Fernando Pessoa

Now at the doorway of the coming year,
Ye nymphs do gather and the garlands twine
That heroes' sons will bear
Fifty years hence in their remembering hands
And of their fathers speak with shining eyes
And of the war that stained the lands.

Weave ye the garlands, for the fame will pass,
And their grandchildren of grandchildren will
No more remember, neither care
Who their ancestor was
Who did that old crown, now scarce a crown, bear
For all must pass, that Time may have his fill.

Weave ye the garlands therefore, for this hour
Will not survive beyond the memory
Of those yet near to it who have the power
The hour somewhat like what it was to see.
Weave ye the garlands, weave
That their memory may live
Awhile, and if that mean that fame is nought,
Weave still the garlands with a gentle thought,
For weaving them, know ye
What to Time's elder shades you yet may give.
The days are heavy with the blood of men,
The year reels like a shattered wall
When the wind comes out of the caves of night.
Our minds are equal with the shaking...
We know not on what power to call
Or which side of the Truth lies right.

Alas! alas! all sides are right in war,
And that impartial vision born of peace,
And that the Gods alone can have,
Lives only in our wish that dim wars mar,
Breathes only in the halls of our release
From all the human things for which we crave.

But these are thoughts, and life is grief and fear.
Weave ye the garlands, lest the coming year
Forget, like ye, the fallen to remember
And the victors to greet.
Weave ye the garlands made
Of some strange flower that lasts unto December
And lay them at Fate's unseen feet.

Ay, for not for the heroes nor the slain
Weave ye the garlands woven with your pain.
Not for the fallen do your cheeks awhile
Flush then grow pale and your proud pain smile.
Not for a man nor for a nation do
Your garlands outreach Time
Perhaps and in eternal regions chime
With the sense of their fame who were e'er true.

For Fate alone all garlands woven are.
Unto Fate's feet the rivers of our tears
Perennial run, nor is there aught more far
Alas! than mere Fate that outwits the sun,
And that in circles round its empty name
Carries the vain course of our sterile fame
And great men as great nations equal lead
Vainly around the frame
Of nothing, like a wind along a mead.

Yet, whether for some man or for no man,
Whether for personal hopes or Fate no one,
Your garlands weave, lest the year come und span
With days fame‑empty the task e'er begun.
Weave garlands, green glad garlands, garlands sad,
Garlands of all sorts, if they glory mean,
Carry your woven garlands to their grave...
The rest is something that cannot be had -
The void as of a ship sunk nor more seen
Beneath the wave.

A low, sad wind fills the lone night
With its one solitary sound.
I have forgotten what delight
Delight has, in the vague around
All sleep is consecrated ground.

Alas for all I ever hoped!
The sheep crop what it lies beneath.
Its grave is where the mountain sloped
When mountains were, but now the heath
Is all the life above its death.

Moan, solitary wind that wakes
When the day sleeps! Moan vague and low!
That which I never was now slakes
Its thirst where reeds cluster round lakes
Of silence, or mute rivers go.

To-morrow shall be yesterday
Lest life forget what it is ever.
I shall myself cast this away
That I am now, and myself sever
From what of me weeps by this river.

This river of the haunted night
That under stars I do not see
Has neither purpose nor delight.
Moan, solitary wind, and be
This life’s unchanging, shoreless sea!

13/3/1933

now takes
Its sleep where reeds dip into lakes

THE ABYSS

BETWEEN me and my consciousness
Is an abyss
At whose invisible botton runs
The noise of a stream far from (...)
Whose very sound is dark and cold –
Ay, on some skin of our soul's deeming,
Cold and dark and terribly old,
Itself, and not in its told seeming.

My hewing has become my seeing
Of that placelessly sunken stream.
Its noiseless noise is ever freeing
My thought from my thught's power to dream.
Some dread reality belongs
To that stream of mute obstruct songs
That speak of no reality
But of its going to no sea.
Lo! with the eyes of my dreamed hearing
I hear the unseen river bearing
Along to where it goes not to
All things my thought is made of – Thought
Itself, and the World, and God who
On that impossible stream float.

Ay, the ideas of God, of World,
Of Myself and of Mystery,
As from some unknown rampart hurled,
Go down with that strewn to that sea
It has not and shall never reach
And belong to its night-bound motion.
Yet oh for that sun on the beach
Of that unattainable ocean!

ANTINOUS


The rain outside was cold in Hadrian's soul.

The boy lay dead
On the low couch, on whose denuded whole,
To Hadrian's eyes, whose sorrow was a dread,
The shadowy light of Death's eclipse was shed.

The boy lay dead, and the day seemed a night
Outside. The rain fell like a sick affright
Of Nature at her work in killing him.
Memory of what he was gave no delight,
Delight at what he was was dead and dim.

O hands that once had clasped Hadrian's warm hands,
Whose cold now found them cold!
O hair bound erstwhile with the Pressing bands!
O eyes half-diffidently bold!
O bare female male-body such
As a god's likeness to humanity!
O lips whose opening redness erst could touch
Lust's seats with a live art's variety!
O fingers skilled in things not to be told!
O tongue which, counter-tongued, made the blood bold!

This covers me, that erst had the blue sky.
This soil treads me, that once I trod. My hand
Put these inscriptions here, half knowing why;
Last, and hence seeing all, of the passing band.


Lisbon, 1920

When I do think my meanest line shall be
More in Time's use than my creating whole,
That future eyes more clearly shall feel me
In this inked page than in my direct soul;
When I conjecture put to make me seeing
Good readers of me in some aftertime,
Thankful to some idea of my being
That doth not even my with gone true soul rime;
An anger at the essence of the world,
That makes this thus, or thinkable this-wise,
Takes my soul by the throat and makes it hurled
In nightly horrors of despaired surmise,
And I become the mere sense of a rage
That lacks the very words whose waste might 'suage.

Hang with festoons and wreaths and coronals
The corridors and halls!
Be there all round the sound of gay bells ringing!
Let there be echoing singing!
Pour out like a libation all your joy!
Shout, even ye children, little maid and boy
Whose belly yet unfurred yet whitely decks
A sexless thing of sex!
Shout out as if ye knew what joy this is
You clap at in such bliss!

SPELL

From the moonlit brink of dreams
I stretch foiled hands to thee,
O borne down other streams
Than eye can think to see!
O crowned with spirit beams!
O veiled spirituality!

My dreams and thoughts abate
Their pennons at thy feet.
O angel born too late
For fallen man to meet!
In what new sensual state
Could our twined lives feel sweet?

What new emotion must
I dream to think thee mine?
What purity of lust?
O tendrilled as a vine
Around my caressed trust!
O dream-pressed spirit-wine!

SUMMER MOMENTS

I

The sky is blue
The glad grass green.
My sad eyes woo
The alien scene.

O could my heart
Partake of it
And feel no smart
Feeling life flit!

I have no home,
No hours save pain.
Sweet breezes, come
Into my brain!

Great river so
Quiet and true,
Teach me to go
Through life like you!

I have no rest.
My flowers have faded.
What was that quest
My will evaded?

Even what I wish
I care not for.
My heart is rich
And my love poor.

O golden day,
Come into me
And my soul ray
With sunlit glee!

Let me be merely
A window-pane
You pass through, clearly
A warmed no-pain.

I faint and shiver
Hearing life come.
O passing river,
Where is my home?

O happy hours
That the fields wear,
Fresh summer showers!
O my despair!

O glad horizons!
O happy hills!
What pain imprisons
My struggling wills?

What is between
Myself and me?
What should have been
Lest this should be?

My life no more
Ever to be
Than a lone shore
Struck by the sea!

What fate, what power
Of dark despair
Makes each fair hour
Taste as not fair?

O for some rest!
Give me a home,
A hope, a nest
Not to stray from!

Somewhere in life
Sure there must be
Something not strife
Waiting for me.

Lead me to it,
O happy day!
Make my heart fit
Thy going away!

Wake me the hopes
At least, though false.
My spirit gropes
Round prison-walls.

Low voice of streams,
Sweet summer's wife –
Why made I dreams
My only life?

Disappointment, my old friend,
I had forgot thou wert with me.
Forgive me. I did half pretend,
Deceiving ill my misery,
That thou hadst gone. Forgive me thou.
Thou old true friend, thou'rt with me now!

Despair, my old companion sure,
Thou too - though not forgotten quite -
Yet for a moment I had fewer
Thoughts of thee - somewhat of respite.
Entirely to forget thee were
Impossible. Friend, thou art here!

And thou, old comrade, Solitude,
Bare of affection and of hope,
Thou twin with me - I were quite rude
Were I to omit by thee to stop
And play the game of cares and fears?...
Why come ye to shame me, oh tears?

SONNET

Could I say what I think, could I express
My every hidden and too-silent though,
And bring my feelings, in perfection wrought,
To one unforced point of living stress.

Could I breathe forth my soul, could I confess
The inmost secrets to my nature brought;
I might be great, yet none to me hath taught
A language well to figure my distress.

Yet day and night to me new whispers bring,
And night, and day from me old whispers take...
Oh for a word, one phrase in which to fling

All that I think and feel, and so to wake
The world; but I am dumb and cannot sing,
Dumb as You clouds before the thunders break.

Alexander Search, May 1904

Set the great Flemish hour aflame!
Your senses of all leisure maim!
Cast down with blows that joy even where they hurt
The hands that mock to avert!
All things pick up to bed that lead ye to
Be naked that ye woo!
Tear up, pluck up, like earth who treasure seek,
When the chest's ring doth peep,
The thoughts that cover thoughts of the acts of heat
This great day does intreat!
Now seem all hands pressing the paps as if
They meant them juice to give!
Now seem all things pairing on one another,
Hard flesh soft flesh to smother,
And hairy legs and buttocks balled to split
White legs mid which they shift.
Yet these mixed mere thoughts in each mind but speak
The day's push love to wreak,
The man's ache to have felt possession,
The woman's man to have on,
The abstract surge of life clearly to reach
The bodies' concrete beach.
Yet some work of this doth the real day don.
Now are skirts lifted in the servants' hall,
And the whored belly's stall
Ope to the horse that enters in a rush,
Half late, too near the gush.
And even now doth an elder guest emmesh
A flushed young girl in a dark nook apart,
And leads her slow to move his produced flesh.
Look how she likes with something in her heart
To feel her hand work the protruded dart!

REGRET

I would that I were again a child
And a child you sweet and pure,
That we might be free and wild
In our consciousness obscure;
That we might play fantastic games
Under trees silent and shady,
That we might have fairy-book names,
I be a lord, you a lady.

And all were a strong ignorance
And a healthy want of thought,
And many a prank, many a dance
Our unresting feet had wrought;
And I would act well a clown's part
To your childish laughter winning,
And I would call you my sweetheart
And the name would have no meaning.

Or sitting close we each other would move
With tales that now gone are sad;
We would have no sex, would feel no love,
Good without fighting the bad.
And a flower would be our life's delight
And a nutshell boat our treasure:
We would lock it in a cupboard at night
As in memory a pleasure.

We would spend hours and days like a wealth
Of goodness too great to cloy,
We would deep enjoy innocence and health
Knowing not we did enjoy...
Ah, what bitterest is is that alone
Now one feeling in me I trace –
That knowledge of what from us hath gone
And of what it left in its place.


Alexander Search

May 29th. 1907

VIII

Ah quantas máscaras e submáscaras,
Usamos nós no rosto de alma, e quando,
Por jogo apenas, ela tira a máscara,
Sabe que a última tirou enfim?
De máscaras não sabe a vera máscara,
E lá de dentro fita mascarada.
Que consciência seja que se afirme,
O aceite uso de afirmar-se a ensona.
Como criança que ante o espelho teme,
As nossas almas, crianças, distraídas,
Julgam ver outras nas caretas vistas
E um mundo inteiro na esquecida causa;
E, quando um pensamento desmascara,
Desmascarar não vai desmascarado.

LULLABY *

My heart is full of lazy pain
And an old English lullaby
Comes out of that mist of my brain.

Upon my lap my sovereign sits
And sucks upon my breast;
Meantime his love maintains my life
And gives my sense her rest.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!

I would give all my singing trade
To be the distant English child
For whom this happy song was made.

When thou hast taken thy repast,
Repose, my babe, on me;
So may thy mother and thy nurse
Thy cradle also be.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullably, mine only joy!

There must have been true happiness
Near where this song was sung to small
White hands clutching a mother's dress.

I grieve that duty doth not work
All that my wishing would,
Because I would not be to thee
But in the best I should.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!

O what a sorrow comes to me
Knowing the bitterness I have
While that child had this lullaby!

Yet as I am, and as I may,
I must and will be thine,
Though all too little for thy self
Vouchsafing to be mine,
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!

My heart aches to be able to weep.
O to think of this song being sung
And the child smiling in its sleep!

Upon my lap my sovereign sits
And sucks upon my breast;
Meantime his love maintains my life
And gives my sense her rest.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!

I was a child too, but would now
Be the child, and no other hearing
This song low-breathed upon its brow.

When thou hast taken thy repast,
Repose, my babe, on me,
So may thy mother and thy nurse
Thy cradle also be.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!

O that I could return to that
Happy time that was never mine
And which I live but to regret!

I grieve that duty doth not work
All that my wishing would,
Because I would not be to thee
But in the best I should.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!

Ay, sing on in my soul, old voice,
So motherfully laying to sleep
The babe that quietly doth rejoice.

Yet as I am, and as I may,
I must and will be thine,
Though all too little for thy self
Vouchsafing to be mine.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!

Sing on and let my heart not weep
Because sometime a child could have
This song to lull him into sleep!

Yet as I am, and as I may,
I must and will be thine,
Though all too little for thy self
Vouchsafing to be mine.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!

Somehow somewhere I heard this song,
I was part of the happiness
That lived its idle lines along.

Yet as I am, and as I may,
I must and will be thine,
Though all too little for thy self
Vouchsafing to be mine.
Sing lullaby, my little boy
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!

Ay, somehow, somewhere I was that
Child, and my heart lay happy asleep.
Now – oh my sad and unknown fate!


* The «Lullaby» quoted is the 134th. poem in Palgrave's Golden Treasury. It was taken by him from Martin Peerson's Private Music, a Song-Book of 1620. The «Lullaby» is here given twice over, and the last stanza twice again.

God made my shivering nerves His human lyre,
A lyre whose curves in angels' faces end.
When God doth sing the song's invisible fire
And half-visible wings over it bend.

Fountain of incorruptible desire!
Gold-misted green isle where my bark doth tend!
My soul, rich with electedness, doth tire
My sense o) me with aches with God to blend.

But lo! to live is to be blent with God
Already. We need nought but life, all life.
Pain, evil, hale, lust, treachery, the rod
Of custom, the bypath of dreams, the knife

Grief hideth till it cut her, the delight
Of death – all these we God's willed spite.

Sorrow came and wept
By my side.
Slow and light she stept
As I walked towards God
By my side.
But I can never find that Great Abode,
And there is darkness in Descried.

The sky is a great turquoise shining glee,
All the earth is gathered up in the blue sea
Ev'n the green fields tend thereto in their joy,
The whole day playeth like a happy boy
Among the dales the hours build with their glee.

How happy, had I no cares, would I be!

But there is too much sorrow in mere seeing
The feminine disease of consciousness
Eats like a worm into the source of being.
The very thought I live gives me distress.
My heart is felt by me like some heavy place.

O heavy day that comes with so much glee
Out of the East.
It turquoises the silence of the sea
And makes a feast
Of blueness of the waves that shiver and flee.

O heavy day because my love hath gone
And taken away
His white arms and his lips like poppies grown
Athwart that day
When I first saw him and felt my heart moan.

My hands are stretched towards his coming, and
He cometh not.
He seems a woman and his gesturing hand
Too oft bath wrought
Dreams of strange vice with him through my heart's sand.

He is scarce more than a child. His body is white,
His arms lie bare
Across my neck and cling like a delight
Of which my share
Is painful like a far sail in the night.

Oh, love, return! All this is dreams of thee
Return and wake
My trembling frame to that vile misery
That love doth take
For his body when the lovers are such as we.

Golden‑haired boy that cannot love me so
As I love him,
Look, life is short, our lips fade... Ay, I know
I am ugly and dim
But love a little or seem... Love me and go
Yet love ere going, and then let me dream
On what was real while life fades and goes slow...

Let them speak ill of me. I do not care
Why shouldst thou care that fairer art than I?
My lips so oft have rested on thy hair,
So oft on thy lips, and so oft
On thy white arms that yet pretend to lie
On my dreams cushions like a vague thing soft...

Let them speak. Life is sweet if thy lips mean
Life. Love is sweet if thou art love.
The scorners cannot know what kisses screen
Our throbbing heart from heart nor prove
That full possession our mad love can scene
With perverse actions like an empire's end
That sinks among the galleys and doth blend
Its sunset with the landscape's emerald green.

Let them speak. Put thy hand within my hand
And let us love as maid and boy are said
To love. But we are none and love is red
On our hot souls thrill and understand.
Oh, to thy bed!

Oh to thy bed, fairer than maidens' couches
And curtained over with strange care for strangeness,
Let's to thy bed and kiss naked while touches
Selected from our hotter dreams transcend
Lust with thought lust acted upon our frames.
The magic misery of our wedded names
Shall light the future with impassioned strangeness.

Antinous!

Let us rest. Every hour is not the next.
May this wreathe round with more than emptiness
The meaning of the ciphered living text
We owe to living and to thought confess.

Let us rest. Every hour is not the last.
A consolation comes from being late
Even at happiness, lest near winds blast
The present flower and fate still follow fate.

Let us rest. Power is useless and life vain.
To ask means to be answered with not giving.
To move towards pleasure is to walk on pain,
And having to live takes life out of living.

So there is no true thought nor just behest,
Nor pomp worthing having. Let us rest.

Joyless seeing me to be
Mother Nature asked of me:
        «What desirest thou?
Whence comes this thy misery?
Whence the sadness on thy brow?
        Tell me what thy wish is.»

- «To give it thou art powerless.
Something lovelier than love,
Bluer than the sky above,
Truer than the truth we have
Something better than the grave,
Aught that in the soul has root,
Something that no mistress' kiss
Nor mother's love can substitute.
But I, dreaming, do pollute
With my dream its object's day.»

In the silence absolute
Of my soul I hear it say:

´'Love can make me but to weep,
        Glory maketh me but pine.
        Give the world with my keep,
        And still nothing will be mine.'»

- «But what feelest thou in thee?»

- «Hope and misery the first,
Then despair and misery.

´Oh, it is a desire, a thirst
The limits of my soul to burst,
To spring outside my consciousness,
        I know not how nor why;
A wish with moonlight wings to fly
Past the high walls of distress.
Lifting my most daring flight
Up, far up, beyond all night,
More than eagles fly in air
Would I in that atmosphere.

«Something more near to me in space
        Than my body is. In fine
Something than myself more mine.
Something (in what words to trace
Its nature?) nearer in its bliss
To me than my own consciousness.
The Something I desire is this.
It is further than far away
And yet (its nature how to find?)
        Closer to me than my mind,
        Nearer to me than to-day.»

He was a nauseous leper
Who in the ruins was;
There ever and anon
The hollow wind did pass,
And wild and feeble and yellow all
        Was the grass.

And the leper sang this song:

«The leper is excluded from his race,
        The leper is driven out,
        The leper is thrust out
        From hall and street and way;
        He must not show his face
        Where human beings may.
        For him there are whips and stones;
        He cannot even stay
        Where mongrels fight for bones
        And are allowed to play.

«No beast as the poor leper is
Worms and snakes have greater bliss.
        But the leper is accurst
        And he knows that well accurst
Is he because a nauseous leper,
Of evil things the worst.

«The toad, the newt, the viper
        Are tolerate and borne,
        But the vile and nauseous leper
        Makes vomit in deep scorn;
        Repugnance is for him
        Inevitably born

«Sometimes he hears the laughter
Of human feast to come,
And music followed, after
By sounds of peace and of home.
        Upon the wind they stray,
        The wind bears them away,
And the nauseous leper, he remains,
        Through night, through day,
Alone with his sores, with his pains.

And bands of strollers pass,
Taking the road afar,
For in the ruins they know well
The leper's sores there are.
And if perchance they see
The leper from their way,
He sees their finger point
And he knows that they say:

«He is the nauseous leper
Who in the ruins doth sit;
He is viler than the plague,
More loathsome far than it;
If near to him we dared do come
Upon him we would spit.»

«Poor leper who is a man,
Poor leper who is alive,
Under his being's ban,
Whose torture's chain unearned
No pity comes to rive.

«A Hand of Might created
The newt, the toad, the viper,
But gave them not its worst;
Kept them from loneliness,
Gave them their kindred's bliss.
        But that hand made the leper
And it made the leper leper:
And that Hand Almighty is
        Of all things the most curst.

I pass before the windows lit
        With inward, curtained light,
And in the houses I see flit
Now and again shadows that hit
        The curtain's yellowed white.
Others a little gleam but show:
Inside, the people chat, I know.

And I feel cold and feel alone,
        Not that I no one have,
But - ah that dreams should ne’er be done! -
That among many I am one,
        As among flowers a grave;
One, and more lonely than can be
Imagined conceivably.

If l were born not to aspire
        Beyond the life that lead
These people whom life cannot tire,
Who chat and slumber by the fire
        Contentedly indeed,
Behind those curtains, by that light
That to the street is somewhat bright;

Could I no more aspire than these,
        Were all my wishes bound
In family or social ease,
In worldly, usual jollities
        Or children playing round,
Happy were I but to have then
The usual life of usual men.

But oh! I have within my heart
        Things that cannot keep still -
A mystic and delirious smart
That doth a restlessness impart,
        An ache, a woe, an ill;
I wearied Sysyphus I groan
Against the world's ironic stone.

I, the eternally excluded
        From socialness and mirth,
The aching heart whose mind has brooded
Till thought turned raving mad hath flooded
        The soul that gave it birth ­-
I weep to know I have in me
Aught at once joy and misery.

And cold before the normal, cold
        And fear‑struck I remain,
As one old, formidably old,
Who doth portentous secrets hold
        That he cannot explain
But which the world's show doth suggest
Unto his mind that knows not rest.

How good after dinner to chat
        And sit in half a sleep,
Without a duty‑sense to strike flat
All ease, all cosiness to abate
        An aspiration deep;
To have an ease no pains do throng
Nor felt as an ease that is wrong.

A home, a rest, a child, a wife ­-
        None of these are for me
Who wish for aught beyond this life
With an incessant inner strife
        That knows not victory.
Ay me! and none to comprehend
This wish that doth all things transcend.

Some in some theatre are away
        Or other place of joy
And keep, for ever glad and gay,
The hounds of thought and care at bay
        That cannot laugh or toy:
These are awaited in some homes,
A faint light from their windows comes.

A cosiness these homes must steep
        In something like a slumber,
And in that surface‑living deep
'Tis hard to know that hearts do keep.
        ......
Yet these are normal; I that sigh
And dread their living - what am I?

Oh joy! oh height of happiness!
        To wish no more than life,
To feel of pleasure, of distress,
A normal more, a normal less,
        By friend or child or wife!
None of these for my soul can be
For more than madness is in me.

I weep sad tears - oh, not to live
        As these in human joy!
Oh, that I could as much believe
As sense and custom joint can give
        Which living cannot cloy!
Man's happiness is poor, I know,
But true - a thing all unlike woe.

Sometimes I dream that I might sit
        By my own fire, and quiet
Might see my wife and children flit
Half in a sleep and not a whit
        In one of dreamy riot;
And I might noble be and pure
In mind, not stupid or obscure.

Sometimes I dream one of these homes
        Secluded socially
One for the many thousand tomes
Of life might keep my heart that roams
        Weak, desolate and free;
That quiet haply might console
My aching heart, my pining soul.

But as the thought of such a glad
        Existence simple here,
As if the thing a venom had
I shiver, tremble and grow sad
        As with a mystic fear;
I dread to think my life might pass
Like that of men, as is and was.

I dread to think of a life sweet
        By family and friends.
Mine eyes the finite that they meet
Abhor - the houses and the street.
        And all things that have ends.
I know not to what I aspire,
Yet know this I cannot desire.

So always incompatible
        And by the usual cold,
I go about, my own deep hell,
Hearing to toll in me the bell
        That tells me I grow old,
Yet this in such an accent strange
lt bears the mystery of Change.

And so - alas! must e'er I be
A stranger everywhere;
The leper in his leprosy
In his exclusion nears not me
        Who cannot living bear:
The world my home, my brother men
Are prisons, chains that bind and pen.

I pass. The windows are behind,
        And I forget their peace,
But tremble yet at what my mind
Conceives and feels; and in the wind
        I wander without cease,
Glad yet sad in me to perceive
Something none other can conceive.

I feel a rage - ay, a rage!
At time that passes, passes away,
A thirst of life nought can assuage,
        An anger that nothing can stay.
And every hour that passes by
        And merges into night a day
Makes, when I think, my soul to cry:
«Torture eternal, torture without end!
        All days pass and not a deed!
        A desire strong as a greed
By an ill of will - oh, misery!
To be a dream of pain condemned!»

I feel a rage! 'tis to feel
Mystery and sadness at one time,
        Till the maddened brain doth reel,
Looking on that bodiless curse.
The passing of the world, as one
Paralytic at a deed of blood
Which he hath no power to avert.
I feel a stranger before the sun,
        A weeper before field and flood,
        A cynic before dirt,
        A revolt before God.

Come, let us speak of dirt!
        God's curse is on our head.
Let our lips irreverence blurt!
We are sufferers all; let us, instead
Of prayer, offer God the sacrifice
Of our minds that he curst with crime and vice,
Of our frames that diseases make dread!

        Let us offer the tyrant of all,
To hang in the hall of his palace of pain,
                A funeral pall,
And a bride's white dress with a stain,
And a widow's weeds, and the crumpled sheets
                From the bed of the wife.
Let them be symbols of human strife!
Give we God the dirt of the streets
Of our spirit, made mud with our tears,
The dust of our joys, the mire of our fears,
                And the rot of our life!

I saw a comic giantess
At a tremendous feast alone,
Striving to eat some gorgeous mess
That formed a hard whole, as a stone.
But for her mouth it was too much
That, her avidity being such,
It doubled her void wish's hell;
And her mouth's wide, impotent clutch
Would have made laugh, did it not quell
Laughter with being horrible.
At her impossible, void feast
I saw her and, seeing her despair,
«What's that too large thing that to eat
You idly strive?» I asked of her ;
And I laughed out serene and rude.

She wept wild tears and said, «This meat
That by its greatness doth elude
My constant gaping, wild and sore,
        Is Beauty whole and complete.»
I looked at her and laughed no more,
But I wept, for I understood.

Build me a cottage deep
In a forest, a simple, silent home,
        Like a breath in a sleep,
Where all wish may be never to roam
And a pleasure all smallness may keep.

        A palace high then build,
With confusion of lights and of rooms,
        A strange sense to yield,
Whither my desire from the cottage's glooms
May go, to return, unfulfilled.

        Then dig me a grave,
That what cottage nor palace can give
        I at length may have,
That the weariness of all ways to live
May cease like the last of a wave.

A non-existence deeply within Being,
A sentient nothingness ethereal,
A more than real Ideality, agreeing
Of subject and of object, all in all.

Nor Life, nor Death, nor sense nor senselessness,
But a deep feeling of not feeling aught;
A calm how deep! ‑ much deeper than distress,
Haply as thinking is without the thought.

Beauty and ugliness, and love and hate,
Virtue and vice ‑ all these nowise will be;
That peace all quiet shall eliminate
Our everlasting life ‑ uncertainty.

A quietness of all our human hopes,
An end as of a feverish, tired breath...
For fit expressions vainly the soul gropes;
It is beyond the logic of our faith.

An opposite of joy's stir, of the deep
Disconsolation that our life doth give,
A waking to the slumber that we sleep,
A sleeping to the living that we live.

All difference unto the life we have,
All other to the thoughts that through us roam;
It is a home if our life be a grave,
It is a grave if our life be a home.

All that we weep, all to which we aspire
Is there, and like an infant on the breast,
We shall e'er be with more than we desire
And our accursed souls at last shall rest.

The unnatural and the strange
Have a perfume of their own
Full of the constancy in chance,
Of the smile at heart a groan:
The unnatural and the strange
Have a perfume of their own.

Flowers are they in a vase
Of no human workmanship,
 The unnatural that dismays
And the strange strong as a whip:
Flowers are they in a vase
Of no human workmanship.

They have the scent of troubled peace,
Of disturbed halls of joy,
This the scent they have, which is
A thing half to sting and cloy:
They have the scent of troubled peace,
Of disturbed halls of joy.

The unnatural and the strange
Have a perfume of their own
That of human flesh, of change
Made corruption without moan:
The unnatural and the strange
Have a perfume of their own.

Sun to-day and storm to-morrow.
        Never can we know
When is joy or when is sorrow,
        Happiness or woe...
The clock strikes. To-day is gone.
Man, proud man, oh think thereon!

From delight we pass to sadness
        From a smile to tears;
And the boldness of our gladness
        Dies within our fears.
The clock strikes. An hour is past.
Think, oh think, how all doth waste!

Oh, vultures that this bleak land shows
Where, the wild wind with fury blows,
What are those bones beneath your wing?
- They are Hermagoras, the king.

His queen to another court hath gone,
Another king sits on his throne,
His riches all are in the East,
Elsewhere his courtiers dance and feast.

We have made his rotting flesh our food,
His gentle skin to tear was good;
For his mantle black and his fair array
His servants took as here he lay.

The sun hath bleached his skeleton
And ants and worms do breed thereon,
And those he loved if they go by
Disdain his bones beneath the sky.

Lady, believe me ever at your feet,
When all the Venus in you you condense
Unto a gesture natural and sweet,
Full-filled with purity's white eloquence.

Your sentient arm so softly did incense
The love of beauty in my soul complete,
That I had given the dearest things of sense
For that your gesture natural and sweet.

Genius and beauty, and the things that mar
The love of life with Love's own purest glow,
Out of all thinking, all unconscious are;

And even you, sweet lady, may not know
How much that gesture was to me a star
Leading my bark upon a sea of woe.

Another day is past, and while it past,
What have I pondered or conceived or read?
Nothing! Another day has gone to waste.
Nothing! Each hour as it is born is dead.

I have done nothing. Time from me has fled,
And unto Beauty not a statue raised!
By thought's firm power no creed nor lie debased
By this young useless and wearied.

Is it my lot then ever to remain
Like a grain of sand upon the beach,
A thing at will of wind, at will of sea?

Alas, that aught that wishes and has pain,
Because e'er fall'n from what its power should reach
Less than a thing inanimate should be!

A friend said once to me: «All that thou writest,
Surely 'tis fancy, and pretence, and feigned;
Surely the moaning wherewith thou affrightest
The healthy mind is preconceived and strained!

´ln all the songs and tales that thou indictest
Why's there no word that is not hard or pained?
Why in good things and true thou not delightest,
But even in youth by thee joys are disdained?»

Because, dear friend, thought to be mad is sweet
Sometimes, and though at others nameless woe,
Yet never human pain the pain can meet

Of the mad brain that doth its madness know;
Because my science learn'd has made complete
The knowledge of an ill that cannot go.

Great Venus' statue, as men do conceive,
Wore it a jewel would all spoiled be;
Yet beauty's not alone simplicity.
Thus men with thoughts the eyes of sense deceive.

Oh, on a lake did they never perceive
A perfect boat, or a sail in the sea
At night that passes, far, mysteriously,
And in the heart a pining strange doth leave?

Ah, me! Upon a young and virgin breast
When it a jewel richly doth adorn,
Each to the other lends beauty and splendour,

As o'er the tremulous sea the stars at rest,
As flow'r and dew - but more; my heart is torn
That neither words nor thoughts that spell can render.

Here is the same as there, my friend,
All places in this world are like.
If doomed thy life in grief to spend,
What change can then thy fate amend,
What from thy soul the pain can strike?

When pain doth wound the tired heart
And grief doth tie the fevered eye,
Some joy indeed the world's great art
May to thy pained soul impart -
What's this if joy in thee not lie?

When on my restless couch I lie
And count the throbbing of my breath,
I see the joy of earth and sky
Yet hate it all; why should not I
So keep my coward mind from death?

True joy comes not from outward show
But in our deepest soul doth rest.
What matter if the sun can glow
And stars at night look sweetly so
When hearts are by their grief opprest?

For when the darkness weighs thy thought,
And night doth fall upon thy soul,
Are not again thy sorrows brought?
Is not thy mind in shadows caught?
Do fears not back upon thee roll?

I cannot do but hope; as mine
Thy mind I see to hopes doth bend;
I in my land and thou in thine
We suffer both - our griefs entwine.
Here is the same as there, my friend.

How sweetly sad it is sometimes to hear
Some old loved sound to memory recalled,
To see, an if in dreams, some old dear face,
Some landscape's stretch, some field, some dale, some stream

A memory so sudden, sad and pleasant,
Aught that recalls the days of happy youth.
        Then spring in happy pain the tears that wait,
Those subtle tears that wait on thought, and all -
Field stream and voice - all that we hear or see -
Goes from the sense, adorned with mem’ry’s hand
And merges slowly into dreamy light.

        I wake; alas! by dreams l was betrayed.
Tis but a semblance that l feel and hear
Because the past, alas! cannot return.
These fields are not the fields I knew, these sounds
Are not the sounds I knew: all those are gone,
And all the past - alas! cannot return.

How great a thing is thought! as through the gloom
Of stormy skies the sudden lightning curls,
As slow the storm in patience grim unfurls
Its mighty volume of resounding boom,

Thought comes, more bright than Reason's sun which hurls
Its constant beams around till verge of doom -
Or as the silver‑chequered shades which loom
'Neath Fancy's moon in windy queerest whirls.

Thought comes, but blinds the glaring mental sight,
But shakes our mind with echoes of its roar
And bears its force beyond our visual scope;

Horrible beauty and unpitying might
That often kills and tears, to rise no more,
The frailest fabric of a dreary hope.

Men of to‑day and yester's nought,
Before you were the things we see
Who gave a guess or gave a thought
That such as you to‑day should be?
Ah, passers by the common way,
Who thought of ye before to‑day?

Men of to‑day, to‑morrow's dust,
When years have past where shall ye go?
What vulgar daub or hurried lust [...]
Shall chronicle your joy and woe?
Waves on the crest of life's swift sea,
After to‑day who'll think of ye?

Genius alone can rouse the fire
That in your glorious nature lies;
Genius alone can strike the Iyre
And raise your name to mortal skies;
Genius of death can tear the pall
And yester's nought may be an all.

But virtue, fool, like human tears,
By sand of earth too surely drunk,
Sinks in the dust of passing years,
Nor knowest thou where has it sunk.
Let genius then the laurel wear;
To‑morrow's dust may live for e'er.

Their blood on thy head, whom the Afric waste
Saw struggling, puppets with unwilful hand,
Brother and brother: their bought souls shall brand
Thine own with horror. Be thy name erased

From the full mouth of men; nor be there traced
To thee one glory to thy parent land;
But'fore us, as'fore God e'er do thou stand
In that thy deed forevermore disgraced.

Where lie the sons and husbands, where those dear
That thy curst craft hath lost? Their drops of blood,
One by one fallen, and many a cadenced tear,

With triple justice weighted trebly dread,
Shall each, rolled onward in a burning flood,
Crush thy dark soul. Their blood be on thy head!

Darkness and storm outside make inward gloom,
Quiet and home within and useless pain
Weigh down upon me as a wasted life,
        Save where from the vile tomb
Of day there comes a semblance of a strife
Through the blown varying of the pallid rain.

Before the thunder shall the mansion shake
A blankly‑smiling day informs our eyne,
And there is here a ghastness and a gale
        That make my frail form quake;
And strange to me who think all things must quail,
A voice is raised in joy ­- alas! not mine.

Why cannot youth be joyous, full of love?
Why am I made the corpse that woes and fears
And problems grim and world‑enigmas dire
        Should like a body wove
Close to my nature, in which is a fire
The feverous source of Iying pains and tears?

Blow hard, thou wind; look pale, thou awful day!
Ye cannot in your dread and horror match
The thing that I bear in me and is me,
        These idle thoughts that stray
Subordinate to the deep agony
Of him who hears the gate of reason's latch
Fall with a sound of termination,
As of a thing locked past and for e'er done.

Why do I waste in dreams fruitless and vain
The substance of my youth in idle tears?.
Why do I count with feverish eye the years
And number with sad heart the ways of pain?

Why should I weep thus, since there is no gain
To me, to men from sighings and from fears?
Since from afar at me the future sneers,
The while the past with me cannot remain.

High Heaven, that errs not and that wills not wrong
To each on earth doth give a work to do,
A distant recompense and rest remote;

I'll to my work then, so God make me strong
To bring the Demons of mine own self to
Their knees, and take the Devil by the throat.

(when English journalists joked on Russia’s disasters)

How long, oh Lord, shall war and strife be rolled
On the God‑breathing breast of slumbering man,
Horrible nightmares in the doubtful span
Of his sleep blind to heaven? As of old,

Shall we, more wise, in frantic joy behold
The bloody fall of nation and of clan,
And ever others' woes with rough glee scan,
And war’s dark names in Glory's charts inscrolled?

We now that in vile joy our egoist fears
Behold dispelled, one day shall mourn the more
That blood of men erased them‑bitter tears

Of desolated woe, as wept of yore
(Yet not for the short space of ten long years)
The Grecian archer on the Lemnian shore.

II

Our enemies are fallen; other hands
Than ours have struck them, and our joy is great
To know that now at length our fears abate
From hurt and menace on great Eastern lands.

Bardling, scribbler and artist, servile bands,
From covert sneer outsigh their trembling hate,
Laughing at misery, and woe, and fal]en state,
Armies of men whole‑crushed on desolate strands.

The fallen lion every ass can kick,
That in his life, shamed to unmotioned fright,
His every move with eyes askance did trace.

I’ll scorn beseems us, men for war and trick,
Whose groanings nation poured her fullest might
To take the freedom of a former [?] race.

To G.N.

Oh, sacred Liberty, dear mother of Fame!
What are men here that they should expel thee?
What right of theirs, save power, makes others be
The pawns, as if unfeeling, in their game?

Ireland and the Transvaal, ye are a shame
On England and a blot! Oh, shall we see
For ever crushed and held who should be free
By human creatures without human name?

Wonder not then, dear friend, that here where men
Are far away I can well rest, and far
From where in lawful bodies, Christian‑wise,

Beings of earth their fellows fold and pen;
Glad that the winds not yet enchained are
And billows yet are free to fall and rise.

Mother of slaves and fools, Thou who dost hold
Within Thine iron chains enslaved mankind,
Old in Thy yoke and in their slavery blind,
Harden'd to grief and woo, corrupt and cold,

But in the craven following, as of old,
Of those old ways, unwise, unfirm, unkind,
Bound ever in the animal bonds that bind
Fish, bird and beast in flock and herd and fold.

The light hath fallen of many a cherished name,
And many a land of love hath been the nurse,
But man's worn heart is evermore the same ­-

Unwilling ever to shake off the curse,
Once self‑inflicted, and the time‑grown shame
That loads the weary, lightless universe.

She lives on the cover
Of a chocolate‑box.
Her wide hat comes over
Her too golden locks.

Near her many a blossom
Of a bad green tree
Her hand's on her bosom
And she looks past me.

Haply she is like
Someone I ne'er knew,
And can memory strike
In a way untrue.

A vague maiden made
Of bad printing work,
Of colours ill‑laid
……

Haply she's someone,
Real, person, and true
In a world, or none,
Our thoughts can construe.

Somehow she is there
And that means something
Real, but not near
Our imagining.

Why was she made that
There and thus, if she
Is not God‑known. What
Is reality?

Nothing that we can
Interpret or dream
Quite exhausts the span
Of what she can seem.

God is very complex.
Life is very wide.
Who knows? She resembles
Much that is denied.

This is idle, but
Perhaps out of here
Its sense may abut
On some notion clear.

Life is shallow water,
Dreams are ripples gone.
To think is to falter
What's known is unknown.

He that would conquer must a soldier be.
He that a soldier will be must be made
To bear all the hard preface of his trade,
        All the rough training must he bear
Whereby he shall the conqueror
……

All pain, all failure and all woe ­
These are but training we must undergo
Ere those heights of ourselves we full can reach
        Whence God has things to teach
And the discarnate fate that girds us round
        Still more to teach and more to wound.

With patience and with fortitude
        Bear thou thy training rude,
Support with grace thy masters that are days
        Made of pain and amaze,
Thy potion take, even it that potion look
That Socrates for his divinity took.

To Aesculape the cock immolate,
        To the Masters of thy fate
Abandon life, thyself strong above all
        Thy power to let things thee appall,
By the sole virtue of thy power set far
        Over thy power to feel fate's war.

The rest, that thing that shall remain of thee
        When land and sky and sea
Alike are mist in thy unseeing eyes,
        This shall nowise
Mater, nor all when all is thine abode,
        Nor God himself when all is God.

Sorrow no more for the faded rose,
Nor of the yellow lily despair.
These, as we see them, are but their shows.
They are elsewhere.

Tis but their shadow lives in our light.
As we see them (...)
They live more truly in our delight
Than in their forms.

The beauty they had was never lost,
It moved away
From the present hour and the form once tossed
Into space and day.

But the undying essence of the (...)

The rose that faded from yesterday
Is where yesterday is.
I shall have again the flower and the day,
The self and the bliss.

When slattern Time, worn out with toil of wearing,
With loose‑tied pack shall trudge upon my years,
And I shall feel that forced occasion nearing
That despair's self (that must live to be) fears,

I, being beggared of all wealth of hope -
So prodigal have I to wishes been -
Shall with known uselessness for the coin grope
To pay that the hour’s ending be serene.

I shall not enter the great silent cave
With curious ardour, or ease out of sun,
But all that with me I shall then still have
Will be a coward rage that all is done.

No hope the cave's a passage shall control
Fear of the immediate night of the shown hole.

I shall not come when thou wilt call,
        For when thou call'st I am with thee.
        When I think of thee, within me
Thyself art, and thy thought self’s all.

Thy presence is thy absence drest
        In thy body that hides thy soul.
Tis in me that thou art possessed,
        'Tis in my thoughts that thou art whole.

Outside thee, given to time and space,
        Thy body, thy mere loss to me,
Partakes of change and age and place?
        Belongs to other laws than thee.

In my dream of thee nothing changes
        Thyself to other than thou art.
        Thy corporal presence is that part
Of thee that thee from thee estranges.

Therefore call me, but await not.
        Thy voice, summed to my dreaming thee,
Shall put new beauty on that thought
        Of thy body that dwells in me.

Thy voice heard from afar shall bring
        Nearer to me thy presence dreamed.
        Brighter and clearer than it seemed
It grow'th in my imagining.

Then call no more. Thy voice twice heard
        Along the real space would be
        Too near now to reality.
Thy second voice were thy first blurred.

Call me but once. I close mine eyes
        And let the second call be dreamed,
        Thy body's vision lightly gleamed
On my seeing memory of thy cries.

The rest, eyes shut lest thou appear.
        Shall be thy clear continuance
        In my dream's constancy askance.
Keep far, keep silent, come not here,

For thou wouldst come too near for sight
        And out of my thoughts step to thee,
        Putting on thy dreamed body in me
        (Thy body's form‑dream infinite)
        Thy limit, visibility.

Into a vision before me the world
Flowered, and it as when a flag, unfurled,
Suddenly shows unknown colours and signs.
        Into an unknown meaning, evident
And unknown ever, it outspread its lines
        Of meaning to my passive wonderment.
The outward and the inward became one.
Feelings and thoughts were visible in shapes,
And flowers and trees as feelings, thoughts. Great capes
Stood out of Soul, thrust into conscious seas,
And on all this a man‑sky spoke its breeze.

Each thing was linked into each other thing
By links of being past imagining,
But visible, as if the skeleton
Were visible and the flesh round it, each one
As if a separate thing visibly alone.

There was no difference between a tree
And an idea. Seeing a river be
And the exterior river were one thing.
The bird's soul and the motion of its wing
Were an inextricable oneness made.
And all this I saw, seeing not, dismayed
With the New God this vision told me of;
For this was aught I could not speak nor love
But a new sentiment not like all others,
Nought like the human feelings, men are brothers
In feeling, woke on my astonished spirit.
With a great suddenness did this disinherit
That thought that looks through mine eyes of the pelf
Of ordered seeing that maketh it itself.

O horror set with mad joy to appal!
O self‑transcendency of all!
O inner infinity of each thing, that now
Suddenly was made visible and local, though
No manner of speech to speak these things in words

Followed that vision! Sight whose sense absurds
Likeness of like, and makes disparity
Contiguous innerly to unity!

How to express what, seen, is not expressed
To the struck sight that sees it? How to know
What comes to senses' threshold to bestow
A visible ignorance upon the knowing?
How to obey the analogy‑behest,
Community in unity to prove
The intellectual meaning of to love,
Shipwrecking difference upon the sight
Renewed from God to Inwards infinite?

Nothing: the exterior world inner expressed,
The flower of the whole vision of the world
        Into its colour of absolutely meaning
In the night unfurled,
And therefore nought unfurling, abstract, that,
        Vision self‑screening,
Patent invisible fact.

Nothing: all,
And I centre of to recall,
        As if Seeing were a god.
The rest the presence of to see,
Hollow self‑sensed infinity,
        And all my being‑not‑souled‑to‑oneness trod
To fragments in my sight‑dishevelled sight.

This Night is Light.

Beside a summer's day
        I lay me down and dreamed.
The light from far away
        In my withinned self gleamed,
An unreal true glow,
Spiritually somehow.

I saw the inner side
        Of summer, earth and morn.
I heard the rivers glide
        From Within. l was borne
To see, through mysteries,
How God everything is.

The motes of sun that dance
        Are audibly whispered.
All is an utterance.
        The sight may hear. I shed
Vision of things as things.
My thoughts are angels' wings.

The corpses of known hours
        In barks unsteered and left
Float, covered with mute flowers,
        Down my dream that is cleft
In banks of mystery ­-
This summer day and I.

And something like a greed
        And yet unlike a wish,
The power to have a need
        Which doth not needing reach,
But is dissolved again
Ere its sad joy reach pain,

A shadowy lightness woven
        Of the day and of me,
Like sparkling water driven
        Never but where we see,
A gap, a pause, a dim
Looking over things' rim,

Starts like a sudden flute
        Pastoral with tuneless notes
Out of the unseen root
        Of all my being denotes,
Spreads, till I feel it not,
O'er my lost sense of thought.

And lo! I am another.
        My senses taste not‑mine.
A hand my sight doth smother
        To a blind sight divine.
I am a lost tune, a mood
Of the finger‑tips of God.

So, like a child‑king crowned,
        I feel new with fear‑pride.
I am robed with sky and ground.
        My inmost soul's outside
Is sunlit seas and lands.
My dreams are seraphs' hands.

My thoughts are something my soul fears.
        I tremble at my very glee.
        Sometimes I feel arrive in me
A dim, a cold. a sad, a fierce
        A lust‑like spirituality.

It makes me one with all the grass.
        My life takes colour at all flowers.
The breeze that seemeth loth to pass
        Shakes off red petals from my hours
        And my heart sulters without showers.

Then God becomes a vice of mine
        And divine feelings an embrace
That sinks my senses in its wine
        And leaves no outline in my ways
Of seeing God flower, grow and shine.

My thoughts and feelings mingle and form
        A vague and hot soul‑unity.
Like a sea that expects a storm,
        A lazy ache and fret make me
A murmur like a coming swarm.

My parched thoughts mix and occupy
        Their interpresences and swell
To each others' places. I descry
        Nought in me save impossible
Mixtures of many things all I.

I am a drunkard of my thoughts.
        My feelings' juice o'erruns my soul.
        My will becomes soaked in them all.
Then life stagnates a dream and rots
        To beauty in my verses' dole.

Here in this wilderness
        Each tree and stone fills me
        With the sadness of a great glee.
God in His altogetherness
        Is whole‑part of each stone and tree.

An inner outward seeingness
        Makes my clear self unknown.
        (O Godfully alone!)
God in His overbeingness
        Survives His death each tree and every stone

Ay, in the barkness and clodfulness
        Of tree and sand and stone
        God is only His Own,
God in all His godfulness,
        Whose concrete soul's each thing's abstraction.

One day, Time having ceased,
        Our lives shall meet again,
From Place and Name released.
        Only that shall remain
Of each of us that may
Seem natural to that Day.

There we will newly love,
        Wondering at the old mood
With which love did us move,
        When pain and solitude
Were what each soul had got
For its contingent lot.

There, heaven being between us
        And touch a real thing,
The texture luminous
        Of our true lives will bring
God into our love like breath.
Nowhere will there be death.

The need to suffer and sigh,
        The inevitable cares,
The awaiting and the cry
        That goes from joy to tears -
These have no need to be
In love's eternity.

The hours shall make our love
        Grow younger, not more old.
Some trick of time shall move
        Wont even to truer gold,
Regret shall not be aught
Possible there to thought.

That region light‑suspended
        Under truer blue skies
Shall let our souls feel blended,
        Yet be true unities.
Nought shall have power to fret
Our hearts to tire of it.

A golden land where God
        Stayed a Day of His Time,
Not as the world, where not
        A moment did he abide,
And where His passing left
The sense of aught bereft.

My heart, that thinks of this,
        Pines, for it is nowhere,
And she that meets my bliss
        With her new old love there -
She is unreal as all
That to this verse I call.

Yet who knows? Perhaps this
        Is not wishing, but seeing.
Perhaps this love, this bliss,
        This conscious glad not‑being
Is some reality
Through fancy seen by me.

Perhaps it casts a spell
        From where it can be found.
What is impossible?
        Where is God's bourne and bound?
Why, if I dream this, may
Not this be mine one day?

Who knows what our dreams are?
        Who knows all that God makes?
Perhaps life doth but mar
        The immediate truth that takes
Its beauty from being dreamed.
Nothing eter merely seemed.

Somewhere where God is nearer
        These things are een now true.
Oh, let me be no fearer
        That this may not be so!
All is more strange than that
Small glimpse of it we get.

Mine eyes are wild with joy
        Because I have these thoughts.
They cannot tire nor cloy
        Because God ever allots
To each high thing the power
To weigh not on its hour.

My flower garden is
        Full of new flowers now.
My lips are kissed by bliss
        Because I know not how.
My heart fails and I swim
Within a luminous rim.

A halo of hope comes round
        My soul. I am that child
That cries: Lo! I have found
        This flower strange and wild.
The unknown flower I have
Grew on my dead dreams' grave.

A trembling sense of being
        More than my sense can hold,
A bird of feeling seeing
        The great, earth‑hidden gold
Of the approaching dawn,
A breath, a light, a swoon,

A presence interwoven
        With rays of other light,
A spell, a power untroven
        Of my more clear delight,
I faint, I fade, I seem
Myself to be my dream.

And if this be not so,
        Oh, God, make it now be!
Let me not find more woe
        Because I so dreamed Thee!
Let aught for which I pine
Merit being divine.

Let this resemble heaven
        And be my home for e'er,
Even if for e'er mean living
        But this hour really fair.
An hour in God shall be
Enough eternity.

God knows. Lie we to sleep
        Contentedly somehow,
Smiling that we did weep,
        As at an overthrow
Of kingdoms the stars, deep
        In silence, smile nor know.

God knows. And an He knew not
        And were not, what of it?
No matter that we do not
        Our life with living fit.
Glad to have sleep and tears,
        Lullaby to our fears!

The day is glad and golden.
Over the sunhit beach
The waves do gladly embolden
Their crisp and clinging reach.

Would I were one as they
With the natural hour,
With the wide sunlit day
And the ancient sea's power.

I would not be here weeping
That I am not aught else,
My waking would be a sleeping
Like this of the sea swells

Not like an outcast from
A home I never knew
Would I be pining for home,
……

Not like a tossed sea‑weed
Between the wave and the wave,
And restless with a mute greed
For something I cannot have.

Something I cannot een dream,
Some spent life I know not...
Oh how fair would nature seem
Were it not for thought!

Dark is the golden day
Unto mine eyes that stare
Brightness and joy away
From sky and shore and here.

Dead is the changing sea,
The wind a monotone,
Oh ever to be he
That never is but alone,

I cannot dream of heaven,
Nor create one in the hour...
Pass, day, and ask not even
For my grateful eyes' dower...

Under a low and sullen sky,
Frowned on by lone winds that moan by
And palely sick for light from high
Till the landscape's soul doth sigh forever,
        Forever sigh,
A black and calmness‑haunted river,
That doth a town from itself sever,
Runs with an inner fear and shiver
Like a dim fate forever nigh,
        Nigher forever.

Ay, through that landscape lapsed from dream
Into a horrid truth doth gleam
That self‑absorbed, self‑empty stream
That bears a dream of dreams' emotion
        To emotion's dream!
Runs from a land whence is no motion
Towards a possible far ocean;
And they, whose eyes anguished sans motion
Bathe in it, take emotion's dream
        For dreams' emotion.

Set out from sight of shore!
                Grow tired of every sea!
        All things are ever more
                Than most they seem to be.
What steps are those that pass outside my door?

        Fail out from shape and thought!
                Let sense and feeling fade!
        O sadness overwrought
                With joy till bliss is strayed!
What birds are those that my swift window shade?

        But be those steps no steps,
                And be those birds dreamed wings,
        Still one ache oversteps
                The life to which it clings,
Though to know what ache no step in me helps
And what this pang is no bird in me sings.

I

All things that shine are God's eyes.
        All things that move are God's speech.
        Every thing has all to teach
To our awakening surmise.

Green are God's thoughts when they are leaves,
        Yellow when sunflowers they are.
        Yet they shine separate and far
From the hands wherewith God weaves.

Light are my steps on the ground
        Yet they do echo through space,
        Through terrible abysses that face
God at the side never found.

II

My dreams are angels' kisses.
Lightly they touch my heart,
Tip‑toe shadow caresses.
They are my Godder part.

There is a flower in my hand.
It is not found in fields.
God looks and can understand,
For He is the dreamer who builds.

He knows how dreams are set up,
He knows how flowers are made glad.
Look: I hold up my cup
And God gives me wine to be mad.

Even as upon a low and cloud-domed day,
When clouds are one cloud till the horizon.
Our thinking senses deem the sun away
And say «'tis sunless» and «there is no sun»;
And yet the very day they wrong truth by
Is of the unseen sun's effluent essence,
The very words do give themselves the lie,
The very thought of absence comes from presence:
Even so deem we through Good of what is evil.
He speaks of light that speaks of absent light,
And absent god, becoming present devil,
Is still the absent god by essence' right.
The withdrawn cause by being withdrawn doth get
(Being thereby cause still) the denied effect.

I feel pale and I shiver.
        What power of the moonlight
Tremulous under the river
        Thus pains me with delight?

What spell told by the moon
        Unlooses all my soul?
O speak to me! I swoon!
        I fade from life's control!

I am a far spirit, e'en
        In the felt place of me.
O river too serene
        For my tranquillity!

O ache somehow of living!
        O sorrow for something!
O moon‑pain the sense‑giving
        That I am vainly king

In some spell‑bound realm mute,
        In a lunar land lone!
O ache as of a dying flute
        When we would have't play on!

I.
Once in a theatre comic
’Tween acts I pondered to see
On a column sculptured, wide and comic,
The grinning mask of Comedy;
And broad and wild in satyr-glee,
The grinning face of Comedy.

II.
«Ah,» said I, «face merry and comic,
There is happiness in thee,
Few faces like thine, wide-mouth'd and comic,
Oh, grinning face of Comedy;
Boisterously wrinkled, ugly and free,
The grinning mask of Comedy.»

III.
But as I gazed at the face that smiled,
With mine eyes half-dreamfully,
«Ah,» said I, «it is forced and wild,
Untrue smile of pitiless glee;
Forcedly wrinkled, unreal, unfree,
Hard-grinning mask of Comedy.»

IV.
And I trembled — now it no longer smiled,
It had forcedly smiled — now not even so.
Oh, fearful face, terribly wild,
Terribly silent face or woe;
Worn, hysterical, mad, unfree,
Woe-twisted face of Comedy.

When the lamp is broken and the shaking
        Light is for ever fled,
There is more memory of its breaking
        Than of the light it shed.
This may common be, but 'tis not glad;
It means many things and all are sad.

1.
Little flower that wert on the hill,
Where art thou to-day?
Thou that saw'st thyself in the rill
Art thou gone away?
Ah, now I see that thou art dead
And that thy charm from us is fled.

If I could carve my poems in wood,
By children they would be understood,

So near to the sense things have in God
Are both my poems and children's thought.

For a child knows that logic and meaning
Are only nothing nothing screening,

And a child is one divinely aware
That all things are toys and all things are fair,

That a thimble, a stone and a cotton‑reel
Are things we can quite divinely feel,

And that, if we make men out of those things,
They are really men, not imaginings.

I would therefore l could take my verse
Out of mere ideas and better it worse

To visible carving or drawing or what
My verses could be resembling that.

Then would I be the children's poet,
And, though perhaps I might never know it

With the outer sense that makes life sadder,
In every innocent face made gladder

God would be giving my soul the sense,
Lost back of knowledge, of recompense ­-

The sense of children more children still
When, acting my poems at their glad will,

They, playing with toys, with legs incurled,
Lightly err the visible world.

I know not whether my mind is broken
Nor do I know if my mind is ill;
I know not if love is but the last token
Of God to me, or a word unspoken
        In a chaos of will.

My thoughts are such as the mad must have
        And dead things guard my soul
Grotesque and odd are the shapes that rule
In my brain as worms in a grave

Fierce dreams of something else!
        Frenzy to go away
(O wave in me that swells!)
        From life, where life must stay -
        Life ever at to‑day!

Some other place and thing!
        Not a life! not mine so!
O to be a wind, a wing.
A bark me there to bring!

        Whither? If I could know,
        I would not wish to go.

Sometimes in the middle of life a change
Suddenly comes like an alienation
A sense of voidness enormous, strange
And a void, deep desolation.

A sense of being left alone
And more and more than abandoned
(…)
'Tis a sense half as if I were dead.

Seldom have I so inly comprehended
With a deep sense so awful and so rude
My complete being's complete solitude
In all its arid loneliness extended

So wholly solitude, so much unblended
With aught else, good or ill, that might intrude
Upon its horror limitless and nude
Whereat my reason reels, not by (...) defended.
And save it from itself (…)

The day is sad as I am sad,
But that no moment can abate
That pang that is all I have had
To take with me and see and feel
While life goes by like a mere wheel.

No. Deeper things than skies and plains
Are dark and lower'd o'er in me.
My sorrows are more empty pains
Than of which plains landscapes can symbols be.
And my own [?] weight of life and self
Resembles nothing but itself.

Sorrow sits by my side
Fondling my careless hair.
She is the lady of golden
Gestures to silence beholden.
Only she does not deride
My dreams and what makes them fair.

Now she doth cease and whisper
The use of dreams to my soul.
She tells me they mean God's blessing
The spirit's shining releasing
From the world's weight and sister
To life's unchanging whole.

When I am dead you'll write - I know you will -
A thoughtful sonnet on my early death,
In which, stating that life but wearieth,
You'll notice how I lie pale, cold, and still.

This in the quatrains, which likewise you'll fill
With some reflections on how soon goes breath
And how the cold and heavy earth beneath
There is an end to living, good or ill.

After this, in the tercets, you will say
That death's a mystery, that nought doth stay,
Perhaps that immortality is true.

Then you will sign and put the date to it.
And, having read again the sonnet, you
Will be content, seeing it is well writ.

IV

I could not think of thee as piecèd rot,
Yet such thou wert, for thou hadst been long dead;
Yet thou liv'dst entire in my seeing thought
And what thou wert in me had never fled.
Nay, I had fixed the moments of thy beauty —
Thy ebbing smile, thy kiss's readiness,
And memory had taught my heart the duty
To know thee ever at that deathlessness.
But when I came where thou wert laid, and saw
The natural flowers ignoring thee sans blame,
And the encroacbing grass, with casual flaw,
Framing the stone to age where was thy name,
I knew not how to feel, nor what to be
Towards thy fate's material secrecy.

They wear no real greatness who have faith
        In God: or Matter, in Life's In or Out.
Only perpetual doubt is truly great,
        And the pain of perpetual doubt.

The hours are weary of being hours.
        Oh, to be aught else! they say.
Their task's to age children, hopes and flowers,
        Paint lips cold and hairs gray.

They sicken and sadden and deaden beauty.
        When they pass and look behind,
Lining the path of their ended duty
        They only weeping fmd.

So, Oh, to be something else! they say,
        For they think they know
That the things and thoughts they take away
        Really fade and go.

But they do not know, blind misers screening
        A robber‑changed false pelf,
That everything has Another Meaning -
        Ay, even God Himself

Kisses on me like dew
        Pour, and it shall be morn
My waked spirit through.
        My bowed, greyed head adorn
With bays, that I may view
        My shadow crowned and smile even as I rnourn

Although my head is bent,
        Thy feet, sandalled with hope,
Pass and are eloquent
         I' th' way they do not stop.
Somewhere i'th' grass they are blent
        With that of me that does for meanings grope

Let us be lovers aye,
        Out of all flesh agreeing,
Lovers in some new way
        That needs not words nor seeing.
Thus abstract, our love may
        Not ours, be but a vague breath of Pure Being

There lived, I know not when, never perhaps­ -
        But the fact is he lived - an unknown king
Whose kingdom was the strange Kingdom of Gaps.
        He was lord of what is twixt thing and thing,
Of interbeings, of that part of us
        That lies between our waking and our sleep,
                Between our silence and our speech, between
Us and the consciousness of us; and thus
        A strange mute kingdom did that weird king keep
                Sequestered from our thought of time and scene.

Those supreme purposes that never reach
        The deed - between them and the deed undone
He rules uncrowned. He is the mystery which
                Is between eyes and sight, nor blind nor seeing.
        Himself is never ended nor begun,
Above his own void presence empty shelf.
                All He is but a chasm in his own being,
The lidless box holding not‑being's no‑pelf.

All think that he is God, except himself.

I have wished so oft this mockery might end
Of love between us! And it's ended now.
Yet I cannot even to myself pretend
That the wished thing achieved gives joy enow.

Every going is a parting too.
Our happiest day doth make us one day older.
To get stars we must have darkness also,
The fresher hour is likewise the colder.

I dare not hesitate not to accept
Thy separating letter, yet I wish
With some vague jealousy I scarce reject
That things were fitted for a different stretch.

Farewell! Yet do I smile at this or not?
My feeling now is lost in thought.

Thou dost explain by Law the weaving
Of all the world, by Chance ruled ever.
I never thought Law was so living,
Nor did I deem Chance was so clever.

Here lies a tyrant whom some called a devil,
Snake-like his folds around our life he curled;
He's dead now, and the world hath no more evil,
Because there is no longer any world.

Apollo married and Hercules married, and this was in real life.
The wife of Hercules loved beautiful rather than strong men,
And strong and not beautiful men was the taste of Apollo's wife.

Friends, tread in peace, here lies the devil;
The world hath now but little evil.

On the marriage of my dear friend Mr. Jinks
(but which may with equal aptness be applied
to the marriage of many other gentlemen)

I

Ye nymphs whose beauties all your hills
                Adorn,
Embodied graces of the sun‑traced rills,
                Mourn;
For gentle Corydon henceforth,
In this hard world where all must pass,
Will feel as icy as the North.
                Alas!

II

        Ah, Corydon! Ah, Corydon!
        And hast thou left all happiness,
        Immoraled joy and whiskied liberty?
                Ah, Corydon!
        Great is our distress.
        And art thou no more free?
Bars shall be useless now. Alas! in vain
The music‑hall shall ring with voices known,
In vain the horse shall course the plain
        And the struck sparrer groan.
        And dogs and beasts and women,
        And brandy, gin and wine,
        And brutish brutes and human ­-
Oh, say, shall all these joys no more be thine?

lll

        Ah, frailness of mankind!
Thou who didst laugh at woman and didst hold
Thyself superior, now, alas! wilt find,
Amid thy waning joy and waning gold,
        Thou learnedst in a sorry school
        That taught thee to disdain
The seeming‑tender being whose dread rule
Shall now wreak on thee horrid pain.
        Too late now wilt thou learn, too late,
        When thy voice is low and humble thy gait,
        When thy soul is crushed and thy dress sedate,
The greatest of all ills the gods on humans rain.

IV

Ah, what avails all mourning? Thou art gone
From life and youth and gaudy loveliness,
From that deep rest that men call drunkenness.
        Ah, Corydon! Ah, Corydon!
        Thou the first hope of all our race
Hast left the blessed paths of peace and love.
        Ah, wilt thou be content to rove
From shop to shop with her, thy mother‑in‑law,
        Or tremble full to hear at night,
        With horror deep and deep affright.
The wordy torrent from thy spouse's jaw?

V

Oh, the troubles to come to thee can ever I dare name?
To work in the day, and at night to walk the bedroom's length,
On a seeming‑heavy baby to waste thy seeming‑waning strength,
And as the husband of thy wife to reach the light of fame.
Now my voice is broke with weeping, and mine eyes red, as with sand,
And my spirit worn with sighing, and with sighing worn my breast ­
Ah, farewell, that thou art gone now to the dreaded obscure land
Where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary never rest.

I swore my love should never fall
For her, the one entrancing she;
I promised marriage, I recall,
And said none was more dear to me.
But soon this love began to fall,
And all her joy was turned to gall;
Till from the beak there came a call
To mind me that in times of glee
                                I swore.

At court all men she did enthrall,
Myself was left no room to crawl;
She won the case. When I did see
Five thousand was the hellish fee,
Why — hang it — then, confound it all,
                                I swore.

With the doleful dead man's bell
Ring, oh, ring not Baby's knell!
Let her calmly, calmly sleep,
But with the flow’rs fresh from the dell
Make thou a music wild and deep,
Such as men can but know well
        When their souls have learnt to weep.

As if Love's self had gone from earth
Oh, sing a music that has birth
In the suspension of commotion
For thus hath death made our emotion.
Sing thou a song more deep and true
Than the vague, soft song of ocean
The quiet darkness moaning through.

Sing into sad tears our distress!
Oh, let soft sorrow be thy strain!
She's gone beyond our love's caress,
Giving to life more loneliness
        And to mystery more pain.

My soul is like a painted boat
That like a sleeping swan doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet
                                singing.

From the beach and from the billow
        Rapturously loud,
From the zephyr that doth pillow
        All his softness on a cloud;
From the murmur of the river,
From the leaves that rustle ever,
        Joyously we come.

We are bright and we are many
        As the early drops of dew,
And we come to little Fanny
        As the day to you;
From the keenness of the mountain,
From the sparkle of the fountain,
        Joyously we come.

From the hill and from the valley,
        From the mountain and the vale;
From the evening melancholy
Where all hath a tale;
        From the sweetness of the meadow,
From the coolness of the shadow,
        Joyously we come.

ln the sadness of the willow,
        In the homely nest
We have dwelt and had a pillow
        In the poet's breast;
And from all things dimly moving
Human souls to bliss and loving
        Joyously we come.

In a saloon that is a sleep
Mine eyes did a picture meet,
And wondrously wise and woefully deep
        And horribly complete.
A profound meaning more than tears
Are seen to give, and human fears,
And human madness and woe,
Come as a scent from that picture weird.

The name of the painter is ignored
        And his purpose none do know.

Whene'er thou dost undo
Thy dark, strange hair before the wind
And the wind takes it up and makes it woo
Tumult and violence in the way it sweeps
Along the air, mingling, unmingling, undefined
In the snake‑like madness it keeps.

Then I do know
That somewhere whence dreams come
And passions go,
Somewhere in that world contrary to this,
Yet landscaped, peopled as this is,
In a great southern sea
There is a storm and a hurled wreck
On rising rocks that cannot reck
For human misery.

The two things are but one.
Thy floating hair is that great ship undone
In a tossed, turbulent, dashed ocean.
Neither precedeth nor doth cause the other
Nor are the two as brother and brother,
But absolutely one, samely the same,
They have somehow an equal name
Where speech is of the essence of what is.

A real sight, like God's, should see the kiss
Of the wind through thy hair and the far storm
One thing, - ­yet two things because we see two
When we conceive them one, the double form
Coming to oneness in what we construe.

Therefore I grieve when thou letst thy hair take
The wind upon its long, thin, changing fingers,
For that sight of me that translates that to
The sterner meaning in what world I know
Only through what in me is not here awake, -
That sight of that mad wreck visibly lingers
And does in my imagination ache.

Alas! all things are linked, and we know not
Half the contents of our each casual thought.
We never see save one little dreamed bit
Of each feeling we have; we pass through it
Like rapid travellers that scarce can see
What they pass by and what they see see erringly.

What is the meaning of my writing this?
Nothing, save that this is,
I know not why, something I know and must
Utter, the purpose of it being with
That secret Being that made my body of dust
Bear my soul's ignored presence, and that breath
Of life that survives my each moment's death.

Lilies cast and roses throw
In the way that she must go
Whom the singing planets hymn,
Sister of the seraphim!

Shifting motes of early sun
In the morning freshness spun
To light dresses for the breeze -
Clothe her coming such as these!

Shadows purple, fountain breaths,
Low mists such as dawning wreathes
Round the tree‑tops - these be made
Hers, for whom spring's feast is laid!

She to us from heaven descended
That dreams might with earth seem blended,
And unquietness more blest
Mingle with our life's unrest.

These the chosen offerings
From what earthly deep joy sings -
These to her we daily bear
Lest she pine for heaven here.

Somewhere where I shall never live
        A palace garden bowers
Such beauty that dreams of it grieve.

There, lining walks immemorial,
        Great antenatal flowers
My lost life before God recall.

There I was happy and the child
        That had cool shadows
Wherein to feel sweetly exiled.

They took all these true things away.
        O my lost meadows!
My childhood before Night and Day!

Chalice of my communion
        With the lost thing that gleams!
Communion‑bond of union
        Between me and my dreams!
O chalice of love's most!
In thy wine, earth's wine's ghost
        To lips that are God's flowers,
My soul has dipped the host
        Of my diviner hours.

My lips are as lips kissed.
        My sad soul happy sings.
O shining through the mist
        Of tremulous angels' wings!
I feel me God's moon's node,
A child again, outside life's road,
        Remembering how I found me
When I awoke from God
        And felt the world around me.

Before light was, light's bright idea lit
        God's thought of it,
And, because through God's thought light's thought did pass,
        Light ever was,
And from beyond eternity became
        The living flame
That trembles into life and reddens with
        Our life's soul‑width.

Before light was, when yet the night was queen
        O'er what had been,
In God's realized prescience it could be
        Light from eternity,
For no time enters into God's thoughts or
        Their spaceless Hour.

Take thou therefore, my Song, from light the mood
        Of being, and brood,
Like the Dove unbegot, over the abyss
        Of consciousness,
Taking as thy true part that thought of God
        Whence light issued.

Let my words burst into that divine flame
        That lights its name
Of each thing from within with ultimate meaning.
        Though earth be screening
With fixed appearance the Sun in each Thing,
        Bear, on thy wing
High‑lifted, rays from the unrisen Sun
        Whence life is spun.

Soar out, my Song, out of despair and night
        And catch that light
Ere it appear, from neath the horizon
        Of action,
Borne out of dreams by intuition bright
        Of endless light.

Though none believe nor any understand,
        Yet feel thee fanned
With those breeze‑breaths that come up with the morn
        From the Unborn.
Soar like a lark into the coming day
        And bear thy way
Into the possibility of noon
        Hid in the dawn.

No matter that none know what thy words speak.
        A day shall break
Out of eternity as each day bright
        Out of each night.
Thy wings shall touch the slanting light of dawn
        And, upwards drawn
By being light‑struck, shall to light be near
        When light's yet far.

Hope is thy ready and high‑soaring flight
        Out of the night,
Joy is thy touching of the first high rays
        That day betrays,
Life is the course thy flight sequesters from
        Earth and its nightly doom,
And these three things are one in thy belief
        That pain is brief.

II

Thou, unseeen Bird, essence of spiritual light,
        That yet art bright
With the epitome of the outer shine,
        Thou that art mine
And yet not mine but general to the earth,
        Wings of rebirth,
Whose song, though in me heard, participates
        Of all that all elates,
Thou point of meeting of me with the wings
        Hidden in all things,
Thou breath, thou vapour, seen and not seen, of
        Some abstract love,
Thou exhalation of the prisoned flight
        Of all things' weight,
Thou that in me art fear, mad splendour, all
        To ache and enthral,

Attract me, take me, o pure flight, and rise
        With me in thine eyes,
Lost, cast, unpetalled and divine, up to
        What thou dost woo!

O Spirit‑Lark that wakest ere the morn
        And art reborn
At each recoming of the sun, and art
        The wiser part
Of all that message is to our low eyes
        Of what shall rise!
Life‑weightless Bird that no meads can attract,
        But that must act
Its fate in air, above our marshes sad
        And meads low‑laid,
In free heights communing with the Great Horn
        As yet unborn!
O sterile Bird that hast no nest nor home
        But what shall come,
That hast no song save in the heights above
        Nests, homes and love,
Nor any thought save for the coming day,
        Though far away
It seem to those who measure yet thy flight
        But by its height
And not by its intention, that is carried
        From life and married
To those diviner hours that winged things
        Find with their wings!
O Bird of ruthless song and untold wishes,
        Whose high flight reaches
Heights not of earth, but of pure air, encumbered
        With no joys weighed and numbered!
Take all my heart in thy purpose of going
        And make the flowing
Down to earth of my song be like thy song,
        Something strange, strong
With distance, eerily half‑perishing
        From farness! Sing,
And let my heart be what thou meanst with singings
        My life with winging.
My hopes and fears with th’tone wherewith thy note
        To me doth float
And the great purpose hidden in my fate
        With thy mere height!

My heart shall thus be happy even if pained,
        Free even if strained
To keep that height of joy whence tremble down
        Thy songs to our own.
My soul may thus be happy, full and free.
        Oh, happily
Raise me from me and lift my life unto
        That thou dost woo -
The light, the sky, the distance and the morn,
        Till I be unborn
Again to pure dispersion in the seas
        Of the high breeze
That speaks to thee, ere light be born, of light,
        Till the delight
Of without being being shall make me
        Song and sky be!

O voice the angels kissed when unbreathed yet!
O lips made spiritual with uttering it!
O eyes wild with the lust of the divine
In thy felt presence, making thee its shrine!
O that this moment of thee were Thyself!
That thou ne’er fell'st from this Thou, and the pelf
Of gathered days with avarice of living,
Touched thee not from this moment of God's giving!
O eternal actuality of thee!
O by thy voice sculptured immutably
In some stone‑flesh of spirit! O set free
From being all contained in being seen!
O firmament of joy purely serene
With spaciousness of soul and stars of song
Above thyself, God's human heights among!

Sing on, and let thy singing be a couch
To that of me which to my soul doth vouch
Of God as of a self and of a home!
Dissolve me to thy notes! Make me become
An outside of myself, and have in me
Nought but a selfless sense of hearing thee!
Let me pertain to the sounds thou dost voice!
Let me be other than I and rejoice
Hearing time like a breeze pass by the place
Thy song imprisons in its halcyon grace!

Thy voice compels to parapets from heaven
Dim winged happinesses whence is woven
To our souls such a glamour, spirit‑fair,
That, feeling it, all life becomes despair
And all the sense of life to wish to die.
Sing on! Between the music's human cry
And thy song's meaning there is interposed
Some third reality, less life‑enclosed,
Some subtler tenderness than music makes
Or words sung, and its moonless moonlight takes
Our visionary moods by their child‑hand
And our tired steps begin to understand.

Sing, nor stop singing till bliss ache too much!
O that I could, without moving my hand,
Stretch forth some hand imaginary and touch
That body of thine thy singing giveth thee!
That kiss‑like touch would wake eternity
In me again, and, as by a great morn,
The night my body makes of me were torn
Away from being, and my unbodied shape
Would, like a ship doubling the final cape,
Come to that sight of port and shiver of coming
That God allows to those whose bliss of roaming
Is no more than the wish to find His peace
And mingle with it as a scent with the breeze.

I had a self and life
        Before this life and self.
When the moon makes woods rife
        With possible fay or elf,
There comes in me a dreaming
That is like a light gleaming
        Somewhere in me away,
On seas that I have known
And placeless lands that own
        Another kind of day.

I dream, and as a blast
        Fans into fire an ember,
My heart gleams with a past
        That I cannot remember.
And as the ember's glowing
Is not fire but fire's showing,
        I waste the empty pelf
Of my mute sense of me.
As rain within the sea
        I fade within myself.

There are mazes of I.
        I am my unknown being.
I have, I know not why,
        Another kind of seeing
(Other than this vain vision
That is my soul's division
        From what girds sight about)
Where to see is to know,
Whose life is faith, and woe
        Fled by the hand of Doubt.

My life has happy hours:
        'Tis when I feel not living;
And, as the scent of flowers
        Round flowers a flower‑soul weaving
That is a corporate spirit,
From myself I inherit,
        My soul's blood's spirit‑air,
A foreself and inself
Which is the being‑pelf
        That with God's loss I share.

There is no peace save where I am not,
The woods are gay where I never pass,
Nothing but shadows are where my thought
Plunges its feet in the moist dead grass.

Nothing save shadows and day elsewhere
Waiting for those that await and hope.
A horror lays its wind on my hair,
And a cold hand does for my cold hand grope.

Yet nothing in me save pain merits this,
Nothing in me save this merits pain.
Oh, Mother of Shadows, whose ice-dead kiss
Is madness, hasten towards my brain!

Why do I desire
What I do not need?
Why does my soul, like fire,
Or a hot abstract greed,
Seek all that is higher?

Why, if not because
It is a soul? (...)
Who can know the cause
When it lies in its whole
Hidden in (...) laws?

Yet this matters not.
What matters is pining
And that stress of thought
That comes of divining
What to wish that may not be got.

I could not be thou, being yet not thou
Were I not God; so to God my thoughts go
(To reach thee, to possess from within
To possess from being not from seeing)
Because, substance of substance, He alone
Can love being all things, and all in each one.
Thus is my love (...) religion.


And by being born, not born; by being love
None; and by being made move, not made to move,
But, indefinable and indistinct,
Wearing no form nor purpose nor precinct
Of use, it hangs, with my soul in its wake
An interval between me and thee, between
Ourselves and God, between thou being but seen
And being loved, abstract absance of place
(...) that
Life, substance of thou being a living thing
Where thought and will and feeling are one thing.


Of the two parts of love, becoming other
And unbecoming self, I do one choose —
The unbecoming, and the other lose.
Yet, as to unbecome must be becoming
Some other thing, as the end for roaming
Makes the thing found where will no matter binds,
The unbecoming of me sure love finds.
Yet if it finds the loved thing, yet not thee,
What thing finds it, that it sought not to be?
What but love's own abstraction, interval
Between souls. And as aether is purest of all
Where filling the mere spaces between things,
Because the more unmixed, the love that clings
To my large disembodiment is best,
Because no object, save love, limits its
(…)
But here not aether but consciousness is
The universal substance, so in this
Less difference between this substance and
God is there — so, if right I understand,
This love which to obtain thee loses thee
And which to complete me uncompletes me,
Which the mere interval doth occupy
Whether neither thy soul nor my soul doth lie,
To which my mere love's force abstractly sends
My void outgoing, and there my being ends,
And so the ends my being had in going
Equally endeth — this love thus foregoing
The object and the subject to be done
By missing into pure Relation;
This love finds God by its internal force,
For when all things are lost God is the loss.

See then how I, starting from me to thee,
Have like a sailor that sets out i' th' sea
For some shore, and the winds drive him away
And this chance casts him on some better bay
Than his intention had been to discover.
Yet if discovering were intended, ever
By what discovered is, where it not willed,
The purpose of discovering is filled,
And if the unwilled discovery is better,
The loss is gam, and that which seemed to fetter
The original purpose, the harsh wind,
Does lead the unled to where he best can find.

Yet this is not the journey's end, for whence
The sailor now arrived, to recommence
He may begin his voyage original
And from the better to the worse recall
For as the original purpose, better less,
Is in the found included, he may thence
His foiled task recompose and now to miss
The purpose that his (...)
So I, from God, the better may go out
To thee, and from within thee, not about
Thy presence, enter into thee and be
The very personality of thee.

Was it the lyrical nightingale
Forgot this music or told this tale?
A murmur of sorrow within me moves
Among the ghosts of unfound loves,
A breath of loss; like a lily faded,
By nought but the spell of that music aided.

I dream, and the sadness of being alive
Is like a mist round the things that strive
For an uttered word or a sense of being.
What sickness of having no seeing but seeing
Haunts with a murmur, thrills with a fear
The unnatural sense of my being here?

Nothing: the moonlight. Nothing: the breeze.
For sure there are, on remoter seas
Than mere containing of thoughts and dreams,
More earthless sorrows, less lucid gleams.
Care, and the fret of not having aught
If there, yet weigh not on life and thought.

Was it the music that came or ended?
Was it that it lost me or that it blended
With that of me that was born to hear it?
A voiceless sighing incarnate spirit,
A murmur of waters that somewhere shine,
A moonlight of dreaming it, a curious wine,

A splendour of opening vision to stars
No separateness from seeing them mars,
A clarion of moon-morn issuing from
The earliest place before love and home —
This, and the music I scarce can hear …
Lie still, my heart! be a dream, my fear!

Many rivers run
        Down to many seas.
All my cares are one:
         On what river of these
        Could my heart have peace?

Two banks to each river.
        None where I may stray
Hearing the rushes shiver
        And seeing the river ever
        Pass, yet seem to stay.

Maybe there is another
         River, but far from Me.
There l may meet the Brother
        Of my eternity.
        In what God will this be?

Mother, my cheeks are wet.
        Let down my hair and kiss
My brow. I seem to forget
        Even if I think of this.

Lullaby to me, mother,
        Lullaby to me.
I loved and was not loved, mother.
        Kiss me and let me be.

Let me sleep as of old, thy hand
        On my brow, so calm and so deep,
That I feel't on my soul, my soul fanned
        By thy breath on the face of my sleep.

I am but a little ship, mother,
        Lost out in the sea.
Lullaby to me, mother,
        Lullaby to me.

[I.]
Take me up in thine arms, oh some mother.
Take me up in thine arms, make me a child.
An endless lack of joy every joy doth smother
That rises in me, sudden or great or mild.

Take me up in thine arms, rock me to sleep.
Rock me to sleep in a great meaningless way.
And may I hear, like one who sleeps in a house by a bay,
A great loud wind rise like a life from the deep
And cease as I fall asleep like a life that passes away.

II.
All I have wished to do, mother, I have not done.
Even what I wish to feel makes mistakes within me.
I grow tired, dimly tired, of the calm and constant sun,
And restless beside the happier restlessness of the sea.

Oh for a boat to believe I might sail in it and go,
Beyond the walls of my sensations' world and become
A floating absence from my worn self, a discarded woe
Trailing behind me likes a ship's trail, shining through
My consciousness of having dropt my life like a lamp in a home.

III.
Mother, my cheeks grow thin with cares I forget to know.
With things I forget to feel, nor know how to think, I pine.
Mine envy, mother, is with the figure of the sturdy man at the wheel,
That does his duty in storms and is salt at soul with good brine.

My heart is lost to a perillous life full of achievement and breath.
My thoughts are given like gifts to a life I could never live.
Teach me how to myself my own life I can forgive.
Teach me how to love life, at least how not to fear death,
And be all that you teach in the sense of a mute kiss you give.


IV.
Rock me to and fro in your arms, mother. It is night.
There is something of endless motion, of final ceasing of care,
In your rocking of me now from now into the light
That the cottage lamp sheds on your rocking fire with the same yellow flare.

Let me sleep, let me sleep, outsleep the ages and Time.
Drift far away from space like a hulk away from shore.
Be your arms around me like a land or a day or a clime,
Be your casual lips on my brow like forgiveness of crime.
Rock me till I lose being, mother, rock me still more.

V.
My pain outgrows my power to feel pain. I am numb. I am faint.
I sicken from having lived no life, but all dreams, dreams, dreams,
My soul is poisoned, mother, with an old and mysterious tai[nt]
And now that you have stopped rocking full on my brow the lamp gleams.

Hide me, mother, from the light for it seems that it sees.
Hide me, make me be blurred against your breast and the night.
Lo! outside the great swell of the dim and eternal seas!
Mother, whom do we wait, to return from beyond the seas?
Is it for anyone at sea that the joy of our lamp we light.

VI.
The wind hath risen, the wind hath risen. Something is colder and truer.
Something of life and its mystery creeps into the room.
Mother, stop the window chinks, make the door fast and sure.
We never know what horror it is that out of the Night may come.

We know not whom we await. It may be worse than the dark.
It may be shapeless unto our thought and dread as God if he be...
Mother, new sounds are creeping like snakes through the darkness. Hark!
Is it the wind you fear? Is it the sea you remark?
Mother, make me to sleep at once, ere I may hear or see.

VII.
When will it born. Mother, this fear and this smart,
This ache as of something lost or something near to be found,
Coils like a viscous impossible manner of snake round the heart
And the night, mother, the night without being nor bound!...
Put your arms so much around me, so much, so close so fast
That they cover the eyes of my fancy and cling round my thought's quick ear.
Mother, let us not see if the night will pass or last.
Let us not think nor be... Let life be as if past.
Let our total and infinite death be the day and the ceasing of fear.

Life tastes to me like golden tobacco.
I have never done anything but smoke life.

After all of what use was it to me to have
Gone to the East and seen India and China?
The earth is similar and little
And there is only one way of living.

I pretended to study engineering.
I lived in Scotland. I visited Ireland.
My heart is a poor grandmother who goes about
Begging at the doors of Joy.

I am unfortunate by primogeniture.
The gipsies stole my luck.
Perhaps I shall not even find near death
A place to shelter me from my cold.

And I was a child like other people.
I was born in a Portuguese province,
And have met English people
Who say I speak English perfectly.

Alone, on the deserted quay, this summer morning,
I look towards the bar, I look towards the Indefinite,
I look and find pleasure in seeing,
Little, black and clear, a steamer coming in.
It is very far yet, distinct and classic after its own fashion.
It leaves on the distant air behind it the vain curls of its smoke.
It is coming in, and morn comes in with it, and on the river
Here, there, naval life awakes,
Sails arise, tugs advance,
Small boats jut out from behind the ships in the port.
There is a vague breeze.
But my soul is with the things that I see least,
With the in-coming steamer,
Because it is with Distance, with Morn,
With the naval meaning of this Hour,
With the painful softness that rises in me like a qualm,
Like a beginning of sea-sickness, but in my soul.

I look from afar at the steamer, with a great independence of mind
And a whell begins to spin in me, very slowly.

The steamers that enter the bar in the morning,
Bring to my eyes with their coming
The glad and sad mystery of all who arrive and depart.
They bring memories of distant quays, and of other moments
Of another kind of the same mankind in other ports.
Every (...), every departure of a ship,
Is — I feel it in me like my blood —
Unconsciously symbolic, terribly
Threatening metaphysical meanings
That startle in me the being I once …

Ah, every quay is a regret made of stone!
And when the ship leaves the quay
And we note suddenly that a space is widening
Between the quay and the ship,
There comes to me, I know not why, a recent anguish,
A mist of feelings of sadness
That shines in the sun of my mosy anguishes
Like the first window the morning strikes on,
And clings round me like some one else's remembrance
Which is somehow mysteriously mine.

Ah, who knows, who knows,
If I did not leave long ago, before Myself,
A quay; if I did not depart, a ship in
The oblique sun of morning,
From another kind of port?
Who knows if I did not leave, before the hour
Of the exterior world as I see it
Dawned for me,
A large quay full of few people,
Of a great half-awakened city,
Of a great city commercial, overgrown, apopletical,
As much as that can be outside Time and Space?

Ay, from a quay, from a quay somehow material,
Real, visible as a quay, really a quay,
The Absolute Quay on whose type, unconsciously imitated,
Insensibly evoked,

We men have built
Our quays in our harbours,
Our quays, of actual stone overlooking true water,
Which, once built, suddenly show themselves to be
Real-Things, Things-Spirits, Entities in Stone-Souls,
At certain moments of ours of root-sentiments
When it seems that a door is opened in the outer world
And, without anything changing
Everything reveals itself to be different.

Ah, the Great Quay whence we embarked in Ship-Nations!
The Great Earlier Quay, eternal and divine!
Of what port? Over what waters? And why do I think of this?
A Great Quay like all other quays, but the Only One.
Full, as they are, of murmurous silences in the fore-dawns
And budding with the dawns in a noise of cranes
And arrivals of goods-trains
And under the black, occasional and light cloud
Of the smoke of the chimneys of the near factories
Which clouds its ground, black with small shining coal,
As if it were the shadow of a cloud passing over dark water.

Ah, what essentiality of mystery and arrested senses
In a divine revealing ecstasy
At the hours coloured like silences and anguishes
Is the bridge between any quay and THE QUAY!

Quay blackly reflected in the still waters,
Suddle [?] on board the ships,
Oh wandering and unstable soul of the people who live in ships,
Of the symbolic people who pass and for whom, nothing lasts
For when the vessel returns to the port,
There is always some change on board!

On continual flights, goings, drunknness of the Different!
Eternal soul of navigators and navigations!
Hulls slowly reflected in the waters
When the ship leaves the port!
To float as soul of life, to depart as voice,
To live the moment tremulously on eternal waters!
To wake to more direct days than the days of Europe,
To see mysterious ports over the loneliness of the sea,
To double distant capes and see sudden great landscapes
Of unnumbred astonished alones!

Ah, the distant beaches, the quays seen from afar,
And then the near beaches and the quays seen from near.
The mystery of each departure and of each arrival,
The painful instability and incomprehensibility
Of this impossible universe
At each naval hour ever more deeply felt right in my skin.
The absurd sob that our souls spill
Over the ever-different tracts of seas with islands afar,
Over the distant lines of the coasts we merely pass by,
Over the clear growing-clear of ports, with their houses and their people,
When the ship nears the land.

Ah, the freshness of morns when we arrive,
And the paleness of the morns when we depart,
When our entrails are gripped up
And a vague sensation resembling a fear
— The ancestral fear of going away and leaving,
The mysterious ancestral terror of Arrivals and New Things —
Grips up our skin and gives us qualms
And all our anguished body feels,
As if it were our soul,
An unexplained desire to feel this in some other way:
A regret at something,
A perturbation of tendernesses towards what vague fatherland?
What coast? what ship? what quay?
That thought sickens within us
And only a great vaccum remains in us,
A hollow satiety of naval minutes,
And a vague anxiety that would be weariness or pain
If it knew how to be that…

The summer morning is, nevertheless, slightly cool,
A slight night-dullness lies yet on the shaken air.
The wheel within me quickens its motion slightly.
And the steamer keeps on coming in, because surely it must coming in,
And not because I see it moving in its excessive distance.

In my imagination it is already near and visible
In all the extent of the lines of its portholes,
And everything trembles in me, all my flesh and all my skin,
On account of that creature that never arrives in any ship
And whom I have come to await to-day on this quay, through an oblique command.

Oh, solitary star, that with bright ray
Lookst from the bosom of envolving night,
Loveliest that none contests thy spaceful way
Now when with rivals is the sky not dight.

Vouch safe on me to keep thy tiny stare
Blinking at night as if in sleepy joy,
Or as the sleepy eyes of some young fair
Who chides their closing to her thought's warm toy.

That there are other stars I well do know
And others that may shine more bright and true;
And yet I wish them not, for one doth so
Outwit decision and attention sue.

And if from this thou can no lesson learn.
Much hast thou spurned that Goodness may not spurn

Before a poor, ignorant crowd
A wild propagandist loud
Shrieked a socialistic speech,
But such pompous terms and thick,
Artistic, scientific
Went with each oratoric screech
That the crowd in silence heard
Wishing of course to applaud,
But expecting a strong word
They could understand, to laud.

«Procrastinators, banditti
Reactionary, servile,
Full‑considerately vile!ª
In this way, pompously witty
He talked and the crowd heard on.
«You», he continued, «each Don
Of financial bloated leer,
I excommunicate here
Before Justice throne severe;
You I detest, I abhor…»

Here a laugh applauding rough
The wide air from the crowd tore.
«That word», they cried in a roar,
«We understand well enough!»

I

'Tis a void winter day, sad as a moan.
A sense of loneliness, as of a stone
Upon a grave, or of a rock in sea
Rests like a mighty shadow over me.
I am unnerved, unminded by the pall
Of solemn clouds that, weighty over all,
Curtail the vision; and upon mine ear

The City's rumble brings despair and fear
To crush my spirit free and wild.
        The rain,
Reiterated horribly, again
Beast with its drops at my cold window‑pane
With such a sound as makes us know it cold.
The world is ghostly, undaylike and old,
And weary passengers, with cautious tread,
Yet hurried, walk within the streets soul‑dead
In the unkindness of their hue of lead.

The streets are streamlets, and perpetual
A sound of little waters, on roof, on wall,
Down in the streets, in pipes, in window‑glass
And into rooms doth wetly come and pass.
        All is the rain's.
All is pale wetness, darkness inly cold,
A sentiment of waste things and of old
Making all things exterior sorrows, pains;
And all we hear and feel and know and see
Is wrapt around as with a masking cloak
In inconceivable monotony.

All in the houses and up from the street
Is a long watery shuffle of heavy feet,
A sound of drenched garments, and a sense
Of a sad chillness, latently intense.
Through cracks in doors and windows a gust cold
Of wind penetrates like a memory of old
Times to make freeze my body, ill reclined
Upon a couch, a sufferer with my mind.

Life in the streets is sad, a monotone
More dull than usual ordinariness:
Business and work have lost their usual stress,
The vender's cries are each of them a moan
Grotesque, desolate, as forlorn and half‑dead
Hearts might produce which make a war (?) attempt
At talking normally, as if they not bled.
Half‑childish urchins, gloriously unkempt
Laugh at the water that cart‑wheels upshed.

The muddy urchins in the streets that play
Make shades of envy in my soul to stay.
Couples, some newly‑married, others not,
Who in the commonness of their no‑thought

Have a deep happiness I would not have,
A joy to which I would prefer the grave,
Pass in the street. some gay and some sedate.
I feel me no like men in any way.
I envy those - I speak true - without hate
And without admiration, isolate (?).
I would that l were happy as they are
But not with that their happiness. Thus far
Such living as theirs is were unto me
Misery, penury, monotony.

Alas for all who dream! Alas for us,
Poor poets, more or less mad, more or less
Foolish! In this consists true happiness!
In knowing how to be monotonous.
Happy are they who can see without sorrow
        To‑day yield us to‑morrow
And yet to‑morrow and to‑day to them
Different days because different days,
Which are to me (save that they pass) the same.

II

The view I have of this cold winter day,
The deep depression that makes my thoughts stray
Is but a symbol and a synthesis
Of what my life perpetually is.

How deep my thoughts in pain and sadness are!
How wreck'd my soul in its intense despair!
How desolate, disconsolately mute
My heart is of the words that like scents shoot
From the full flower of true youthfulness!
How locked am I within my own distress!
How in the tragic circle soul‑confined
        Of my abhorred self!
Not one ambition leads me - power nor pelf,
No wish for fame, no love of poor mankind.
But I am weary, desolate and cold
E'vn as this winter day. I have grown old
In watching dreams go by and pass away
        Leaving a memory pure and bright
        Of aught that was and died as light
Without the living horror of decay.

Is this thy life, irresolute soul of mine?
How pale the sun of thy sad morn doth shine!
How it forebodes the cloudiness that comes
Outstretched wings of the storm whose muffled drums
Of warning in the paling day are heard
Deep in the distance lesseningly blurred.

Thou look'st not death nor evil in the face
Poor soul despairing in life's troubled race!
All forms of life, all things have been to thee
Mutations of eternal misery.
All years, all homes to thee have been
In the same drama many a change of scene.
Thou hast not learned to live, but thou dost cling
Madly to life (dreading Death's night severe),
As if life or the world were anything!

I.

Thy hand with its lovely fingers
        And the heavy rings on them!
How my soul over them lingers
Each finger with a heavy gem,
Each ring like a small diadem!

When thou and I are alone,
One only wish my soul stings —
Holding thy hand in my own,
All night, while the night-bird sings,
To take off and replace thy rings.

I

My tale is simple, sad and brief -
As simple as all tales of grief,
As brief as all that is ours, though
It seem eternal to its woe;
No tale of glorious deeds or fair,
But one short poem of despair;
Dark as all things where man is caught
In the fine‑poisoned nets of thought.
Here is no flame of love's old fire,
Nor song of pent or free desire,
No thousand herses [?] fill its plan,
But it is centred round one man.
A man? A boy, if boyhood be
That where is sober misery.
About a boy all moves, an elf
Careless of happiness or pelf,
But fated to sing but himself.

I was not born to joy nor love.
The earth below, the sky above
Compel a sense within my soul
That deeply, heavily doth roll,
Like a tremendous, mystic sea
In lands where dreams alone can be;
A feeling that a sadness is,
Weeping in broken‑hearted bliss;
A sense that is a deep despair -
I know not why I should feel this
Before the things that are most fair.

Beauty is more than pleasure's joy:
That which must please is made to cloy,
And Nature cloys not with distaste
But gives a sorrow [?], as of past
Things whence the Present does inherit
Something where [...] is and deep
Beauty delicious in a sleep
That is half‑sadness to the spirit.

For Pleasure is not Joy - we know
Joy lives as sorrow in the heart;
One or the other lives; the dart
That Sorrow kills comes from Joy's bow.
Pleasure and distaste are not so.
Sorrow and Joy are as the strange
And unknown forms of life and change
That are ignored in depths of ocean:
Pure is the depth of their emotion.
Pleasure and Pain are not like these,
But as on surfaces of seas
The alternation of their motion
And shows of shifting without end.
Joy may like the sun's light transcend
The clouds of Pain; Pleasure may be
The face and look of Misery.

III

Ay, Nature chills me with deep fear,
For Nature, to my seeing, spent
With looking on my woes too near,
It is but Mystery eloquent.
The plainest stone, the simplest flower -
All have a meaning deep and vast,
Mocking their living of an hour.
But this significance, that hath past
So oft to poet’s song and word,
Makes them but madmen, even as I,
Speaking in outline [?] sense absurd
Strange thoughts for beings that must die.
But Man to me is dreader still,
The thing of thought, feeling and will,
Which is so dark unto mine eyes
That of the sense he calls his soul
- Let not of seeing speak the mole [?] -
I cannot dream to theorize.

For men, who have wrought creeds and codes
And guided nations by the roads
Of feeling and of speculation,
Have seen as much - nothing - as I
Into the world. All could perceive
That Nature aught doth signify:
Beyond this they could stop or rave.
Most raved and therefore could believe.

Yet I, naturally wrapt about,
Normally, as in feathers the bird,
With hesitation and with doubt,
Find all the world a thing absurd.
Because myself, a part of it,
Am an absurdity unfit.

Too young I learnt to reason coldly
And draw conclusions firmly, boldly,
From thoughts and facts to shatter creeds,
Careless of man's mendacious needs.
Preciseness cast in me the seeds
Of madness, and the soil was good
For that abnormal growth of pain
Whose flowers are red, colour of blood.

Too soon I learned to see too clear,
And therefore nothing now can capture
My heart, to which reasoning is rapture,
That sees night where most poets say
«'Tis day - I see it all - ­'tis day.ª
They sing of joy, T sing of fear.

Alas! Why should I stop thus long
Over the illness of my life,
That has Insanity for wife?
Turn I back with an impulse strong.
Leave I this shallowness and sing.
The deeper sorrow of my song.

II.

When thou seeëst me spend hours
Holding in a feverish glance
Thy mouth or teeth, or thy hand,
And notest how my soul devours
With a sleepness like to trance
The commonest things that stand

And askest what in them I see
That into each my spirit delves
As if each had a mystery,
Thou err'st in thy conjecturings,
For what ever obsesses me
Is not things in their weary selves
But the being there of things.

Weep, violin and viol,
        Low flute and fine bassoon.
Lo, an enchanted isle
        Moon‑bound beneath the moon!
My dream‑feet rustle through it
        Chequered by shade and beam.
Oh, could my soul but woo it
        From being but a dream!

Violin, viol and flute.
        Lo, the isle hangs in air!
Through it I wander, mute
        With too much loss of care.
And the air where't doth float
        No air's, but light of moon.
Its paths are known to each note
        Of viol and bassoon.

Yet is it real, that isle,
        As our clear islands mortal?
Do flute, bassoon and viol
        But ope with sound a portal,
And show, somehow, somewhere,
        To what looks out from me
That pendulous island rare
        In a moon‑woven sea?

Maybe 'tis truer than ours.
        How true are these? But lo!
That isle that knows no hours
        Nor needeth hours to know,
And that hath truth and root
        Somewhere known of the moon,
Fades in the fading of flute,
        Violin and bassoon.

III.

        Eyes are strange things.
Meaning in them becomes life,
        Life in them has wings.

Look at me thus. Thy glance is mad and rare.
Thine eyes show deep and wild an inner strife.
        How they are more than Horror fair!

IV.

1.
When thou didst speak but now I felt
        A terror mad and strange.
Conceive it thou. I could have knelt
To thy lips, to their curve, to its change.
        The talking curve of thy lips
        And thy teeth but slightly shown
Were my delirium's waking whips.
        I felt my reason overthrown.

A super-sensual fetichism
        Haunts my deep-raving brain.
Greater than ever grows the abysm
Of my reason's and feeling's schism,
        Cut with the pickaxe of pain.

More than they show all things contain.

2.
Something not of this world doth lie
        In thy smile, in thy lips live turn;
A figure, a form I know not why
That wakes in me — without a sigh
        But with terror I cannot spurn
        With terror wild and mute —
Is it remembrances, is it
        Desires so vague half-known they flit
And not in thought nor sentiment take root?

        My mind grows madder and more fit
        In everything to catch and find
        Meanings, resemblances defined
        By not a form that thought can hit.

Smile not. Thou canst not comprehend!
        What is this? What truth doth sleep
        In these ravings without end
                And beyond notion deep?
Laugh not. Know'st thou what madness is?
Wonder not. All is mysteries.
        Ask not. For who can reply?
Weep for me, child, but do not love me
Who have in me too much that is above me,
        Too much I cannot call «I».
        Weep for the ruin of my mind
Weep rather, child, that things so deep should move me
        To lose the clear thoughts that could prove me
                One worthy of mankind.

V.

My child, I see thine eyes upon
A shadow, as cast by the wings
When a swift bird passes close by
The castle-window before the sun:
So through thy glance the shadows fly...

The souls of things dead and bygone
Haunt the appearances of living things

First there was but the moon
        And the black‑tramelled trees
In the lunar lagoon
        Of the forgotten breeze.

Then some unseen thing stirred
        Where the moon‑silence snowed
And a vague whirl unheard
        Vacantly tip‑toed.

Slowly, idly, alone,
        Beyond the eyes of sight,
Somewhere invisibly shown,
        They danced their delight.

Their far vagueness wound
        Round the heart a pain,
A phantom fear found
        Voluble and vain.

The heart remembered lives
        Before loves and homes,
Whose rare memory revives
        Only when this dance comes.

A wish for a vague thing soon,
        A loosened sense of selves,
A thing in the soul like moon,
        Aught in the hopes like elves -

Tip‑toe aerial gliding
        Shadow‑lunar blent,
Bending, mingling, hiding,
        To and fro they went.

Left and right, belonging
        To no place, they swayed.
A low pipe, like longing,
        To their dancing played.

There, in the silence dropped
        Like a thing on the ground,
Whirled they awhile, then stopped,
        Then renewed their round,

Till with their slowing turns
        The cold air grows more bare.
Then the mere moonlight returns
        And there had been nothing there.

Here lieth A[lexander] S[earch]
Whom God and man left in the lurch
And nature mocked with pain and woe
He believed not in state or church
Nor in God, woman, man or love
Nor earth below nor heaven above.
His knowledge did to this about:
(...) and love is not
Nothing is everywhere sincere
Save sorrow, hatred, lust and fear
And even these sometimes do look
Less than in the ill they work.

He died at twenty odd
This was is dying sentiment:
Accurst be Nature, Man and God.

Apollo unto Neptune said:
        «Come, I shall drink the sea!»
But Neptune laughed out like a lad
        In his boyish jollity,
And cried: «You would drink the earth, if you could,
        And infinity.»
And the poet the symbol who understood
        Felt his misery.

«I love my dreams», I said, a winter morn,
To the practical man, and he, in scorn,
Replied: «I am no slave of the Ideal,
But, as all men of sense, I love the Real.»
Poor fool, mistaking all that is and seems!
I love the Real when I love my dreams.

I cannot well deceive me that there was
In my love nobleness, even though ill.
Now that the tunnel through which I did pass
Yields to the glaring day, I can instil
Into my thought a wonder how I could
Suppose that way to be a place of staying;
Thus being a fool in the way all men should,
Yet not the complete fool to take no naying (!!!)

I loved a woman; there was the story of sex relations, an emotional novelty. They were sex relations and no more. It was pleasure and no more.

Era em Adriano fria a chuva fora.

Jaz morto o jovem
No raso leito, e sobre o seu desnudo todo,
Aos olhos rasos de Adriano, cuja dor é medo,
A umbrosa luz do eclipse-morte era difusa.

Jaz morto o jovem, e o dia semelhava noite
Lá fora. A chuva cai como um exausto alarme
Da Natureza em acto de matá-lo.
Memória de que el' foi não dava já deleite,
Deleite no que el' foi era morto e indistinto.

Ó mãos que já apertaram as de Adriano quentes,
Cuja frieza agora as sente frias!
Ó cabelo antes preso p'lo penteado justo!
Ó olhos algo inquietantemente ousados!
Ó simples macho corpo feminino qual
O aparentar-se um deus à humanidade!
Os lábios cujo abrir vermelho titilava
Os sítios da luxúria com tanta arte viva!
Ó dedos que hábeis eram no de não ser dito!
Ó língua que na língua o sangue audaz tornava!
[...]

A.S. (Alex[ander] Search)

Here lies a poet who was mad and young
The two things may go together
As to the songs he sung
They were found in winter weather.




EPITAPHS FOR THE FUTURE

Monarchy

Here lies a part of hell that on earth was
(It took it long to pass,
Riddled by way of Justice
[…]
Here lies the other part.


Religion

Here lies the beautiful assassin cold
who smiled upon his victim and singing
Murdering sweet songs to his imagining
Till by his each a (...) he sells
It died because it was old.

To all those people that say
That honour and good are dead
Many things might well be said;
One of them is that they be.

If rank [?] the guinea‑stamp but be,
Why, to this one thing may be said:
That 'tis only midst men we see
        A guinea‑stamp on head [?]

You tell me, for oft you choose
Rude and uncourteous to grow,
I can't say «Bo» to a goose...
        Why, James: Bo!

What is the best‑named thing in all
The world? Why, this: A papal bull.

They say that all roads lead to Rome,
        And, what's more, it is true;
But it is clear most of them must
        Lead crookedly thereto.

I became good, and was despised.
I became bad; I hated was.
If good or bad I was not prized,
In good or evil, equal loss.

I became bad and good by turns,
And thus did but unite two ills.
The spleen that now within me burns
Therefrom, nor good nor evil stills.

In a cart.

Here we go while morning life burns
        In the sunlight's golden ocean,
And upon our faces a freshness comes,
        A freshness whose soul is motion.

Up the hills, up! Down to the vales!
        Now in the plains more slow!
Now in swift turns the shaken cart reels.
        Soundless in sand now we go!

But we must come to some village or town,
        And our eyes show sorrow at it.
Could we for ever and ever go on
        In the sun and air that we hit;

On an infinite road, at a mighty pace,
        With endless and free commotion,
With the sun eter round us and on our face
        A freshness whose soul is motion!

Poet

Little bird, sing me a sweet song deep
        Of what is not to‑day;
Be it not the future that yet doth sleep
In the hall where Time his hours doth keep,
        More than far away.

Sing me a song of the things thou knew'st
        And desirest e'er,
Be it a song to which but is used
The heart that has to love refused
        What is merely fair.

Bird

Young, too young hither I was brought
        From the dells and trees;
Weep with me - I remember them not
Save with a vague and a pining thought:
        Can I sing of these?

Poet

Sing, little bird, sing me that song -­
        None can be more dear -
Come of the spirit that doth long
Not for the past with a sadness strong,
        But for what was never here.

Sing me, sing me that song, little bird;
        I would also sing
Of sounds I remember yet never heard,
Of wishes by which my soul is stirred
        Till then bliss doth sting.

Bird

To breathe that singing I have no might;
        Sing it deeply thou!
I sing when the day is clear and bright
And when the moon is so much in night
        That thy tears do flow.

But thou, thou sing'st in woe, in ill,
        And thy voice is fit
To speak of what the wish doth fill
With pinings indescribable,
        Shadows vague of it.

Poet

Ay, little bird, let us sing in all weather
        A song, of to‑day,
Come of the sense we feel together
That nothing that doth die and wither
        Truly goes away.

Many an evil, many a bliss
        Go to make existence' hell,
But the greatest evil of all is this:
        To live and to know it well.

Since this from life at once we see
        Thus simply gathered,
Must not the greatest bliss then be
        To die and know oneself dead?

That's true, as far as I guess,
That's true and impossible,
As far as I know and tell.
So much for happiness!

I said unto the world one day:
        «I suspect thee of existence!»
And the world showed a smiled resistance
        To what I did say.
«Let us go to court», he replied; «go we
Before a Court both wise and rare.

Let Reason one judge of our cause be;
Imagination be also there
And Feeling the judges our cause to hear.»
We went before the Court, and Reason
Said to me: «Thy crime is half‑treason!
The World's acquitted of what thou say'st:
        Of existence 'tis guilty not.
This by the written code of Thought
        In the pages of Unrest.»
(I was but in the costs condemned
Of the suit I lost as play;
But those, they leave me poor and yet
        Are more than I can pay.)

«Tell me», one day to a poet said
        A deep, brutal man,
«If you had to choose between seeing dead
Your wife whom you do love so well
And the loss complete, irreparable,
        Of your verses all, instead -
Which loss would you rather feel?»

The poet glanced with sudden woe
And deep distress at him who so
Broke with a question ill‑foreseen
His inner silence half‑serene,
And he did not answer; and the other
Smiled, as elder to younger brother:
The tortured glance of startled sense
And sudden self‑knowledge intense
And newness of self‑consciousness
Was bitter, as ev'n he could guess.
More than a smile were violence.

Do you know the crime I committed
        Nearly twenty years ago?
At that crime my heart is torn.
        What my crime was do you know?
'T was the crime of being born.

And every day another crime
        I commit, and ever have done
Up to now in the face of Time.
        Do you know what crime this is?
'Tis the crime of living on.

Do you know what evil's disgrace
        Has made an outcast's my lot
And sundered me from my race?
        Do you know what crime is that?
'Tis the crime of having thought.

Ring, bells, ring - ring out clear!
Perhaps by the vague sentiment that you raise -
I know not why - you remind me of my infancy.
        Ring, bells, ring! Your soul is a tear.
        What does it matter? My childhood's glee -
        You cannot call it back to me.

Ring, bells, ring out your song!
You remind me of some happiness
(Perhaps one that I never felt),
Of what has been, of what lasts not long,
Of what was not but seems now a bliss.
Something of sorrow, something of despair
        Is in me by your melody.
Sing, sing of the past which was fair -
        You cannot call it back to me.

        Though you sing but your set melody,
        Yet ring out wildly, wildly, bells!
Ring out the song that tears out the heart,
        Speaking of what I know not, sing
        To and fro till the soul's deep smart
Calms itself by too much, too deep in the heart.

        In the wordless speech of your own
        Ring out, wild bells, ring out!
        Ye have something of souls left alone;
Ye give me a sorrow, a deep ache of doubt,
        Ununderstood sentiment sad...
Do you sing of my childhood that thus you should moan?
        Then I was unconscious; now I am mad.

Ring out bells! Your sadness that stings
        Has a sob as an inner sound.
        I have in me colossal things.
Ring on! in your music I am drowned.
All in the world has a limit and bound.
        Ring on, desperate and free!
Can ye not of skies and of wings
        Speak loud to my misery?
Speak an ye will; except sorrow and pain
        Ye bring not anything to me.

        Ring out, wild bells, clearly, deep!
Whatever the pain ye sing of may be -
What does it matter? Life, death are one sleep
        Full of dreams of agony.
        All is unreal and we blind.
Ring out your song! I desire to weep
        For all that my life might be.
All that you call or recall to my mind
You cannot bring nor bring back to me.

I

The hen said «I can fly».
        Do you know why?
Over a fence she flew.

The eagle said «Can I fly?»
        Can you tell why?
Unto the stars she could not go.

II

Baby came into the world.
In a basket full of flowers
Which a fairy brought, an angel
From the paradisal bowers.

III

A philosopher of name
In the best of mind once said:
«Man is... » the rest is immaterial
And need not be chronicled.

A thousand hearts are labouring for the good
Of poor mankind ill-civilized and chill;
A thousand minds are making war to ill
With thought or feeling ponderate or rude.

And I alone, as if not understood
By me the suffering that the sense doth fill,
Am sunk in an abeyance deep of will
In a wild, crazy somnolence of mood.

Thus show I mute and cold to misery
Yet not suspected thoughts like dim clouds float,
The presages of horrors, in my mind.

Thus am I miserable and my soul in me,
A skilful helmsman in a helmless boat,
Is like one loving beauty yet born blind.

Never have I so deeply felt my exclusion from mankind.
To one side the sane, to the other side the lame and the halt and the blind;
To one side the healthy, the good, the strong, those in life's prime,
To the other side the slaves of genius, of madness, of crime.
Build prisons and hospitals and Bedlams. To one side the glad,
To the other side the sickly, the stupid, the ill and the mad.

At no time have I felt so deep the gulf between me and men.
Is it idiocy, madness or crime, or genius - or what is this pain?
I have felt it to-day with full truth and have felt to remember it well:
I am one thrown aside ‑ a torturer and tortured in my being's hell;
Yet I asked not to live, nor had choice of my living's rotten worth,
I had no power on my life, nor am I guilty of my birth.

So I shall sing my song without hope, cheerless and forlorn,
That men may learn - at least they may laugh - to what some hearts are born;
Song all mystery, all symbols, contradictions in ignoble dance,
But that this is madness complete not the smallest ignorance;
Song all of tortures of soul, of a being's human abysm
And never a doubt but this is but raving egotism;
Song of evil, song of hate, song of revolt, song of love
Of Nature, of Mother Nature, the earth at my feet and the sky above;
Song of the hatred of customs, of creeds, of conventions, of institutions
Song of madness unpondering to human prostitutions;
Song of one that better were dead, song of one set aside,
Song of one that hell and earth conspired and combined to deride.

Peace! let the sane be set on that side and the mad on this side.

And so they whisper about us -
About me and about you?
And so they whisper about us?
Let us give them reason to!

I have built my temple — wall and face —
Outside the idea of space,
Complex — built as a full-rigged ship;
I made its walls of my fears,
Its turrets many of weird thoughts and tears —
And that strange temple thus unfurled
Like a death's-head flag, that like a whip
Stinging around my soul is curled,
Is far more real than the world.

IX

Now is she gowned completely, her face won
To a flush. Look how the sun
Shines hot and how the creeper, loosed, doth strain
To hit the heated pane!
She is all white, all she's awaiting him.
Her eyes are bright and dim.
Her hands are cold, her lips are dry, her heart
Pants like a pursued hart.

The world is woven all of dream and error
And but one sureness in our truth may lie –
That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror
We know it not by knowing it thereby.
For but one side of things the mirror knows,
And knows it colded from its solidness.
A double lie its truth is; what it shows
By true show's false and nowhere by true place.
Thought clouds our life's day-sense with strangeness, yet
Never from strangeness more than that it's strange
Doth buy our perplexed thinking, for we get
But the words sense from words – knowledge, truth, change.
We know the world is false, not what is true.
Yet we think on, knowing we ne'er shall know.

How yesterday is long ago! The past
Is a fixed infinite distance from to-day,
And bygone things, the first-lived as the last,
In irreparable sameness far away.
How the to-be is infinitely ever
Out of the place wherein it will be Now,
Like the seen wave yet far up in the river,
Which reaches not us, but the new-waved flow!
This thing Time is, whose being is having none,
The equable tyrant of our different fates,
Who could not be bought off by a shattered sun
Or tricked by new use of our careful dates.
This thing Time is, that to the grave will bear
My heart, sure but of it and of my fear.

The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss
Upon the wetted sand. I look, yet dream.
Surely reality cannot be this!
Somehow, somewhere this surely doth but seem!
The sky, the sea, this great extent disclosed
Of outward joy, this bulk of life we feel,
Is not something, but something interposed.
Only what in this is not this is real.
If this be to have sense, if to be awake
Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things,
For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take
And for truth commune with imaginings,
Holding a dream too bitter, a too fair curse,
This common sleep of men, the universe.

My weary life, that lives unsatisfied
On the foiled off-brink of being e'er but this,
To whom the power to will hath been denied
And the will to renounce doth also miss;
My sated life, with having nothing sated,
In the motion of moving poised aye,
Within its dreams from its own dreams abated –
This life let the Gods change or take away.
For this endless succession of empty hours,
Like deserts after deserts, voidly one,
Doth undermine the very dreaming powers
And dull even thought's active inaction,
Tainting with fore-unwilled will the dreamed act
Twice thus removed from the unobtained fact.

In the darkness of my soul,
Just as dark as the souls of men,
By the blessing of their eternal curse,
        Flashes like a bodiless ghoul,
In its rare fulness above all ken,
The sense of the sense of the universe.

And such a cowardice of thought,
Absorbing all my life and all
I have in me, more gall than gall,
Takes me, that I fear to open my eyes
And my mind to a most horrid surprise,
And I feel my being near to suppression
In a horror past Fancy's confession.

More than the cowardest of beasts
Before a gaping flash overhead,
More than the drunkard in his unrests
Who sees visions of more than dread,
More than all that fear can conceive,
More than madness can make to believe,
More than cannot be imagined,
        The sense of the mystery of all,
When it flashes on me full as can be,
Doth my maddened soul appal.

Speak it not ‑ nor can it be spoken, -
No, not the shadow of the sensation,
Of the chord of sanity that is broken
In me by that moment's distress
And intensity of negation;
Think it not, thought is powerless
This horror less than to express.

The meanest thing grows terrible
And the basest thought sublime -
All in a world more horrible
Than the sense of the soul of time,
Than the fear of the depth of death,
Than the remorse of more than crime.

‘Tis half as if its solution it brought,
That mystery that foul is as rot.
        Yet if it did so bring
        Dead were my thought
And my whole self dead as any thing:
'Tis this that coarsely men can name,
        Looking on the face of God.
And that feeling, that sense can more than maim
The spirit, more than make it a clod;
It would kill outright straight, outright,
With a shock of which hell is no mirror,
        More than is known in terror,
        More than is dreamt of fright.

Pius, of pious anger full,
In's bull makes priests and men of bias
Spy us. Although Pius is pious,
His bull (if that's a bull) 's a bull.

Pius the Tenth, your letter, bull -
Whate'er it is, with great attention
I read, although 'tis rather dull;
And, to speak true, not to deceive,
These words synthetise the impression
That from your bull I did receive: -

How much of that do you believe?

He asked me, half in his fine compassion,
To sketch in two strokes his portrait high;
'Tis done: a coat strikingly in fashion
        And a red tie.

Thou dost say that too soon we grow old,
That all pleasure of earth is but air;
Ay, but tell me, oh moralist cold,
Besides pleasure what pleasure is there?

«Thy will be done» (with a capital T)
Though ever on earth and on sea
There be the shadow of thy curse
Daily more terrible and worse
        Thy will be done!

«Thy Will be done» (with a capital W)
O Man, though many a woe doth trouble you,
Still you pray on, and beat your heart,
And thank the Tyrant in his nest:
        «Thy w[ill] be done».

«Thy will Be done» (with a capital B).
Though more than horrid misery
Break the whole earth and wreck the nations
Man cries on, in vile resignations:
        «Thy will be done!»

«Thy will be Done» (with a capital D)
All are (...) and all unfree,
And yet from cottage and from hall
The groaning and the dying call
        «Thy will be done!»

«Thy W[ill] Be Done» (all with capital letters),
Although God (...) our mind and fetters,
We roll our eyes and groan uncheerly
We join our hands and half-sincerely
Exclaim from life we pay too dearly:
        «Thy will be done!»

«He was strong and kind to all mankind,
Strong all temptations through.ª
May this epitaph be written over thee,
And, what's more, may it be true.

PRAYER

Our lady of Useless Tears,
Thine is my heart's best shrine.
I am sick with the gorging years,
I am drunk with the bitter wine
Of having but cares and fears,
Of knowing but how to pine.

It is useless to pray to thee,
But my heart is full of pain.
Thy glance would be charity,
Even if the look were disdain.
Give me that I may be
A child like thine again.

My sense of me is all tears.
I pity my heart too much.
O a cradle for my fears
And the hem of thy garment to clutch!
O wert thou alive and near us,
And thy hand a hand that could touch!

I do not know how to pray.
My heart is a torn pall.
See how my hair grows gray.
O teach my lips to call
On thy name night and day
As if that name were all.

My fathers' faith doth rise
To my lips this sick hour.
I pray to thee with mine eyes
Rosaries of anguish. O dower
My soul with a least sweet lies
Of thy suffering son's power!

I have forgotten the taste
Of faith, and ache for prayer.
My heart is a garden laid waste.
O thy hand on my hair
Like a mother's hand let rest
And let me die with it there!

EPICUREAN

From night's great womb with pain the horrid morn hao broke,
Far o'er the throbbing earth the clattering thunders roar,
The Titan wakes at last, his front begrimed with gore,
His brutal gasp abrupt uproots the rugged oak.

In mortal throes he raves, and with his stertorous croak
The birds are struck, the streams with terror dried, the shore
Caves into sea, mounts break down to their horrid core,
The tottering crags are rent, is rent the cloud’s gray cloak.

The lightning shrinks, the seas in roaring clangor splash,
The giant sways and now, with sudden thunderous crash,
Falls, and the throned stars from glittering seats are torn.

He fell; the startl'd earth, with frantic fury stung,
Split, burst, and broke; the air with rankling curses rung
But in the sky the sun still smiled as in scorn.

IV

The boy and the girl did kiss
And the world looked on with joy
At that pure touch of early bliss,
Chaste in its childly stainlessness
        Given by the girl to the boy.
'T was the first kiss of youth, and used
The world is to those words abused ­-
«Purity», «love», «free from stain.»
Strange doctor who hath e'er confused
The medulla and the brain!

V

The heart's a pump.

I love the things that children love
        Yet with a comprehension deep
That lifts my pining soul above
        Those in which life as yet doth sleep.

All things that simple are and bright,
        Unnoticed unto keen‑worn wit,
With a child's natural delight
        That makes me proudly weep at it.

I love the sun with personal glee,
        The air as if I could embrace
Its wideness with my soul and be
        A drunkard by expense of gaze.

I love the heavens with a joy
        That makes me wonder at my soul,
It is a pleasure nought can cloy,
        A thrilling I cannot control.

So stretched out here let me lie
        Before the sun that soaks me up,
And let me gloriously die
        Drinking too deep of living's cup;

Be swallowed of the sun and spread
        Over the infinite expanse,
Dissolved, like a drop of dew dead
        Lost in a super‑normal trance;

Lost in impersonal consciousness
        And mingling in all life become
A selfless part of Force and Stress
        And have a universal home;

And in a strange way undefined
Lose in the one and living Whole
The limit that I call my mind,
The bounded thing I call my soul.

Be it so; we are sundered for ever­ -
        I and life's happy and sane.
My nature and theirs did us sever;
        Nought can unite us again.

Again? We were never unparted,
        Differently destined and born­ -
They born to be light and stout‑hearted,
        I to be pained and worn.

Be it so; we for ever are sundered!
        What would the normal with me?
My own inner reason hath wondered
        Trembling at its misery.

I give me all over to terror
        All unto madness and woe;
I yield up my thoughts unto error.
        'Twas to be so; be it so!

Of my thoughts I no longer am master,
        Ceasing is now all control.
My mind doth decay: take your pasture
        Ravings, ye worms of the soul!

To‑day I sought to write, and found I had
With expectation my worn mind abused,
Yet deemed I not so choked and so confused
My thoughts already should be. I grow mad.

Bare of ideas, lame in my o'er‑used
Uselessly tired reason, feeling bad
Before the light sun, I stand lone and sad,
Friendship and kinship by mankind refused.

I labour but to think. I cannot think.
My thinking raves or sickens into dream
As I of some deep‑witched brew did drink.

That did strange horrors in my soul reveal.
A storm approaches. All grows dark. I feel
My reason leave me like a last sunbeam.

ALENTEJO SEEN FROM THE TRAIN

Nothing with nothing around it
And a few trees in between
None of which very clearly green,
Where no river or flower pays a visit.
If there be a hell, I've found it,
For if ain't here, where the Devil is it?

1907

THE LIP

One day in half-slumbrous raving
Where I saw strange fancies skip,
I saw in a dream, by no light's gleam,
A man with only one lip –
Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely,
Absolutely with only one lip.

I remember well that he had no face
Nor a nose with a usual tip;
He had nor eyes, nor cheks, nor hair
But only, only one lip –
Only one, only one, only one,
Only one, one, one lip.

Can ye think of it without terror?
No other lip did slip
Into the vision, nor was it a lack:
There was only, only one lip.
Could you see him as I you would grow mad.
That man with only one lip.


Alexander Search

January, 2nd 1908

LA CHERCHEUSE

Pale with the sense of being mortal,
Now dost thou, passing yearning's glades,
Knock with cold hands at the hushed portal
Of the closed palace of the shades.
Thy hands fall and thy wide eyes grope.
Oh, let me kiss thy feet and hope!

Let us not wish to understand,
Bravely despair even of despair,
Cold unfelt hand in cold dead hand,
Let us set out for mere Somewhere,
With bodies by the cold made none,
By nigh to invisibleness done.

Perhaps, thus losing earthly goal,
Our sense of us numbed to innerness,
Sudden we shall find ourselves all Soul,
Hand in hand spirits, waked to bliss,
Having, through some Gate not in space,
Lo! Lapsed to everlasting grace.

MEANTIME

Far away, far away,
Far away from here...
There is no worry after joy
Or away from fear
Far away from here.

Her lips were not very red,
Nor her hair quite gold.
Her hands played with rings.
She did not let me hold
Her hands playing with gold.

She is something past,
Far away from pain.
Joy can touch her not, nor hope
Enter her domain,
Neither love in vain.

Perhaps at some day beyond
Shadows and light
She will think of me and make
All me a delight
All away from sight.

ON AN ANKLE

A SONNET BEARING THE IMPRIMATUR
OF THE INQUISITOR-GENERAL
AND OTHER PEOPLE OF DISTINCTION AND DECENCY

I had a revelation not from high,
But from below, when thy skirt awhile lifted
Betrayed such promise that I am not gifted
With words that may that view well signify.

And even if my verse that thing would try,
Hard were it, if that work came to be sifted,
To find a word that rude would not have shifted
There from the cold hand of Morality.

To gaze is nought; mere sight no mind hath wrecked.
But oh! sweet lady, beyond what is seen
What things may guess or hint at Disrespect?!

Sacred is not the beauty of a queen...
I from thine ankle did as much suspect
As you from this may suspect what I mean.

But these are thoughts or promises or but
Half the purpose of rut,
And this is lust thought-of or futureless
Or used but lust to ease.
Do ye the circle true of love pretend,
And, what Nature, intend!
Do ye actually ache
The horse of lust by reins of life to bend
And pair in love for love's creating sake!
Bellow! Roar! Stallions be or bulls that fret
On their seed's hole to get!
Surge for that carnal complement that will
Your flesh's young juice thrill
To the wet mortised joints at which you meet
The coming life to greet,
In the tilled womb that will bulge till it do
The plenteous curve of spheric earth renew!

And ye, that wed to-day, guess these instincts
Of the concerted group in hints
Yourselves from Nature naturally have,
And your good future brave!
Close lips, nude arms, felt breasts and organ mighty,
Do your joy's night work rightly!
Teach them these things, O day of pomp of heat!
Leave them in thoughts such as must make the feat
Of flesh inevitable and natural as
Pissing when wish doth press!
Let them cling, kiss and fit
Together with natural wit,
And let the night, coming, teach them that use
For youth is in abuse!
Let them repeat the link, and pour and pour
Their pleasure till they can no more!
Ay, let the night watch over their repeated
Coupling in darkness, till thought's self, o'erheated,
Do fret and trouble, and sleep come on hurt frames,
And, mouthing each one's names,
They in each other's arms dream still of love
And something of it prove!
And, if they wake, teach them to recommence,
For an hour was far hence;
Till their contacted flesh, in heat o'erblent
With joy, sleep sick, while, spent
The stars, the sky pale in the East and shiver
Where light the night doth sever,
And with clamour of joy and life's young din
The warm new day come in.


Lisbon, 1913.

35 SONETS

I

Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.

If that apparent part of life's delight
Our tingled flesh-sense circumscribes were seen
By aught save reflex and co-carnal sight,
Joy, flesh and life might prove but a gross screen.
Haply Truth's body is no eyable being,
Appearance even as appearance lies,
Haply our close, dark, vague, warm sense of seeing
Is the choked vision of blindfolded eyes.
Where from what comes to thought's sense of life? Nought.
All is either the irrational world we see
Or some aught-else whose being-unknown doth rot
Its use for our thought's use. Whence taketh me
A qualm-like ache of life, a body-deep
Soul-hate of what we seek and what we, weep.

THE STORY OF SALOMON WASTE

This is all the story of Salomon Waste.
Always hurrying yet never in haste
He fussed and worked and toiled all frothing
And at the end of all did nothing
This is all of Salomon Waste.

He lived in wishing and in striving,
And nothing came of all his living;
He worked and toiled in pain and sweat,
And nothing came out of all that.
This is all the story of Salomon Waste.
..............

Each day new projects did betray,
Yet each day was like every day.
He was born and died and between these
He worried himself himself to tease.

He bustled, worried, moved and cried
But in his life no more’s descried
Than two clear facts: he lived and died.
This is all the story of Salomon Waste.

Alexander Search, 11/08/1907

MANIA OF DOUBT

All things unto me are queries
That from normalness depart,
And their ceaseless asking wearies
My heart.
Things are and seem, and nothing bears
The secret of the life it wears.
All thing’s presence e’er is asking
Questions of disturbing pain
With dreadful hesitation tasking
My brain
How false is truth? How much doth seem
Since dreams are all and all’s a dream.
Before mystery my will faileth
Torn with war within the mind,
.............

Alexander Search

APPROACHING

With dragging steps severe, like creeping hate,
Through the black silence of my conscious brain
I hear madness advance, and feel with pain
The ground it treads on writhe and palpitate.
How to avoid its coming soon or late
How not to feel the mind’s grand vainly strain,
But rooted lie awaiting its dread reign
That cometh inopposable as fate?

If only madness came as lightning doth –
Suddenly – that were the least greatest ill...
But oh! to feel with consciousness’ clear sight
Reason’s day go to twilight in swift growth,
And the twilight of reason, pale and chill,
Darken towards impenetrable night.

Alexander Search, 23/03/1909

DOUBT

Tell me, tell me who dreams most –
He who sees the world aright
Or the man in dreaming lost?
What is true? What is’t that seems –
The lie that’s lie that is in dreams?

Who is unto truth less near –
He who sees all truth a shadow
Or he who sees dreams all clear?
He who is a good guest, or he?
Who feels alien at the feast?


Alexander Search, 19/06/1907

EPITAPH

Here lies who thought himself the best
Of poet’s in the world’s extend;
In life he had not joy nor rest.

He filled with madness many a song,
And at whatever age he died
Thus many days he lived too long.

He lived im powerless egotism,
His soul tumultuous and disordered
By thought and feeling’s endless schism.

In everything he had a foe
And without courage bore his part
In life’s interminable woe.

He was a slave to grief and fear
And incoherent thoughts he had
And wishes unto madness near.

Those whom he loved, by arts of ill
He treated worse than foes; but he
His own worst enemy was still.

He of himself did ever sing,
Incapable of modesty,
Lock’d in his wild imagining.

Useless was all his toiless trouble
Empty of sense his fears and pains
And many of them were ignoble.

Vile thus and worthless his distress;
His words, though bitterer far than hate,
His bitter soul could not express.
.........

Let not a healthy mind pollute
His grave, but fitly there will pass
The traitor and the prostitute;

The drunkard and the wencher there
May pass, but quick, lest they should ponder,
Perchance, that pleasure is but air.

Each weak and execrable mind
Which plagued man with its rotteness
Its conscious master here will find.

Conscious, for in him he could tell
Madness and ill were what they were,
But neither did he will to quell.

Pass by therefore ye who can weep,
Let rotteness work in neglect,
While the rough winds the dead leaves sweep.

His slumbering brother to the sod
Not even in imagining
Disturb not with the name of God.

But let him lie and peace for ever
Far from the eyes and mouth of men
And from what him from them did sever.

He was a thing that God had wrought
And to the sin of having lived
He joined the crime of having thought.

Alexander Search, Julho de 1907

DESOLATION

Here where the rugged hills
Their gnarled loose bases grip into the earth,
And nothing save the sorrow of our birth
From seeing the seeing spirit fills,
Here where, among the grim, deserted stones,
Na hope of green for desertness atones,
Or water's sound
Make sweet the solitude around,
Here may I lay
This day
My head
Upon the ground and say
No better bed
Can he who has but himself for life have,
Nor better grave.

The sterile part
Of love, feeling, was given me.
Fom the humanness even of a broken heart
God set me free.
Out of my destiny no flower was made
To grow.
All in me fated was not even to fade
Or e'en a vain and transient glory show.

The very need
For love or joy or the human part of thought,
Pride, and the abstract greed
For truth, that lifts the heart and doth allot
A value of self and world to consciousness –
Even this bliss
My empty heart has not.

O weary born,
Faded begun.
Gone from unseen shores to seen shores forlorn,
Sent out of sun-gone unto unborn sun!
The singer of his wish
To sing no song,
The poor spendthrift rich
With knowing not fo, what to long.
The Hyperion dispossessed
Ere birth
Of that sun-mansion set out beyond rest
Above the wide-lit stretches of the earth.

The uncrowned king
That never saw the land
Of which he oft doth sing,
And whose lost path he cannot understand
Nor know to dream steps him there to bring.
The priest deferred
From the inner shrine.
The thought but never uttered word,
The fore spilt wine,
The anxiousness for hope, the cold divine
Of anguish that no anguish human is,
The solitary pine
On the cold hill of consciousness.

The hour
The lord
Returns
Back to the polluted bower,
Home to the intransitable ford,
Again to the ice-padlocked burns:
The shadow
Fixedly thrown
On the green meadow
By a tree overgrown
With leaves, but fruitless, flowerless and lone.

The last
Sight of a shore
Which the unhalting ship doth pass
And where it never shall pass more;
But where the heart-dim sailor knows
Homes are happy because not his,
Lips warm because never his lips to kiss,
Gardens fair because therein grows
The unfound rose,
Hours soft, fate fresh, life a real fair elf
Because somewhere outside himself.


16/10/1916

To its own father that child fair doth seem
Which unbribed eyes may but indifferent deem;
        Therefore this book, my child's first son too dear,
        Do thou inspect with careful search austere.
        If good, I better promise to indict;
        If bad, I will not think thou sayest right.
        'Tis not my pride, but human nature, friend,
        Owning no wrong doth covertly amend.

Ah, foolish girl with many a fancy fraught,
Seek not the dreary path of solemn thought.
The man who thinks is he that suffers worst,
By Nature blest, by everything accurst.
Thought is but madness to one thing confined,
A pleasing illness, woeful, undefined;
Pleasing as is the fury of the storm
That swings above its dangerous force enorm;
Pleasing as genius to which one must know
Death will not spare the dreadful, sudden blow;
Of body, soul and happiness the waster,
Thought's a good servant but a tyrannous master.

Leave then to madmen thought and pass thy life
Away from doubt and ceaseless mental strife;
Seek but to please and cherish but to scorn,
Love not with faith or thou must learn to mourn;
Be thy delight in silks and baubles gay,
Treat tears as feints and think life but a play;
Think with thy heart, reserve thy mind to scheme;
Let thine eyes practise an (unreal) dream:
Thy form to attract, thy voice not to repel;
The art of slander see than learn full well;
Try to please women as thou pleasest men...
Thou may'st succeed... and may I live till then.

When Cynthia smiled all Nature smiled, the streams
Glinted like diamonds in the golden beams;
Upon the branches sang the tuneful birds,
Amid the lowing of the grazing herds.
When Cynthia laughed the world was reft of pain
And varied flowers smiled on the enwitched swain;
The very storm restrained its fitful might,
The seas were ripples and the earth was bright.
If Cynthia frowned the skies gave out a groan,
The earth a shudder and the wind a moan;
Men's heads were drooped, no youthful face was glad,
The flowers had closed, the fields were stern and sad.
If Cynthia railed all Nature's voice was hoarse,
The very orbs withheld their wanted course;
The sun was pale, the moon gave out no light,
All night was hell, all day was like to night.
But, though I lived that day, my blinded eyes
Such many miracles beheld not rise.

Methought the sun preserved his wonted shine
And that men were, as ever, undivine,
Methought the storm went on, nor crash'd the less
And pain also, men suffering without cease;
Nor on the branches sang the birds the more
Nor brightened Nature her too bounteous store;
Nor wandered yet the world, or hung behind,
Nor did the orbs; what wandered was thy mind.

As when the moon which on a wide deep stream
Makes every wavelet glint with silver light,
By some black cloud, a shadow of the night
ls but awhile obscured, yet still gleam

The waves in darkness, to no falling beam,
And please in shade with the obscure delight
Of a profounder motion, stilly dight
With softened silver, like a thing of dream;

So may for e'er my song its force retain,
And though a cloud o'ercast my weary mind
Let that but fill the glitter of my strain

With staider sweetness, showing to mankind
That though beneath a cloud I can sustain
My wonted song, to hope and bliss not blind.