The leaves are singing, and the sea,

And the sand in the wind,

Blown grass and hurrying people;

Full of melodious strings and lutes and flutes

Rustling and whispering forever.

The sad music of Life is in my ears,

Never ceasing, never asleep,

And my heart is strung between chord and chord

Like a crucifix in a rosary.

How soundly sleepeth the fool,

With profane snore taunting the solemn-pillared night—

He hath no dreams of restless, subtle forms

That shift across a feverish vacancy;

Nor doth he hear the drums of time

Beating against oblivion tunes of war,

Goading the crippled hours on their endless march—

But waketh to yawn in the face of the sun,

Then turneth back to sleep....

How soundly the wise man sleepeth,

Couched royally in the purple of the dark

With his white mistress, Peace—

And when the morning stealeth on his rest,

As a rose he doth pluck her from the spreading tree of days,

And reviveth his heart

With the perfume of the world....

But 'twixt the wise and the foolish

Many nights shed sorrow and fear,

And nets are spread for timid feet,

And the waves beat on the shifting sand....

Moonlit lilacs under the window,

And the pale smell of their falling blossoms,

And the white floating beams like luminous moths

Fluttering from bloom to bloom.

Sprays of lilac flowers

Frothing at the green verge of midnight waves,

Frozen to motionless icicles.

Moonlight flows over me,

Spreads her bright watery hair over my face,

Full of illicit, marvellous perfumes

Wreathed with syringa and plaited with hyacinths;

Hair of the moonlight falling about me,

Straight and cool as the drooping tresses of rain.

Old woman forever sitting

Alone in the large hotel under the fans,

Infinitely alone where around you spin

So many lives like painted tops,

Smearing the void a moment with their hues,

Giddily catching at balance as they pause.

What crime was yours, old woman,

What sin against the Earth

That she should give you now

A cap of dust and furrows on your cheeks,

And at the end

A hole dug in the mould?

Is death the promise of Fate's last rebound,

Revenge of Time that waits within the clock

And laughs awry at life,

For a kiss, for a dream, for a child that you bore,

For a fresh rose pinned to your bosom?

The owl is in your spirit,

Blinking through the oldest tree of wisdom—

And now your fingers are weaving

The cold pale invisible blossoms of death

Into a waxen wreath,

And Time

Sits down beside you knitting with quick hands

Grey counterpanes to cover up a grave!

Loneliness I love,

And that is why they have called me forth into the streets.

Loneliness I love,

But the crowd has clutched at me with fawning hands,...

My spirit speaks

In the scented quietness of a divine melancholy

Murmuring the tunes

For which my dreams are the delicate instruments.

The shadowy silences

Have made me beautiful and dressed me in velvet dignities,

And that is why

The noise of tambourines has maddened my soul into dancing,

And I am clad

In the lust-lipped whispering of furtive caresses.

Holiness I love,

And touching the virginal pierced feet of martyrs,

The crucified feet

Nestled among lilies and hallowing candles.

Holiness I love

And the melodious absolution falling on my sins.

But that is why

Blasphemous priests have forced my hands to tear

The vesture of secrecy

Which hides the human nakedness of God.

I met an Indian underneath a tree, under a ragged tree,

His face was yellow and wrinkled like some stone whereon a God had writ

And his emaciated fingers drew circles in the dust....

I bent my mouth to his ear, crying "O father, O Prophet!

I have wandered far over the earth troubled with doubts that will not let me rest,

Canst thou not tell me with all thy wizardries and meditations

The purpose of our lives upon this world,

The secret truth Earth shelters in her womb?"

But he was listening to the whispering of the mountains,

To the boom of God's paces on the rocks,

And the swishing steps of his followers in the rivers.

Then suddenly he pointed to the arched doorway in between the hills,

And the mysterious purple curtain of the dusk that drooped from cliff to cliff.

I saw in his eyes the vision of highborn ghosts,

Of divine ivory faces wreathed with the flowers of wisdom—

And I knew that he had found only the half-spoken promises of Heaven....

I saw a drunkard laughing in a tavern,

His cup was tilted and the wine spilt crimson on the sprawled arms and distracted hair of a woman fallen asleep,

I watched him there and wondered

If ever the bubbling goblins of wine had whispered him life's secret.

But he raised the cup of his carousals and gazed at emptiness,

Toasting some wild, irreverent dream,

A woman sat within a little house,

Scolding and singing ballads to her child,

And all around came the quarrel of children's voices.

Yet one boy sat apart within the furthest corner of the room

Painting an animal with coloured chalks.

I lingered by the fire thinking of life, its vanities and mysteries,

But the woman did not heed me,

Nor her pale son that sat so hunched and still,

Painting his visions with the broken chalks,

For they had discovered the absorbing painful secrets of giving birth....

It was evening as I wandered,

By a lake two lovers leaned, smiling to see their faces in the water,

For they had found within each other's souls

An argent flattering mirror wherein to gaze and see their faces change with all the moods and shadows of the day....

Not here should I discover the answer to bring light into my darkness,

Into the dim psychic crystals of my soul opalled with the changing colours of unrest—

So I went away into the loneliness, asking the forests and the mountains and the sea

The knowledge of life's baffling mysteries.

But they were roaring in a wind of memories,

Gathering the rain into their bodies to make them fierce and strong,

Heaving their shoulders upward to the morning,

Crowning their foreheads with sunlight.

From the fathomless depth of my boredom, from the

last room of its emptiness, an elf has come to play

with me.

As comes a little gold spider to a prison cell teasing the

criminal from his darkness to tear at a thread of sunlight,

and kiss the mouth of a shy morning whispering through

the window.

An elf has come to dance with me, blown like a leaf on

the path of my autumn lassitude.

Sprightly one, dervish! You are the living adventure

born of my dead childhood, you are the small god in the

temples of my unbelief, you are the bird that nests in ruined

temples, laying your silver eggs by moonlight and singing

when the pagan birds are still.

You are the dream-sower in the fields of sleep, you have

jingled the star-bells on the hood of darkness, and from the

knarled, stark tree of time have flung me the apple of

eternal laughter.

Lolling in snow, like kings in ermine coats, the gilt-crowned

bottles lie.... Our thoughts are dangled in

a laughter of leaves as bunches of blue and yellow grapes

for faery beggars, for ragged fancies to pluck and taste.

Our music shall be the minstrelsy of ghostly ballad-mongers

that have stolen from the ashen banquets of death to bless

our revels.

Our spirits shall flit like those winged faces of cherubs

that never can alight, but swing forever on the azure ribbons

of the sky.

And all our dreams and kisses shall be as the rose-leaves

falling on ancient festivals, as the shadows of rose-leaves

falling on phantom lovers in the sleep-pillared temples of

our first archaic passion.

The roots of our longing are probing the heart of night,

delving and twining together that our ultimate truth

may grow out of the darkness that bewilders and nourishes.

Out of the earth, the dust, the crystals of frost that bind

themselves like a tight crown over our heads.

Through the mould and the frost our hair and fingers shall

prick their spears of pallor and flame, and in the green

ardour of our up-rushing leaves the red goblets of fire

shall open, and masses of white flowers, milky as the star-sprays

that droop over Heaven, shall splash their bright

foam from the darkness, as waves that rise and break into

a fountain of blossoms.