Since there is no escape, since at the end
My body will be utterly destroyed,
This hand I love as I have loved a friend,
This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed;
Since there is no escape even for me
Who love life with a love too sharp to bear:
The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea
And hours alone too still and sure for prayer--
Since darkness waits for me, then all the more
Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore
In pride; and let me sing with my last breath;
In these few hours of light I lift my head;
Life is my lover--I shall leave the dead
If there is any way to baffle death.
Death went up the hall
Unseen by every one,
Trailing twilight robes
Past the nurse and the nun.
He paused at every door
And listened to the breath
Of those who did not know
How near they were to Death.
Death went up the hall
Unseen by nurse and nun;
He passed by many a door--
But he entered one.
Let it be you who lean above me
On my last day,
Let it be you who shut my eyelids
Forever and aye.
Say a “Good-night” as you have said it
All of these years,
With the old look, with the old whisper
And without tears.
You will know then all that in silence
You always knew,
Though I have loved, I loved no other
As I love you.
Serene descent, as a red leaf’s descending
When there is neither wind nor noise of rain,
But only autumn air and the unending
Drawing of all things to the earth again:
So be it; let the snow sift deep and cover
All that was drunken once with light and air;
The earth will not regret her tireless lover,
Nor he awake to know she does not care.
Between the mighty legs of Death
We play the schoolboy pranks of breath ;
Scrawl challenge on his sodden boots.
The while he coils his cypress-roots.
I had three friends in Gotham,
And one of them is dead.
And one of them has palsy
And cannot leave his bed.
And now I know the other
Will soon desert me too,
And end his days in Sing Sing,
For something he will do.
When I was one and twenty.
My ills were in their prime.
With aches and pains aplenty.
And gout before my time;
I had the pyorrhea,
And fever turned me blue—
They said that I would be a
Dead man at twenty-two.
Now I am two and twenty.
The aches and pains I thought
Were miseries aplenty,
Compared to these, are naught;
And even these are bubbles,
That scarce can worry me,
When I regard the troubles
I'll have at twenty-three.
I often wonder, Oscar,
How it fares with you ;
Do you look down and smile on us,
From that vast realm of blue ?
Tell me, Brother, do you hear
The belching cannon's roar?
Does their death-dealing thunder break
Your peace on yonder shore ?
I seem to hear you answering,
That toil and pain and woe
And care and strife — ah! yes, and death
Were left behind, below.
I plucked a rose, a red rose rare,
I placed her on a throne
Within my heart; and there I dare
To worship her alone.
An idol, thus, I paid to her
My constant vigil, love, and care.
Upon my knees, I prayed to her,
My whole heart in my prayer.
Alas ! my love, my care, my prayer,
Failed! failed to keep my treasure fair.
I saw (my heart filled with despair)
Her drooping head ;
Her beauty, grace and fragrance flown,
Her every leaf and petal shorn,
I gazed in silence — and alone —
Upon my dead.
Sedate and archaic, a twilight-frilled haze
Walks over the meadows like rolled-out centuries
Quivering in sprightly welcome.
Trees pushed down by silence;
Trees lolling in comely abandon;
Trees pungently flamboyant,
Their leaves spinning in the wind’s golden elusiveness.
Trees probing the shrilly sensitive sunset
Like little, laced nightmares leaning
Upon a scarlet breast;
Trees sprinkling their stifled mockery
Upon the blue tomb of the air;
Trees, are you silenced beings
Whitening into the winding paradise
Of old loves seeking a second death?
And has this archaic, twilight-frilled haze
O the agony of having too much power!
In my passive palm are hundreds of lives.
Strange alchemy, they drain my blood.
My heart becomes iron; my brain copper; my eyes silver; my lips brass.
Merely by twitching a supple finger, I twirl lives from me,
Strong-winged or fluttering and broken.
They are my children: I am their mother and father.
I watch them live and die.
The smile of one face is like a fierce mermaid
Floating dead in a little pale-brown pond.
The lips of one are twisted
To a hieroglyphic of silence.
The face of another is like a shining frog.
Another face is met by a question
That digs into it like sudden claws.
Beside it is a face like a mirror
In which a stiffened child dangles....
Dead soldiers, in a sprawling crescent,
Whose faces form a gravely mocking sentence.