Starlit silences!

Breeding fears, swarming with sudden deaths,

With separations, burdens, and despairs,

Weaving slow eerie fancies in my brain ...

Forlorn shorn monks go down the cloisters of quietness

With tortured crucifixes cut in ivory

Clasped in their praying hands,

And psalmed with lips renunciate of kisses ...

Forgotten days are painted on the night

In parables and symbols of remorse

That jeer from out the wind-stirred tapestries.

The hangman's rope coils upward like a snake

Out of the death-coloured waters,

While the black barges pass

Funereal,

Carrying doom from mist to mist....

And madmen steal about the wintry parks

Under the high glum walls of an asylum,

With eyes lit up in phosphorescent ecstasies,

With fumbling hands

That grope for things invisibly obscene.

Even the clock

Grown idiot too from keeping madmen's time

Gibbers the hours away in irrelevant chimes....

Silence embalms the dead with scented bands

And is the watchman to deserted houses,

And draws the violet curtain on the day,

And fits a mask of silver to the moon.

Silence brings corpses from the crypts of memory

And sits them round us in the empty chairs,

Opens the secret chambers of our hopes

And shows us there in awful pantomime

Lust wreathing love with poppies and with ashes,

And Beauty dressing Sin for carnival,

And Peace made drunken with a cup of blood.

It winds as ivy round our listening thoughts

Cry out, sing, make noises,

Bacchantes, revellers, clowns!

Bring myriad lamps in clusters, likening grapes

That spill the wine of light into our gloom;

Pressing against our lips

The red grape-kisses of pleasure.

Bring the hounds,

The garlanded white ones,

To bay and snarl and tear the flying rags

Of stillness shadowing away!

Lean over me, O Life,

And whisper all thy lying flatteries

That drag me back from Silence and her dead.

I have kept vigil on my soul too long

Within this vast cathedral of dim sleep,

Languidly gathering

The cold grey lilies of the stars

To slip between her passive waxen hands....

The mountain is an Emperor.

The clouds are his beard, and the stars his diadem;

His bauble is the moon;

He is dressed in silver forests, and the mist his train;

His feet are two white rivers.

I know what happiness is—

It is the negation of thought,

The shutting off

Of all those brooding phantoms that surround

As dank trees in a forest

Cutting the daylight into rags,

Caging the sun

In rusted prison bars.

Happiness loves to lie at a river's edge

And make no song,

But listen to the water's murmuring wisdom,

The kissing touch of leaves wind-bowed together,

The feathery swish of cloud wings on a hill;

Opening wide the violet-petalled doors

Of every shy and cloistered sense,

That all the scent and music of the world

May rush into the soul.

And happiness expands

The rainbow arch for a procession of dreams,

For moth-like fancies winged with evening,

For dove-breasted silences,

For shadowy reveries

And starry pilgrims....

I know what happiness is—

It is the giving back to Earth

Of all our furtive thefts,

The lurid jewels that we stole away

From passion, sin and pain,

Because they glittered strangely, luring us

With their forbidden beauty.

Because our childish fingers curiously

Crave the pale secrets of the moon

And grope for dangerous toys.

Happiness comes in giving back to Earth

The things we took from her with violent hands,

Remembering only

Long hath the pen lain idle in my hand,

Or traced slow sentences without a rhyme,

Words strung at random to beguile the time

As children threading beads upon a strand.

I have strayed far away from fairyland

Whose little hills grow steep and hard to climb;

I creep along the valleys in the slime,

Or hide me like an ostrich in the sand.

For I have sought a mellow idleness,

To be forever buried as a fly

Lies casketed in amber; where the stress

Of peril, hunger, Death can never cry

To wake me from my sanguine weariness,

Or cloud the lucid stillness with a sigh.

I laid my heart on a stone

And stood in the wood to watch.

Presently a priest came by;

He hid it in his cowl

And buried it in the graveyard.

Now is it grown into a cyclamen tree,

Clustering over the wall,

Beckoning far along the twilight road;

Nodding and singing where the cypress moans,

Ringing its little bells while the great bell tolls.

Whiter than ghosts are its flowers,

And its scent is sweeter than ghostly music—

All the men and priests that pass

In the night when the stars lean down,

Smell the heavy fragrance there

And feel the gentle touch of dripping dew.

Then they cross themselves and go

Hurriedly, warily,

Dreaming of pale women,

Under the pale stars.

The cold light steals into my soul

Revealing its emptiness,

The cold winds batter at my heart

And make its lonely tenant shake with fear—

The raindrops slide across the window-glass

Like sighs that fall from patient weariness;

And coldly smiling time

Peers with his clock-face, ticking in my brain

The pulse of a monotonous remorse.