life Death hath thee petrified.
The soft the flowing and the putrified
That made thee up, is by that artist great
Now crystalliz’d unto a changeless state.
That thing thou walkedst, nos’d and ear’d and eyed,
Eternally severely doth abide,
Sunk from the bands of them that drank and ate.
Green mummies walk above thy walled gloom,
Unripen’d mummies; they intemperate
Seek in life’s beauty their high-crowned doom
In vain. But thee no passion doth illume
Stiff in the musked darkness of the tomb
Hard in stiff bands of red and nacarat.
Sepulchral Life
Lo, all the world as some vast corpse long dead,
Fadeth and perisheth and doth decay,
Even as a corpse, in whose unhonor’d clay
The worms have long the inmost secrets read;
Even as a corpse, upon whose lowly head
The sun beats, and the holy rain doth play;
Even as a corpse, whereof the people say,
—We would that these dead bones were buried.
Even so: and in the earth’s vast sepulchre
Our fainting souls their doubtful footsteps bear,
Dreaming of that which no dead men may see;
And in our passage to the second death,
We whisper strange names with our pesty breath,
Of Love, and Honour, and great Victory.
Corpse
A dead corpse crowned with a crown of gold
Sits thron’d beneath the sky’s gigantic pall;
Gold garments from its rotted shoulders fall,
And regal purple robes funereal.
Before its face a vast processional
Goes by with offerings for its great knees cold;
Its soft hand doth a golden sceptre hold;
And in its flesh lie sleeping worms uproll’d.
They that pass ceaseless by see not at all;
They know not that beneath its garments’ fold
Is but a corpse, rotted, and dead, and tall.
He is accurst that sees it dead and old;
He is accurst that sees: the white worms call
For him: for him have funeral dirges toll’d.
Mankind
They do not know that they are wholly dead,
Nor that their bodies are to the worm given o’er;
They pass beneath the sky forevermore;
With their dead flesh the earth is cumbered.
Each day they drink of wine and eat of bread,
And do the things that they have done before;
And yet their hearts are rotten to the core,
And from their eyes the light of life is fled.
Surely the sun is weary of their breath;
They have no ears, and they are dumb and blind;
Long time their bodies hunger for the grave.
How long, O God, shall these dead corpses rave?
When shall the earth be clean of humankind?
When shall the sky cease to behold this death?
The Defilers
O endless idiocy of humankind!
O blatant dead that howl and scream and roar!
O strange dead things the worms have gambled for!
O dull and senseless, foolish, mad and blind!
How long now shall your scent defile the wind?
How long shall you make vile the earth’s wide floor?
How long, how long, O waiting ages hoar,
Shall the white dawn their gaping faces find?
O vile and simple, blind of heart and mind,
When shall your last wave roll forevermore
Back from the sick and long-defiled shore?
When shall the grave the last dead carcass bind?
O shameless humankind! O dead! O dead!
When shall your rottenness be buried?
The Grotesques
I
I saw a dead corpse lying in a tomb,
Long buried and rotten to the core;
Behold this corpse shall know not evermore
Aught that may be outside its wormy room;
It lies uncover’d in the pesty gloom,
Eyeless and earless, on the charnel-floor,
While in its nameless corpse the wormlets hoar
Make in its suppurated brain their room.
And in that charnel that no lights illume,
It shriek’d of things that lay outside its door;
And while the still worms through its soft heart bore,
It lay and reason’d of the ways of doom,
And in its head thoughts mov’d as in a womb;
And in its heart the worms lie evermore.
II
I saw a dead corpse in a haughty car,
Whom in a high tomb phantom horses bore,
Aye to and fro upon the scatter’d floor;
His dead eyes star’d as though they look’d afar,
His gold wheels myriad perish’d souls did mar,
While through his flesh the ravenous wormlets tore;
He in whose eyes the worm was conqueror,
Held his high head unmoved like a star.
And as with loud sound and reverberant jar,
And as with splash of crusht flesh and dull roar,
The death-car thunder’d past the tomb-walls hoar,
Within those dead dominions the dead tsar
Receiv’d his plaudits where dead bodies are;
And in his heart the worms lie evermore.
III
I saw a dead corpse making a strange cry,
With dead feet planted on a high tomb’s floor;
The dead stand round, with faces that implore;
His dead hands bless them, stretched forth on high.
—And art thou God?—and art thou majesty?—
And art thou he whom all the dead adore?—
And art thou he that hath the skies in store?—
Nay, nay, dead dust, dead dust, and vanity.
And wouldst thou rise up to the lighted sky?—
Nay, nay, thy limbs are rotten on the floor;
Thou shalt not out from thy polluted sty;
Thou wouldst become divinity once more,
Thou dreamest of splendour that shall never die;
And in thy heart the worms lie evermore.
IV
I saw a dead corpse lying on the floor
Of a tomb; worms were in its woman’s head,
Its black flesh lay about it shred on shred,
And the dead things slept in its bosom hoar.
And evermore inside that loathed door,
It turn’d itself as one upon a bed,
It turn’d itself as one whom sleep hath fled,
As one that the sweet pangs of passion bore.
And from its passionate mouth’s corrupted sore,
And from its lips that are no longer red,
Came forth love’s accents; and it spake, and said.
—The Pleiades and night’s noon-hours are o’er,
And I am left alone in wearyhead.
And in its heart the worms lie evermore.
Dead Dialogue
| 1st Corpse. |
I would now that the sweet light of the sun
Might once again shine down upon my face;
So weary am I of my rottenness.
|
| 2nd Corpse. |
Rejoice that now at least thou art done with life;
This thing shall nevermore return.
|
| 1st Corpse. |
At last
My body is aweary of the tomb;
It is a hundred years since in the grave
I have lain down between four narrow walls,
Shut up with putrid darkness and the worm.
There is no flesh upon my body now,
That was so long a-rotting; on
|
