NOW fogs enfold the sea
And berries fall from eaves,
The cat’s eyes glitter green into the dark.
The sloping hills of myrrh,
The trees with tender anise overweighed,
The pointed flag-leaves stir
Only to weep again,
Only to sob and mourn Adonis dead.
Throughout this dolorous night of cloudy jade
Even the hornless dragon of the sea,
The green and golden sequined basilisk,
The water-scorpion and the python-king
Like sad eclipses trail about the land.
The crane, the ibis and the mango-bird,
The jungle-fowl, the heron and the roc,
The badger and three-footed tortoise join
In pouring out their eyes.
O Cypris violet-stoled, O wrapped in purple woof
Arise and beat your azure-veined breasts!
Small jewelled nipples, bleed!
For I have seen you make that curved mouth
A bed of balsam, bed of crisp lush flowers,
Whose poor crushed frozen lips compactly closed
Lie, flakes of ice, where once were flakes of fire,
Their loveliness a thing of agony.
The moon has slanted off, and querulous ghosts
Hover along the brink of treacherous voids
And leap into this night of blinded eyes
(Blind now to pleasure’s lapping ecstasies);
This peacock-throated night whose stifling cries
Shudder and crack: ’tis Misery who calls
“Woe” to the black solemnities of sky
For loveliest Adonis—he is dead.
Low on the hills he lies, the lovely bleeding one,
His throat aflash with faint stunned strands of light.
Low on the hills he lies and breathes his life away
And from his thigh of milk-white agate gashed,
Slit by the cruel tusk,
The ruby blood drips down his skin of snow.
Beneath his brows stars set in crystal deep
(Once memories, hungers glinted in their pools),
Are glazed dim, opaque and lustreless,
The blue orbs burn no more beneath translucent lids.
His locks are wet with the clear drops of night,
The rose has fled his lip: the very kiss hangs dead,
The kiss that Cypris never will forego.
And when the bitter white wind breaks the morn,
His gathered hounds bay gloom about his corpse,
The green-haired Nereids of the marsh make moan,
Frail flowers dabble pollened cheeks with tears,
From vavicel to calyx petals weep....
Long spiral tufts of drooping galingale,
The shadowy deer-grass and the swallow-wort
Sob through their bat’s wing tissues tremulous,
The poplars weeping amber in the vales,
The orchises and sandal-trees, lament.
But Aphrodite with unbraided hair
And tragic thorn-pierced feet so delicate,
Calls through the woodlands and again, again.
O, more than music’s many stringèd charms,
His lulling name reverberates afar
Where faint sails clasp the ribbands of the sea.
But round his navel leaps the thick dark blood,
His chest is lapped in scarlet from the thighs,
Now purpled are those limbs afore as white
As veils of snow unflecked by merest breeze.
Cypris was fair: whilst her Adonis lived
The light would melt her body into song,
But with Adonis has her beauty died,
Died as a vaporous melody on a lute.
“Woe, woe, for Cypris!” all the mountains call,
The oak-trees answer: “For Adonis, woe!”
For Aphrodite all the rivers weep,
The wells bewail Adonis on the hills.
Echo resounds “Ai, ai ... Adonis dead ...
Most beautiful Adonis ... he is dead.”
As Venus saw the wasting limbs, the wound
Gashed in the whiteness of her loved one’s thighs,
She clasped him to her, moaning supply warm
Against his chilled inertness:
“Farewell, Adonis; once, as I was telling
Deluding tales of happiness, the morrow,
When I had thought that joy had come for dwelling,
Came sorrow.
“The almoner of death, the silent creeper,
Has snared my love, and I shall see him never,
I, manacled in miseries, a weeper
For ever.
“A widowed goddess with her beauty setting
Like a gold sun to rise no longer, never,
Whose love, with Acheron, is fast forgetting
Her for ever.”
For each blood drop the Paphian sheds a tear,
And tears and blood on earth are turned to flowers:
The ruby blood brings forth the pursy rose,
The tears bring forth the air-white wind-flower,
For loveliest Adonis—he is dead.
No seemly couch, this lonely bed of leaves
For dead Adonis: beautiful in death
As one that stumbles on a slumber, falls
On downy-wingèd doze of braided air.
Your bed let him possess, O Cytherea,
Lay him to sleep on couch of twisted gold,
The couch that yearns for wan Adonis’ limbs.
Cast on him drooping eyes of jasmine-flowers,
Nay, all the flowers have faded in his death,
As keen swift lovely murmurs drowned on breeze.
Sprinkle his limbs with bakkaris and myrrh,
Nay, perished all the perfumes in his death,
All flushed soft legendary scents dissolve—
Disquieting erotic memories.
The torches on the lintel all are quenched
And Hymenæus rends the bridal crown.
No more the song is “Hymen”: a new song
The Graces grieve like mournful Autumn boughs,
The toneless sound that means a broken heart:
“Woe, for Adonis, son of Cinyrus!”
To him the Muses chant their starry music,
And painted insects floating motionless
At their weird sound, unconscious of the day,
Bright feathered wings hung in the gloom of thought
Mimic the melancholy atmosphere
And dry words start and rattle in the throat,
Shudder in sorrow; but he does not heed.
The bending vault of stars,
Of cool green quiet stars,
Where clouds but catch the palest tinge of day,
Is tangled with the sea;
The moonlight tossed and thrown by jostling waves
Refrain from dirges, cease,
O Cypris, your lament.
Again you must bewail another year!