Collected Works (Vol. III)

102 GARGOYLES LE JOUR DES MORTS. AT Paris upon Dead Man’s Day I danced into the cemetery. The air was cool ; the sun was gay 3 The scent of the revolving clay Made me most wondrous merry. Earth, after an agonising bout, Had swallowed up a widow clean. The issue hung for long in doubt :-— —Oh! anybody can make out The mystery I mean. The dead were dancing with the worms ; The live were laughing with their lemans ; The dead-alive were making terms With God, and notaries, and germs, With house-agents and demons. All Paris keeping sacrament Of musing or of melancholy, Impatient of the next event, To spend, to barter, to be spent 5-— I chuckled at the folly. ‘‘T would that I were dead and damned,” Thinks every wiser human. ‘*Corpses have room, and men are jammed ; Those offer food, and these are crammed :— And cheaper, too, is woman !” I, being neither God nor ghost, A mere caprice of matter, Hop idly in the hideous host, Content to chaff the uttermost, To cackle and to chatter. They bring their wreaths to deck the dead, As skipping-ropes the devils use them. One through the immortelles perks his head. [These sights to ghosties are as bread ; The luckless living lose them.] Grotesque and grim the pageant struts; We sit a-straddle on the crosses. Our soulless missiles take for butts The passers’ hats, or in their guts Disturb their dinner’s process. Thus one man’s work is one man’s play ; The melancholy help the merry. , All tread the ordered stupid way At Paris, upon Dead Man’s Day, In Pere Lachaise his cemetery. AVE MORS. O VIRGIN ! O my sister! Ilear me, death! The tainted kisses of the harlot life Sicken me; hers is foul and fevered breath, This notsome woman I have made my wife. She lies asweat, aslime. QO hear me, thou! Wash with thy tears this desecrated brow ! With cool chaste kisses cleanse me! Lay me out Wrapped in a spotless winding-sheet, and soothe These nerves ill nuzzled by the black swine’s snout With thine eternal anodyne of truth! The foul beast grunts and snorts; but hear me, death! Thy wings are wind-white as her hoofs are dunged. Thy songs are faint and pale with honey breath, Honey and poppy! as her mouth hot- tongued Spews out its hideous lust. O loathéd life! Thou nameless horror of the bestial strife Of love and hate, I straitly charge thee quit This bed of nastiness, this putrid sea3 For not by any amorous tricks of wit Shalt thou regain thine empire over me. O virgin, O my sister! Hear me, death! Thou hast a sleep compelling soul and mind. Thine is the sweet insufferable breath That comes like Bessarabia’s twilight wind To bring a quiet coolth from day’s long heat, Peace to the belly gorged with blood and meat,