How can I write? I only hear
The sobbing murmur of the sea.
Raphael breathed and bade me pass
His rapt evangel to mankind;
I cannot even match, alas!
The ululation of the wind.
The gross grey gods like gargoyles spit
On every poet’s holy head;
No mustard-seed of truth or wit
In those curst furrows, quick or dead!
A tithe of what I know would cleanse
The leprosy of earth; and I –
My limits are like other men’s.
I must live dumb, and dumb must die!
Since my full moon first broke from angel spheres!A year of infinite love unwearying —No circling seasons, but perennial spring!A year of triumph trampling through defeat,The first made holy and the last made sweetBy this same love; a year of wealth and woe,Joy, poverty, health, sickness — all one glowIn the pure light that filled…
Maid miraculously male,Rapture of thine own excessBlushing through the velvet veilWhere the olive cheeks aglowShadow-soften into snow,Breasts like Bacchanals afloatUnder the proudly phallic throat!Be thou to my pilgrimageLight, and laughter sweet and sage,Till the darkling day expireOf my life in thy caress,Thou my frenzy and my fire,Lamp of living loveliness!Thou the ruler of the rodThat…
At last an end of all I hoped and feared!Muttered the hermit through his elfin beard.Then what art thou? the evil whisper whirred.I doubt me soerly if the hermit heard.To all God’s questions never a word he said,But simply shook his venerable head.God sent all plagues; he laughed and heeded not,Till people certified him insane.But…
Nature might findIn her inheritanceThe seedlings of a raceLess infinitely base.
Down crashed upon an immobileAnd brainless barrier of ice.Courage!The grey gods shoot a laughing lip: –Let not faith founder with the ship!We reel before the blows of fate;Our stout souls stagger at the shock.Oh! there is Something ultimateFixed faster than the living rock.Courage!Catastrophe beyond beliefHarden our hearts to fear and grief!The gods upon the Titans…
To the domes of the star-girdled Seven, the abode ofineffable things,Quintessence of joy and of strength, that, abolishingfuture and past,Mak’st the Present an infinite length, my soul all-Onewith the Vast,The Lone, the Unnameable God, that is ice of Hismeasureless cold,Without being or form or abode, without motion ormatter, the foldWhere the shepherded Universe sleeps, with…
