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Page 1 of 21910 · PDF PAGE 140
130 ROSA DECIDUA O Rose, thou art sick ! The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.BLAKE. ROSE of the World ! If so, then what a world ! What worm at its red heart lay curled From the beginning ? Plucked and torn and trampled And utterly corrupt is she That was the queen-flower unexampled In gardens goodlier than Arcady. O Thou ! whose body was my lyre, whose soul Lay on my mouth like a live coal ! This time thou hearest not my song ; …
1910 · PDF PAGE 7
vii CONTENTS ROSA COELI. To my wife 1 ABJAD-I-ALAIN. To the memory of Alain Lutiy 16 THE HERMIT. To Cecil Jones 22 THE WIZARD WAY. To J. F. C. Fuller 24 THE WINGS. To Dot 34 THE GARDEN OF JANUS To V. B. Neuburg 35 THE TWO SECRETS To Mary Waska 45 THE PRIESTESS OF PANORMITA. To Hilda Howard 47 THE HAWK AND THE BABE. To Raymond Radclyffe 55 THE DUELLISTS. To Norah Moore 57 ATHOR AND ASAR. To Frank Harris 60 AFTER JUDGMENT. To Ophelia L 61 THE FIVE ADORATIONS. To Gerald Pinsent 64 TELEPATHY. To Euphemia L 65 THE SWIMMER. To Norman Mudd 72…
1910 · PDF PAGE 11
1 ROSA COELI I ROSE of the World ! Ruby with blood from the bright veins of God Caught in the chalice of your heart, and pearled With dew at many a melting period When the amethyst lustre of your eyes dissolves The veil that hides your naked splendour From these infirm resolves And halting loves of your poor poets soul With radiance mild and tender, So that I see awhile the golden goal ! Yea ! all your light involves Me, me tenebrous, me too cold and base Ever to kindle to the maiden face (Three years my wife, three years of me unwon !) That w…
1910 · PDF PAGE 15
ROSA COELI 5 IV Your wine-stained and wine-coloured hair unloosing, Mingle your wine-wise breath, Spiritual siren ! with the scent seducing Your body sheds, scarred with the bleeding kisses My tenderness bit in, Like to a lion feeding in wild white wildernesses, My spirit sensible to your skin : Mingle them to a crescent character That shall set shimmering all the parchment fine And send a steam like wine Laden with ecstasy and pain Choral through all the passion-stained and passion- trembling air. Inspire a closer strain Such as strange orchid…
1910 · PDF PAGE 22
12 ROSA COELI Things beyond words, beyond the want of them Beyond the pauses and the ecstasies . . . . Where should my dream get such a diadem Of voiceless thoughts as these ? XII These dreams reform Themselves into a rainbow to the storm Of simple passion ; let me from the string Take many-coloured wing As a swift-thoughted arrow Vertically shot against the sun ! I would you were a sow And these my verses were your squealing farrow, That they might suck the milk of your perfection Unto them, that the worlds ear might be won, The worlds heart…
1910 · PDF PAGE 8
…o Ctesse 115 THE LADDER. To K. M. Ward 117 BELLADONNA. To Dot L 123 THE POET AT BAY. To Wilfred Merton 126 UT. To Allen Bennett 128 ROSA DECIDUA. To Lord Salvesen 130 THE CIRCLE AND THE POINT. To Ouarda the Seer 141 IN MEMORIAM. 142 AD FIDELEM INFIDELEM. To Elaine W K 145 THE SPHINX. To The Sphinx 146 THE JEW OF FEZ. To Winston Churchill 147 THE PENTAGRAM. To George Raffalovich 149 SONG. To Kathleen K 150 AN HYMN. To the Countess of Tankerville 151 PROLOGUE TO RODIN IN RIME. To Kathleen K 153
1910 · PDF PAGE 24
14 ROSA COELI XIV Give me thine hand, Rose of the Stars, and we will soar above Wisdom and Strength and Love, Into the sphere where all delight retires In azure flames and silver-edgéd fires. Now through the veil we shoot Like snaky lightning through a thundercloud Up to the awful precipice-skirted place Where deaf, blind, palsied, mute There sits the leprous God ; we laugh aloud Seeing him face to face, Blowing him like a shaken sheaf of snow With a brief gust of wind Over the cliffs of his ensanguine throne ; Seating ourselves thereon, as men…
1910 · PDF PAGE 12
2 ROSA COELI And azure abyss that blows ; Only the one sun on the steppéd snows ; Only the one star of the sister seven ; Only the one moon in the orchard close In the one hour that unto love is given Of all the hours of bliss ; Only the one joy in a world of woes ; Only the one spark in the storm-cloud riven ; Only the one shaft through the rose-dawn driven, Thy shaft, Eros ! Not as Apollo or as Artemis Loosing gray death from golden thong To slay the poet in a song, The lover in a kiss ; But to divide the inmost marrow With that ensanguine ar…
1910 · PDF PAGE 25
ROSA COELI 15 Laughing upon the laughing lake below, Expectant of some strange experience Worth all the woes of sense, Some drop of nectar worth a world of wine, Some grace of One divine Worth more than all lifes grace, and more than life intense. Was there a wonder if the silken boy Found her a-playing on the bluebell marge And drank from golden vats the wine of joy ; Hot, eager, overcoming in her breath, As she would draw him to those large And firm white breasts and mix her liquid life With his in pagan strife ? Or with a grace like God, a …
1910 · PDF PAGE 14
4 ROSA COELI We radiate love, a velvet-soft complaint, Most like the echo of a chime at vesper Rung far across narcissus-haunted leas, Lilied lagoons, and moon-enchanted seas, By the high-bosomed boy, large-eyed, with fasting faint That shares an hermitage with some devoutest saint. III As, in our life, I passed the awful gate Where like a Cerberus sate The triform silence, Fate, And bade the red blood bloom Within that Palace of untasted gloom ; As, in our life, confronting the black forms Colossal ghosts, like storms ! I did abide in the mo…
1910 · PDF PAGE 21
ROSA COELI 11 I mock with the weak word of wife, I was sucked down into the crater rim, Into the crimson damask dim Candescent cave of night O then I mock myself with words ! They are like cardinal-coloured birds And honey-coloured doves : Yet one thing mortal serves to name another As mortal as itself. Why must our deathless loves Be stained by the black-hearted mother That called things by dead names ? The sunny elf Language shall play with the ethereal flames But never dare approach The central and volcanic fire, The inmost Force, nor, like…
1910 · PDF PAGE 150
140 ROSA DECIDUA Now call me callous ! Pass me, prigs, and sneer At the base soul that could not bear its cross ! I say that infinite loss is infinite loss, That tears are trivial, tears are happiness, That this blind ache is Gods last punishment For love ; that all things in that one thing shent Are damned, that had I loved her less I could have prated in some honeyed strain. Taking a subtle pleasure in my pain. It is my bulk, the mass of my intent, That makes the ruin abject. I had sung Some partial earthquake ; here the universe Crashes wit…
1910 · PDF PAGE 13
ROSA COELI 3 Upon the sepulchres, the dizzy seas Of this my mind, Sabbatic rout that spanned These straits my soul ! Ay, they are dead and drowned (And damned, I doubt !) Ah God ! I am exhaust In the red moons holocaust ! God ! God ! The chasms secret and profound Suck down the porphyry flood Of your maniacal, ensorcelled blood That maddens and bewitches. My life is suffocatednow I swoon I die ! I am in hell, red hell, red hell, Circles me closer ; all the souls afire As if the boreal moon With all the icy Lapland hags That shiver on s hib…
1910 · PDF PAGE 143
ROSA DECIDUA 133 As He is wholly blessing to the wise. This thing invertebrate, this sewer-flood, Compact of treacheries, meannesses, and lies, Horrible thirst, infamous beastliness, Dirt and disease, so sottish wallowing, Yet sensitive to pain so hideous That sometimes he appears all pain, all fear, All hateso slavish, yet so fierce a king, A tyrant to himself, insidious And cunning as some sordid sorceress ; Incapable of action or control, Yet a black gulph to drown so strong a soul ! . . . He lay close curled within my roses heart. There i…
1910 · PDF PAGE 17
ROSA COELI 7 Your hair was like a forest of tall pines In winter ; black strange dwarfs with crooked spines And elfin eyes, and bleating mouths that worked All manner of grimace and bleak derision Bore them away ; hollow-eyed ghosts that lurked About the sea made thereof masts ; they fitted Tall ships and goodly, furrowing the deep To harvest merchandise ; strong and keen-witted The mariners ; oho ! the breezes leap Like lovers on them ; lo ! they fared forth To South, East, West and North, Iceland, the Indies, Sicily, and Spain. . . . Lo ! men…
1910 · PDF PAGE 23
ROSA COELI 13 In silver spirit clad with gold of sense, But sending forth thy rays life-pearled As a bridegroom squandering his strength upon the bride Thou art sufficient to redeem the world. XIII O ! is the secret of the starry deep Nothing but pain and pleasure, grief and joy ? Is God a wanton boy To play with us so bitter cheap By such a jewelled light ? Be thine the power, Rose of the Stars, in this thy tortured hour When the wee lips that clung to thee are cold, To give the world a light of other gold From that men hoard, from that the s…
1910 · PDF PAGE 144
134 ROSA DECIDUA All understanding, that it bleeds again As a corpse should bleed at the murderers touch ! Then, not content, she must needs smutch All my past purifying pain, Turning all life to a thing fouler than Aught yet imaginable to man ! Who asks me for my tears ? She flings the body of my sweet dead child Into my face with hells own epitaph, Profanes that shrine Of infinite love and infinite loss, My empty shrine, the one shrine undefiled, My one close-claspèd cross And hers as much as mine ! Profanes it with a hideous laugh And a l…
1910 · PDF PAGE 19
ROSA COELI 9 X Another time, through tides from chaos rolled I was upborne by this my scarabee With scales like plates of porphyry and gold And wings like flakes of the green light that pours Through the blue heart of the Hawaian sea. So to the hollow shores We came, and did behold a silver avenue That wound through cypress groves and woods of yew Unto the hills ; hideous hyaenas laughed, Mean jackals snarled and screamed, and wild dogs bayed : Bayed at the waning moon that lapsed above Out of all light (had I not been in love, And drunken on t…
1910 · PDF PAGE 20
10 ROSA COELI But when I came between the hills, behold The moons silver and gold Stood in the zenith, that I lost my guide. There stood I passion-pale Like a lost lamb that seeks the starry fold Within that warm and scented vale Clothed with narcissus, hyacinth, tuberose, Snowdrop and lily, all white, all cream, all gold, With never a blush like dawns to flush or fail Upon their garden-close. O wide is the world, wide, wide ! Be sure that I was lost, Lost, lost for ever ; are there palimpsests Wherein a man might study at great cost His jour…
1910 · PDF PAGE 141
ROSA DECIDUA 131 This is no tragedy of little tears. My brain is hard and cold ; there is no beat Of its blood ; there is no heat Of sacred fire upon my lips to sing. My heart is dead ; I say that name thrice over ; Rose !Rose !Rose ! Even as lover should call to lover ; There is no quickening, No flood, no fount that flows ; No water wells from the dead spring. My thoughts come singly, dry, contemptuous, Too cold for hate : all I can say is that they come From some dead sphere without me ; Singly they come, beats of a senseless drum Jarred …