.
Ah longing, like a pariah bare,
And passion, led by lewd despair
To kiss the smelling jowl of death!

As in a sunless cavern cold,
Like one who flies a crime,
Fearful, and old as God is old,
The spirit shrank from time;
For a stifled scream was the angry gold
Of the weird sunset, and the noonday bold
Was the stare on the face of a crime.

I saw as brain-blurred drunkards see;
I felt, yet could not feel;
I seemed in moving time to be
In nerveless immobility
As dust upon a wheel.

Some world material moved around,
Mazed breadths of spume and brine;
Strange voices spake as from a bound
Far off, I answered with a sound,
Nor knew the answer mine;
And sometimes like a weary hound
I heard the darkness whine.

In throbbing night 'twixt sleep and sleep
My tortured spirit heard
A wail that wandered down the deep,
A sorrow on the windy deep
Wail like a wounded bird;
And I wept as a haunted man doth weep
Who dare not speak a word.

Sometimes I sensed heaven's bellied gloom,
Storm like dumb and pregnant doom
Scowl on the waters wild;
Or tempest 'neath a plunging sky
Down crashing waves with haunting cry
Scream like a tortured child;

A blind thing staggering in the night
Strained, groaning, 'gainst a pervious power
That flashed and eddied, wild and white,
That wheeled and wailed from hour to hour;
And, somewhere, strangely burned to sight
Dawn like a doom a-flower ...

On ever onward, darkly driven,
A soul, unsheltered, and unshriven,
With lodestar gone, with raiment riven,
Drove in the gale of the wrath of Heaven ...

The monsoon blew; the changing stars
Rode by in deeper skies.
At times between the raking spars
I felt the blank moon rise;
Or heard the chanties of the tars
With a sad, sick surprise.

And once a heaven, the sapphire's hue,
Flashed o'er the freshening wave;
They hurt the heart as laughers do
When love stands by a grave.

And now a level ocean grey
Would lie along a level day,
Unwhipt of wing or wind;
Or sunset make a carmine stain
That sucked like sadness at the brain,
And sank into the mind,
And touched me with some wandering pain,
Some sentience of mankind again.

... And whe