English

O vanish'd star, fall'n flower, O god deceas'd
and deep in marble night sepulchred, where
rises the might that sank, disastrous flare,
in the agonizing dream thy latest priest?

Far hence in the awful vault another East
blossoms ecstatic rose and Eden air
is sweet on singing flesh that knows no share
in thy void grave whence all the springs have ceas'd.

Stars that with all our glory laden shift
aimless, what term is set unto this drift?
All dawns are spilt along the hopeless way,

O sunk in surge of purple, it is told
how thy hot hand was heavy o'er the world,
belying the fair troth of thy impearl'd
Orient, and thy gracious van of gold:

and thee, once Moloch infamous or old
Kronos, who knows if ever, radiant-curl'd,
thou didst abash the chaos, seeing thee hurl'd
by crouching hate to join the sullen mould.

Now is the shrouded hour, and the gray mood
o'er the all-pervasive and vain grave may brood,
or yet again the circling torch begin,

if all the ends of hope in dawning eyes

An iron folk, with iron hand, and hate
our welcome where we come; driven o'er the earth
in storm of conquest; venturing the salt firth;
homeless, the sword our bride, insatiate:

nor yet that we had sought to make us great
who had dwelt right fain in vales of love and mirth;
but thy dire hest summon'd us at our birth,
thy ministers of evil, consecrate:

thou torturer! to us no gentler god
than we were masters to those slaves; thy rod
was in our hands, but in our hearts the curse

Night has resumed our hope: the fight is done,
and fall'n once more the high heart that dared to assume
a god for us; and few beside the tomb
we bend, of all the folk his love made one,

questioning the deep mind if fame, to have won
had made so sacred evermore their doom
as night herself hath wed intemerate, whom
she spared the crown that brands the victor Hun.

She knows, the night with whom they lie, she knows
and earth remembers when our unfaith grows;
each autumn of her dolorous year shall have

In that last fight upon the western hill
against the shifting face of elder ill
whence yet the horizon's daily passing bleeds,
hero, our hope that not in dusty needs
the breath should choke entrusted us to speak
some god in time, we watch'd thee strive and wreak
the deed of light, we trembling where we held
our humble tilths, and thee, that bulk compell'd,
high in the golden limbeck of the west
as whom the hour should momently invest
Hesperian, flesh exempt from blight and frost:

Are ye indeed gone forth, and is your place
emptied of all that might whereby we held
our fields and home and faith derived of eld,
and whither now is turn'd your alter'd face?

The hearth-flame shakes and dies that once we bore
hither from altars of our happier sires;
now the young foe sows wide his ruin-fires:
the land is changed to know us never more.

The sword is vain, perish'd in age-long rust;
cover each head and wait by the dead flame
the ending of our tale upon this earth:

TWILIGHTS OF THE GODS AND THE FOLK

We nameless, that have labour'd in the dumb
patience of more than thousand years, whose task
what harvest claim'd our faith stay'd not to ask,
must all we perish ere the sabbath come?

The dawn was chill about our going forth
each morn, and black the earth in that damp hour
with presage of a ne'er-vouchsafed flower,
and bitter in our eyes the sleety north.

Harsh mother, thou hast drunk our soul unborn;
take now this outworn flesh and our despair:

In Eblis' ward now fall'n, where wisdom rose,
beyond the East and past the fane-strown sands,
are jasper caverns hewn of Afrit hands,
whereover Caf hath hung its huge repose.

There, in the limpid pave, a cloudy rose
mirrors eternal agony, in bands
of saddening purple shed from shrouded strands
where the snared sun a fix'd disaster glows.

A ruby of harden'd flame, an ice-bound woe,
burns in their crystal breast whose wizard brow
was gemm'd with name of Soliman long before

Where Soliman-ben-Daoud sleeps, unshown
to mortal eye, the vaulted bay of gloom
stagnates, aloft, into the pendent stone,
his Temple's roots, long wither'd in his tomb.

Chin-high against his flaming sword, alone,
brooding far hence in heaven's untarnish'd bloom,
a seraph bars all passage to the throne
where, priestly dight, the Master bides the doom.

Dully his mitre blazes o'er his brow
whereunder the dead eyes, wide-set, avow
the terror of the day that he awaits:

and, o'er his mitre's peak, his word of might,

Because he felt against his hundred years
the beating of the wings of Azrael,
the Master, he that watch'd o'er Afrit fears
building the Temple incorruptible,

palm-propt on guile of cedarn wands, uprears
his dreadful stature in the crystal cell
that thence, tho' death unsaint their magian spheres,
erect, his eyes might dwell, implacable.

So, when at last the worm-pierc'd cedar snapt
and, at the sound of his great fall, the Jinn
sail'd clamorously towards Eblis, disabused,