Читать книгу Spider-webs in Verse: A Collection of Lyrics for Leisure Moments, Spun at Idle Hours - Charles William Wallace - Страница 40

Table of Contents

In the depths of my ink bottle,

With a fiery gleaming throttle

Stood a fierce and ghoulish demon all the day;

And the murky ink was lighted

With a fiendish fire that blighted

Every sprite of good that on its bosom lay.

And my pen, from Love’s own quiver,

Wrought of gold, began to shiver

With a fearful quaking terror born of death

As I touched the hellish-lighted

Surface of the Ink that frighted

Pluto’s self and stole Persephone’s sweet breath.

Hour after fearful hour

Stood that blasting, fiendish power

In whose grasp my golden pen was ground to dust.

Oh, the wasting, endless season

Chilling heart and killing reason

As the gloating demon glutted full his lust!

“Golden Pen that Love had given,

Wrought of gold from my heart riven,

Thus my palsied, broken heart must bury thee

In the fiendish ink, made blacker

By the demon’s fiery lacquer

On the surface of its dark uncertainty.”

Then a shadow came before me

And a loathing sickness o’er me

As the demon sank below and out of sight;

For I saw a stream of gold

That the demon could not hold

To the bottom of the darkness drip its light.

Then I knew that never, never

Would Love’s gold-illumined quiver

Bind again the shaft the demon could not hold;

For I saw a radiance shining

’Round the place, and angels twining

Strange and all-eternal Beauty of the gold!

Darkness reigned then, deep, unlighted,

Silence sitting near, half-frighted

By the demon’s disappointed distant wail

And far-off mingled angel voices

Tuned to music that rejoices

In the glory of a love that cannot fail.

Morning?—Thank God that all our seeing

And our seeming is not being!

Dear wife, let your warm cheek still against mine lie

While your loving arms and kisses

Doubly tell what loving bliss is.—

Warning:—Before you go to bed, don’t eat mince pie!