Classic Poem

Romanzel through deep heights rises: not to the sky.
In death no air like that soft earth-blue whose hollow climates
Poets long filled with secret universes
Where truth in plaintive multiple was not itself —
A mountainous oppression is the sky of Romanzel.
It weighs upon him low and cloudily,
The too-sweet, plenary oxygen of suicide —
Till he's so many several demon-satyrs
Leaping in frolicsome despair from peak to peak.
And always, impossibly below, framed in a dance
Half-lewd, half-paradisial — dear Amulette,
Frank earth-illusion, a nymph within a grove of self
Musing her free dominion and her loveliness.
Near by sleeps Unidor: the privacies of Amulette
His purest dreams are, all like himself asleep there,
Save for the faint black fume which death, white boredom,
In the untroubled mind of Unidor stirs up.
But Romanzel, far above, sees sharp, understands too much.
" I must kill myself," he says in every body of him —
" I must kill my soul, it is that which still lives.
Thus will my flesh be time-identical with Amulette,
Her beauty and my eyes will have acquaintance
Like days of the same century, though mine be but
The old fool's part and hers the saucy schoolgirl's
Pretending nunnish innocence of love.
Of Unidor the relic's then a little locket-heart,
Pathos in mother-of-pearl like childhood treasure
Sometimes to weep against somewhat — not knowing why."
And with a tearful grace, pity of Unidor
Like metric slowness anatomizing the rash down-tumbling,
Romanzel leaps, falls, leaps. . . . Amulette dances,
More briskly than before, indeed; Unidor, dreaming,
Smiles at some nameless humour of an instant . . .
And all that's left of Romanzel bestrews the ground
Like the discarded bones of a vexed ghost.
Amulette does not mark them, far less does Unidor:
The sorrows of the dead who die — such matters cannot give them pause.