A Political Poem
The vision of a rock where lightnings whirl’d
Bruising the darkness with their crackling light;
The waves, enormous wanderers of the world,
Beat on it with their hammers day and night.
Two figures crouching on the black rock, bound
To one another with a coiling chain;
A grey-haired youth, whose cheeks had never found,
Or long ere this had lost their ruddy stain;
A sibyl, with fierce face as of a hound
That dreams. She moveth, feeling in her brain
The lightnings pulse—behold her, aye behold—
Ignoble joy, and more ignoble pain
Cramm’d all her youth; and hates have bought and sold
Her spirit. As she moves, the foam-globes burst
Over her spotted flesh and flying hair
And her gigantic limbs. The weary thirst
Unquenchable still glows in her dull stare,
As round her, slow on feet that have no blood,
The phantoms of her faded pleasures walk;
And trailing crimson vans, a mumbling brood,
Ghosts of her vanished glories, muse and stalk
About the sea. Before her lies that youth,
Worn with long struggles; and the waves have sung
Their passion and their restlessness and ruth
Through his sad soul for ever old and young,
Till their fierce miseries within his eyes
Have lit lone tapers. Now the night was cast,
Making all one o’er rock and sea and skies;
And when once more the lightning Genii passed,
Strewing upon the rocks their steel-blue hair,
I saw him stagger with the clanking chain,
Trailing and shining ’neath the flickering glare.
With little cries of joy he kissed the rain
In creviced rocks, and laughed to the old sea,
And, nodding to and fro, sang songs of love,
And flowers and little children. Suddenly
Dropt down the velvet darkness from above,
Hiding away the ocean’s yelping flocks.
When flash on flash once more the lightning came,
The youth had flung his arms around the rocks,
And in the sibyl’s eyes a languid flame
Was moving. Bleeding now, his grasp unlocks,
And he is dragged again before her feet.
Why not? He is her own; and crouching nigh
Bending her face o’er his, she watches meet
And part his foaming mouth with eager eye—
To place a kiss of fire on the dim brow
Of Failure, and to crown her crownless head,
That all men evermore may humbly bow
Down to the mother of the foiled and dead.
For this did the Eternal Darkness bring
Thither thy dust, and knead it with a cry,
Gathered on her own lips, Oh youth, and fling
Failure for glory down on thee, and mould
Thy withered foe, and with the purple wing
Of ocean fan thee into life, and fold
For ever round thy waking and thy sleep
The darkness of the whirlwind shattered deep.