The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (37 page)

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,

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

Across the movement and the 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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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,

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

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

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

Prepare His coming: lo, His mighty whim

To rear and mar, goes forth enormously

In nights and constellations! Darkness hears

Enragèd suns that bellow down the deep

God's ravenous and insatiable will;

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

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

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,

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

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

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,

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,

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

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,

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,

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

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,

That hour of consummation and of doom,

Of justice, and rebellion justified.

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

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 Hecatean
5
rite.

When half the conclave of the glooms was gone,

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.

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—

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,

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.

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

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

Where even the swart vans of Time are stunned,

Seek thou some tall Cimmerian
6
citadel,

And proud demonian capitals unsunned

Whose ramparts, ominous with horrent gloom,

Heave worldward on the unwaning light of hell.

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?

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?—

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.

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.

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,

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.

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:

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,

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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,

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.

O lovely demon, half-divine!

Hemlock and hydromel and gall,

Honey and aconite and wine

Mingle to make that mouth of thine—

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,

Wept by the moon, that wizards use

To secret runes when they require

Some silver philtre, sweet and dire.