Dark Poetry

"The Hound of Heaven"

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat--and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet--
"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."

I pleaded, outlaw-wise,
By many a hearted casement, curtained red,
Trellised with intertwining charities
(For, though I knew His love Who followed,
Yet was I sore adread
Lest having Him, I must have naught beside);
But if one little casement parted wide,
The gust of His approach would clash it to.
Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars;
Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.
I said to dawn, Be sudden; to eve, Be soon;
With thy young skyey blossoms heap me over
From this tremendous Lover!
Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!
I tempted all His servitors, but to find
My own betrayal in their constancy,
In faith to Him their fickleness to me,
Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
The long savannahs of the blue;
Or whether, Thunder-driven,
They clanged his chariot 'thwart a heaven
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet--
Still with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
Came on the following Feet,
And a Voice above their beat--
"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."

I sought no more that after which I strayed
In face of man or maid;
But still within the little children's eyes
Seems something, something that replies;
They at least are for me, surely for me!
I turned me to them very wistfully;
But, just as their young eyes grew sudden fair
With dawning answers there,
Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.
"Come then, ye other children, Nature's--share
With me," said I, "your delicate fellowship;
Let me greet you lip to lip,
Let me twine with you caresses,
Wantoning
With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses'
Banqueting
With her in her wind-walled palace,
Underneath her azured daïs,
Quaffing, as your taintless way is,
From a chalice
Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring."
So it was done;
I in their delicate fellowship was one--
Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies.
I knew all the swift importings
On the wilful face of skies;
I knew how the clouds arise
Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings;
All that's born or dies
Rose and drooped with--made them shapers
Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine--
With them joyed and was bereaven.
I was heavy with the even,
When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the day's dead sanctities.
I laughed in the morning's eyes.
I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,
Heaven and I wept together,
And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine;
Against the red throb of its sunset-heart
I laid my own to beat,
And share commingling heat;
But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.
In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's gray cheek.
For ah! we know not what each other says,
These things and I; in sound I speak--
Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.
Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;
Let her, if she would owe me,
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
The breasts of her tenderness;
Never did any milk of hers once bless
My thirsting mouth.
Nigh and nigh draws the chase,
With unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy;
And past those noisèd Feet
A voice comes yet more fleet--
"Lo naught contents thee, who content'st not Me."

Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
And smitten me to my knee;
I am defenseless utterly.
I slept, methinks, and woke,
And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years--
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
Yea, faileth now even dream
The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist;
Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist
I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,
Are yielding; cords of all too weak account
For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed.
Ah! is Thy love indeed
A weed, albeit amaranthine weed,
Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?
Ah! must--
Designer infinite!--
Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?
My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust;
And now my heart is a broken fount,
Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
From the dank thoughts that shiver
Upon the sighful branches of my mind.
Such is; what is to be?
The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?
I dimly guess what Time in mist confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity;
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.
But not ere him who summoneth
I first have seen, enwound
With blooming robes, purpureal, cypress-crowned;
His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.
Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields
Be dunged with rotten death?

Now of that long pursuit
Comes on at hand the bruit;
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
"And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard?
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!
Strange, piteous, futile thing,
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught," He said,
"And human love needs human meriting,
How hast thou merited--
Of all man's clotted clay rhe dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms.
But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for the at home;
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!"

Halts by me that footfall;
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstreched caressingly?
"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me."

Francis Thompson (1859-1907)
 
Night Voices

Why should you have to live?
We don’t.
Why should you have to suffer?
We don’t.
Why shouldn’t you have to die?
We did.

- Thomas Ligotti
 
teguififthzeal said:
"The Hound of Heaven"

Francis Thompson (1859-1907)
Click to expand...

That's a grand poem, thanks for introducing Thompson. I am almost embarrassed I'd never heard of him. His life has strange similarities to Thomas De Quincey's, the opium addiction, the poverty and homelessness, the prostitute that saved him and then disappeared..it is almost uncanny. But ultimately and compared to Thompson, De Quincy was very fortunate.
 
O for a soul outstripping Samson's might
As the great sun outstrips the strengthless stars!
Then not the puny temples of the earth
Would I demolish in my giant spite.
Gods! could I grasp the pillars of the world
Within the circuit of my hate-strong arms
Into the infernal fires that leap beneath
I'd spurn this rounded infamy of fate,
Blow out the stars, spit out the sun itself,
And trample e'en the darkness into dust!
-- The Hate Titanic, Lewis Spence
 
SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES

By Siegfried Sassoon

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
 
"Absence" by Joel Lane

By the pervading dawn I knew the long night past,
Yet dared not prove in truth the dream's deception fled
Back to the vaults of memory; I had dreamed you dead,
Had almost seen it, erewhile, in the sky overcast,
The sickly shadows swallowed by the mist at the last,
The moribund evening and the clouds bleeding red.
The night wind snatched away the purple blooms that bled
Peace on my eyelids, and my bares eyes stared aghast
Into the pearl of a pale, painful world of day
Where daylight's living colours all had leached away
Into the weaveless fabric of night's sombre shade;
And your eyes were dull; unstirring, your lips were grey;
Then the cold rain fell hard like a sharp-edged blade
Upon my bent neck as I knelt alone and prayed.
 
A Dirge

BY THOMAS JAMES MERTON

Some one who hears the bugle neigh will know
How cold it is when sentries die by starlight.

But none who love to hear the hammering drum
Will look, when the betrayer
Laughs in the desert like a broken monument,
Ringing his tongue in the red bell of his head,
Gesturing like a flag.

The air that quivered after the earthquake
(When God died like a thief)
Still plays the ancient forums like pianos;
The treacherous wind, lover of the demented,
Will harp forever in the haunted temples.

What speeches do the birds make
With their beaks, to the desolate dead?
And yet we love those carsick amphitheaters,
Nor hear our Messenger come home from hell
With hands shot full of blood.

No one who loves the fleering fife will feel
The light of morning stab his flesh,
But some who hear the trumpet’s raving, in the ruined sky,
Will dread the burnished helmet of the sun,
Whose anger goes before the King.
 
to Valentina Serova


That's how we live, without forgetting,
Today it's him, tomorrow I.
The cup of death goes round the table
And each must wait his turn to die.
If I am blind to how you treat me.
It's not because I cannot see.
It is because, around the table,
The cup comes round again towards me!


--Konstantin Simonov
 
long ago i translated this:

"the Desperado (de Nerval)"

I am the bereaved, the widower, the shadowy,
the Cathar prince of the devastated citadel:
My guiding star is snuffed, my galactic lute
carries Melancholy's sable pentacle.

You who consoled me in the dark of the sepulcher,
give me back Posilipo & the Mediterranean,
the fragrance that enchanted my sere despair,
& that arbor where the rose & grape are intimate.

am I Cupid or Apollo?....Poe or Byron?
the kiss of some dread queen still becrimsons my brow;
I have dreamed in the grotto where the siren plashes...
& twice have I crossed Acheron victorious:

practicing in turn on the lyre of Orpheus
moans of a mystic, sobs of a dying elf.


Cyril Tourneur said:
Je suis le Ténébreux, - le Veuf, - l'Inconsolé,
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la Tour abolie :
Ma seule Etoile est morte, - et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.
Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m'as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d'Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé,
Et la treille où le Pampre à la Rose s'allie.
Suis-je Amour ou Phébus ?... Lusignan ou Biron ?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine ;
J'ai rêvé dans la Grotte où nage la sirène...
Et j'ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l'Achéron :
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d'Orphée
Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la Fée.​
Click to expand...
 
Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

-Christina Rossetti
 
“Seht Ihr” by Robert Walser (1909), trans. Daniele Pantano (2012)

You do see me crossing the meadow
stiff and dead from the mist?
I long for that home,
that home I’ve never had,
and without any hope
that I’ll ever be able to reach it.
For such a home, never touched,
I carry that longing that will
never die, like that meadow dies
stiff and dead from the mist.
You do see me crossing it, full of dread?
 
The Music of the Yellow Moon




The children hop and eat pigeons,

clowning moonlit in their funeral linens.

A Little Drummer Boy huddles in pale

ash mortar handstanding toward a lost star,

his Way gone. Their choral reeds burn stink,

rotting heaven's rumor of gold and mink.

A flame spree of screams ring from burnt

tongues, their small feet storming

our amputee grounds. A single mower

moves left toward the hobby horses.

In ash colonies drudgery, suicide brick,

they scatter, names blurs rented for pain;

"Where are we? Where have they gone?"

belches the sobbing, collective moan.

Look not toward me, child.

Or better, stay: hear my long,

cancerous groan.
 
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The Circus

One day, you will go to the circus. Not a circus with clowns or trapeze artists. No side shows or dancing horses. There will be no performers. Or, more properly, you will be the only performer, even as you sit in the deserted bleachers waiting for the show to begin.

One day, you will go to the circus. A chill breeze from infinitely far away will blow through a fluttering tent flap while circulating shadows congregate in the peaks where the tall poles disappear beyond all light. Your apprehension will grow.

One day, you will go to the circus. You will wonder what has become of the jugglers, animal acts, and acrobats. As the cold wind gusts over the roof of the tent, the fabric thudding ominously, you will wonder what is outside. You will wonder if there is anything.

One day, you will go to the circus. You will wonder how the constant, ever-blowing wind does not begin to tear through the big top. The thought will come to you, I should leave, go home. Find some place, any place familiar. But you won't. You can't.

One day, you will go to the circus. And the circus, though seeming never to have begun, will, in reality, never end. You will realize there is nothing outside and that you are alone and will forever remain that way. The shadows far above you will draw closer, whispering. Hear them whisper even now

One day, you will go to the circus. You will go to the circus.
 
Indirect Animal
The teeth clenched tight in expectancy of the blow,
the eyelids shut in anticipation of debris,
the nasal openings dilated to await the air's madness,
the ears full blush expecting some unknown velocity,
the skin wrinkled in fear beyond the doubt of chance...
But wait!
What is this face, but a thin, pallid mask of shallow memories?
The nails dig deep into the palms as gravity takes its weight
in the final collapse.
 
For serious lovers of weird poetry, Joshi's Spectral Realms is a handsome journal that publishes new and vintage pieces by some very fine writers. Go to the Hippocampus site and you'll see the list of authors in each volume. Joshi may sell some at discount price from his blog but you'll have to check that out...
Of course, I'm hardly an objective reviewer--I love this stuff!-- but I suspect enthusiasts of the fantastic in verse may find much to like here.
 
"Darkness Starts" by Christian Wiman

A shadow in the shape of a house
slides out of a house
and loses its shape on the lawn.

Trees seek each other
as the wind within them dies.

Darkness starts inside of things
but keeps on going when the things are gone.

Barefoot careless in the farthest parts of the yard
children become their cries.

-- From Hard Night (2005)


 
"In Love with Raymond Chandler" by Margaret Atwood

An affair with Raymond Chandler, what a joy! Not because of the mangled bodies and
​
the marinated cops and hints of eccentric sex, but because of his interest in furniture. He
knew that furniture could breathe, could feel, not as we do but in a way more muffled,
like the word upholstery, with its overtones of mustiness and dust, its bouquet of
sunlight on aging cloth or of scuffed leather on the backs and seats of sleazy office
chairs. I think of his sofas, stuffed to roundness, satin-covered, pale blue like the eyes of his
cold blond unbodied murderous women, beating very slowly, like the hearts of
hibernating crocodiles; of his chaises longues, with their malicious pillows. He knew
about front lawns too, and greenhouses, and the interiors of cars.
This is how our love affair would go. We would meet at a hotel, or a motel,
whether expensive or cheap it wouldn't matter. We would enter the room, lock the door,
and begin to explore the furniture, fingering the curtains, running our hands along the
spurious gilt frames of the pictures, over the real marble or the chipped enamel of the
luxurious or tacky washroom sink, inhaling the odor of the carpets, old cigarette smoke
and spilled gin and fast meaningless sex or else the rich abstract scent of the oval
transparent soaps imported from England, it wouldn't matter to us; what would matter
would be our response to the furniture, and the furniture's response to us. Only after we
had sniffed, fingered, rubbed, rolled on, and absorbed the furniture of the room would
we fall into each other's arms, and onto the bed (king-size? peach-colored? creaky?
narrow? four-posted? pioneer-quilted? lime-green chenille-covered?), ready at last to do
the same things to each other.
 
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