u/KaiserGoji

a short collection by BASIL BACCHUS or ADAM ASTRUM

♄ 🌜︎🌞︎🌛︎ ♄

LITTLE SUNSHINE

Little Sunshine,
Cloaked in a deep blue,

The moral of the starry night is:
Be thine and be true!

☙🌜︎✧🌛︎❧

Parting, they'd seem’d to tread upon the air,
Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart
Maybe to meet again more close, and share
The inward fragrance of each other’s heart.
He, to his chamber gone, a ditty fair
Sang, of delicious love and honey’d dart;
She, with light steps, went up a western hill,
And bade the sun farewell, and joy’d her fill.

Soon she turn’d up a drying pen, which had
Written her into purple phantasies,
She kiss’d it with a lip more chill than stone,
And put it in her bosom, where it dries
And freezes utterly unto the bone
Those dainties made to still an infant’s cries:
Then ’gan she work again; nor stay’d her care,
But to throw back at times her veiling hair.

And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
Hung over her sweet Basil evermore,
And moisten’d it with tears unto the core.

And, furthermore, her brethren wonder’d much
Why she sat drooping by the Basil green,
And why it flourish’d, as by magic touch;
Greatly they wonder’d what the thing might mean:
They could not surely give belief, that such
A very nothing would have power to wean
Her from her own fair youth, and pleasures gay,
And even remembrance of her love’s delay.

☙🌜︎✧🌛︎❧

One from a lucid urn of starry dew
Wash'd his light limbs as if embalming them;
She then clipp'd her profuse locks, and threw
The wreath upon him, like an anadem,
Which twelve cold tears instead of pearls begem;
Then later in her wilful grief would break
Her bow and winged reeds, as if to stem
A greater loss with one which was more weak;
And dull the barbed fire against his frozen cheek.

The leporine corpse, touch'd by this spirit tender,
Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath;
Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour
Is chang'd to fragrance, they illumine death
And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath;
Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows
Be as a sword consum'd before the sheath
By sightless lightning? — the intense Adam glows
A moment, then is quench'd in a most cold repose.

 "The sun came forth, and many reptiles spawned;
He set, and each ephemeral insect then
Was gather'd into death without a dawn,
And the immortal stars awoke again;
So is it in the world of living men:
A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight
Making earth bare and veiling heaven, and when
It sinks, the swarms that dimm'd or shar'd its light
Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit's awful night."

Thus ceas'd she: and the mountain shepherds came,
Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent;
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow; to her wilds he had sent
The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,
And Love taught Grief to fall like music from his tongue.

 The splendours of the firmament of time
May be eclips'd, but are extinguish'd not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

 The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, hearth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.— Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!— Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, weak in
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

And she with trembling hands clasps his cold head,
And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries,
"Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead;
See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes,
Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies
A tear some Dream has loosen'd from his brain."
Lost Angel of a ruin'd Paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain
She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.

The breath whose might I have invok'd in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Natalie, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are,

Borne back ceaselessly into future past.

☙🌜︎✧🌛︎❧

TWO ECLIPSES ACROSS LITTLE EGYPT

Here I sat, waiting, waiting — and all for naught!
Beyond all good and evil, within light’s lot

In love with what soon were shadows, only play
Only lake, only moon, only time delayed,

Then, O, my dear starfriend cleaved time into twain
— Just like my accursed lip, that precious bane!

Therein the sky shalt she a star ever remain …

♄ 🌜︎🌞︎🌛︎ ♄