STARLIT silences!
Breeding fears, swarming with sudden deaths,
With separations, burdens, and despairs,
Weaving slow eerie fancies in my brain . . .
Forlorn shorn monks go down the cloisters of quietness
With tortured crucifixes cut in ivory
Clasped in their praying hands,
And psalmed with lips renunciate of kisses . . .
Forgotten days are painted on the night
In parables and symbols of remorse
That jeer from out the wind-stirred tapestries.
The hangman's rope coils upward like a snake
Out of the death-coloured waters,
While the black barges pass
Funereal,
Carrying doom from mist to mist. . . .
And madmen steal about the wintry parks
Under the high glum walls of an asylum,
With eyes lit up in phosphorescent ecstasies,
With fumbling hands.
That grope for things invisibly obscene.
Even the clock
Grown idiot too from keeping madmen's time
Gibbers the hours away in irrelevant chimes. . . .
Silence embalms the dead with scented bands
And is the watchman to deserted houses,
And draws the violet curtain on the day,
And fits a mask of silver to the moon.
Silence brings corpses from the crypts of memory
And sits them round us in the empty chairs,
Opens the secret chambers of our hopes
And shows us there in awful pantomime
Lust wreathing love with poppies and with ashes,
And Beauty dressing Sin for carnival,
And Peace made drunken with a cup of blood.
It winds as ivy round our listening thoughts
Shutting all sounds away, enclosing us
Within its stifled virid twilight. . . .
Breeding fears, swarming with sudden deaths,
With separations, burdens, and despairs,
Weaving slow eerie fancies in my brain . . .
Forlorn shorn monks go down the cloisters of quietness
With tortured crucifixes cut in ivory
Clasped in their praying hands,
And psalmed with lips renunciate of kisses . . .
Forgotten days are painted on the night
In parables and symbols of remorse
That jeer from out the wind-stirred tapestries.
The hangman's rope coils upward like a snake
Out of the death-coloured waters,
While the black barges pass
Funereal,
Carrying doom from mist to mist. . . .
And madmen steal about the wintry parks
Under the high glum walls of an asylum,
With eyes lit up in phosphorescent ecstasies,
With fumbling hands.
That grope for things invisibly obscene.
Even the clock
Grown idiot too from keeping madmen's time
Gibbers the hours away in irrelevant chimes. . . .
Silence embalms the dead with scented bands
And is the watchman to deserted houses,
And draws the violet curtain on the day,
And fits a mask of silver to the moon.
Silence brings corpses from the crypts of memory
And sits them round us in the empty chairs,
Opens the secret chambers of our hopes
And shows us there in awful pantomime
Lust wreathing love with poppies and with ashes,
And Beauty dressing Sin for carnival,
And Peace made drunken with a cup of blood.
It winds as ivy round our listening thoughts
Shutting all sounds away, enclosing us
Within its stifled virid twilight. . . .
Cry out, sing, make noises,
Bacchantes, revellers, clowns!
Bring myriad lamps in clusters, likening grapes
That spill the wine of light into our gloom;
Pressing against our lips
The red grape-kisses of pleasure.
Bring the hounds,
The garlanded white ones,
To bay and snarl and tear the flying rags
Of stillness shadowing away!
Lean over me, O Life,
And whisper all thy lying flatteries
That drag me back from Silence and her dead.
I have kept vigil on my soul too long
Within this vast cathedral of dim sleep,
Languidly gathering
The cold grey lilies of the stars
To slip between her passive waxen hands. . . .
Bacchantes, revellers, clowns!
Bring myriad lamps in clusters, likening grapes
That spill the wine of light into our gloom;
Pressing against our lips
The red grape-kisses of pleasure.
Bring the hounds,
The garlanded white ones,
To bay and snarl and tear the flying rags
Of stillness shadowing away!
Lean over me, O Life,
And whisper all thy lying flatteries
That drag me back from Silence and her dead.
I have kept vigil on my soul too long
Within this vast cathedral of dim sleep,
Languidly gathering
The cold grey lilies of the stars
To slip between her passive waxen hands. . . .
1918