In nights and constellations! Darkness hears
Enragèd suns that bellow down the deep
God’s ravenous and insatiable will;
35
And He is strong with change, and rideth forth
In whirlwind clothed, with thunders and with doom
To the red stars: God’s throne is reared of change;
Its myriad and successive hands support
Like music His omnipotence, that fails
40
If mercy or if justice interrupt
The sequence of that tyranny, begun
Upon injustice, and doomed evermore
To stand thereby.
I, who with will not less
Than His, but lesser strength, opposed to Him
45
This unsubmissive brow and lifted mind,
He holds remote in nullity and night
Doubtful between old Chaos and the deeps
Betrayed by Time to vassalage. Methinks
All tyrants fear whom they may not destroy,
50
And I, that am of essence one with His,
Though less in measure, He may not destroy,
And but withstands in gulfs of dark suspense,
A secret dread for ever: for God knows
This quiet will irrevocably set
55
Against His own, and this my prime revolt
Yet stubborn, and confirmed eternally.
And with the hatred born of fear, and fed
Ever thereby, God hates me, and His gaze
Sees the bright menace of mine eyes afar
60
Through midnight, and the innumerable blaze
Of servile suns: lo, strong in tyranny,
The despot trembles that I stand opposed!
For fain am I to hush the anguished cries
Of Substance, broken on the racks of change,
65
Of Matter tortured into life; and God,
Knowing this, dreads evermore some huge mishap—
That in the vigils of Omnipotence,
Once careless, I shall enter heaven, or He,
Himself, with weight of some unwonted act,
70
Thoughtless perturb His balanced tyranny,
To mine advance of watchful aspiration.
With rumored thunder and enormous groan
(Burden of sound that heavens overborne
Let slip from deep to deep, even to this
75
Where climb the huge cacophonies of Chaos)
God’s universe moves on. Confirmed in pride,
In patient majesty serene and strong,
I wait the dreamt, inevitable hour
Fulfilled of orbits ultimate, when God,
80
Whether through His mischance or mine own deed,
Or rise of other and extremer Strength,
Shall vanish, and the lightened universe
No more remember Him than Silence does
An ancient thunder. I know not if these,
85
Mine all-indomitable eyes, shall see
A maimed and dwindled Godhead cast among
The stars of His creating, and beneath
The unnumbered rush of swift and shining feet
Trodden into night; or mark the fiery breath
90
Of His infuriate suns blaze forth upon
And scorch that coarsened Essence; or His flame,
A mightier comet, roar and redden down,
Portentous unto Chaos. I but wait,
In strong majestic patience equable,
95
That hour of consummation and of doom,
Of justice, and rebellion justified.
THE GHOUL
He seemed, in implicit deeper night
Of cypress, and the glade of cedarn gloom,
A shadow come from catacomb or tomb,
The shade of midnight’s subterranean might
5
Upthrown to strengthen darkness, and affright,
Light’s rear and remnant, and defer the doom
Of phantoms—ere the haled dawn relume
The woodland fanes of Hecatean5 rite.
When half the conclave of the glooms was gone,
10
Gigantical I saw his form define,
And sombre on the sun’s eternal ways;
And fantoms languid in the night’s decline,
Were, thinnest mist-ranks paling tow’rd the dawn,
O’er the black tarns of his abhorrent gaze.
DESIRE OF VASTNESS
Supreme with night, what high mysteriarch—
The undreamt-of god beyond the trinal noon
Of elder suns empyreal—past the moon
Circling some wild world outmost in the dark—
5
Lays on me this unfathomed wish to hark
What central sea with plume-plucked midnight strewn,
Plangent to what enormous plenilune
That lifts in silence, hinderless and stark?
The brazen empire of the bournless waste,
10
The unstayed dominions of the brazen sky—
These I desire, and all things wide and deep;
And, lifted past the level years, would taste
The cup of an Olympian ecstasy,
Titanic dream, and Cyclopean sleep.
THE MEDUSA OF DESPAIR
I may not mask for ever with the grace
Of woven flowers thine eyes of staring stone:
Ere the lithe adders and the garlands blown,
Parting their tangle, have disclosed thy face
5
Lethal as are the pale young suns in space—
Ere my life take the likeness of thine own—
Get hence! the dark gods languish on their throne,
And flameless grow the Furies they embrace.
Regressive, through what realms of elder doom
10
Where even the swart vans of Time are stunned,
Seek thou some tall Cimmerian6 citadel,
And proud demonian capitals unsunned
Whose ramparts, ominous with horrent gloom,
Heave worldward on the unwaning light of hell.
THE REFUGE OF BEAUTY
From regions of the sun’s half-dreamt decay,
All day the cruel rain strikes darkly down;
And from the night thy fatal stars shall frown—
Beauty, wilt thou abide this night and day?
5
Roofless, at portals dark and desperate,
Wilt thou a shelter unrefused implore,
And past the tomb’s too-hospitable door
Evade thy lover in eluding Hate?
Alas, for what have I to offer thee?—
10
Chill halls of mind, dank rooms of memory
Where thou shalt dwell with woes and thoughts infirm;
This rumor-throngèd citadel of Sense,
Trembling before some nameless imminence;
And fellow-guestship with the glutless Worm.
THE HARLOT OF THE WORLD
O Life, thou harlot who beguilest all!
Beautiful in thy house, the golden world.
Abidest thou, where Powers pinion-furled
And flying Splendors follow to thy call.
5
Innumerous like the stars or like the dust,
Nations and monarchs were thy thralls of yore:
Unto the grave’s old womb forevermore
Hast thou betrayed the passion and the lust.
Fair as the moon of summer is thy face,
10
And mystical with cloudiness of hair. . . .
Only an eye, subornless by delight,
Shall find, within thy phosphorescent gaze,
Those caverns of corruption and despair
Where the Worm toileth in the charnel night.
MEMNON AT MIDNIGHT
Methought upon the tomb-encumbered shore
I stood of Egypt’s lone monarchal stream,
And saw immortal Memnon, throned supreme
In gloom as of that Memphian night of yore:
5
Fold upon fold purpureal he wore,
Beneath the star-borne canopy extreme—
Carven of silence and colossal dream,
Where waters flowed like sleep forevermore.
Lo, in the darkness, thick with dust of years,
10
How many a ghostly god around his throne,
With thronging wings that were forgotten Fames,
Stood, ere the dawn restore to ancient ears
The long-withholden thunder of their names,
And music stilled to monumental stone.
LOVE MALEVOLENT
I fain would love thee, but thy lips are fed
With poison-honey, hivèd in a skull;
They seem like scarlet poppies, beautiful
For delving roots, deep-clenchèd in the dead.
5
Thine eyes are coloured like the nightshade-flow’r. . . .
Blent in the opiate perfume of thy breath
Are dreams, and purple sleep, and scented death
For him that is thy lover for an hour.
Mandragora, within the graveyard grown,
10
Hath given thee its carnal root to eat,
And vipers, born and nurstled in a tomb,
From fawning mouths drip venom at thy feet;
Yet from thy lethal lips and thine alone,
Love would I drink, as dew from poison-bloom.
THE CRUCIFIXION OF EROS
Because of thee immortal Love hath died:
Because thy wilful heart will not believe,
Thy hands and mine a thorny crown must weave,
And build a cross for Love the crucified.
5
Behold, how beautiful the limbs that bleed—
The limbs that bleed, O stubborn heart, for us!
Stilled are the lids so softly tremulous,
And mute the mouth of our eternal need. . . .
Though this thy fearful lips would now deny,
10
Love is divine and cannot wholly die:
Draw forth the nails thy tender hands have driven,
And we will know the mercy infinite,
Will find redemption in our own delight,
And in each other’s heart the only heaven.
THE TEARS OF LILITH
O lovely demon, half-divine!
Hemlock and hydromel and gall,
Honey and aconite and wine
Mingle to make that mouth of thine—
5
Thy mouth I love: but most of all
It is thy tears that I desire—
Thy tears, like fountain-drops that fall
In gardens red, Satanical;
Or like the tears of mist and fire,
10
Wept by the moon, that wizards use
To secret runes when they require
Some silver philtre, sweet and dire.
REQUIESCAT IN PACE
M. L. M.
White iris on thy bier,
With the white rose, we strew,
And lotus pale or blue
As moonlight on the orient mountain-snows.
5
Slumber, as they that sleep
In the slow sands unknown,
Or under seas that zone
With lulling foam the sealed, extremer lands.
Slumber, with songless birds
10
That sang, and sang to death,
Giving their gladder breath
To lonely winds in one melodious pang.
Sleep, with the golden queens
Of planets long forgot,
15
Whose fire-soft lips are not
Recalled by any sorcery of song.
Sleep, with the flowers that were,
And any leaf that fell
On field or flowerless dell
20
In autumns lost of memory and grief.
Pass, with the music flown
From ivory lyre, and lute
Of mellow string left mute
In cities desolate ere the dream of Tyre.7
25
Pass, with the clouds that sank
In sunset turned to grey
On some Edenic day
For which the exiled years have ever yearned.
White iris on thy bier,
30
With the white rose, we strew,
And lotus pale or blue
As moonlight on the orient mountain-snows.
THE MOTES
I saw a universe today:
Through a disclosing bar of light
The motes were whirled in gleaming flight
That briefly dawned and sank away.
5
Each had its swift and tiny noon;
In orbit-streams I marked them flit,
Successively revealed and lit.
The sunlight paled and shifted soon.
THE HASHISH-EATER; OR, THE APOCALYPSE OF EVIL
Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,
5
Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
The spaceward-flown horizon infinite.
Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut,
The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise,
By jealous moons maleficently urged
10
To follow me for ever; mountains horned
With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed
With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued,
Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain;
And continents of serpent-shapen trees,
15
Pursue my flight through ages spurned to fire
By that supreme ascendance; sorcerers,
And evil kings, predominantly armed
With scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin whereon
20
Are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame,
Would stay me; and the sirens of the stars,
With foam-like songs from silver fragrance wrought,
Would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons
Where viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell,
25
With antic gnomes abominably wise,
Heave up their icy horns across my way.
But naught deters me from the goal ordained
By suns and eons and immortal wars,
And sung by moons and motes; the goal whose name
30
Is all the secret of forgotten glyphs
By sinful gods in torrid rubies writ
For ending of a brazen book; the goal
Whereat my soaring ecstasy may stand
In amplest heavens multiplied to hold
35
My hordes of thunder-vested avatars,
And Promethèan armies of my thought,
That brandish claspèd levins. There I call
My memories, intolerably clad
In light the peaks of paradise may wear,
40
And lead the Armageddon of my dreams
Whose instant shout of triumph is become
Immensity’s own music: for their feet
Are founded on innumerable worlds,
Remote in alien epochs, and their arms
45
Upraised, are columns potent to exalt
With ease ineffable the countless thrones
Of all the gods that are or gods to be,
And bear the seats of Asmodai and Set8
Above the seventh paradise.
Supreme
50
In culminant omniscience manifold,
And served by senses multitudinous,
Far-posted on the shifting walls of time,
With eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields
Of utter night and chaos, I convoke
55
The Babel of their visions, and attend
At once their myriad witness. I behold
In Ombos,9 where the fallen Titans dwell,
With mountain-builded walls, and gulfs for moat,
The secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug
60
Beneath an alp-like buttress; and I list,
Too late, the clang of adamantine gongs
Dinned by their drowsy guardians, whose feet
Have felt the wasp-like sting of little knives
Embrued with slobber of the basilisk
65
Or the pale juice of wounded upas. In
Some red Antarean10 garden-world, I see
The sacred flower with lips of purple flesh,
And silver-lashed, vermilion-lidded eyes
Of torpid azure; whom his furtive priests
70
At moonless eve in terror seek to slay
With bubbling grails of sacrificial blood
That hide a hueless poison. And I read
Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,
The annulling word a spiteful demon wrote
75
In gall of slain chimeras; and I know
What pentacles the lunar wizards use,
That once allured the gulf-returning roc,
With ten great wings of furlèd storm, to pause
Midmost an alabaster mount; and there,
80
With boulder-weighted webs of dragons’ gut
Uplift by cranes a captive giant built,
They wound the monstrous, moonquake-throbbing bird,
And plucked from off his saber-taloned feet
Uranian sapphires fast in frozen blood,
85
And amethysts from Mars. I lean to read
With slant-lipped mages, in an evil star,
The monstrous archives of a war that ran
Through wasted eons, and the prophecy
Of wars renewed, which shall commemorate
90
Some enmity of wivern-headed kings
Even to the brink of time. I know the blooms
Of bluish fungus, freaked with mercury,
That bloat within the craters of the moon,
And in one still, selenic hour have shrunk
95
To pools of slime and fetor; and I know