ORACLES
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ART*
1GO5
THE DEATH OF THE DRUNKARD.}
I.
TERROR, and darkness, and hor:id despair !
Agony painted upon the once fair
Brow of the man who refused to give up
The love of the wine-filled, the o’erflowing
cup.
‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging.”
No wine in death is his torment assuaging.
Il.
Just what the parson had told me when
young:
Just what the people in chapel have sung:
‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging.”
Desunt cetera.
A PEEP BEHIND THE SCENES.
In the hospital bed she lay,
Rotting away !
Cursing by night and cursing by day,
Rotting away !
1 This, the earliest poem ever written by me,
has perished save the above fragment. Its
date is 1886,—-A, C.
It should be noted that this fragment is of a
wildly revolutionary tendency. It made him
the Ibsen of a school where a parson and a
chapel were considered with the rest of the
non-Plymouth-Brethren world as so many
devils let loose from hell.
* This volume consists of unpublished poems dating from 1886-1903.
Crowley writes, ‘‘ The sense is of dead leaves drifting in the dusty cave of my mind.”
The lupus is over her face and head,
Filthy and foul and horrid and dread,
And her shrieks they would almost wake the
dead ;
Rotting away !
In her horrible grave she lay,
Rotting away !
Rotting by night, and rotting by day,
Rotting away !
| In the place of her face is a gory hole,
And the worms are gnawing the tissues foul,
And the devil is gloating over her soul,
Rotting away !
LINES ON BEING INVITED TO MEET
THE PREMIER IN WALES, SEP-
TEMBER 1892.
I wI.Li not shake thy hand, old man,
I will not shake thy hand ;
You bear a traitor’s brand, old man,
You bear a liar’s brand.
Thy talents are profound and wide,
Apparent power to win;
It is not everyone has lied
A nation into sin.
And look thou not so black, my friend,
Nor seam that hoary brow ;
Thy deeds are seamier, my friend,
Thy record blacker now.
Conceining the title
He
does not seem to have been aware that Coleridge gave the title ‘‘SibylJine Leaves” toa similar
culiection.
VOl.. IT.
A