You have understood so little of me, and my adoration

That shone upon my forehead, like a crown of curious stones,

You turned into a cap and bells for Folly's coronation

And made a foolish tinkling from my laughter and my

moans.

You have led me through the market like an ass upon the halter,

You have fed me upon thistles; I was driven by the crowd;

But my faith in what I am, my conceit, you cannot alter;

I was proud in pomp and purple, as a clown I leave you proud!

A greater pride than sits upon a throne for mere adorning,

A fiercer strength than in the gods of wood that cannot bow;

I tore my purple into rags and knelt to bear your scorning,

And I am rebel leader to a band of beggars now.

In the twilight of my love I stand and strew the bitter ashes;

They are blown into my eyes again, the fires that shone for you;

In the blushing of the sunset their ghostly fervour flashes

As they sink for everlasting in the darkness and the dew.

Your heart is as a moonstone hieroglyphed with secret letters;

You have never read my passion, as I never learnt their sign,

But I praise your haunting beauty and I bear the bruise of fetters

And I reel from your remembrance as I spill the ancient wine.

I will shout, and tear the darkness; I will snuff the candles sacred

With the rage of my abasement, with the blast of my farewell;

I will smile with cynic softness, but my tears are dropping acrid

And sizzling in a gutter down the white-hot streets of Hell!

Lulled are the dazzling colours of the day,

And mild the heavens, burnt out like an ash.

Hungry and strange along the shadowed dusk

Walks Melancholy, and with bitter mouth

Sucks the last juices from the sun's ripe fruit.

Now can I sing the sickly lines of love

And of love's failure, spell my sorrows out

In the sad spaces of the gloaming night,

And stooping, huddled, hide me in the dark.

My words were fireless in the flaming sun,

And all the throats of flowers from their content

Puffed back my pinings proudly in my face

And bade me give them tunes to make them dance....

Lean, hungry, like my love the moon looks down

From the white solitudes of Heaven. All aghast

And sterile as the arms of my desire

She flings her light despairing on the sky.

The night is strange and still, for dropping tears,

Or burying hatred in a deep-dug grave.

Washed at my feet by the curded foam of sluggish waves,

As the rain splinters and the mud gleams with malicious light,

Like a frail shell, million tinged and quaintly wrought

The thought of you, which held against mine ear

Hums all the echoed melodies of your soul;

The sigh of wearied life, the ebbing sweet of love,

The little tunes of wine mixed with the chants of death,

The following of beauty's fugitive limbs

Whose classic feet, and rapturous pale breast

Gleam on the clouds and foam,

Call to her lovers.—

Thus standing in the blasting of the wind,

And numb with ceaseless drip of moments from the cloud

Of lowering hours, I toy with this strange relic of the sea,

Turned with such perfectness from her tumultuous wheels,

Thoughts of you million tinged and quaintly wrought.

My poems cannot laugh. They are the voice

Of birds that mourn and cry above the sea,

And this wild joy my love has brought to me

Lies dumb and knows not how it shall rejoice.

I am most weary of the petulant songs I sing,

Most tired of tunes that only learn to weep,

And long to turn my dreams from their pale sleep

Into a gentle minstrelsy with harp of silver string;

To fashion for my love one perfect verse

Symmetrically threaded by beauty word on word,

Flowing and flashing like the luted laughter of a bird

To bless the soul with music which I ravished with a curse.

But as a coward in the general gloom

I mimic fortune with my tunes of ill,

Nor pipe despite her wistful mirth and trill

Of love that moves with music into Doom;

Of love that thrills with joy the graveyard cold,

And like a gay canary in a cage

Mocks at his prison, and with flippant rage

Flaunts his bright wing to fill the gloom with gold.

On the hill there is a tavern, long-loved, well-remembered,

Where all the sleepy afternoon the little tables dream,

And the cool green bottles ranged, laugh and gleam with golden highlights,

And the waiters wrangle, and the flies, with murmurs merged and mixed.

We will go there, you and I, to wake the nodding contentment,

And toast our fancies reverently with red wine and with white wine,

And with eyes mesmerised to the horizon gazing,

Dream our iridescent dreams and sigh our shadowy sighs.

Oh canst thou not hear in my heart all its whispering fears

Whose wind-like voices

Flutter the leaves of my hope and bow them with tears

While the body rejoices.

Till all the pomp and beauty of day, the Cardinal Sun

Trailing his scarlet vesture

Leaves after light the pale hills sullen and dun,

Turns with a gesture

Colour and glory to smoke that is deathly and grey.

I follow the shadows of sorrow

That press so close to the dancing heels of the day

And darken the morrow.

The world turns pale and cold, for I seem to see

Beyond its golden visor

The leering skull that derides at our lives and me

Being older than life and wiser....

I hear the cry of the world that writhes to the lash of the whip

Beyond the sound of the treetops singing

To the wind's persuasive violins and bells of dews that drip,

Or rush of feathers winging....

Dost thou fear death as I? Ah no, but thy lips are against my cheek

Murmuring tenderly

The perfumed lies stolen from spring that wistfully through the bleak

Windows of frost so slenderly

Steals her little ghost's flute. Thou tellest of things that might be

If life were as kind as a lover,

If we were beloved of the world and the world of we.

Thy white words hover

Dove-like in rose leaf evenings over the nest

Silvering heaven

With rustle of lovers that nestle together for rest.

If I could have given

As in the silence the clear moonlight drips

Among the fields that love her drowsily,

These passionate moments trickle on through time,

From soul to languorous soul.

Like mad musicians upon fretted harps,

The senses play upon the poignant nerves,—

And colours clothe our mood

As smoke against the light, as shimmering prisms

Irised with pallors of an opal's heart

In which the glittered pattern of desire

Smoulders and changes....

O love, thou nightingale-throated singer,

Thread on thy jewelled chords from start to star

And keep thy silver delicate delight

Out of the flush and lustre that makes mad.

Let thy fairy feet

Go tripping down a scarcely scented path,

Between an avenue of breathless flowers.

The hours glide by as swans across a lake,

Across the luminous waters of desire,

And beat as wings the rustle of soft words,

As love bends down,

Breathing his adoration on a fainting mouth.

I can but give thee unsubstantial things

Wrapt as in rose-leaves between thought and thought,

No gems or garments marvellously wrought

On ivory spools with rare embroiderings.

Nor for thy fingers precious, fabled rings

That cardinals have worn, and queens have bought

With blood and beauty. I have only sought

A song that hovers on illusive wings.

Accept from me a dream that hath no art,

I give my empty hands for thee to hold,

Take thou the gift of silence for my part,

With all the deeper things I have not told.

Yet if thou canst, decipher in my heart

Its passions writ in hieroglyphs of gold.

I have no other friend but thee,

But while I tell thee all my thought

Thine ears are buzzing with gossip of dreams,

Soothsayings and sighs, and little things—

How canst thou listen to me?

Bodies heaving like waves,

Sighing through the dishevelled tresses of foam,

The massive whiteness of limbs flung out of shadow,

Splashed with ecstasial moonlight,

Sculptured voluptuously in ephemeral marbles.

Lingering touch of fingers,

Cooler than the curving ringlets of spray

Fluting the new-blown petals of a shell,

And kisses murmuring as the lips of darkness

Against the ivory forehead of the moon.

Your face to me is like a beautiful city

Dreaming forever by the rough wild sea,

And I the ship upon a wilderness of waves

Heavily laden with memories....

I roam over all the earth

Making rhymes of you, and singing songs,

Because your face will never let me rest,

Because I can not frame it in a star

Surrounded with my cloudy reveries,

Because I may not pluck it like a flower

To breathe the incense of its perfumed soul—

Your face is like the carved hilt of a sword

Whose sheath is in my breast!

Oh! why will you not let me love you

Well enough?

You have plucked my blossoms,

Gathered the leaves

And revived them with water;

But all the tortuous roots

Delving for your spirit

In subterranean passions

With a blind unresting desire,

Have you felt them, have you known?

In the blackest night of sleep

Though I be sunk a thousand fathoms

In the cerulean depths of slow oblivion,

My soul still swims toward you

Against the envious pressure of the tide....

You who are so tired, so filled with sleep

That you would brush a rose-leaf from your cheek

Lest its heaviness should stir your rest,

How can you shoulder the weight of my great burden

That is too vast for me to bear alone?

I tell you

Love is no little thing,

No moth-winged Cupid painted on the air,

No thin flute music petaling the silence

As leaves that flutter from a cherry tree.

It is the thought that broods upon its death,

The dread of mountains looking to the storm

Ere shrieks of lightning cleave their breasts in twain.

It is the fire that pillars up the stars

To mix its flame with their eternal gold.

Oh, listen to me!

You shall hear my message sung from sphere to sphere

As star-dust pouring a path through Heaven.

You shall know me

In the pensive shadows of trees,

In the luminary phantoms

My devotion kneels to you,

Holding a candle to illumine your face.

My loneliness is your shadow

Along the solitary roads.

My passion is a book between your hands

Whose leaves are as the leaves of violets,

A volume of pressed flowers

Scenting your fingers though you read it not.

And my white faith

Is a silken surplice clothing you in peace.