The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies Read online

  And heroes fail in the web thy slow caresses weave.

  Comest thou from the black profound, or stars above?

  10

  Destiny, like a dog, follows thy scented gown;

  Sowing, all chancefully, disaster, joy and love,

  Thou art the imperatrix of all, the slave of none.

  Thou tramplest on the dead with mockeries eternal;

  Horror is half thy jewel-laden rosary;

  15

  And Murder is a precious amulet infernal

  That on thy bosom burns and trembles amorously.

  The ephemera flies to hail thee, candle of all our night,

  And flaming dies, in adoration of its doom;

  The lover leans toward the breast of his delight,

  20

  Even as a dying man, fain to caress his tomb.

  Be thou from hell or heaven, say, what matters it,

  O Beauty! fearful sphinx ingenuous, if alone

  Thine eye, thy foot, thy smile, unbar the infinite

  Which I have always loved and never yet have known?

  25

  Angel or sorceress, from God or Lucifer,

  What matter—O my fay with velvet eyes—if thus

  Thou renderest, by rhythm, gleam and flying myrrh,

  The world less execrable and time less burdenous?

  THE REMORSE OF THE DEAD

  My sable love, when you at last are lain

  Unsought upon the lone sepulchral bed,

  And darkly keep your brothel with the dead,—

  Your roomless vault that weeps with fetid rain;

  5

  Yea, when the ponderous carven shaft unshaken

  Is the one weight your passionate nipples know,

  And grinds you down and will not let you go

  To find again your faithless lechers, taken

  By fairer trulls—then, then, O harlot love,

  10

  The grave, which has my very voice, will sigh

  All night about your sleep-derided corse,

  Whispering ever: “In the days above,

  You dreamt not how the unslumbering wantons lie,

  Gnawed by the worms which are the last remorse.”

  EXORCISM

  Like ghosts returning stealthily

  From those grey lands

  Palled with funereal ashes falling

  After the burnt-out sunset,

  5

  The mists of the valley reach with wavering, slow,

  Malignant arms from pine to pine, and climb the hill

  As fatal memories climb

  To assail some heart benighted and bewitched. . . .

  And once they would have crept

  10

  Around me in resistless long beleaguerment,

  To lay their death-bleak fingers on my heart:

  But now

  My memories are of you and of the many graces

  And tender, immortal, mad beatitudes of love;

  15

  And every chill and death-born phantom,

  Made harmless now and dim,

  Must pass to haunt the inane, unpassioned air;

  And only living ghosts

  Of raptures gone or ecstasies to be,

  20

  May touch me and attain within the circle

  Your arms have set about me.

  NYCTALOPS

  Ye that see in darkness

  When the moon is drowned

  In the coiling fen-mist

  Far along the ground—

  5

  Ye that see in darkness,

  Say, what have ye found?

  —We have seen strange atoms

  Trysting on the air—

  The dust of vanished lovers

  10

  Long parted in despair,

  And dust of flowers that withered

  In worlds of otherwhere.

  We have seen the nightmares

  Winging down the sky,

  15

  Bat-like and silent,

  To where the sleepers lie;

  We have seen the bosoms

  Of the succubi.

  We have seen the crystal

  20

  Of dead Medusa’s tears.

  We have watched the undines

  That wane in stagnant weirs,

  And mandrakes madly dancing

  By black, blood-swollen meres.

  25

  We have seen the satyrs

  Their ancient loves renew

  With moon-white nymphs of cypress,

  Pale dryads of the yew,

  In the tall grass of graveyards

  30

  Weighed down with evening’s dew.

  We have seen the darkness

  Where charnel things decay,

  Where atom moves with atom

  In shining swift array,

  35

  Like ordered constellations

  On some sidereal way.

  We have seen fair colors

  That dwell not in the light—

  Intenser gold and iris

  40

  Occult and recondite;

  We have seen the black suns

  Pouring forth the night.

  OUTLANDERS

  By desert-deepened wells and chasmed ways,

  And noon-high passes of the crumbling nome

  Where the fell sphinx and martichoras roam;

  Over black mountains lit by meteor-blaze,

  5

  Through darkness ending not in solar days,

  Beauty, the centauress, has brought us home

  To shores where chaos climbs in starry foam,

  And the white horses of Polaris24 graze.

  We gather, upon those gulfward beaches rolled,

  10

  Driftage of worlds not shown by any chart;

  And pluck the fabled moly from wild scaurs:

  Though these are scorned by human wharf and mart—

  And scorned alike the red, primeval gold

  For which we fight the griffins in strange wars.

  SONG OF THE NECROMANCER

  I will repeat a subtle rune—

  And thronging suns of Otherwhere

  Shall blaze upon the blinded air,

  And spectres terrible and fair

  5

  Shall walk the riven world at noon.

  The star that was mine empery

  Is dust upon unwinnowed skies:

  But primal dreams have made me wise,

  And soon the shattered years shall rise

  10

  To my remembered sorcery.

  To mantic mutterings, brief and low,

  My palaces shall lift amain,

  My bowers bloom; I will regain

  The lips whereon my lips have lain

  15

  In rose-red twilights long ago.

  Before my murmured exorcism

  The world, a wispy wraith, shall flee:

  A stranger earth, a weirder sea,

  Peopled with shapes of Faëry,

  20

  Shall swell upon the waste abysm.

  The pantheons of darkened stars

  Shall file athwart the crocus dawn;

  Goddess and Gorgon, Lar25 and faun,

  Shall tread the amaranthine lawn,

  25

  And giants fight their thunderous wars.

  Like graven mountains of basalt,

  Dark idols of my demons there

  Shall tower through bright zones of air,

  Fronting the sun with level stare;

  30

  And hell shall pave my deepest vault.

  Phantom and fiend and sorcerer

  Shall serve me . . . till my term shall pass,

  And I become no more, alas,

  Than a frail shadow on the glass

  35

  Before some latter conjurer.

  TO HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT

  Lover of hills and fields and towns antique,

&nbs
p; How hast thou wandered hence

  On ways not found before,

  Beyond the dawnward spires of Providence?26

  5

  Hast thou gone forth to seek

  Some older bourn than these—

  Some Arkham27 of the prime and central wizardries?

  Or, with familiar felidae,

  Dost now some new and secret wood explore,

  10

  A little past the senses’ farther wall—

  Where spring and sunset charm the eternal path

  From Earth to ether in dimensions nemoral?

  Or has the Silver Key28

  Opened perchance for thee

  15

  Wonders and dreams and worlds ulterior?

  Hast thou gone home to Ulthar or to Pnath?29

  Has the high king who reigns in dim Kadath30

  Called back his courtly, sage ambassador?

  Or darkling Cthulhu31 sent

  20

  The sign which makes thee now a councilor

  Within that foundered fortress of the deep

  Where the Old Ones32 stir in sleep

  Till mighty temblors shake their slumbering continent?

  Lo! in this little interim of days

  25

  How far thy feet are sped

  Upon the fabulous and mooted ways

  Where walk the mythic dead!

  For us the grief, for us the mystery. . . .

  And yet thou art not gone

  30

  Nor given wholly unto dream and dust:

  For, even upon

  This lonely western hill of Averoigne

  Thy flesh had never visited,

  I meet some wise and sentient wraith of thee,

  35

  Some undeparting presence, gracious and august.

  More luminous for thee the vernal grass,

  More magically dark the Druid stone,

  And in the mind thou art forever shown

  As in a magic glass;

  40

  And from the spirit’s page thy runes can never pass.

  MADRIGAL OF MEMORY

  To my remote abandonment

  Your deep and lustrous hair has lent

  How many an autumn-colored dream;

  Your eyes bring many an April gleam

  5

  To this my place of uncontent.

  Like torchy fires your footsteps leap

  Where covens of lost dreamers keep

  Their sabbat and their bacchanal;

  Your breasts are moons that mount and fall

  10

  Through the dim, turbulent climes of sleep.

  Among the rondured hills that merge

  Into the prone horizon-verge,

  My haunted eyes have seen, have felt,

  Your mobile hips at twilight melt,

  15

  Your supple bosom lift and surge.

  In dryad ways not understood

  You stir and whisper through the wood.

  Far off the throbbing waters flow

  Against a sanguine afterglow

  20

  Like the sweet pulses of your blood.

  At morning, from the cloudy south,

  Your tresses sweep athwart my drouth.

  Night bears amid its magic bower

  Your body’s many-scented flower

  25

  And bud and blossom of your mouth.

  THE OLD WATER-WHEEL

  Often, on homeward ways, I come

  To a deserted orchard, old and lone,

  Unplowed, untrod, with wilding grasses grown

  Through rows of pear and plum.

  5

  There, in a never-ceasing round,

  In the slow stream, by noon, by night, by dawn,

  An ancient, hidden water-wheel turns on

  With a sad, reiterant sound.

  Most eerily it comes and dies,

  10

  And comes again, when on the horizon’s breast

  The ruby of Antares seems to rest,

  Fallen from star-fraught skies:

  A dolent, drear, complaining note

  Whose all-monotonous cadence haunts the air

  15

  Like the recurrent moan of a despair

  Some heart has learned by rote;

  Heavy, and ill to hear, for one

  Within whose breast, today, tonight, tomorrow,

  Like the slow wheel, an ancient, darkling sorrow

  20

  Turns and is never done.

  THE HILL OF DIONYSUS

  This is enchanted ground

  Whereto the nymphs are bound;

  Where the hoar oaks maintain,

  While seasons mount or wane,

  5

  Their ghostly satyrs, dim and undispelled.

  It is a place fulfilled and circled round

  With fabled years and presences of Eld.

  These things have been before,

  And these are things forevermore to be;

  10

  And he and I and she,

  Inseparate as of yore,

  Are celebrants of some old mystery.

  Under the warm blue skies

  The flickering butterflies,

  15

  Dancing with their frail shadows, poise and pass.

  Now, with the earth for board,

  The bread is eaten and the wine is poured;

  While she, the twice-adored,

  Between us lies on the pale autumn grass.

  20

  Thus has she lain before,

  And thus we two have watched her reverently;

  More beautiful, and more

  Mysterious for her body’s nudity.

  Full-burdened with the culminating year,

  25

  The heavens and earth are mute;

  Till on a fitful wind we seem to hear

  Some fainting murmur of a broken flute.

  Adown the hillside steep and sere

  The laurels bear their ancient leaves and fruit.

  30

  These things have happened even thus of yore,

  These things are part of all futurity;

  And she and I and he,

  Returning as before,

  Participate in some unfinished mystery.

  35

  Her hair, between my shoulder and the sun,

  Is turned to iridescent fire and gold:

  A witch’s web, whereon

  Wild memories are spun,

  And magical delight and sleep unfold

  40

  Beyond the world where Anteros33 is lord.

  It is the hour of mystical accord,

  Of respite, and release

  From all that hampers us, from all that frets,

  And from the vanity of all regrets.

  45

  Where grape and laurel twine,

  Once more we drink the Dionysian wine,

  Ringed with the last horizon that is Greece.

  IF WINTER REMAIN

  Hateful, and most abhorred,

  about us the season

  of sleet, of snow and of frost

  reaches, and seems unending

  5

  as plains whereon

  lashed prisoners go,

  chained, and enforced

  to labor in glacial mines,

  digging the baubles of greybeard kings,

  10

  of bleak Polarian34 lords.

  Benumbed and failing,

  we languish for shores Canopic35

  that foulder to vaults of fire,

  for streams of ensanguined lotus

  15

  drinking the candent flame

  with lips unsered, unsated,

  for valleys wherein no shadow,

  whether of cassia or cypress,

  shall harbor the ghost of ice,

  20

  the winter’s etiolate phantom.

  Benumbed and failing,

  we languish for shores Ca
nopic

  that foulder to vaults of fire.

  Fain would we hail the summer,

  25

  like slaves endungeoned

  beneath some floe-built fortress,

  greeting their liberator,

  the hero in golden mail. . . .

  But . . . if summer should come no more,

  30

  and winter remain

  a stark colossus

  bestriding the years?

  If, silent and pale,

  with marmorean armor,

  35

  the empire of cold

  should clasp the world

  to its rimed equator

  beneath the low,

  short arc of the sun,

  40

  out-ringed by the far-flung

  orbit of death?

  AMITHAINE

  Who has seen the towers of Amithaine

  Swan-throated rising from the main

  Whose tides to some remoter moon

  Flow in a fadeless afternoon? . . .

  5

  Who has seen the towers of Amithaine

  Shall sleep, and dream of them again.

  On falcon banners never furled,

  Beyond the marches of the world,

  They blazon forth the heraldries

  10

  Of dream-established sovereignties

  Whose princes wage immortal wars

  For beauty with the bale-red stars.

  Amid the courts of Amithaine

  The broken iris rears again

  15

  Restored from gardens youth has known;

  And strains from ruinous viols flown

  The legends tell in Amithaine

  Of her that is its chatelaine.

  Dreamer, beware! in her wild eyes

  20

  Full many a sunken sunset lies,

  And gazing, you shall find perchance

  The fallen kingdoms of romance,

  And past the bourns of north and south

  Follow the roses of her mouth.

  25

  The trumpets blare in Amithaine

  For paladins that once again

  Ride forth to ghostly, glamorous wars

  Against the doom-preparing stars.

  Dreamer, awake! . . . but I remain

  30

  To ride with them in Amithaine.

  CYCLES

  The sorcerer departs . . . and his high tower is drowned

  Slowly by low flat communal seas that level all . . .

  While crowding centuries retreat, return and fall

  Into the cyclic gulf that girds the cosmos round,

  5

  Widening, deepening ever outward without bound . . .

  Till the oft-rerisen bells from young Atlantis call;

  And again the wizard-mortised tower upbuilds its wall

  Above a re-beginning cycle, turret-crowned.