And heroes fail in the web thy slow caresses weave.
Comest thou from the black profound, or stars above?
10
Destiny, like a dog, follows thy scented gown;
Sowing, all chancefully, disaster, joy and love,
Thou art the imperatrix of all, the slave of none.
Thou tramplest on the dead with mockeries eternal;
Horror is half thy jewel-laden rosary;
15
And Murder is a precious amulet infernal
That on thy bosom burns and trembles amorously.
The ephemera flies to hail thee, candle of all our night,
And flaming dies, in adoration of its doom;
The lover leans toward the breast of his delight,
20
Even as a dying man, fain to caress his tomb.
Be thou from hell or heaven, say, what matters it,
O Beauty! fearful sphinx ingenuous, if alone
Thine eye, thy foot, thy smile, unbar the infinite
Which I have always loved and never yet have known?
25
Angel or sorceress, from God or Lucifer,
What matter—O my fay with velvet eyes—if thus
Thou renderest, by rhythm, gleam and flying myrrh,
The world less execrable and time less burdenous?
THE REMORSE OF THE DEAD
My sable love, when you at last are lain
Unsought upon the lone sepulchral bed,
And darkly keep your brothel with the dead,—
Your roomless vault that weeps with fetid rain;
5
Yea, when the ponderous carven shaft unshaken
Is the one weight your passionate nipples know,
And grinds you down and will not let you go
To find again your faithless lechers, taken
By fairer trulls—then, then, O harlot love,
10
The grave, which has my very voice, will sigh
All night about your sleep-derided corse,
Whispering ever: “In the days above,
You dreamt not how the unslumbering wantons lie,
Gnawed by the worms which are the last remorse.”
EXORCISM
Like ghosts returning stealthily
From those grey lands
Palled with funereal ashes falling
After the burnt-out sunset,
5
The mists of the valley reach with wavering, slow,
Malignant arms from pine to pine, and climb the hill
As fatal memories climb
To assail some heart benighted and bewitched. . . .
And once they would have crept
10
Around me in resistless long beleaguerment,
To lay their death-bleak fingers on my heart:
But now
My memories are of you and of the many graces
And tender, immortal, mad beatitudes of love;
15
And every chill and death-born phantom,
Made harmless now and dim,
Must pass to haunt the inane, unpassioned air;
And only living ghosts
Of raptures gone or ecstasies to be,
20
May touch me and attain within the circle
Your arms have set about me.
NYCTALOPS
Ye that see in darkness
When the moon is drowned
In the coiling fen-mist
Far along the ground—
5
Ye that see in darkness,
Say, what have ye found?
—We have seen strange atoms
Trysting on the air—
The dust of vanished lovers
10
Long parted in despair,
And dust of flowers that withered
In worlds of otherwhere.
We have seen the nightmares
Winging down the sky,
15
Bat-like and silent,
To where the sleepers lie;
We have seen the bosoms
Of the succubi.
We have seen the crystal
20
Of dead Medusa’s tears.
We have watched the undines
That wane in stagnant weirs,
And mandrakes madly dancing
By black, blood-swollen meres.
25
We have seen the satyrs
Their ancient loves renew
With moon-white nymphs of cypress,
Pale dryads of the yew,
In the tall grass of graveyards
30
Weighed down with evening’s dew.
We have seen the darkness
Where charnel things decay,
Where atom moves with atom
In shining swift array,
35
On some sidereal way.
We have seen fair colors
That dwell not in the light—
Intenser gold and iris
40
Occult and recondite;
We have seen the black suns
Pouring forth the night.
OUTLANDERS
By desert-deepened wells and chasmed ways,
And noon-high passes of the crumbling nome
Where the fell sphinx and martichoras roam;
Over black mountains lit by meteor-blaze,
5
Through darkness ending not in solar days,
Beauty, the centauress, has brought us home
To shores where chaos climbs in starry foam,
And the white horses of Polaris24 graze.
We gather, upon those gulfward beaches rolled,
10
Driftage of worlds not shown by any chart;
And pluck the fabled moly from wild scaurs:
Though these are scorned by human wharf and mart—
And scorned alike the red, primeval gold
For which we fight the griffins in strange wars.
SONG OF THE NECROMANCER
I will repeat a subtle rune—
And thronging suns of Otherwhere
Shall blaze upon the blinded air,
And spectres terrible and fair
5
Shall walk the riven world at noon.
The star that was mine empery
Is dust upon unwinnowed skies:
But primal dreams have made me wise,
And soon the shattered years shall rise
10
To my remembered sorcery.
To mantic mutterings, brief and low,
My palaces shall lift amain,
My bowers bloom; I will regain
The lips whereon my lips have lain
15
In rose-red twilights long ago.
Before my murmured exorcism
The world, a wispy wraith, shall flee:
A stranger earth, a weirder sea,
Peopled with shapes of Faëry,
20
Shall swell upon the waste abysm.
The pantheons of darkened stars
Shall file athwart the crocus dawn;
Goddess and Gorgon, Lar25 and faun,
Shall tread the amaranthine lawn,
25
And giants fight their thunderous wars.
Like graven mountains of basalt,
Dark idols of my demons there
Shall tower through bright zones of air,
Fronting the sun with level stare;
30
And hell shall pave my deepest vault.
Phantom and fiend and sorcerer
Shall serve me . . . till my term shall pass,
And I become no more, alas,
Than a frail shadow on the glass
35
Before some latter conjurer.
TO HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT
Lover of hills and fields and towns antique,
&nbs
p; How hast thou wandered hence
On ways not found before,
Beyond the dawnward spires of Providence?26
5
Hast thou gone forth to seek
Some older bourn than these—
Some Arkham27 of the prime and central wizardries?
Or, with familiar felidae,
Dost now some new and secret wood explore,
10
A little past the senses’ farther wall—
Where spring and sunset charm the eternal path
From Earth to ether in dimensions nemoral?
Or has the Silver Key28
Opened perchance for thee
15
Wonders and dreams and worlds ulterior?
Hast thou gone home to Ulthar or to Pnath?29
Has the high king who reigns in dim Kadath30
Called back his courtly, sage ambassador?
Or darkling Cthulhu31 sent
20
The sign which makes thee now a councilor
Within that foundered fortress of the deep
Where the Old Ones32 stir in sleep
Till mighty temblors shake their slumbering continent?
Lo! in this little interim of days
25
How far thy feet are sped
Upon the fabulous and mooted ways
Where walk the mythic dead!
For us the grief, for us the mystery. . . .
And yet thou art not gone
30
Nor given wholly unto dream and dust:
For, even upon
This lonely western hill of Averoigne
Thy flesh had never visited,
I meet some wise and sentient wraith of thee,
35
Some undeparting presence, gracious and august.
More luminous for thee the vernal grass,
More magically dark the Druid stone,
And in the mind thou art forever shown
As in a magic glass;
40
And from the spirit’s page thy runes can never pass.
MADRIGAL OF MEMORY
To my remote abandonment
Your deep and lustrous hair has lent
How many an autumn-colored dream;
Your eyes bring many an April gleam
5
To this my place of uncontent.
Like torchy fires your footsteps leap
Where covens of lost dreamers keep
Their sabbat and their bacchanal;
Your breasts are moons that mount and fall
10
Through the dim, turbulent climes of sleep.
Among the rondured hills that merge
Into the prone horizon-verge,
My haunted eyes have seen, have felt,
Your mobile hips at twilight melt,
15
Your supple bosom lift and surge.
In dryad ways not understood
You stir and whisper through the wood.
Far off the throbbing waters flow
Against a sanguine afterglow
20
Like the sweet pulses of your blood.
At morning, from the cloudy south,
Your tresses sweep athwart my drouth.
Night bears amid its magic bower
Your body’s many-scented flower
25
And bud and blossom of your mouth.
THE OLD WATER-WHEEL
Often, on homeward ways, I come
To a deserted orchard, old and lone,
Unplowed, untrod, with wilding grasses grown
Through rows of pear and plum.
5
There, in a never-ceasing round,
In the slow stream, by noon, by night, by dawn,
An ancient, hidden water-wheel turns on
With a sad, reiterant sound.
Most eerily it comes and dies,
10
And comes again, when on the horizon’s breast
The ruby of Antares seems to rest,
Fallen from star-fraught skies:
A dolent, drear, complaining note
Whose all-monotonous cadence haunts the air
15
Like the recurrent moan of a despair
Some heart has learned by rote;
Heavy, and ill to hear, for one
Within whose breast, today, tonight, tomorrow,
Like the slow wheel, an ancient, darkling sorrow
20
Turns and is never done.
THE HILL OF DIONYSUS
This is enchanted ground
Whereto the nymphs are bound;
Where the hoar oaks maintain,
While seasons mount or wane,
5
Their ghostly satyrs, dim and undispelled.
It is a place fulfilled and circled round
With fabled years and presences of Eld.
These things have been before,
And these are things forevermore to be;
10
And he and I and she,
Inseparate as of yore,
Are celebrants of some old mystery.
Under the warm blue skies
The flickering butterflies,
15
Dancing with their frail shadows, poise and pass.
Now, with the earth for board,
The bread is eaten and the wine is poured;
While she, the twice-adored,
Between us lies on the pale autumn grass.
20
Thus has she lain before,
And thus we two have watched her reverently;
More beautiful, and more
Mysterious for her body’s nudity.
Full-burdened with the culminating year,
25
The heavens and earth are mute;
Till on a fitful wind we seem to hear
Some fainting murmur of a broken flute.
Adown the hillside steep and sere
The laurels bear their ancient leaves and fruit.
30
These things have happened even thus of yore,
These things are part of all futurity;
And she and I and he,
Returning as before,
Participate in some unfinished mystery.
35
Her hair, between my shoulder and the sun,
Is turned to iridescent fire and gold:
A witch’s web, whereon
Wild memories are spun,
And magical delight and sleep unfold
40
Beyond the world where Anteros33 is lord.
It is the hour of mystical accord,
Of respite, and release
From all that hampers us, from all that frets,
And from the vanity of all regrets.
45
Where grape and laurel twine,
Once more we drink the Dionysian wine,
Ringed with the last horizon that is Greece.
IF WINTER REMAIN
Hateful, and most abhorred,
about us the season
of sleet, of snow and of frost
reaches, and seems unending
5
as plains whereon
lashed prisoners go,
chained, and enforced
to labor in glacial mines,
digging the baubles of greybeard kings,
10
of bleak Polarian34 lords.
Benumbed and failing,
we languish for shores Canopic35
that foulder to vaults of fire,
for streams of ensanguined lotus
15
drinking the candent flame
with lips unsered, unsated,
for valleys wherein no shadow,
whether of cassia or cypress,
shall harbor the ghost of ice,
20
the winter’s etiolate phantom.
Benumbed and failing,
we languish for shores Ca
nopic
that foulder to vaults of fire.
Fain would we hail the summer,
25
like slaves endungeoned
beneath some floe-built fortress,
greeting their liberator,
the hero in golden mail. . . .
But . . . if summer should come no more,
30
and winter remain
a stark colossus
bestriding the years?
If, silent and pale,
with marmorean armor,
35
the empire of cold
should clasp the world
to its rimed equator
beneath the low,
short arc of the sun,
40
out-ringed by the far-flung
orbit of death?
AMITHAINE
Who has seen the towers of Amithaine
Swan-throated rising from the main
Whose tides to some remoter moon
Flow in a fadeless afternoon? . . .
5
Who has seen the towers of Amithaine
Shall sleep, and dream of them again.
On falcon banners never furled,
Beyond the marches of the world,
They blazon forth the heraldries
10
Of dream-established sovereignties
Whose princes wage immortal wars
For beauty with the bale-red stars.
Amid the courts of Amithaine
The broken iris rears again
15
Restored from gardens youth has known;
And strains from ruinous viols flown
The legends tell in Amithaine
Of her that is its chatelaine.
Dreamer, beware! in her wild eyes
20
Full many a sunken sunset lies,
And gazing, you shall find perchance
The fallen kingdoms of romance,
And past the bourns of north and south
Follow the roses of her mouth.
25
The trumpets blare in Amithaine
For paladins that once again
Ride forth to ghostly, glamorous wars
Against the doom-preparing stars.
Dreamer, awake! . . . but I remain
30
To ride with them in Amithaine.
CYCLES
The sorcerer departs . . . and his high tower is drowned
Slowly by low flat communal seas that level all . . .
While crowding centuries retreat, return and fall
Into the cyclic gulf that girds the cosmos round,
5
Widening, deepening ever outward without bound . . .
Till the oft-rerisen bells from young Atlantis call;
And again the wizard-mortised tower upbuilds its wall
Above a re-beginning cycle, turret-crowned.