The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies Read online

  In nights and constellations! Darkness hears

  Enragèd suns that bellow down the deep

  God’s ravenous and insatiable will;

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  And He is strong with change, and rideth forth

  In whirlwind clothed, with thunders and with doom

  To the red stars: God’s throne is reared of change;

  Its myriad and successive hands support

  Like music His omnipotence, that fails

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  If mercy or if justice interrupt

  The sequence of that tyranny, begun

  Upon injustice, and doomed evermore

  To stand thereby.

  I, who with will not less

  Than His, but lesser strength, opposed to Him

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  This unsubmissive brow and lifted mind,

  He holds remote in nullity and night

  Doubtful between old Chaos and the deeps

  Betrayed by Time to vassalage. Methinks

  All tyrants fear whom they may not destroy,

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  And I, that am of essence one with His,

  Though less in measure, He may not destroy,

  And but withstands in gulfs of dark suspense,

  A secret dread for ever: for God knows

  This quiet will irrevocably set

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  Against His own, and this my prime revolt

  Yet stubborn, and confirmed eternally.

  And with the hatred born of fear, and fed

  Ever thereby, God hates me, and His gaze

  Sees the bright menace of mine eyes afar

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  Through midnight, and the innumerable blaze

  Of servile suns: lo, strong in tyranny,

  The despot trembles that I stand opposed!

  For fain am I to hush the anguished cries

  Of Substance, broken on the racks of change,

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  Of Matter tortured into life; and God,

  Knowing this, dreads evermore some huge mishap—

  That in the vigils of Omnipotence,

  Once careless, I shall enter heaven, or He,

  Himself, with weight of some unwonted act,

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  Thoughtless perturb His balanced tyranny,

  To mine advance of watchful aspiration.

  With rumored thunder and enormous groan

  (Burden of sound that heavens overborne

  Let slip from deep to deep, even to this

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  Where climb the huge cacophonies of Chaos)

  God’s universe moves on. Confirmed in pride,

  In patient majesty serene and strong,

  I wait the dreamt, inevitable hour

  Fulfilled of orbits ultimate, when God,

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  Whether through His mischance or mine own deed,

  Or rise of other and extremer Strength,

  Shall vanish, and the lightened universe

  No more remember Him than Silence does

  An ancient thunder. I know not if these,

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  Mine all-indomitable eyes, shall see

  A maimed and dwindled Godhead cast among

  The stars of His creating, and beneath

  The unnumbered rush of swift and shining feet

  Trodden into night; or mark the fiery breath

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  Of His infuriate suns blaze forth upon

  And scorch that coarsened Essence; or His flame,

  A mightier comet, roar and redden down,

  Portentous unto Chaos. I but wait,

  In strong majestic patience equable,

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  That hour of consummation and of doom,

  Of justice, and rebellion justified.

  THE GHOUL

  He seemed, in implicit deeper night

  Of cypress, and the glade of cedarn gloom,

  A shadow come from catacomb or tomb,

  The shade of midnight’s subterranean might

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  Upthrown to strengthen darkness, and affright,

  Light’s rear and remnant, and defer the doom

  Of phantoms—ere the haled dawn relume

  The woodland fanes of Hecatean5 rite.

  When half the conclave of the glooms was gone,

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  Gigantical I saw his form define,

  And sombre on the sun’s eternal ways;

  And fantoms languid in the night’s decline,

  Were, thinnest mist-ranks paling tow’rd the dawn,

  O’er the black tarns of his abhorrent gaze.

  DESIRE OF VASTNESS

  Supreme with night, what high mysteriarch—

  The undreamt-of god beyond the trinal noon

  Of elder suns empyreal—past the moon

  Circling some wild world outmost in the dark—

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  Lays on me this unfathomed wish to hark

  What central sea with plume-plucked midnight strewn,

  Plangent to what enormous plenilune

  That lifts in silence, hinderless and stark?

  The brazen empire of the bournless waste,

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  The unstayed dominions of the brazen sky—

  These I desire, and all things wide and deep;

  And, lifted past the level years, would taste

  The cup of an Olympian ecstasy,

  Titanic dream, and Cyclopean sleep.

  THE MEDUSA OF DESPAIR

  I may not mask for ever with the grace

  Of woven flowers thine eyes of staring stone:

  Ere the lithe adders and the garlands blown,

  Parting their tangle, have disclosed thy face

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  Lethal as are the pale young suns in space—

  Ere my life take the likeness of thine own—

  Get hence! the dark gods languish on their throne,

  And flameless grow the Furies they embrace.

  Regressive, through what realms of elder doom

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  Where even the swart vans of Time are stunned,

  Seek thou some tall Cimmerian6 citadel,

  And proud demonian capitals unsunned

  Whose ramparts, ominous with horrent gloom,

  Heave worldward on the unwaning light of hell.

  THE REFUGE OF BEAUTY

  From regions of the sun’s half-dreamt decay,

  All day the cruel rain strikes darkly down;

  And from the night thy fatal stars shall frown—

  Beauty, wilt thou abide this night and day?

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  Roofless, at portals dark and desperate,

  Wilt thou a shelter unrefused implore,

  And past the tomb’s too-hospitable door

  Evade thy lover in eluding Hate?

  Alas, for what have I to offer thee?—

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  Chill halls of mind, dank rooms of memory

  Where thou shalt dwell with woes and thoughts infirm;

  This rumor-throngèd citadel of Sense,

  Trembling before some nameless imminence;

  And fellow-guestship with the glutless Worm.

  THE HARLOT OF THE WORLD

  O Life, thou harlot who beguilest all!

  Beautiful in thy house, the golden world.

  Abidest thou, where Powers pinion-furled

  And flying Splendors follow to thy call.

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  Innumerous like the stars or like the dust,

  Nations and monarchs were thy thralls of yore:

  Unto the grave’s old womb forevermore

  Hast thou betrayed the passion and the lust.

  Fair as the moon of summer is thy face,

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  And mystical with cloudiness of hair. . . .

  Only an eye, subornless by delight,

  Shall find, within thy phosphorescent gaze,

  Those caverns of corruption and despair

  Where the Worm toileth in the charnel night.

  MEMNON AT MIDNIGHT


  Methought upon the tomb-encumbered shore

  I stood of Egypt’s lone monarchal stream,

  And saw immortal Memnon, throned supreme

  In gloom as of that Memphian night of yore:

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  Fold upon fold purpureal he wore,

  Beneath the star-borne canopy extreme—

  Carven of silence and colossal dream,

  Where waters flowed like sleep forevermore.

  Lo, in the darkness, thick with dust of years,

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  How many a ghostly god around his throne,

  With thronging wings that were forgotten Fames,

  Stood, ere the dawn restore to ancient ears

  The long-withholden thunder of their names,

  And music stilled to monumental stone.

  LOVE MALEVOLENT

  I fain would love thee, but thy lips are fed

  With poison-honey, hivèd in a skull;

  They seem like scarlet poppies, beautiful

  For delving roots, deep-clenchèd in the dead.

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  Thine eyes are coloured like the nightshade-flow’r. . . .

  Blent in the opiate perfume of thy breath

  Are dreams, and purple sleep, and scented death

  For him that is thy lover for an hour.

  Mandragora, within the graveyard grown,

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  Hath given thee its carnal root to eat,

  And vipers, born and nurstled in a tomb,

  From fawning mouths drip venom at thy feet;

  Yet from thy lethal lips and thine alone,

  Love would I drink, as dew from poison-bloom.

  THE CRUCIFIXION OF EROS

  Because of thee immortal Love hath died:

  Because thy wilful heart will not believe,

  Thy hands and mine a thorny crown must weave,

  And build a cross for Love the crucified.

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  Behold, how beautiful the limbs that bleed—

  The limbs that bleed, O stubborn heart, for us!

  Stilled are the lids so softly tremulous,

  And mute the mouth of our eternal need. . . .

  Though this thy fearful lips would now deny,

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  Love is divine and cannot wholly die:

  Draw forth the nails thy tender hands have driven,

  And we will know the mercy infinite,

  Will find redemption in our own delight,

  And in each other’s heart the only heaven.

  THE TEARS OF LILITH

  O lovely demon, half-divine!

  Hemlock and hydromel and gall,

  Honey and aconite and wine

  Mingle to make that mouth of thine—

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  Thy mouth I love: but most of all

  It is thy tears that I desire—

  Thy tears, like fountain-drops that fall

  In gardens red, Satanical;

  Or like the tears of mist and fire,

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  Wept by the moon, that wizards use

  To secret runes when they require

  Some silver philtre, sweet and dire.

  REQUIESCAT IN PACE

  M. L. M.

  White iris on thy bier,

  With the white rose, we strew,

  And lotus pale or blue

  As moonlight on the orient mountain-snows.

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  Slumber, as they that sleep

  In the slow sands unknown,

  Or under seas that zone

  With lulling foam the sealed, extremer lands.

  Slumber, with songless birds

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  That sang, and sang to death,

  Giving their gladder breath

  To lonely winds in one melodious pang.

  Sleep, with the golden queens

  Of planets long forgot,

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  Whose fire-soft lips are not

  Recalled by any sorcery of song.

  Sleep, with the flowers that were,

  And any leaf that fell

  On field or flowerless dell

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  In autumns lost of memory and grief.

  Pass, with the music flown

  From ivory lyre, and lute

  Of mellow string left mute

  In cities desolate ere the dream of Tyre.7

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  Pass, with the clouds that sank

  In sunset turned to grey

  On some Edenic day

  For which the exiled years have ever yearned.

  White iris on thy bier,

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  With the white rose, we strew,

  And lotus pale or blue

  As moonlight on the orient mountain-snows.

  THE MOTES

  I saw a universe today:

  Through a disclosing bar of light

  The motes were whirled in gleaming flight

  That briefly dawned and sank away.

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  Each had its swift and tiny noon;

  In orbit-streams I marked them flit,

  Successively revealed and lit.

  The sunlight paled and shifted soon.

  THE HASHISH-EATER; OR, THE APOCALYPSE OF EVIL

  Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;

  I crown me with the million-colored sun

  Of secret worlds incredible, and take

  Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,

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  Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume

  The spaceward-flown horizon infinite.

  Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut,

  The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise,

  By jealous moons maleficently urged

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  To follow me for ever; mountains horned

  With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed

  With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued,

  Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain;

  And continents of serpent-shapen trees,

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  With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league,

  Pursue my flight through ages spurned to fire

  By that supreme ascendance; sorcerers,

  And evil kings, predominantly armed

  With scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin whereon

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  Are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame,

  Would stay me; and the sirens of the stars,

  With foam-like songs from silver fragrance wrought,

  Would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons

  Where viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell,

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  With antic gnomes abominably wise,

  Heave up their icy horns across my way.

  But naught deters me from the goal ordained

  By suns and eons and immortal wars,

  And sung by moons and motes; the goal whose name

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  Is all the secret of forgotten glyphs

  By sinful gods in torrid rubies writ

  For ending of a brazen book; the goal

  Whereat my soaring ecstasy may stand

  In amplest heavens multiplied to hold

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  My hordes of thunder-vested avatars,

  And Promethèan armies of my thought,

  That brandish claspèd levins. There I call

  My memories, intolerably clad

  In light the peaks of paradise may wear,

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  And lead the Armageddon of my dreams

  Whose instant shout of triumph is become

  Immensity’s own music: for their feet

  Are founded on innumerable worlds,

  Remote in alien epochs, and their arms

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  Upraised, are columns potent to exalt

  With ease ineffable the countless thrones

  Of all the gods that are or gods to be,

  And bear the seats of Asmodai and Set8

  Above the seventh paradise.

  Supreme

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  In culminant omniscience manifold,

  And served by senses multitudinous,

  Far-posted on the shifting walls of time,

  With eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields

  Of utter night and chaos, I convoke

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  The Babel of their visions, and attend

  At once their myriad witness. I behold

  In Ombos,9 where the fallen Titans dwell,

  With mountain-builded walls, and gulfs for moat,

  The secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug

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  Beneath an alp-like buttress; and I list,

  Too late, the clang of adamantine gongs

  Dinned by their drowsy guardians, whose feet

  Have felt the wasp-like sting of little knives

  Embrued with slobber of the basilisk

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  Or the pale juice of wounded upas. In

  Some red Antarean10 garden-world, I see

  The sacred flower with lips of purple flesh,

  And silver-lashed, vermilion-lidded eyes

  Of torpid azure; whom his furtive priests

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  At moonless eve in terror seek to slay

  With bubbling grails of sacrificial blood

  That hide a hueless poison. And I read

  Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,

  The annulling word a spiteful demon wrote

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  In gall of slain chimeras; and I know

  What pentacles the lunar wizards use,

  That once allured the gulf-returning roc,

  With ten great wings of furlèd storm, to pause

  Midmost an alabaster mount; and there,

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  With boulder-weighted webs of dragons’ gut

  Uplift by cranes a captive giant built,

  They wound the monstrous, moonquake-throbbing bird,

  And plucked from off his saber-taloned feet

  Uranian sapphires fast in frozen blood,

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  And amethysts from Mars. I lean to read

  With slant-lipped mages, in an evil star,

  The monstrous archives of a war that ran

  Through wasted eons, and the prophecy

  Of wars renewed, which shall commemorate

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  Some enmity of wivern-headed kings

  Even to the brink of time. I know the blooms

  Of bluish fungus, freaked with mercury,

  That bloat within the craters of the moon,

  And in one still, selenic hour have shrunk

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  To pools of slime and fetor; and I know