Classic Poem

I. The D ANCE

In the black glitter of night the grey vapour forest
Lies a dark Ghost in the water, motionless, dark;
Like a corpse by the bank fallen, and hopelessly rotting
Where the thin silver soul of the stars silently dances.

The flowers are closed, the birds are carved on the trees,
When out of the forest glide hundreds of spear-holding shadows;
In smooth dark ivory bodies their eyeballs gleaming,
Forming a gesturing circle beneath the Moon.

The bright-eyed shadows, the tribe in ritual gathered,
Are dancing and howling, the embryo soul of the nation:
In loud drum-beating monotonous the tightly stretched skins
Of oxen that stared at the stars are singing wild paeans:
Wild paeans for food that magically grew in the clearings
When he that was slain was buried and is resurrected,
And a green mist arose from the mud and shone in the Moon,
A great delirium of faces, a new generation.

The thin wafer Moon it is there, it is there in the sky,
The hand-linked circle raise faces of mad exaltation —
Dance, O you Hunters, leap madly upon the flung shields,
Shoot arrows into the sky, thin moon-seeking needles:

Now you shall have a harvest, a belly-full rapture,
There shall be many fat women, full grown, and smoother than honey,
Their limbs like ivory rounded, and firm as a berry,
Their lips full of food, and their eyes mad with hunger for men!

The heat of the earth arises, a faint love-mist
Wan with over-desiring, and in the marshes
Blindly the mud stirs, clouding in the dark shining water,
And troubling the still soft swarms of fallen stars.

There is bright sweat upon the bodies of cattle,
Great vials of life motionless in the moonlight,
Breathing faint mists over the warm, damp ground;
And the cry of a dancer rings through the shadowy forest.

The tiger is seeking his mate, and his glassy eyes
Are purple and shot with starlight in the grass shining,
The fiery grass tortured out of the mud and writhing
Under the sun, now shivering and pale in the Moon.

The shadows are dancing, dancing, dancing, dancing,
The grey vapour arms of the forest lie dreaming around them;
The cold, shining moonlight falls from their bodies and faces,
But caught in their eyes lies prisoned and faintly gleaming:

And they return to their dwellings within the grey forest,
Into their dark huts burying the moonlight with them,
Burying the trees and the stars and the flowing river,
And the glittering spears, and their dark, evocative gestures.

II. S LEEP

Hollow the world in the moonlit hour when the birds are shadows small,
Lost in the swarm of giant leaves and myriad branches tall;
When vast thick boughs hang across the sky like solid limbs of night,
Dug from still quarries of grey-black air by the pale transparent light,
And the purple and golden blooms of the sun, each crimson and spotted flower,
Are folded up, or have faded away, as that still intangible power
Floats out of the sky, falls shimmering down, a silver-shadowy bloom,
On the spear-pointed forest a fragile crown, in the soul a soft, bright gloom;
Hollow the world when the shadow of man lies prone and still on its floor,
And the moonlight shut from his empty heart weeps softly against his door,
And his terror and joy but a little dream in the corner of his house,
And his voice dead in the darkness 'mid the twittering of a mouse.

III. The E MPTY F OREST

Hollow the world! hollow the world!
And its dancers shadow-grey;
And the Moon a silver-shadowy bloom
Fading and falling away;
And the forest's grey vapour, and all the trees
Shadows against the sky;
And the soul of man and his ecstasies
A night-forgotten cry.
Hollow the world! hollow the world!