102
GARGOYLES
LE JOUR DES MORTS.
AT Paris upon Dead Man’s Day
I danced into the cemetery.
The air was cool ; the sun was gay 3
The scent of the revolving clay
Made me most wondrous merry.
Earth, after an agonising bout,
Had swallowed up a widow clean.
The issue hung for long in doubt :-—
—Oh! anybody can make out
The mystery I mean.
The dead were dancing with the worms ;
The live were laughing with their lemans ;
The dead-alive were making terms
With God, and notaries, and germs,
With house-agents and demons.
All Paris keeping sacrament
Of musing or of melancholy,
Impatient of the next event,
To spend, to barter, to be spent 5-—
I chuckled at the folly.
‘‘T would that I were dead and damned,”
Thinks every wiser human.
‘*Corpses have room, and men are jammed ;
Those offer food, and these are crammed :—
And cheaper, too, is woman !”
I, being neither God nor ghost,
A mere caprice of matter,
Hop idly in the hideous host,
Content to chaff the uttermost,
To cackle and to chatter.
They bring their wreaths to deck the dead,
As skipping-ropes the devils use them.
One through the immortelles perks his head.
[These sights to ghosties are as bread ;
The luckless living lose them.]
Grotesque and grim the pageant struts;
We sit a-straddle on the crosses.
Our soulless missiles take for butts
The passers’ hats, or in their guts
Disturb their dinner’s process.
Thus one man’s work is one man’s play ;
The melancholy help the merry. ,
All tread the ordered stupid way
At Paris, upon Dead Man’s Day,
In Pere Lachaise his cemetery.
AVE MORS.
O VIRGIN ! O my sister! Ilear me, death!
The tainted kisses of the harlot life
Sicken me; hers is foul and fevered breath,
This notsome woman I have made my wife.
She lies asweat, aslime. QO hear me, thou!
Wash with thy tears this desecrated brow !
With cool chaste kisses cleanse me! Lay
me out
Wrapped in a spotless winding-sheet, and
soothe
These nerves ill nuzzled by the black swine’s
snout
With thine eternal anodyne of truth!
The foul beast grunts and snorts; but hear
me, death!
Thy wings are wind-white as her hoofs are
dunged.
Thy songs are faint and pale with honey
breath,
Honey and poppy! as her mouth hot-
tongued
Spews out its hideous lust. O loathéd life!
Thou nameless horror of the bestial strife
Of love and hate, I straitly charge thee quit
This bed of nastiness, this putrid sea3
For not by any amorous tricks of wit
Shalt thou regain thine empire over me.
O virgin, O my sister! Hear me, death!
Thou hast a sleep compelling soul and
mind.
Thine is the sweet insufferable breath
That comes like Bessarabia’s twilight wind
To bring a quiet coolth from day’s long heat,
Peace to the belly gorged with blood and
meat,