The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (41 page)

Fallest thou from the heavens, or soarest from the abyss,

O Beauty? Thy regard infernal and divine

Pours out, in vast confusion, crime and benefice,

And therefore one might well compare thee unto wine.

The sunset and the dawn in thy deep eyes are holden;

Thou sheddest forth perfumes like a tempestuous eve;

Thy mouth, a philtred amphora, doth the child embolden,

And heroes fail in the web thy slow caresses weave.

Comest thou from the black profound, or stars above?

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;

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,

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?

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?

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;

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,

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.”

Like ghosts returning stealthily

From those grey lands

Palled with funereal ashes falling

After the burnt-out sunset,

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

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;

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,

May touch me and attain within the circle

Your arms have set about me.

Ye that see in darkness

When the moon is drowned

In the coiling fen-mist

Far along the ground—

Ye that see in darkness,

Say, what have ye found?

—We have seen strange atoms

Trysting on the air—

The dust of vanished lovers

Long parted in despair,

And dust of flowers that withered

In worlds of otherwhere.

We have seen the nightmares

Winging down the sky,

Bat-like and silent,

To where the sleepers lie;

We have seen the bosoms

Of the succubi.

We have seen the crystal

Of dead Medusa's tears.

We have watched the undines

That wane in stagnant weirs,

And mandrakes madly dancing

By black, blood-swollen meres.

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

Weighed down with evening's dew.

We have seen the darkness

Where charnel things decay,

Where atom moves with atom

In shining swift array,

Like ordered constellations

On some sidereal way.

We have seen fair colors

That dwell not in the light—

Intenser gold and iris

Occult and recondite;

We have seen the black suns

Pouring forth the night.

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,

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 Polaris
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graze.

We gather, upon those gulfward beaches rolled,

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.

I will repeat a subtle rune—

And thronging suns of Otherwhere

Shall blaze upon the blinded air,

And spectres terrible and fair

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

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

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,

Shall swell upon the waste abysm.

The pantheons of darkened stars

Shall file athwart the crocus dawn;

Goddess and Gorgon, Lar
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and faun,

Shall tread the amaranthine lawn,

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;

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

Before some latter conjurer.

Lover of hills and fields and towns antique,

How hast thou wandered hence

On ways not found before,

Beyond the dawnward spires of Providence?
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Hast thou gone forth to seek

Some older bourn than these—

Some Arkham
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of the prime and central wizardries?

Or, with familiar felidae,

Dost now some new and secret wood explore,

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 Key
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Opened perchance for thee

Wonders and dreams and worlds ulterior?

Hast thou gone home to Ulthar or to Pnath?
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Has the high king who reigns in dim Kadath
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Called back his courtly, sage ambassador?

Or darkling Cthulhu
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sent

The sign which makes thee now a councilor

Within that foundered fortress of the deep

Where the Old Ones
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stir in sleep

Till mighty temblors shake their slumbering continent?

Lo! in this little interim of days

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

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,

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;

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

To my remote abandonment

Your deep and lustrous hair has lent

How many an autumn-colored dream;

Your eyes bring many an April gleam

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

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,

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

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

And bud and blossom of your mouth.

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.

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,

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

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

Turns and is never done.

This is enchanted ground

Whereto the nymphs are bound;

Where the hoar oaks maintain,

While seasons mount or wane,

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;

And he and I and she,

Inseparate as of yore,

Are celebrants of some old mystery.

Under the warm blue skies

The flickering butterflies,

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.

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,

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.

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.

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

Beyond the world where Anteros
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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.

Where grape and laurel twine,

Once more we drink the Dionysian wine,

Ringed with the last horizon that is Greece.