The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (36 page)

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

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.

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,

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

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

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,

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

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,

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

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,

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

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

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.

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

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.

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,

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

The day was full on altars hot.

I heard—enisled in those melodic seas—

The central music of the Pleiades,
1

And to Alcyone
2
my soul

Swayed with the stars that own her song's control.

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

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 Antares
3
blind!

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

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

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

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—

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

Where Rigel
4
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

Wrought by the shuttles intricate of earth.

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

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,

This inescapable alternity?

Must beauty blossom, rooted in decay,

And night devour its flaming hues alway?

Sickening, will Life not turn eventually,

Or ravenous Death at last be satisfied?

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—

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

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

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

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

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

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;

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

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

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.

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,

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,

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

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—

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,

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

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

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,

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

Like careless pebbles, or, with shattered suns,

Brightening the aspect of Eternity.

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

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

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.

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

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,

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.