The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (38 page)

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.

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

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,

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

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.
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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,

With the white rose, we strew,

And lotus pale or blue

As moonlight on the orient mountain-snows.

I saw a universe today:

Through a disclosing bar of light

The motes were whirled in gleaming flight

That briefly dawned and sank away.

Each had its swift and tiny noon;

In orbit-streams I marked them flit,

Successively revealed and lit.

The sunlight paled and shifted soon.

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,

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

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,

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

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,

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

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

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,

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

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 Set
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Above the seventh paradise.

Supreme

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

The Babel of their visions, and attend

At once their myriad witness. I behold

In Ombos,
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where the fallen Titans dwell,

With mountain-builded walls, and gulfs for moat,

The secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug

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

Or the pale juice of wounded upas. In

Some red Antarean
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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

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

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,

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,

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

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

To pools of slime and fetor; and I know

What clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown,

Are proffered to their gods in Uranus

By mole-eyed peoples; and the livid seed

Of some black fruit a king in Saturn ate,

Which, cast upon his tinkling palace-floor,

Took root between the burnished flags, and now

Hath mounted and become a hellish tree,

Whose lithe and hairy branches, lined with mouths,

Net like a hundred ropes his lurching throne,

And strain at starting pillars. I behold

The slowly-thronging corals that usurp

Some harbor of a million-masted sea,

And sun them on the league-long wharves of gold—

Bulks of enormous crimson, kraken-limbed

And kraken-headed, lifting up as crowns

The octiremes of perished emperors,

And galleys fraught with royal gems, that sailed

From a sea-fled haven.

Swifter and stranger grow

The visions: now a mighty city looms,

Hewn from a hill of purest cinnabar

To domes and turrets like a sunrise thronged

With tier on tier of captive moons, half-drowned

In shifting erubescence. But whose hands

Were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought

To semblance of prodigious blooms of old,

No eremite hath lingered there to say,

And no man comes to learn: for long ago

A prophet came, warning its timid king

Against the plague of lichens that had crept

Across subverted empires, and the sand

Of wastes that cyclopean mountains ward;

Which, slow and ineluctable, would come

To take his fiery bastions and his fanes,

And quench his domes with greenish tetter. Now

I see a host of naked giants, armed

With horns of behemoth and unicorn,

Who wander, blinded by the clinging spells

Of hostile wizardry, and stagger on

To forests where the very leaves have eyes,

And ebonies like wrathful dragons roar

To teaks a-chuckle in the loathly gloom;

Where coiled lianas lean, with serried fangs,

From writhing palms with swollen boles that moan;

Where leeches of a scarlet moss have sucked

The eyes of some dead monster, and have crawled

To bask upon his azure-spotted spine;

Where hydra-throated blossoms hiss and sing,

Or yawn with mouths that drip a sluggish dew

Whose touch is death and slow corrosion. Then

I watch a war of pygmies, met by night,

With pitter of their drums of parrot's hide,

On plains with no horizon, where a god

Might lose his way for centuries; and there,

In wreathèd light and fulgors all convolved,

A rout of green, enormous moons ascend,

With rays that like a shivering venom run

On inch-long swords of lizard-fang.

Surveyed

From this my throne, as from a central sun,

The pageantries of worlds and cycles pass;

Forgotten splendors, dream by dream, unfold

Like tapestry, and vanish; violet suns,

Or suns of changeful iridescence, bring

Their rays about me like the colored lights

Imploring priests might lift to glorify

The face of some averted god; the songs

Of mystic poets in a purple world

Ascend to me in music that is made

From unconceivèd perfumes and the pulse

Of love ineffable; the lute-players

Whose lutes are strung with gold of the utmost moon,

Call forth delicious languors, never known

Save to their golden kings; the sorcerers

Of hooded stars inscrutable to God,

Surrender me their demon-wrested scrolls,

Inscribed with lore of monstrous alchemies

And awful transformations.

If I will,

I am at once the vision and the seer,

And mingle with my ever-streaming pomps,

And still abide their suzerain: I am

The neophyte who serves a nameless god,

Within whose fane the fanes of Hecatompylos
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Were arks the Titan worshippers might bear,

Or flags to pave the threshold; or I am

The god himself, who calls the fleeing clouds

Into the nave where suns might congregate

And veils the darkling mountain of his face

With fold on solemn fold; for whom the priests

Amass their monthly hecatomb of gems—

Opals that are a camel-cumbering load,

And monstrous alabraundines, won from war

With realms of hostile serpents; which arise,

Combustible, in vapors many-hued

And myrrh-excelling perfumes. It is I,

The king, who holds with scepter-dropping hand

The helm of some great barge of orichalchum,

Sailing upon an amethystine sea

To isles of timeless summer: for the snows

Of hyperborean winter, and their winds,

Sleep in his jewel-builded capital,

Nor any charm of flame-wrought wizardry,

Nor conjured suns may rout them; so he flees,

With captive kings to urge his serried oars,

Hopeful of dales where amaranthine dawn

Hath never left the faintly sighing lote

And lisping moly. Firm of heart, I fare

Impanoplied with azure diamond,

As hero of a quest Achernar
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lights,

To deserts filled with ever-wandering flames

That feed upon the sullen marl, and soar

To wrap the slopes of mountains, and to leap

With tongues intolerably lengthening

That lick the blenchèd heavens. But there lives

(Secure as in a garden walled from wind)

A lonely flower by a placid well,

Midmost the flaring tumult of the flames,

That roar as roars a storm-possessèd sea,

Implacable for ever; and within

That simple grail the blossom lifts, there lies

One drop of an incomparable dew

Which heals the parchèd weariness of kings,

And cures the wound of wisdom. I am page

To an emperor who reigns ten thousand years,

And through his labyrinthine palace-rooms,

Through courts and colonnades and balconies

Wherein immensity itself is mazed,

I seek the golden gorget he hath lost,

On which, in sapphires fine as orris-seed,

Are writ the names of his conniving stars

And friendly planets. Roaming thus, I hear

Like demon tears incessant, through dark ages,

The drip of sullen clepsydrae; and once

In every lustrum, hear the brazen clocks

Innumerably clang with such a sound

As brazen hammers make, by devils dinned

On tombs of all the dead; and nevermore

I find the gorget, but at length I find

A sealèd room whose nameless prisoner

Moans with a nameless torture, and would turn

To hell's red rack as to a lilied couch

From that whereon they stretched him; and I find,

Prostrate upon a lotus-painted floor,

The loveliest of all belovèd slaves

My emperor hath, and from her pulseless side

A serpent rises, whiter than the root

Of some venefic bloom in darkness grown,

And gazes up with green-lit eyes that seem

Like drops of cold, congealing poison.

Hark!

What word was whispered in a tongue unknown,

In crypts of some impenetrable world?

Whose is the dark, dethroning secrecy

I cannot share, though I am king of suns,