Collected Works (Vol. III)

LIBER SECUNDUS VEL AMORIS 159 All shattered, overblown. Come back to me! I cannot have you dead, and live: let death Strangle my breath Now as I kiss you still—Eurydice ! Come back to me! Eurydice, Fling down the foolish lyre, the witless power! Cast the dead laurel inthe dust! The flower Of all the world is marred, the day’s desire Distorted in the eclipse, the sun’s dead hour. Let me fall down beside thee! Let me take The kisses that thou canst not give, and slake Despair in purposeless caresses, dire Shames fang-wise fastened of the eternal snake. Is there no warmth where beauty isso bright ? No soul still flickering in the lambent light Still shed from all the body’s excellence? No lamp unchidden of the utter night? Cannot my life be molten into thee, Or thy death fall with rosier arms on me, Or soul with soul commingle without sense, As the sun’s rays strike deep into the sea? O beauty of all teauty—central flower Of all the blossoms in the summer’s bower ! Fades not all Nature in thy fall? the sun Not darken in the miserable hour? I hate all Nature’s mockery of life. The laugh is grown a grin; the gentle strife Of birds and waves and winds at play is grown A curse, acruelty. My wife! my wife! I am broken, I cannot sleep, I cannot die. Pain, pain for ever! Nature is a lie, The godsa lhe. Myself? but I am found Sole serious in the hateful comedy. Blackness, all blackness! How I hate the earth, The curse that brought my being into birth. I, loving more her loveliness, am bound And broken—thrice more bitter for my mirth ! Song, was it song I trusted in? Or thou, Apollo, was it thou didst bind my brow With laurel for a poison-wreath of hell To sear my brain and blast my being now? A band of most corroding poison wound Dissolving with its venom the profound Deep of my spirit with its terrible Sense without speech and horror without sound. A devil intertwining in my heart Its cold and hideous lust, a twiforked dart Even from the fatherly and healing hand— The double death without a counterpart In hell’s own deepest pit, far, far below Phlegethon’s flame and Styx’s stifling flow, Far below Tartarus, below the land Thrust lowest in the devilish vertigo. IfI could weep or slumber or forget! If love once left me, with his eyelids wet With tender memory of his own despair Or frozen to a statue of regret ! If but the chilling agony, that turns Yo bitter fever-heat that stings and burns Would freeze me, or destroy me, or impair My sense, that it should feel not how it yearns! Or if this pain were only pain, and not A deadness deeper than all pain, a spot And central core of agony in me, One heart-worm, one plague-leprosy, one blot Of death, one anguish deeper than control ?— Then were I fit to gain the Olympian goal And fling forth fiery wailings to the sea, And tune the sun’s ray to my smitten soul! How shoald I sing who cannot even see? Grope through a mist of changeless misery. An age-long pain—no time in wretched. ness !— As of an hammer annihilating me