Chapter I: LOOK at the swaling sunset

And wish I could go also Through the red doors beyond the black-purple bar.

I wish that I could go
Through the red doors where I could put off
My shame like shoes in the porch,
My pain like garments,
And leave my flesh discarded lying
Like luggage of some departed traveller
Gone one knows not where.

Then I would turn round,
And seeing my cast-off body lying like lumber,
I would laugh with joy.

ELEGY

SINCE I lost you, my darling, the sky has come near, And I am of it, the small sharp stars are quite near, The white moon going among them like a white bird among snow-berries, And the sound of her gently rustling in heaven like a bird I hear.

And I am willing to come to you now, my dear, As a pigeon lets itself off from a cathedral dome To be lost in the haze of the sky, I would like to come, And be lost out of sight with you, and be gone like foam.

For I am tired, my dear, and if I could lift my feet, My tenacious feet from off the dome of the earth To fall like a breath within the breathing wind Where you are lost, what rest, my love, what rest!

GREY EVENING

WHEN you went, how was it you carried with you My missal book of fine, flamboyant hours? My book of turrets and of red-thorn bowers, And skies of gold, and ladies in bright tissue?

Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped And garnered that the golden daylight yields.

Dim lamps like yellow poppies glimmer among The shadowy stubble of the under-dusk, As farther off the scythe of night is swung, And little stars come rolling from their husk.

And all the earth is gone into a dust Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold, Covered with aged lichens, pale with must, And all the sky has withered and gone cold.

And so I sit and scan the book of grey, Feeling the shadows like a blind man reading, All fearful lest I find the last words bleeding With wounds of sunset and the dying day.

FIRELIGHT AND NIGHTFALL

THE darkness steals the forms of all the queens, But oh, the palms of his two black hands are red, Inflamed with binding up the sheaves of dead Hours that were once all glory and all queens.

And I remember all the sunny hours Of queens in hyacinth and skies of gold, And morning singing where the woods are scrolled And diapered above the chaunting flowers.

Here lamps are white like snowdrops in the grass; The town is like a churchyard, all so still And grey now night is here; nor will Another torn red sunset come to pass.

THE MYSTIC BLUE

OUT of the darkness, fretted sometimes in its sleeping, Jets of sparks in fountains of blue come leaping To sight, revealing a secret, numberless secrets keeping.

Sometimes the darkness trapped within a wheel Runs into speed like a dream, the blue of the steel Showing the rocking darkness now a-reel.

And out of the invisible, streams of bright blue drops Rain from the showery heavens, and bright blue crops Surge from the under-dark to their ladder-tops.

And all the manifold blue and joyous eyes, The rainbow arching over in the skies, New sparks of wonder opening in surprise.

All these pure things come foam and spray of the sea Of Darkness abundant, which shaken mysteriously, Breaks into dazzle of living, as dolphins that leap from the sea Of midnight shake it to fire, so the secret of death we see.