The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies Page 34
And in the cloud-bewildered peaks is pent.
Her face the light of fallen planets wore,
But as I gazed, in doubt and wonderment,
Mine eyes were dazzled, and I saw no more.
THE STAR-TREADER
I
A voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams,
Saying, “Make haste: the webs of death and birth
Are brushed away, and all the threads of earth
Wear to the breaking; spaceward gleams
5
Thine ancient pathway of the suns,
Whose flame is part of thee;
And the deep gulfs abide coevally
Whose darkness runs
Through all thy spirit’s mystery.
10
Go forth, and tread unharmed the blaze
Of stars wherethrough thou camest in old days;
Pierce without fear each vast
Whose hugeness crushed thee not within the past.
A hand strikes off the chains of Time,
15
A hand swings back the door of years;
Now fall earth’s bonds of gladness and of tears,
And opens the strait dream to space sublime.”
II
Who rides a dream, what hand shall stay!
What eye shall note or measure mete
20
His passage on a purpose fleet,
The thread and weaving of his way!
It caught me from the clasping world,
And swept beyond the brink of Sense,
My soul was flung, and poised, and whirled
25
Like to a planet chained and hurled
With solar lightning strong and tense.
Swift as communicated rays
That leap from severed suns a gloom
Within whose waste no suns illume,
30
The wingèd dream fulfilled its ways.
Through years reversed and lit again
I followed that unending chain
Wherein the suns are links of light;
Retraced through lineal, ordered spheres
35
The twisting of the threads of years
In weavings wrought of noon and night;
Through stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll,
Those folds that form the raiment of the soul.
III
Enkindling dawns of memory,
40
Each sun had radiance to relume
A sealed, disused, and darkened room
Within the soul’s immensity.
Their alien ciphers shown and lit,
I understood what each had writ
45
Upon my spirit’s scroll;
Again I wore mine ancient lives,
And knew the freedom and the gyves
That formed and marked my soul.
IV
I delved in each forgotten mind,
50
The units that had builded me,
Whose deepnesses before were blind
And formless as infinity—
Knowing again each former world—
From planet unto planet whirled
55
Through gulfs that mightily divide
Like to an intervital sleep.
One world I found, where souls abide
Like winds that rest upon a rose;
Thereto they creep
60
To loose all burden of old woes.
And one there was, a garden-close
Whose blooms are grown of ancient sin
And death the sap that wells and flows:
The spirits weep that dwell therein.
65
And one I knew, where chords of pain
With stridors fill the Senses’ lyre;
And one, where Beauty’s olden chain
Is forged anew with stranger loveliness,
In flame-soft links of never-quenched desire
70
And ineluctable duress.
V
Where no terrestrial dreams had trod
My vision entered undismayed,
And Life her hidden realms displayed
To me as to a curious god.
75
Where colored suns of systems triplicate
Bestow on planets weird, ineffable,
Green light that orbs them like an outer sea,
And large auroral noons that alternate
With skies like sunset held without abate,
80
Life’s touch renewed incomprehensibly
The strains of mirth and grief’s harmonious spell.
Dead passions like to stars relit
Shone in the gloom of ways forgot;
Where crownless gods in darkness sit
85
The day was full on altars hot.
I heard—enisled in those melodic seas—
The central music of the Pleiades,1
And to Alcyone2 my soul
Swayed with the stars that own her song’s control.
90
Unchallenged, glad, I trod, a revenant
In worlds Edenic longly lost;
Or dwelt in spheres that sing to those,
Through space no light has crossed,
Diverse as Hell’s mad antiphone uptossed
95
To Heaven’s angelic chant.
VI
What vasts the dream went out to find!
I seemed beyond the world’s recall
In gulfs where darkness is a wall
To render strong Antares3 blind!
100
In unimagined spheres I found
The sequence of my being’s round—
Some life where firstling meed of Song,
The strange imperishable leaf,
Was placed on brows that starry Grief
105
Had crowned, and Pain anointed long;
Some avatar where Love
Sang like the last great star at morn
Ere the pale orb of Death filled all its sky;
Some life in fresher years unworn
x
Upon a world whereof
Peace was a robe like to the calms that lie
On pools aglow with latter spring:
There Time’s pellucid surface took
Clear image of all things, nor shook
115
Till the black cleaving of Oblivion’s wing;
Some earlier awakening
In pristine years, when giant strife
Of forces darkly whirled
First forged the thing called Life—
120
Hot from the furnace of the suns—
Upon the anvil of a world.
VII
Thus knew I those anterior ones
Whose lives in mine were blent;
Till, lo! my dream, that held a night
125
Where Rigel4 sends no message of his might,
Was emptied of the trodden stars,
And dwindled to the sun’s extent—
The brain’s familiar prison-bars,
And raiment of the sorrow and the mirth
130
Wrought by the shuttles intricate of earth.
RETROSPECT AND FORECAST
Turn round, O Life, and know with eyes aghast
The breast that fed thee—Death, disguiseless, stern:
Even now, within my mouth, from tomb and urn,
The dust is sweet. All nurture that thou hast
5
Was once as thou, and fed with lips made fast
On Death, whose sateless mouth it fed in turn.
Kingdoms abased, and Thrones that starward yearn,
All are but ghouls that batten on the past.
Monstrous and dread, must it forever abide,
10
This inescapable alternity?
Must beauty blossom, rooted in decay,
Sickening, will Life not turn eventually,
Or ravenous Death at last be satisfied?
NERO
This Rome, that was the toil of many men,
The consummation of laborious years—
Fulfillment’s crown to visions of the dead
And image of the wide desire of kings—
5
Is made my darkling dream’s effulgency,
Fuel of vision, brief embodiment
Of wandering will and wastage of the strong
Fierce ecstasy of one tremendous hour,
When ages piled on ages like a pyre
10
Flamed to the years behind and years to be.
Yet any sunset were as much as this,
Save for the music forced from tongueless things,
The rape of Matter’s huge, unchorded harp
By the many-fingered fire—a music pierced
15
With the tense voice of Life, more quick to cry
Its agony—and save that I believed
The radiance redder for the blood of men.
Destruction hastens and intensifies
The process that is beauty, manifests
20
Ranges of form unknown before, and gives
Motion, and voice, and hue, where otherwise
Bleak inexpressiveness had levelled all.
If one create, there is the lengthy toil;
The labored years and days league toward an end
25
Less than the measure of desire, mayhap,
After the sure consuming of all strength
And strain of faculties that otherwhere
Were loosed upon enjoyment; and at last
Remains to one capacity nor power
30
For pleasure in the thing that he hath made.
But on destruction hangs but little use
Of time or faculty, but all is turned
To the one purpose, unobstructed, pure,
Of sensuous rapture and observant joy;
35
And from the intensities of death and ruin
One draws a heightened and completer life,
And both extends and vindicates himself.
I would I were a god, with all the scope
Of attributes that are the essential core
40
Of godhead, and its visibility.
I am but emperor, and hold awhile
The power to hasten death upon its way,
And cry a halt to worn and lagging Life
For others, but for mine own self may not
45
Delay the one nor bid the other speed.
There have been many kings, and they are dead,
And have no power in death save what the wind
Confers upon their blown and brainless dust
To vex the eyeballs of posterity.
50
But were I God, I would be overlord
Of many kings, and were as breath to guide
Their dust of destiny. And were I God,
Exempt from this mortality which clogs
Perception and clear exercise of will,
55
What rapture it would be, if but to watch
Destruction crouching at the back of Time,
The tongueless dooms which dog the travelling suns;
The vampire, Silence, at the breast of worlds,
Fire without light that gnaws the base of things,
60
And Lethe’s mounting tide that rots the stone
Of fundamental spheres. This were enough
Till such time as the dazzled wings of will
Came up with power’s accession, scarcely felt
For very suddenness. Then I would urge
65
The strong contention and conflicting might
Of Chaos and Creation—matching them,
Those immemorial powers inimical,
And all their stars and gulfs subservient,
Dynasts of time, and anarchs of the dark—
70
In closer war reverseless, and would set
New discord at the universal core—
A Samson-principle to bring it down
In one magnificence of ruin. Yea,
The monster, Chaos, were mine unleashed hound,
75
And all my power Destruction’s own right arm!
I would exult to mark the smouldering stars
Renew beneath my breath their elder fire
And feed upon themselves to nothingness.
The might of suns—slow-paced with swinging weight
80
Of myriad worlds—were made at my desire
One orb of roaring and torrential light,
Through which the voice of Life were audible,
And singing of the immemorial dead,
Whose dust is loosened into vaporous wings
85
With soaring wrack of systems ruinous.
And were I weary of the glare of these,
I would tear out the eyes of light, and stand
Above a chaos of extinguished suns,
That crowd and grind and shiver thunderously,
90
Lending vast voice and motion by no ray
To the stretched silence of the blinded gulfs.
Thus would I give my godhead space and speech
For its assertion, and thus pleasure it,
Hastening the feet of Time with cast of worlds
95
Like careless pebbles, or, with shattered suns,
Brightening the aspect of Eternity.
TO THE DAEMON SUBLIMITY
I wane and weary: come, thou swifter One,
With vans of ether-sundering instancy,
Zoned with essential night and sovereignty
Of flame septuple, strong to blind or stun
5
Beyond the bolted levin. Though Earth, undone,
Fail to thy meteor-fraught epiphany,
Though Time be as a chasm-riven sea,
Come thou, and bear me to thy chosen sun.
Yea, in the fiery fastness of the star
10
That thine empyreal wings most often find,
Thy lordliest eyrie, lone in gulf and gloom,
Leave me and lose me, safe from wasting war
Of finite things unworthy, and resigned
To some apotheosis of bright doom.
AVERTED MALEFICE
Where mandrakes, crying from the moonless fen,
Told how a witch, with eyes of owl or bat,
Found, and each root maleficently fat
Pulled for her waiting cauldron, on my ken
5
Upstole, escaping to the world of men,
A vapor as of some infernal vat;
Across the stars it clomb, and caught thereat
As if their bright regard to veil again.
Despite the web, methought they knew, appalled,
10
The stealthier weft in which all sound was still. . . .
Then sprang, as if the night found breath anew,
A wind whereby the stars were disenthralled. . . .
Far off, I heard the cry of frustrate ill,
A witch that wailed above her curdled brew.
THE ELDRITCH DARK
Now as the twilight’s doubtful interval
Closes with night’s accomplished certainty,
A wizard wind goes crying eerily,
And on the wold misshapen shadows crawl,
5
Miming the trees, whose voices climb and fall,
Imploring, in Sabbatic ecstasy,
The sky where vapor-mounted phantoms flee
From the scythed moon impendent over all.
Twin veils of covering cloud and silence, thrown
10
Across the movement and th
e sound of things,
Make blank the night, till in the broken west
The moon’s ensanguined blade awhile is shown. . . .
The night grows whole again. . . . The shadows rest,
Gathered beneath a greater shadow’s wings.
SHADOW OF NIGHTMARE
What gulf-ascended hand is this, that grips
My spirit as with chains, and from the sound
And light of dreamland, draws me to the bound
Where darkness waits with wide, expectant lips?
5
Albeit thereat my footing holds, nor slips,
The night-born menace and the fear confound
All days and hours of gladness, girt around
With sense of near, unswervable eclipse.
So lies a land whose noon is plagued with whirr
10
Of bats, than their own shadows swarthier,
That trace their passing upon white abodes,
Wherein from court to court, from room to room,
In hieroglyphics of abhorrent doom,
Is trailed the slime of slowly crawling toads.
SATAN UNREPENTANT
Lost from those archangelic thrones that star,
Fadeless and fixed, heaven’s light of azure bliss;
Forbanned of all His splendor and depressed
Beyond the birth of the first sun, and lower
5
Than the last star’s decline, I still endure,
Abased, majestic, fallen, beautiful,
And unregretful in the doubted dark,
Throneless, that greatens chaos-ward, albeit
From chanting stars that throng the nave of night
10
Lost echoes wander here, and of His praise
With ringing moons for cymbals dinned afar,
And shouted from the flaming mouths of suns.
The shadows of impalpable blank deeps—
Deep upon deep accumulate—close down,
15
Around my head concentered, while above,
In the lit, loftier blue, star after star
Spins endless orbits betwixt me and heaven;
And at my feet mysterious Chaos breaks,
Abrupt, immeasurable. Round His throne
20
Throbs now the rhythmic resonance of suns,
Incessant, perfect, music infinite:
I, throneless, hear the discords of the dark,
And roar of ruin uncreate, than which
Some vast cacophony of dragons, heard
25
In wasted worlds, were purer melody.
The universe His tyranny constrains
Turns on: in old and consummated gulfs
The stars that wield His judgement wait at hand,
And in new deeps Apocalyptic suns
30
Prepare His coming: lo, His mighty whim
To rear and mar, goes forth enormously