II THE SONG OF TEL THE NUBIAN
Small dazzling face!
I shut you in my soul;
How can I perish now?
But thence a strange decay—
Your fragile gleaming wrists
Waver my days and shake my life
To golden tremors. I have no life at all,
Only thin golden tremors
That shudder over the abyss of days
Which hedged my spirit, my spirit your prison walls
That shrunk like phantasms with your vivid beauty—
Towering and widening till
The sad moonless place
Throngs with a million torches
And spears of flaming wings.
III THE TOWER OF SKULLS
Mourners
These layers of piled-up skulls,
These layers of gleaming horror—stark horror!
Ah me! Through my thin hands they touch my eyes.
Everywhere, everywhere is a pregnant birth,
And here in death’s land is a pregnant birth.
Your own crying is less mortal
Than the amazing soul in your body.
Your own crying yon parrot takes up
And from your empty skull cries it afterwards.
Thou whose dark activities unenchanted
Days from gyrating days, suspending them
To thrust them far from sight, from the gyrating days
Which have gone widening on and left us here,
Cast derelicts lost for ever.
When aged flesh looks down on tender brood;
For he knows between his thin ribs’ walls
The giant universe, the interminable
Panorama—synods, myths and creeds,
He knows his dust is fire and seed.