Classic Poem

And with what stern conscience, honest fellows,
The lifelike dead their living lives reclaim! No pleasantries!
But not so that goddess by whose wit and patronage
They cry unchallenged their mournful ecstasies:
A gay rogue, she!
Who would believe, under the tall sombre folds,
A toying inner creature, mind and mischief
Of the gigantic all-ghoul, Death?
Cat-seeming, in lazy thought-games tangled
While the rats teem, children of sterile breed —
Little difference, be they caught or spared.
Ah, the divine tact and felinity
Of Death towards the dead!
They, her philosophical pets,
Think love alone prolongs them.
" Ah, the darlings," to herself confides our mother-parodist,
" To-morrow they must be eaten, embarrassed fruits
Of my perverse, time-prolonging humours.
To-morrow I shall eat them: over-real, too much themselves,
They know their madness, already are sane."
Ah, the pretty notion! Ah, to-morrow's immense suppering!
She has not forgotten, anticipation fills
And makes a nauseous plenty —
Excessive yesterdays, paltry infinitude,
Cavernous nothing, tumid with life.
Thus in the still veins of ancient vent-ways
The immortal rats bespeak the future.
Thus beats, in false-earnest, a dry heart once a heart,
Rejoicing to be heart, however dead,
However 'tis only Death's jocose agitation,
However but the heart of a goddess at play,
Pretending, in her large make-believe of vesture,
A heart like a world a-toss, a live heart,
A veinage of people like a live world seeming —
Seeming, like her, eternal.