English

Northward, he dream'd, in Judah's vine-clad hills,
of gold and gems, earth's jealous-hoarded flower,
garner'd within Jehovah's temple-sills:
and sterile wisdom crown'd his brow with power.

Where burnt Arabia, named the Happy, spills
above the silken seas that gird her bower
rich heat of spice her chymic sun distils,
she dwelt, and lonely beauty was her dower.

The desert lay between them; yet they knew
each one of each, and love and longing grew:
she came: and desert blossom'd where she came.

What gems' chill glitter yon, thrice dipt
in dusky Styx, or tears unshed
the spheres, in icy exile stript,
congeal in midnight's gaze of lead?

O thou crown'd caitiff, o'er our head
whereon thine agelong wounds have dript
the dark arms of thy passion spread
dwarf the vast vault to a hard crypt.

Round thine eternal hour of woe
the abyss urges, a rigid throe,
whose woeful dark sees nought emerge,

save these, their consolation vain
and frozen on the helpless verge,
lonely, ecstatic fires of pain.

The window is wide and lo! beyond its bars
dim fields of fading stars
and cavern tracts, whence the great store of tears
that Beauty all the years
hath wept in wanderings of the eyeless dark,
remembering the long cark
whereunder we, her care, are silent bow'd,
invades with numbing shroud
this dwindling realm of listless avatars.
Dim fields of fading stars,
and shall yet ye with amaranth rapture burn
and maiden grace return
sprung soft and sudden on the fainting night,
rose passioning to white;

Once, when the sun-burst flew
its banner above broad seas and eastern hills,
my casement knew
that morning in her wondrous isle of youth distils

perpetual balm, and tidings trumpeted
of Eden air
winsome and quick, round many a wilding grace unwed,
clad only in glad hair,

bade fancy soar
far and aloft along that limitless ecstasy
of crystal, towards some shore
where life were crown'd amidst a halcyon sea.

Now — desolate, despairful (lamentable retreat!
wreck'd wheels and spars!),

This rose the lips that kiss, and the young breast
they kindle, flush'd throughout its waking snows;
and this, that tremulous on the morning blows,
heart's youth some golden dew of dream hath blest;

auroras, grace and sooth! no tragic west
shed splendid the red anger of your close:
how soon within this wandering barrow grows
the canker'd heap of petals once caress'd!

Old odours of the rose are sickening; night,
hasten above the corpse of old delight,
if in decay the heart cherish some heat,

She is the night: all horror is of her
heap'd, shapeless, on the unclaim'd chaotic marsh
or huddled on the looming sepulchre
where the incult and scanty herb is harsh.

She is the night: all terror is of her
when the distemper'd dark begins to boil
with wavering face of larve and oily blur
of pallor on her suffocating coil.

Or majesty is hers, when marble gloom
supports her, calm, with glittering signs severe
and grandeur of metallic roof of doom,
far in the windows of our broken sphere.

Thus in her hour of wrath, o'er Adam's head
Lilith, then first reveal'd, a name of dread,
thus in her hour of sorrow: and the rage,
that drove the giant-hunters in that age
since whelm'd beneath the weltering cataclysm,
was the mad flight from her instant abysm
and iron sadness and unsatisfied
despair of kings that by Euphrates' side
rein the wing'd steer or grasp the stony mane
of lions dared, if so they might obtain
surcease of lingering unnamed distress.
And if she kept the word forgetfulness

Terrible, if he will not have me else,
I lurk to seize and strangle, in the cells
where he hath made a dusk round his delight:
whether he woo the bride's incarnate bright
and natural rose to shimmer thro' the dense
of odour-motes whereby the brooding sense
flows forth beyond its aching bounds and lies,
full-brimm'd and sombre, around her clear disguise
that saturates the dusk with secret gold;
or the miraculous rose of Heaven to unfold
out from its heart of ruby fire and rain
unceasing drift of petals, and maintain

Thick sleep, with error of the tangled wood,
and vapour from the evening marsh of sense,
and smoothness of the glide of Lethe, would
inaugurate his dullard innocence,
cool'd of his calenture, elaborate brute:
but, all deceitful of his craven hope,
the devious and covert ways of dream
shall lead him out upon no temper'd beam
or thick-grass'd ease, where herbs of soothing shoot
in asphodel, but on the shuddering scope
and the chill touch of endless distances
still thronging on the wingless soul that flees

O thou that achest, pulse o' the unwed vast,
now in the distant centre of my brain
dizzily narrow'd, now beyond the last
calm circle widening of the starry plain,
where, on the scatter'd edge of my surmise,
the twilit dreams fail off and rule is spent
vainly on vagrant bands the gulfs invite
to break away to the dark: they, backward sent
tho' dumb, with dire infection in their eyes,
startle the central seat: — O pulse of night,
passing the hard throb of sun-smitten blood
when the noon-world is fused in fire and blent