XII
So in this agony of enforcéd silence
The sober song breaks to a phrenzied scream ;
The shattering brain admits the mad god’s violence,
And wild things course as in an evil dream :
Devils and dancers, druid rites and dread,
Horrible symbols scarred across the sky,
Invisible terrors of the quick and dead,
Impossible phantoms in mad revelry
Conjoined in spinthriae of bestial form,
Human-faced toads, and serpent-headed women,
All lashed and slashed by the all-wandering storm
Caricature of all things holy and human —
—- Such are the discords that absolve the strain
As this wild threnody dissolves the brain.
XIII
Forgive me, o my holy and happy maid,
Lola, sweet Lola, for the imagination
Of all things monstrous that your soul dismayed
Reads on the palimpsest of my elation.
Simple and sweet and chaste our love is ever,
And these its wild and mystic characters
That rage and storm in impotent endeavour
To unveil our glory to our worshippers.
Lola, dear Lola, mystic maiden o’ mine,
Let us not mingle with the ribald rout
That throng our temple. Close, Palladian shrine,
With our reverberate glory rayed about!
Abide within — with me! Let silence sever
This velvet now’ from that unclothed ’for ever’!