your evil is my spirit sad—
I mourn because you are not really bad;
Because your beauty’s perfect cruelty
Is ever marr’d with pity and distress,
And you still show within your wickedness
The poor stale weakness of humanity.
VII
I am as one that thirsteth for all things,
As one that holdeth to his lips the cup,
With lower’d eyes searching the wine’s dull flame.
No thing may I refuse among all things,
Till, having drain’d unto its dregs the cup,
I may return into the astral flame.
VIII
Heart, we have wholly drain’d the cup of sadness,
And found in sadness no reality;
Now from the night of sadness let us go.
Henceforward let us drain the cup of gladness,
And find in gladness no reality;
From sadness then and gladness let us go.
Sonnet of the Instruments of Death
Adorned daggers, ruby-hilted swords;
Huge mortal serpents in gold volumes roll’d;
All-holy poisons in wrought cups of gold;
Unfailing crucifixes of strong cords;
Mortal baptismal waters without fords,
Wherein lie death’s communicants untold—
Which of these instruments blessed and old,
Is meetest for life’s purple-robed lords?
Ye that commune in death’s ciborium,
Of all the vessels in his sacristy
Which will ye choose to make of you a clod—
Sharp swords, bright lightnings, orient opium?—
All these, brave souls, are of one sanctity;
All ways are good whereby ye pass to God.
Truth
It is not that I have not sought thy face
Ceaselessly through the world’s eternal lie,
More than all things and throughout every place,
Which having seen I were content to die.
But I have sought thee and I have not found;
Wherefore my soul is banish’d from delight,
And sitteth joyless as a madman bound
Seeing vain visions in the loathed night.
I know not even that I do not know,
But all things waver before me to and fro;
As one half head that would be dead I lie.
And thou, Death, if thy face be really fair,
I know not, or but renewal of vanity;
Wherefore mine eyes have seen the last despair.
Hegel
Because my hope is dead, my heart a stone,
I read the words that Hegel once did write—
An idiot gibbering in the dark alone—
Till on my heart and vision fell the night.
Monotony
A dead corpse full of wormy questionings,
Beneath the open sky my soul lies dead,
Shameless and rotten and unburied,
For whom eternity no difference brings.
Only the wind my loathed incense flings
Afar afar; only above my head
Day passes, night returns when day is fled,
Unchangeable return of changeless things.
Unto the dead all things bring only pain,
And evermore my perish’d heart is woe
For the vile worms that gnaw it lying low;
While the dead days, like to an endless chain,
Pass ever o’er my body cruelly slow,
And evermore with pain return again.
Sepulture
My heart is but a tomb, where vain and cold
My dead hopes lie: encoffin’d there my Pride
Lies dead, and my Life’s Gladness crucified,
And there my Morning Joy long turn’d to mould;
And there like once-lov’d corpses dead and old
My Victory that long long since hath died,
And all my Hopes lie shrouded side by side,
For whom no eyes have wept, no dirges toll’d.
And there insensate on the darken’d floor
Despair a maniac still doth howl and scream,
Among all these long dead alive alone;
Among these things I sit upon a throne,
In endless contemplation evermore;
Nor these suffice to break my iron dream.
Miserrimus
In the last hopeless depth of hell’s dark tomb
Wherein I sit for aye with bowed head
In anguish and great sorrow buried
Where never sun the blackness doth illume,
I saw pass by me through the bitter gloom
All them whom life with deepest grief hath fed,
Whom also here among the hopeless dead
Through hell pursueth maniac, gnashing doom.
Me there forever crusht to hopeless stone
They passt by, all the damn’d; they shall not know
Through all eternity but only woe,
Now hear no sound but sound of them that groan.
And unto me that sat than these more low,
These seem’d like happy gods that heaven own;
They past away; and there in hell alone
My heart took up again its ancient woe.
Scorn
Dead am I, and ye triumph o’er me dead,
Ye that within mine eyes have found your home,
Ye that are soft and blind and white like foam,
Ye that have made of me your meat and bread.
Unto the worms I am abandoned;
Over my flesh their loathed cohorts roam;
Upon my heart whereto their hosts have clomb
Their hungry lips shall evermore be fed.
Here am I but a dead corpse in a tomb;
I shall not out from my accurs’d abode,
Inhabited by the dull worm and the toad;
Ye vile sojourners in my rotten room,
Torment me with your everlasting goad!
I scorn you till the end shall come of doom.
The Grave
The loathed worms are crawling over me
All the dead hours; about my buried head
Their soft intolerable mouths are gathered,
And in my dead eyes that have ceas’d to see.
I am full of worms and rotten utterly,
Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.
The lifeless earth lies close against mine eyes;
I know that I have rotted long ago;
My limbs are made one with the worms I know
Where all my head and body putrifies.
So in the earth my coffin’d ordure lies
Within my loathed shambles strait and low.
There is no thing now where my face hath been,
And all my flesh lies soft upon the floor;
Unto my heart the worms have found a door,
And all my body is to the worms akin;
They long time since their feasting did begin,
And they shall part not from me evermore.
Here lie I stretch’d out through the rotting years,
And I am surely weary of the grave,
And I have sometimes thought that I might rave,
And my two perish’d eyes almost shed tears.
There is no one that sees and none that hears;
I shall not out from my corrupted cave.
Here now forever with the lustful worms
I lie within my putrid sunken sty,
And through eternity my soul shall die.
O thou toward whom all my dead spirit squirms!
Forevermore I love thee through all terms
Until the dead stars rot in the black sky.
Mummy
Thou art at last made perfect; from the estate
Of mushy
