah me! I dote.
I ask to feel once more that agony
Of gradual despair the shrouding years
Have softened. Rather let me beg of thee
A fitter boon, — that thou wilt lay thy hand
Upon my mouth and smoothe the torrid trace
Of thy hot passion from my pallid lips
With its cool flower-touch. For I yearn to slake
My thirst with long draughts of the poppied flood.

I weary after death and cannot die.
The haunting memory of thy breathless love
Holds back my spirit from the slopes of death;
Thy hot kiss burns upon my weary lips
And will not let me pass. Not all the streams
Of Lethe could do out that ardent stain,
Whose spell thou only, that didst lay it on,
Canst bid release its hold upon my soul.
What should I do among the mail-clad ghosts
That crowd the courts of the Elysian fields,—
Shades that have never known a heavenly love,
Whose windy babble is of battled fields,—
With that hot seal of immortality
Upon my lips? To all eternity
I should relive, in those eternal shades,
The ghost of that irrevocable past,
Whose sorcery thou only canst uncharm.
Oh, rather let me brook the pangs of hell
And feel Tisiphone's unresting lash,
Far rather all the torments of the damned,
Whose spirit does not prey upon itself,
Than that eternal awful life in death,
That endless immortality of pain!

I do not yearn, as others might have yearned,
To climb with thee those star-crowned steeps of heaven
Or win a place in those supernal spheres
Wherein thy beauty burns eternally,
Among the Gods divinest, as thy star
Shines in the meaner circle of its mates;
Nor do I thirst to breathe the ambient fire
That is the air of those celestial plains.
Too well I know, my world-worn soul might not
Endure the intolerable ecstasy
Of that fierce ichor coursing through my veins:
The fragile texture of this cunning clay
Would shrink and shrivel into nothingness
In the hot flame of an immortal love.
I do but ask of thee forgetfulness
And the blank calm of unremembering night.
Ah me!