Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently --
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free --
Up domes -- up spires -- up kingly halls --
Up fanes -- up Babylon-like walls --
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers --
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.
There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye --
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass --
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea --
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.
But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave -- there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide --
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow --
The hours are breathing faint and low --
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.
Donald Justice
In Bertram's Garden
Jane looks down at her organdy skirt
As if it somehow were the thing disgraced,
For being there, on the floor, in the dirt,
And she catches it up about her waist,
Smooths it out along one hip,
And pulls it over the crumpled slip.
On the porch, green-shuttered, cool,
Asleep is Bertram, that bronze boy,
Who, having wound her around a spool,
Sends her spinning like a toy
Out to the garden, all alone,
To sit and weep on a bench of stone.
Soon the purple dark must bruise
Lily and bleeding-heart and rose,
And the little Cupid lose
Eyes and ears and chin and nose,
And Jane lie down with others soon,
Naked to the naked moon.
What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over-there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbor where
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up.
And gradually light returns to the street,
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbor . . . I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.
John Heath-Stubbs
The Unpredicted
The goddess Fortune be praised (on her toothed wheel
I have been mincemeat these several years)
Last night, for a whole night, the unpredictable
Lay in my arms, in a tender and unquiet rest --
(I perceived the irrelevance of my former tears) --
Lay, and at dawn departed. I rose and walked the streets
Where a whitsuntide wind blew fresh, and blackbirds
Incontestably sang, and the people were beautiful.
John Greenleaf Whittier
Brown of Ossawatomie
John Brown of Osawatomie spake on his dying day:
'I will not have to shrive my soul a priest in Slavery's pay;
But let some poor slave-mother whom I have striven to free,
With her children, from the gallows-stair put up a prayer for me!'
John Brown of Ossawatomie, they led him out to die;
And lo! a poor slave-mother with her little child pressed nigh:
Then the bold, blue eye grew tender, and the old harsh face grew mild,
As he stooped between the jeering ranks and kissed the negro's child!
The shadows of his stormy life that moment fell apart,
And they who blamed the bloody hand forgave the loving heart;
That kiss from all its guilty means redeemed the good intent,
And round the grisly fighter's hair the martyr's aureole bent!
Perish with him the folly that seeks through evil good!
Long live the generous purpose unstained with human blood!
Not the raid of midnight terror, but the thought which underlies;
Not the borderer's pride of daring, but the Christian's sacrifice.
Nevermore may yon Blue Ridges the Northern rifle hear,
Nor see the light of blazing homes flash on the negro's spear;
But let the free-winged angel Truth their guarded passes scale,
To teach that right is more than might, and justice more than mail!
So vainly shall Virginia set her battle in array;
In vain her trampling squadrons knead the winter snow with clay!
She may strike the pouncing eagle, but she dares not harm the dove;
And every gate she bars to Hate shall open wide to Love!
Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made out of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it - our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -
Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.
Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowzy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.
Robinson Jeffers
Salmon-Fishing
The days shorten, the south blows wide for showers now,
The south wind shouts to the rivers,
The rivers open their mouths and the salt salmon
Race up into the freshet.
In Christmas month against the smoulder and menace
Of a long angry sundown
Red ash of the dark solstice, you see the anglers
Pitiful, cruel, primeval,
Like the priests of the people that built Stonehenge,
Dark silent forms, performing
Remote solemnities in the red shallows
Of the river's mouth at the year's turn,
Drawing landward their live bullion, the bloody mouths
And scales full of the sunset
Twitch on the rocks, no more to wander at will
The wild Pacific pasture nor wanton and spawning
Race up into fresh water.
My well-beloved was stripped. Knowing my whim,
She wore her tinkling gems, but naught besides:
And showed such pride as, while her luck betides,
A sultan's favoured slave may show to him.
When it lets off its lively, crackling sound,
This blazing blend of metal crossed with stone,
Gives me an ecstasy I've only known
Where league of sound and lustre can be found.
She let herself be loved: then, drowsy-eyed,
Smiled down from her high couch in languid ease.
My love was deep and gentle as the seas
And rose to her as to a cliff the tide.
My own approval of each dreamy pose,
Like a tamed tiger, cunningly she sighted:
And candour, with lubricity united,
Gave piquancy to every one she chose.
Her limbs and hips, burnished with changing lustres,
Before my eyes clairvoyant and serene,
Swanned themselves, undulating in their sheen;
Her breasts and belly, of my vine the clusters,
Like evil angels rose, my fancy twitting,
To kill the peace which over me she'd thrown,
And to disturb her from the crystal throne
Where, calm and solitary, she was sitting.
So swerved her pelvis that, in one design,
Antiope's white rump it seemed to graft
To a boy's torso, merging fore and aft.
The talc on her brown tan seemed half-divine.
The lamp resigned its dying flame. Within,
The hearth alone lit up the darkened air,
And every time it sighed a crimson flare
It drowned in blood that amber-coloured skin.
Chu Shu-chen (ca. 1200)
Stormy Night in Autumn
Like a flight of arrows the wind
Pierces my curtain. The cold rain
Roars like the drum of the nightwatch.
My breasts are freezing. Huddled
In my folded quilt, I cannot sleep.
My tears flow without stopping.
The bamboos outside my window
Sob like the broken heart of Autumn.
Rain beats on the painted tiles.
This night will never end. Freezing,
Alone in the dark, I am
Going mad, counting my sorrows.
My heart pounds as if it would break.
Inside my body, thin as a
Stem of bamboo, my bowels
Twist and knot. How will I ever
Escape from this torture? Outside
My window now I hear the rain
Rattle on the banana trees.
Each beaten leaf contains
Ten thousand pains.
Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.
O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.
Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low
As long ago, my love, how long ago.
My life closed twice before its close--
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
Wilfrid Blunt
Farewell to Juliet
I see you, Juliet, still, with your straw hat
Loaded with vines, and with your dear pale face,
On which those thirty years so lightly sat,
And the white outline of your muslin dress.
You wore a little fichu trimmed with lace
And crossed in front, as was the fashion then,
Bound at your waist with a broad band or sash,
All white and fresh and virginally plain.
There was a sound of shouting far away
Down in the valley, as they called to us,
And you, with hands clasped seeming still to pray
Patience of fate, stood listening to me thus
With heaving bosom. There a rose lay curled.
It was the reddest rose in all the world.
Betti Alver (of Estonia)
A Tailor Called Sorrow
Yesterday in drizzling rain
on the road,
depression came
with its scissors open.
He put unhappy shirts
around the necks
of children,
and stitched black markings
on the lives of others.
Around the red faces
the tailor called sorrow
let a cloth with death silk
in it
hang,
and mingled white basting thread
in their hair.
Mina Loy
Letters of the Unliving
The present implies presence
thus
unauthorized by the present
these letters are left authorless --
have lost all origin
since the inscribing hand
lost life.
The harshness of the past
croaks,
from creased leaves
covered with unwritten writing
since death's erasure
of the writer --
erased the lover
Well-chosen and so ill-relinquished
the husband heartsease --
acme of communion --
made euphonious
our esoteric universe.
Ego's oasis now's
the sole companion.
My body and my reason
you left to the drought of your dying:
the longing and the lack
of a racked creature
shouting
to an unanswering hiatus
'reunite us!'
till slyly
patience creeps up on passion
and the elation of youth
dwindles out of season.
Agony
ends in an equal grave
with ecstasy.
An uneasy mist
rises from this calligraphy of recollection
documenting a terror of dementia.
This package of ago
creaks with the horror of echo.
The bloom of love
decoyed
to decay by the finger
of Hazard the swindler --
deathly handler who leaves
no post-mortem mask
but a callous earth.
Posing the extreme enigma
in my Bewilderness
can your face excelling Adonis
have ceased to be
or ever have had existence?
With you no longer the addresser
there is no addressee
to dally with defunct reality.
Can one who still has being
be inexistent?
I am become
dumb
in answer
to your dead language of amor.
Diminuendo
of life's imposture
implies no possible retrial
by my present self --
my cloud-corpse
beshadowing your shroud.
The one I was with you:
inhumed in chasms.
No creator
reconstrues scar-tissue
to shine as birth-star.
But to my sub-cerebral surprise
at last on blase sorrow
dawns an iota of disgust
for life's intemperance:
'As once you were'
Withhold your ghostly reference
to the sweet once were we.
Leave me
my final illiteracy
of memory's languor --
my preference
to drift in lenient coma
an older Ophelia
on Lethe.
You hide in the ostrich egg
behind the Coptic parchment
among the rows of books
in your mother's closed mouth
in the portrait hanging in the living room
in the Etruscan urn in the hall
that will never hold your ashes.
You live in my mind when I work
think, sleep
inhabit my eyes
when I cry,
laugh, speak or am silent.
You're in my blood which circulates badly
you often make your presence felt
with a sharp pain in the liver
a headache
gut-ache
until you rise rise
toward my stomach
stopping at the height
of my throat,
I can't digest your presence
your absence makes me ill.
I vomit, hoping to feel better
from the stimulus of birth
an emptiness is born
that never sleeps at night
wakes every morning.
Don't think about it everyone says:
I keep quiet lower my eyes
death winks at me.
Marilyn Hacker
Bloomingdale's I
'If I weren't working, I'd sleep next to you
an hour or two more. Then we'd get the car
and drive a while, out of Manhattan, to
a quiet Bloomingdale's in Westchester.
If we saw anything we liked, we'd buy it!
We'd try things on, first, in one cubicle.
You'd need to make an effort to be quiet
when I knelt down and got my fingers full
of you, my mouth on you, against the wall.
You'd pull my hair. You'd have to bite your tongue.
I'd hold your ass so that you wouldn't fall.
Later, we'd take a peaceful walk along
the aisles, letting our hands touch every chance
they got, among the bras and underpants.'
It's almost as if we're already there,
in the narrow stone house, me upstairs
writing at the splintery pine table,
you in the downstairs study, with its cradle
of a marriage bed, slit window looking
into the Buniols' herb garden. I'm cooking
a sonnet sequence and a cassoulet
with goose from Carcassonne, let mijoter
on the burner till nightfall. The vow
of silence breaks at seven. It's noon now.
Pleasure delayed is pleasure amplified
-- I'll show you these bitch Welsh quatrains I've tried.
It's your turn to work outdoors in the sun
on the roof -- your footsteps, and the last line's done.
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
Pauline Hanson
From Creature to Ghost
Across the night
until beside me,
the wild dogs crouch
and the hunted, the hurt thing,
cries its anguish,
begs its life.
But night is a country
of dying and dead
and when night voices howl
somewhere and how
the body is torn --
shuddering out of it
what small thing is this
so slant, so uncertain,
the moon will not show
nor darkness describe
the slow way it moves
from creature to ghost
and now from the home of
its body is lost.
Is lost, is alone,
yet so great this anguish
of dying and dead,
I think the small ones
of all the earth
sometime are met in it.
Or time is always
of once and now.
And in any night
when the wind is black
and the wild dogs leap --
hunted and tormented
and torn from the body,
like the animal ones
of all the earth
I come to everywhere,
everywhere this darkness.
And shuddering into it
if once I was only
the one who listened
listening has made me
the one who cries.
Until in this place
of dying and dead:
from creature to ghost
the way is so strange --
I die, I live,
in the anguish of both.
Love at the closing of our days
is apprehensive and very tender.
Glow brighter, brighter, farewell rays
of one last love in its evening splendor.
Blue shade takes half the world away:
through western clouds alone some light is slanted.
O tarry, O tarry, declining day,
enchantment, let me stay enchanted.
The blood runs thinner, yet the heart
remains as ever deep and tender.
O last belated love, thou art
a blend of joy and of hopeless surrender.
Thomas Hood
I Remember, I Remember
I remember, I remember
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn.
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day;
But now I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away!
I remember, I remember
The roses, red and white,
The violets, and the lily-cups, --
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday, --
The tree is living yet!
I remember, I remember
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
My spirit flew in feathers then,
That is so heavy now,
And summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow!
I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky.
It was a childish ignorance,
But now 't is little joy
To know I'm farther off from heaven
Than when I was a boy.
And so we too came where the rest have come,
To where each dreamed, each drew, the other home
From all distractions to the other's breast,
Where each had found, each was, the wold bird's nest.
For that we came, and knew that we must know
The thing we knew of but we did not know.
We said then, What if this were now no more
Than a faint shade of what we dreamed before?
If love should here find little joy or none,
And done, it were as if it were not done,
Would we not love still? What if none can know
The thing we know of but we do not know.
For we know nothing but that, long ago,
We learnt to love God whom we cannot know.
I touch your eyelids that one day must close,
Your lips as perishable as a rose:
And say that all must face, before we know
The thing we know of but we do not know.
Hamlet: To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: aye, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss? --
My lady laughs, delighting in what is.
If she but sighs, a bird puts out its tongue.
She makes space lonely with a lovely song.
She lilts a low soft language, and I hear
Down long sea-chambers of the inner ear.
We sing together; we sing mouth to mouth.
The garden is a river flowing south.
She cries out loud the soul's own secret joy;
She dances, and the ground bears her away.
She knows the speech of light, and makes it plain
A lively thing can come to life again.
I feel her presence in the common day,
In that slow dark that widens every eye.
She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again
and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin - I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
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