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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
A CONCORDANCE TO THE POETRY
OF DONALD WANDREI
Compiled by Phillip A. Ellis
Hippocampus Press
—————————
New York
Introduction
copyright © 2008 by Phillip A. Ellis
Published by Hippocampus Press
P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156.
www.hippocampuspress.com
Text copyright © 2008 Harold Hughesdon.
Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos.
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any
means without the written permission of the publisher.
ISBN13: 978-0-9814888-2-0
First Edition
135798642
CONTENTS
Introduction............................................................................................ 7
Schedule................................................................................................. 9
A ...................................................................................................... 13
B....................................................................................................... 60
C....................................................................................................... 80
D ...................................................................................................... 95
E..................................................................................................... 115
F ..................................................................................................... 126
G .................................................................................................... 149
H .................................................................................................... 160
I ...................................................................................................... 178
J...................................................................................................... 206
K .................................................................................................... 208
L..................................................................................................... 211
M.................................................................................................... 229
N .................................................................................................... 250
O .................................................................................................... 261
P ..................................................................................................... 286
Q .................................................................................................... 299
R..................................................................................................... 300
S ..................................................................................................... 310
T..................................................................................................... 349
U .................................................................................................... 409
V .................................................................................................... 414
W.................................................................................................... 418
Y .................................................................................................... 452
Index of Poem Titles.......................................................................... 459
INTRODUCTION
Donald Wandrei is not much remembered as a poet, now. That he was a poet of
beauty and decadence, that he was among the most skilled poets in H. P.
Lovecraft’s circle of friends and writing associates, and that he has been unjustly
neglected as a result of his failure to follow Twentieth Century artistic trends, or
to be a member of its leading circles, are points that few scholars and critics of
weird literature can deny.
The problem with Wandrei is that, thematically, at least, he was a
throwback to the late Nineteenth Century. He was a poet, as mentioned, of
decadence, but he was also a poet of horrific fantasy. His Sonnets of the Midnight
Hours stands in the front ranks of weird verse, surpassed only by the best of
Clark Ashton Smith, and, some would argue, surpassing even the best of
Lovecraft. Technically, too, he can be considered a throwback, and this can be
seen occasionally in his diction, but, whilst his formalist tendencies were out of
favour in an age of vers libre, he was likewise out of temper with the mid-century
American formalists, for the most part.
Serious poets did not write horror.
Besides these caveats, there is reason to read Wandrei, as there is to read
Lovecraft and Smith. All three were poets with a keen sense of the delicacies of
English poetry, even when such could be expressed robustly, and earnestly.
Wandrei is not a poet of the masses, like Kipling, or Lawson, nor is he a poet of
the elite. He plays a part similar to Victor Daley’s: he is the great imaginitive
dreamer in a mundane world. And that is grounds enough for the world’s
ignorance, perhaps, of his work.
Usually, only the greater poets receive the dignity of a concordance. A
concordance lends the work dignity, states its importance. Why, then, has
Wandrei deserved such a concordance, if he is so ignored? That the ignorance is
unjust, undeserved, is my argument. Wandrei is a fine, if minor poet. And it is with
the primary aim of stimulating a close examination of the poems of Wandrei, and
their language particularly, that this concordance has been created.
It is with this hope that I now present my labours, a modest work that
collects the majority of Wandrei’s extant poems. I have started, I hope, this
critical process: it is to myself and others that I look to, to fulfil the promise that
this concordance offers.
Briefly, the concordance is organised alphabetically by the language actually
used in the poems. Each entry consists usually of the headword, followed by one or
more lines of poetry; the headword is italicised in each line, and a key, consisting
of a number assigned to each poem followed by the line number, completes each
entry. The poems are listed in numerical order after this introduction, and they
consist of the bulk of all extant poems.
8
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
The text used for the poems is that of the Hippocampus Press edition,
Sanctity and Sin. This is currently the most available edition of Wandrei’s poems,
although it neglects the earlier Necronomicon Press edition of Wandrei’s
Collected Poems.
As with any such venture, there have been debts of gratitude, and for
services rendered. I would like to acknowledge the work and advice of S. T.
Joshi, David E. Schultz, Ben Szumskyj, Martin Andersson, and, particularly,
Derrick Hussey. The latter has been particularly patient with me, and without
his support and enthusiasm this project may have languished for far longer than
it has. I would, lastly, like to take this opportunity to thank Dr William Wright,
for keeping me sane during the process of compiling this concordance.
A CONCORDANCE TO THE POETRY OF
DONALD WANDREI
SCHEDULE
Ecstasy and Other Poems
001
002
003
004
005
006
007
008
009
010
011
012
013
014
015
016
017
018
019
020
021
022
023
024
025
026
027
028
029
030
The Voice of Beauty
The Song of Autumn
Ecstasy
Let us Love To-night
Vain Warning
On some Drawings
Sanctity and Sin
To Myrrhiline
The Song of Oblivion
In Madrikor
The Woodland Pool
Death and the Poet: a Fragment
Satiation
In Memoriam: George Sterling
Bacchanalia
Awakening
Red
Hermaphroditus
Aphrodite
Amphitrite
Philomela
A Drinking Song
At the Bacchic Revel
The Challenger
The Greatest Regret
Futility
From the Shadowlands of Memory
The Poet’s Language
Nightmare
Valerian
Dark Odyssey
031
032
033
Largo
Aubade
Fata Morgana
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
10
034
035
036
037
038
039
040
041
042
043
044
045
046
047
048
049
050
051
052
Borealis
In Memoriam: No Name
Dark Odyssey
Look Homeward, Angel
Under the Grass
You will Come back
After Bacchus, Eros
To Lucasta on her Birthday
Villanelle à la Mode
For the Perishing Aphrodite
Morning Song
The Whispering Knoll
The Five Lords
Lost Atlantis
The Plague Ship
The Voyagers’ Return to Tyre
Chaos Resolved
Epithalamium
Epilude
Poems for Midnight
053
054
055
056
057
058
059
060
061
062
063
064
065
066
067
068
069
Phantom
The Corpse Speaks
The Woman at the Window
Shadowy Night
The Worm-King
Incubus
The Prehistoric Huntsman
Water Sprite
Witches’ Sabbath
Forest Shapes
The Dream that Dies
The Sleeper
The Moon-Glen Altar
The Morning of a Nymph
Death and the Traveler: a Fragment
Ishmael: I
II
Sonnets of the Midnight Hours
070
071
072
073
074
075
After Sleep
Purple
The Old Companions
The Head
In the Attic
The Cocoon
Schedule
076
077
078
079
080
081
082
083
084
085
086
087
088
089
090
091
092
093
094
095
096
The Metal God
The Little Creature
The Pool
The Prey
The Torturers
The Statues
The Hungry Flowers
The Eye
The Rack
Escape
Capture
In the Pit
The Unknown Color
Monstrous Form
Nightmare in Green
What Followed me?
Fantastic Sculpture
The Tree
The Bell
The Ultimate Vision
Somewhere Past Ispahan
Collected Poems
Poems from Broken Mirrors
097
098
099
100
101
102
Fling Wide the Roses
Drink!
The Dead Mistress
My Lady Hath Two Lovely Lips
Aftermath
Credo
Sonnets of the Midnight Hours
103
104
105
106
107
108
Dream-Horror
The Grip of Evil Dreams
The Creatures
The Red Specter
Doom
Chant to the Dead
Moon Magic
109
110
111
112
The Glow
The Song
The Overtone
The Dream
11
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
12
Dead Fruit of the Fugitive Years
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
The Dream Changes
Surrender
Though all my Days
The Second Beauty
Twice Excellent Perfection
This Larger Room
The Woman Answers
The Deadly Calm
Corroding Acids
With Cat-like Tread
Lyrics of Doubt
123
124
A Testament of Desertion
To the God of my Fathers
125
126
127
128
129
Marmora
The Cypress-Bog
A Queen in Other Skies
Epitaph to a Lady
Portrait of a Lady During a Half Hour Wait while she Finished
Dressing
The Little Gods Wait
Solitary
Lines
I am Man
Golden Poppy
130
131
132
133
134
Sanctity and Sin
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
The Poet’s Lament
There was a Smell of Dandelions
The Classicist
Pedagogues
Street Scene...
The School of Seduction
The Monster Gods
Poems from. Invisible Sun
142
143
144
“I am as mad as mad can be,”
“Dig and delve”
“There was a young woman I know”
145
146
147
[Limerick]
Elegy
September Hill
A
A
Like the voice of a wind that shivers and passes
Like the pain in a passionate note
From a nightingale’s golden throat,
Like a perishing star,
Like a mist that fades in the sodden skies
The gifts of my body I bring to a flesh-white and beautiful palace,
I hold all her body a beautiful living white chalice
A slave of her passion, my passion, our ecstasy secret, malign;
For pleasures and joys that she knows not, for a new and monstrous
delight;
At her feet I have laid the tribute of a burning intolerable passion,
Of a passion swayed not by reason, a passion ungovernable, mad;
We shall live in a rapturous embrace, in an endless and holy
A little while,
For a little while, our life is bright,
For a little while, there is light,
But a moment will come and death destroy
Never a rose will deathlessly bloom,
Life is the gift to a slave.
After a while shalt go.
Never again will a dead girl thrill
To a silent lute.
All night I bowed before a burning shrine;
A choral hymn of mad and sweetest pain,
A chant to loveliness and strange, unfathomed glory,
A mute triumphal song with love’s refrain.
For thee, the gods a planet would destroy.
For many a thousand leagues around
A thousand and a thousand years ago,
The song of life is but a tedious, bitter moan;
And now at last I crown me with a coronal
He strove to bring a light.
A lonely traveler on another star;
A dreamer in eternity,
To solve one dark, strange riddle, a sage
Who asked and answered in a breath
When down the hillside came a long, low crying,
A song of pagan passion, wild and sweet;
Was it a half-god or a satyr leaping
The shadows thickened, but a blaze illuming
There came a sound: Was it a song of gladness
From the sea, a wind; the revelry has ended;
I hear a moaning in the dreamless trees;
001.1
001.3
001.4
001.8
001.13
003.5
003.7
003.10
003.18
003.21
003.22
003.27
004.14
004.31
004.32
004.33
004.35
004.38
004.42
004.66
004.67
007.18
007.30
007.31
007.32
008.12
010.9
012.40
013.2
013.7
014.3
014.11
014.12
014.33
014.34
015.3
015.4
015.19
015.25
015.33
015.41
015.42
14
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
A frantic whisper with the wind is blended
A warning cry—the shadowy forms are shifting:
There is a rush of hooves in the break of dawn;
A last, wild note from the distant hills comes drifting—
A maiden’s kiss
The dripping symbol of a murderer’s hands.
There touches his body lightly a shiver,
Ecstasy pains him with a quiver,
Her flesh a torment, her body a rapturous ache
For a promised trysting, a god long due, she yearns,
And on the salt sea-wind there comes a wild, sweet sighing
A passionate burst of song from a golden throat,
A rapture in the night,
A lyric ecstasy, a sad, sweet note,
Pain, and a choral delight;
The clear, pure warble of a nightingale
A golden throat, a golden song that fail—
The glasses clink for a Bacchic drink—
A wine-red toast to the health of the host—
Contains what a flagon always should!
With a rare old vintage mellowed in wood!
A drunken girl where the revellers whirl—
Flesh and the grape and a wreath of vine!
A girdle that slips from a maiden’s hips—
A form that clings to a satyr sings,
The rose, the grape, and a god are mine!
A reveller creeps where his leman sleeps—
Malignant, as if guarded by a spell,
And fearful regions of a nameless fright,
Vampirish beings of a stellar race,
What did it matter a thousand years ago
That in the later days a boy would come,
What will it matter a thousand years from now
That once a poet lived and loved and died,
And by a hideous world was crucified
With thorns of loathing on a fevered brow?
Was there a goddess in the days of old,
Who cast on me a mystic spell malign,
And drink her kisses as a priceless wine?
Did I a lovely deathless form enfold?
A phantom of the dead, forgotten Greek.
There is a language I would fain employ,
Is like the pure, sweet warbling of a bird,
And every sound a thing of lyric joy.
As if a wind had musically stirred
And of that thing there came to me a fear
And watched a queen of Saturn mourn
To watch a little creature pick
And drunk a wine of amethyst
015.43
015.45
015.46
015.47
016.4
017.8
018.5
018.7
019.3
019.7
020.11
021.1
021.2
021.3
021.4
021.5
021.7
022.1
022.3
022.6
022.10
023.1
023.2
023.3
023.5
023.6
023.7
024.12
025.8
025.11
026.1
026.2
026.5
026.6
026.7
026.8
027.1
027.3
027.7
027.8
027.14
028.1
028.3
028.4
028.7
029.9
030.11
030.15
030.19
A
15
Fermented in a wizard’s tomb.
030.20
A thousand million years ago,
030.38
With dazzle of a monstrous flame,
030.42
A star they knew before it came.
030.44
Even as one who hath a quiet sleep,
031.13
Of a dream supernal.
033.16
Of a glory I have drunken,
033.21
In a madness it has perished,
033.22
As if a wizard’s wand
034.3
Where night was like a shroud before an altar
036.13
Before a vaster deep beyond all thought,
036.14
Upon a fruitless quest.
036.32
The night that brings a sleep.
036.64
A cool dark pillow, a comforting bed,
038.13
And a pebble necklace around his head
038.15
For youth, a ravished poppy’s petals blown:
040.6
I promised you a villanelle,
042.1
You caught me, bound me, with a spell,
042.4
I promised you a villanelle.
042.6
Do light thoughts in a light heart dwell,
042.7
I promised you a villanelle.
042.12
Not always empty is a shell,
042.16
I promised you a villanelle;
042.18
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
043.4
For a love that was fleeting as day?
043.8
Like a priest at a shrine I adore thee,
043.9
Like a drinker of chloral I dream,
043.10
Art thou only a phantom before me,
043.11
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul
such a madness and fury will sweep?
043.16
043.21
Like a flame, like a splendor supernal,
In a furnace of ecstasy whirled,
043.22
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment
ere worship and love were to perish?
043.27
Yet it seems that a veil rises slowly
043.33
And conceals like a curtain the shrine,
043.34
There is a faint, far rapture of birds in the breathless beauty of dawn, 044.1
There is a stir of wakening winds that whisper across the lawn.
044.2
And a presence of something supernal drifts over the springsweet earth,
044.3
And the bitter sleep and the sadness have fled in a strange rebirth.
044.4
From a trunk, that withered, blighted bole,
045.2
This hill, haunted by a deathly spell,
045.6
A sibilance that followed as I stole
045.18
Risen a spectre from the dead
046.19
My royal robes like a purple ghost
046.27
On a purple throne.
046.32
Yet we like a woman came to cloy.
046.38
16
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
We were won and lost of a mad young boy.
Only fishes keep a seeming
For a long and mystic sleep
Time has tolled a solemn knell,
There could not be so still a sea
A heady fragrance filled the air
And over all a choral singing.
Wherefor, solution distant as a star,
A fuller dream replacing that that wanes.
A greater wealth your greater love assures
Her grave, gray eyes a beauty hide
A gray dusk mists the air
A phantom of a kingdom of no sound.
I can not move a thigh,
My corpse was once a festering sore
A noisome pool as once before.
Amid a realm of sorcery,
Never a light to mark the trail
In a fabulous land, in a fabulous time,
There lived and there ruled on a crumbling throne
A worm that was born of the deep sea-slime,
Not a creature lived in all the land,
Saw only a realm of wet black sand
Not a thing disputed the lordly worm
Nor ever a hand caressed its fat;
All it would find was a plump drowned rat
As deathless as ever a worm can be,
But a smile has crossed her quiet face—
Trapped in a crevice by great settling boulders.
In his hand a stone-pick; in his mummied eyes
Where the rock-fall caught him with a sad surprise
The rocks on a sunken shore.
To capture a breast, to hold the hair
And sinks to sleep in a sounding shell.
And a rat-like sound of pitter and patter.
And the echoing mirth of a sullen mutter,
And the dirge of a wind that whispers and dies
Like a creature unseen as it scurries and passes
From a meadowlark’s passionate throat,
As a cindering star,
Like foam in a tempest scattered and thinned
Like a mist that fades into sodden skies
Of the woods to a spot forlorn,
She will halt in a secret place
Where the trees form a little dark room:
Arabesques on a tomb.
A leafy light and shadow-patterned heliation
A thousand and a thousand years ago,
Traveler: Not soon for I must find a song—
046.39
047.19
047.35
047.39
048.11
049.9
049.27
050.7
051.14
051.32
053.2
053.6
053.20
054.5
054.48
054.54
055.3
056.6
057.1
057.2
057.3
057.6
057.8
057.11
057.13
057.15
057.18
058.11
059.4
059.5
059.7
060.11
060.19
060.24
062.5
062.6
062.7
063.1
063.4
063.8
063.11
063.13
065.6
065.9
065.10
065.12
066.7
067.40
067.56
A
Across a purple ground to purple cliffs
Across a velvet sky. And when I came.
And in a sea of purple shadows drowned.
Out of a dusky corner came the stare
Of some gray form that made a rattling sound.
Was it an hour? Eternity? A week?—
Whose black, scaled body had for head a beak,
A beak that, darting, closed me in its trap.
I came upon a curious great throne
A king who saw but used no eyes for seeing,
A metal titan shapen like a cone,
Quicksilver, pulsing with a deep soft tone
Oh little creature, here’s a tale of doom....
Unto my feet a little trickle crept
With blood that had so curious a glow;
At length all motion ceased, upon a crag.
The burning harpy eyes, head of a hag,
A tolling like a myriad decibels
Of lunar sorcerers; a thousand hells
I heard a sound of cosmic revelry,
With eyes of golden fury; while a score
The vacant halls were quiet as a tomb.
A savage, indestructible enemy.
To seek, beneath the flower-heads, a path.
I found my leg become a hellish root,
A deep force pulls me toward the window-blind,
The leering of a huge and sightless eye.
They slit me till a hundred new wounds bled;
Then hurled me, shapeless, on a needle-bed.
A thought my tongueless mouth could never speak;
The sun stared on me like a blood-red eye,
Caught me with safety but a league away.
There’s one small shape that mews upon a spit;
Impalpable, a brain-shaped thing of dread,
A glowing form, it drifted on a course
A sentient entity from hell, alive.
Atop a mountain measurelessly high
That pierced the blackness of a starless sky
A monstrous form surged on and searched with cry
As of a lost and hungry child. Then die
A giant shape part human, part despair,
The face a group of eyes above a blur
From which a tongue curled inward to my lair,
And of that thing swept over me a fear
And every forward step a weary strain.
Save one upon a dais standing tall,
The naked torso of a goddess glowing
Breast tip a vine; the striding legs for feet
A tuft of slender tentacles, a crest
17
071.2
071.4
071.14
072.5
072.6
072.10
075.13
075.14
076.3
076.5
076.6
076.7
077.13
078.1
078.12
079.10
079.12
080.3
080.7
080.11
081.6
081.14
082.8
082.10
082.11
083.1
083.14
084.5
084.8
084.11
085.5
086.2
087.5
088.3
088.4
088.14
089.2
089.3
089.6
089.7
089.11
089.12
089.13
090.9
091.4
092.3
092.4
092.6
092.9
18
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Of blue-red veins erect, a spiral swarm.
Its branches leafless, yet a budding hand
Of bird and fish in nodules like a band
All night I heard the tolling of a bell;
The tolling came like measures for a spell.
Then all the seas united with a roar
There lay a bed of shells and bones; I spied
A city of a vast antiquity.
I saw rise up a substance soft and white
Great wealth have I, a kingdom own, with palaces for pleasure,
And lissome houris, gems and gold in many a measure,
And life less like a tomb.
And faintly comes the echo of a traveler’s song,
Rich ends, and soft the tinkle of a camel’s bell
The outer-lands where all’s a dream, and dream-winds blow
Drink! For you’ll soon have the earth for a cover!
A thousand and a thousand years have fled;
She had a lover for her wondrous grace;
Such a treasure? I’d be missing
A venomous, waiting, and phallic orchid dozes.
A tiger-lily opens and fails and closes
The garden is still with a fever that passes all name;
With a sweet rapture of shame.
A nameless and sorcerous glory has made me weak:
Life is a dream between two deaths; a blind
A million million men have lived and passed,
A million million men will live and pass,
And from a dusky corner came the stare
Of some white form that made a rattling sound;
And yet I could not move. There came a creak,
And then I felt a tongue or talon stroke
My neck, and heard a husky gurgling choke
As of a yellow corpse about to speak....
I saw great shadows across a gibbous moon;
And in the sky, there hung a baleful glare.
Out of the night, there came a shrill long scream,
My face was eaten by a red, huge Thing.
There was a red, raw dripping thing that mowed
And tottered in a spreading pool of blood;
There was a shape, on which a scarlet flood
Enwrapped it in a steaming blood-red shroud:
There was a sound, gigantically loud,
There was a crackle as of blazing wood,
And all the air was misty as a cloud.
The heavens like a dead, colossal hearse
O Love, a flower closes
A music in the air,
Wherein a cloudlike throng
A glow that develops and flows from the inner being
092.10
093.5
093.8
094.1
094.8
094.9
095.5
095.6
095.13
096.13
096.16
096.30
096.92
096.95
096.101
098.1
099.7
099.13
100.4
101.13
101.14
101.17
101.20
101.22
102.1
102.12
102.14
104.5
104.6
104.10
104.11
104.12
104.13
105.2
105.4
105.9
105.14
106.1
106.2
106.3
106.4
106.5
106.7
106.8
107.5
109.1
109.22
109.35
110.3
A
Murmurs the music of a magic hymn;
It is the blessing of a Druid’s prayer,
A flame of the stars, Beloved, burns out of the far-flung spaces
A wind from worlds beyond blows out of foreign places
Rippling the leaves that sleep in a moonless midnight noon.
A wind from the spheres that through your shadowy hair is blowing
Unending, a tale, even to him who tells, unknown.
A princess are, with beauty lovelier
When Nielsen with a pen of magic drew
A music-maker, lord of sorcery.
Though every hour were rich with a great store
For beauty of the mind, where, as on a loom
Else beauty were as lifeless as a tomb.
There is a room, Beloved, that you’ll inherit;
A counterpart of what is still to be?
That you make these to that a sacrifice,
And all your days, and mine, a vain device.
And should a mouth as pleasureful as mine
Remember phrases with a vague surprise
For you have taught a thousand things to me,
I am a fool, for only fools would trust
And only echo answer a low call.
And a bitter full heart,
Nor lift a burden from my crumpled shoulders;
A ruby flares in the glistening sky,
In a marsh that even the water-snakes spurn,
Before the palace a beacon flares,
Out of the sky, a black star shines,
From the palace, a marble monster whines,
On the throne a king for its worm-queen pines
A slain man moans on a pointed stake
By a cypress-veiled lagoon.
Footprints of a man-bat woven
Feet are ended in a fen—
She rules a realm decayed from elder days,
A star
She liked the texture of a lily,
Her own reflections in a mirror.
She loved to play a dangerous game
A paragon, except in virtue,
A beauty, save in soul and body,
Her laugh was like a silver bell.
A single gardenia lies with delicate grace in
The midst of her things: a girdle, as though to chasten
Heretical eyes is casually hung on a chair;
Their elders have promised them a day of returning,
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
They sleep a long sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
In all the silences that haunt a vacant room.
19
110.10
110.15
111.1
111.3
111.4
111.7
111.12
113.2
113.4
113.12
115.5
116.5
116.8
118.1
118.10
118.13
118.14
119.10
120.3
120.10
121.1
122.12
123.13
124.13
125.5
125.9
125.14
125.17
125.18
125.19
125.23
126.2
126.13
126.15
127.17
127.19
128.1
128.12
128.13
128.25
128.26
128.33
129.13
129.14
129.15
130.5
130.7
130.19
131.12
20
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
I could never love a girl with such a rhyme!
Like a steak half roasted there.
And a smell of dandelions was
Oh what a classicist am I,
Oh what a classicist am I,
He surely was a classic beauty.”
Oh what a classicist am I.
Expound a learned fourth dimension
Still live a hundred years ago,
Each pedagogue, a happy oyster,
And every prof, a second Firkins,
A model professorial wonder,
For who could ever be a prof.
Why, there each young M.A. would go to,
“Miss Shere, are you a kind person?”
“I’m asking you, Miss Shere. Are you a cruel person?”
“A great deal matters. Who are you?”
Archibald Mimmih ran a neat
The elder gods have promised a day of returning
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
They sleep a long sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
Till a quarter of twelve,
It’s a quarter of twelve,
There was a young woman I know
There was a young man—such a pity!—
Who burped a remarkable ditty,
Ran a pipe-line that tapped him,
Drifting as leaves but urgent with a force
Abide And in her movements, languid charms abide.
That all would pass, that nothing would abide.
Able
Can’t you see that I’d be able
Abode I seek through chambers of thy strange abode;
Abomination
Abomination beautiful,
About About the eaves,
About me, who am dead.
As of some ancient corpse about to speak....
As of a yellow corpse about to speak....
“What are you talking about?”
Above Her eyes will close at my lips on the feverish brow above;
The scented hair above thy brow,
Where the lilies bloom above;
Above the bacchanal in the forest dwelling
The sun’s rim slides above the flaming, far horizon,
The face a group of eyes above a blur
Rubies I yet will place in that jet hair above
Who liked it above or below,
Abroad Dawn breaks abroad; then happily she dances, turning
Absolute In darkness absolute, and listening hard,
135.12
136.8
136.11
137.1
137.19
137.28
137.29
138.13
138.17
138.24
138.29
138.31
138.33
138.36
139.1
139.3
139.8
140.1
141.5
141.7
141.19
143.2
143.10
144.1
145.1
145.2
145.4
147.11
053.5
107.11
135.8
124.5
030.27
002.13
054.15
072.13
104.13
139.6
003.14
004.19
004.26
015.15
066.9
089.12
096.47
144.2
066.15
074.2
A
In silence absolute the lifeless land
Absorb The very mice absorb their wisdom,
Abysmal Abysmal secrets, monstrous mysteries, I know;
Whence came you, spawn of what abysmal womb?
Abyssal Abyssal pilgrimage undaunted, strong
Abysses We will pass from rapture to rapture and plumb the most utter
abysses
Itself was lost beyond abysses of the night...
Though endlessly we traversed far abysses,
Accompany
Old prophecies alone accompany her.
Ache
Her flesh a torment, her body a rapturous ache
I do not know. There is an ache that fills
Acherontic
Of Acherontic streams;
Of Acherontic streams;
Aches To soothe white flesh that for caresses aches.
Achieved
Desired of many but achieved by few.
Aching In my arms I will hold her, passive, but I know her flesh will be
aching
Acid
They poured fresh acid on my blinding eyes;
Acids
Till acids of experience undeceive
The acids would not matter, nor I rue
Across His vision, and he peered across the darkling sky
Tremors across his white flesh pass.
There is a stir of wakening winds that whisper across the lawn.
Across a purple ground to purple cliffs
Across a velvet sky. And when I came.
I looked across the great plain warily.
Across the rubble, creeping, crawling, gliding,
What followed me across the lifeless plain?
Across the boiling seas’ own muffled boom;
I saw great shadows across a gibbous moon;
Added They added madness to my frantic cries
Though all my days were added one by one,
Adding Like cardinal numbers adding without end;
Admiring
Make you fair for admiring.
Adoration
Quiet hangs over all the world; in adoration
To this he gives his only adoration,
Adore Unto the end I worship and adore;
Like a priest at a shrine I adore thee,
I adore you,
Love, ere thy lips dead lips alone adore.
Adoring She walks in charm, adoring nature pleases
O Love, my heart adoring
Adventure
21
093.1
138.21
013.22
017.12
024.7
003.15
034.15
079.9
053.15
019.3
027.9
012.4
067.4
020.4
068.12
003.17
084.2
121.8
121.13
014.17
018.8
044.2
071.2
071.4
082.5
089.5
091.1
094.3
105.2
084.3
115.1
115.2
096.36
066.5
068.13
007.58
043.9
052.3
097.4
041.7
109.37
22
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Or was he bent on dark adventure, bold,
Aeons In aeons closes
Aflame With monstrous fires aflame.
With monstrous fires aflame.
A-Flinging
And when thy surfeit comes, then die! and die a-flinging
Afraid Why is it that I tremble, half afraid,
After
After a while shalt go.
And after this, there came to me one green
There will be none after.
For there will come none after,
After you.
Now was I destined after all to die,
And after this, there came to me one green
Afterglow
Evening to night, and night to afterglow,
After-Hell
Fore-glimpse of after-hell.
After-Nightfall
Enchantment grows in this soft after-nightfall noon,
Afternoon
And melancholy, dream away the afternoon
Again Never again will a dead girl thrill
But no voice shall speak again
When the night came down again.
Of golden voices that again will speak;
Traveler: Goodby, but if we meet again—
You’ve come again. You keep me company here,
Engulfed again the riddles of the ocean;
Neither thing will walk again.
The golden poppy once again will grow to bloom
If I never take you anywhere again;
Against He barricades himself against the world:
Desparing cry. I crouched against the wall
Of wave that smote against colossal wave.
Age
see also Dawn-Age
Beyond the age of any sun;
Of every age and every sky.
And traveled backward past the age of man
Age-Old Age-old dreams.
Ages
I peered far down the final future ages,
We have lived through cycles of birth and change, through cosmic
ages,
Agleam Moonstruck, voiceless, yet their sorceress-eyes agleam,
Aglow By cryptic tarns aglow with lethal flame,
Ago
Beckoning to rites forgotten long ago:
The tale is told of years of long ago.
A thousand and a thousand years ago,
What did it matter a thousand years ago
059.11
133.60
012.25
067.25
097.7
083.3
004.42
029.1
052.2
052.8
052.9
085.1
090.1
147.13
045.8
096.89
096.56
004.66
047.33
048.8
067.34
067.54
077.2
094.11
126.16
134.23
135.3
069.2
088.9
094.10
030.50
030.56
036.18
015.32
036.33
112.5
006.22
036.50
006.16
007.48
012.40
026.1
A
A thousand million years ago,
So long ago.
Since ten thousand years ago.
A thousand and a thousand years ago,
The substance of it in the long ago.
The maid I love was buried long ago;
Still live a hundred years ago,
Agony As I remember, in my agony
Beyond the rack’s red searing agony
Agree Or quite agree—it’s all the same; no virtues please
Agricola Agricola, agricolae.
Agricola, agricolae.
Agricola, agricolae.
Agricolae
Agricola, agricolae.
Agricolae, Agricolarum,
Agricola, agricolae.
Agricola, agricolae.
Agricolarum
Agricolae, Agricolarum,
Ah
DEATH: Ah Poet, scorn me not,
Ah, God, that I could draw instead of write,
Ah, God! That I had genius, mad and great,
Death: Ah Traveler, scorn me not
Aimless You, and you leave the aimless labyrinth
Of aimless life, of aimless death. Long since
So muse I while the endless, aimless minutes wear
Air
see also Mid-Air
The air hung slumbrous in the drowsy heat,
Tremble upon the scented air of night,
We shivered in the quiet air,
A heady fragrance filled the air
And Psyche hover on the summer air.
Of water, fire, earth and air attend you,
A gray dusk mists the air
Them fill the air with measureless strong beat—
That beat the air to frenzy, dirges, knells.
Burn incense till the fragrant air is odorous,
Floats up, and bathes the burning air still shimmering,
In the breathless rapture of the scented dreamful air;
The hot, still air is sweet with heavy perfumes;
Foul nightmare creatures peering through the air:
Vast wings were flapping in the still night air;
And through the riven air, there harshly swept
And all the air was misty as a cloud.
The air from some vast stellar carnage bled
A music in the air,
Slow patterns in the air; the warm embrace
Air and water creatures fight,
23
030.38
039.24
047.10
067.40
075.8
099.1
138.17
080.9
084.9
096.64
137.2
137.20
137.30
137.2
137.11
137.20
137.30
137.11
012.44
025.1
025.13
067.44
051.33
076.10
096.73
015.2
015.10
035.5
049.9
051.37
051.40
053.6
079.2
080.2
096.25
096.86
101.2
101.7
104.4
105.1
105.10
106.8
106.12
109.22
114.7
126.10
24
Airy
Aisles
Akbar
Alas
Alfred’s
Alice
Alien
Alike
Alive
All
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Strange songs filled the air
Live with all things of earth and airy splendor,
Their enigmatic laughter filled the aisles;
Bismillah wa Allahu Akbar! when with facile
But alas! Your name is Myrtle,
Quote scholars dead in Alfred’s time,
There stand her books, the Willy Pogany Alice
His cosmic challenge in an alien world.
In those mysterious lands and alien places
In alien land, by night’s resounding vastness?
I’ll talk of future times and alien shores.
Malefic, purposive, with alien force
And I am sick alike of passion and of glory,
Her thoughts and deeds alike were shoddy.
A sentient entity from hell, alive.
To limbs alive with wormlike, writhing fur,
I hold all her body a beautiful living white chalice
The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will betray
her.
Her lips and her face and her breasts, all her body I will cover with
kisses,
All the night.
And all the long night her body to mine I shall press;
I shall teach her the lore of Venus till all her sweet body tremble,
Shall lose all Beauty in the end,
All to death must go.
Solemn all you picture them, solemn and so luring,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I sought the poisonous fruit of her;
Yea, all the bitter night I sought the bitter rapture,
My blood was burning in my veins, and all the torment
Rose and fell and rose through all the Lesbian night;
And she was cool, yet hers was all the passion,
And all the ecstasy and dolorous delight.
And we were love-sick, yea, and sick with all love’s poison,
Yea, we would love till all our senses swoon;
That love and passion weary all too soon.
But all night long we worshipped at our pagan altar,
All night I bowed before a burning shrine;
And all the love and wondrous beauty of my beloved
Yea, all love’s lyric horror all were sweet;
And all the swooning, sick, and ravishing caresses
More crazed by all the amorous joys thereof;
Yea, love and more than love were all the long night’s portion,
All night in worship and in love I lay;
All night I dreamed the one long night would last for ever,
But Time will pass, and Love will pass, and all Love’s pleasure,
And all the beauty of that night now lies decaying,
Lo, all the later days are long and dull and weary,
136.5
051.54
081.12
096.82
135.10
138.11
129.5
024.14
036.45
059.12
077.12
088.5
096.4
128.28
088.14
089.9
003.7
003.11
003.13
003.20
003.26
003.29
004.11
004.20
006.17
007.1
007.2
007.3
007.5
007.6
007.7
007.8
007.9
007.14
007.16
007.17
007.18
007.19
007.22
007.23
007.26
007.33
007.38
007.39
007.41
007.43
007.45
A
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
For gall and ash are all the ecstasy.
Yea, all the barren years that linger in their passing,
And bitter all the poison that it brings;
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
Dearest of all dear things that I possess.
Pass, with all joy that passes,
But all is mute forevermore.
For all is dead, and all is still,
That fell, all Mandrikor to kill.
Where all seemed dead beneath the branch-twined roof
Ringed all around with sentinels that swayed,
Dim citadel, all dank and poisonous,
Of all my spectral lands,
More fabulous than all the gems of fame,
All things that thou dost love,
All things that thou wouldst know.
In whom all Beauty’s graces meet—
All pleasures I have ever found have been as gall.
All men, all things, all hopes, my burning dreams of fire;
I took the usual pleasures known to all mankind;
And yet, in all my travels I could only find
My weary mind has travelled all the stellar maze
All time and space were mine, and mine was every sky:
Nothing in all the universe is left for me,
All night long.
You only live when all worth living’s lost.
He burst asunder all the whelming bars
From all the hate of all those bitter scars.
And pass, as all things pass, deeming the dumb
With all the dreadful cerements of the grave,
And all his flesh to rottenness was slave;
That blasted all the worlds that were.
How all my days are as an aria played
How all my time is winnowed, leaving husks
All heaven smouldered in mysterious burning,
And all the glory faded from the skies.
Amid all worlds of time and dust begotten
Before a vaster deep beyond all thought,
I searched the years that hold all things immortal
I will not find it till all things shall cease,
And still for this one dream all else forsaking
I know this all I ever will be knowing:
Through all the space of worlds in time and spirit,
When all the olden days are over,
I have riven all darkness to find thee.
I have burned all my flame at the altar,
With its drapery hiding all wholly,
All things died in my black might,
25
007.51
007.56
007.59
007.62
007.63
008.8
009.13
010.4
010.13
010.16
011.7
011.10
011.16
012.19
012.23
012.41
012.42
012.52
013.5
013.6
013.13
013.15
013.19
013.21
013.26
015.16
017.20
024.5
024.8
026.3
029.2
029.6
030.8
031.1
031.5
034.10
034.17
036.7
036.14
036.17
036.58
036.59
036.63
037.2
039.1
043.5
043.17
043.35
046.7
26
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
All colours else were wan and tame,
All his great love will end in me,
Awaited us, sea-weary all,
It knew me not from all the rest,
And over all a choral singing.
With olden dead endeavor all erased,
For all things die, but they die most regretful
That flowered not, and all things weep to die,
And all the laughing nymphs that make earth fair;
Live with all things of earth and airy splendor,
All else is still the realm around,
All the rottenness, I dread;
All the flesh on which fat worms have fed;
All the slime and mould that slowly spread
In all the years by time begun,
Not a creature lived in all the land,
All it would find was a plump drowned rat
All her dreaming, raptured face is white,
And made him one with all earth’s humblest creatures.
Like all his deeds, his very name unknown,
Yet all who gaze upon him walk beside him.
While creatures cower in their burrows, silent all,
Murmur of all things that wane,
Quiet hangs over all the world; in adoration
Of all my timeless lands,
More fabulous than all the gems of fame.
I offer all
All things that you might love,
All things that you would know.
Your soul’s desire, all lasting rapture,
All past and future. Traveler, stay!
He scans the regions lying all around,
Where all things are, yet are not; time and space
Held sway, with purple dreamlands all around.
My old companions waited all around:
As all the years of Hercules’ great labors,
But all at once the shell of that cocoon
That filled all worlds, all space; vibrations freeing
All substances and creatures from the bond
At length all motion ceased, upon a crag.
And all the little jeweled blades of grass
Now was I destined after all to die,
In all this hideous land the only soul.
And I, and all that phantom city, died.
And all around their other victims wait,
I found no door, and when all hope lay dead
With all the dreadful cerements of the grave
And I in all that solitude lie slain.
But all the strange and withered things still hung
046.23
046.43
049.6
049.20
049.27
051.6
051.15
051.16
051.39
051.54
053.17
054.12
054.13
054.14
055.6
057.6
057.15
058.3
059.8
059.13
059.16
061.5
063.10
066.5
067.19
067.23
067.38
067.41
067.42
067.49
067.50
069.5
070.11
071.11
072.2
073.10
075.9
076.8
076.9
079.10
082.3
085.1
085.6
086.14
087.2
088.7
090.2
091.8
093.11
A
All night I heard the tolling of a bell;
All night I heard the cadences of doom
Then all the seas united with a roar
And all strange things once covered by the sea
Now I am bored with all things brief and transitory,
Weary of all desires grown monotonous,
Than you. I have drained all delights from long impresses
Of your bright lips, all pleasure that your flesh possesses,
And all love’s joys that were.
Now I am bored with all things present, all things olden,
With all things disagree,
Or quite agree—it’s all the same; no virtues please
I know that nothing is worth while, all things are quite
Futile, futility as well; that all things wane,
All pleasure and all pain,
All substances and dreams, all sorrow, all delight,
All present, past, and future worlds; and day, and night;
All lacking, and all gain.
And leave behind me all the weary works of man,
Fling wide the roses, ere the petals all be faded,
I am the night and the garden and all things swoon
Wonder and beauty and terror are hanging all over,
The garden is still with a fever that passes all name;
All things are symbols of eternal death—
All nature whispers but her one word: Death.
The sum of all man knows, the sum of all
Of all the stars and all the universe,
And all that ever will be known, is Death.
And all around, the weary corpses lie;
And awful things were lying all around—
And all the air was misty as a cloud.
Upon all things of life and time and space;
In all infinity was left no place
Where Death in death all things did not immerse.
That all would pass, that nothing would abide.
All things their form reveal,
With wonder past all knowing,
Comes love, and all the beauty that love possesses,
To birth the song that all the spheres are singing?
Though all my days were added one by one,
I love you for the beauty all can see,
Your moods are dear to me, and all the ways
You care for that warm house of all your own,
To all the world; and dearer still are those
And all your days, and mine, a vain device.
All night the blood-red ruby glares,
And paid for all, on some occasions.
She hated all lies, save her own,
In all the silences that haunt a vacant room.
27
094.1
094.2
094.9
095.3
096.1
096.7
096.52
096.53
096.54
096.55
096.63
096.64
096.67
096.68
096.69
096.70
096.71
096.72
096.98
097.1
101.3
101.16
101.17
102.5
102.9
102.16
102.19
102.20
103.2
104.2
106.8
107.2
107.7
107.8
107.11
109.18
109.25
110.2
110.12
115.1
116.13
117.1
117.2
117.5
118.14
125.13
128.20
128.29
131.12
28
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
All the least lines that spelled
I am doom that all dooms follow,
I am all cups that fill,
I am all deaths that chill,
I am all life that springs anew,
The true believer makes his own faith all along
And though all poppy seeds in final chaos scatter,
Over all the tall wet grass.
I know all Latin stems and nouns,
The names of all the Roman towns;
And perfect students, all in rhythm,
Which is better than all,
Restoring all things lost and small things broken.
Allah
And La Illaha illa Allah! M’hamed rasul
Allah! the kneeling figures in devotion pray,
To heart’s desire that only I and Allah know,
Allah’s The roads to distant marts; and Allah’s blessed foretell
Allahu Bismillah wa Allahu Akbar! when with facile
Allay
He seeks to allay the old desire,
All-Consuming
You flare up in the all-consuming flame,
Alloy
Far silver bells with Song’s most sweet alloy.
All’s
The outer-lands where all’s a dream, and dream-winds blow
All-Seeing
I am the triumph of all-seeing eye,
Almost That almost hissed or the shimmering mist
Alone To any save themselves alone,
Ennui alone.
Alone and far,
And wander in far lands and seas, alone,
Winging your vast way lonely and alone
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
Clad him alone;
When Atlantis stood alone
Of the dual flower that alone endures;
Old prophecies alone accompany her.
And she alone has beauty, grave and gray.
And it ruled alone.
Lost in that dim dawn-age he died alone,
Will wait, alone.
In my domain alone you’ll capture
Through mighty chambers, hunted and alone,
Alone protruded from the desert sand,
I heard alone the surging tides in motion.
Love, ere thy lips dead lips alone adore.
She loved alone and loved she most
And listen always as I journey on alone.
Alone know why,
132.5
133.22
133.28
133.30
133.31
134.20
134.22
136.12
137.3
137.4
138.27
143.6
147.12
096.79
096.80
096.100
096.94
096.82
018.10
017.5
028.8
096.101
133.53
048.15
010.23
013.4
014.10
025.3
037.3
043.28
046.28
047.13
051.30
053.15
053.18
057.5
059.15
065.24
067.48
076.2
093.4
094.14
097.4
128.11
131.16
143.8
A
Along
You drift along the desert’s burning sands;
Along starroads with only moonglow paven
The sun lay warm along our way,
The sun lay warm along our way.
As we, triumphant, strode along,
Along the walls dwelt living mummies, bound
And widening inch by inch along the floor
And burning eyes along each limb. It spun
Of knotty burls along the trunk, and clung
The mandrakes moaned along the black lagoon,
Along the summit island lanes of shrubs and trees;
The true believer makes his own faith all along
The coeds only get along
Aloud And now I cry aloud unto the lonely spaces,
Already I take the bridgeway you already know.
Also
They left me also rotten corpses there
They also ought to know their Caesar,
Altar
But all night long we worshipped at our pagan altar,
Where night was like a shroud before an altar
I have burned all my flame at the altar,
Although
Had I, although I knew on what it fed,
Although my flesh with many knives is slit.
Always Contains what a flagon always should!
Not always empty is a shell,
Nor always full the charming sleeve—
What form you have, for always you appear
That she had always invitations,
And listen always as I journey on alone.
They’re always right, they can’t be wrong,
There always was farther to go.
Am
I am enraptured of one immortally lovely, with beautiful tresses,
I am enraptured by strange and undreamed-of passionate sinful
caresses
That I am the deathless Greek upon an urn
Now I am jaded with my long, complete excess;
And I am sick to death with utter weariness
I lived whole cycles of existence; I am wise;
Ere I, by night and darkness, am bereft
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of
endless and awful delight;
I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate,
meshed in the love thou hast sown,
I am the colour deep blood-red,
I am the colour yet to be;
I am the sweet close winding-sheet
That I am weary though I’ve gone not far,
Therefor am I, with what I have, content,
And I am dead.
29
017.6
037.6
049.8
049.14
049.19
072.7
078.3
091.12
093.9
105.3
131.2
134.20
138.6
007.49
147.14
103.11
137.23
007.17
036.13
043.17
075.7
103.4
022.6
042.16
042.17
077.7
128.18
131.16
138.5
144.5
003.1
003.3
004.76
013.25
013.27
013.29
031.8
043.2
043.26
046.18
046.42
046.45
050.5
050.13
054.1
30
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And I am dead.
For I am dead.
About me, who am dead.
I am the sleeper
Now I am bored with all things brief and transitory,
And I am sick alike of passion and of glory,
Now I am bored with all things present, all things olden,
I am the night and the garden and all things swoon
By the breath of its shameless lips I am lightly kissed
I am blind in the white embrace of the moon’s hot stream;
I find no rest in the passions with which I am shaken,
I am awed, O Love, at knowing this mystery,
I am awed that the moon and stars are so close to me.
I am awed that flower and forest and leaf be shaken
I am not sorry to have been your lover,
I am a fool, for only fools would trust
Why am I sad?
Thus am I sad.
Why am I weary?
Thus am I weary.
Why am I old?
Thus am I old.
I hear them in the grass when I am walking
I hear them when I am not even questing
I am man.
I am the master of each living thing,
I am the huntsman of each fleeing kind,
I am the arrow of the cosmic mind,
I am wisdom of my own self blind,
I am man,
I am builder, I am maker,
I am my own final taker,
I am man.
I am slayer, I am slain,
I am fire,
I am sod,
I am the empty brain
I am sunlight on the hill,
I am mist in midnight hollow,
I am doom that all dooms follow,
I am foam torn free of storm waves cresting,
I am dust in cosmic outways resting,
I am mote
I am man.
I am all cups that fill,
I am the fleeting dew,
I am all deaths that chill,
I am all life that springs anew,
I am man.
054.3
054.7
054.15
064.2
096.1
096.4
096.55
101.3
101.8
101.27
101.28
110.5
110.6
110.7
120.9
121.1
123.1
123.5
123.6
123.10
123.11
123.15
131.1
131.11
133.1
133.2
133.3
133.4
133.5
133.6
133.8
133.11
133.12
133.13
133.14
133.15
133.18
133.20
133.21
133.22
133.23
133.24
133.25
133.27
133.28
133.29
133.30
133.31
133.32
A
I am sower, I am reaper,
I am wastrel, never keeper,
I am seeker,
I am man.
I am instant lost in time,
I am atom lost in space,
I am the triumph of all-seeing eye,
I am the cinder wiped away,
I am night erasing day,
I am nothing as I die,
I am man.
I am telling you goodbye, dear,
Oh what a classicist am I,
And in my greatest bliss I am
Oh what a classicist am I,
Oh what a classicist am I.
I am as mad as mad can be,
For I am as mad as mad can be.
Amber The green-flecked amber of your smoky-lidded eyes.
Behind the amber lids they dimly dream,
Amethyst
And drunk a wine of amethyst
The grasses with glimmering dew are jewelled in opal and amethyst,
Amid
Lost amid their dreamlands, your captured phantoms dream.
I peered amid those waters black and still.
Danced and revelled amid the olive-grove?
Amid all worlds of time and dust begotten
Amid a realm of sorcery,
To fall amid colossal precipices.
Amidst Amidst great cobwebs hanging everywhere
Among Among the greater infinite he quests,
Amorous As the amorous maidens were loved in decadent Rome I shall love
her,
More crazed by all the amorous joys thereof;
With nymphs and girls in amorous Bacchic moods:
Caresses, though I find slight joy in amorous
The monstrous spell of the night is an amorous cover
An
We shall live in a rapturous embrace, in an endless and holy
That I am the deathless Greek upon an urn
For well we knew the holy night must have an ending,
But only an ancient, buried passion sings.
In search of vengeance for an ancient wrong
His cosmic challenge in an alien world.
Monotony of life an empty show?
I do not know. There is an ache that fills
An unknown golden tongue where every word
How all my days are as an aria played
Where night was like a shroud before an altar
Upon an endless path forever going
31
133.33
133.34
133.35
133.50
133.51
133.52
133.53
133.54
133.55
133.56
133.57
135.1
137.1
137.9
137.19
137.29
142.1
142.10
096.38
127.7
030.19
044.6
006.24
011.21
015.18
036.7
055.3
079.14
072.1
014.5
003.33
007.26
015.28
096.11
101.18
003.27
004.76
007.15
007.64
024.3
024.14
026.4
027.9
028.2
031.1
036.13
036.61
32
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Has love become an aquarelle?
I can not close an eye,
Stares with an eye she can not shun.
An unseen step on the creeping moss—
They found him deep within an ancient cave
An eagerness; and pain upon his features
Or rests where an ocean current laves
To capture an errant eel
Like the ghost of an echoing note
The world is an opium-dream;
Who follows an endless stream
And slowly paces to an inner hall,
Discovering there an equal leaden hue,
Was it an hour? Eternity? A week?—
Pursued and pounced; an arm that had no source
Where sat an even greater, stranger being,
As if there never were an end in store.
Of days and nights that are an old and tiring story,
The monstrous spell of the night is an amorous cover
An emptiness not knowing you are there.
An empress regnant in an empty tomb—
The little gods dream an apocalyptic dream;
The monster gods dream an apocalyptic dream;
The monster gods dream an apocalyptic dream,
Ancient But only an ancient, buried passion sings.
Thou art as lovely as that ancient queen
That still preserve dark ancient stains
Where ancient gods assuaged their lust consuming
In search of vengeance for an ancient wrong
My mind with longings for some ancient thing,
They found him deep within an ancient cave
The sound of ancient lutes
As of some ancient corpse about to speak....
Nothing remains of her; her ancient bed
The ruined relics of the ancient past,
And there were living, ancient mummies bound
Now I, at dusk, beside the wall of ancient tombs,
The monster gods will answer the Ancient Ones and rise.
And
Like the voice of a wind that shivers and passes
Desolate, lonely, and far,
Like the wind, and the trees, and the rain,
Like the rows of poppies scattered and thinned,
And summer is fled,
And the days are dead,
And the trees are bare
And the skies are lead,
And the wind is blowing cold.
And the days are dark,
And the north-wind—hark!
042.13
054.4
055.4
056.3
059.1
059.6
060.10
060.15
063.3
064.1
064.3
069.10
069.11
072.10
074.13
076.4
078.7
096.5
101.18
118.8
127.18
130.2
141.2
141.18
007.64
008.9
010.3
015.27
024.3
027.10
059.1
067.35
072.13
099.3
102.6
104.7
134.4
141.12
001.1
001.7
001.9
001.11
002.2
002.4
002.5
002.6
002.7
002.9
002.11
A
How it howls and whoops
And its faintest breath
And it cries
And the long nights near
And summer is fled,
And the days are dead,
And the wind is blowing cold.
With beauty of face and of body as the deathlessly beautiful Greek;
I am enraptured by strange and undreamed-of passionate sinful
caresses
The gifts of my body I bring to a flesh-white and beautiful palace,
The passion-born kiss and caress of my maddening desire;
She will strip herself naked, in splendid and terrible glory array her,
The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will betray
her.
Her lips and her face and her breasts, all her body I will cover with
kisses,
We will pass from rapture to rapture and plumb the most utter
abysses
For pleasures and joys that she knows not, for a new and monstrous
delight;
Our desire with breast to breast and body to body we shall be slaking
Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her redlips
be ashen,
And her flesh, glad.
And all the long night her body to mine I shall press;
We shall live in a rapturous embrace, in an endless and holy
Till she lie in ecstasy knowing and desiring her sisterhood;
We shall love in our passion in strange and ineffable ways and
dissemble
Evil and good.
Even as Song and Life and Love,
To dust and ash will turn.
To Death and Time.
And thou shalt go;
For ever and ever and desolate,
Beauty and Love and Life must die,
Youth and Song and Joy;
But a moment will come and death destroy
And I shall join thee, Myrrhiline,
Every youth and maiden must
And even so, Myrrhiline,
Let us forget vain sorrow and tears
Lily and poppy and rose are gone,
And the song of Beauty for ever dying
And while the fleeting hours away;
And I shall kiss thy warm, soft lips
And I shall play
And never will the present cease,
33
002.12
002.17
002.20
002.26
002.32
002.34
002.35
003.2
003.3
003.5
003.6
003.9
003.11
003.13
003.15
003.18
003.19
003.23
003.24
003.26
003.27
003.30
003.31
003.32
004.2
004.9
004.13
004.15
004.23
004.29
004.30
004.33
004.43
004.45
004.47
004.53
004.57
004.61
004.72
004.73
004.75
004.78
34
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And never shall I find release,
When thou thy pleasure and joy art taking,
Poisonous and beautiful and dead;
Sorrowing and sorrowing for lost days golden,
Heavy-lidded, somber-eyed, sacrosanct and sinful
Solemn all you picture them, solemn and so luring,
Slave and queen and dancing-girl, wondrous fair,
Waiting, watching till I come and join them where,
My blood was burning in my veins, and all the torment
Rose and fell and rose through all the Lesbian night;
And she was cool, yet hers was all the passion,
And all the ecstasy and dolorous delight.
And we were love-sick, yea, and sick with all love’s poison,
And we were fierce and passionate in our embraces,
Lest dawn and barren ashes enter in.
For we would keep the pleasure and the torment burning,
That love and passion weary all too soon.
And all the love and wondrous beauty of my beloved
Love’s beauty and love’s torment and love’s fever-kisses,
And all the swooning, sick, and ravishing caresses
That made our veins and pulses wildly beat.
And I was more insatiate with satiation,
And still I sought the overpowering drunken rapture,
The beauty, terror, and the pain of love.
A choral hymn of mad and sweetest pain,
A chant to loveliness and strange, unfathomed glory,
Yea, love and more than love were all the long night’s portion,
Till senses reeled, and time and reason fled,
And beauty passed unto its final perfect beauty,
And holy sin and sanctity were wed.
And so I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night in worship and in love I lay;
But Time will pass, and Love will pass, and all Love’s pleasure,
For Beauty ever must dissolve and die;
And all the beauty of that night now lies decaying,
The hymn and song have changed to moan and cry.
Lo, all the later days are long and dull and weary,
And now I cry aloud unto the lonely spaces,
The years and love are gone, and thou art gone, beloved,
And weariness of life oppresses me;
For gall and ash are all the ecstasy.
Unto the end I worship and adore;
I worship thee and ever worship more.
But bitter is the end of love and man’s desire,
And bitter all the poison that it brings;
Drunken with beauty and sweet ecstasy,
I close thee, pure and rare as ivory,
And I, who hold that Beauty is supreme,
And the tired day;
004.79
005.5
006.2
006.5
006.9
006.17
006.18
006.23
007.5
007.6
007.7
007.8
007.9
007.11
007.12
007.13
007.16
007.19
007.21
007.23
007.24
007.25
007.27
007.28
007.30
007.31
007.33
007.34
007.35
007.36
007.37
007.38
007.41
007.42
007.43
007.44
007.45
007.49
007.53
007.54
007.56
007.58
007.60
007.61
007.62
008.2
008.6
008.13
009.6
A
As the mist and the rain;
Their flame and their tears;
They dwell in wasteland and in night.
And never footsteps tread the ground.
For all is dead, and all is still,
And underneath the shroud of gloom
And baleful boles of strange misshapen growths
And brooded in that vast and soundless grove.
I passed and reached the black pool’s rock-strewn edge.
And hanging creepers that reluctantly
Dim citadel, all dank and poisonous,
I paused and watched the cryptic waters watch.
Within the pool so fathomless and dark.
I peered amid those waters black and still.
And by the dark caress was claimed forever,
And in the waters saw my own face drown,
Are black and gold and red,
And in their solemn state,
My thrones, majestical, imperial, and great,
Strange wondrous jewels and diadems
And garlands overflung
And silver flutes
A thousand and a thousand years ago,
Thy one Beloved, fair and sweet,
And now at last I crown me with a coronal
My destiny, and found what men can never guess;
And yet, in all my travels I could only find
I have made love in normal and eccentric ways;
Of star and sun.
All time and space were mine, and mine was every sky:
And I have had terrific grief, and known the cry
And I am sick to death with utter weariness
And old ennui.
For ever will I call, and search the frozen skies
He peered, and in the curtained realms of sleep
And death, the great, from whom he held his vow
Alone and far,
His vision, and he peered across the darkling sky
To read the tale of star and sun,
And fixed for ever on the shoreless sea.
Who asked and answered in a breath
The greatest riddle and though vassal claimed the vassalage
Twilight upon the hills and woods was dying,
A song of pagan passion, wild and sweet;
And on the wind the strange, low notes kept failing
And still it seemed as if great Pan were calling
And over the woods in ecstasy, and swelling
Danced and revelled amid the olive-grove?
Garlands of rose and violet, and wreaths of vine;
35
009.16
009.22
010.5
010.12
010.13
010.14
011.3
011.6
011.9
011.11
011.16
011.17
011.20
011.21
011.23
011.24
012.13
012.14
012.15
012.24
012.29
012.36
012.40
012.51
013.7
013.10
013.15
013.17
013.20
013.21
013.23
013.27
013.28
013.31
014.2
014.6
014.10
014.17
014.18
014.30
014.34
014.35
015.1
015.4
015.5
015.7
015.13
015.18
015.22
36
`
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Love and wine.
015.24
With nymphs and girls in amorous Bacchic moods:
015.28
And still to flushed and heated faces burning,
015.29
For Youth, and Spring, and the woodland feast of Pan?
015.34
His pagan pipes for semigod and maid;
015.38
And body to body, drunken forms were swaying
015.39
Weary of pomp and power, gorged with glut,
016.1
And find that what I thought so great is but
016.3
Of desolation and the livid dead,
017.3
Whence came your charnel hue of pain and blood?
017.4
Oh color of destruction, rage, and lust,
017.17
Foul messenger of war and holocaust,
017.18
Hermaphroditus, loved and lover,
018.1
But only and ever his flesh is burning,
018.11
With breasts of fire, and passionate lips to slake,
019.1
The rose and the violet bind her hair;
019.6
And her body is bare.
019.8
And arms as sinuous as snakes,
020.2
And there are pale, fair faces calling for caresses
020.3
Where only the wind and the wide, waste meadows have their home, 020.5
The white-caps and the foam their coronal.
020.8
There are strange eyes that beckon, white breasts and bodies crying 020.9
And on the salt sea-wind there comes a wild, sweet sighing
020.11
Pain, and a choral delight;
021.4
Love, and Death are born.
021.8
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
022.4
The table is spread and the flagon red
022.5
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
022.8
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
022.12
023.2
Flesh and the grape and a wreath of vine!
Lust, and the red, red wine!
023.4
The rose, the grape, and a god are mine!
023.6
Lust, and the red, red wine!
023.8
Of Time and Space, and strode upon his long
024.6
And on the doors of doom, disdainful, hurled
024.13
And wander in far lands and seas, alone,
025.3
Then, on this paper now so blank and white,
025.5
And fearful regions of a nameless fright,
025.8
With mad new colours and queer lines I’d trace
025.9
Phantasmal things of beauty and of death,
025.10
Soft plants and creatures, dead, that still draw breath.
025.12
Ah, God! That I had genius, mad and great,
025.13
And pass, as all things pass, deeming the dumb
026.3
That once a poet lived and loved and died,
026.6
And by a hideous world was crucified
026.7
To tell of pomp and splendour long unknown,
026.10
Of buried kings, and empires perilous;
026.11
In Paphian gardens lost and ruinous.
026.14
And bound me with long coils of dusky gold?
027.4
A
Her body and her rose-red lips to mine,
And drink her kisses as a priceless wine?
And every sound a thing of lyric joy.
And I, who long for fairer melodies
And haunting as some fabulous lost stream,
And after this, there came to me one green
With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
And of his face, there was no vestige seen,
And all his flesh to rottenness was slave;
And of that thing there came to me a fear
And turned to flee that corpse’s hideous head.
And saw it smile with fleshless, gaping lips,
And saw the space-invading star
And watched a queen of Saturn mourn
And thou hast known the azure mist
And drunk a wine of amethyst
On curious corpses, gold and green.
Of sights and sounds of outer space,
And find its cosmic burial
And once thy purple eyes went blind
And when they oped they could not find
Their purple vision fade and die,
Of every age and every sky.
By fumbling fingers, and forgotten soon,
Ere I, by night and darkness, am bereft
Of hope; and how my hours are unavailing
And how my love that burns herein so deep
And hath no waking to no dawn nor sun.
Through its valleys and its mountains
And the lotus of their leaven,
And the suns eternal,
And the old stars are sunken
And the ways that I cherished.
And forget worlds olden?
And the heart holds its ravage,
And the mind’s decision,
And surge of falling flame of far dominions,
And giant fountains pouring down the wide skylanes.
And blazed in beauty, deep on topless deep,
And where the heart’s transcendent vision, unreturning,
And then I turned, and looked within your eyes,
And then I turned, and looked within your eyes,
And all the glory faded from the skies.
Her world and sky.
And left her lovely body to oblivion;
We only left her body lying still and deep;
Her birth and sleep.
And outer, oldest galaxies that wane;
Amid all worlds of time and dust begotten
37
027.6
027.7
028.4
028.9
028.13
029.1
029.4
029.5
029.6
029.9
029.11
029.13
030.7
030.11
030.17
030.19
030.24
030.26
030.39
030.41
030.43
030.54
030.56
031.2
031.8
031.9
031.11
031.14
033.1
033.6
033.14
033.23
033.24
033.30
033.34
033.35
034.8
034.9
034.11
034.14
034.16
034.16
034.17
035.4
035.6
035.10
035.12
036.6
036.7
38
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And perished in the utmost cosmic tomb,
And knowing that my quest at last must falter
And end, there too I sought.
And traveled backward past the age of man
In continents and islands that are sunken,
Where sand and tides on shattered cities roll,
And farther back, when worlds were in their dawning.
And farther still when life was yet to come,
The spheres that spin of chance the blind and dumb,
I watched the universe grow cold and chill;
In those mysterious lands and alien places
I sought in maze of sorcery and bale;
And when in closer human haunts I tired,
And still for this one dream all else forsaking
Through trackless labyrinths more dark and deep,
Through all the space of worlds in time and spirit,
Winging your vast way lonely and alone
Eternity between you and your haven;
And longer ways before you yet to wander
Through them and over them—what shall be found
Pebbles and beetles and layers of earth,
And incubi avidly waiting to take
And twist their sinuous downward course—
And a pebble necklace around his head
And looted fields;
Dead eyes will greet dead eyes, and ravage
Of naked hearts, and dust
And unforgotten nights
And we will part, as once we parted
For song and laughter, now the wind’s regret;
For feast and wine, the grass stained darkly yet;
Her garments only know what curves and hollows
And fugues parade from hearts that grieve?
Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast brought
me this feverous love to consume me,
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of
endless and awful delight;
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent glory
and glow that relume thee,
In the years of the past, in the coming and passing of lovers and
love and the paths love has taken,
In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of the
future, the passions to waken,
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul
such a madness and fury will sweep?
Is it thine that shall weaken and wane?
And its death is the death of the world.
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of
soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
036.10
036.15
036.16
036.18
036.21
036.22
036.25
036.26
036.28
036.34
036.45
036.54
036.55
036.59
036.62
037.2
037.3
037.8
037.9
038.3
038.6
038.7
038.10
038.15
039.9
039.13
039.14
039.17
039.22
040.5
040.7
041.11
042.8
043.1
043.2
043.3
043.13
043.15
043.16
043.20
043.24
043.25
A
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment
ere worship and love were to perish?
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
Wine of life and of death I have drunken,
Is the rose to be withered and shrunken?
Shall the poppy be flameless and dead?
And conceals like a curtain the shrine,
And the form that it covers is thine.
And a presence of something supernal drifts over the springsweet earth,
And the bitter sleep and the sadness have fled in a strange rebirth.
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft
luminous mist,
The grasses with glimmering dew are jewelled in opal and amethyst,
And my heart is fulfilled of its dream as I walk my enchanted way.
Strange was the night, and stranger
While ghostly presences writhed wan and weary
And mistily shone the ghostly
And phantoms that seemed hopelessly and lostly
For sick flames and the crawling dust,
He had dreams and thoughts of just
Hatred and spleen.
My Lust, and Fury, and crimson shame,
All colours else were wan and tame,
Made mad songs and patterns of,
We were won and lost of a mad young boy.
And then passed by.
Fishes swim and monsters creep
Sea-tides ebb and flow;
And its glory far was known,
Shadowy growths and shadowy skies
For a long and mystic sleep
Only growths and fishes dwell
We turned and set forth once more,
But we turned too late and we knew our fate
For the plague germs fed on the sick and the dead
And the living walked less like men
Than shadows that crept with the sun, and slept
And stifling tropic heat;
Till the engines failed and we lay there gaoled
From heat and plague as they died,
And one by one with the setting sun
And celebrate our festival.
Revel and welcome, games and play
And cast them for our footfall where
The face was lost and I had guessed
Sunlight and seawind, laughter, song.
And everywhere the women flinging
39
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043.34
043.36
044.3
044.4
044.5
044.6
044.8
045.5
045.11
045.13
045.15
046.14
046.15
046.16
046.22
046.23
046.35
046.39
046.40
047.3
047.7
047.14
047.24
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047.37
048.2
048.3
048.5
048.6
048.7
048.10
048.19
048.22
048.23
049.4
049.5
049.13
049.18
049.22
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40
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
The wreath, the garland, and the rose,
And over all a choral singing.
Sunlight and seawind, laughter, song....
So great the gap, and firmly barred the doors,
And find defeat ere I have much begun;
And certainty, by doubt and change, undone,
And conquest everlastingly beyond,
Where no man walks, and shall not ever see,
Nor ever have; and since this mortal bond
Yet do you leave the dark and lonely waste
And years of striving in one moment ended.
And into more than light, to something wholly
And crystal clear, of life and love and rapture,
That flowered not, and all things weep to die,
And they who merely lived are first to sigh:
And to no futile dream of death aspires,
And of no emptiness is unforgetful.
And no love lasts if love be only mind,
Then flesh and spirit, unceasing springs, uncover—
Oh sweet beloved and enchanted lover—
You, and you leave the aimless labyrinth
For fields of asphodel and hyacinth,
And Psyche hover on the summer air.
And sprites invisible attend the meeting,
And all the laughing nymphs that make earth fair;
Of water, fire, earth and air attend you,
And by your side, in beauty’s own rebirth
With soft, light golden limbs to dance and follow,
Oh love consummate in the flesh and spirit,
That doth the icon and the dream inherit,
And deeper fires, burning, burning, burning,
Live with all things of earth and airy splendor,
Oh love compassionate and strangely tender,
Symbol of beauty, love, and life, and healing,
Of Hymen and the gods that watch your way.
And in her movements, languid charms abide.
And neither dawn nor darkness shades her clime.
She walks with dust and dreams.
And she alone has beauty, grave and gray.
And I am dead.
And I am dead.
All the slime and mould that slowly spread
Eternal night, and earth damp, black, and cold
That presses on my grave and me, rolled
And spoiling, lured them. But I could not squirm
Sick, still, and weary, while they ate their way;
And wriggle through my gray
The harvest, and to revel deep
At me and slyly chuckle while they keep
049.24
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049.28
050.4
050.6
050.8
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051.5
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051.16
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054.1
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054.38
054.40
A
And rotten in each swelling pore,
And rotten to the very core,
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
And the stars in the drowning pools are pale.
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Is it the willows shiver and sigh?
There lived and there ruled on a crumbling throne
And it ruled alone.
And the little red eyes in the serpent’s head
And the slimy things of the slimy dead
Where it lived and ruled in the endless gloom,
And dead men’s bones.
As deathless and old as the deathless sea,
And the worm is king for eternity,
Of the white worm-king and the fat white fold,
An eagerness; and pain upon his features
And made him one with all earth’s humblest creatures.
Where the rippling waters ebb and flow between
Her coral isles and shadowy pearls
With beauty of frail and waving fronds go wide,
That tremble and fall in tide on foaming tide,
Where breakers and lonely waters roar,
And sinks to sleep in a sounding shell.
And taloned shapes of evil stalk, for one night free,
And cower behind the black tree boles
With their faces dissolved and deathly heads
Where the little lithe worm still tumbles and crawls,
And a rat-like sound of pitter and patter.
And the echoing mirth of a sullen mutter,
And the dirge of a wind that whispers and dies
Like a creature unseen as it scurries and passes
Desolate, lonely, and far
Like foam in a tempest scattered and thinned
Nightward and deeper.
On the old and grass-covered mound
Trees solemn and soundless and tall
And softly rises to rejoice in dawn;
A leafy light and shadow-patterned heliation
And glowing brightlier, awakening seem the skies, on
She drinks the earthly and heavenly beauty of morning;
She hears the birds’ glad rapture and singing glee;
Are black and gold and red.
And in their solemn state
My thrones majestical, imperial, and great
Strange wondrous jewels and diadems
And magic garlands flung
And Aphrodite, every dream you seek;
And silver flutes
41
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054.50
056.1
056.5
056.8
056.9
056.10
057.2
057.5
057.7
057.9
057.12
057.16
057.17
057.19
057.23
059.6
059.8
060.3
060.4
060.7
060.9
060.13
060.24
061.11
062.2
062.3
062.4
062.5
062.6
062.7
063.1
063.7
063.11
064.4
065.15
065.21
066.2
066.7
066.11
066.13
066.14
067.13
067.14
067.15
067.24
067.29
067.32
067.36
42
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
A thousand and a thousand years ago,
The face that haunts your heart and mind.
All past and future. Traveler, stay!
Death: We will. We will, and I know when.
He turns, and now returns to unheard choral
Till thus, from incantation and invoking,
Of flesh and spirit, and attains the crown
Of inner ecstasy and exaltation
Barren or fertile, rich or thin and poor,
Where peasants till starved earth and long dead ground.
And slowly paces to an inner hall,
He sees them ride, and hears the ringing horn.
Where all things are, yet are not; time and space
But phantoms; life and death part each of other;
And back; and purple suns flamed northerly
Across a velvet sky. And when I came.
And when I crossed the imperial weaving span
And so I soared on pinions of the night
And when my steed permitted me to light,
And in a sea of purple shadows drowned.
Stray hands and heads that crawled; in nests I found
My neck, and heard that husky, gurgling choke
I could not move though mind and spirit broke.
It rolled, and spun, and stopped in front of me,
Till memory slowly came, and knowledge grew,
It fell in parts, and I was part of it.
In darkness absolute, and listening hard,
That glowed with fitful lights, and each one starred
And I drew back, but still the hand with stark,
Pursued and pounced; an arm that had no source
My loved one made soft cooing sounds, and so
And shining eyes bespoke caresses, slow
And languid, warming into life; no dread
Through mighty chambers, hunted and alone,
All substances and creatures from the bond
And I, though struggling, in that selfsame hour
Oh little creature, lost in time and space,
And watch, or seem to watch, me for your face
Changing and new, so hard to know, to trace.
And though you never talk (do you have tongue?)
I’ll talk of future times and alien shores.
And widening inch by inch along the floor
Aside. The flow turned toward me, and it kept
Increasing, spreading more and ever more
Before me, one closed portal, and the flow
Of this fresh pool of thin and brilliant blue.
And when the talons loosened, I could see
That flayed my flesh, and I was bound by spells
Weird, lifeless birds that talked and harshly sang.
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068.6
068.8
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068.11
069.6
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069.14
070.11
070.12
071.3
071.4
071.5
071.9
071.12
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072.3
072.12
072.14
073.2
073.4
073.14
074.2
074.6
074.11
074.13
075.1
075.5
075.6
076.2
076.9
076.12
077.1
077.4
077.8
077.11
077.12
078.3
078.5
078.6
078.10
078.14
079.11
080.6
081.4
A
Of revelers turned statue, and no more
Past them the leopards led me on and on
And when I saw these titans, thereupon
But when I passed and left them in their gloom,
And all the little jeweled blades of grass
And on my flesh their mouths, devouring, fall.
And so I slowly raise the shade to greet
And stare and stare in horror as I meet
The leering of a huge and sightless eye.
And when at last my captors bore me through
And I, and all that phantom city, died.
And all around their other victims wait,
Though they are broken too, and their flesh slit.
Around and see the comrades that are mine;
They left me morsels, curious and queer,
And in recurring deaths escape them never.
I found no door, and when all hope lay dead
Sheer cliff and rockfall miles below. There, sliding
A monstrous form surged on and searched with cry
As of a lost and hungry child. Then die
And stood tremendous to my caverned room,
Engirt, and hurled me nightward into doom.
And after this, there came to me one green
With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
And of its face no vestige could be seen,
And of its flesh the rotten remnants gave
And of that thing swept over me a fear
So great I turned and clawed my hands to bone
And everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
And every forward step a weary strain.
And still it followed, still I heard it gain
And I in all that solitude lie slain.
And burning eyes along each limb. It spun
Fantastic shapes and forms loomed everywhere
Rose-pink, and outward thrusting from each bare
Of creepers, and where head should be was growing
Then came the rush of hoofbeats and, soft-pressed
Of bird and fish in nodules like a band
Of knotty burls along the trunk, and clung
But all the strange and withered things still hung
And from those giant caverns’ lifted gloom
The ocean beds were open now, and free,
And all strange things once covered by the sea
There lay a bed of shells and bones; I spied
Then thousand ships and more; shapes great and wee
And weird encrusted forms on every side.
I saw the vales and mountains of the deep,
The weedy pastures and the drowned, the dead;
And in the fading vision of my sleep
43
081.7
081.9
081.11
081.13
082.3
082.14
083.11
083.13
083.14
086.12
086.14
087.2
087.4
087.10
087.11
087.14
088.7
089.4
089.6
089.7
089.10
089.14
090.1
090.4
090.5
090.6
090.9
090.10
090.12
091.4
091.5
091.8
091.12
092.1
092.5
092.8
092.12
093.8
093.9
093.11
094.7
095.2
095.3
095.5
095.7
095.8
095.9
095.11
095.12
44
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
I saw rise up a substance soft and white
Now I am bored with all things brief and transitory,
With love, and life, and death, and even with ennui;
And I am sick alike of passion and of glory,
Of days and nights that are an old and tiring story,
And dreams that can not be.
And indolently languish in her languorous
And polished ebony,
And lissome houris, gems and gold in many a measure,
I clap, and at the sign
Come forth my slaves and eunuchs and the dancing girls:
I hear the music’s plaintive sob, watch spins and whirls,
And drowsyhead gives way to dreams more slumberous,
And weary drag of minutes grows less dolorous,
And life less like a tomb.
And of the empty dreams that were not worth desiring,
And if you mesmerize
And sinuous, then I will raise you from the lowly
And if you charm me not, and I grow weary of
And your mouth poppy-lipped,
And if your kisses, like most kisses, mean not love,
And of your lush young beauty I grow wearier
And all love’s joys that were.
And melancholy, dream away the afternoon
And dream caravans of Nirvana are beholden,
And houris sad songs croon.
Doubt everything, doubt that I doubt, and wearily
Me, and I sicken with the languid unsurcease
All pleasure and all pain,
All substances and dreams, all sorrow, all delight,
All present, past, and future worlds; and day, and night;
All lacking, and all gain.
Away, and listless hours voluptuously flaunting
My withered heart, stained as with vermeil and rich vair,
Till evetide falls, and the Muezzin call to prayer
And La Illaha illa Allah! M’hamed rasul
Now day dies, and night falls, and that great summer moon
Floats up, and bathes the burning air still shimmering,
And the cicadas sing,
And champak fragrance makes the drowsy senses swoon,
And fair seems everything.
From somewhere in the distance voices fall and swell,
And faintly comes the echo of a traveler’s song,
The roads to distant marts; and Allah’s blessed foretell
Rich ends, and soft the tinkle of a camel’s bell
And leave behind me all the weary works of man,
And take the caravan
To heart’s desire that only I and Allah know,
The outer-lands where all’s a dream, and dream-winds blow
095.13
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096.6
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A
And when thy surfeit comes, then die! and die a-flinging
Drink! For the night and the fruit of the vine!
Drink! For the flagon is full and deep!
A thousand and a thousand years have fled;
Joys that pass and youth too fleet,
I am the night and the garden and all things swoon
I walk in the steps where the Beloved and I held tryst;
Where, drowsy and drunken and dreaming, nod and list
That tremble and shiver with passions that lately were?
A venomous, waiting, and phallic orchid dozes.
A tiger-lily opens and fails and closes
Wonder and beauty and terror are hanging all over,
A nameless and sorcerous glory has made me weak:
Of flowers and marvellous jasper and coral grasses
The night grows dim and unreal and reeling: do I waken
Wherein sweet terms, as Love, and Hope, and God,
The mountains and the rivers whisper: Death.
A million million men have lived and passed,
And found, the one reality is Death.
A million million men will live and pass,
And find, the one reality is Death.
The sum of hope and faith and life, the sum
Of all the stars and all the universe,
And all that ever will be known, is Death.
And all around, the weary corpses lie;
And bloated carrion rats that near me sit!
Around, and see the comrades that I had;
And then they left me, lonely. lying where
And awful things were lying all around—
Wan hands and heads that had no trace of wound,
And from a dusky corner came the stare
And there were living, ancient mummies bound
In gummy cloths of long and human hair.
These charnel horrors made me sick and weak,
And yet I could not move. There came a creak,
And then I felt a tongue or talon stroke
My neck, and heard a husky gurgling choke
And in the sky, there hung a baleful glare.
Terror and death seemed stalking everywhere,
And still those vast wings beat that sullen tune;
Would seize their prey and seek their cosmic lair?
And through the riven air, there harshly swept
And tottered in a spreading pool of blood;
And all the air was misty as a cloud.
And both my hands were covered with that red,
And everything was red and strange and mad;
And veiled the shrieking shape in haze that had
Upon all things of life and time and space;
Upon all things of life and time and space;
45
097.7
098.4
098.6
099.7
100.5
101.3
101.6
101.9
101.12
101.13
101.14
101.16
101.22
101.24
101.29
102.3
102.11
102.12
102.13
102.14
102.15
102.18
102.19
102.20
103.2
103.8
103.10
103.13
104.2
104.3
104.5
104.7
104.8
104.9
104.10
104.11
104.12
105.4
105.5
105.6
105.8
105.10
106.2
106.8
106.9
106.10
106.13
107.2
107.2
46
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And DOOM had fallen on the universe.
Nor vestige of the worlds of old; and now,
And wood-winds lightly grieve
And footsteps seem to pass
And flowers fair as moly
And voices shake the night
The worlds of sleep and waking,
And dreams become the real.
And fair things yet more fair,
And beauty yet unknown,
And light that never shone
And every dream-form glowing
The image and the fanes
Out of the well of the heart and the heart’s recesses
Comes love, and all the beauty that love possesses,
A glow that develops and flows from the inner being
And illumines with mystical light the eyes unseeing.
I am awed that the moon and stars are so close to me.
I am awed that flower and forest and leaf be shaken
O Love, the world so shadowy and dim
So faint the dream, O Love, and yet so fair.
In splendor of birth and dawning there where the worlds begin:
We are one with the stars, Beloved, and witnessed the young sun’s
dawning
When light shone out of the mystical ebb and flow:
And oblivion saw strange worlds begin to glow.
We have lived through cycles of birth and change, through cosmic
ages,
We have dwelt with new suns and watched the old stars die;
We have been participant and passer-by.
To birth, we have witnessed the past and present blend;
We have seen in the future time, and space, and the universe
creeping
We are deathless, O Love, and deific; we have known the
wonder supernal:
We have found that only the dream is unchanging, O Love, and
eternal,
Phantasmal realms of faëry, strange and new,
Where moons are high, and only dream-winds stir,
And young Prince Charming rides in quest of her
He who may lift the spell, and yet I seem
Is dreamland, out of Space and out of Time.
For, and the loveliness you watch so well.
With you. and you so beautiful and fair.
Of sleepy hours that time and plenty send;
Of beauty’s rarest harvests, and the hours
Differed so, each from each, and this one more
Though this were Paradise, and Paradise
Radiant and ever-freshening, ever new,
107.4
107.13
109.3
109.11
109.13
109.15
109.17
109.19
109.23
109.26
109.27
109.29
109.38
110.1
110.2
110.3
110.4
110.6
110.7
110.9
110.16
111.6
112.1
112.2
112.4
112.5
112.6
112.8
112.10
112.11
112.13
112.15
113.5
113.6
113.7
113.10
113.14
114.12
114.14
115.4
115.6
115.7
115.9
115.10
A
And I would let it in complete eclipse
The spinning threads weave patterns rich and rare,
And more for beauty, only known to me.
Your moods are dear to me, and all the ways
To all the world; and dearer still are those
Arrays and disarrays the house contains,
The changing fancy and the careful rows
Perfection gains by contrast and may be
The artistry external, and I find
And through its darkened window see no sky:
And you will never know what years drift by.
And it may be that you will find it lonely,
And it may be that you will find it fair;
And it may be that you will find it only
And all your days, and mine, a vain device.
And should a mouth as pleasureful as mine
To those that bless, and by my charm, are blessed.
And I look on with clearer, colder eyes,
Who finds impersonal and calm the skies;
And truths I could not otherwise discover.
And overlook the underlying thrust,
Them, and the words so beautiful and sweet
Them, and the words so beautiful and sweet
Assume new meaning and become the prick
And naked lay the true design, the trick.
The fall of footsteps light and pantherine
Came near me, passed, and faintly died away;
And of my presence, I could feel no sign
That says, These things shall be, and they are so:
And waited, wondered, though I did not know...
And only echo answer a low call.
And the days that are dead,
And the fallen sweet clover,
And a bitter full heart,
Only you, and the past, my dearest
And for thy wine, than earthly wine more sweet,
And for thy bread, than my bread more sustaining,
I ask no comfort and no ease of thee,
And point out ways to rapturous rebirth;
I ask for blankness and the dark, dark earth.
Long-dead creatures murmur and sigh
Mandrakes writhe and witch-fires burn,
Lethal waters sleep and swoon
Flickering flames and fire-flies
Lighting swamps and tarns unholy
And the miles of rotten bogs.
Air and water creatures fight,
And rise
Is as the fall and rise of mist of myrrh.
47
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116.6
116.14
117.1
117.5
117.6
117.7
117.11
117.13
118.2
118.4
118.5
118.6
118.7
118.14
119.10
119.14
120.2
120.7
120.12
121.3
121.9
121.9
121.10
121.12
122.1
122.2
122.3
122.6
122.8
122.12
123.3
123.9
123.13
123.19
124.3
124.4
124.9
124.11
124.14
125.7
125.10
126.1
126.3
126.5
126.8
126.10
127.4
127.5
48
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
So deeply dark and fair
And violet depths with flameful passions gleam.
And ope
The sight of goblets cool and rounded,
And scandal, better if unfounded.
And for the rest, she owed, and owed.
She loved alone and loved she most
And lovers, fat ones, old ones, came
And steadily grew strange and stranger.
And paid for all, on some occasions.
A beauty, save in soul and body,
Her thoughts and deeds alike were shoddy.
She had no scruples and no morals
And thus preserved her innocence.
Lips parting and closing over the draught her
And Machen to read when she thinks of the fabulous chalice.
The flagons and bottles and jars that cover her dresser
Stand waiting to perfume and powder and softly caress her,
Elizabeth Arden, Walska, and Rubenstein;
She is new each time that their contents grow, lesser, and lesser.
And ashes consume what the elders condemn.
The little gods then will tremble and waken
And rub out the granules of sleep from their eyes:
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
The little gods will answer their elders and rise.
The little gods will walk from hill and from highlands,
And four-dimension vaults revolve and open wide;
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
And they hide in eery lands where the fen-fires gleam.
Along the summit island lanes of shrubs and trees;
I hear them in the meadows and in wasteland,
Deserted city streets, and fog, and lantern glow.
I hear them over thunder, and at midnight gloom;
I hear them in the spring rise and in fall ways,
I hear them by the lake shore and at cliffs of stone;
I hear them in the open and in hallways,
And listen always as I journey on alone.
And past Nirvana waits eternal vision, pure,
Of black and radiant night.
The golden poppy folds and each eternal I
And though all poppy seeds in final chaos scatter,
And night’s great arch illume.
And I hope that you won’t cry dear,
And it only rhymes with turtle......
Poems ripe, red, rich, and rare,
And a smell of dandelions was
I know all Latin stems and nouns,
And any Latin phrase can quote,
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127.14
128.2
128.4
128.8
128.11
128.15
128.16
128.20
128.26
128.28
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128.40
129.2
129.8
129.9
129.10
129.11
129.12
130.8
130.9
130.10
130.11
130.12
130.13
130.14
130.15
130.16
130.20
131.2
131.7
131.8
131.10
131.13
131.14
131.15
131.16
134.8
134.12
134.16
134.22
134.24
135.2
135.11
136.7
136.11
137.3
137.6
A
Anew
Angel
49
And to the students in my classes,
137.7
And in my greatest bliss I am
137.9
Comparisons and conjugations,
137.13
And philological relations,
137.14
And other such-like things as that is
137.15
For they are life and love to me,
137.17
Illussimae and classicorum
137.21
And when I die, must be enscrolled
137.25
“Oh hail to thee, and et to Brute;
137.27
And think the words they drop are jewels.
138.2
And win the prof’s eternal pity,
138.7
And wonder what we’re conning to.
138.18
And learn the use of “ge” and “isdem.”
138.22
And in this pedagogic cloister,
138.23
Would rant and dream and drowse and doze.
138.26
And perfect students, all in rhythm,
138.27
And every prof, a second Firkins,
138.29
And Mr. Briggs would watch their English,
138.39
And every error, he would single-ish!
138.40
“Us, you and me. What matters except us?”
139.7
“Ely Forchamer, Miss Shere. I’m white and virtuous and fairly goo—” 139.9
Who came from near and came from far
140.7
And asked to go to Hades.
140.8
And ashes consume what the elder gods condemn.
141.8
The monster gods then will tremble and waken
141.9
And rub out the granules of sleep in their eyes,
141.10
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
141.11
The monster gods will answer the Ancient Ones and rise.
141.12
The monster gods will walk then from hills and from highlands,
141.13
When four-dimensioned vaults revolve and open wide;
141.14
141.15
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
141.16
And they hide in eerie lands where the fen-fires gleam.
141.20
The cat on the fence, and world conditions,
142.4
Emily Post, and thieves in state;
142.5
Means ditched by your girl and left by your friend,
142.8
Dig and delve
143.1
And you and I
143.7
So dig and delve,
143.9
And she didn’t mind,
144.4
And drew gas for the whole of Sauk City!
145.5
Farewell, good friend. You leave us now. And yet,
146.1
And past the winding river’s end you gaze,
147.4
Earth and eternity. Is some voice calling?
147.7
And how and whence the steadfastness, the source?
147.9
Restoring all things lost and small things broken.
147.12
Evening to night, and night to afterglow,
147.13
I am all life that springs anew,
133.31
Look homeward, angel, for the way is long.
037.14
50
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Anguish Anguish of some lost thing’s cry or call
Annoy That tongue hath no harsh syllable to annoy
Another A lonely traveler on another star;
Another mass their hungry pet half-ate,
Answer The answer came, where I in torment lay,
I answer—if they love me in my fashion,
And only echo answer a low call.
The little gods will answer their elders and rise.
The monster gods will answer the Ancient Ones and rise.
Answered
Who asked and answered in a breath
Antiquity
A city of a vast antiquity.
Antistrophes
Antistrophes that seven before him knew,
Any
Lovely as any girl the world has seen,
To any save themselves alone,
Beyond the age of any sun;
Wherein no seed nor any fruit are left,
Unknown what goal, if any goal, lies yonder
From any moon.
Than any known in lands that never were,
The legend saith: wherefor does any legend matter?
And any Latin phrase can quote,
Or any other words to jar ’em;
Anything
Not anywhere was life nor anything,
Anytime Quite to make it match in verse most anytime;
Anywhere
Not anywhere was life nor anything,
Not on earth nor anywhere
If I never take you anywhere again;
Aphrodite
Surely shall Aphrodite give you greeting,
And Aphrodite, every dream you seek;
Apocalypse
The cold apocalypse of sand.
Apocalyptic
Apocalyptic prophet of our doom,
The little gods dream an apocalyptic dream;
The little gods dream their apocalyptic dream;
The monster gods dream an apocalyptic dream;
The monster gods dream an apocalyptic dream,
Apollo Of pagany, divinely young Apollo,
Appalling
Oh color hideous, appalling, mad,
Appear What form you have, for always you appear
Appearances
Of daggers, fair appearances retreat
045.10
028.5
014.11
087.7
080.13
119.12
122.12
130.12
141.12
014.34
095.6
068.7
008.11
010.23
030.50
031.6
037.11
109.32
113.3
134.19
137.6
137.12
107.12
135.9
107.12
133.65
135.3
051.36
067.32
010.20
017.10
130.2
130.18
141.2
141.18
051.44
017.9
077.7
121.11
A
Appeared What they appeared. But there are some so blind
Aquarelle
Has love become an aquarelle?
Arabesques
Of arabesques the blood-red sun,
Arabesques on a tomb.
Arch
And night’s great arch illume.
Archibald
Archibald Mimmih ran a neat
Arctic From the Arctic gloom.
Arden Elizabeth Arden, Walska, and Rubenstein;
Are
Oh, the nights are long
And the days are dead,
And the trees are bare
And the skies are lead,
The days are short
And the days are dark,
The days are drear,
Oh, the nights are long
And the days are dead,
The flowers of old are overblown,
Lily and poppy and rose are gone,
The lips of the singers of Greece are still,
Maiden voices are mute;
The past is forgotten, its lips are dumb,
Lo, all the later days are long and dull and weary,
The sands of time are thick, the days march slow;
The years and love are gone, and thou art gone, beloved,
For gall and ash are all the ecstasy.
For none are left the tale to tell.
Are black and gold and red,
At last are wise
A warning cry—the shadowy forms are shifting:
You are the brand that sears, the mark of shame,
Beyond the rocks there are fair bodies with long tresses,
And there are pale, fair faces calling for caresses
There are strange eyes that beckon, white breasts and bodies crying
Love, and Death are born.
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
The rose, the grape, and a god are mine!
The listening ear; its tones are softly heard
Thine eyes, Valerian, are full
Thy purple haunted eyes are mad
They gazed on stars that now are dust,
Valerian! Thine eyes are filled
Valerian! Thine eyes are old
For they are blinded with the glut
51
121.5
042.13
055.2
065.12
134.24
140.1
002.19
129.11
002.3
002.4
002.5
002.6
002.8
002.9
002.25
002.33
002.34
004.56
004.57
004.64
004.65
004.68
007.45
007.46
007.53
007.56
010.24
012.13
014.29
015.45
017.7
020.1
020.3
020.9
021.8
022.4
022.8
022.12
023.6
028.6
030.25
030.30
030.33
030.45
030.49
030.55
52
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
How all my days are as an aria played
031.1
Wherein no seed nor any fruit are left,
031.6
Of hope; and how my hours are unavailing
031.9
On the meads that are rarest,
033.10
And the old stars are sunken
033.23
Where the asphodels are springing?
033.26
Whence the last birds are winging?
033.28
In continents and islands that are sunken,
036.21
Pause, rest, turn back while still your wings are strong,
037.13
Long are the roots that enter the soil
038.9
When all the olden days are over,
039.1
Of the phantoms that are not, but seem?
043.12
As the stars are, my love is eternal.
043.23
The grasses with glimmering dew are jewelled in opal and amethyst, 044.6
These, these are gone, nothing of them remains
051.8
But they whose life was barren are most fretful,
051.17
And they who merely lived are first to sigh:
051.18
Unless in deeper love both are combined;
051.25
There are no eyes to see,
053.11
My bones are hoar
054.55
Why are the marsh-weeds drooping low?
056.2
And the stars in the drowning pools are pale.
056.8
Are these shadows, now, like finger-tips,
058.7
They are curious things that hide in the woods
062.1
Are black and gold and red.
067.13
Are sick with memories awesome, eerie, fateful,
070.5
Where all things are, yet are not; time and space
070.11
What are the dim dread images that bind
083.5
Though they are broken too, and their flesh slit.
087.4
Around and see the comrades that are mine;
087.10
Of days and nights that are an old and tiring story,
096.5
And dream caravans of Nirvana are beholden,
096.59
I know that nothing is worth while, all things are quite
096.67
Her eyes are blind; her sweet white limbs but know
099.5
Wonder and beauty and terror are hanging all over,
101.16
Are merely words that mean no more than life.
102.4
All things are symbols of eternal death—
102.5
The worms with endless, spoiling flesh are glad.
103.14
Blessed be the dead for they are dead.
108.1
Where none are seen:
109.12
I am awed that the moon and stars are so close to me.
110.6
To birth the song that all the spheres are singing?
110.12
Your eyes, Beloved, are filled with the beauty of strange stars glowing 111.5
We are one with the stars, Beloved, and witnessed the young sun’s
dawning
112.1
We are deathless, O Love, and deific; we have known the wonder
supernal:
112.13
I know there are no princesses, but you
113.1
A princess are, with beauty lovelier
113.2
A
Where moons are high, and only dream-winds stir,
These are the things I love you for: the gray
You are the fairest of the lovely whom
Your moods are dear to me, and all the ways
To all the world; and dearer still are those
Your imperfections are as fair to me
An emptiness not knowing you are there.
Are these bright ways foredue to that one whom
To those that bless, and by my charm, are blessed.
What they appeared. But there are some so blind
What they are told, the falseness never find
That says, These things shall be, and they are so:
And the days that are dead,
For the springs that are gone.
For the times that are over,
Feet are ended in a fen—
Are like the secret pools of Jupiter.
Are languorous with dreams of mighty doom,
Though I know that you are pretty,
That your words are clever, witty,
For they are life and love to me,
Are things that never ought to bore ’em.
Or else they’re much more dumb than geese are.
And think the words they drop are jewels.
Especially when their knees are pretty.
“Miss Shere, are you a kind person?”
“I’m asking you, Miss Shere. Are you a cruel person?”
“What are you talking about?”
“A great deal matters. Who are you?”
“You’re offensive. That’s what you are.”
Aria
How all my days are as an aria played
Arm
Pursued and pounced; an arm that had no source
My hand? Why is my arm so strongly stayed?
Armageddon
Symbol of Armageddon, rot of rust,
Arms
In my arms I will hold her, passive, but I know her flesh will be
aching
But in thine arms, Myrrhiline,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
And so I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
And arms as sinuous as snakes,
Or the open arms, or the eyes of glass;
May sing of her are vain;
The branching arms that reached with taloned tips,
Had hooves, the arms no hands but splaying fall
Arose
I must, for it arose, its mass dividing
Around For many a thousand leagues around
53
113.6
114.1
116.1
117.1
117.5
117.9
118.8
118.11
119.14
121.5
121.7
122.6
123.3
123.4
123.7
126.15
127.2
127.13
135.4
135.5
137.17
137.22
137.24
138.2
138.8
139.1
139.3
139.6
139.8
139.12
031.1
074.13
083.6
017.19
003.17
004.80
007.1
007.37
007.51
007.63
020.2
038.14
041.14
091.11
092.7
089.8
010.9
54
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Ringed all around with sentinels that swayed,
I watched on earth the littler things around;
Deep stems twining around the mandrake,
And a pebble necklace around his head
Tides around Atlantis sweep,
All else is still the realm around,
In dissolution’s rot. Around,
He scans the regions lying all around,
Held sway, with purple dreamlands all around.
My old companions waited all around:
Yet twined around me with inhuman force.
Around me, solid walls of no escape,
And all around their other victims wait,
Around and see the comrades that are mine;
And all around, the weary corpses lie;
Around, and see the comrades that I had;
And awful things were lying all around—
Array
She will strip herself naked, in splendid and terrible glory array her,
Of lips too tender; your precise array.
Arrays Its superficial vesture whose arrays
Arrays and disarrays the house contains,
Arrow I am the arrow of the cosmic mind,
Arrowed Some arrowed beast crept to its hillside fastness?
Art
Thou art beautiful, Myrrhiline,
Thou art loveliest of the things I know;
When thou at the breasts of thy mistress art slaking
When thou thy pleasure and joy art taking,
The years and love are gone, and thou art gone, beloved,
Thou art as lovely as that ancient queen
With supernatal art.
Art thou only a phantom before me,
Artifice That’s natural artifice in you; the way
Artistry The artistry external, and I find
As
As it stirs the dust
With beauty of face and of body as the deathlessly beautiful Greek;
As the amorous maidens were loved in decadent Rome I shall love
her,
As Sappho of Lesbos was loved in the glory of Greece that is gone;
Never has woman been loved as I shall love her, never
Has man known the terrible glory of woman as I;
Even as Song and Life and Love,
Even as one who loves thee, Love,
Even as I.
Even as I, Oh Myrrhiline,
As the forgotten girls who placed them there.
As one who of strange pleasure sips,
As gods might worship Beauty marvellous.
I close thee, pure and rare as ivory,
Thou art as lovely as that ancient queen
011.10
036.44
038.5
038.15
047.32
053.17
054.20
069.5
071.11
072.2
074.14
078.9
087.2
087.10
103.2
103.10
104.2
003.9
114.8
117.3
117.6
133.4
059.10
004.39
004.40
005.1
005.5
007.53
008.9
032.8
043.11
114.4
117.13
002.23
003.2
003.33
003.34
003.37
003.38
004.2
004.3
004.4
004.10
004.60
004.74
008.4
008.6
008.9
A
Lovely as any girl the world has seen,
As the mist and the rain;
Drowning as willow-fingers drowned, deep—deep—
As thou hast never known;
All pleasures I have ever found have been as gall.
And still it seemed as if great Pan were calling
As though sly Pan had used his pipes to capture
And arms as sinuous as snakes,
Malignant, as if guarded by a spell,
And pass, as all things pass, deeming the dumb
Will be as perished poppies overblown
And drink her kisses as a priceless wine?
As if a wind had musically stirred
For songs as wondrous as this wondrous dream,
Whose perfect euphony would be as clear
And haunting as some fabulous lost stream,
How all my days are as an aria played
Or as the futile, giant music made
Shall even as my lost days be foredone,
Even as one who hath a quiet sleep,
Is such as gods impart
As if a wizard’s wand
That once ran red as blood
And we will part, as once we parted
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
For a love that was fleeting as day?
As the stars are, my love is eternal.
And my heart is fulfilled of its dream as I walk my enchanted way.
A sibilance that followed as I stole
From heat and plague as they died,
As we strode the streets of Tyre
As we strode down the streets of Tyre.
As we, triumphant, strode along,
Wherefor, solution distant as a star,
Spontaneous as yours,
A noisome pool as once before.
As deathless and old as the deathless sea,
As deathless as ever a worm can be,
On her brow the moonbeams lie as lace,
Like a creature unseen as it scurries and passes
As a cindering star,
Is the dream as it dies.
As the wind she will pass.
She will dream as the night wanes slowly,
As you have never known,
From towers topless as the realms of sleep
It is not blessed sleep. It looms as hateful.
As dreaded as some strange disease’s pain,
55
008.11
009.16
011.25
012.2
013.5
015.7
015.11
020.2
024.12
026.3
026.13
027.7
028.7
028.11
028.12
028.13
031.1
031.3
031.12
031.13
032.7
034.3
039.11
039.22
043.4
043.8
043.23
044.8
045.18
048.22
049.1
049.7
049.19
050.7
052.6
054.54
057.17
057.18
058.9
063.1
063.8
063.14
065.4
065.19
067.2
069.3
070.1
070.2
56
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
As fearful as the haunts of the insane.
As of some ancient corpse about to speak....
It watched me, waiting, while I stared as long
As all the years of Hercules’ great labors,
As I went onward toward those upper lairs.
Burst; mindless, mewing as it tried to speak,
As if there never were an end in store.
As I remember, there were clanging gongs
As I remember, there were flaming tongs
As I remember, in my agony
The vacant halls were quiet as a tomb.
And stare and stare in horror as I meet
As of a lost and hungry child. Then die
I saw it then, two trunks that fused as one,
Futile, futility as well; that all things wane,
My withered heart, stained as with vermeil and rich vair,
Wherein sweet terms, as Love, and Hope, and God,
As of a yellow corpse about to speak....
There was a crackle as of blazing wood,
And all the air was misty as a cloud.
And flowers fair as moly
For beauty of the mind, where, as on a loom
Else beauty were as lifeless as a tomb.
Your imperfections are as fair to me
As your more supernatal beauty, since
And should a mouth as pleasureful as mine
The chance, the pattern, call it as one will,
I merely listened, as I listen still,
Is as the fall and rise of mist of myrrh.
Mysterious as her sunken palace is,
So long as there was never danger;
The midst of her things: a girdle, as though to chasten
And listen always as I journey on alone.
As I note
As from birth
As I began,
I am nothing as I die,
As the unknown force disposes
I’m quite as good as ears to asses;
And other such-like things as that is
Would be as old as papa Perkins,
I am as mad as mad can be,
For I am as mad as mad can be.
As you begin your final travel, know
Drifting as leaves but urgent with a force
Ascends The radiant god ascends with warmth eternal,
Ash
To dust and ash will turn.
For gall and ash are all the ecstasy.
Ashen Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips
070.3
072.13
073.9
073.10
074.4
075.10
078.7
080.1
080.5
080.9
081.14
083.13
089.7
091.9
096.68
096.76
102.3
104.13
106.7
106.8
109.13
116.5
116.8
117.9
117.10
119.10
122.5
122.7
127.5
127.12
128.14
129.14
131.16
133.26
133.40
133.46
133.56
133.61
137.8
137.15
138.30
142.1
142.10
146.2
147.11
066.10
004.9
007.56
A
Ashes
Aside
Ask
Asked
Asking
Asleep
Asphodel
be ashen,
It lies where ashen lips no longer sing—
Two loves, two deaths, two flameless fires, ashen,
Lest dawn and barren ashes enter in.
We will pour ashes from the phials
And ashes consume what the elders condemn.
And ashes consume what the elder gods condemn.
Aside. The flow turned toward me, and it kept
I ask no comfort and no ease of thee,
I ask for blankness and the dark, dark earth.
Who asked and answered in a breath
And asked to go to Hades.
“I’m asking you, Miss Shere. Are you a cruel person?”
With the breath of the web-faced things asleep
For fields of asphodel and hyacinth,
Asphodels
Where the asphodels are springing?
Where asphodels do grow.
Aspire I aspire
Aspires And to no futile dream of death aspires,
Assail But still assail the deeper firmament.
Assailing To chart the labyrinths of long assailing;
Assay
Shine bright, ring out, attend the sweet assay
Asses
I’m quite as good as ears to asses;
Assuaged
Where ancient gods assuaged their lust consuming
Assume Assume new meaning and become the prick
Assures A greater wealth your greater love assures
Asunder He burst asunder all the whelming bars
At
Her eyes will close at my lips on the feverish brow above;
At her feet I have laid the tribute of a burning intolerable passion,
Petals tremulous with dew at dawn
When thou at the breasts of thy mistress art slaking
But all night long we worshipped at our pagan altar,
And now at last I crown me with a coronal
At last are wise
He stood at last before the citadel
Itself from horror at those eyes’ blind sheen.
Thine eyes were at the avatar
I have drunk at the fountains
We left her staring at the musty pall,
And knowing that my quest at last must falter
Like a priest at a shrine I adore thee,
I have burned all my flame at the altar,
At me and slyly chuckle while they keep
Till at last, in her caverned halls
Stared at my own dead eyes unearthly lit.
Then at the top I stood on magic squares
57
003.23
027.13
051.24
007.12
039.10
130.8
141.8
078.5
124.9
124.14
014.34
140.8
139.3
125.3
051.34
033.26
041.4
133.16
051.20
050.14
031.10
051.59
137.8
015.27
121.10
051.32
024.5
003.14
003.21
004.58
005.1
007.17
013.7
014.29
024.10
029.8
030.5
033.3
035.3
036.15
043.9
043.17
054.40
060.21
073.11
074.5
58
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
But all at once the shell of that cocoon
At length all motion ceased, upon a crag.
And when at last my captors bore me through
I clap, and at the sign
How glad I was that I at last awoke!
At first I deemed it some mad nightmare-dream,
For Death the Conqueror at last was king;
I am awed, O Love, at knowing this mystery,
My life-illusion has at last been broken,
I hear them over thunder, and at midnight gloom;
I hear them by the lake shore and at cliffs of stone;
Here at the house you dwelled
But once, for every soul in mosque, at sea, on sand
Now I, at dusk, beside the wall of ancient tombs,
While over us the wind at twilight soughs,
Ate
see also Half-Ate
Sick, still, and weary, while they ate their way;
Athwart Athwart the circling citadel of stars,
Atlantis Lost Atlantis slumbers deep,
When Atlantis stood alone
On Atlantis dreaming, dreaming
Mark where dead Atlantis lies
Swimming through Atlantis doomed;
Tides around Atlantis sweep,
Lost Atlantis slumbers well
Atom
I am atom lost in space,
Will atom keep
Atop
Atop a mountain measurelessly high
Attains Of flesh and spirit, and attains the crown
Attempts
Attempts to flee from depths where hope was slain;
Attend And sprites invisible attend the meeting,
Of water, fire, earth and air attend you,
Shine bright, ring out, attend the sweet assay
Atthla They saw the mighty Atthla fall
Attic
Slowly I climbed the worn old attic stairs
Attitudes To illustrate their attitudes,
Aureoled
Thy face is aureoled
Authors’ The authors’ names I know by rote,
Autumn Autumn is old
Sleep, with autumn sleeping,
Autumnal
On the autumnal gust;
Of oak the leaves fall in autumnal haze
Avatars The secret of eternal avatars.
Avidly And incubi avidly waiting to take
The fleshly flowers whispered avidly:
Await Await thy kingly head.
075.9
079.10
086.12
096.21
104.14
105.12
107.9
110.5
120.1
131.10
131.14
132.1
134.2
134.4
147.3
054.29
036.2
047.1
047.13
047.17
047.25
047.28
047.32
047.40
133.52
133.66
089.2
068.10
070.7
051.38
051.40
051.59
030.37
074.1
138.16
032.3
137.5
002.10
009.5
009.18
147.2
036.4
038.7
082.1
012.16
A
Await your kingly head.
Awaited Awaited us, sea-weary all,
He wins the long awaited separation
Awaiting
Awaiting morn.
For the soft flowers awaiting the lips of the lover
Awake In sunlight splendid meadows to awake.
I hear them wide awake or part way resting,
Awaken Now I fully awaken
With ghostly winds that whisper to them, Awaken.
Awakened
I have awakened in the fevered midnight noon,
Awakening
And glowing brightlier, awakening seem the skies, on
Awaking I have not found it sleeping or awaking.
Away
And while the fleeting hours away;
Its white life away;
While empty cities rot away
I have sundered the stars away;
Away; the specters by the gnarled trunk muttered
No ears to hear her footsteps die away.
Before I dropped away, for I was free—
For silence unto silence died away.
Caught me with safety but a league away.
I turn away from diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls,
O Cyrenaya, take away the sweet, dark gum,
And melancholy, dream away the afternoon
Away, and listless hours voluptuously flaunting
Till softly falls away
Sleep the dim night away
The years away intended, but for leaping
Came near me, passed, and faintly died away;
Nor that thou roll away the mountain boulders
I am the cinder wiped away,
Then away, away,
Away, away.
Awed
I am awed, O Love, at knowing this mystery,
I am awed that the moon and stars are so close to me.
I am awed that flower and forest and leaf be shaken
Awesome
Are sick with memories awesome, eerie, fateful,
Awful What evil source your awful scarlet flood?
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of
endless and awful delight;
And awful things were lying all around—
The charnel sounds of awful slaughtering.
Awoke How glad I was that I at last awoke!
Avatar Thine eyes were at the avatar
Azure And thou hast known the azure mist
59
067.16
049.6
068.9
065.8
101.19
051.35
131.9
033.9
110.8
101.1
066.11
036.57
004.72
009.8
010.11
043.6
045.19
053.13
079.13
080.14
086.2
096.19
096.34
096.56
096.74
096.81
109.7
119.5
122.2
124.10
133.54
143.3
143.11
110.5
110.6
110.7
070.5
017.2
043.2
104.2
105.11
104.14
030.5
030.17
B
Bacchanal
Above the bacchanal in the forest dwelling
Bacchic With nymphs and girls in amorous Bacchic moods:
The glasses clink for a Bacchic drink—
What, ho! For the Bacchic brotherhood!
Back
And farther back, when worlds were in their dawning.
Still farther back before the stars were spawning
Pause, rest, turn back while still your wings are strong,
You will come back to me,
You will come back to me, lost lover,
Come back with setting suns
You will come back some day, lost lover,
Come back, come back to me,
And back; and purple suns flamed northerly
And I drew back, but still the hand with stark,
Some warning voice calls out: Go back—go back!
They dragged me back with never pause for rest.
Back through the desert for those fiends to flay,
They gave me back my eyes so I could peer
I sink back in the pillows of my deep divan
Backward
And traveled backward past the age of man
Bait
The chewed remains of something used for bait;
Bale
I sought in maze of sorcery and bale;
Baleful And baleful boles of strange misshapen growths
Mars poured on you the bane of baleful beams,
Of burning, baleful scarlet spun
And in the sky, there hung a baleful glare.
Balustrades
Of sun illumes the mouldy balustrades.
Band
Phantasmal fire burns the band of sorcery,
Of bird and fish in nodules like a band
Bane
Mars poured on you the bane of baleful beams,
Banners Where banners of his proud name float unfurled,
Bare
And the trees are bare
And her body is bare.
That streams from her glowing body bare
Rose-pink, and outward thrusting from each bare
Laid bare the mystery of the vast sea-tomb,
In that bare wall where my fists wildly beat,
Barred So great the gap, and firmly barred the doors,
Barren Lest dawn and barren ashes enter in.
Yea, all the barren years that linger in their passing,
015.15
015.28
022.1
022.2
036.25
036.27
037.13
039.2
039.7
039.8
039.19
039.20
071.3
074.11
083.9
086.5
086.6
087.9
096.8
036.18
087.6
036.54
011.3
017.15
055.14
105.4
053.10
061.9
093.8
017.15
069.4
002.5
019.8
060.20
092.5
094.6
124.7
050.4
007.12
007.59
B
But they whose life was barren are most fretful,
Barren or fertile, rich or thin and poor,
Barricades
He barricades himself against the world:
Bars
He burst asunder all the whelming bars
Bathed Or be bathed in new glory,
Bathes Floats up, and bathes the burning air still shimmering,
Bathing By bathing me in streams of molten lead.
Bat
see Man-Bat
Bat-Things
The bat-things weave,
Be
see also Soon-to-be-Forgotten
Till her body be mine.
In my arms I will hold her, passive, but I know her flesh will be
aching
Our desire with breast to breast and body to body we shall be slaking
Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips
be ashen,
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond shall
not sever
There will be,
Passionlessly waiting till the spell shall be broken
Will be as perished poppies overblown
Whose perfect euphony would be as clear
Shall even as my lost days be foredone,
Or be bathed in new glory,
Delight be withholden?
To be, I thought to find in nearer faces
I know this all I ever will be knowing:
Through them and over them—what shall be found
Our thoughts will be more sad than death is
Be still, O Muse! what syllables soever,
Should love be told in brede or breve?
In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of the
future, the passions to waken,
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul
such a madness and fury will sweep?
Is the rose to be withered and shrunken?
Shall the poppy be flameless and dead?
I am the colour yet to be;
Though ye colours pass, though his limbs be fleet,
There could not be so still a sea
No love endures if love be only passion
And no love lasts if love be only mind,
There will be none after.
Her vigil never will be done:
As deathless as ever a worm can be,
But the musty tale can never be told
Night be gone.
61
051.17
069.6
069.2
024.5
033.29
096.86
084.4
061.10
003.12
003.17
003.19
003.23
003.39
004.81
006.7
026.13
028.12
031.12
033.29
033.32
036.47
036.63
038.3
039.4
041.13
042.14
043.15
043.16
043.31
043.32
046.42
046.47
048.11
051.22
051.23
052.2
055.18
057.18
057.21
066.4
62
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
The days for which the heart should be most grateful
My own the lineaments that seemed to be
Oh heart, cease beating; eyes, close; sight, be wrong:
Whose source could only, be some fearful shape
Though singly impotent, might be in mass
I know that I’ll by them be watched for ever
And of its face no vestige could be seen,
Me hope. I fell, though flesh itself be rent
Of creepers, and where head should be was growing
And dreams that can not be.
Fling wide the roses, ere the petals all be faded,
Live riotously, ere thy life for death be traded,
Take, or the taking never will be thine;
Such a treasure? I’d be missing
Blessed be the dead for they are dead.
Blessed be the living for they will be dead.
Blessed be the unborn for they shall be dead.
I am awed that flower and forest and leaf be shaken
Love comes. I know that I shall never be
Oh love, it is enough that I may be
Yet would it be no Eden to entice.
Reveal the symmetry that should be shown
Perfection gains by contrast and may be
There will be none with you to help you share it,
And it may be that you will find it lonely,
And it may be that you will find it fair;
And it may be that you will find it only
A counterpart of what is still to be?
Or think that those sweet words were meant to be
That says, These things shall be, and they are so:
No human being could be near her:
Can’t you see that I’d be able
And when I die, must be enscrolled
They’re always right, they can’t be wrong,
Would be as old as papa Perkins,
For who could ever be a prof.
“Well, I guess I’ll be going. I’ll be seeing you.”
I am as mad as mad can be,
For I am as mad as mad can be.
Beacon Before the palace a beacon flares,
Beak
Whose black, scaled body had for head a beak,
A beak that, darting, closed me in its trap.
Beams Mars poured on you the bane of baleful beams,
Bear
Go! I can not bear thee, Go!
I can not bear you. Go!
Bearing Bearing the world upon his broken shoulders,
I come, weary yet bearing still this load.
Beast
Some arrowed beast crept to its hillside fastness?
Of human form or beast, weird sorcery
070.4
073.6
073.12
078.11
082.7
087.13
090.5
091.7
092.8
096.6
097.1
097.3
097.6
100.4
108.1
108.2
108.3
110.7
113.9
114.13
115.11
117.4
117.11
118.3
118.5
118.6
118.7
118.10
121.4
122.6
128.10
135.8
137.25
138.5
138.30
138.33
139.15
142.1
142.10
125.14
075.13
075.14
017.15
012.10
067.10
059.2
124.8
059.10
093.7
B
Beasts
Beat
see Half-Beasts
That made our veins and pulses wildly beat.
On which such sunfire beat.
Them fill the air with measureless strong beat—
That beat the air to frenzy, dirges, knells.
And still those vast wings beat that sullen tune;
In that bare wall where my fists wildly beat,
Beating With wings of beating purple flew to me
Oh heart, cease beating; eyes, close; sight, be wrong:
Then beating to the chambers of my brain
Beautiful I am enraptured of one immortally lovely, with beautiful tresses,
With beauty of face and of body as the deathlessly beautiful Greek;
The gifts of my body I bring to a flesh-white and beautiful palace,
I hold all her body a beautiful living white chalice
Beautiful maidens have their bed
Beautiful youths have long lain dead
Thou art beautiful, Myrrhiline,
Poisonous and beautiful and dead;
Abomination beautiful,
With you. and you so beautiful and fair.
Them, and the words so beautiful and sweet
Beauty Is the voice of Beauty that dies.
With beauty of face and of body as the deathlessly beautiful Greek;
Shall lose all Beauty in the end,
So shalt thou thy beauty lend
Beauty and Love and Life must die,
Even the least. Beauty must die.
Never will Beauty escape the grave,
And the song of Beauty for ever dying
And all the love and wondrous beauty of my beloved
Love’s beauty and love’s torment and love’s fever-kisses,
The beauty, terror, and the pain of love.
And beauty passed unto its final perfect beauty,
For Beauty ever must dissolve and die;
And all the beauty of that night now lies decaying,
Drunken with beauty and sweet ecstasy,
As gods might worship Beauty marvellous.
And I, who hold that Beauty is supreme,
Die, with Beauty that dies
The beauty of her immarbled by the Greek;
The growth of seeds of morbid beauty, sown
Phantasmal things of beauty and of death,
The beauty of thy features,
And blazed in beauty, deep on topless deep,
So fair she is that beauty hath no graces
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of
endless and awful delight;
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were as
shadowed as night?
63
007.24
048.12
079.2
080.2
105.6
124.7
071.7
073.12
080.12
003.1
003.2
003.5
003.7
004.25
004.27
004.39
006.2
030.27
114.14
121.9
001.14
003.2
004.11
004.12
004.29
004.34
004.36
004.61
007.19
007.21
007.28
007.35
007.42
007.43
008.2
008.4
008.13
009.19
012.32
025.6
025.10
032.5
034.11
041.1
043.2
043.4
64
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate,
meshed in the love thou hast sown,
043.26
There is a faint, far rapture of birds in the breathless beauty of dawn, 044.1
Except the fair, faint dream of beauty slowly
051.9
Beauty more vital for your hearts to capture,
051.13
Till beauty into perfect beauty swoons;
051.53
Symbol of beauty, love, and life, and healing,
051.62
Her grave, gray eyes a beauty hide
053.2
And she alone has beauty, grave and gray.
053.18
With beauty of frail and waving fronds go wide,
060.7
She drinks the earthly and heavenly beauty of morning;
066.13
And of your lush young beauty I grow wearier
096.50
Springtide waning, Beauty sweet,
100.6
Wonder and beauty and terror are hanging all over,
101.16
And beauty yet unknown,
109.26
Comes love, and all the beauty that love possesses,
110.2
Your eyes, Beloved, are filled with the beauty of strange stars glowing 111.5
A princess are, with beauty lovelier
113.2
The inner beauty I more deeply care
114.11
Beauty possesses, but would not care
116.2
For beauty of the mind, where, as on a loom
116.5
Else beauty were as lifeless as a tomb.
116.8
I love you for the beauty all can see,
116.13
And more for beauty, only known to me.
116.14
As your more supernatal beauty, since
117.10
Surely this beauty was not meant for keeping
119.1
A beauty, save in soul and body,
128.26
The golden poppy glows in beauty with the light
134.11
He surely was a classic beauty.”
137.28
Beauty’s In whom all Beauty’s graces meet—
012.52
Poems for Beauty’s own enraptured ear.
028.14
And by your side, in beauty’s own rebirth
051.43
Of beauty’s rarest harvests, and the hours
115.6
128.22
Because Because she sometimes fell or stumbled;
Beckon There are strange eyes that beckon, white breasts and bodies crying
020.9
Beckoning
Beckoning to rites forgotten long ago:
006.16
Become Until your birthsite was become effaced.
037.7
Has love become an aquarelle?
042.13
I found my leg become a hellish root,
082.11
And dreams become the real.
109.19
You will become? It seems so strange to me
118.12
Assume new meaning and become the prick
121.10
Becomes
Becomes that single soul, the unity beholden
134.17
Bed
see also Needle-Bed
Beautiful maidens have their bed
004.25
A cool dark pillow, a comforting bed,
038.13
Set, fixed, immovable my bed;
054.9
B
There lay a bed of shells and bones; I spied
Nothing remains of her; her ancient bed
Beds
The ocean beds were open now, and free,
Been
Never has woman been loved as I shall love her, never
I have been made by thee idolatrous;
All pleasures I have ever found have been as gall.
She has been swallowed in the years’ long flow.
We have been participant and passer-by.
We have been the dreamed-of, the dreamer, the fugitive dream:
My life-illusion has at last been broken,
I am not sorry to have been your lover,
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
You have never been inspiring to my pen.
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
Beetles Pebbles and beetles and layers of earth,
Before All night I bowed before a burning shrine;
Before the greater dream whose dawn
He stood at last before the citadel
A star they knew before it came.
Where night was like a shroud before an altar
Before a vaster deep beyond all thought,
Still farther back before the stars were spawning
And longer ways before you yet to wander
Art thou only a phantom before me,
Before we had lost the shore.
Of those the days before the quest.
There was none before you,
A noisome pool as once before.
Antistrophes that seven before him knew,
Before me, one closed portal, and the flow
Before I dropped away, for I was free—
Curled inward, flowerwise. I stood before
Before the palace a beacon flares,
Befriended
Or gold that never yet no man befriended,
Beg
“I beg your pardon, I don’t know you.”
Began That swiftly toward me now began to fall,
It is the ceaseless song that love began; unended,
As I began,
Who knows when I first began?
Begged I begged the gods to save me from such pain.
Begin
In splendor of birth and dawning there where the worlds begin:
And oblivion saw strange worlds begin to glow.
As you begin your final travel, know
Begins I dream through realms where naught begins or ends,
Begins the journey long.
Begotten
Amid all worlds of time and dust begotten
Begun And find defeat ere I have much begun;
65
095.5
099.3
095.2
003.37
008.5
013.5
099.8
112.8
112.14
120.1
120.9
130.11
135.6
141.11
038.6
007.18
014.14
024.10
030.44
036.13
036.14
036.27
037.9
043.11
048.4
049.16
052.1
054.54
068.7
078.10
079.13
081.3
125.14
051.3
139.2
088.13
111.11
133.46
133.58
080.10
111.6
112.4
146.2
070.10
096.96
036.7
050.6
66
Behind
Beholden
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
In all the years by time begun,
To seek some image far behind some portal
And cower behind the black tree boles
Though they who tortured me were far behind,
Behind, the thirsting tips upon me, warm,
And leave behind me all the weary works of man,
Green eyes you hide yourself behind; your face
Behind the amber lids they dimly dream,
In front or behind,
And dream caravans of Nirvana are beholden,
Becomes that single soul, the unity beholden
Being
Where sat an even greater, stranger being,
A glow that develops and flows from the inner being
No human being could be near her:
Beings Vampirish beings of a stellar race,
Beings’ Where far, unhuman beings’ dark embrace
Being’s This being’s face is soft, he shall not pass;
Believe From love or faith or trust—fools—who believe
Believed Believed no truth except what pleased her;
Believer The true believer makes his own faith all along
Believers Grace, true believers, with burnouses flowing gracile,
Bell
All night I heard the tolling of a bell;
The bell beneath the seas, beyond the shore.
Rich ends, and soft the tinkle of a camel’s bell
Her laugh was like a silver bell.
Bells
Far silver bells with Song’s most sweet alloy.
Oh bells that shall not ever ring for me,
Beloved All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
And all the love and wondrous beauty of my beloved
And so I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
The years and love are gone, and thou art gone, beloved,
Unto the utter end I worship thee, beloved,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
Thy one Beloved, fair and sweet,
Oh sweet beloved and enchanted lover—
I walk in the steps where the Beloved and I held tryst;
The Beloved is gone; I know not the way she has taken;
A flame of the stars, Beloved, burns out of the far-flung spaces
Your eyes, Beloved, are filled with the beauty of strange stars glowing
It is so strange, Beloved, that everything has blended
We are one with the stars, Beloved, and witnessed the young
sun’s dawning
There is a room, Beloved, that you’ll inherit;
Below Sheer cliff and rockfall miles below. There, sliding
Who liked it above or below,
Bend
Round the bend,
Beneath Sleeping beneath the grass;
055.6
036.19
062.2
085.9
092.13
096.98
114.2
127.7
144.3
096.59
134.17
076.4
110.3
128.10
025.11
070.13
082.2
121.6
128.30
134.20
096.83
094.1
094.12
096.95
128.33
028.8
051.58
007.1
007.19
007.37
007.51
007.53
007.57
007.63
012.51
051.27
101.6
101.26
111.1
111.5
111.9
112.1
118.1
089.4
144.2
133.49
004.44
B
Where all seemed dead beneath the branch-twined roof
It slumbers deep beneath the fabled hills,
Beneath twin moons of livid red.
Sunk beneath the washing wave;
In my tomb beneath the ground,
In my grave beneath my mound.
That glimmer beneath her sunless, wind-departed skies.
To seek, beneath the flower-heads, a path.
When I collapsed beneath that burning sky?
The bell beneath the seas, beyond the shore.
Or if, beneath those warmer, clearer skies,
I bow beneath this fruitless unattaining,
Burn beneath the stagnant skies,
Resting beneath the shadow curtain falling
Benison Though every day were filled with benison
Bent
Or was he bent on dark adventure, bold,
Bereft Ere I, by night and darkness, am bereft
Beside Yet all who gaze upon him walk beside him.
One fleshy tentacle, raised me beside
Now I, at dusk, beside the wall of ancient tombs,
Ennobled by your grace, your love—beside you,
Bespoke And shining eyes bespoke caresses, slow
Bespoken
In love bespoken,
Bestow Upon her to bestow;
Betray The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will betray
her.
Better Were better than their hideous, measure wrongs.
And scandal, better if unfounded.
Which is better than all,
Between All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
And so I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
Eternity between you and your haven;
Where the rippling waters ebb and flow between
Until, between
Beyond Liliths look beyond the sketchbook’s leaf,
Our worship went beyond our own dim comprehension,
Beyond the shadows of the shrouded deep
Beyond the rocks there are fair bodies with long tresses,
He passed beyond the utmost realm of stars,
Beyond the heavens’ great celestial throng,
Beyond the age of any sun;
Out of the mystical spaces flung beyond,
Itself was lost beyond abysses of the night...
Before a vaster deep beyond all thought,
I sought beyond no more.
Beyond the soaring clouds’ infinity;
67
011.7
027.12
030.36
047.2
054.17
054.18
060.5
082.10
085.4
094.12
099.12
124.1
126.4
147.5
115.3
059.11
031.8
059.16
091.13
134.4
146.5
075.5
132.2
041.2
003.11
080.8
128.4
143.6
007.1
007.37
007.51
007.63
037.8
060.3
109.16
006.10
007.29
014.1
020.1
024.1
024.2
030.50
034.2
034.15
036.14
036.40
037.10
68
Bids
Big
Bind
Binds
Bird
Birds
Birds’
Birth
Birthsite
Bismillah
Bitter
Black
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And conquest everlastingly beyond,
Beyond the window’s tracery
Beyond the lifetime of the sun.
That streamed to join the nothingness beyond.
Beyond the rack’s red searing agony
Beyond the violet, within the red?
The bell beneath the seas, beyond the shore.
A wind from worlds beyond blows out of foreign places
Beyond the black beyond the stellar maze.
She lifts her young faun face to greet the flushing sky, bids
Great big moonfaced politicians,
The rose and the violet bind her hair;
What are the dim dread images that bind
Binds you, O Love.
Is like the pure, sweet warbling of a bird,
So huge the wings, I wondered what the bird
Of bird and fish in nodules like a band
Whence the last birds are winging?
There is a faint, far rapture of birds in the breathless beauty of dawn,
Weird, lifeless birds that talked and harshly sang.
She hears the birds’ glad rapture and singing glee;
Her birth and sleep.
Died upon birth.
To birth the song that all the spheres are singing?
In splendor of birth and dawning there where the worlds begin:
We have lived through cycles of birth and change, through cosmic
ages,
To birth, we have witnessed the past and present blend;
As from birth
Until your birthsite was become effaced.
Bismillah wa Allahu Akbar! when with facile
Yea, all the bitter night I sought the bitter rapture,
But bitter is the end of love and man’s desire,
And bitter all the poison that it brings;
The song of life is but a tedious, bitter moan;
Of bitter woe.
From all the hate of all those bitter scars.
And the bitter sleep and the sadness have fled in a strange rebirth.
And a bitter full heart,
I passed and reached the black pool’s rock-strewn edge.
I peered amid those waters black and still.
Are black and gold and red,
Black
All things died in my black might,
While sick men stoked; the black hulk poked
Eternal night, and earth damp, black, and cold
Saw only a realm of wet black sand
050.9
055.1
055.20
076.14
084.9
088.2
094.12
111.3
127.20
066.3
142.3
019.6
083.5
109.40
028.3
079.4
093.8
033.28
044.1
081.4
066.14
035.12
039.6
110.12
111.6
112.5
112.10
133.40
037.7
096.82
007.3
007.61
007.62
013.2
013.24
024.8
044.4
123.13
011.9
011.21
012.13
046.1
046.7
048.17
054.21
057.8
B
For magic black.
And cower behind the black tree boles
Are black and gold and red.
Whose black, scaled body had for head a beak,
Quick to my side two black, sleek leopards sprang
The mandrakes moaned along the black lagoon,
Out of the dark where the black moons creep,
Out of the sky, a black star shines,
Beyond the black beyond the stellar maze.
Of black and radiant night.
Blackness
That pierced the blackness of a starless sky
Blade
No moving thing, no blade of grass. One tree
Blades And all the little jeweled blades of grass
Blame Who can blame the mouth that sips
Blandly They blandly sit upon their stools
Blank
Then, on this paper now so blank and white,
Blankness
I ask for blankness and the dark, dark earth.
Blasted That blasted all the worlds that were.
Blaze
The shadows thickened, but a blaze illuming
Blazed And blazed in beauty, deep on topless deep,
Blazing There was a crackle as of blazing wood,
Bled
They slit me till a hundred new wounds bled;
The air from some vast stellar carnage bled
Bleeding
So great, I clawed my face to bleeding strips,
Red phantoms in its bleeding mystery hid.
Blend
To birth, we have witnessed the past and present blend;
Blended A frantic whisper with the wind is blended
It is so strange, Beloved, that everything has blended
Bless
To those that bless, and by my charm, are blessed.
Blessed It is not blessed sleep. It looms as hateful.
The roads to distant marts; and Allah’s blessed foretell
Blessed be the dead for they are dead.
Blessed be the living for they will be dead.
Blessed be the unborn for they shall be dead.
To those that bless, and by my charm, are blessed.
Blessing It is the blessing of a Druid’s prayer,
Blight What nightmare bore you, hateful blight of red?
I gave him the pall of Death’s last blight,
Blighted From a trunk, that withered, blighted bole,
Blind
see also Window-Blind
Itself from horror at those eyes’ blind sheen.
And once thy purple eyes went blind
Except to blind you;—
The spheres that spin of chance the blind and dumb,
Was it only for darkness to blind me,
Bloodless, the blind eyes of eternity,
69
061.4
062.2
067.13
075.13
081.5
105.3
125.2
125.17
127.20
134.12
089.3
093.3
082.3
100.3
138.1
025.5
124.14
030.8
015.25
034.11
106.7
084.5
106.12
029.10
106.14
112.10
015.43
111.9
119.14
070.1
096.94
108.1
108.2
108.3
119.14
110.15
017.1
046.6
045.2
029.8
030.41
033.38
036.28
043.7
073.7
70
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Her eyes are blind; her sweet white limbs but know
099.5
I am blind in the white embrace of the moon’s hot stream
101.27
Then blind, the favored ones; while I, more wise
119.7
What they appeared. But there are some so blind
121.5
I am wisdom of my own self blind,
133.5
Blinded For they are blinded with the glut
030.55
Blinder Longer blinder
133.38
Blinding They poured fresh acid on my blinding eyes;
084.2
Blindly Doubting, I stumble blindly to thy feet,
124.2
Bliss
And in my greatest bliss I am
137.9
Bloat
I now have ceased to bloat;
054.42
Bloated The death of pale-green bloated things.
030.12
And bloated carrion rats that near me sit!
103.8
Blood
My blood was burning in my veins, and all the torment
007.5
Whence came your charnel hue of pain and blood?
017.4
That once ran red as blood
039.11
With blood that had so curious a glow;
078.12
And tottered in a spreading pool of blood;
106.2
Blood-Brother
Blood-brother, boon companion to the yew,
068.2
Bloodless
Bloodless, the blind eyes of eternity,
073.7
Bloodprints
My bloodprints in the dead sand marked my trail.
085.10
Blood-Red
Have seen the blood-red plenilune.
030.4
I am the colour deep blood-red,
046.18
Of arabesques the blood-red sun,
055.2
The blood-red waving wastes of sand
055.11
There is pressure on her blood-red lips,
058.5
The sun stared on me like a blood-red eye,
085.5
Enwrapped it in a steaming blood-red shroud:
106.4
All night the blood-red ruby glares,
125.13
Blood’s The blood’s full worth.
038.8
Bloom Where the lilies bloom above;
004.26
Never a rose will deathlessly bloom,
004.35
096.26
Till jasmine, oleander, or full roses’ bloom
The golden poppy once again will grow to bloom
134.23
Bloomed Where the fabled roses bloomed.
047.31
Blooms The summer blooms.
101.10
The legend saith: for each, the golden poppy blooms
134.1
Blow
Only phantom poppies blow,
047.29
Why has the night-wind ceased to blow?
056.4
The outer-lands where all’s a dream, and dream-winds blow
096.101
Is only known in realms where dream-winds blow.
099.4
Blowing And the wind is blowing cold.
002.7
And the wind is blowing cold.
002.35
A wind from the spheres that through your shadowy hair is blowing 111.7
Blown Forget, with the blown poppies forgetting
009.21
B
Blows
Blue
Blue-Red
Blur
Boast
Bodies
Body
Bogs
71
For youth, a ravished poppy’s petals blown:
Blown petals that fall,
For the winds that have blown,
A wind from worlds beyond blows out of foreign places
Blue rubies won by stealth
Blue rubies won by stealth
Of this fresh pool of thin and brilliant blue.
040.6
063.6
123.2
111.3
012.20
067.20
078.14
Of blue-red veins erect, a spiral swarm.
The face a group of eyes above a blur
She loved no man, so she would boast,
Beyond the rocks there are fair bodies with long tresses,
With bodies flashing in the sounding seas of foam,
There are strange eyes that beckon, white breasts and bodies crying
With beauty of face and of body as the deathlessly beautiful Greek;
The gifts of my body I bring to a flesh-white and beautiful palace,
I hold all her body a beautiful living white chalice
Till her body be mine.
Her lips and her face and her breasts, all her body I will cover with
kisses,
Our desire with breast to breast and body to body we shall be slaking
Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips
be ashen,
And all the long night her body to mine I shall press;
I shall teach her the lore of Venus till all her sweet body tremble,
Her lips with my lips, her passionate body with mine I shall cover
Thy body fevered with love’s desire,
Thy body now so passionate
Yield his body unto dust,
And body to body, drunken forms were swaying
There touches his body lightly a shiver,
Her flesh a torment, her body a rapturous ache
And her body is bare.
Her body and her rose-red lips to mine,
And left her lovely body to oblivion;
We left her far more quiet body lying there:
We only left her body lying still and deep;
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of
endless and awful delight;
My body will not pour
Body? Spread.
That streams from her glowing body bare
Whose black, scaled body had for head a beak,
Would maggots in my starved, gaunt body loll
Me from my ennui with your body naked wholly,
Your body slender-hipped.
That dead body in the ooze.
A beauty, save in soul and body,
And the miles of rotten bogs.
092.10
089.12
128.9
020.1
020.7
020.9
003.2
003.5
003.7
003.12
003.13
003.19
003.23
003.26
003.29
003.35
004.7
004.21
004.46
015.39
018.5
019.3
019.8
027.6
035.6
035.7
035.10
043.2
054.53
054.65
060.20
075.13
085.3
096.40
096.48
126.12
128.26
126.8
72
Boiling
Bold
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Across the boiling seas’ own muffled boom;
Or was he bent on dark adventure, bold,
Upon my tomb, this legend bold:
Bole
From a trunk, that withered, blighted bole,
Boles
And baleful boles of strange misshapen growths
And cower behind the black tree boles
Bond
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond shall
not sever
Nor ever have; and since this mortal bond
All substances and creatures from the bond
In bond unbroken,
Bone
So great I turned and clawed my hands to bone
Bones My bones are hoar
And dead men’s bones.
There lay a bed of shells and bones; I spied
Books There stand her books, the Willy Pogany Alice
Boom
Across the boiling seas’ own muffled boom;
Boon
Blood-brother, boon companion to the yew,
Borderlands
In eerie borderlands I vainly waited
Bore
What nightmare bore you, hateful blight of red?
And when at last my captors bore me through
Are things that never ought to bore ’em.
Bored Now I am bored with all things brief and transitory,
Now I am bored with all things present, all things olden,
Born
see also Passion-Born
Love, and Death are born.
Thine eyes were old when God was born,
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul such
a madness and fury will sweep?
A worm that was born of the deep sea-slime,
Borne Borne onward yet by that same ceaseless yearning,
However brief or stilled, or borne on farther turn,
Both
Unless in deeper love both are combined;
And both my hands were covered with that red,
Her vestures; both were quite revealing.
Bother Nothing on earth can bother me,
None of these things can bother me
Bottles The flagons and bottles and jars that cover her dresser
Boughs Over the treetops, under the boughs,
Here on the hillside by the great gnarled boughs
Boulders Trapped in a crevice by great settling boulders.
Nor that thou roll away the mountain boulders
Bound see also Spell-Bound
And bound me with long coils of dusky gold?
You caught me, bound me, with a spell,
Of them, bound, yet magnificently free;
Along the walls dwelt living mummies, bound
That flayed my flesh, and I was bound by spells
094.3
059.11
137.26
045.2
011.3
062.2
003.39
050.11
076.9
132.4
090.10
054.55
057.16
095.5
129.5
094.3
068.2
036.49
017.1
086.12
137.22
096.1
096.55
021.8
030.9
043.16
057.3
036.41
134.14
051.25
106.9
128.36
142.2
142.9
129.9
062.8
147.1
059.4
124.10
027.4
042.4
051.60
072.7
080.6
B
They burned me, bound me with deep-knotted ties;
And there were living, ancient mummies bound
Bow
Her bow toward the cleaner west
I bow beneath this fruitless unattaining,
Bowed All night I bowed before a burning shrine;
Boy
That in the later days a boy would come,
We were won and lost of a mad young boy.
Brain
Then beating to the chambers of my brain
One thought more torturing usurped my brain,
I am the empty brain
Brain-Shaped
Impalpable, a brain-shaped thing of dread,
Brake
On its shore, mad emeralds burn in the brake,
Branch To every branch. The tree had long since died,
Branches
Its branches leafless, yet a budding hand
Branches’
The willow branches’ languid tendrils sank,
Branching
The branching arms that reached with taloned tips,
Branch-Twined
Where all seemed dead beneath the branch-twined roof
Brand You are the brand that sears, the mark of shame,
Brazen On long, metallic clang, the brazen door
Bread
And for thy bread, than my bread more sustaining,
Break
There is a rush of hooves in the break of dawn;
To burn, to break; their pleasure not to slay
It’s the break of day,
Breakers Where breakers and lonely waters roar,
Breaking
Remember the days that will come of the breaking
Breaks Dawn breaks abroad; then happily she dances, turning
Breast Our desire with breast to breast and body to body we shall be slaking
To capture a breast, to hold the hair
Moulds her breast.
Breast tip a vine; the striding legs for feet
Breasts Her lips and her face and her breasts, all her body I will cover with
kisses,
Thy breasts that seek delight in fire,
When thou at the breasts of thy mistress art slaking
Over his breasts his fingers hover,
With breasts of fire, and passionate lips to slake,
There are strange eyes that beckon, white breasts and bodies crying
The kohl that shades your eyes, your breasts with henna tipped,
Breath And its faintest breath
Thy rotten breath
Who asked and answered in a breath
Soft plants and creatures, dead, that still draw breath.
Your rotten breath
73
084.6
104.7
048.18
124.1
007.18
026.2
046.39
080.12
084.10
133.18
088.3
125.22
093.10
093.5
011.18
091.11
011.7
017.7
081.2
124.4
015.46
086.7
143.4
060.13
005.3
066.15
003.19
060.19
066.8
092.6
003.13
004.8
005.1
018.3
019.1
020.9
096.44
002.17
012.8
014.34
025.12
067.8
74
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
But could not move or even draw one breath:
By the breath of its shameless lips I am lightly kissed
With the breath of the web-faced things asleep
Breathless
In the breathless, waiting morn;
There is a faint, far rapture of birds in the breathless beauty of dawn,
In the breathless rapture of the scented dreamful air;
Brede
Should love be told in brede or breve?
Breeze On bridges, river trails, on every gentle breeze.
Breezes Her step is lighter than the summer breezes
Out of the west, foul breezes sweep,
Breve
Should love be told in brede or breve?
Bridges On bridges, river trails, on every gentle breeze.
Bridgeway
I take the bridgeway you already know.
Brief
While there remain but few—how few!—brief dusks
Now I am bored with all things brief and transitory,
However brief or stilled, or borne on farther turn,
Briefer Briefer, weaker,
Briggs And Mr. Briggs would watch their English,
Bright For a little while, our life is bright,
Shine bright, ring out, attend the sweet assay
The windows burning bright with eldritch fires;
Of your bright lips, all pleasure that your flesh possesses,
Are these bright ways foredue to that one whom
Bright jewels on the knowledge tree.
Bright-Eyed
With bright-eyed ecstasy, exultant wrath,
Brightlier
And glowing brightlier, awakening seem the skies, on
Brilliance
To prove the brilliance of their wits,
Brilliant Of this fresh pool of thin and brilliant blue.
To brilliant flame, whose splendors mesmerize,
Bring
The gifts of my body I bring to a flesh-white and beautiful palace,
I know that death itself will never bring release;
He strove to bring a light.
Bring hashish, cannabis, or sleepy opium,
Bringing
Hetaira, matron, virgin bringing
Is it the glow so magically bringing
Brings And bitter all the poison that it brings;
The years have passed, yet each long year in passing brings
The night that brings a sleep.
Joining your journey, brings our living light to hold you, guide you.
Broke
I could not move though mind and spirit broke.
They crushed me, broke me till I could not rise,
Broken Passionlessly waiting till the spell shall be broken
Bearing the world upon his broken shoulders,
093.13
101.8
125.3
021.6
044.1
101.2
042.14
131.4
041.5
125.1
042.14
131.4
147.14
031.7
096.1
134.14
133.37
138.39
004.31
051.59
086.11
096.53
118.11
137.18
082.13
066.11
138.10
078.14
119.6
003.5
013.30
014.3
096.31
049.25
110.11
007.62
013.3
036.64
146.7
072.14
084.7
006.7
059.2
B
Though they are broken too, and their flesh slit.
My life-illusion has at last been broken,
Felt deeper silence broken by no sound,
Restoring all things lost and small things broken.
Brooded And brooded in that vast and soundless grove.
Brotherhood
What, ho! For the Bacchic brotherhood!
Brought That brought to Mirtylon its doom,
Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast
brought me this feverous love to consume me,
I brought him dreams of eternal night,
The twilight brought no ease from the hot
That force demonic brought its eyes their sheen.
Brow
Her eyes will close at my lips on the feverish brow above;
The scented hair above thy brow,
With thorns of loathing on a fevered brow?
On her brow the moonbeams lie as lace,
Brown Dream, with the brown grass withering
Your hair’s soft brown of gold; your hands that trace
Brows Upon their brows, forgotten girls were flinging
The garlands from their brows unbound
Brute
“Oh hail to thee, and et to Brute;
Budding Its branches leafless, yet a budding hand
Builder I am builder, I am maker,
Building Building on to what goal later,
Burden Nor lift a burden from my crumpled shoulders;
Burial And find its cosmic burial
Buried But only an ancient, buried passion sings.
Of buried kings, and empires perilous;
We buried her in the solemn fall
Where its buried cities sleep
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
The maid I love was buried long ago;
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
Burls
Of knotty burls along the trunk, and clung
Burn
Thy lips that in the midnight burn,
With lips that to thine own lips burn,
To burn, to break; their pleasure not to slay
Burn incense till the fragrant air is odorous,
They would not burn me quickly on their spit;
Mandrakes writhe and witch-fires burn,
On its shore, mad emeralds burn in the brake,
Burn beneath the stagnant skies,
The golden petals burn,
Burned I have burned all my flame at the altar,
They burned me, bound me with deep-knotted ties;
Burning At her feet I have laid the tribute of a burning intolerable passion,
The minutes shall wane in delirium, the burning hours pass slowly,
My blood was burning in my veins, and all the torment
75
087.4
120.1
122.10
147.12
011.6
022.2
030.18
043.1
046.5
048.13
090.8
003.14
004.19
026.8
058.9
009.11
114.6
015.21
049.12
137.27
093.5
133.8
133.62
124.13
030.39
007.64
026.11
035.1
047.4
087.1
099.1
103.1
093.9
004.5
004.77
086.7
096.25
103.5
125.10
125.22
126.4
134.15
043.17
084.6
003.21
003.25
007.5
76
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
For we would keep the pleasure and the torment burning,
All night I bowed before a burning shrine;
All men, all things, all hopes, my burning dreams of fire;
Till night had cooled the burning winds of day;
And still to flushed and heated faces burning,
You drift along the desert’s burning sands;
But only and ever his flesh is burning,
With torture on their burning spits.
All heaven smouldered in mysterious burning,
I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate, meshed
in the love thou hast sown,
And deeper fires, burning, burning, burning,
Of burning, baleful scarlet spun
The burning harpy eyes, head of a hag,
When I collapsed beneath that burning sky?
The windows burning bright with eldritch fires;
And burning eyes along each limb. It spun
Floats up, and bathes the burning air still shimmering,
In the mystical burning pallor of the moon
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
Burnouses
Grace, true believers, with burnouses flowing gracile,
Burns
Her eyes with longing, her face with fever burns;
And how my love that burns herein so deep
Phantasmal fire burns the band of sorcery,
A flame of the stars, Beloved, burns out of the far-flung spaces
Burped Who burped a remarkable ditty,
Burrows While creatures cower in their burrows, silent all,
Burst
A passionate burst of song from a golden throat,
He burst asunder all the whelming bars
Burst; mindless, mewing as it tried to speak,
But
In my arms I will hold her, passive, but I know her flesh will be
aching
But a moment will come and death destroy
But even thou, Oh Myrrhiline,
But in thine arms, Myrrhiline,
But all night long we worshipped at our pagan altar,
But Time will pass, and Love will pass, and all Love’s pleasure,
But dawn destroyed our passionate delight.
But bitter is the end of love and man’s desire,
But only an ancient, buried passion sings.
But all is mute forevermore.
The song of life is but a tedious, bitter moan;
But weariness.
He sought the infinite in life, but now
But found no other than the great refrain:
The shadows thickened, but a blaze illuming
And find that what I thought so great is but
007.13
007.18
013.6
015.6
015.29
017.6
018.11
030.48
034.10
043.26
051.52
055.14
079.12
085.4
086.11
091.12
096.86
101.4
130.7
141.7
096.83
019.5
031.11
061.9
111.1
145.2
061.5
021.1
024.5
075.10
003.17
004.33
004.41
004.80
007.17
007.41
007.52
007.61
007.64
010.4
013.2
013.12
014.4
014.19
015.25
016.3
B
But only and ever his flesh is burning,
But everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
While there remain but few—how few!—brief dusks
But the eyes have no vision,
I sought, but sought in vain.
In search of something lost, but never near it;
Of the phantoms that are not, but seem?
But the gulf is cold
But no voice shall speak again
But we turned too late and we knew our fate
“Greetings!” I cried but in the throng
But still assail the deeper firmament.
For all things die, but they die most regretful
But they whose life was barren are most fretful,
But fulness leaves no unassuaged desires,
Treasure outlasting cities fair but fleeting.
But never changes, never fades,
And spoiling, lured them. But I could not squirm
But now that time is gone of yore
But spectral flame on the puff-pod floss
But the musty tale can never be told
But a smile has crossed her quiet face—
But she, in decadent fall,
Traveler: Goodby, but if we meet again—
Desired of many but achieved by few.
But phantoms; life and death part each of other;
The head sprang high; but slashed by unseen sabers
And I drew back, but still the hand with stark,
But inbetween; whose phosphorescent glow,
But all at once the shell of that cocoon
But something from the dark side of the moon
A king who saw but used no eyes for seeing,
But when I passed and left them in their gloom,
Caught me with safety but a league away.
But punish, since their power I dared to test.
I tried to scream but heard no sound, no hoarse,
To flee, but where I crawled, wherever fled,
Had hooves, the arms no hands but splaying fall
But all the strange and withered things still hung
But could not move or even draw one breath:
But what is there in wealth? In treasure what but treasure?
But ennui still is mine.
But I grow weary of your sensuous caresses,
Her eyes are blind; her sweet white limbs but know
But from the sundered room I never crept—
That nothing exists but the vision, the thought supreme.
I know there are no princesses, but you
Beauty possesses, but would not care
For things external, but of higher worth,
77
018.11
029.12
031.7
033.33
036.8
037.4
043.12
047.16
047.33
048.3
049.17
050.14
051.15
051.17
051.19
051.42
053.7
054.25
054.51
056.7
057.21
058.11
065.23
067.54
068.12
070.12
073.13
074.11
075.4
075.9
075.12
076.5
081.13
086.2
086.8
088.8
090.11
092.7
093.11
093.13
096.17
096.24
096.49
099.5
105.13
112.16
113.1
116.2
116.10
78
By
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
The years away intended, but for leaping
What they appeared. But there are some so blind
I listen, but I do not hear them fall,
But the spell-bound half-beasts lie in their lairs
That saw her but heard neither her voice nor her laughter.
The essence of her is here—but I wish she would hasten!
But when my span
But once, for every soul in mosque, at sea, on sand
But alas! Your name is Myrtle,
“Huh. Well, maybe. But I’m sociable, Miss—”
“But I’m perfectly moral.”
“But Miss Shere—”
Drifting as leaves but urgent with a force
I am enraptured by strange and undreamed-of passionate sinful
caresses
Of a passion swayed not by reason, a passion ungovernable, mad;
By the girls they gave their love.
Is whispered by the sad wind sighing
More crazed by all the amorous joys thereof;
I have been made by thee idolatrous;
And by the dark caress was claimed forever,
Blue rubies won by stealth
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
The beauty of her immarbled by the Greek;
Inflicted by the gods in elder wars.
Malignant, as if guarded by a spell,
And by a hideous world was crucified
By fumbling fingers, and forgotten soon,
By seas that thunder vainly to the moon;
Ere I, by night and darkness, am bereft
By softer gold than gold.
Naught by thy loveliness
Or remain by the willows
With only the withered trees to watch us passing by;
Borne onward yet by that same ceaseless yearning,
By cryptic tarns aglow with lethal flame,
This hill, haunted by a deathly spell,
Away; the specters by the gnarled trunk muttered
And then passed by.
By forgotten poets told.
By the legions of the pest.
And one by one with the setting sun
And certainty, by doubt and change, undone,
What though you walk by Mammon unattended,
And by your side, in beauty’s own rebirth
In all the years by time begun,
Trapped in a crevice by great settling boulders.
In alien land, by night’s resounding vastness?
By forest track
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B
Blue rubies won by stealth
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
Desired of many but achieved by few.
The head sprang high; but slashed by unseen sabers
And widening inch by inch along the floor
That flayed my flesh, and I was bound by spells
I could not turn though fronted by the rack.
By bathing me in streams of molten lead.
I thought ironic laughter passed me by.
I know that I’ll by them be watched for ever
And all strange things once covered by the sea
By the breath of its shameless lips I am lightly kissed
With only rotting corpses lying by,
My face was eaten by a red, huge Thing.
Though all my days were added one by one,
Perfection gains by contrast and may be
And you will never know what years drift by.
To those that bless, and by my charm, are blessed.
Planks riddled through by worms, that he is wise
Felt deeper silence broken by no sound,
Heard legends not by earthly voices told,
By a cypress-veiled lagoon.
The little gods sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
They sleep a long sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
I hear them by the lake shore and at cliffs of stone;
Here, by the hand you held
While I pass by
The legend saith: when each lone traveller passes by,
By the luscious curtains gleaming.
The authors’ names I know by rote,
The monster gods sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
They sleep a long sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
Means ditched by your girl and left by your friend,
Ennobled by your grace, your love—beside you,
Here on the hillside by the great gnarled boughs
79
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C
Cadences
Caesar
Calair
Call
Calling
Calls
Calm
Came
All night I heard the cadences of doom
They also ought to know their Caesar,
To see the Hylots of Calair,
For ever will I call, and search the frozen skies
The lonely, lovely sea-maidens call,
Anguish of some lost thing’s cry or call
The city rang with joyful call
Till evetide falls, and the Muezzin call to prayer
The chance, the pattern, call it as one will,
And only echo answer a low call.
And still it seemed as if great Pan were calling
And there are pale, fair faces calling for caresses
Earth and eternity. Is some voice calling?
Some warning voice calls out: Go back—go back!
Who finds impersonal and calm the skies;
When down the hillside came a long, low crying,
There came a sound: Was it a song of gladness
Whence came your charnel hue of pain and blood?
Whence came you, spawn of what abysmal womb?
And after this, there came to me one green
And of that thing there came to me a fear
A star they knew before it came.
To perish when my later footsteps came;
Yet we like a woman came to cloy.
When the night came down again.
Of those who came to praise this day
Across a velvet sky. And when I came.
Out of a dusky corner came the stare
Till memory slowly came, and knowledge grew,
I came upon a curious great throne
The answer came, where I in torment lay,
The dark, walled city slowly came in view,
Whence came that unknown color? Was its source
And after this, there came to me one green
Then came the rush of hoofbeats and, soft-pressed
The tolling came like measures for a spell.
And from a dusky corner came the stare
And yet I could not move. There came a creak,
Out of the night, there came a shrill long scream,
Stranger than ever came
Came near me, passed, and faintly died away;
And lovers, fat ones, old ones, came
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C
With each lesson came complete
Who came from near and came from far
Camel’s Rich ends, and soft the tinkle of a camel’s bell
Can
Can escape to tell of muted grief.
Enigmatic regions that no eye can know,
Go! I can not bear thee, Go!
My destiny, and found what men can never guess;
He walks where none can know or see,
Its equal can confess.
Mine the love that can fade not or falter,
Than which no love can have supremer worth.
I can not close an eye,
I can not move a thigh,
I can not even sigh
Stares with an eye she can not shun.
As deathless as ever a worm can be,
But the musty tale can never be told
I can not bear you. Go!
I can not find, nor do I seem to place
And dreams that can not be.
Who can blame the mouth that sips
These things I love, yet words can never tell
Thought fashions worlds that earth can never share,
I love you for the beauty all can see,
And any Latin phrase can quote,
When I can make my students Cram.
I am as mad as mad can be,
Nothing on earth can bother me,
None of these things can bother me
For I am as mad as mad can be.
That we who linger here will not forget, can not forget
Candles Tall candles there were dreaming
Cannabis
Bring hashish, cannabis, or sleepy opium,
Canst
Drink deep the cup, ere thou canst drink no more;
Can’t
Can’t you see that I’d be able
They’re always right, they can’t be wrong,
Canter Or hunters canter shouting toward the moor.
Capped Till with derrick they capped him,
Caps
see White-Caps
Captors And when at last my captors bore me through
Capture As though sly Pan had used his pipes to capture
In the soft, first capture.
To capture moods that change or leave;
Beauty more vital for your hearts to capture,
To capture an errant eel
To capture a breast, to hold the hair
Capture In my domain alone you’ll capture
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Captured
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Lost amid their dreamlands, your captured phantoms dream.
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
Caravan And take the caravan
Caravans
And dream caravans of Nirvana are beholden,
Of caravans that throng
Cardinal Like cardinal numbers adding without end;
Care
The inner beauty I more deeply care
Beauty possesses, but would not care
You care for that warm house of all your own,
Or starfire care
Cared Who cared? Once more immortal Pan was playing
Careful The changing fancy and the careful rows
Carefully Your polished phrases spoken carefully,
Caress The passion-born kiss and caress of my maddening desire;
Caress.
And by the dark caress was claimed forever,
Stand waiting to perfume and powder and softly caress her,
Caressed Nor ever a hand caressed its fat;
Caresses I am enraptured by strange and undreamed-of passionate sinful
caresses
And all the swooning, sick, and ravishing caresses
And there are pale, fair faces calling for caresses
To soothe white flesh that for caresses aches.
And shining eyes bespoke caresses, slow
Caresses, though I find slight joy in amorous
But I grow weary of your sensuous caresses,
Caressing
Caressing her?
Duty, in her lips caressing!
Carnage The air from some vast stellar carnage bled
Carrion With knowledge of the carrion
And bloated carrion rats that near me sit!
Carved Jades exquisite, delicately carved ivory,
Cast
Who cast on me a mystic spell malign,
And cast them for our footfall where
Casually Heretical eyes is casually hung on a chair;
Cat
The cat on the fence, and world conditions,
Caught You caught me, bound me, with a spell,
Where the rock-fall caught him with a sad surprise
They caught me in the wasteland in the west.
Caught me with safety but a league away.
Cause Yet saw no cause why gossip seized her.
Cave
They found him deep within an ancient cave
I saw from that dim cave where I was hiding
Caverned
Till at last, in her caverned halls
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C
And stood tremendous to my caverned room,
Caverns’ And from those giant caverns’ lifted gloom
Cease
And never will the present cease,
I will not find it till all things shall cease,
Oh heart, cease beating; eyes, close; sight, be wrong:
Ceased When time had ceased, when every world was riven,
I now have ceased to bloat;
Worms now have ceased to gloat,
Why has the night-wind ceased to blow?
At length all motion ceased, upon a crag.
Ceaseless
Borne onward yet by that same ceaseless yearning,
It is the ceaseless song that love began; unended,
Celebrate
And celebrate our festival.
Celestial Beyond the heavens’ great celestial throng,
Censers The fire is cold; no fuming censers flare;
Centuries
The dust of centuries lies on her head;
Cerements
With all the dreadful cerements of the grave,
With all the dreadful cerements of the grave
Certainly
“Certainly not.”
“You certainly will.”
Certainty
And certainty, by doubt and change, undone,
Chair
Heretical eyes is casually hung on a chair;
Chalice I hold all her body a beautiful living white chalice
The nectar of their chalice
And Machen to read when she thinks of the fabulous chalice.
Challenge
His cosmic challenge in an alien world.
Chamber That followed through the chamber where I fled.
In that dark chamber, numb with terror, mute,
Chambers
Through mighty chambers, hunted and alone,
Then beating to the chambers of my brain
I seek through chambers of thy strange abode;
Champak
And champak fragrance makes the drowsy senses swoon,
Chance The spheres that spin of chance the blind and dumb,
The chance, the pattern, call it as one will,
Change To capture moods that change or leave;
And certainty, by doubt and change, undone,
We have lived through cycles of birth and change, through cosmic
ages,
Changed The hymn and song have changed to moan and cry.
Changes But never changes, never fades,
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84
Changing
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And surge of falling flame of far dominions,
Changing and new, so hard to know, to trace.
The changing fancy and the careful rows
Chant A chant to loveliness and strange, unfathomed glory,
Would chant their perfect lessons with ’m.
Chantment
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment ere
worship and love were to perish?
Chaos And though all poppy seeds in final chaos scatter,
Charm She walks in charm, adoring nature pleases
And if you charm me not, and I grow weary of
I love you for the charm earth gave to you,
To those that bless, and by my charm, are blessed.
Charming
Nor always full the charming sleeve—
And young Prince Charming rides in quest of her
Charms And in her movements, languid charms abide.
Charnel Whence came your charnel hue of pain and blood?
These charnel horrors made me sick and weak,
The charnel sounds of awful slaughtering.
Chart
To chart the labyrinths of long assailing;
Chasten The midst of her things: a girdle, as though to chasten
Chaunting
The faithful, with far chaunting.
Chaunting of moon-dim princesses whose clime
Cheeks Thy cheeks that glow,
Cherish Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of
soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
Cherished
And the ways that I cherished.
Chewed The chewed remains of something used for bait;
Child
Not woman, man, or child crawled in my lap.
As of a lost and hungry child. Then die
Random child
Children Or purple, dear to children of the dust,
Chill
I watched the universe grow cold and chill;
I am all deaths that chill,
Chink To the host! Clink! Clink! Let the glasses chink!
Chloral Like a drinker of chloral I dream,
Choke My neck, and heard that husky, gurgling choke
My neck, and heard a husky gurgling choke
Choking With mystic earth, thereof for ever choking,
Choral A choral hymn of mad and sweetest pain,
Pain, and a choral delight;
And over all a choral singing.
He turns, and now returns to unheard choral
Chorus Chorus
Chuckle At me and slyly chuckle while they keep
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C
Cicadas And the cicadas sing,
Cinder I am the cinder wiped away,
Cindering
As a cindering star,
Circling Athwart the circling citadel of stars,
Citadel Dim citadel, all dank and poisonous,
He stood at last before the citadel
Athwart the circling citadel of stars,
Cities
While empty cities rot away
They saw Mercurial cities rust
Where sand and tides on shattered cities roll,
Where its buried cities sleep
On the cities sleeping there
Treasure outlasting cities fair but fleeting.
From sunken cities rose the solemn knell.
City
The city rang with joyful call
The dark, walled city slowly came in view,
And I, and all that phantom city, died.
A city of a vast antiquity.
Deserted city streets, and fog, and lantern glow.
And drew gas for the whole of Sauk City!
Clad
Specter, in swathings of sick scarlet clad,
Clad him alone;
Claim To claim the maid for whose desire he strove?
Claimed And by the dark caress was claimed forever,
Has claimed the everlasting vow of him who coldly rests
The greatest riddle and though vassal claimed the vassalage
She claimed that thoughts, not deeds, pervert you—
Clamped They clamped hot irons on my throbbing head;
Clang
I knocked upon the portal till with clang
On long, metallic clang, the brazen door
Clanging As I remember, there were clanging gongs
Clap
I clap, and at the sign
Clarke’s Not too malicious; the strangeness of Harry Clarke’s Poe;
Classes And to the students in my classes,
Classic He surely was a classic beauty.”
Classicist
Oh what a classicist am I,
Oh what a classicist am I,
Oh what a classicist am I.
Classicorum
Illussimae and classicorum
Clawed So great, I clawed my face to bleeding strips,
So great I turned and clawed my hands to bone
Cleaner Her bow toward the cleaner west
Clear
The clear, pure warble of a nightingale
Whose perfect euphony would be as clear
And crystal clear, of life and love and rapture,
Your limbs, if limbs you have; nor is it clear
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137.29
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Clearer Or if, beneath those warmer, clearer skies,
And I look on with clearer, colder eyes,
Clever That your words are clever, witty,
Cliff
Sheer cliff and rockfall miles below. There, sliding
Cliffs
Across a purple ground to purple cliffs
I hear them by the lake shore and at cliffs of stone;
Climb They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
Climbed Slowly I climbed the worn old attic stairs
Clime And neither dawn nor darkness shades her clime.
Chaunting of moon-dim princesses whose clime
Clings A form that clings to a satyr sings,
Clink
The glasses clink for a Bacchic drink—
To the host! Clink! Clink! Let the glasses chink!
Cloister And in this pedagogic cloister,
Close
Her eyes will close at my lips on the feverish brow above;
I close thee, pure and rare as ivory,
In life’s dead close;
I am the sweet close winding-sheet
Thus I close my doors
I can not close an eye,
Oh heart, cease beating; eyes, close; sight, be wrong:
I am awed that the moon and stars are so close to me.
Past where, once seen, once open, close in no tomorrow,
Closed In search of closed escapes.
A beak that, darting, closed me in its trap.
Before me, one closed portal, and the flow
Close-Hidden
Of that malign, close-hidden ebon pool.
Closer Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips
be ashen,
And when in closer human haunts I tired,
Its footsteps shuffling closer on the stone,
Closes A tiger-lily opens and fails and closes
O Love, a flower closes
In aeons closes
Closing The scattered symbols of those closing pages
Lips parting and closing over the draught her
Closlier What words convey how closelier she follows
Closure Down the far closure of the valley, sky,
Cloths In gummy cloths of long and human hair.
Cloud And all the air was misty as a cloud.
Cloudlike
Wherein a cloudlike throng
Clouds’ Beyond the soaring clouds’ infinity;
Clove
That clove through midnight where no other stirred,
Cloven With the fresher tracks of cloven
Clover And the fallen sweet clover,
Cloy
Yet we like a woman came to cloy.
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C
Clung Of knotty burls along the trunk, and clung
Coast
In the distance sank the coast in the dank
Coasts From the stricken hosts of those plague-filled coasts
Cobwebs Amidst great cobwebs hanging everywhere
There were great cobwebs hanging everywhere,
Cocoon The strange cocoon, not living yet nor dead
But all at once the shell of that cocoon
Coeds The coeds only get along
Coffin To coffin. earth, the dead.
Stained is the coffin floor
Coils
And bound me with long coils of dusky gold?
Cold
And the wind is blowing cold.
Has the cold of death
When the cold monotone
And the wind is blowing cold.
Rest, with the cold ground resting
The cold apocalypse of sand.
I watched the universe grow cold and chill;
The fire is cold; no fuming censers flare;
But the gulf is cold
Eternal night, and earth damp, black, and cold
Dark, dark, cold, dead,
Of its cold sea-tomb.
She will go in the cold moonlight
She will sink on the cold, cold ground,
In heat of summer day or cold of winter snow;
Colder And I look on with clearer, colder eyes,
Coldly Has claimed the everlasting vow of him who coldly rests
Collapsed
When I collapsed beneath that burning sky?
College In their ideal, idyllic college,
Color
Oh color hideous, appalling, mad,
Oh color of destruction, rage, and lust,
Skeins of fluctuant color, lit
With that wild color overspread,
Whence came that unknown color? Was its source
The unknown color hostile in pursuit
Colossal To fall amid colossal precipices.
Of wave that smote against colossal wave.
The heavens like a dead, colossal hearse
Colour I was the only colour when
I am the colour deep blood-red,
I am the colour yet to be;
Coloured
Fourth was I in the coloured host,
Colours With mad new colours and queer lines I’d trace
All colours else were wan and tame,
We were the colours that his love
Though ye colours pass, though his limbs be fleet,
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054.57
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065.1
065.13
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120.2
014.7
085.4
138.19
017.9
017.17
034.6
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088.12
079.14
094.10
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Combined
Unless in deeper love both are combined;
Come But a moment will come and death destroy
For us the future never will come,
Remember the days that will come of the breaking
Waiting, watching till I come and join them where,
That in the later days a boy would come,
And farther still when life was yet to come,
You will come back to me,
You will come back to me, lost lover,
Come back with setting suns
You will come back some day, lost lover,
Come back, come back to me,
Let one long, lingering note through night come stealing,
For there will come none after,
You’ve come again. You keep me company here,
Come forth my slaves and eunuchs and the dancing girls:
I come to men with unrequiting passion,
Their ravage, if they had not come from you.
I come, weary yet bearing still this load.
Now in the mind come messages unspoken,
Comes A last, wild note from the distant hills comes drifting—
And on the salt sea-wind there comes a wild, sweet sighing
Until, once more, when mistily comes the morn,
Withdraw till dawn comes gray.
And faintly comes the echo of a traveler’s song,
And when thy surfeit comes, then die! and die a-flinging
Comes love, and all the beauty that love possesses,
Love comes. I know that I shall never be
Comfort I ask no comfort and no ease of thee,
Comforting
A cool dark pillow, a comforting bed,
Coming In the years of the past, in the coming and passing of lovers and
love and the paths love has taken,
Till the coming of dawn.
She waits the coming of the golden guest;
It merely hinted of the coming week.
Companion
Blood-brother, boon companion to the yew,
What goal, what new companion did I seek?
Companions
My old companions waited all around:
Company
You’ve come again. You keep me company here,
To keep me company lest I go mad:
Comparisons
Comparisons and conjugations,
Compassionate
Oh love compassionate and strangely tender,
051.25
004.33
004.69
005.3
006.23
026.2
036.26
039.2
039.7
039.8
039.19
039.20
051.61
052.8
077.2
096.22
119.9
121.14
124.8
147.10
015.47
020.11
069.13
096.84
096.92
097.7
110.2
113.9
124.9
038.13
043.13
065.20
066.6
084.14
068.2
072.9
072.2
077.2
103.12
137.13
051.55
C
Complete
Now I am jaded with my long, complete excess;
And I would let it in complete eclipse
With each lesson came complete
Comprehension
Our worship went beyond our own dim comprehension,
Comrades
Around and see the comrades that are mine;
Around, and see the comrades that I had;
And conceals like a curtain the shrine,
Concealed
Concealed with opalescent mist whose fall
Conceits The pedants utter strange conceits
Condemn
And ashes consume what the elders condemn.
And ashes consume what the elder gods condemn.
Conditions
The cat on the fence, and world conditions,
Cone
A metal titan shapen like a cone,
Confess Its equal can confess.
Confused
That I confused the words you’d plainly spoken.
Conjugations
Comparisons and conjugations,
Conning And wonder what we’re conning to.
Conqueror
For Death the Conqueror at last was king;
Conquest
And conquest everlastingly beyond,
Constellations
In constellations now to space-dust shrunken
Consume
Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast brought
me this feverous love to consume me,
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
And ashes consume what the elders condemn.
And ashes consume what the elder gods condemn.
Consuming
see also All-Consuming
Where ancient gods assuaged their lust consuming
Consummate
Oh love consummate in the flesh and spirit,
Contain The earth could not contain
Contained
Contained no thought or dust of thing or race;
Contains Contains what a flagon always should!
Arrays and disarrays the house contains,
Content Therefor am I, with what I have, content,
89
013.25
115.13
140.3
007.29
087.10
103.10
043.34
127.3
138.9
130.8
141.8
142.4
076.6
032.10
120.4
137.13
138.18
107.9
050.9
036.23
043.1
043.28
130.8
141.8
015.27
051.47
014.16
107.6
022.6
117.6
050.13
90
Contents
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Content to know the image of the dream,
She is new each time that their contents grow, lesser, and lesser.
Continents
In continents and islands that are sunken,
Contrast Perfection gains by contrast and may be
Convey What words convey how closelier she follows
Cooing My loved one made soft cooing sounds, and so
Cool
And she was cool, yet hers was all the passion,
I reached my hands down to the cool, wet depths
A cool dark pillow, a comforting bed,
Sometimes in cool delight she floats on drifting weeds
She wakens with the dew yet cool upon her eyelids
The sight of goblets cool and rounded,
On which the cool green rain gleams.
Cooled Till night had cooled the burning winds of day;
Coral
Her coral isles and shadowy pearls
Of flowers and marvellous jasper and coral grasses
Coronal And now at last I crown me with a coronal
The white-caps and the foam their coronal.
Core
And rotten to the very core,
Corner Out of a dusky corner came the stare
And from a dusky corner came the stare
Corpse Six feet deep my corpse lies, drowned
My corpse was once a festering sore
As of some ancient corpse about to speak....
As of a yellow corpse about to speak....
Corpses On curious corpses, gold and green.
For green corpses he did lust,
And all around, the weary corpses lie;
With only rotting corpses lying by,
They left me also rotten corpses there
Corpse’s And turned to flee that corpse’s hideous head.
Corridors
So little light, so many corridors,
Corruption
Corruption. Six feet deep
Cosmic His cosmic challenge in an alien world.
That I to cosmic realms could take my flight!
And find its cosmic burial
And perished in the utmost cosmic tomb,
I seemed to sink in some huge cosmic pool.
I heard a sound of cosmic revelry,
Would seize their prey and seek their cosmic lair?
We have lived through cycles of birth and change, through cosmic
ages,
I am the arrow of the cosmic mind,
I am dust in cosmic outways resting,
Could And yet, in all my travels I could only find
113.11
129.12
036.21
117.11
041.9
075.1
007.7
011.22
038.13
060.12
066.1
128.2
136.10
015.6
060.4
101.24
013.7
020.8
054.50
072.5
104.5
054.19
054.48
072.13
104.13
030.24
046.13
103.2
103.7
103.11
029.11
050.2
054.32
024.14
025.4
030.39
036.10
071.13
080.11
105.8
112.5
133.4
133.24
013.15
C
The earth could not contain
Ah, God, that I could draw instead of write,
That I could picture worlds I’ve never known,
That I to cosmic realms could take my flight!
He leered so vilely, Horror could not save
And when they oped they could not find
Could wing no flight,
Where only courage of lost hope could ravel
His sunken eyes could only see
There could not be so still a sea
So few the days, so much that one could know,
And spoiling, lured them. But I could not squirm
I could not move though mind and spirit broke.
Whose source could only, be some fearful shape
And when the talons loosened, I could see
I could not turn though fronted by the rack.
They crushed me, broke me till I could not rise,
A thought my tongueless mouth could never speak;
They gave me back my eyes so I could peer
And of its face no vestige could be seen,
Stretched farther than horizons. I could see
But could not move or even draw one breath:
They left to me my eyes, so I could stare
And yet I could not move. There came a creak,
I scarce could know the evil that I did;
And truths I could not otherwise discover.
And of my presence, I could feel no sign
No human being could be near her:
Where none could know or share.
I could never love a girl with such a rhyme!
For who could ever be a prof.
Counterpart
That has no counterpart in lands of time
A counterpart of what is still to be?
Countless
Trailed countless fingers in the ebon edge
Courage Where only courage of lost hope could ravel
Course And twist their sinuous downward course—
A glowing form, it drifted on a course
Cover Her lips and her face and her breasts, all her body I will cover with
kisses,
Her lips with my lips, her passionate body with mine I shall cover
Cover the form whose hand still gropes.
Drink! For you’ll soon have the earth for a cover!
The monstrous spell of the night is an amorous cover
The flagons and bottles and jars that cover her dresser
Covered see also Grass-Covered
In the streets now covered deep,
Whose white fat folds were covered with grime,
91
014.16
025.1
025.2
025.4
029.7
030.43
034.13
036.3
046.11
048.11
050.1
054.25
072.14
078.11
079.11
083.10
084.7
084.11
087.9
090.5
093.2
093.13
103.9
104.10
106.11
120.12
122.3
128.10
134.6
135.12
138.33
053.3
118.10
011.13
036.3
038.10
088.4
003.13
003.35
062.10
098.1
101.18
129.9
047.34
057.4
92
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And all strange things once covered by the sea
And both my hands were covered with that red,
Covers And the form that it covers is thine.
Cower While creatures cower in their burrows, silent all,
And cower behind the black tree boles
At length all motion ceased, upon a crag.
Crackle There was a crackle as of blazing wood,
Cram
When I can make my students Cram.
Crawl I saw the hungry flowers toward me crawl
Crawled I crawled like one impelled on ways resisted,
Stray hands and heads that crawled; in nests I found
The swart hand crawled, through mid-air lengthening,
Not woman, man, or child crawled in my lap.
To flee, but where I crawled, wherever fled,
Crawling
For sick flames and the crawling dust,
Across the rubble, creeping, crawling, gliding,
Crawls Where the little lithe worm still tumbles and crawls,
Crazed More crazed by all the amorous joys thereof;
Creak And yet I could not move. There came a creak,
Creator The great Creator,
Creature To watch a little creature pick
Not a creature lived in all the land,
Like a creature unseen as it scurries and passes
Oh little creature, lost in time and space,
Oh little creature, whether old or young,
Oh little creature, here’s a tale of doom....
Creatures
see also Sea-Creatures
Soft plants and creatures, dead, that still draw breath.
Only slimy creatures stare
Phosphorescent creatures go
And made him one with all earth’s humblest creatures.
While creatures cower in their burrows, silent all,
Part human creatures creeping from their lair.
All substances and creatures from the bond
Showed everywhere, while flopping creatures died.
Foul nightmare creatures peering through the air:
Were they strange creatures from Outside that soon
Long-dead creatures murmur and sigh
Air and water creatures fight,
Creatures’
Purer than earthly creatures’,
Creep Where lichens creep on crumbled fanes
Fishes swim and monsters creep
I feel the worms that creep, creep, creep,
Out of the dark where the black moons creep,
Creepers And hanging creepers that reluctantly
Of creepers, and where head should be was growing
095.3
106.9
043.36
061.5
062.2
079.10
106.7
137.10
082.12
045.3
072.3
074.10
075.11
090.11
046.14
089.5
062.4
007.26
104.10
133.10
030.15
057.6
063.1
077.1
077.9
077.13
025.12
047.8
047.27
059.8
061.5
072.4
076.9
095.4
104.4
105.7
125.7
126.10
032.6
010.2
047.3
054.35
125.2
011.11
092.8
C
Creeping
An unseen step on the creeping moss—
Part human creatures creeping from their lair.
Across the rubble, creeping, crawling, gliding,
We have seen in the future time, and space, and the universe
creeping
Creeps A reveller creeps where his leman sleeps—
Crept
The Northern Lights crept down with pulsing streamers
Than shadows that crept with the sun, and slept
Some arrowed beast crept to its hillside fastness?
Unto my feet a little trickle crept
But from the sundered room I never crept—
Crest
A tuft of slender tentacles, a crest
Cresting I am foam torn free of storm waves cresting,
Crevice Trapped in a crevice by great settling boulders.
Crib
Of infant in the crib
Cried
“Greetings!” I cried but in the throng
The ebony gates, one savage curse I cried,
Cries
And it cries
They added madness to my frantic cries
Crimson White poppy of the crimson eve—
My Lust, and Fury, and crimson shame,
The crimson, never-setting sun,
Upon the crimson eve,
Croon And houris sad songs croon.
Cross
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Crossed But a smile has crossed her quiet face—
And when I crossed the imperial weaving span
Crosses No traveler crosses now the land,
Crouched
Desparing cry. I crouched against the wall
Crown And now at last I crown me with a coronal
Of flesh and spirit, and attains the crown
Crowned
Crowned thrice with cypress, endless times with laurel,
Crucified And by a hideous world was crucified
Cruel
Though they, with cruel joy, had given me
“I’m asking you, Miss Shere. Are you a cruel person?”
Crumbled
Where lichens creep on crumbled fanes
Long crumbled in primordial pre-time’s span;
Crumbling
Sunken walls of crumbling stone
There lived and there ruled on a crumbling throne
Crumpled
Nor lift a burden from my crumpled shoulders;
Crushed The roses, crushed, lie scattered everywhere;
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056.3
072.4
089.5
112.11
023.7
034.1
048.7
059.10
078.1
105.13
092.9
133.23
059.4
133.44
049.17
086.13
002.20
084.3
042.2
046.22
055.10
109.2
096.60
056.1
056.5
056.9
058.11
071.5
010.17
088.9
013.7
068.10
068.1
026.7
084.12
139.3
010.2
036.20
047.11
057.2
124.13
040.1
94
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
They crushed me, broke me till I could not rise,
Like the voiceless cry
The hymn and song have changed to moan and cry.
And now I cry aloud unto the lonely spaces,
And I have had terrific grief, and known the cry
Or was it the old despairing cry of sadness
A warning cry—the shadowy forms are shifting:
Anguish of some lost thing’s cry or call
Desparing cry. I crouched against the wall
A monstrous form surged on and searched with cry
How much more exquisite to hear me cry
In the marble palace, gold dwarfs cry,
From the cry
And I hope that you won’t cry dear,
Crying When down the hillside came a long, low crying,
There are strange eyes that beckon, white breasts and bodies crying
Cryptic I paused and watched the cryptic waters watch.
By cryptic tarns aglow with lethal flame,
Crystal And crystal clear, of life and love and rapture,
Cup
Drink deep the cup, ere thou canst drink no more;
I am all cups that fill,
Curious On curious corpses, gold and green.
They are curious things that hide in the woods
I came upon a curious great throne
With blood that had so curious a glow;
They left me morsels, curious and queer,
Curled Curled inward, flowerwise. I stood before
From which a tongue curled inward to my lair,
Current Or rests where an ocean current laves
More modish than the current mode;
Curse
The ebony gates, one savage curse I cried,
Oblivion had laid its deathless curse
Curtain And conceals like a curtain the shrine,
Resting beneath the shadow curtain falling
Curtained
He peered, and in the curtained realms of sleep
Curtains By the luscious curtains gleaming.
Curves Her garments only know what curves and hollows
Cycles I lived whole cycles of existence; I am wise;
We have lived through cycles of birth and change, through cosmic
ages,
Cypress Crowned thrice with cypress, endless times with laurel,
Cypress-Veiled
By a cypress-veiled lagoon.
Cyrenaya
O Cyrenaya, take away the sweet, dark gum,
Dance, Cyrenaya, while I watch you swaying slowly,
Into the moonlight, Cyrenaya, I would go
Cry
084.7
001.5
007.44
007.49
013.23
015.35
015.45
045.10
088.9
089.6
103.6
125.6
133.43
135.2
015.3
020.9
011.17
036.50
051.12
097.2
133.28
030.24
062.1
076.3
078.12
087.11
081.3
089.13
060.10
128.6
086.13
107.1
043.34
147.5
014.2
136.4
041.11
013.29
112.5
068.1
126.2
096.34
096.37
096.97
D
Daggers
Dais
Damp
Dance
Of daggers, fair appearances retreat
Save one upon a dais standing tall,
Eternal night, and earth damp, black, and cold
With soft, light golden limbs to dance and follow,
Dance, Cyrenaya, while I watch you swaying slowly,
Danced Danced and revelled amid the olive-grove?
Dances Dawn breaks abroad; then happily she dances, turning
Dancing Outlined the revellers dancing through the woods,
Come forth my slaves and eunuchs and the dancing girls:
Dancing-Girl
Slave and queen and dancing-girl, wondrous fair,
Dandelions
And a smell of dandelions was
Danger Witch-forms tormented, from dark demon danger,
So long as there was never danger;
Dangerous
She loved to play a dangerous game
Dank
Dim citadel, all dank and poisonous,
You stain vermilion vipers in dank glades.
In the distance sank the coast in the dank
Dared But punish, since their power I dared to test.
Dark
And the days are dark,
That still preserve dark ancient stains
Within the pool so fathomless and dark.
And by the dark caress was claimed forever,
To solve one dark, strange riddle, a sage
The dark star’s necrophilic race.
Through trackless labyrinths more dark and deep,
A cool dark pillow, a comforting bed,
Witch-forms tormented, from dark demon danger,
In the dark sea-grave.
So dark whichever pathway one may go,
Yet do you leave the dark and lonely waste
In dark liquescence. Mocking maggots peep
Dark, dark, cold, dead,
Or was he bent on dark adventure, bold,
Demonic revel holds dark, writhing forms in thrall,
Where the trees form a little dark room:
There, ringed with dark trees holy,
Where far, unhuman beings’ dark embrace
The mouth where something dark was trickling through.
I watched them till, from out the greater dark,
But something from the dark side of the moon
121.11
092.3
054.21
051.46
096.37
015.18
066.15
015.26
096.22
006.18
136.11
045.7
128.14
128.13
011.16
017.16
048.9
086.8
002.9
010.3
011.20
011.23
014.33
030.28
036.62
038.13
045.7
047.5
050.3
051.5
054.39
054.57
059.11
061.7
065.10
065.17
070.13
073.8
074.9
075.12
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Where vast, dark marbles stood in endless miles,
The dark, walled city slowly came in view,
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
In that dark chamber, numb with terror, mute,
It lifted toward its dark, devouring lips.
O Cyrenaya, take away the sweet, dark gum,
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
I have met darker nights than that of old,
Deep loving, dark thinking,
I ask for blankness and the dark, dark earth.
Out of the dark where the black moons creep,
So deeply dark and fair
Darkened
And through its darkened window see no sky:
Darkling His vision, and he peered across the darkling sky
Darkly In shadow-ruled dominions darkly fated
For feast and wine, the grass stained darkly yet;
Darkness
Ere I, by night and darkness, am bereft
I have riven all darkness to find thee.
Was it only for darkness to blind me,
And neither dawn nor darkness shades her clime.
Till darkness falls—it never will—
In darkness absolute, and listening hard,
Whose whisper in the quiet darkness? Why
Darting A beak that, darting, closed me in its trap.
Dawn Till the dawn.
Petals tremulous with dew at dawn
Lest dawn and barren ashes enter in.
But dawn destroyed our passionate delight.
Before the greater dream whose dawn
There is a rush of hooves in the break of dawn;
And hath no waking to no dawn nor sun.
There is a faint, far rapture of birds in the breathless beauty of dawn,
And neither dawn nor darkness shades her clime.
From dawn to dusk her white sides feel
Till the coming of dawn.
And softly rises to rejoice in dawn;
Dawn breaks abroad; then happily she dances, turning
The dawn, when those great wings had made retreat;
Withdraw till dawn comes gray.
Dawn-Age
Lost in that dim dawn-age he died alone,
Dawning
And farther back, when worlds were in their dawning.
In splendor of birth and dawning there where the worlds begin:
We are one with the stars, Beloved, and witnessed the young sun’s
dawning
Dawn’s For dawn’s rebirth.
081.10
086.9
087.1
088.10
091.14
096.34
103.1
122.9
123.14
124.14
125.2
127.6
118.2
014.17
036.51
040.7
031.8
043.5
043.7
053.8
055.17
074.2
147.8
075.14
003.36
004.58
007.12
007.52
014.14
015.46
031.14
044.1
053.8
060.17
065.20
066.2
066.15
079.7
096.84
059.15
036.25
111.6
112.1
109.8
D
Day
I dreamed the night would never turn to day.
And the tired day;
Till night had cooled the burning winds of day;
You will come back some day, lost lover,
For a love that was fleeting as day?
The world is wondrously quiet, so quiet, prophetic of day,
Of those who came to praise this day
All present, past, and future worlds; and day, and night;
Now day dies, and night falls, and that great summer moon
Dream of forgetful day,
Though every day were filled with benison
Their elders have promised them a day of returning,
In heat of summer day or cold of winter snow;
I am night erasing day,
Say, sixty-five, not one day under,
The elder gods have promised a day of returning
It’s the break of day,
Days
And the days are dead,
The days are short
And the days are dark,
The days are drear,
And the days are dead,
Remember the days that will come of the breaking
Sorrowing and sorrowing for lost days golden,
Lo, all the later days are long and dull and weary,
The sands of time are thick, the days march slow;
That in the later days a boy would come,
The older glory of the days that were
Was there a goddess in the days of old,
How all my days are as an aria played
Shall even as my lost days be foredone,
When all the olden days are over,
Whisper of the days of old,
Of those the days before the quest.
So few the days, so much that one could know,
No voice to tell of days that were,
The days for which the heart should be most grateful
Of days and nights that are an old and tiring story,
Though all my days were added one by one,
And all your days, and mine, a vain device.
And the days that are dead,
She rules a realm decayed from elder days,
Dazzle With dazzle of a monstrous flame,
Dazzling Such dazzling stores of useless learning!
Dead
see also Long-Dead
And the days are dead,
The dry dead leaves
And the days are dead,
Beautiful youths have long lain dead
97
007.40
009.6
015.6
039.19
043.8
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049.3
096.71
096.85
109.6
115.3
130.5
131.6
133.55
138.32
141.5
143.4
002.4
002.8
002.9
002.25
002.34
005.3
006.5
007.45
007.46
026.2
026.12
027.1
031.1
031.12
039.1
047.12
049.16
050.1
053.12
070.4
096.5
115.1
118.14
123.3
127.17
030.42
138.38
002.4
002.15
002.34
004.27
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Never again will a dead girl thrill
Poisonous and beautiful and dead;
In life’s dead close;
On the dead earth;
For all is dead, and all is still,
Where all seemed dead beneath the branch-twined roof
The poppies of the dead
Of dead desire.
Of desolation and the livid dead,
Soft plants and creatures, dead, that still draw breath.
A phantom of the dead, forgotten Greek.
For I was his, that horror of the dead.
They gorged on wonders vanished, dead.
Through space’s dead debris I wandered, wondered
Dead eyes will greet dead eyes, and ravage
Shall the poppy be flameless and dead?
Risen a spectre from the dead
Mark where dead Atlantis lies
Lies upon the dead drowned men.
For the plague germs fed on the sick and the dead
With olden dead endeavor all erased,
And I am dead.
And I am dead.
For I am dead.
To coffin. earth, the dead.
About me, who am dead.
Until my dead flesh stirred. I only lay,
Or in my dead flesh foul to float,
Dark, dark, cold, dead,
Silent, still, old, dead;
Dead, dead,
For ever dead.
Dead, dead,
For ever dead.
Soul? Dead.
For ever dead.
For ever dead, dead, dead.
And the slimy things of the slimy dead
Through its foul dead realm were it ever to squirm,
And dead men’s bones.
Where he sleeps with the dead.
The poppies of the dead
From having watched the dead rose petals strew
Where peasants till starved earth and long dead ground.
Stared at my own dead eyes unearthly lit.
The strange cocoon, not living yet nor dead
My bloodprints in the dead sand marked my trail.
I found no door, and when all hope lay dead
For I was its, that horror from the dead.
004.66
006.2
009.4
009.10
010.13
011.7
012.12
013.8
017.3
025.12
027.14
029.14
030.34
036.11
039.13
043.32
046.19
047.25
047.36
048.5
051.6
054.1
054.3
054.7
054.11
054.15
054.28
054.44
054.57
054.58
054.59
054.60
054.61
054.62
054.67
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D
The weedy pastures and the drowned, the dead;
Love, ere thy lips dead lips alone adore.
The endless silence of the endless dead;
There is no picture of her dear dead face,
The heavens like a dead, colossal hearse
Blessed be the dead for they are dead.
Blessed be the living for they will be dead.
Blessed be the unborn for they shall be dead.
And the days that are dead,
That dead body in the ooze.
Quote scholars dead in Alfred’s time,
Deadly The deadly hardness of reality,
Deal
“A great deal matters. Who are you?”
Dear
Dearest of all dear things that I possess.
Rest, with the dear things lying
Or purple, dear to children of the dust,
There is no picture of her dear dead face,
Your moods are dear to me, and all the ways
I am telling you goodbye, dear,
And I hope that you won’t cry dear,
Dearer To all the world; and dearer still are those
Dearest Dearest of all dear things that I possess.
Only you, and the past, my dearest
Dearth In its dearth;
Death Has the cold of death
To Death and Time.
All to death must go.
But a moment will come and death destroy
DEATH: I offer thee such dreams
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
DEATH: Turn not, Oh Poet, wait!
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
DEATH: I offer thee the wealth
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
DEATH: Oh Poet, these I offer thee:
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
DEATH: Ah Poet, scorn me not,
THE POET (wildly): I yield! I yield! Thy lips, Oh Death!
And I am sick to death with utter weariness
I know that death itself will never bring release;
And death, the great, from whom he held his vow
Of death.
Love, and Death are born.
Phantasmal things of beauty and of death,
The death of pale-green bloated things.
Our thoughts will be more sad than death is
And its death is the death of the world.
Wine of life and of death I have drunken,
And to no futile dream of death aspires,
99
095.11
097.4
099.6
099.10
107.5
108.1
108.2
108.3
123.3
126.12
138.11
120.11
139.8
008.8
009.3
051.2
099.10
117.1
135.1
135.2
117.5
008.8
123.19
009.12
002.18
004.13
004.20
004.33
012.1
012.7
012.11
012.17
012.18
012.26
012.27
012.43
012.44
012.53
013.27
013.30
014.6
014.36
021.8
025.10
030.12
039.4
043.24
043.29
051.20
100
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Death: I offer you such dreams
Traveler: I scorn you, Death,
Death: Turn not, oh Traveler, wait!
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
Death: I offer you the wealth
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
Death: Oh Traveler, these I offer you:
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
Death: Ah Traveler, scorn me not
Death: However far you go, I wait.
Death: We will. We will, and I know when.
Death: Not long, not long....
But phantoms; life and death part each of other;
Of aimless life, of aimless death. Long since
I too was fastened on that tree of death.
With love, and life, and death, and even with ennui;
Live riotously, ere thy life for death be traded,
Terror and death seemed stalking everywhere,
Of death itself, there now was left no trace,
Where Death in death all things did not immerse.
For Death the Conqueror at last was king;
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
Death-Fevers
Death-fevers mottled you with lurid shades.
Death-Knell
My soul’s death-knell.
Deathless
That I am the deathless Greek upon an urn
Did I a lovely deathless form enfold?
As deathless and old as the deathless sea,
As deathless as ever a worm can be,
For they were deathless hunters, I the dying.
Oblivion had laid its deathless curse
We are deathless, O Love, and deific; we have known the wonder
supernal:
Deathlessly
With beauty of face and of body as the deathlessly beautiful Greek;
Never a rose will deathlessly bloom,
Deathly This hill, haunted by a deathly spell,
With their faces dissolved and deathly heads
Deaths In separate deaths, so long,
Two loves, two deaths, two flameless fires, ashen,
And in recurring deaths escape them never.
I am all deaths that chill,
Death’s I gave him the pall of Death’s last blight,
Debris Through space’s dead debris I wandered, wondered
Decadent
As the amorous maidens were loved in decadent Rome I shall love
067.1
067.7
067.11
067.17
067.18
067.26
067.27
067.43
067.44
067.53
067.55
067.57
070.12
076.10
093.14
096.2
097.3
105.5
107.3
107.8
107.9
130.11
141.11
017.14
013.16
004.76
027.8
057.17
057.18
085.14
107.1
112.13
003.2
004.35
045.6
062.3
039.23
051.24
087.14
133.30
046.6
036.11
D
her,
But she, in decadent fall,
Decayed She rules a realm decayed from elder days,
Decaying
see also Half-Decaying
And all the beauty of that night now lies decaying,
Decibels A tolling like a myriad decibels
Decision And the mind’s decision,
Decomposition
In my own decomposition. Thick white worms have lolled
Deeds Like all his deeds, his very name unknown,
She claimed that thoughts, not deeds, pervert you—
Her thoughts and deeds alike were shoddy.
Deemed
At first I deemed it some mad nightmare-dream,
Deeming
And pass, as all things pass, deeming the dumb
Deep
Graven deep the riddle of their deep despair.
Drowning as willow-fingers drowned, deep—deep—
Of dwarfs in deep Lethean sands;
Beyond the shadows of the shrouded deep
Over his loins his deep eyes rove.
It slumbers deep beneath the fabled hills,
And how my love that burns herein so deep
And blazed in beauty, deep on topless deep,
We only left her body lying still and deep;
Before a vaster deep beyond all thought,
Through trackless labyrinths more dark and deep,
Deep stems twining around the mandrake,
There was never love greater than mine, so destroying, so ravaging,
ravishing, rapturous, deep;
I am the colour deep blood-red,
Lost Atlantis slumbers deep,
In the streets now covered deep,
That hung on our deep sea-graves.
Six feet deep I lie;
Six feet deep my corpse lies, drowned
Corruption. Six feet deep
Six feet deep.
The harvest, and to revel deep
A worm that was born of the deep sea-slime,
They found him deep within an ancient cave
Of dwarfs in deep Lethean sands;
Ring upon ring, with stone walls sevenfold deep,
Quicksilver, pulsing with a deep soft tone
A deep force pulls me toward the window-blind,
I saw the vales and mountains of the deep,
I sink back in the pillows of my deep divan
Drink deep the cup, ere thou canst drink no more;
101
003.33
065.23
127.17
007.43
080.3
033.35
054.23
059.13
128.27
128.28
105.12
026.3
006.20
011.25
012.21
014.1
018.4
027.12
031.11
034.11
035.10
036.14
036.62
038.5
043.14
046.18
047.1
047.34
048.16
054.2
054.19
054.32
054.34
054.38
057.3
059.1
067.21
069.1
076.7
083.1
095.9
096.8
097.2
102
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Drink! For the flagon is full and deep!
Deep loving, dark thinking,
In endless deep
Deeper But still assail the deeper firmament.
Unless in deeper love both are combined;
And deeper fires, burning, burning, burning,
Nightward and deeper.
Felt deeper silence broken by no sound,
Deep-Knotted
They burned me, bound me with deep-knotted ties;
Deeply Deeply the folded roses
The inner beauty I more deeply care
So deeply dark and fair
Defaced I hear them in the rubble of defaced land
Defeat And find defeat ere I have much begun;
Deific We are deathless, O Love, and deific; we have known the wonder
supernal:
Delicate A single gardenia lies with delicate grace in
Delicately
Jades exquisite, delicately carved ivory,
Delight For pleasures and joys that she knows not, for a new and monstrous
delight;
Thy breasts that seek delight in fire,
Let us give over ourselves to delight,
And all the ecstasy and dolorous delight.
But dawn destroyed our passionate delight.
The loveliest girl to give him strange delight;
Pain, and a choral delight;
Delight be withholden?
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of
endless and awful delight;
Sometimes in cool delight she floats on drifting weeds
All substances and dreams, all sorrow, all delight,
Delight in sudden vagaries of your mind.
Delights Delights of Ispahan.
Than you. I have drained all delights from long impresses
Delirium The minutes shall wane in delirium, the burning hours pass slowly,
I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate,
meshed in the love thou hast sown,
Delirium over my shaken soul now passes,
Dell
For love, the dell where hired maenads moan.
Delve
Dig and delve
So dig and delve,
Delver’s What shall reward the delver’s toil
Demented
The poppy yielded you demented dreams,
Demon Witch-forms tormented, from dark demon danger,
Demonic
Demonic revel holds dark, writhing forms in thrall,
098.6
123.14
133.67
050.14
051.25
051.52
064.4
122.10
084.6
109.5
114.11
127.6
131.5
050.6
112.13
129.13
096.14
003.18
004.8
004.51
007.8
007.52
015.12
021.4
033.32
043.2
060.12
096.70
117.14
096.12
096.52
003.25
043.26
101.21
040.8
143.1
143.9
038.11
017.13
045.7
061.7
D
103
That force demonic brought its eyes their sheen.
090.8
Deny
Yield grace to only one, deny the rest?
119.11
Departed
see Wind-Departed
Depths Descending into midnight depths that lurked
011.19
I reached my hands down to the cool, wet depths
011.22
In the depths of gloomy murk:
047.38
Attempts to flee from depths where hope was slain;
070.7
And violet depths with flameful passions gleam.
127.10
Derrick Till with derrick they capped him,
145.3
Descending
Descending into midnight depths that lurked
011.19
Descends
For in the midnight hours, when sleep descends,
070.9
Desert Back through the desert for those fiends to flay,
086.6
Alone protruded from the desert sand,
093.4
Deserted
Seaweed fills deserted lanes;
047.23
Deserted city streets, and fog, and lantern glow.
131.8
Deserts The dried-up seas, the deserts drear.
010.19
Desert’s You drift along the desert’s burning sands;
017.6
Design In my design;
046.44
The ever fresh design of your own fashion.
051.28
And naked lay the true design, the trick.
121.12
Desire The passion-born kiss and caress of my maddening desire;
003.6
The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will betray
her.
003.11
Our desire with breast to breast and body to body we shall be slaking 003.19
Thy body fevered with love’s desire,
004.7
No more, no more I know the fierce desire of woman,
007.55
But bitter is the end of love and man’s desire,
007.61
Of dead desire.
013.8
To claim the maid for whose desire he strove?
015.20
He seeks to allay the old desire,
018.10
Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast brought
me this feverous love to consume me,
043.1
Your soul’s desire, all lasting rapture,
067.49
To heart’s desire that only I and Allah know,
096.100
Nor I desire it if it held not you;
115.12
Desired The phantom that so greatly I desired
036.53
Desired of many but achieved by few.
068.12
Desires But fulness leaves no unassuaged desires,
051.19
Weary of all desires grown monotonous,
096.7
Desiring
Till she lie in ecstasy knowing and desiring her sisterhood;
003.30
And of the empty dreams that were not worth desiring,
096.32
Desolate
Desolate, lonely, and far,
001.7
For ever and ever and desolate,
004.23
104
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Desolate, lonely, and far
Yet, when toward farther desolate wastes I stole,
Desolation
The desolation tomblike, sere,
Of desolation and the livid dead,
Despair Graven deep the riddle of their deep despair.
A giant shape part human, part despair,
Despairing
Or was it the old despairing cry of sadness
Desparing cry. I crouched against the wall
Despairs
Of some imprisoned thing with old despairs.
Despite Of modes that will not match despite your pains.
Destined Now was I destined after all to die,
Destiny My destiny, and found what men can never guess;
Destroy But a moment will come and death destroy
For thee, the gods a planet would destroy.
Destroyed
But dawn destroyed our passionate delight.
Destroying
There was never love greater than mine, so destroying, so ravaging,
ravishing, rapturous, deep;
Destruction
Oh color of destruction, rage, and lust,
Develops
A glow that develops and flows from the inner being
Device And all your days, and mine, a vain device.
Devil
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
Goddess or devil or only human,
Devoid Devoid of mirth, devoid of feeling;
Devotion
Allah! the kneeling figures in devotion pray,
Devour Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
Devouring
And on my flesh their mouths, devouring, fall.
It lifted toward its dark, devouring lips.
Dew
Petals tremulous with dew at dawn
The grasses with glimmering dew are jewelled in opal and amethyst,
She wakens with the dew yet cool upon her eyelids
I am the fleeting dew,
Diadems
Strange wondrous jewels and diadems
Strange wondrous jewels and diadems
Diamonds
I turn away from diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls,
Did
What did it matter a thousand years ago
063.7
085.7
010.18
017.3
006.20
089.11
015.35
088.9
074.8
117.8
085.1
013.10
004.33
008.12
007.52
043.14
017.17
110.3
118.14
022.4
022.8
022.12
140.11
128.34
096.80
043.28
082.14
091.14
004.58
044.6
066.1
133.29
012.24
067.24
096.19
026.1
D
Didn’t
Die
Died
Dies
Did I embrace her wildly, did I hold
Did I a lovely deathless form enfold?
For green corpses he did lust,
What did he seek, this wayfarer of old?
What goal, what new companion did I seek?
For what, I did not know, yet tense, on guard
I scarce could know the evil that I did;
Where Death in death all things did not immerse.
And waited, wondered, though I did not know...
Who knew why Romans didn’t rhyme,
And she didn’t mind,
Of flowers that die,
Though we die.
Thou shalt die,
Must die;
Beauty and Love and Life must die,
Even the least. Beauty must die.
For Beauty ever must dissolve and die;
Die, with the leaves that drift
Die, with Beauty that dies
Their purple vision fade and die,
For all things die, but they die most regretful
That flowered not, and all things weep to die,
No ears to hear her footsteps die away.
Why do the mandrakes fear to die?
Now was I destined after all to die,
As of a lost and hungry child. Then die
And when thy surfeit comes, then die! and die a-flinging
They know that it will take me years to die,
We have dwelt with new suns and watched the old stars die;
I am nothing as I die,
And when I die, must be enscrolled
That once a poet lived and loved and died,
Died upon birth.
All things died in my black might,
From heat and plague as they died,
Lost in that dim dawn-age he died alone,
For silence unto silence died away.
And I, and all that phantom city, died.
To every branch. The tree had long since died,
I dreamed the waters of the world had died,
Showed everywhere, while flopping creatures died.
I only know she died in Mytilene.
Upon his fallen kingdoms, God had died.
Came near me, passed, and faintly died away;
Is the voice of Beauty that dies.
Die, with Beauty that dies
The mortal flesh that dies?
And the dirge of a wind that whispers and dies
105
027.5
027.8
046.13
059.9
072.9
074.3
106.11
107.8
122.8
138.12
144.4
001.6
003.40
004.1
004.22
004.29
004.34
007.42
009.17
009.19
030.54
051.15
051.16
053.13
056.12
085.1
089.7
097.7
103.3
112.6
133.56
137.25
026.6
039.6
046.7
048.22
059.15
080.14
086.14
093.10
095.1
095.4
099.14
107.14
122.2
001.14
009.19
012.49
062.7
106
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Is the dream as it dies.
Now day dies, and night falls, and that great summer moon
Differed Differed so, each from each, and this one more
Dig
Dig and delve
So dig and delve,
Dim
see also Moon-Dim
Our worship went beyond our own dim comprehension,
Dim citadel, all dank and poisonous,
Lost in that dim dawn-age he died alone,
What are the dim dread images that bind
I saw from that dim cave where I was hiding
The night grows dim and unreal and reeling: do I waken
Sleep the dim night away
O Love, the world so shadowy and dim
We have read inscrutable symbols on dim, dynastic pages,
Dimension
see also Four-Dimension
Expound a learned fourth dimension
Dimensioned
see Four-Dimensioned
Dimly Behind the amber lids they dimly dream,
Dine
To make my sufferings worse if I should dine.
Dirge
And the dirge of a wind that whispers and dies
Dirges That beat the air to frenzy, dirges, knells.
Disagree With all things disagree,
Disarrays
Arrays and disarrays the house contains,
Discover And truths I could not otherwise discover.
Discovering
Discovering there an equal leaden hue,
Discoverlessly
Discoverlessly far,
Disease’s As dreaded as some strange disease’s pain,
Disdainful
And on the doors of doom, disdainful, hurled
Disgusting
“Masher. Disgusting.”
Disposes As the unknown force disposes
Disputed Not a thing disputed the lordly worm
Dissemble
We shall love in our passion in strange and ineffable ways and
dissemble
Dissolution’s
In dissolution’s rot. Around,
Dissolve
For Beauty ever must dissolve and die;
Felt flesh dissolve in motes of silver tints
Dissolved
With their faces dissolved and deathly heads
063.14
096.85
115.7
143.1
143.9
007.29
011.16
059.15
083.5
089.1
101.29
109.7
110.9
112.7
138.13
127.7
087.12
062.7
080.2
096.63
117.6
120.12
069.11
127.16
070.2
024.13
139.14
133.61
057.11
003.31
054.20
007.42
076.13
062.3
D
Distance In the distance sank the coast in the dank
From somewhere in the distance voices fall and swell,
Distant A last, wild note from the distant hills comes drifting—
So long, so far, so distant have you flown
Wherefor, solution distant as a star,
The roads to distant marts; and Allah’s blessed foretell
Ditched Means ditched by your girl and left by your friend,
Ditty
Who burped a remarkable ditty,
Divan I sink back in the pillows of my deep divan
Dividing I must, for it arose, its mass dividing
Divine Most lovely, half satanic, half divine,
Divinely Of pagany, divinely young Apollo,
Divinity Where legend prophesied divinity,
Do
Only now do we live.
I do not know. There is an ache that fills
Where asphodels do grow.
Do light thoughts in a light heart dwell,
So little, yet to do so well,
Yet do you leave the dark and lonely waste
Why do the mandrakes fear to die?
I can not find, nor do I seem to place
And though you never talk (do you have tongue?)
Why do I shrink from the soft red mouths of roses
The night grows dim and unreal and reeling: do I waken
Now wherefor do you make this larger room
I listen, but I do not hear them fall,
What do I want?
This do I want.
Only do we who knew you feel the source,
Does
The legend saith: wherefor does any legend matter?
Dolorous And all the ecstasy and dolorous delight.
And weary drag of minutes grows less dolorous,
Domain I offer thee the vague, vast Hadean domain
That her domain has overrun.
That enters her wide domain.
Domain I offer you my whole vast Hadean domain
In my domain alone you’ll capture
Dominions
And surge of falling flame of far dominions,
In shadow-ruled dominions darkly fated
Don
She liked to don herself in raiment
Done
Our task was done.
Her vigil never will be done:
In Wonderland; Rothenstein’s portraits done with malice
If this were done to Minnesota,
Don’t
“I beg your pardon, I don’t know you.”
Doom Lie only shards of that dread doom
Apocalyptic prophet of our doom,
And on the doors of doom, disdainful, hurled
107
048.9
096.91
015.47
037.1
050.7
096.94
142.8
145.2
096.8
089.8
027.2
051.44
037.12
004.70
027.9
041.4
042.7
042.10
051.5
056.12
077.5
077.11
101.11
101.29
118.9
122.13
123.16
123.20
146.8
134.19
007.8
096.29
012.5
055.12
060.16
067.5
067.48
034.8
036.51
128.5
035.8
055.18
129.6
138.35
139.2
010.15
017.10
024.13
108
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
That brought to Mirtylon its doom,
What total purpose wrought such total doom;
Oh little creature, here’s a tale of doom....
What sense of overhanging doom has made
Engirt, and hurled me nightward into doom.
All night I heard the cadences of doom
And DOOM had fallen on the universe.
Are languorous with dreams of mighty doom,
I am doom that all dooms follow,
Doomed Swimming through Atlantis doomed;
Dooms Holds me till in unending dooms I smother.
I am doom that all dooms follow,
Door
Progressing slowly underneath the door
The door must open, showing why the hue
On long, metallic clang, the brazen door
I found no door, and when all hope lay dead
Doors And on the doors of doom, disdainful, hurled
So great the gap, and firmly barred the doors,
Thus I close my doors
Dost
All things that thou dost love,
Doth
For song, not she, doth gain.
That doth the icon and the dream inherit,
Doubt And certainty, by doubt and change, undone,
Doubt everything, doubt that I doubt, and wearily
Doubting
Doubting, I stumble blindly to thy feet,
Dowers Than that just passed held sweeter, fuller dowers;
Down I reached my hands down to the cool, wet depths
When down the hillside came a long, low crying,
For the good of the town, with the spirits—Down!
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
The Northern Lights crept down with pulsing streamers
And giant fountains pouring down the wide skylanes.
I peered far down the final future ages,
When the night came down again.
As we strode down the streets of Tyre.
Laughing, she flashes down the shifting tides of green,
The world of which no tale is handed down.
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
She often made the first down payment,
Down the far closure of the valley, sky,
Downward
And twist their sinuous downward course—
Doze
Would rant and dream and drowse and doze.
Dozes
A venomous, waiting, and phallic orchid dozes.
Drag
And weary drag of minutes grows less dolorous,
Dragged They dragged me back with never pause for rest.
Drained Than you. I have drained all delights from long impresses
Drapery With its drapery hiding all wholly,
030.18
036.12
077.13
083.7
089.14
094.2
107.4
127.13
133.22
047.28
070.14
133.22
078.2
078.13
081.2
088.7
024.13
050.4
052.7
012.41
041.16
051.48
050.8
096.62
124.2
115.8
011.22
015.3
022.11
029.3
034.1
034.9
036.33
048.8
049.7
060.1
068.14
090.3
128.7
147.6
038.10
138.26
101.13
096.29
086.5
096.52
043.35
D
109
Drapes Their gentle drapes enfold.
041.12
Draught Lips parting and closing over the draught her
129.2
Draw
Ah, God, that I could draw instead of write,
025.1
Soft plants and creatures, dead, that still draw breath.
025.12
But could not move or even draw one breath:
093.13
Drawings
Orchids, lilies grow exotic in these drawings,
006.1
Dread Lie only shards of that dread doom
010.15
All the rottenness, I dread;
054.12
And languid, warming into life; no dread
075.6
What are the dim dread images that bind
083.5
Impalpable, a brain-shaped thing of dread,
088.3
Dreaded As dreaded as some strange disease’s pain,
070.2
Dreadful With all the dreadful cerements of the grave,
029.2
With all the dreadful cerements of the grave
090.2
Dream see also Nightmare-Dream, Opium-Dream
Strange, grave women dream of some strange pleasure
006.3
Lost amid their dreamlands, your captured phantoms dream.
006.24
Worship thee, knowing that I only dream.
008.14
Dream, with the flowers dreaming,
009.9
Dream, with the brown grass withering
009.11
Whose dream of old is gone
014.13
Before the greater dream whose dawn
014.14
For songs as wondrous as this wondrous dream,
028.11
Of a dream supernal.
033.16
The still-eluding dream.
036.48
And still for this one dream all else forsaking
036.59
Like a drinker of chloral I dream,
043.10
And my heart is fulfilled of its dream as I walk my enchanted way.
044.8
Except the fair, faint dream of beauty slowly
051.9
A fuller dream replacing that that wanes.
051.14
And to no futile dream of death aspires,
051.20
That doth the icon and the dream inherit,
051.48
Is the dream as it dies.
063.14
065.19
She will dream as the night wanes slowly,
And Aphrodite, every dream you seek;
067.32
I dream through realms where naught begins or ends,
070.10
And melancholy, dream away the afternoon
096.56
And dream caravans of Nirvana are beholden,
096.59
The outer-lands where all’s a dream, and dream-winds blow
096.101
Dream of forgetful day,
109.6
So faint the dream, O Love, and yet so fair.
110.16
We have been the dreamed-of, the dreamer, the fugitive dream:
112.14
We have found that only the dream is unchanging, O Love, and
eternal,
112.15
Content to know the image of the dream,
113.11
Behind the amber lids they dimly dream,
127.7
The little gods dream an apocalyptic dream;
130.2
The little gods dream their apocalyptic dream;
130.18
110
Dreamed
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Would rant and dream and drowse and doze.
The monster gods dream an apocalyptic dream;
The monster gods dream an apocalyptic dream,
All night I dreamed the one long night would last for ever,
I dreamed the night would never turn to day.
I dreamed the waters of the world had died,
Dreamed-Of
We have been the dreamed-of, the dreamer, the fugitive dream:
Dreamer A dreamer in eternity,
We have been the dreamed-of, the dreamer, the fugitive dream:
Dreamers
Summoned from realms unknown to earthly dreamers
Dream-Form
And every dream-form glowing
Dreamful
In the breathless rapture of the scented dreamful air;
Dreaming
Dreaming majestic dreams, I worship thee
Dream, with the flowers dreaming,
My dreaming eyes kept searching, seeking, staring
On Atlantis dreaming, dreaming
All her dreaming, raptured face is white,
Over the dreaming grass;
Where, drowsy and drunken and dreaming, nod and list
Dreaming of Her.
Tall candles there were dreaming
Dreamland
Is dreamland, out of Space and out of Time.
Dreamlands
Lost amid their dreamlands, your captured phantoms dream.
Held sway, with purple dreamlands all around.
Dreamless
I hear a moaning in the dreamless trees;
Dreamlikely
Then dreamlikely they uttered
Dreams Dreaming majestic dreams, I worship thee
DEATH: I offer thee such dreams
All men, all things, all hopes, my burning dreams of fire;
Age-old dreams.
The poppy yielded you demented dreams,
Enchanted me with dreams that weave;
I brought him dreams of eternal night,
He had dreams and thoughts of just
She walks with dust and dreams.
She dreams of fear.
Sometimes she dreams to music of murmuring waves
Death: I offer you such dreams
And dreams that can not be.
138.26
141.2
141.18
007.39
007.40
095.1
112.14
014.12
112.14
034.4
109.29
101.2
008.3
009.9
036.31
047.17
058.3
065.2
101.9
101.15
136.3
113.14
006.24
071.11
015.42
045.17
008.3
012.1
013.6
015.32
017.13
042.5
046.5
046.15
053.16
058.4
060.8
067.1
096.6
D
And drowsyhead gives way to dreams more slumberous,
And of the empty dreams that were not worth desiring,
All substances and dreams, all sorrow, all delight,
And dreams become the real.
The real world dreams,
Romantic dreams, illusions, poetry,
Are languorous with dreams of mighty doom,
We listened to these strange tall dreams
Dream-Winds
The outer-lands where all’s a dream, and dream-winds blow
Is only known in realms where dream-winds blow.
Where moons are high, and only dream-winds stir,
Drear
The days are drear,
The dried-up seas, the deserts drear.
Dresser The flagons and bottles and jars that cover her dresser
Drew
And I drew back, but still the hand with stark,
When Nielsen with a pen of magic drew
And drew gas for the whole of Sauk City!
Dried-Up
The dried-up seas, the deserts drear.
Drift
Or the rustle of leaves that drift with the wind,
Die, with the leaves that drift
You drift along the desert’s burning sands;
Or vanishing leaves that drift off with the wind,
You drift upon the moonlight hovering near
Grown faint, the winds drift slowly
And you will never know what years drift by.
Drifted A glowing form, it drifted on a course
Drifting A last, wild note from the distant hills comes drifting—
Moon, if moon-made they, those drifting shapes
Sometimes in cool delight she floats on drifting weeds
Drifting as leaves but urgent with a force
Drifts
That drifts from the vacant meadows of the sea.
And a presence of something supernal drifts over the springsweet earth,
Drink
The glasses clink for a Bacchic drink—
And drink her kisses as a priceless wine?
Drink deep the cup, ere thou canst drink no more;
Drink! For you’ll soon have the earth for a cover!
Drink! For the joy of the winking wine!
Drink! For the red-stained lips of your lover!
Drink! For the night and the fruit of the vine!
Drink! For the pleasure, forget sad thinking!
Drink! For the flagon is full and deep!
Drink! For the sheer great joy of drinking!
Drink! Till you fall in your wine-full sleep!
Drinker Like a drinker of chloral I dream,
Drinking
Drink! For the sheer great joy of drinking!
111
096.28
096.32
096.70
109.19
109.20
120.13
127.13
136.9
096.101
099.4
113.6
002.25
010.19
129.9
074.11
113.4
145.5
010.19
001.12
009.17
017.6
063.12
077.3
109.9
118.4
088.4
015.47
045.14
060.12
147.11
020.12
044.3
022.1
027.7
097.2
098.1
098.2
098.3
098.4
098.5
098.6
098.7
098.8
043.10
098.7
112
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Drinks She drinks the earthly and heavenly beauty of morning;
066.13
Drip
The janitors would drip with knowledge,
138.20
Dripping The dripping symbol of a murderer’s hands.
017.8
Their dripping tongues from my soft flesh that, old
054.24
There was a red, raw dripping thing that mowed
106.1
Driven Then only, from those vacant spaces driven,
036.39
Droop Gave way, the willows five with solemn droop
011.12
Drooping
Why are the marsh-weeds drooping low?
056.2
Drop
And think the words they drop are jewels.
138.2
Dropped Before I dropped away, for I was free—
079.13
Drown And in the waters saw my own face drown,
011.24
Drowned
Drowning as willow-fingers drowned, deep—deep—
011.25
Lies upon the dead drowned men.
047.36
Six feet deep my corpse lies, drowned
054.19
All it would find was a plump drowned rat
057.15
And in a sea of purple shadows drowned.
071.14
The weedy pastures and the drowned, the dead;
095.11
Drowning
Drowning as willow-fingers drowned, deep—deep—
011.25
And the stars in the drowning pools are pale.
056.8
Drowse Would rant and dream and drowse and doze.
138.26
Drowsy The air hung slumbrous in the drowsy heat,
015.2
To fulness in the drowsy summer noons,
051.51
Enough, while drowsy minutes lengthen to hours golden,
096.58
And champak fragrance makes the drowsy senses swoon,
096.88
Where, drowsy and drunken and dreaming, nod and list
101.9
Drowsyhead
And drowsyhead gives way to dreams more slumberous,
096.28
Drugged I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate,
meshed in the love thou hast sown,
043.26
Druid’s It is the blessing of a Druid’s prayer,
110.15
Drunk And drunk a wine of amethyst
030.19
I have drunk at the fountains
033.3
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of endless
and awful delight;
043.2
Drunken
007.27
And still I sought the overpowering drunken rapture,
Drunken with beauty and sweet ecstasy,
008.2
And body to body, drunken forms were swaying
015.39
A drunken girl where the revellers whirl—
023.1
Of a glory I have drunken,
033.21
Each drunken reveller has long since gone;
040.2
Wine of life and of death I have drunken,
043.29
Where, drowsy and drunken and dreaming, nod and list
101.9
Dry
The dry dead leaves
002.15
Dual
Then live! Live in this dual love, partake
051.29
Of the dual flower that alone endures;
051.30
D
Due
Dull
Dumb
For a promised trysting, a god long due, she yearns,
Lo, all the later days are long and dull and weary,
The past is forgotten, its lips are dumb,
And pass, as all things pass, deeming the dumb
The spheres that spin of chance the blind and dumb,
Or else they’re much more dumb than geese are.
Dusk
A gray dusk mists the air
From dawn to dusk her white sides feel
Now I, at dusk, beside the wall of ancient tombs,
Dusks While there remain but few—how few!—brief dusks
Dusky And bound me with long coils of dusky gold?
Out of a dusky corner came the stare
And from a dusky corner came the stare
Dust
see also Space-Dust
As it stirs the dust
To dust and ash will turn.
Yield his body unto dust,
Remember the dust.
In the stirless dust;
They gazed on stars that now are dust,
Amid all worlds of time and dust begotten
Of naked hearts, and dust
For sick flames and the crawling dust,
Or purple, dear to children of the dust,
She walks with dust and dreams.
The dust of centuries lies on her head;
Contained no thought or dust of thing or race;
From the dust of forgotten worlds to whole new systems leaping
I am dust in cosmic outways resting,
Dutch For she paid half, when they went Dutch,
Duty
Duty, in her lips caressing!
Dwarfs Of dwarfs in deep Lethean sands;
That made Serise’s red dwarfs glad.
Of dwarfs in deep Lethean sands;
In the marble palace, gold dwarfs cry,
Dwell
They dwell in dying Mandrikor
They dwell in wasteland and in night.
Upon the ruined planet dwell
Do light thoughts in a light heart dwell,
Only growths and fishes dwell
Where sea-friends dwell,
Dwelled Here at the house you dwelled
Dwellers I saw the dwellers of the ocean night,
Dwelling
Above the bacchanal in the forest dwelling
Dwelt I have dwelt in the palace
Along the walls dwelt living mummies, bound
We have dwelt with new suns and watched the old stars die;
113
019.7
007.45
004.68
026.3
036.28
137.24
053.6
060.17
134.4
031.7
027.4
072.5
104.5
002.23
004.9
004.46
005.6
009.20
030.33
036.7
039.14
046.14
051.2
053.16
099.2
107.6
112.9
133.24
128.19
100.8
012.21
030.32
067.21
125.6
010.1
010.5
010.21
042.7
047.37
060.22
132.1
095.10
015.15
033.7
072.7
112.6
114
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Dwindling
Where dwindling monitors of night had sundered
Dying And the song of Beauty for ever dying
They dwell in dying Mandrikor
Twilight upon the hills and woods was dying,
Her face has watched the dying sun.
For they were deathless hunters, I the dying.
Dynastic We have read inscrutable symbols on dim, dynastic pages,
036.9
004.61
010.1
015.1
055.8
085.14
112.7
E
Each
The years have passed, yet each long year in passing brings
Each drunken reveller has long since gone;
From each of us he took his joy,
What though one kingdom each of you forsake,
And rotten in each swelling pore,
Each vespertime, he wearies of the view
But phantoms; life and death part each of other;
That glowed with fitful lights, and each one starred
With signs unreadable, on each the shard
Each step eternal, on I struggled, trying
And burning eyes along each limb. It spun
Rose-pink, and outward thrusting from each bare
Differed so, each from each, and this one more
She is new each time that their contents grow, lesser, and lesser.
I am the master of each living thing,
I am the huntsman of each fleeing kind,
The legend saith: for each, the golden poppy blooms
The legend saith: for each, nepenthe follows sorrow,
The legend saith: when each lone traveller passes by,
The golden poppy folds and each eternal I
Each pedagogue, a happy oyster,
Why, there each young M.A. would go to,
With each lesson came complete
Eagerness
An eagerness; and pain upon his features
Ear
The listening ear; its tones are softly heard
Poems for Beauty’s own enraptured ear.
Ears
No ears to hear her footsteps die away.
I’m quite as good as ears to asses;
Earth
On the dead earth;
The earth could not contain
We left her only to the waiting earth that gave
I watched on earth the littler things around;
And a presence of something supernal drifts over the springsweet earth,
And all the laughing nymphs that make earth fair;
Of water, fire, earth and air attend you,
In your steps on the wakened ways of earth
Live with all things of earth and airy splendor,
To coffin. earth, the dead.
Eternal night, and earth damp, black, and cold
With mystic earth, thereof for ever choking,
Where peasants till starved earth and long dead ground.
013.3
040.2
046.37
051.31
054.49
069.9
070.12
074.6
074.7
085.11
091.12
092.5
115.7
129.12
133.2
133.3
134.1
134.7
134.13
134.16
138.24
138.36
140.3
059.6
028.6
028.14
053.13
137.8
009.10
014.16
035.11
036.44
044.3
051.39
051.40
051.45
051.54
054.11
054.21
068.5
069.7
116
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Drink! For you’ll soon have the earth for a cover!
For sunlit earth:
Thought fashions worlds that earth can never share,
I love you for the charm earth gave to you,
The lands no traveller ever found on earth;
I ask for blankness and the dark, dark earth.
I rule the earth
Not on earth nor anywhere
Nothing on earth can bother me,
Earth and eternity. Is some voice calling?
Earthly Purer than earthly creatures’,
Summoned from realms unknown to earthly dreamers
She drinks the earthly and heavenly beauty of morning;
Of earthly ecstasy.
In this sweet earthly house was not for sleeping
Heard legends not by earthly voices told,
And for thy wine, than earthly wine more sweet,
Earth’s And made him one with all earth’s humblest creatures.
Ease
The twilight brought no ease from the hot
I ask no comfort and no ease of thee,
Eaten
My face was eaten by a red, huge Thing.
Eaves
About the eaves,
Sea-tides ebb and flow;
Ebb
Where the rippling waters ebb and flow between
When light shone out of the mystical ebb and flow:
Ebon
Trailed countless fingers in the ebon edge
Of that malign, close-hidden ebon pool.
Ebony The idol in my shrine of ebony,
The ebony gates, one savage curse I cried,
And polished ebony,
Eccentric
I have made love in normal and eccentric ways;
Echo
And faintly comes the echo of a traveler’s song,
And only echo answer a low call.
Echoing And the echoing mirth of a sullen mutter,
Like the ghost of an echoing note
Eclipse And I would let it in complete eclipse
Ecstasies Where maidens swoon in midnight ecstasies;
Would use that tongue’s undreamed-of ecstasies
Ecstasy A slave of her passion, my passion, our ecstasy secret, malign;
Till she lie in ecstasy knowing and desiring her sisterhood;
And all the ecstasy and dolorous delight.
The memory of the elder ecstasy has faded,
For gall and ash are all the ecstasy.
Drunken with beauty and sweet ecstasy,
And over the woods in ecstasy, and swelling
Ecstasy pains him with a quiver,
A lyric ecstasy, a sad, sweet note,
In a furnace of ecstasy whirled,
098.1
109.4
116.7
116.9
116.12
124.14
133.42
133.65
142.2
147.7
032.6
034.4
066.13
096.66
119.4
122.11
124.3
059.8
048.13
124.9
105.14
002.13
047.7
060.3
112.2
011.13
011.14
008.7
086.13
096.15
013.17
096.92
122.12
062.6
063.3
115.13
015.44
028.10
003.10
003.30
007.8
007.47
007.56
008.2
015.13
018.7
021.3
043.22
E
117
In ecstasy to reap
054.37
Of inner ecstasy and exaltation
068.11
With bright-eyed ecstasy, exultant wrath,
082.13
Of earthly ecstasy.
096.66
Eden
Yet would it be no Eden to entice.
115.11
Edge
I passed and reached the black pool’s rock-strewn edge.
011.9
Trailed countless fingers in the ebon edge
011.13
Eel
To capture an errant eel
060.15
Eerie
In eerie borderlands I vainly waited
036.49
I thought I heard the eerie
045.9
Are sick with memories awesome, eerie, fateful,
070.5
And they hide in eerie lands where the fen-fires gleam.
141.20
Eery
And they hide in eery lands where the fen-fires gleam.
130.20
Effaced Until your birthsite was become effaced.
037.7
Egypt
The lips of Egypt, Troy,
067.31
Eidotrope
Her eyes of eidotrope,
127.11
Eight
see Pieces-of-Eight
Elder
The memory of the elder ecstasy has faded,
007.47
Inflicted by the gods in elder wars.
024.4
She rules a realm decayed from elder days,
127.17
The elder gods have promised a day of returning
141.5
And ashes consume what the elder gods condemn.
141.8
Elders Their elders have promised them a day of returning,
130.5
And ashes consume what the elders condemn.
130.8
The little gods will answer their elders and rise.
130.12
Eldritch The windows burning bright with eldritch fires;
086.11
Elements
The elements their four-fold essence send you,
051.41
Elizabeth
Elizabeth Arden, Walska, and Rubenstein;
129.11
Else
And still for this one dream all else forsaking
036.59
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
043.4
All colours else were wan and tame,
046.23
All else is still the realm around,
053.17
109.39
Where nothing else remains.
Else beauty were as lifeless as a tomb.
116.8
Or else they’re much more dumb than geese are.
137.24
Eluding see Still-Eluding
Ely
“Ely Forchamer, Miss Shere. I’m white and virtuous and fairly goo—” 139.9
’Em
Or any other words to jar ’em;
137.12
Are things that never ought to bore ’em.
137.22
They paid him to seduce ’em!
140.12
Embrace
We shall live in a rapturous embrace, in an endless and holy
003.27
Did I embrace her wildly, did I hold
027.5
Where far, unhuman beings’ dark embrace
070.13
I am blind in the white embrace of the moon’s hot stream;
101.27
118
Embraces
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Slow patterns in the air; the warm embrace
And we were fierce and passionate in our embraces,
Emerald Emerald green;
Emeralds
I turn away from diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls,
On its shore, mad emeralds burn in the brake,
Emerging
Emerging into light from shadowed fanes,
Emily
Emily Post, and thieves in state;
Empires Of buried kings, and empires perilous;
Employ There is a language I would fain employ,
Empress An empress regnant in an empty tomb—
Emptiness
And of no emptiness is unforgetful.
An emptiness not knowing you are there.
Empty While empty cities rot away
Monotony of life an empty show?
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
Not always empty is a shell,
With empty fanes.
How strange. How strangely empty is the room.
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
And of the empty dreams that were not worth desiring,
An empress regnant in an empty tomb—
I am the empty brain
Empurpled
Through sullen skies empurpled with vast flame.
Enchanted
Enchanted me with dreams that weave;
And my heart is fulfilled of its dream as I walk my enchanted way.
Oh sweet beloved and enchanted lover—
Moves from worlds without to enchanted worlds within.
Enchantment
Leave them to enchantment where you left them lingering
Oh enchantment that entices,
Enchantment grows in this soft after-nightfall noon,
Encrusted
And weird encrusted forms on every side.
Encysted Oh hearts encysted in supernal urning.
Encysted from the sight of other eyes;
End
Shall lose all Beauty in the end,
Unto the utter end I worship thee, beloved,
Unto the end I worship and adore;
But bitter is the end of love and man’s desire,
And end, there too I sought.
All his great love will end in me,
As if there never were an end in store.
With weary steps to the old, original end.
114.7
007.11
046.12
096.19
125.22
051.10
142.5
026.11
028.1
127.18
051.21
118.8
010.11
026.4
029.3
042.16
047.26
077.14
090.3
096.32
127.18
133.18
071.8
042.5
044.8
051.27
111.8
006.21
033.39
096.89
095.8
051.56
119.2
004.11
007.57
007.58
007.61
036.16
046.43
078.7
112.12
E
Endeavor
Like cardinal numbers adding without end;
Till I end
What end smaller
Finding that life from end to end
And past the winding river’s end you gaze,
With olden dead endeavor all erased,
From the sea, a wind; the revelry has ended;
And years of striving in one moment ended.
Feet are ended in a fen—
Ending For well we knew the holy night must have an ending,
This never ending night of mounting pain,
Endless We shall live in a rapturous embrace, in an endless and holy
In endless repose;
Uprose gigantic in the endless gloom,
Upon an endless path forever going
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of
endless and awful delight;
Where it lived and ruled in the endless gloom,
Who follows an endless stream
Crowned thrice with cypress, endless times with laurel,
Where vast, dark marbles stood in endless miles,
So muse I while the endless, aimless minutes wear
The endless silence of the endless dead;
The endless silence of the endless dead;
The worms with endless, spoiling flesh are glad.
I love you for the realms of endless view,
In endless deep
Endlessly
Endlessly,
So endlessly, so wearily, you paced
Though endlessly we traversed far abysses,
Ends
I dream through realms where naught begins or ends,
Rich ends, and soft the tinkle of a camel’s bell
Endures No love endures if love be only passion
Of the dual flower that alone endures;
Enemy A savage, indestructible enemy.
Enfold Did I a lovely deathless form enfold?
Their gentle drapes enfold.
Engines Till the engines failed and we lay there gaoled
Engirt Engirt, and hurled me nightward into doom.
English And Mr. Briggs would watch their English,
Engulfed Engulfed again the riddles of the ocean;
Enigmatic
Enigmatic loveliness of enigmatic figures,
Enigmatic regions that no eye can know,
Their enigmatic laughter filled the aisles;
Ennobled
Ennobled by your grace, your love—beside you,
Ended
119
115.2
133.45
133.63
142.7
147.4
051.6
015.41
051.7
126.15
007.15
084.13
003.27
009.2
011.4
036.61
043.2
057.12
064.3
068.1
081.10
096.73
099.6
099.6
103.14
116.11
133.67
004.82
037.5
079.9
070.10
096.95
051.22
051.30
082.8
027.8
041.12
048.19
089.14
138.39
094.11
006.13
006.14
081.12
146.5
120
Ennui
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Ennui alone.
And old ennui.
With love, and life, and death, and even with ennui;
But ennui still is mine.
Me from my ennui with your body naked wholly,
I only find more ennui in philosophies,
Enough Enough, while drowsy minutes lengthen to hours golden,
Oh love, it is enough that I may be
Who plainly wasn’t old enough?
Enraptured
I am enraptured of one immortally lovely, with beautiful tresses,
I am enraptured by strange and undreamed-of passionate sinful
caresses
Poems for Beauty’s own enraptured ear.
Enriching
Enriching us, of your own everlasting glow.
Enscrolled
And when I die, must be enscrolled
Enshroud
The vanished mists of time enshroud him, hide him;
Ensorcelled
Her queer, ensorcelled eyes
Enter
Lest dawn and barren ashes enter in.
Entered Where I entered the traces
Enters That enters her wide domain.
Entice Yet would it be no Eden to entice.
Entices Oh enchantment that entices,
Entity A sentient entity from hell, alive.
Enwrapped
Enwrapped it in a steaming blood-red shroud:
Equal
Its equal can confess.
Discovering there an equal leaden hue,
Erased With olden dead endeavor all erased,
Erasing I am night erasing day,
Ere
Ere I, by night and darkness, am bereft
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment ere
worship and love were to perish?
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
And find defeat ere I have much begun;
Fling wide the roses, ere the petals all be faded,
Drink deep the cup, ere thou canst drink no more;
Live riotously, ere thy life for death be traded,
Love, ere thy lips dead lips alone adore.
Erect
Of blue-red veins erect, a spiral swarm.
Errant To capture an errant eel
Error
And every error, he would single-ish!
Errors Were errors that have lost their hold on me.
Escape Never will Beauty escape the grave,
013.4
013.28
096.2
096.24
096.40
096.61
096.58
114.13
138.34
003.1
003.3
028.14
146.9
137.25
059.14
127.1
007.12
033.15
060.16
115.11
033.39
088.14
106.4
032.10
069.11
051.6
133.55
031.8
043.27
043.28
050.6
097.1
097.2
097.3
097.4
092.10
060.15
138.40
120.14
004.36
E
Can escape to tell of muted grief.
Around me, solid walls of no escape,
For my escape I knew what I must pay:
And in recurring deaths escape them never.
Escapes In search of closed escapes.
Especially
Especially when their knees are pretty.
Essence The elements their four-fold essence send you,
The essence of her is here—but I wish she would hasten!
Et
“Oh hail to thee, and et to Brute;
Eternal The sea’s eternal mystery,
And the suns eternal,
The secret of eternal avatars.
As the stars are, my love is eternal.
In night’s eternal pall.
I brought him dreams of eternal night,
Eternal night, and earth damp, black, and cold
The radiant god ascends with warmth eternal,
Each step eternal, on I struggled, trying
All things are symbols of eternal death—
We have found that only the dream is unchanging, O Love, and
eternal,
And past Nirvana waits eternal vision, pure,
The golden poppy folds and each eternal I
And win the prof’s eternal pity,
Eternities
Of nights that seemed eternities, of vain
Eternity A dreamer in eternity,
Eternity between you and your haven;
And the worm is king for eternity,
Was it an hour? Eternity? A week?—
Bloodless, the blind eyes of eternity,
Earth and eternity. Is some voice calling?
Eunuchs Come forth my slaves and eunuchs and the dancing girls:
Euphony Whose perfect euphony would be as clear
Eve
White poppy of the crimson eve—
Walpurgis Eve.
Upon the crimson eve,
Even
Even as Song and Life and Love,
Even as one who loves thee, Love,
Even as I.
Even as I, Oh Myrrhiline,
Even the least. Beauty must die.
But even thou, Oh Myrrhiline,
And even so, Myrrhiline,
Shall even as my lost days be foredone,
Even as one who hath a quiet sleep,
Still farther where not even stars were flaring
I can not even sigh
121
006.12
078.9
086.3
087.14
045.16
138.8
051.41
129.16
137.27
020.10
033.14
036.4
043.23
045.12
046.5
054.21
066.10
085.11
102.5
112.15
134.8
134.16
138.7
070.6
014.12
037.8
057.19
072.10
073.7
147.7
096.22
028.12
042.2
061.12
109.2
004.2
004.3
004.4
004.10
004.34
004.41
004.47
031.12
031.13
036.29
054.6
122
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Where sat an even greater, stranger being,
But could not move or even draw one breath:
With love, and life, and death, and even with ennui;
Unending, a tale, even to him who tells, unknown.
In a marsh that even the water-snakes spurn,
I hear them when I am not even questing
Evening Evening to night, and night to afterglow,
Ever
For ever and ever and desolate,
And the song of Beauty for ever dying
All night I dreamed the one long night would last for ever,
For Beauty ever must dissolve and die;
I worship thee and ever worship more.
All pleasures I have ever found have been as gall.
For ever will I call, and search the frozen skies
And fixed for ever on the shoreless sea.
For ever his heart is filled with yearning,
But only and ever his flesh is burning,
For ever mounting past the realm of light,
Some thing I find not though I ever seek.
I know this all I ever will be knowing:
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul such
a madness and fury will sweep?
Where no man walks, and shall not ever see,
Nor ever have; and since this mortal bond
The ever fresh design of your own fashion.
Oh bells that shall not ever ring for me,
For ever dead.
For ever dead.
For ever fled.
For ever spread.
For ever dead.
For ever dead, dead, dead.
Ever the orb’s fantastic glare
Nor ever a hand caressed its fat;
Through its foul dead realm were it ever to squirm,
As deathless as ever a worm can be,
With mystic earth, thereof for ever choking,
Increasing, spreading more and ever more
I know that I’ll by them be watched for ever
And all that ever will be known, is Death.
Stranger than ever came
Radiant and ever-freshening, ever new,
The lands no traveller ever found on earth;
For who could ever be a prof.
Ever-Freshening
Radiant and ever-freshening, ever new,
Everlasting
Has claimed the everlasting vow of him who coldly rests
Enriching us, of your own everlasting glow.
076.4
093.13
096.2
111.12
125.9
131.11
147.13
004.23
004.61
007.39
007.42
007.60
013.5
013.31
014.30
018.9
018.11
024.9
027.11
036.63
043.16
050.10
050.11
051.28
051.58
054.60
054.62
054.64
054.66
054.68
054.69
055.13
057.13
057.14
057.18
068.5
078.6
087.13
102.20
109.31
115.10
116.12
138.33
115.10
014.7
146.9
E
Everlastingly
And conquest everlastingly beyond,
Evermore
Prisoned here in time for evermore remembered,
Every
Every youth and maiden must
Yet everywhere, in every region, there was nought
All time and space were mine, and mine was every sky:
An unknown golden tongue where every word
And every sound a thing of lyric joy.
Of every age and every sky.
When time had ceased, when every world was riven,
And Aphrodite, every dream you seek;
And every forward step a weary strain.
To every branch. The tree had long since died,
And weird encrusted forms on every side.
And every dream-form glowing
Though every day were filled with benison
Though every hour were rich with a great store
On bridges, river trails, on every gentle breeze.
But once, for every soul in mosque, at sea, on sand
And every prof, a second Firkins,
And every error, he would single-ish!
Everything
Doubt everything, doubt that I doubt, and wearily
And fair seems everything.
And everything was red and strange and mad;
It is so strange, Beloved, that everything has blended
Everywhere
The presences pass everywhere
Yet everywhere, in every region, there was nought
But everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
The roses, crushed, lie scattered everywhere;
And everywhere the women flinging
Amidst great cobwebs hanging everywhere
And everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
Fantastic shapes and forms loomed everywhere
Showed everywhere, while flopping creatures died.
Shimmering everywhere.
There were great cobwebs hanging everywhere,
Terror and death seemed stalking everywhere,
Evetide Till evetide falls, and the Muezzin call to prayer
Evil
Evil and good.
What evil source your awful scarlet flood?
And taloned shapes of evil stalk, for one night free,
What shape of evil? What its foul intent?
I scarce could know the evil that I did;
Evince Twice excellent; thus your slight flaws evince
Exacting Is too exacting for man’s magistry,—
Exaltation
123
050.9
006.19
004.45
013.11
013.21
028.2
028.4
030.56
036.37
067.32
091.4
093.10
095.8
109.29
115.3
115.5
131.4
134.2
138.29
138.40
096.62
096.90
106.10
111.9
010.7
013.11
029.12
040.1
049.23
072.1
090.12
092.1
095.4
101.5
104.1
105.5
096.77
003.32
017.2
061.11
091.2
106.11
117.12
050.12
124
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Of inner ecstasy and exaltation
Excellent Twice excellent; thus your slight flaws evince
Except Except to blind you;—
Except the fair, faint dream of beauty slowly
A paragon, except in virtue,
Believed no truth except what pleased her;
“Us, you and me. What matters except us?”
Excess Now I am jaded with my long, complete excess;
Exhume Exhume forgotten platitudes
Existence
I lived whole cycles of existence; I am wise;
Exists
That nothing exists but the vision, the thought supreme.
Exotic Orchids, lilies grow exotic in these drawings,
Experience
Till acids of experience undeceive
She said she lacked experience;
Expound Expound a learned fourth dimension
Exquisite
Jades exquisite, delicately carved ivory,
How much more exquisite to hear me cry
External For things external, but of higher worth,
The artistry external, and I find
Exultant With bright-eyed ecstasy, exultant wrath,
Eye
Enigmatic regions that no eye can know,
I can not close an eye,
Stares with an eye she can not shun.
The leering of a huge and sightless eye.
The sun stared on me like a blood-red eye,
I am the triumph of all-seeing eye,
Eyed
see Bright-Eyed, Sad-Eyed, Somber-Eyed
Eyeless That feebly moved its pulpy, eyeless head.
Eyelids Her eyelids vaguely stir;
She wakens with the dew yet cool upon her eyelids
Eyes
see also Sorceress-Eyes
Her eyes will close at my lips on the feverish brow above;
Thine eyes that for strange raptures yearn,
The soft, red lips? The shadowy eyes?
For him whose sightless eyes
Over his loins his deep eyes rove.
Her eyes with longing, her face with fever burns;
There are strange eyes that beckon, white breasts and bodies crying
Thy purple eyes, Valerian,
Thine eyes were at the avatar
Thine eyes were old when God was born,
Valerian, thine eyes were sick
Thine eyes were stricken when they saw
Thine eyes, Valerian, are full
Thy purple haunted eyes are mad
And once thy purple eyes went blind
068.11
117.12
033.38
051.9
128.25
128.30
139.7
013.25
138.15
013.29
112.16
006.1
121.8
128.38
138.13
096.14
103.6
116.10
117.13
082.13
006.14
054.4
055.4
083.14
085.5
133.53
095.14
058.6
066.1
003.14
004.6
012.48
014.28
018.4
019.5
020.9
030.1
030.5
030.9
030.13
030.21
030.25
030.30
030.41
E
Eyes’
125
Valerian! Thine eyes are filled
030.45
Valerian! Thine eyes are old
030.49
Valerian! Thine eyes shall shut,
030.53
Of thine eyes holdeth me.
032.2
In your eyes, there is rapture
033.18
But the eyes have no vision,
033.33
And then I turned, and looked within your eyes,
034.16
My dreaming eyes kept searching, seeking, staring
036.31
Or the open arms, or the eyes of glass;
038.14
Dead eyes will greet dead eyes, and ravage
039.13
His sunken eyes could only see
046.11
For his mad eyes;
046.20
Her grave, gray eyes a beauty hide
053.2
There are no eyes to see,
053.11
And the little red eyes in the serpent’s head
057.7
In his hand a stone-pick; in his mummied eyes
059.5
Sometimes her gleaming eyes
060.6
Their wild eyes glare.
061.8
While its pale eyes kept watching patiently
073.3
Bloodless, the blind eyes of eternity,
073.7
Stared at my own dead eyes unearthly lit.
073.11
Oh heart, cease beating; eyes, close; sight, be wrong:
073.12
And shining eyes bespoke caresses, slow
075.5
A king who saw but used no eyes for seeing,
076.5
The burning harpy eyes, head of a hag,
079.12
With eyes of golden fury; while a score
081.6
They poured fresh acid on my blinding eyes;
084.2
They gave me back my eyes so I could peer
087.9
The face a group of eyes above a blur
089.12
That force demonic brought its eyes their sheen.
090.8
And burning eyes along each limb. It spun
091.12
The green-flecked amber of your smoky-lidded eyes.
096.38
096.44
The kohl that shades your eyes, your breasts with henna tipped,
Her eyes are blind; her sweet white limbs but know
099.5
They left to me my eyes, so I could stare
103.9
And illumines with mystical light the eyes unseeing.
110.4
Your eyes, Beloved, are filled with the beauty of strange stars glowing 111.5
Green eyes you hide yourself behind; your face
114.2
Encysted from the sight of other eyes;
119.2
And I look on with clearer, colder eyes,
120.2
Nor that thou give my sightless eyes to see,
124.12
Her queer, ensorcelled eyes
127.1
Her eyes of eidotrope,
127.11
Heretical eyes is casually hung on a chair;
129.15
And rub out the granules of sleep from their eyes:
130.10
And rub out the granules of sleep in their eyes,
141.10
Itself from horror at those eyes’ blind sheen.
029.8
F
Fabled
Fabulous
Face
Faced
Faces
It slumbers deep beneath the fabled hills,
Her face is sweeter than those fabled places
Where the fabled roses bloomed.
027.12
041.3
047.31
Who ruled in fabulous, forgotten Troy;
More fabulous than all the gems of fame,
And haunting as some fabulous lost stream,
In a fabulous land, in a fabulous time,
More fabulous than all the gems of fame.
And Machen to read when she thinks of the fabulous chalice.
With beauty of face and of body as the deathlessly beautiful Greek;
Her lips and her face and her breasts, all her body I will cover with
kisses,
Thy lovely face uplifted now,
And in the waters saw my own face drown,
The face that haunts thy memory?
Her eyes with longing, her face with fever burns;
And of his face, there was no vestige seen,
So great, I clawed my face to bleeding strips,
Thy face is aureoled
Her face is sweeter than those fabled places
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent glory
and glow that relume thee,
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
One old familiar face I found
The face was lost and I had guessed
One old familiar face I found.
Her face has watched the dying sun.
All her dreaming, raptured face is white,
But a smile has crossed her quiet face—
She lifts her young faun face to greet the flushing sky, bids
The face that haunts your heart and mind.
It was my own; my own face showed that hue,
And watch, or seem to watch, me for your face
This being’s face is soft, he shall not pass;
The face a group of eyes above a blur
And of its face no vestige could be seen,
There is no picture of her dear dead face,
My face was eaten by a red, huge Thing.
Green eyes you hide yourself behind; your face
see Web-Faced
Witching, haunted, haunting, mysterious faces
008.10
012.23
028.13
057.1
067.23
129.8
003.2
003.13
004.18
011.24
012.47
019.5
029.5
029.10
032.3
041.3
043.3
043.28
049.15
049.18
049.21
055.8
058.3
058.11
066.3
067.47
073.5
077.4
082.2
089.12
090.5
099.10
105.14
114.2
006.15
F
And still to flushed and heated faces burning,
And there are pale, fair faces calling for caresses
To be, I thought to find in nearer faces
With their faces dissolved and deathly heads
Facile
Bismillah wa Allahu Akbar! when with facile
Fade
Their purple vision fade and die,
Mine the love that can fade not or falter,
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
Faded The memory of the elder ecstasy has faded,
And all the glory faded from the skies.
Fling wide the roses, ere the petals all be faded,
Fades
Like a mist that fades in the sodden skies
Pass, with pleasure that fades
But never changes, never fades,
Like a mist that fades into sodden skies
Fading And in the fading vision of my sleep
Faëry
Phantasmal realms of faëry, strange and new,
Faëry’s The little gods sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
They sleep a long sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
The monster gods sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
They sleep a long sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
Fail
A golden throat, a golden song that fail—
I saw I still must fail.
I stumbled onward, knowing I must fail,
Failed Till the engines failed and we lay there gaoled
Failing And on the wind the strange, low notes kept failing
Fails
A tiger-lily opens and fails and closes
Fain
There is a language I would fain employ,
Faint
More ghostly than the faint starlight.
There is a faint, far rapture of birds in the breathless beauty of dawn,
Except the fair, faint dream of beauty slowly
Grown faint, the winds drift slowly
So faint the dream, O Love, and yet so fair.
Fainter Grew fainter in the silence of its grave;
Faintest And its faintest breath
Faintly And faintly comes the echo of a traveler’s song,
Came near me, passed, and faintly died away;
Fair
Have perished in ruinous gardens fair
Slave and queen and dancing-girl, wondrous fair,
Thy one Beloved, fair and sweet,
Beyond the rocks there are fair bodies with long tresses,
And there are pale, fair faces calling for caresses
So fair she is that beauty hath no graces
While maidens lovely, smiling, fair,
Except the fair, faint dream of beauty slowly
And all the laughing nymphs that make earth fair;
Treasure outlasting cities fair but fleeting.
Make you fair for admiring.
127
015.29
020.3
036.47
062.3
096.82
030.54
043.19
043.28
007.47
034.17
097.1
001.13
009.15
053.7
063.13
095.12
113.5
130.3
130.19
141.3
141.19
021.7
036.56
085.13
048.19
015.5
101.14
028.1
010.8
044.1
051.9
109.9
110.16
094.13
002.17
096.92
122.2
004.59
006.18
012.51
020.1
020.3
041.1
049.11
051.9
051.39
051.42
096.36
128
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And fair seems everything.
096.90
And flowers fair as moly
109.13
And fair things yet more fair,
109.23
So faint the dream, O Love, and yet so fair.
110.16
So lovely with its skin so fair; the grace
114.3
With you. and you so beautiful and fair.
114.14
How fair you were, if you were only fair,
116.3
Your imperfections are as fair to me
117.9
And it may be that you will find it fair;
118.6
Of daggers, fair appearances retreat
121.11
So deeply dark and fair
127.6
Have seen the golden poppy spread its petals fair
134.5
Fairer
And I, who long for fairer melodies
028.9
Fairest To the star that is fairest;
033.12
You are the fairest of the lovely whom
116.1
Fairly
“Ely Forchamer, Miss Shere. I’m white and virtuous and fairly goo—” 139.9
Faith
The sum of hope and faith and life, the sum
102.18
From love or faith or trust—fools—who believe
121.6
No hope, no faith, no fear, no trust remaining
124.6
The true believer makes his own faith all along
134.20
Faithful The faithful, with far chaunting.
096.78
Fall
see also Rock-Fall
Have seen the fall of many kings,
030.10
They saw the mighty Atthla fall
030.37
We buried her in the solemn fall
035.1
That tremble and fall in tide on foaming tide,
060.9
Blown petals that fall,
063.6
But she, in decadent fall,
065.23
Then wanders onward while the shadows fall,
069.12
To fall amid colossal precipices.
079.14
And on my flesh their mouths, devouring, fall.
082.14
That swiftly toward me now began to fall,
088.13
092.7
Had hooves, the arms no hands but splaying fall
From somewhere in the distance voices fall and swell,
096.91
Drink! Till you fall in your wine-full sleep!
098.8
The fall of footsteps light and pantherine
122.1
I listen, but I do not hear them fall,
122.13
Concealed with opalescent mist whose fall
127.3
Is as the fall and rise of mist of myrrh.
127.5
I hear them in the spring rise and in fall ways,
131.13
Or twilight’s fall
143.5
Of oak the leaves fall in autumnal haze
147.2
Fallen And DOOM had fallen on the universe.
107.4
Upon his fallen kingdoms, God had died.
107.14
And the fallen sweet clover,
123.9
Falling Falling on the window-pane
136.2
Resting beneath the shadow curtain falling
147.5
Falls
Till darkness falls—it never will—
055.17
She falls,
060.23
F
Falseness
Till evetide falls, and the Muezzin call to prayer
Till softly falls away
Now day dies, and night falls, and that great summer moon
129
096.77
096.81
096.85
What they are told, the falseness never find
121.7
And knowing that my quest at last must falter
036.15
Mine the love that can fade not or falter,
043.19
Fame
More fabulous than all the gems of fame,
012.23
More fabulous than all the gems of fame.
067.23
Familiar One old familiar face I found
049.15
One old familiar face I found.
049.21
Fancy The changing fancy and the careful rows
117.7
Fanes
Where lichens creep on crumbled fanes
010.2
With skirling fires of weird, vast fanes,
034.7
With empty fanes.
047.26
Emerging into light from shadowed fanes,
051.10
The image and the fanes
109.38
Fantastic Ever the orb’s fantastic glare
055.13
Fantastic shapes and forms loomed everywhere
092.1
Far
Desolate, lonely, and far,
001.7
Alone and far,
014.10
Far on the hills, I heard the notes of rapture
015.9
And wander in far lands and seas, alone,
025.3
Far silver bells with Song’s most sweet alloy.
028.8
And surge of falling flame of far dominions,
034.8
We left her far more quiet body lying there:
035.7
I sought it in far lands of timeless travel
036.1
To seek some image far behind some portal
036.19
I peered far down the final future ages,
036.33
So long, so far, so distant have you flown
037.1
There is a faint, far rapture of birds in the breathless beauty of dawn, 044.1
And its glory far was known,
047.14
That I am weary though I’ve gone not far,
050.5
Desolate, lonely, and far
063.7
The sun’s rim slides above the flaming, far horizon,
066.9
I still have far to go, it’s late.
067.52
Death: However far you go, I wait.
067.53
Where far, unhuman beings’ dark embrace
070.13
In that far, future time where I was fleeing
076.1
Though endlessly we traversed far abysses,
079.9
Though they who tortured me were far behind,
085.9
The faithful, with far chaunting.
096.78
Discoverlessly far,
127.16
Who came from near and came from far
140.7
Down the far closure of the valley, sky,
147.6
Farewell Farewell, good friend. You leave us now. And yet,
146.1
Far-Flung
A flame of the stars, Beloved, burns out of the far-flung spaces
111.1
Farther And farther back, when worlds were in their dawning.
036.25
Falter
130
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And farther still when life was yet to come,
Still farther back before the stars were spawning
Still farther where not even stars were flaring
Yet, when toward farther desolate wastes I stole,
Stretched farther than horizons. I could see
However brief or stilled, or borne on farther turn,
There always was farther to go.
Farthest Nothing of farthest or nearest,
Fashion The ever fresh design of your own fashion.
I answer—if they love me in my fashion,
Fashions Thought fashions worlds that earth can never share,
Fast
Locked fast with that hypnotic sun.
For in the talons I was fast immured.
That nightmare sculpture, running fast, was near me....
Fastened
I too was fastened on that tree of death.
Fastness Some arrowed beast crept to its hillside fastness?
Fat
All the flesh on which fat worms have fed;
Whose white fat folds were covered with grime,
Nor ever a hand caressed its fat;
Of the white worm-king and the fat white fold,
And lovers, fat ones, old ones, came
Fate
But we turned too late and we knew our fate
Like me uncertain of their final fate
Fated
In shadow-ruled dominions darkly fated
Fateful Are sick with memories awesome, eerie, fateful,
Fathomless
Within the pool so fathomless and dark.
Faun
She lifts her young faun face to greet the flushing sky, bids
Favored Then blind, the favored ones; while I, more wise
Fear
And of that thing there came to me a fear
Why do the mandrakes fear to die?
She dreams of fear.
And of that thing swept over me a fear
Until I stumbled. Fear no longer lent
No hope, no faith, no fear, no trust remaining
Fearful And fearful regions of a nameless fright,
As fearful as the haunts of the insane.
Whose source could only, be some fearful shape
Me fearful? What the sight that I shall find?
Feast
For Youth, and Spring, and the woodland feast of Pan?
For feast and wine, the grass stained darkly yet;
Features The beauty of thy features,
An eagerness; and pain upon his features
Wildly, wildly, round features mandragoral
Fed
On the nectar of love I have fed,
For the plague germs fed on the sick and the dead
All the flesh on which fat worms have fed;
Had I, although I knew on what it fed,
036.26
036.27
036.29
085.7
093.2
134.14
144.5
123.17
051.28
119.12
116.7
055.16
079.8
092.14
093.14
059.10
054.13
057.4
057.13
057.23
128.15
048.3
087.3
036.51
070.5
011.20
066.3
119.7
029.9
056.12
058.4
090.9
091.6
124.6
025.8
070.3
078.11
083.8
015.34
040.7
032.5
059.6
068.4
043.30
048.5
054.13
075.7
F
Feebly
Feel
That feebly moved its pulpy, eyeless head.
I only sighed to feel them play
I feel the worms that creep, creep, creep,
I feel the worms that leap
From dawn to dusk her white sides feel
And of my presence, I could feel no sign
Only do we who knew you feel the source,
Feeling Devoid of mirth, devoid of feeling;
Feet
At her feet I have laid the tribute of a burning intolerable passion,
Six feet deep I lie;
Six feet deep my corpse lies, drowned
Corruption. Six feet deep
Six feet deep.
Unto my feet a little trickle crept
The rooted feet that walked with measured stride.
Breast tip a vine; the striding legs for feet
Doubting, I stumble blindly to thy feet,
Feet are ended in a fen—
Fell
Rose and fell and rose through all the Lesbian night;
That fell, all Mandrikor to kill.
It fell in parts, and I was part of it.
Me hope. I fell, though flesh itself be rent
Fell
Because she sometimes fell or stumbled;
Felt
When I felt through me spread the germ
Until I felt that tongue or talon stroke
Felt flesh dissolve in motes of silver tints
And then I felt a tongue or talon stroke
Felt deeper silence broken by no sound,
Fen
Feet are ended in a fen—
Fence The cat on the fence, and world conditions,
Fen-Fires
The tarns run red where the fen-fires toss—
The little gods hide where the fen-fires gleam.
And they hide in eery lands where the fen-fires gleam.
The monster gods hid where the fen-fires gleam.
And they hide in eerie lands where the fen-fires gleam.
Fermented
Fermented in a wizard’s tomb.
Fertile Barren or fertile, rich or thin and poor,
Festering My corpse was once a festering sore
Festful Their festful riot in my rotting heap.
Festival And celebrate our festival.
That play for pagan festival.
Fetter Whom spells will fetter sleeping till the true
Fever
Her eyes with longing, her face with fever burns;
The garden is still with a fever that passes all name;
Fevered Thy body fevered with love’s desire,
With thorns of loathing on a fevered brow?
I have awakened in the fevered midnight noon,
131
095.14
054.30
054.35
054.36
060.17
122.3
146.8
128.34
003.21
054.2
054.19
054.32
054.34
078.1
091.10
092.6
124.2
126.15
007.6
010.16
073.14
091.7
128.22
054.26
072.11
076.13
104.11
122.10
126.15
142.4
056.11
130.4
130.20
141.4
141.20
030.20
069.6
054.48
054.41
049.4
067.37
113.8
019.5
101.17
004.7
026.8
101.1
132
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Feverish Her eyes will close at my lips on the feverish brow above;
003.14
Fever-Kisses
Love’s beauty and love’s torment and love’s fever-kisses,
007.21
Feverous Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast brought me
this feverous love to consume me,
043.1
Fevers see Death-Fevers
Few
While there remain but few—how few!—brief dusks
031.7
So few the days, so much that one could know,
050.1
Desired of many but achieved by few.
068.12
Fields
Fields sere.
002.30
And looted fields;
039.9
For fields of asphodel and hyacinth,
051.34
On fields of noon,
109.28
Fiends Back through the desert for those fiends to flay,
086.6
Fierce And we were fierce and passionate in our embraces,
007.11
No more, no more I know the fierce desire of woman,
007.55
Of slow, fierce grief.
039.18
Fight
Air and water creatures fight,
126.10
Figures Enigmatic loveliness of enigmatic figures,
006.13
The flitting figures gather in the pale moonlight
061.3
Allah! the kneeling figures in devotion pray,
096.80
Fill
Them fill the air with measureless strong beat—
079.2
I am all cups that fill,
133.28
Filled
see also Plague-Filled
For ever his heart is filled with yearning,
018.9
Valerian! Thine eyes are filled
030.45
A heady fragrance filled the air
049.9
That filled all worlds, all space; vibrations freeing
076.8
Their enigmatic laughter filled the aisles;
081.12
Your eyes, Beloved, are filled with the beauty of strange stars glowing 111.5
Though every day were filled with benison
115.3
Strange songs filled the air
136.5
Fills
I do not know. There is an ache that fills
027.9
Seaweed fills deserted lanes;
047.23
Final
And beauty passed unto its final perfect beauty,
007.35
Forget, with the long, final forgetting
009.23
I peered far down the final future ages,
036.33
Like me uncertain of their final fate
087.3
I am my own final taker,
133.11
And though all poppy seeds in final chaos scatter,
134.22
As you begin your final travel, know
146.2
Find
And never shall I find release,
004.79
And yet, in all my travels I could only find
013.15
And find that what I thought so great is but
016.3
Some thing I find not though I ever seek.
027.11
And find its cosmic burial
030.39
And when they oped they could not find
030.43
Where shall I find you?
033.40
To be, I thought to find in nearer faces
036.47
F
I will not find it till all things shall cease,
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
I have riven all darkness to find thee.
And find defeat ere I have much begun;
All it would find was a plump drowned rat
For I will help you find—
Traveler: Not soon for I must find a song—
I can not find, nor do I seem to place
Me fearful? What the sight that I shall find?
To reach the haven I would never find.
Caresses, though I find slight joy in amorous
I find no surcease in the unrelieving wine;
I only find more ennui in philosophies,
I find no rest in the passions with which I am shaken,
And find, the one reality is Death.
The artistry external, and I find
And it may be that you will find it lonely,
And it may be that you will find it fair;
And it may be that you will find it only
What they are told, the falseness never find
Finder Never finder,
Finding Finding that life from end to end
Finds
Who finds impersonal and calm the skies;
Fingers see also Willow-Fingers
Trailed countless fingers in the ebon edge
Over his breasts his fingers hover,
By fumbling fingers, and forgotten soon,
Tremendous fingers, growing, strengthening,
Fingers raised; there hangs her mirror—poor mirror—
Finger-Tips
Are these shadows, now, like finger-tips,
Finish Tortures would mark the finish of my quest.
Fire
For wine of fire.
Thy breasts that seek delight in fire,
All men, all things, all hopes, my burning dreams of fire;
Where flame greets flame in quenchless fire.
With breasts of fire, and passionate lips to slake,
The fire is cold; no fuming censers flare;
Of water, fire, earth and air attend you,
Phantasmal fire burns the band of sorcery,
Fire, supernal.
I am fire,
Fire-Flies
Flickering flames and fire-flies
Fires
see also Fen-Fires, Witch-Fires
With monstrous fires aflame.
With skirling fires of weird, vast fanes,
Two loves, two deaths, two flameless fires, ashen,
133
036.58
043.4
043.5
050.6
057.15
067.45
067.56
077.5
083.8
085.12
096.11
096.20
096.61
101.28
102.15
117.13
118.5
118.6
118.7
121.7
133.36
142.7
120.7
011.13
018.3
031.2
074.12
129.3
058.7
086.4
003.8
004.8
013.6
018.12
019.1
040.3
051.40
061.9
066.12
133.14
126.3
012.25
034.7
051.24
134
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And deeper fires, burning, burning, burning,
With monstrous fires aflame.
The windows burning bright with eldritch fires;
Firkins And every prof, a second Firkins,
Firmament
But still assail the deeper firmament.
Firmly So great the gap, and firmly barred the doors,
First
In the soft, first capture.
I was the first to tinge his pen;
And they who merely lived are first to sigh:
At first I deemed it some mad nightmare-dream,
She often made the first down payment,
Who knows when I first began?
Fish
Of bird and fish in nodules like a band
Fishes Fishes swim and monsters creep
Only fishes keep a seeming
Only growths and fishes dwell
Fists
In that bare wall where my fists wildly beat,
Fitful
With fitful gust
That glowed with fitful lights, and each one starred
Five
see also Sixty-Five
Gave way, the willows five with solemn droop
Fixed
And fixed for ever on the shoreless sea.
Set, fixed, immovable my head:
Set, fixed, immovable my bed;
Set, fixed, immovable myself, now wed
Flagon The table is spread and the flagon red
Contains what a flagon always should!
Drink! For the flagon is full and deep!
Flagons The flagons and bottles and jars that cover her dresser
Flame Their flame and their tears;
You flare up in the all-consuming flame,
Where flame greets flame in quenchless fire.
With dazzle of a monstrous flame,
And surge of falling flame of far dominions,
By cryptic tarns aglow with lethal flame,
Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast brought
me this feverous love to consume me,
I have burned all my flame at the altar,
Like a flame, like a splendor supernal,
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
He was possessed with my red flame,
But spectral flame on the puff-pod floss
Through sullen skies empurpled with vast flame.
With refluence of flame
A flame of the stars, Beloved, burns out of the far-flung spaces
To brilliant flame, whose splendors mesmerize,
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
051.52
067.25
086.11
138.29
050.14
050.4
033.20
046.2
051.18
105.12
128.7
133.58
093.8
047.3
047.19
047.37
124.7
002.21
074.6
011.12
014.30
054.8
054.9
054.10
022.5
022.6
098.6
129.9
009.22
017.5
018.12
030.42
034.8
036.50
043.1
043.17
043.21
043.28
046.21
056.7
071.8
109.30
111.1
119.6
130.7
F
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
Flamed And back; and purple suns flamed northerly
Flameful And violet depths with flameful passions gleam.
Flameless
Shall the poppy be flameless and dead?
Two loves, two deaths, two flameless fires, ashen,
Flames For sick flames and the crawling dust,
Flickering flames and fire-flies
Flaming The sun’s rim slides above the flaming, far horizon,
As I remember, there were flaming tongs
Flamingly
For something unknown in the flamingly riotous masses
Flapping With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
Vast wings were flapping in the night. I heard
With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
Vast wings were flapping in the still night air;
Flare
You flare up in the all-consuming flame,
The fire is cold; no fuming censers flare;
Strange witch-lights flare,
Flares
A ruby flares in the glistening sky,
Before the palace a beacon flares,
Flaring Still farther where not even stars were flaring
Flashes Laughing, she flashes down the shifting tides of green,
Flashing With bodies flashing in the sounding seas of foam,
Flaunting
Away, and listless hours voluptuously flaunting
Flaws
Twice excellent; thus your slight flaws evince
Flay
Back through the desert for those fiends to flay,
Flayed That flayed my flesh, and I was bound by spells
Flecked see Green-Flecked
Fled
And summer is fled,
And summer is fled,
In their hidden othertime long fled.
Till senses reeled, and time and reason fled,
And the bitter sleep and the sadness have fled in a strange rebirth.
Flesh? Fled.
For ever fled.
Now here, now there I fled; still on it swept.
That followed through the chamber where I fled.
To flee, but where I crawled, wherever fled,
A thousand and a thousand years have fled;
Flee
And turned to flee that corpse’s hideous head.
Attempts to flee from depths where hope was slain;
Nowhere to flee, however I might strive,
To flee, but where I crawled, wherever fled,
Fleeing In that far, future time where I was fleeing
I am the huntsman of each fleeing kind,
Fleet
Though ye colours pass, though his limbs be fleet,
Joys that pass and youth too fleet,
135
141.7
071.3
127.10
043.32
051.24
046.14
126.3
066.9
080.5
101.23
029.4
079.1
090.4
105.1
017.5
040.3
061.6
125.5
125.14
036.29
060.1
020.7
096.74
117.12
086.6
080.6
002.2
002.32
006.4
007.34
044.4
054.63
054.64
078.8
088.6
090.11
099.7
029.11
070.7
088.11
090.11
076.1
133.3
046.47
100.5
136
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Fleeting And while the fleeting hours away;
For a love that was fleeting as day?
Treasure outlasting cities fair but fleeting.
The trees, the birds, the fleeting springs, the years,
I am the fleeting dew,
Flesh
The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will
betray her.
In my arms I will hold her, passive, but I know her flesh will be
aching
And her flesh, glad.
The mortal flesh that dies?
Tremors across his white flesh pass.
But only and ever his flesh is burning,
Her flesh a torment, her body a rapturous ache
To soothe white flesh that for caresses aches.
Flesh and the grape and a wreath of vine!
And all his flesh to rottenness was slave;
Then flesh and spirit, unceasing springs, uncover—
Oh love consummate in the flesh and spirit,
All the flesh on which fat worms have fed;
Their dripping tongues from my soft flesh that, old
Until my dead flesh stirred. I only lay,
Or in my dead flesh foul to float,
Flesh? Fled.
Of flesh and spirit, and attains the crown
Felt flesh dissolve in motes of silver tints
That flayed my flesh, and I was bound by spells
And on my flesh their mouths, devouring, fall.
Though they are broken too, and their flesh slit.
And of its flesh the rotten remnants gave
Me hope. I fell, though flesh itself be rent
Of your bright lips, all pleasure that your flesh possesses,
Although my flesh with many knives is slit.
The worms with endless, spoiling flesh are glad.
Fleshless And saw it smile with fleshless, gaping lips,
Fleshly The fleshly flowers whispered avidly:
Flesh-White
The gifts of my body I bring to a flesh-white and beautiful palace,
Fleshy One fleshy tentacle, raised me beside
Flew
With wings of beating purple flew to me
Flickering
Flickering flames and fire-flies
Flies
see Fire-Flies
Flight
That I to cosmic realms could take my flight!
Could wing no flight,
Fling
Fling wide the roses, ere the petals all be faded,
Flinging Upon their brows, forgotten girls were flinging
And everywhere the women flinging
Flitting The flitting figures gather in the pale moonlight
004.72
043.8
051.42
102.10
133.29
003.11
003.17
003.24
012.49
018.8
018.11
019.3
020.4
023.2
029.6
051.26
051.47
054.13
054.24
054.28
054.44
054.63
068.10
076.13
080.6
082.14
087.4
090.6
091.7
096.53
103.4
103.14
029.13
082.1
003.5
091.13
071.7
126.3
025.4
034.13
097.1
015.21
049.23
061.3
F
Float
Floats
Flood
Floor
Flopping
Floss
Flow
Flower
Flowered
137
Or in my dead flesh foul to float,
Where banners of his proud name float unfurled,
Sometimes in cool delight she floats on drifting weeds
Floats up, and bathes the burning air still shimmering,
What evil source your awful scarlet flood?
There was a shape, on which a scarlet flood
Stained is the coffin floor
And widening inch by inch along the floor
054.44
069.4
060.12
096.86
017.2
106.3
054.46
078.3
Showed everywhere, while flopping creatures died.
But spectral flame on the puff-pod floss
Where other universes flow.
Sea-tides ebb and flow;
Where the rippling waters ebb and flow between
Aside. The flow turned toward me, and it kept
Before me, one closed portal, and the flow
She has been swallowed in the years’ long flow.
When light shone out of the mystical ebb and flow:
Of the dual flower that alone endures;
O Love, a flower closes
I am awed that flower and forest and leaf be shaken
095.4
056.7
030.40
047.7
060.3
078.5
078.10
099.8
112.2
051.30
109.1
110.7
That flowered not, and all things weep to die,
Flower-Heads
To seek, beneath the flower-heads, a path.
Flowers Of flowers that die,
The flowers of old are overblown,
Dream, with the flowers dreaming,
They passed the land where flowers gnaw
From flowers strown upon the ground
The fleshly flowers whispered avidly:
I saw the hungry flowers toward me crawl
For the soft flowers awaiting the lips of the lover
Of flowers and marvellous jasper and coral grasses
And flowers fair as moly
Flowerwise
Curled inward, flowerwise. I stood before
Flowing The flowing porphyry
Grace, true believers, with burnouses flowing gracile,
Flown Of summer flown.
The years of the past have long since flown,
So long, so far, so distant have you flown
Flows
A glow that develops and flows from the inner being
Fluctuant
Skeins of fluctuant color, lit
Flung
see also Far-Flung
Out of the mystical spaces flung beyond,
And magic garlands flung
Flushed And still to flushed and heated faces burning,
051.16
082.10
001.6
004.56
009.9
030.23
049.10
082.1
082.12
101.19
101.24
109.13
081.3
032.1
096.83
002.24
004.55
037.1
110.3
034.6
034.2
067.29
015.29
138
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Flushing She lifts her young faun face to greet the flushing sky, bids
Flutes And silver flutes
And silver flutes
Foam
With bodies flashing in the sounding seas of foam,
The white-caps and the foam their coronal.
Like foam in a tempest scattered and thinned
I am foam torn free of storm waves cresting,
Foaming That tremble and fall in tide on foaming tide,
Fog
Deserted city streets, and fog, and lantern glow.
Fold
see also Four-Fold
Of the white worm-king and the fat white fold,
Folded Deeply the folded roses
Folds
Whose white fat folds were covered with grime,
The golden poppy folds and each eternal I
Follow Freeing them to follow passion’s sorcery.
With soft, light golden limbs to dance and follow,
I am doom that all dooms follow,
Followed A sibilance that followed as I stole
That followed through the chamber where I fled.
What followed me across the lifeless plain?
And still it followed, still I heard it gain
Follows What words convey how closelier she follows
Who follows an endless stream
The legend saith: for each, nepenthe follows sorrow,
Fool
I am a fool, for only fools would trust
Fools
I am a fool, for only fools would trust
From love or faith or trust—fools—who believe
Foot
So, hesitantly, I put forth my foot
Footfall And cast them for our footfall where
Footprints
Footprints of a man-bat woven
Footsteps
And never footsteps tread the ground.
To perish when my later footsteps came;
No ears to hear her footsteps die away.
Its footsteps shuffling closer on the stone,
And footsteps seem to pass
The fall of footsteps light and pantherine
The footsteps pantherine upon the ground.
For
For wine of fire.
For pleasures and joys that she knows not, for a new and monstrous
delight;
Thine eyes that for strange raptures yearn,
For ever and ever and desolate,
For a little while, our life is bright,
For a little while, there is light,
And the song of Beauty for ever dying
For splendour unknown.
For us the future never will come,
066.3
012.36
067.36
020.7
020.8
063.11
133.23
060.9
131.8
057.23
109.5
057.4
134.16
006.8
051.46
133.22
045.18
088.6
091.1
091.5
041.9
064.3
134.7
121.1
121.1
121.6
082.9
049.13
126.13
010.12
036.52
053.13
090.13
109.11
122.1
122.14
003.8
003.18
004.6
004.23
004.31
004.32
004.61
004.63
004.69
F
Sorrowing and sorrowing for lost days golden,
Prisoned here in time for evermore remembered,
For we would keep the pleasure and the torment burning,
For well we knew the holy night must have an ending,
For one intoxicating night were mine.
All night I dreamed the one long night would last for ever,
For Beauty ever must dissolve and die;
For gall and ash are all the ecstasy.
For thee, the gods a planet would destroy.
For many a thousand leagues around
For all is dead, and all is still,
For none are left the tale to tell.
For thee to reign.
For this I offer thee:
Nothing in all the universe is left for me,
For ever will I call, and search the frozen skies
In vain for peace.
For him whose mystic sleep
For him who sought the mystery,
For him whose sightless eyes
And fixed for ever on the shoreless sea.
For he has passed from stage to stage,
To claim the maid for whose desire he strove?
For Youth, and Spring, and the woodland feast of Pan?
His pagan pipes for semigod and maid;
For ever his heart is filled with yearning,
For the white-limbed god.
For a promised trysting, a god long due, she yearns,
And there are pale, fair faces calling for caresses
To soothe white flesh that for caresses aches.
The glasses clink for a Bacchic drink—
What, ho! For the Bacchic brotherhood!
For the grape’s red juice there is just one use—
For the good of the town, with the spirits—Down!
In search of vengeance for an ancient wrong
For ever mounting past the realm of light,
My mind with longings for some ancient thing,
And I, who long for fairer melodies
For songs as wondrous as this wondrous dream,
Poems for Beauty’s own enraptured ear.
For I was his, that horror of the dead.
For they are blinded with the glut
For nothing suffices
And still for this one dream all else forsaking
Look homeward, angel, for the way is long.
For we will know how love
For song and laughter, now the wind’s regret;
For youth, a ravished poppy’s petals blown:
For feast and wine, the grass stained darkly yet;
139
006.5
006.19
007.13
007.15
007.20
007.39
007.42
007.56
008.12
010.9
010.13
010.24
012.6
012.45
013.26
013.31
013.32
014.22
014.25
014.28
014.30
014.32
015.20
015.34
015.38
018.9
019.4
019.7
020.3
020.4
022.1
022.2
022.7
022.11
024.3
024.9
027.10
028.9
028.11
028.14
029.14
030.55
033.37
036.59
037.14
039.5
040.5
040.6
040.7
140
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
For love, the dell where hired maenads moan.
For song, not she, doth gain.
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
Was it only for darkness to blind me,
For a love that was fleeting as day?
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment ere
worship and love were to perish?
For green corpses he did lust,
For sick flames and the crawling dust,
For his mad eyes;
For a long and mystic sleep
For the plague germs fed on the sick and the dead
And cast them for our footfall where
Is too exacting for man’s magistry,—
Beauty more vital for your hearts to capture,
For all things die, but they die most regretful
For fields of asphodel and hyacinth,
Oh light that never shone for me one ray,
Oh bells that shall not ever ring for me,
For there will come none after,
For I am dead.
For ever dead.
For ever dead.
For ever fled.
For ever spread.
For ever dead.
For ever dead, dead, dead.
And the worm is king for eternity,
For the tale is the grave’s.
For magic black.
And taloned shapes of evil stalk, for one night free,
For you to reign.
That play for pagan festival.
For I will help you find—
Traveler: Not soon for I must find a song—
With mystic earth, thereof for ever choking,
The days for which the heart should be most grateful
For in the midnight hours, when sleep descends,
For what, I did not know, yet tense, on guard
Whose black, scaled body had for head a beak,
A king who saw but used no eyes for seeing,
And watch, or seem to watch, me for your face
What form you have, for always you appear
Make this your home for I will make it yours;
What nameless hunter searching for its meat?
For in the talons I was fast immured.
Before I dropped away, for I was free—
For silence unto silence died away.
040.8
041.16
043.4
043.7
043.8
043.27
046.13
046.14
046.20
047.35
048.5
049.13
050.12
051.13
051.15
051.34
051.57
051.58
052.8
054.7
054.60
054.62
054.64
054.66
054.68
054.69
057.19
057.25
061.4
061.11
067.6
067.37
067.45
067.56
068.5
070.4
070.9
074.3
075.13
076.5
077.4
077.7
077.10
079.3
079.8
079.13
080.14
F
For they were deathless hunters, I the dying.
For my escape I knew what I must pay:
They dragged me back with never pause for rest.
Back through the desert for those fiends to flay,
The chewed remains of something used for bait;
I know that I’ll by them be watched for ever
I must, for it arose, its mass dividing
For I was its, that horror from the dead.
Breast tip a vine; the striding legs for feet
The tolling came like measures for a spell.
Great wealth have I, a kingdom own, with palaces for pleasure,
Make you fair for admiring.
Live riotously, ere thy life for death be traded,
Sing, for too soon, too long, thy mouth shall know no singing.
Drink! For you’ll soon have the earth for a cover!
Drink! For the joy of the winking wine!
Drink! For the red-stained lips of your lover!
Drink! For the night and the fruit of the vine!
Drink! For the pleasure, forget sad thinking!
Drink! For the flagon is full and deep!
Drink! For the sheer great joy of drinking!
She had a lover for her wondrous grace;
Made for love, made for kissing;
For the soft flowers awaiting the lips of the lover
For something unknown in the flamingly riotous masses
For Death the Conqueror at last was king;
Blessed be the dead for they are dead.
Blessed be the living for they will be dead.
Blessed be the unborn for they shall be dead.
For sunlit earth:
For dawn’s rebirth.
These are the things I love you for: the gray
For, and the loveliness you watch so well.
For you, or for one kiss from your soft lips.
For beauty of the mind, where, as on a loom
I love you for the charm earth gave to you,
For things external, but of higher worth,
I love you for the realms of endless view,
I love you for the beauty all can see,
And more for beauty, only known to me.
You care for that warm house of all your own,
Surely this beauty was not meant for keeping
In this sweet earthly house was not for sleeping
The years away intended, but for leaping
Than they, sow seeds for harvests of no reaping.
For I give love like sips of precious wine
For you have taught a thousand things to me,
I am a fool, for only fools would trust
For the winds that have blown,
141
085.14
086.3
086.5
086.6
087.6
087.13
089.8
090.14
092.6
094.8
096.13
096.36
097.3
097.5
098.1
098.2
098.3
098.4
098.5
098.6
098.7
099.13
100.2
101.19
101.23
107.9
108.1
108.2
108.3
109.4
109.8
114.1
114.12
115.14
116.5
116.9
116.10
116.11
116.13
116.14
117.2
119.1
119.4
119.5
119.8
119.13
120.10
121.1
123.2
142
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
For the springs that are gone.
123.4
For the times that are over,
123.7
For the grain that is reaped
123.8
And for thy wine, than earthly wine more sweet,
124.3
And for thy bread, than my bread more sustaining,
124.4
I ask for blankness and the dark, dark earth.
124.14
On the throne a king for its worm-queen pines
125.19
And for the rest, she owed, and owed.
128.8
For she paid half, when they went Dutch,
128.19
And paid for all, on some occasions.
128.20
For you were token.
132.6
The legend saith: for each, the golden poppy blooms
134.1
But once, for every soul in mosque, at sea, on sand
134.2
The legend saith: for each, nepenthe follows sorrow,
134.7
For they are life and love to me,
137.17
For who could ever be a prof.
138.33
For surely none would think of spurning
138.37
Working hard for pieces-of-eight,
142.6
For I am as mad as mad can be.
142.10
And drew gas for the whole of Sauk City!
145.5
Force
Yet twined around me with inhuman force.
074.14
A deep force pulls me toward the window-blind,
083.1
Malefic, purposive, with alien force
088.5
That force demonic brought its eyes their sheen.
090.8
As the unknown force disposes
133.61
Returning humbly our own love whose force,
146.6
Drifting as leaves but urgent with a force
147.11
Forchamer
“Ely Forchamer, Miss Shere. I’m white and virtuous and fairly goo—” 139.9
“Tut-tut, Mr. Forchamer. You’re not. You’re homely.”
139.10
“Nine o’clock Saturday night, Mr. Forchamer.”
139.18
Foredone
Shall even as my lost days be foredone,
031.12
Foredue Are these bright ways foredue to that one whom
118.11
Fore-Glimpse
Fore-glimpse of after-hell.
045.8
Foreign A wind from worlds beyond blows out of foreign places
111.3
Forest Above the bacchanal in the forest dwelling
015.15
What forms were those that through the forest sleeping
015.17
By forest track
061.2
I am awed that flower and forest and leaf be shaken
110.7
Foretell The roads to distant marts; and Allah’s blessed foretell
096.94
Forever And by the dark caress was claimed forever,
011.23
Upon an endless path forever going
036.61
Forevermore
But all is mute forevermore.
010.4
Forevermore.
054.45
Forevermore.
054.47
Forevermore.
054.52
F
143
Forevermore.
Let us forget the passing of years,
Let us forget vain sorrow and tears
Forget, with the blown poppies forgetting
Forget, with the long, final forgetting
And forget worlds olden?
Drink! For the pleasure, forget sad thinking!
That we who linger here will not forget, can not forget
054.56
004.52
004.53
009.21
009.23
033.30
098.5
146.3
Dream of forgetful day,
Forgetting
Forget, with the blown poppies forgetting
Forget, with the long, final forgetting
Forgot Hast thou forgot
Have you forgot?—
If I thus forgot to meet
Forgotten
see also Soon-to-be-Forgotten
As the forgotten girls who placed them there.
The past is forgotten, its lips are dumb,
Beckoning to rites forgotten long ago:
Who ruled in fabulous, forgotten Troy;
Upon their brows, forgotten girls were flinging
A phantom of the dead, forgotten Greek.
By fumbling fingers, and forgotten soon,
With scrutiny of systems long forgotten,
By forgotten poets told.
From the dust of forgotten worlds to whole new systems leaping
Exhume forgotten platitudes
Forlorn Of the woods to a spot forlorn,
Form
see also Dream-Form
A form that clings to a satyr sings,
Did I a lovely deathless form enfold?
And the form that it covers is thine.
No other form is near,
Cover the form whose hand still gropes.
Where the trees form a little dark room:
Of some gray form that made a rattling sound.
What form you have, for always you appear
A glowing form, it drifted on a course
A monstrous form surged on and searched with cry
Of human form or beast, weird sorcery
Of some white form that made a rattling sound;
All things their form reveal,
Formless With formless terrors running through my mind?
Forms see also Witch-Forms
What forms were those that through the forest sleeping
And body to body, drunken forms were swaying
A warning cry—the shadowy forms are shifting:
109.6
Forget
Forgetful
009.21
009.23
012.46
067.46
100.7
004.60
004.68
006.16
008.10
015.21
027.14
031.2
036.5
047.15
112.9
138.15
065.6
023.5
027.8
043.36
058.10
062.10
065.10
072.6
077.7
088.4
089.6
093.7
104.6
109.18
083.4
015.17
015.39
015.45
144
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Demonic revel holds dark, writhing forms in thrall,
Fantastic shapes and forms loomed everywhere
And weird encrusted forms on every side.
Forsake What though one kingdom each of you forsake,
Forsaken Forsaken often, she forsook
Forsaking
And still for this one dream all else forsaking
Forsook Forsaken often, she forsook
Forth
We turned and set forth once more,
So, hesitantly, I put forth my foot
Come forth my slaves and eunuchs and the dancing girls:
Forty
To forty thousand species, Woman
Forward And every forward step a weary strain.
Fought I who had fought so hard to reach my goal?
Foul
Foul messenger of war and holocaust,
Or in my dead flesh foul to float,
Through its foul dead realm were it ever to squirm,
What shape of evil? What its foul intent?
Foul nightmare creatures peering through the air:
Out of the west, foul breezes sweep,
Found All pleasures I have ever found have been as gall.
My destiny, and found what men can never guess;
I found or made new pleasures that I shall not tell;
But found no other than the great refrain:
Still seeking that which I had never found,
I have not found it sleeping or awaking.
One old familiar face I found
One old familiar face I found.
They found him deep within an ancient cave
Stray hands and heads that crawled; in nests I found
I found my leg become a hellish root,
I found no door, and when all hope lay dead
And found, the one reality is Death.
We have found that only the dream is unchanging, O Love, and
eternal,
The lands no traveller ever found on earth;
Fountains
I have drunk at the fountains
And giant fountains pouring down the wide skylanes.
The little gods sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
They sleep a long sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
The monster gods sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
They sleep a long sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
Four-Dimension
And four-dimension vaults revolve and open wide;
Four-Dimensioned
When four-dimensioned vaults revolve and open wide;
Four-Fold
The elements their four-fold essence send you,
061.7
092.1
095.8
051.31
128.23
036.59
128.23
048.2
082.9
096.22
140.9
091.4
085.2
017.18
054.44
057.14
091.2
104.4
125.1
013.5
013.10
013.14
014.19
036.42
036.57
049.15
049.21
059.1
072.3
082.11
088.7
102.13
112.15
116.12
033.3
034.9
130.3
130.19
141.3
141.19
130.14
141.14
051.41
F
Fourth
Fourth was I in the coloured host,
Expound a learned fourth dimension
Fragrance
A heady fragrance filled the air
And champak fragrance makes the drowsy senses swoon,
Fragrant Burn incense till the fragrant air is odorous,
Frail
With beauty of frail and waving fronds go wide,
Frantic A frantic whisper with the wind is blended
They added madness to my frantic cries
Free
Of them, bound, yet magnificently free;
And taloned shapes of evil stalk, for one night free,
Before I dropped away, for I was free—
The ocean beds were open now, and free,
I am foam torn free of storm waves cresting,
Freeing Freeing them to follow passion’s sorcery.
That filled all worlds, all space; vibrations freeing
Frenzy That beat the air to frenzy, dirges, knells.
Fresh
The ever fresh design of your own fashion.
Of this fresh pool of thin and brilliant blue.
They poured fresh acid on my blinding eyes;
Freshening
see Ever-Freshening
Fresher With the fresher tracks of cloven
Fretful But they whose life was barren are most fretful,
Friend Means ditched by your girl and left by your friend,
Farewell, good friend. You leave us now. And yet,
Friends see Sea-Friends
Fright And fearful regions of a nameless fright,
From
From a nightingale’s golden throat,
From the Arctic gloom.
We will pass from rapture to rapture and plumb the most utter
abysses
And death, the great, from whom he held his vow
For he has passed from stage to stage,
From Pan’s wild pipes, the god’s own song of yearning
Of half-gods outcast from the world of man?
From the sea, a wind; the revelry has ended;
A last, wild note from the distant hills comes drifting—
That drifts from the vacant meadows of the sea.
A passionate burst of song from a golden throat,
A girdle that slips from a maiden’s hips—
From all the hate of all those bitter scars.
That rose from out the gulfs of utter night,
What will it matter a thousand years from now
Itself from horror at those eyes’ blind sheen.
From the way I have taken
From the sweep of vast spaces
Or from transitory
Summoned from realms unknown to earthly dreamers
145
046.26
138.13
049.9
096.88
096.25
060.7
015.43
084.3
051.60
061.11
079.13
095.2
133.23
006.8
076.8
080.2
051.28
078.14
084.2
126.14
051.17
142.8
146.1
025.8
001.4
002.19
003.15
014.6
014.32
015.31
015.36
015.41
015.47
020.12
021.1
023.3
024.8
024.11
026.5
029.8
033.11
033.13
033.31
034.4
146
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And all the glory faded from the skies.
Then only, from those vacant spaces driven,
From utmost regions of strange realms returning,
We will pour ashes from the phials
And fugues parade from hearts that grieve?
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent glory
and glow that relume thee,
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
From a trunk, that withered, blighted bole,
Witch-forms tormented, from dark demon danger,
Risen a spectre from the dead
From each of us he took his joy,
Fronds from out its temples rise;
From the stricken hosts of those plague-filled coasts
The twilight brought no ease from the hot
From heat and plague as they died,
The shadows slipped from our side.
From flowers strown upon the ground
The garlands from their brows unbound
It knew me not from all the rest,
Emerging into light from shadowed fanes,
Their dripping tongues from my soft flesh that, old
Of the realm that rose from stale sea-waves,
From dawn to dusk her white sides feel
That streams from her glowing body bare
From a meadowlark’s passionate throat,
From having watched the dead rose petals strew
Till thus, from incantation and invoking,
From towers topless as the realms of sleep
Attempts to flee from depths where hope was slain;
Part human creatures creeping from their lair.
I watched them till, from out the greater dark,
But something from the dark side of the moon
All substances and creatures from the bond
From metal monsters humming voiceless songs.
I begged the gods to save me from such pain.
A sentient entity from hell, alive.
I saw from that dim cave where I was hiding
From which a tongue curled inward to my lair,
For I was its, that horror from the dead.
Rose-pink, and outward thrusting from each bare
Alone protruded from the desert sand,
From sunken cities rose the solemn knell.
And from those giant caverns’ lifted gloom
I turn away from diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls,
Me from my ennui with your body naked wholly,
And sinuous, then I will raise you from the lowly
Than you. I have drained all delights from long impresses
034.17
036.39
036.43
039.10
042.8
043.3
043.28
045.2
045.7
046.19
046.37
047.22
048.1
048.13
048.22
048.24
049.10
049.12
049.20
051.10
054.24
057.22
060.17
060.20
063.4
068.3
068.8
069.3
070.7
072.4
074.9
075.12
076.9
080.4
080.10
088.14
089.1
089.13
090.14
092.5
093.4
094.4
094.7
096.19
096.40
096.41
096.52
F
From somewhere in the distance voices fall and swell,
Why do I shrink from the soft red mouths of roses
Unmeaning march from nothingness to night,
And from a dusky corner came the stare
Were they strange creatures from Outside that soon
But from the sundered room I never crept—
That seemed to pour from where the horror stood;
The air from some vast stellar carnage bled
From any moon.
A glow that develops and flows from the inner being
A wind from worlds beyond blows out of foreign places
A wind from the spheres that through your shadowy hair is blowing
Moves from worlds without to enchanted worlds within.
From the dust of forgotten worlds to whole new systems leaping
Differed so, each from each, and this one more
For you, or for one kiss from your soft lips.
Encysted from the sight of other eyes;
From love or faith or trust—fools—who believe
Their ravage, if they had not come from you.
From the fury of living.
Nor lift a burden from my crumpled shoulders;
From the palace, a marble monster whines,
Rise from half-decaying logs
She rules a realm decayed from elder days,
And rub out the granules of sleep from their eyes:
The little gods will walk from hill and from highlands,
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
From the riddle of the rib
As from birth
From the cry
From the one reciting there.
Who came from near and came from far
The monster gods will walk then from hills and from highlands,
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
Finding that life from end to end
Fronds Fronds from out its temples rise;
With beauty of frail and waving fronds go wide,
It rolled, and spun, and stopped in front of me,
Front
In front or behind,
Fronted I could not turn though fronted by the rack.
Frozen For ever will I call, and search the frozen skies
Fruit
All night I sought the poisonous fruit of her;
Wherein no seed nor any fruit are left,
Drink! For the night and the fruit of the vine!
Fruitless
Upon a fruitless quest.
I bow beneath this fruitless unattaining,
147
096.91
101.11
102.2
104.5
105.7
105.13
106.6
106.12
109.32
110.3
111.3
111.7
111.8
112.9
115.7
115.14
119.2
121.6
121.14
123.12
124.13
125.18
126.7
127.17
130.10
130.13
130.15
130.16
133.39
133.40
133.43
136.6
140.7
141.13
141.15
141.16
142.7
047.22
060.7
073.2
144.3
083.10
013.31
007.2
031.6
098.4
036.32
124.1
148
Fugitive
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
We have been the dreamed-of, the dreamer, the fugitive dream:
112.14
Fugues And fugues parade from hearts that grieve?
042.8
Fulfilled
And my heart is fulfilled of its dream as I walk my enchanted way.
044.8
Full
see also Wine-Full
Thine eyes, Valerian, are full
030.25
Nor always full the charming sleeve—
042.17
Till jasmine, oleander, or full roses’ bloom
096.26
Drink! For the flagon is full and deep!
098.6
And a bitter full heart,
123.13
Fuller
A fuller dream replacing that that wanes.
051.14
Than that just passed held sweeter, fuller dowers;
115.8
Fully
Now I fully awaken
033.9
Fulness But fulness leaves no unassuaged desires,
051.19
To fulness in the drowsy summer noons,
051.51
Fumbling
By fumbling fingers, and forgotten soon,
031.2
Fuming The fire is cold; no fuming censers flare;
040.3
Fungi
Have known the fungi of the moon,
030.2
Fur
To limbs alive with wormlike, writhing fur,
089.9
Furnace In a furnace of ecstasy whirled,
043.22
Further I further search with neither hope nor peace
036.60
Fury
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul such a
madness and fury will sweep?
043.16
My Lust, and Fury, and crimson shame,
046.22
With eyes of golden fury; while a score
081.6
From the fury of living.
123.12
Fused
I saw it then, two trunks that fused as one,
091.9
Futile
Or as the futile, giant music made
031.3
And to no futile dream of death aspires,
051.20
Futile, futility as well; that all things wane,
096.68
Futility Futile, futility as well; that all things wane,
096.68
Future For us the future never will come,
004.69
I peered far down the final future ages,
036.33
In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of the
043.15
future, the passions to waken,
All past and future. Traveler, stay!
067.50
In that far, future time where I was fleeing
076.1
I’ll talk of future times and alien shores.
077.12
All present, past, and future worlds; and day, and night;
096.71
The soon-to-be-forgotten future days.
102.8
We have seen in the future time, and space, and the universe
creeping
112.11
Nothing of future or present,
123.18
G
Gain
For song, not she, doth gain.
And still it followed, still I heard it gain
All lacking, and all gain.
Gains
Perfection gains by contrast and may be
Galaxies And outer, oldest galaxies that wane;
Gall
The gall that intermingled with the myrrh.
For gall and ash are all the ecstasy.
All pleasures I have ever found have been as gall.
Game She loved to play a dangerous game
Games Revel and welcome, games and play
Gaoled Till the engines failed and we lay there gaoled
Gap
So great the gap, and firmly barred the doors,
Gaping And saw it smile with fleshless, gaping lips,
Garden I am the night and the garden and all things swoon
The garden is still with a fever that passes all name;
Gardenia
A single gardenia lies with delicate grace in
Gardens Have perished in ruinous gardens fair
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
In Paphian gardens lost and ruinous.
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
Garland The wreath, the garland, and the rose,
Garlands And garlands overflung
Garlands of rose and violet, and wreaths of vine;
The garlands from their brows unbound
And magic garlands flung
Garments
Her garments only know what curves and hollows
Gas
And drew gas for the whole of Sauk City!
Gates
The ebony gates, one savage curse I cried,
Gather The flitting figures gather in the pale moonlight
Gaunt Whose gaunt trunks guarded with malevolence
Would maggots in my starved, gaunt body loll
Gave
By the girls they gave their love.
Gave way, the willows five with solemn droop
We left her only to the waiting earth that gave
I gave him the pall of Death’s last blight,
They gave me back my eyes so I could peer
And of its flesh the rotten remnants gave
I love you for the charm earth gave to you,
Gaze
Yet all who gaze upon him walk beside him.
And past the winding river’s end you gaze,
Gazed They gazed on stars that now are dust,
041.16
091.5
096.72
117.11
036.6
007.4
007.56
013.5
128.13
049.5
048.19
050.4
029.13
101.3
101.17
129.13
004.59
012.30
026.14
067.30
049.24
012.29
015.22
049.12
067.29
041.11
145.5
086.13
061.3
011.8
085.3
004.28
011.12
035.11
046.6
087.9
090.6
116.9
059.16
147.4
030.33
150
Ge
Geese
Gems
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And learn the use of “ge” and “isdem.”
Or else they’re much more dumb than geese are.
I offer thee phantasmal gems
More fabulous than all the gems of fame,
I offer you phantasmal gems
More fabulous than all the gems of fame.
And lissome houris, gems and gold in many a measure,
Ah, God! That I had genius, mad and great,
Their gentle drapes enfold.
On bridges, river trails, on every gentle breeze.
When I felt through me spread the germ
For the plague germs fed on the sick and the dead
138.22
137.24
012.22
012.23
067.22
067.23
096.16
025.13
041.12
131.4
054.26
048.5
Her gestures supplemented well
The coeds only get along
My royal robes like a purple ghost
Like the ghost of an echoing note
Ghostly More ghostly than the faint starlight.
While ghostly presences writhed wan and weary
And mistily shone the ghostly
With ghostly winds that whisper to them, Awaken.
Ghosts Peopled with ghosts of their invention,
Giant
Or as the futile, giant music made
And giant fountains pouring down the wide skylanes.
A giant shape part human, part despair,
And from those giant caverns’ lifted gloom
Gibbous I saw great shadows across a gibbous moon;
Gift
Life is the gift to a slave.
Gifts
The gifts of my body I bring to a flesh-white and beautiful palace,
Gifts that repaid our journey’s woes,
Gigantic Uprose gigantic in the endless gloom,
Gigantically
There was a sound, gigantically loud,
Gilded Or gilded idols undeserving trust,
Girdle A girdle that slips from a maiden’s hips—
The midst of her things: a girdle, as though to chasten
Girl
see also Dancing-Girl
Never again will a dead girl thrill
Lovely as any girl the world has seen,
The loveliest girl to give him strange delight;
A drunken girl where the revellers whirl—
I could never love a girl with such a rhyme!
Means ditched by your girl and left by your friend,
Girls
By the girls they gave their love.
As the forgotten girls who placed them there.
The love of girls more strange on stranger stars I won;
Upon their brows, forgotten girls were flinging
With nymphs and girls in amorous Bacchic moods:
Come forth my slaves and eunuchs and the dancing girls:
128.35
138.6
046.27
063.3
010.8
045.11
045.13
110.8
138.14
031.3
034.9
089.11
094.7
105.2
004.38
003.5
049.26
011.4
Genius
Gentle
Germ
Germs
Gestures
Get
Ghost
106.5
051.4
023.3
129.14
004.66
008.11
015.12
023.1
135.12
142.8
004.28
004.60
013.18
015.21
015.28
096.22
G
Give
Let us give over ourselves to delight,
The loveliest girl to give him strange delight;
Surely shall Aphrodite give you greeting,
The subtle pleasure that you give to me,
For I give love like sips of precious wine
Nor that thou give my sightless eyes to see,
Given Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast brought
me this feverous love to consume me,
Was the tribute then given in vain?
Though they, with cruel joy, had given me
Gives
To this he gives his only adoration,
And drowsyhead gives way to dreams more slumberous,
Glad
And her flesh, glad.
That made Serise’s red dwarfs glad.
She hears the birds’ glad rapture and singing glee;
The worms with endless, spoiling flesh are glad.
How glad I was that I at last awoke!
Glade In the glade.
Through the still, sleeping glade
Glades You stain vermilion vipers in dank glades.
Gladness There came a sound: Was it a song of gladness
Glare
No glare
Ever the orb’s fantastic glare
Their wild eyes glare.
And in the sky, there hung a baleful glare.
Glares All night the blood-red ruby glares,
Glass
Or the open arms, or the eyes of glass;
Those glittering swords that shone like splintered glass,
Glasses The glasses clink for a Bacchic drink—
To the host! Clink! Clink! Let the glasses chink!
Gleam No gleam illumes the hoofprints on the lawn.
And violet depths with flameful passions gleam.
The little gods hide where the fen-fires gleam.
And they hide in eery lands where the fen-fires gleam.
The monster gods hid where the fen-fires gleam.
And they hide in eerie lands where the fen-fires gleam.
Gleaming
Watch upon the ruins gleaming
Sometimes her gleaming eyes
By the luscious curtains gleaming.
Gleams On which the cool green rain gleams.
Glee
She hears the birds’ glad rapture and singing glee;
Made mutterings that sounded like low glee.
Glide
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
Gliding Across the rubble, creeping, crawling, gliding,
Glimmer That glimmer beneath her sunless, wind-departed skies.
Glimmering
The grasses with glimmering dew are jewelled in opal and amethyst,
151
004.51
015.12
051.36
114.10
119.13
124.12
043.1
043.18
084.12
068.13
096.28
003.24
030.32
066.14
103.14
104.14
015.40
065.5
017.16
015.33
053.9
055.13
061.8
105.4
125.13
038.14
082.6
022.1
022.9
040.4
127.10
130.4
130.20
141.4
141.20
047.20
060.6
136.4
136.10
066.14
082.4
130.16
141.16
089.5
060.5
044.6
152
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Glimpse see Fore-Glimpse
Glistening
I stroked the glistening webwork on its head.
075.2
A ruby flares in the glistening sky,
125.5
Glittering
Those glittering swords that shone like splintered glass,
082.6
Gloat
Worms now have ceased to gloat,
054.43
Gloom From the Arctic gloom.
002.19
And underneath the shroud of gloom
010.14
Uprose gigantic in the endless gloom,
011.4
Where it lived and ruled in the endless gloom,
057.12
But when I passed and left them in their gloom,
081.13
And from those giant caverns’ lifted gloom
094.7
I hear them over thunder, and at midnight gloom;
131.10
Gloomy In the depths of gloomy murk:
047.38
Glory
She will strip herself naked, in splendid and terrible glory array her, 003.9
As Sappho of Lesbos was loved in the glory of Greece that is gone; 003.34
Has man known the terrible glory of woman as I;
003.38
A chant to loveliness and strange, unfathomed glory,
007.31
The glory of
012.39
The older glory of the days that were
026.12
Of a glory I have drunken,
033.21
Or be bathed in new glory,
033.29
And all the glory faded from the skies.
034.17
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent glory
and glow that relume thee,
043.3
And its glory far was known,
047.14
The glory of
067.39
And I am sick alike of passion and of glory,
096.4
A nameless and sorcerous glory has made me weak:
101.22
Glow
Thy cheeks that glow,
004.17
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent glory
and glow that relume thee,
043.3
But inbetween; whose phosphorescent glow,
075.4
078.12
With blood that had so curious a glow;
A glow that develops and flows from the inner being
110.3
Is it the glow so magically bringing
110.11
And oblivion saw strange worlds begin to glow.
112.4
Deserted city streets, and fog, and lantern glow.
131.8
Enriching us, of your own everlasting glow.
146.9
Glowed That glowed with fitful lights, and each one starred
074.6
Glowing That streams from her glowing body bare
060.20
And glowing brightlier, awakening seem the skies, on
066.11
A glowing form, it drifted on a course
088.4
The naked torso of a goddess glowing
092.4
And every dream-form glowing
109.29
Your eyes, Beloved, are filled with the beauty of strange stars glowing 111.5
Glows The golden poppy glows in beauty with the light
134.11
Glut
Weary of pomp and power, gorged with glut,
016.1
G
For they are blinded with the glut
Gnarled There where the gnarled limbs twisted
Away; the specters by the gnarled trunk muttered
Here on the hillside by the great gnarled boughs
Gnaw
They passed the land where flowers gnaw
Go
And thou shalt go;
All to death must go.
After a while shalt go.
Go! I can not bear thee, Go!
Phosphorescent creatures go
So dark whichever pathway one may go,
With beauty of frail and waving fronds go wide,
She will go in the cold moonlight
To her tryst she will go in the night,
Offends my nostrils. Go!
I can not bear you. Go!
Traveler: Not now, not yet. I go my way,
I still have far to go, it’s late.
Death: However far you go, I wait.
Some warning voice calls out: Go back—go back!
Into the moonlight, Cyrenaya, I would go
To keep me company lest I go mad:
Why, there each young M.A. would go to,
And asked to go to Hades.
There always was farther to go.
How greatly you have guided us. We go
Goal
I sought my spirit’s goal.
Unknown what goal, if any goal, lies yonder
What goal, what new companion did I seek?
I who had fought so hard to reach my goal?
Building on to what goal later,
Goblets The sight of goblets cool and rounded,
God
see also Half-God
For the white-limbed god.
For a promised trysting, a god long due, she yearns,
The rose, the grape, and a god are mine!
Ah, God, that I could draw instead of write,
Ah, God! That I had genius, mad and great,
Thine eyes were old when God was born,
The radiant god ascends with warmth eternal,
Wherein sweet terms, as Love, and Hope, and God,
Upon his fallen kingdoms, God had died.
To play God,
Goddess Was there a goddess in the days of old,
The naked torso of a goddess glowing
Goddess or devil or only human,
Gods
see also Half-Gods, Lizard-Gods
As gods might worship Beauty marvellous.
For thee, the gods a planet would destroy.
153
030.55
045.1
045.19
147.1
030.23
004.15
004.20
004.42
012.10
047.27
050.3
060.7
065.1
065.3
067.9
067.10
067.51
067.52
067.53
083.9
096.97
103.12
138.36
140.8
144.5
146.4
036.24
037.11
072.9
085.2
133.62
128.2
019.4
019.7
023.6
025.1
025.13
030.9
066.10
102.3
107.14
133.17
027.1
092.4
140.11
008.4
008.12
154
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Where ancient gods assuaged their lust consuming
Inflicted by the gods in elder wars.
Is such as gods impart
Of the gods, I inherit
Of Hymen and the gods that watch your way.
I begged the gods to save me from such pain.
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The little gods dream an apocalyptic dream;
The little gods sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
The little gods hide where the fen-fires gleam.
The little gods then will tremble and waken
The little gods will answer their elders and rise.
The little gods will walk from hill and from highlands,
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The little gods dream their apocalyptic dream;
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The monster gods dream an apocalyptic dream;
The monster gods sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
The monster gods hid where the fen-fires gleam.
The elder gods have promised a day of returning
And ashes consume what the elder gods condemn.
The monster gods then will tremble and waken
The monster gods will answer the Ancient Ones and rise.
The monster gods will walk then from hills and from highlands,
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The monster gods dream an apocalyptic dream,
God’s
From Pan’s wild pipes, the god’s own song of yearning
Goes
To worship where she goes.
Going Upon an endless path forever going
“Well, I guess I’ll be going. I’ll be seeing you.”
Gold
Are black and gold and red,
And bound me with long coils of dusky gold?
On curious corpses, gold and green.
By softer gold than gold.
Or gold that never yet no man befriended,
Are black and gold and red.
And lissome houris, gems and gold in many a measure,
Your hair’s soft brown of gold; your hands that trace
In the marble palace, gold dwarfs cry,
Golden From a nightingale’s golden throat,
Sorrowing and sorrowing for lost days golden,
Of golden voices that will never speak;
A passionate burst of song from a golden throat,
A golden throat, a golden song that fail—
An unknown golden tongue where every word
With soft, light golden limbs to dance and follow,
She waits the coming of the golden guest;
Of golden voices that again will speak;
With eyes of golden fury; while a score
015.27
024.4
032.7
033.4
051.63
080.10
130.1
130.2
130.3
130.4
130.9
130.12
130.13
130.17
130.18
141.1
141.2
141.3
141.4
141.5
141.8
141.9
141.12
141.13
141.17
141.18
015.31
041.8
036.61
139.15
012.13
027.4
030.24
032.4
051.3
067.13
096.16
114.6
125.6
001.4
006.5
012.34
021.1
021.7
028.2
051.46
066.6
067.34
081.6
G
Gone
Gongs
Goo
Good
Goodby
Goodbye
Gorged
Gossip
Grace
Graces
Gracile
Grain
155
Enough, while drowsy minutes lengthen to hours golden,
096.58
The legend saith: for each, the golden poppy blooms
134.1
Have seen the golden poppy spread its petals fair
134.5
Past golden poppy’s lure,
134.9
The golden poppy glows in beauty with the light
134.11
The golden petals burn,
134.15
The golden poppy folds and each eternal I
134.16
The golden poppy once again will grow to bloom
134.23
Oh, spring is gone
002.1
Oh, spring is gone
002.31
As Sappho of Lesbos was loved in the glory of Greece that is gone; 003.34
Lily and poppy and rose are gone,
004.57
The years and love are gone, and thou art gone, beloved,
007.53
Whose dream of old is gone
014.13
Pan is gone.
015.48
Each drunken reveller has long since gone;
040.2
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent glory
and glow that relume thee,
043.3
That I am weary though I’ve gone not far,
050.5
These, these are gone, nothing of them remains
051.8
But now that time is gone of yore
054.51
Night be gone.
066.4
The Beloved is gone; I know not the way she has taken;
101.26
For the springs that are gone.
123.4
As I remember, there were clanging gongs
080.1
“Ely Forchamer, Miss Shere. I’m white and virtuous and fairly goo—” 139.9
Evil and good.
003.32
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
022.4
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
022.8
For the good of the town, with the spirits—Down!
022.11
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
022.12
I’m quite as good as ears to asses;
137.8
Farewell, good friend. You leave us now. And yet,
146.1
067.54
Traveler: Goodby, but if we meet again—
I am telling you goodbye, dear,
135.1
Weary of pomp and power, gorged with glut,
016.1
They gorged on wonders vanished, dead.
030.34
Yet saw no cause why gossip seized her.
128.32
She walks with stately grace.
053.1
Grace, true believers, with burnouses flowing gracile,
096.83
She had a lover for her wondrous grace;
099.13
So lovely with its skin so fair; the grace
114.3
Yield grace to only one, deny the rest?
119.11
A single gardenia lies with delicate grace in
129.13
Ennobled by your grace, your love—beside you,
146.5
In whom all Beauty’s graces meet—
012.52
So fair she is that beauty hath no graces
041.1
Grace, true believers, with burnouses flowing gracile,
096.83
For the grain that is reaped
123.8
156
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Granules And rub out the granules of sleep from their eyes:
And rub out the granules of sleep in their eyes,
Grape Flesh and the grape and a wreath of vine!
The rose, the grape, and a god are mine!
Grape’s For the grape’s red juice there is just one use—
Grass
Sleeping beneath the grass;
Dream, with the brown grass withering
Trembling, he moans on the trodden grass;
For feast and wine, the grass stained darkly yet;
Over the dreaming grass;
And all the little jeweled blades of grass
No moving thing, no blade of grass. One tree
Over the jeweled grass,
I hear them in the grass when I am walking
Over all the tall wet grass.
Grass-Covered
On the old and grass-covered mound
Grasses see also Willow-Grasses
The grasses with glimmering dew are jewelled in opal and amethyst,
With whispering steps through the wildwood grasses,
Of flowers and marvellous jasper and coral grasses
Grateful The days for which the heart should be most grateful
Gratis I offer to my students gratis,
Grave see also Sea-Grave
Never will Beauty escape the grave,
Strange, grave women dream of some strange pleasure
With all the dreadful cerements of the grave,
We left no mark to show her grave,
Her grave, gray eyes a beauty hide
And she alone has beauty, grave and gray.
In my grave beneath my mound.
That presses on my grave and me, rolled
The prehistoric huntsman in his grave,
With all the dreadful cerements of the grave
Grew fainter in the silence of its grave;
Graven Graven deep the riddle of their deep despair.
Graves see also Sea-Graves
For the tale is the grave’s.
Gray
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft luminous
mist,
Her grave, gray eyes a beauty hide
A gray dusk mists the air
And she alone has beauty, grave and gray.
And wriggle through my gray
Of some gray form that made a rattling sound.
Withdraw till dawn comes gray.
These are the things I love you for: the gray
Great
My thrones, majestical, imperial, and great,
And death, the great, from whom he held his vow
130.10
141.10
023.2
023.6
022.7
004.44
009.11
018.6
040.7
065.2
082.3
093.3
109.10
131.1
136.12
065.15
044.6
063.2
101.24
070.4
137.16
004.36
006.3
029.2
035.9
053.2
053.18
054.18
054.22
059.3
090.2
094.13
006.20
057.25
044.5
053.2
053.6
053.18
054.31
072.6
096.84
114.1
012.15
014.6
G
But found no other than the great refrain:
And still it seemed as if great Pan were calling
And find that what I thought so great is but
Beyond the heavens’ great celestial throng,
Ah, God! That I had genius, mad and great,
So great, I clawed my face to bleeding strips,
Great joy he had.
All his great love will end in me,
So great the gap, and firmly barred the doors,
Trapped in a crevice by great settling boulders.
My thrones majestical, imperial, and great
Amidst great cobwebs hanging everywhere
As all the years of Hercules’ great labors,
I came upon a curious great throne
The dawn, when those great wings had made retreat;
I looked across the great plain warily.
So great I turned and clawed my hands to bone
Then thousand ships and more; shapes great and wee
Great wealth have I, a kingdom own, with palaces for pleasure,
Now day dies, and night falls, and that great summer moon
Drink! For the sheer great joy of drinking!
There were great cobwebs hanging everywhere,
I saw great shadows across a gibbous moon;
Though every hour were rich with a great store
The great Creator,
And night’s great arch illume.
“A great deal matters. Who are you?”
Great big moonfaced politicians,
Here on the hillside by the great gnarled boughs
Greater Among the greater infinite he quests,
Before the greater dream whose dawn
There was never love greater than mine, so destroying, so ravaging,
ravishing, rapturous, deep;
A greater wealth your greater love assures
I watched them till, from out the greater dark,
Where sat an even greater, stranger being,
Greater than
Or much greater,
Greatest The greatest riddle and though vassal claimed the vassalage
And in my greatest bliss I am
Greatly The phantom that so greatly I desired
How greatly you have guided us. We go
Greece As Sappho of Lesbos was loved in the glory of Greece that is gone;
The lips of the singers of Greece are still,
Greek With beauty of face and of body as the deathlessly beautiful Greek;
That I am the deathless Greek upon an urn
The beauty of her immarbled by the Greek;
A phantom of the dead, forgotten Greek.
Green see also Pale-Green
157
014.19
015.7
016.3
024.2
025.13
029.10
046.8
046.43
050.4
059.4
067.15
072.1
073.10
076.3
079.7
082.5
090.10
095.7
096.13
096.85
098.7
104.1
105.2
115.5
133.10
134.24
139.8
142.3
147.1
014.5
014.14
043.14
051.32
074.9
076.4
133.9
133.64
014.35
137.9
036.53
146.4
003.34
004.64
003.2
004.76
012.32
027.14
158
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And after this, there came to me one green
On curious corpses, gold and green.
Green
Emerald green;
For green corpses he did lust,
Then live! Live with the green, lush trees returning
Laughing, she flashes down the shifting tides of green,
And after this, there came to me one green
Green eyes you hide yourself behind; your face
On which the cool green rain gleams.
Green-Flecked
The green-flecked amber of your smoky-lidded eyes.
Greet
Dead eyes will greet dead eyes, and ravage
She lifts her young faun face to greet the flushing sky, bids
What sight in later hours would haply greet
And so I slowly raise the shade to greet
Greeting Surely shall Aphrodite give you greeting,
Greetings
“Greetings!” I cried but in the throng
Greets Where flame greets flame in quenchless fire.
Grew
With power he grew intoxicate,
Till memory slowly came, and knowledge grew,
Grew fainter in the silence of its grave;
We were present when space grew heavy with seeds of its own
spawning.
And steadily grew strange and stranger.
Grief
Can escape to tell of muted grief.
And I have had terrific grief, and known the cry
Of slow, fierce grief.
Grieve And fugues parade from hearts that grieve?
And wood-winds lightly grieve
Grime Whose white fat folds were covered with grime,
Gropes Cover the form whose hand still gropes.
Ground Rest, with the cold ground resting
And never footsteps tread the ground.
From flowers strown upon the ground
In my tomb beneath the ground,
She will sink on the cold, cold ground,
Where peasants till starved earth and long dead ground.
Across a purple ground to purple cliffs
The footsteps pantherine upon the ground.
Group The face a group of eyes above a blur
Grove see also Olive-Grove
And brooded in that vast and soundless grove.
Swoons in the moonless olive grove;
Grow
Orchids, lilies grow exotic in these drawings,
I watched the universe grow cold and chill;
Where asphodels do grow.
Only spectral lilies grow
029.1
030.24
046.9
046.12
046.13
051.50
060.1
090.1
114.2
136.10
096.38
039.13
066.3
079.6
083.11
051.36
049.17
018.12
046.29
073.4
094.13
112.3
128.16
006.12
013.23
039.18
042.8
109.3
057.4
062.10
009.1
010.12
049.10
054.17
065.13
069.7
071.2
122.14
089.12
011.6
018.2
006.1
036.34
041.4
047.30
G
Growing
Grown
Grows
Growth
Growths
Guard
Guarded
Guess
Guessed
Guessless
And if you charm me not, and I grow weary of
But I grow weary of your sensuous caresses,
And of your lush young beauty I grow wearier
She is new each time that their contents grow, lesser, and lesser.
The golden poppy once again will grow to bloom
Tremendous fingers, growing, strengthening,
Of creepers, and where head should be was growing
Until, my shaking limbs grown weak, I stepped
Weary of all desires grown monotonous,
Grown faint, the winds drift slowly
Of the pulpy head that never grows old,
And weary drag of minutes grows less dolorous,
Enchantment grows in this soft after-nightfall noon,
The night grows dim and unreal and reeling: do I waken
The growth of seeds of morbid beauty, sown
And baleful boles of strange misshapen growths
Shadowy growths and shadowy skies
Only growths and fishes dwell
For what, I did not know, yet tense, on guard
Whose gaunt trunks guarded with malevolence
Malignant, as if guarded by a spell,
My destiny, and found what men can never guess;
“Well, I guess I’ll be going. I’ll be seeing you.”
In void, in waste, in riddle never guessed,
The face was lost and I had guessed
The guessless riddle of infinity.
She waits the coming of the golden guest;
Joining your journey, brings our living light to hold you, guide you.
How greatly you have guided us. We go
But the gulf is cold
see also Time-Gulfs
That rose from out the gulfs of utter night,
Through mightier gulfs where still the purple rule
Gum
O Cyrenaya, take away the sweet, dark gum,
Gummy In gummy cloths of long and human hair.
Gurgling My neck, and heard that husky, gurgling choke
My neck, and heard a husky gurgling choke
Gust
With fitful gust
On the autumnal gust;
Guest
Guide
Guided
Gulf
Gulfs
159
096.43
096.49
096.50
129.12
134.23
074.12
092.8
078.4
096.7
109.9
057.24
096.29
096.89
101.29
025.6
011.3
047.24
047.37
074.3
011.8
024.12
013.10
139.15
036.30
049.18
014.26
066.6
146.7
146.4
047.16
024.11
071.10
096.34
104.8
072.12
104.12
002.21
009.18
H
Had
And I have had terrific grief, and known the cry
Till night had cooled the burning winds of day;
As though sly Pan had used his pipes to capture
Ah, God! That I had genius, mad and great,
As if a wind had musically stirred
Where dwindling monitors of night had sundered
When time had ceased, when every world was riven,
Still seeking that which I had never found,
Great joy he had.
He had dreams and thoughts of just
Before we had lost the shore.
The face was lost and I had guessed
Pursued and pounced; an arm that had no source
Had I, although I knew on what it fed,
Whose black, scaled body had for head a beak,
With blood that had so curious a glow;
The dawn, when those great wings had made retreat;
Though they, with cruel joy, had given me
I who had fought so hard to reach my goal?
Had hooves, the arms no hands but splaying fall
To every branch. The tree had long since died,
I dreamed the waters of the world had died,
She had a lover for her wondrous grace;
Around, and see the comrades that I had;
Wan hands and heads that had no trace of wound,
And veiled the shrieking shape in haze that had
Oblivion had laid its deathless curse
And DOOM had fallen on the universe.
Upon his fallen kingdoms, God had died.
Their ravage, if they had not come from you.
That she had always invitations,
She reaped the whirlwind she had sown,
With her sweet self, she had no quarrels,
She had no scruples and no morals
Hadean I offer thee the vague, vast Hadean domain
I offer you my whole vast Hadean domain
Hades And asked to go to Hades.
Hag
The burning harpy eyes, head of a hag,
Hail
“Oh hail to thee, and et to Brute;
Hair
The scented hair above thy brow,
The rose and the violet bind her hair;
Tumescent orchids swart with hair.
To capture a breast, to hold the hair
013.23
015.6
015.11
025.13
028.7
036.9
036.37
036.42
046.8
046.15
048.4
049.18
074.13
075.7
075.13
078.12
079.7
084.12
085.2
092.7
093.10
095.1
099.13
103.10
104.3
106.13
107.1
107.4
107.14
121.14
128.18
128.31
128.37
128.39
012.5
067.5
140.8
079.12
137.27
004.19
019.6
030.16
060.19
H
In swathes of softly searching sentient hair.
Rubies I yet will place in that jet hair above
In gummy cloths of long and human hair.
A wind from the spheres that through your shadowy hair is blowing
Hair’s
Your hair’s soft brown of gold; your hands that trace
Half
Most lovely, half satanic, half divine,
Why is it that I tremble, half afraid,
For she paid half, when they went Dutch,
Like a steak half roasted there.
Half-Ate Another mass their hungry pet half-ate,
Half-Beasts
But the spell-bound half-beasts lie in their lairs
Half-Decaying
Rise from half-decaying logs
Half-God
Was it a half-god or a satyr leaping
Half-Gods
Of half-gods outcast from the world of man?
Half-Heard
To make the unison of this half-heard overtone;
Half-Mad
He was half-mad;
Half-Open
Stood out, half-open pods showed mystery
Hall
And slowly paces to an inner hall,
Halls
Till at last, in her caverned halls
The vacant halls were quiet as a tomb.
Hallways
I hear them in the open and in hallways,
Halt
She will halt in a secret place
She will halt where the moonrays trace
Hand
Nor ever a hand caressed its fat;
In his hand a stone-pick; in his mummied eyes
Cover the form whose hand still gropes.
The swart hand crawled, through mid-air lengthening,
And I drew back, but still the hand with stark,
My hand? Why is my arm so strongly stayed?
Its branches leafless, yet a budding hand
Here, by the hand you held
Handed The world of which no tale is handed down.
Hands I reached my hands down to the cool, wet depths
The dripping symbol of a murderer’s hands.
Stray hands and heads that crawled; in nests I found
The hands that wrought it vanished in its power,
So great I turned and clawed my hands to bone
Had hooves, the arms no hands but splaying fall
Wan hands and heads that had no trace of wound,
And both my hands were covered with that red,
Your hair’s soft brown of gold; your hands that trace
161
072.8
096.47
104.8
111.7
114.6
027.2
083.3
128.19
136.8
087.7
125.15
126.7
015.19
015.36
111.10
046.4
093.6
069.10
060.21
081.14
131.15
065.9
065.11
057.13
059.5
062.10
074.10
074.11
083.6
093.5
132.3
068.14
011.22
017.8
072.3
076.11
090.10
092.7
104.3
106.9
114.6
162
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Hanging And hanging creepers that reluctantly
Amidst great cobwebs hanging everywhere
Wonder and beauty and terror are hanging all over,
There were great cobwebs hanging everywhere,
Hangs Quiet hangs over all the world; in adoration
Fingers raised; there hangs her mirror—poor mirror—
Haply What sight in later hours would haply greet
Happily Dawn breaks abroad; then happily she dances, turning
Happy Each pedagogue, a happy oyster,
Hard
In darkness absolute, and listening hard,
Changing and new, so hard to know, to trace.
I who had fought so hard to reach my goal?
Working hard for pieces-of-eight,
Hardness
The deadly hardness of reality,
Hark
And the north-wind—hark!
Harpy The burning harpy eyes, head of a hag,
Harry
Not too malicious; the strangeness of Harry Clarke’s Poe;
Harsh That tongue hath no harsh syllable to annoy
Harshly Weird, lifeless birds that talked and harshly sang.
And through the riven air, there harshly swept
Harvest The harvest, and to revel deep
Harvests Of beauty’s rarest harvests, and the hours
Than they, sow seeds for harvests of no reaping.
Has
Has the cold of death
Never has woman been loved as I shall love her, never
Has man known the terrible glory of woman as I;
The memory of the elder ecstasy has faded,
Lovely as any girl the world has seen,
My weary mind has travelled all the stellar maze
Has claimed the everlasting vow of him who coldly rests
For he has passed from stage to stage,
From the sea, a wind; the revelry has ended;
In a madness it has perished,
Each drunken reveller has long since gone;
Has love become an aquarelle?
In the years of the past, in the coming and passing of lovers and love
and the paths love has taken,
Time has tolled a solemn knell,
That has no counterpart in lands of time
And she alone has beauty, grave and gray.
Her face has watched the dying sun.
That her domain has overrun.
Why has the night-wind ceased to blow?
She has yielded to the kiss of night,
But a smile has crossed her quiet face—
What sense of overhanging doom has made
She has been swallowed in the years’ long flow.
A nameless and sorcerous glory has made me weak:
011.11
072.1
101.16
104.1
066.5
129.3
079.6
066.15
138.24
074.2
077.8
085.2
142.6
120.11
002.11
079.12
129.7
028.5
081.4
105.10
054.38
115.6
119.8
002.18
003.37
003.38
007.47
008.11
013.19
014.7
014.32
015.41
033.22
040.2
042.13
043.13
047.39
053.3
053.18
055.8
055.12
056.4
058.1
058.11
083.7
099.8
101.22
H
163
The Beloved is gone; I know not the way she has taken;
101.26
It is so strange, Beloved, that everything has blended
111.9
My life-illusion has at last been broken,
120.1
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
130.11
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
141.11
Hashish Bring hashish, cannabis, or sleepy opium,
096.31
Hast
As thou hast never known;
012.2
Hast thou forgot
012.46
And thou hast known the azure mist
030.17
Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast brought
me this feverous love to consume me,
043.1
Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast brought
me this feverous love to consume me,
043.1
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of soul;
is it passion or poison I cherish?
043.25
I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate, meshed
in the love thou hast sown,
043.26
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment ere
worship and love were to perish?
043.27
Hasten The essence of her is here—but I wish she would hasten!
129.16
Hate
From all the hate of all those bitter scars.
024.8
Hated She hated all lies, save her own,
128.29
Hateful What nightmare bore you, hateful blight of red?
017.1
It is not blessed sleep. It looms as hateful.
070.1
Hath
That tongue hath no harsh syllable to annoy
028.5
Even as one who hath a quiet sleep,
031.13
And hath no waking to no dawn nor sun.
031.14
So fair she is that beauty hath no graces
041.1
My lady hath two lovely lips,
100.1
Hatred Hatred and spleen.
046.16
Haunt In all the silences that haunt a vacant room.
131.12
Haunted Witching, haunted, haunting, mysterious faces
006.15
Thy purple haunted eyes are mad
030.30
This hill, haunted by a deathly spell,
045.6
Haunting
006.15
Witching, haunted, haunting, mysterious faces
And haunting as some fabulous lost stream,
028.13
Remembered raptures haunting
096.75
Haunts The face that haunts thy memory?
012.47
And when in closer human haunts I tired,
036.55
The face that haunts your heart and mind.
067.47
As fearful as the haunts of the insane.
070.3
Have
At her feet I have laid the tribute of a burning intolerable passion, 003.21
Beautiful maidens have their bed
004.25
Beautiful youths have long lain dead
004.27
Let us have joy while we may;
004.50
The years of the past have long since flown,
004.55
Have perished in ruinous gardens fair
004.59
For well we knew the holy night must have an ending,
007.15
164
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
The hymn and song have changed to moan and cry.
007.44
I have been made by thee idolatrous;
008.5
The years have passed, yet each long year in passing brings
013.3
All pleasures I have ever found have been as gall.
013.5
I have made love in normal and eccentric ways;
013.17
And I have had terrific grief, and known the cry
013.23
Where only the wind and the wide, waste meadows have their home, 020.5
Have known the fungi of the moon,
030.2
Have travelled lands Hesperian,
030.3
Have seen the blood-red plenilune.
030.4
Have seen the fall of many kings,
030.10
I have wandered in spirit,
033.2
I have drunk at the fountains
033.3
I have dwelt in the palace
033.7
From the way I have taken
033.11
Of a glory I have drunken,
033.21
But the eyes have no vision,
033.33
I have not found it sleeping or awaking.
036.57
So long, so far, so distant have you flown
037.1
I have riven all darkness to find thee.
043.5
I have sundered the stars away;
043.6
I have burned all my flame at the altar,
043.17
Wine of life and of death I have drunken,
043.29
On the nectar of love I have fed,
043.30
And the bitter sleep and the sadness have fled in a strange rebirth.
044.4
And find defeat ere I have much begun;
050.6
Nor ever have; and since this mortal bond
050.11
Therefor am I, with what I have, content,
050.13
All the flesh on which fat worms have fed;
054.13
In my own decomposition. Thick white worms have lolled
054.23
I now have ceased to bloat;
054.42
Worms now have ceased to gloat,
054.43
067.2
As you have never known,
Have you forgot?—
067.46
I still have far to go, it’s late.
067.52
Of secret worlds that have no name or place.
070.8
Your limbs, if limbs you have; nor is it clear
077.6
What form you have, for always you appear
077.7
And though you never talk (do you have tongue?)
077.11
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
087.1
Great wealth have I, a kingdom own, with palaces for pleasure,
096.13
Than you. I have drained all delights from long impresses
096.52
Drink! For you’ll soon have the earth for a cover!
098.1
A thousand and a thousand years have fled;
099.7
I have awakened in the fevered midnight noon,
101.1
A million million men have lived and passed,
102.12
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
103.1
We have lived through cycles of birth and change, through cosmic
ages,
112.5
H
We have dwelt with new suns and watched the old stars die;
We have read inscrutable symbols on dim, dynastic pages,
We have been participant and passer-by.
To birth, we have witnessed the past and present blend;
We have seen in the future time, and space, and the universe
creeping
We are deathless, O Love, and deific; we have known the wonder
supernal:
We have been the dreamed-of, the dreamer, the fugitive dream:
We have found that only the dream is unchanging, O Love, and
eternal,
I am not sorry to have been your lover,
For you have taught a thousand things to me,
Were errors that have lost their hold on me.
I have met darker nights than that of old,
For the winds that have blown,
Their elders have promised them a day of returning,
Have seen the golden poppy spread its petals fair
You have never been inspiring to my pen.
The elder gods have promised a day of returning
How greatly you have guided us. We go
Haven Eternity between you and your haven;
To reach the haven I would never find.
Having From having watched the dead rose petals strew
Haze
And veiled the shrieking shape in haze that had
Of oak the leaves fall in autumnal haze
He
He peered, and in the curtained realms of sleep
He strove to bring a light.
He sought the infinite in life, but now
Among the greater infinite he quests,
And death, the great, from whom he held his vow
He walks where none can know or see,
His vision, and he peered across the darkling sky
For he has passed from stage to stage,
To claim the maid for whose desire he strove?
Trembling, he moans on the trodden grass;
He seeks to allay the old desire,
He passed beyond the utmost realm of stars,
He burst asunder all the whelming bars
He stood at last before the citadel
He leered so vilely, Horror could not save
He was half-mad;
Great joy he had.
Once he was pale with love of me,
For green corpses he did lust,
He had dreams and thoughts of just
He was possessed with my red flame,
With power he grew intoxicate,
From each of us he took his joy,
165
112.6
112.7
112.8
112.10
112.11
112.13
112.14
112.15
120.9
120.10
120.14
122.9
123.2
130.5
134.5
135.6
141.5
146.4
037.8
085.12
068.3
106.13
147.2
014.2
014.3
014.4
014.5
014.6
014.9
014.17
014.32
015.20
018.6
018.10
024.1
024.5
024.10
029.7
046.4
046.8
046.10
046.13
046.15
046.21
046.29
046.37
166
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
He is mine.
Than which no love can have supremer worth.
What did he seek, this wayfarer of old?
Or was he bent on dark adventure, bold,
Lost in that dim dawn-age he died alone,
Where he sleeps with the dead.
He turns, and now returns to unheard choral
He wins the long awaited separation
To this he gives his only adoration,
He barricades himself against the world:
He scans the regions lying all around,
Each vespertime, he wearies of the view
He sees them ride, and hears the ringing horn.
This being’s face is soft, he shall not pass;
His realms were vacua, he proved his vow
He who may lift the spell, and yet I seem
Planks riddled through by worms, that he is wise
He surely was a classic beauty.”
And every error, he would single-ish!
Head
Await thy kingly head.
And turned to flee that corpse’s hideous head.
Set, fixed, immovable my head:
And the little red eyes in the serpent’s head
Of the pulpy head that never grows old,
She will pillow her head
Await your kingly head.
The head most strangely seemed like one I knew;
The head sprang high; but slashed by unseen sabers
I stroked the glistening webwork on its head.
Whose black, scaled body had for head a beak,
The burning harpy eyes, head of a hag,
They clamped hot irons on my throbbing head;
Of creepers, and where head should be was growing
That feebly moved its pulpy, eyeless head.
The dust of centuries lies on her head;
If in your head or heart, there were not room
Heads see also Flower-Heads
With their faces dissolved and deathly heads
Stray hands and heads that crawled; in nests I found
Wan hands and heads that had no trace of wound,
Heady A heady fragrance filled the air
Healing Symbol of beauty, love, and life, and healing,
Health A wine-red toast to the health of the host—
Heap
Their festful riot in my rotting heap.
Heaps While scattered leaves in mildewed heaps
Hear
I hear a moaning in the dreamless trees;
No ears to hear her footsteps die away.
Never more shall I hear sound
I turned on stealthy step lest something hear me.
046.48
051.49
059.9
059.11
059.15
065.16
068.6
068.9
068.13
069.2
069.5
069.9
069.14
082.2
107.10
113.10
120.6
137.28
138.40
012.16
029.11
054.8
057.7
057.24
065.14
067.16
073.1
073.13
075.2
075.13
079.12
084.1
092.8
095.14
099.2
116.4
062.3
072.3
104.3
049.9
051.62
022.3
054.41
062.9
015.42
053.13
054.16
092.11
H
Heard
Hears
Hearse
Heart
Hearts
I hear the music’s plaintive sob, watch spins and whirls,
How much more exquisite to hear me cry
I listen, but I do not hear them fall,
I hear them in the grass when I am walking
I hear them when no human voice is talking
I hear them in the rubble of defaced land
I hear them in the meadows and in wasteland,
I hear them wide awake or part way resting,
I hear them over thunder, and at midnight gloom;
I hear them when I am not even questing
I hear them in the spring rise and in fall ways,
I hear them by the lake shore and at cliffs of stone;
I hear them in the open and in hallways,
see also Half-Heard
Far on the hills, I heard the notes of rapture
The listening ear; its tones are softly heard
I thought I heard the eerie
My neck, and heard that husky, gurgling choke
Vast wings were flapping in the night. I heard
I heard a sound of cosmic revelry,
I tried to scream but heard no sound, no hoarse,
And still it followed, still I heard it gain
All night I heard the tolling of a bell;
All night I heard the cadences of doom
I heard alone the surging tides in motion.
My neck, and heard a husky gurgling choke
Heard legends not by earthly voices told,
That saw her but heard neither her voice nor her laughter.
She hears the birds’ glad rapture and singing glee;
He sees them ride, and hears the ringing horn.
The heavens like a dead, colossal hearse
For ever his heart is filled with yearning,
And the heart holds its ravage,
Do light thoughts in a light heart dwell,
And my heart is fulfilled of its dream as I walk my enchanted way.
The face that haunts your heart and mind.
The days for which the heart should be most grateful
Oh heart, cease beating; eyes, close; sight, be wrong:
My withered heart, stained as with vermeil and rich vair,
O Love, my heart adoring
Out of the well of the heart and the heart’s recesses
If in your head or heart, there were not room
My mind, not heart, is now my soul’s true token.
And a bitter full heart,
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
Of naked hearts, and dust
167
096.23
103.6
122.13
131.1
131.3
131.5
131.7
131.9
131.10
131.11
131.13
131.14
131.15
015.9
028.6
045.9
072.12
079.1
080.11
088.8
091.5
094.1
094.2
094.14
104.12
122.11
129.4
066.14
069.14
107.5
018.9
033.34
042.7
044.8
067.47
070.4
073.12
096.76
109.37
110.1
116.4
120.8
123.13
130.1
130.17
141.1
141.17
039.14
168
Heart’s
Heat
Heated
Heaved
Heaven
Heavenly
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And fugues parade from hearts that grieve?
Beauty more vital for your hearts to capture,
Oh hearts encysted in supernal urning.
And where the heart’s transcendent vision, unreturning,
To heart’s desire that only I and Allah know,
Out of the well of the heart and the heart’s recesses
The air hung slumbrous in the drowsy heat,
And stifling tropic heat;
From heat and plague as they died,
In heat of summer day or cold of winter snow;
And still to flushed and heated faces burning,
Then ocean received the husks that we heaved
Of their paradisal heaven.
All heaven smouldered in mysterious burning,
She drinks the earthly and heavenly beauty of morning;
Heavens The heavens like a dead, colossal hearse
Heavens’
Beyond the heavens’ great celestial throng,
Heavy The hot, still air is sweet with heavy perfumes;
We were present when space grew heavy with seeds of its own
spawning.
Heavy-Lidded
Heavy-lidded, somber-eyed, sacrosanct and sinful
Held
And death, the great, from whom he held his vow
Held sway, with purple dreamlands all around.
I walk in the steps where the Beloved and I held tryst;
Than that just passed held sweeter, fuller dowers;
Nor I desire it if it held not you;
Here, by the hand you held
Heliation
A leafy light and shadow-patterned heliation
Hell
see also After-Hell
A sentient entity from hell, alive.
Hellish I found my leg become a hellish root,
Hells
Of lunar sorcerers; a thousand hells
Help
For I will help you find—
There will be none with you to help you share it,
Hemlocks
Mute tongues will tell remembered hemlocks
Henna The kohl that shades your eyes, your breasts with henna tipped,
Her
I hold all her body a beautiful living white chalice
She will strip herself naked, in splendid and terrible glory array her,
A slave of her passion, my passion, our ecstasy secret, malign;
The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will betray
her.
Till her body be mine.
Her lips and her face and her breasts, all her body I will cover with
kisses,
042.8
051.13
051.56
034.14
096.100
110.1
015.2
048.10
048.22
131.6
015.29
048.21
033.8
034.10
066.13
107.5
024.2
101.7
112.3
006.9
014.6
071.11
101.6
115.8
115.12
132.3
066.7
088.14
082.11
080.7
067.45
118.3
039.16
096.44
003.7
003.9
003.10
003.11
003.12
003.13
H
Her eyes will close at my lips on the feverish brow above;
In my arms I will hold her, passive, but I know her flesh will be
aching
At her feet I have laid the tribute of a burning intolerable passion,
Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips
be ashen,
And her flesh, glad.
And all the long night her body to mine I shall press;
I shall teach her the lore of Venus till all her sweet body tremble,
Till she lie in ecstasy knowing and desiring her sisterhood;
As the amorous maidens were loved in decadent Rome I shall love
her,
Her lips with my lips, her passionate body with mine I shall cover
Never has woman been loved as I shall love her, never
All night I sought the poisonous fruit of her;
The lips of her of Troy,
The beauty of her immarbled by the Greek;
Her flesh a torment, her body a rapturous ache
Her eyes with longing, her face with fever burns;
The rose and the violet bind her hair;
And her body is bare.
Did I embrace her wildly, did I hold
Her body and her rose-red lips to mine,
Her body and her rose-red lips to mine,
And drink her kisses as a priceless wine?
We buried her in the solemn fall
We left her staring at the musty pall,
Her world and sky.
And left her lovely body to oblivion;
We left her far more quiet body lying there:
We left no mark to show her grave,
We only left her body lying still and deep;
We left her only to the waiting earth that gave
Her birth and sleep.
Upon her to bestow;
Her face is sweeter than those fabled places
Her step is lighter than the summer breezes
Her garments only know what curves and hollows
May sing of her are vain;
Her loveliness in poetry lies never.
Her bow toward the cleaner west
Her grave, gray eyes a beauty hide
And in her movements, languid charms abide.
And neither dawn nor darkness shades her clime.
No ears to hear her footsteps die away.
Old prophecies alone accompany her.
Her face has watched the dying sun.
She scans the shadows of her land,
That her domain has overrun.
169
003.14
003.17
003.21
003.23
003.24
003.26
003.29
003.30
003.33
003.35
003.37
007.2
012.31
012.32
019.3
019.5
019.6
019.8
027.5
027.6
027.6
027.7
035.1
035.3
035.4
035.6
035.7
035.9
035.10
035.11
035.12
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041.3
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048.18
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053.8
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Her vigil never will be done:
Her timeless vision staring still
All her dreaming, raptured face is white,
There is pressure on her blood-red lips,
Her eyelids vaguely stir;
Caressing her?
On her brow the moonbeams lie as lace,
But a smile has crossed her quiet face—
Her coral isles and shadowy pearls
That glimmer beneath her sunless, wind-departed skies.
Sometimes her gleaming eyes
That enters her wide domain.
From dawn to dusk her white sides feel
That streams from her glowing body bare
Till at last, in her caverned halls
To her tryst she will go in the night,
She will pillow her head
She wakens with the dew yet cool upon her eyelids
She lifts her young faun face to greet the flushing sky, bids
Moulds her breast.
And indolently languish in her languorous
The dust of centuries lies on her head;
Nothing remains of her; her ancient bed
Her eyes are blind; her sweet white limbs but know
There is no picture of her dear dead face,
She had a lover for her wondrous grace;
Duty, in her lips caressing!
Dreaming of Her.
All nature whispers but her one word: Death.
And young Prince Charming rides in quest of her
Her queer, ensorcelled eyes
Her eyes of eidotrope,
Mysterious as her sunken palace is,
No human being could be near her:
Her own reflections in a mirror.
Her latest lover’s love was such
Her thoughts and deeds alike were shoddy.
She hated all lies, save her own,
Believed no truth except what pleased her;
Yet saw no cause why gossip seized her.
Her laugh was like a silver bell.
Her gestures supplemented well
Her vestures; both were quite revealing.
With her sweet self, she had no quarrels,
And thus preserved her innocence.
This is the Wedgwood she lifted, the saki she quaffed, her
Lips parting and closing over the draught her
Fingers raised; there hangs her mirror—poor mirror—
That saw her but heard neither her voice nor her laughter.
055.18
055.19
058.3
058.5
058.6
058.8
058.9
058.11
060.4
060.5
060.6
060.16
060.17
060.20
060.21
065.3
065.14
066.1
066.3
066.8
096.10
099.2
099.3
099.5
099.10
099.13
100.8
101.15
102.9
113.7
127.1
127.11
127.12
128.10
128.12
128.17
128.28
128.29
128.30
128.32
128.33
128.35
128.36
128.37
128.40
129.1
129.2
129.3
129.4
H
171
There stand her books, the Willy Pogany Alice
The flagons and bottles and jars that cover her dresser
Stand waiting to perfume and powder and softly caress her,
The midst of her things: a girdle, as though to chasten
The essence of her is here—but I wish she would hasten!
129.5
129.9
129.10
129.14
129.16
As all the years of Hercules’ great labors,
Prisoned here in time for evermore remembered,
She slumbers lightly here,
Was someone here?
You’ve come again. You keep me company here,
Now here, now there I fled; still on it swept.
The essence of her is here—but I wish she would hasten!
Here at the house you dwelled
Here, by the hand you held
That we who linger here will not forget, can not forget
Here on the hillside by the great gnarled boughs
And how my love that burns herein so deep
Oh little creature, here’s a tale of doom....
073.10
006.19
058.2
058.12
077.2
078.8
129.16
132.1
132.3
146.3
147.1
031.11
077.13
Heretical eyes is casually hung on a chair;
Hermaphroditus
Hermaphroditus, loved and lover,
Hers
And she was cool, yet hers was all the passion,
Herself She will strip herself naked, in splendid and terrible glory array her,
She liked to don herself in raiment
Hesitantly
So, hesitantly, I put forth my foot
Hesperian
Have travelled lands Hesperian,
Hetaira Hetaira, matron, virgin bringing
Hid
Red phantoms in its bleeding mystery hid.
The monster gods hid where the fen-fires gleam.
Hidden see also Close-Hidden
In their hidden othertime long fled.
Hide
Her grave, gray eyes a beauty hide
The vanished mists of time enshroud him, hide him;
They are curious things that hide in the woods
Green eyes you hide yourself behind; your face
The little gods hide where the fen-fires gleam.
And they hide in eery lands where the fen-fires gleam.
And they hide in eerie lands where the fen-fires gleam.
Hideous Oh color hideous, appalling, mad,
And by a hideous world was crucified
And turned to flee that corpse’s hideous head.
Were better than their hideous, measure wrongs.
In all this hideous land the only soul.
Hiding With its drapery hiding all wholly,
I saw from that dim cave where I was hiding
129.15
Hercules’
Here
Herein
Here’s
Heretical
018.1
007.7
003.9
128.5
082.9
030.3
049.25
106.14
141.4
006.4
053.2
059.14
062.1
114.2
130.4
130.20
141.20
017.9
026.7
029.11
080.8
085.6
043.35
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
We were most high;
The head sprang high; but slashed by unseen sabers
Atop a mountain measurelessly high
Where moons are high, and only dream-winds stir,
Higher For things external, but of higher worth,
Highlands
The little gods will walk from hill and from highlands,
The monster gods will walk then from hills and from highlands,
Hill
This hill, haunted by a deathly spell,
The little gods will walk from hill and from highlands,
I am sunlight on the hill,
Hills
Twilight upon the hills and woods was dying,
Far on the hills, I heard the notes of rapture
A last, wild note from the distant hills comes drifting—
It slumbers deep beneath the fabled hills,
The monster gods will walk then from hills and from highlands,
Hillside When down the hillside came a long, low crying,
Some arrowed beast crept to its hillside fastness?
Here on the hillside by the great gnarled boughs
Him
Has claimed the everlasting vow of him who coldly rests
For him whose mystic sleep
For him who sought the mystery,
For him whose sightless eyes
The loveliest girl to give him strange delight;
Ecstasy pains him with a quiver,
I brought him dreams of eternal night,
I gave him the pall of Death’s last blight,
Clad him alone;
They found him deep within an ancient cave
Where the rock-fall caught him with a sad surprise
And made him one with all earth’s humblest creatures.
The vanished mists of time enshroud him, hide him;
Yet all who gaze upon him walk beside him.
Antistrophes that seven before him knew,
Unending, a tale, even to him who tells, unknown.
Mobbed him to induce him;
They paid him to seduce ’em!
Till with derrick they capped him,
Ran a pipe-line that tapped him,
Himself He barricades himself against the world:
Hint
No hint of what it once resembled, save
Hinted It merely hinted of the coming week.
Hipped see Slender-Hipped
Hippogriffs
Of purple leagues, violet hippogriffs
Hips
A girdle that slips from a maiden’s hips—
Hired
For love, the dell where hired maenads moan.
His
Yield his body unto dust,
And death, the great, from whom he held his vow
046.36
073.13
089.2
113.6
116.10
130.13
141.13
045.6
130.13
133.20
015.1
015.9
015.47
027.12
141.13
015.3
059.10
147.1
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014.25
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018.7
046.5
046.6
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068.7
111.12
140.10
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145.3
145.4
069.2
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084.14
071.6
023.3
040.8
004.46
014.6
H
His vision, and he peered across the darkling sky
As though sly Pan had used his pipes to capture
His pagan pipes for semigod and maid;
Over his breasts his fingers hover,
Over his loins his deep eyes rove.
There touches his body lightly a shiver,
Tremors across his white flesh pass.
For ever his heart is filled with yearning,
But only and ever his flesh is burning,
A reveller creeps where his leman sleeps—
Of Time and Space, and strode upon his long
His cosmic challenge in an alien world.
And of his face, there was no vestige seen,
And all his flesh to rottenness was slave;
For I was his, that horror of the dead.
I was the first to tinge his pen;
His sunken eyes could only see
For his mad eyes;
We were the colours that his love
From each of us he took his joy,
All his great love will end in me,
Though ye colours pass, though his limbs be fleet,
Bearing the world upon his broken shoulders,
The prehistoric huntsman in his grave,
In his hand a stone-pick; in his mummied eyes
An eagerness; and pain upon his features
Like all his deeds, his very name unknown,
To this he gives his only adoration,
Where banners of his proud name float unfurled,
His realms were vacua, he proved his vow
Upon his fallen kingdoms, God had died.
The true believer makes his own faith all along
His life, his love, his song;
Within the limits of his nose,
Hissed That almost hissed or the shimmering mist
Historic see Post-Historic
Ho
What, ho! For the Bacchic brotherhood!
Hoar
My bones are hoar
Hoarse I tried to scream but heard no sound, no hoarse,
Hold
I hold all her body a beautiful living white chalice
In my arms I will hold her, passive, but I know her flesh will be
aching
Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips
be ashen,
And I, who hold that Beauty is supreme,
Unbodied things hold silent sway
Did I embrace her wildly, did I hold
I searched the years that hold all things immortal
To capture a breast, to hold the hair
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018.4
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029.6
029.14
046.2
046.11
046.20
046.34
046.37
046.43
046.47
059.2
059.3
059.5
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068.13
069.4
107.10
107.14
134.20
134.21
138.25
048.15
022.2
054.55
088.8
003.7
003.17
003.23
008.13
010.10
027.5
036.17
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Were errors that have lost their hold on me.
120.14
Joining your journey, brings our living light to hold you, guide you.
146.7
Holdeth Of thine eyes holdeth me.
032.2
Holds
And the heart holds its ravage,
033.34
Demonic revel holds dark, writhing forms in thrall,
061.7
Holds me till in unending dooms I smother.
070.14
Hollow I am mist in midnight hollow,
133.21
Hollows Shall I wander in the hollows
033.25
Her garments only know what curves and hollows
041.11
Holocaust
Foul messenger of war and holocaust,
017.18
Holy
We shall live in a rapturous embrace, in an endless and holy
003.27
For well we knew the holy night must have an ending,
007.15
And holy sin and sanctity were wed.
007.36
There, ringed with dark trees holy,
065.17
So luminous, O Love, the shrine so holy,
110.13
Home Where only the wind and the wide, waste meadows have their home, 020.5
Make this your home for I will make it yours;
077.10
Homely “Tut-tut, Mr. Forchamer. You’re not. You’re homely.”
139.10
Homeward
Look homeward, angel, for the way is long.
037.14
Hoofbeats
Then came the rush of hoofbeats and, soft-pressed
092.12
Hoofprints
No gleam illumes the hoofprints on the lawn.
040.4
Hooples Instead, they sound like Major Hooples
138.3
Hooves There is a rush of hooves in the break of dawn;
015.46
Had hooves, the arms no hands but splaying fall
092.7
Hope
Of hope; and how my hours are unavailing
031.9
Where only courage of lost hope could ravel
036.3
I further search with neither hope nor peace
036.60
Attempts to flee from depths where hope was slain;
070.7
I found no door, and when all hope lay dead
088.7
Me hope. I fell, though flesh itself be rent
091.7
Wherein sweet terms, as Love, and Hope, and God,
102.3
The sum of hope and faith and life, the sum
102.18
124.6
No hope, no faith, no fear, no trust remaining
And I hope that you won’t cry dear,
135.2
Hopeful The lanes where hopeful virgins tumbled.
128.24
Hopelessly
And phantoms that seemed hopelessly and lostly
045.15
Hopes All men, all things, all hopes, my burning dreams of fire;
013.6
Horizon The sun’s rim slides above the flaming, far horizon,
066.9
Horizons Stretched farther than horizons. I could see
093.2
Horn
He sees them ride, and hears the ringing horn.
069.14
Horror Yea, all love’s lyric horror all were sweet;
007.22
He leered so vilely, Horror could not save
029.7
Itself from horror at those eyes’ blind sheen.
029.8
For I was his, that horror of the dead.
029.14
H
And stare and stare in horror as I meet
For I was its, that horror from the dead.
That seemed to pour from where the horror stood;
Horrors These charnel horrors made me sick and weak,
Host
A wine-red toast to the health of the host—
To the host! Clink! Clink! Let the glasses chink!
Fourth was I in the coloured host,
Hostile The unknown color hostile in pursuit
Hosts
From the stricken hosts of those plague-filled coasts
Hot
The twilight brought no ease from the hot
They clamped hot irons on my throbbing head;
The hot, still air is sweet with heavy perfumes;
I am blind in the white embrace of the moon’s hot stream;
Hour
Was it an hour? Eternity? A week?—
And I, though struggling, in that selfsame hour
Though every hour were rich with a great store
Houris And lissome houris, gems and gold in many a measure,
And houris sad songs croon.
Hours The minutes shall wane in delirium, the burning hours pass slowly,
And while the fleeting hours away;
Of hope; and how my hours are unavailing
For in the midnight hours, when sleep descends,
What sight in later hours would haply greet
Enough, while drowsy minutes lengthen to hours golden,
Away, and listless hours voluptuously flaunting
Of sleepy hours that time and plenty send;
Of beauty’s rarest harvests, and the hours
House You care for that warm house of all your own,
Arrays and disarrays the house contains,
In this sweet earthly house was not for sleeping
Here at the house you dwelled
Hover Over his breasts his fingers hover,
And Psyche hover on the summer air.
Hovering
You drift upon the moonlight hovering near
How
How it howls and whoops
How it wildly swoops
How all my days are as an aria played
How all my time is winnowed, leaving husks
While there remain but few—how few!—brief dusks
Of hope; and how my hours are unavailing
And how my love that burns herein so deep
For we will know how love
What words convey how closelier she follows
How strange. How strangely empty is the room.
How much more exquisite to hear me cry
How glad I was that I at last awoke!
How fair you were, if you were only fair,
How greatly you have guided us. We go
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083.13
090.14
106.6
104.9
022.3
022.9
046.26
088.12
048.1
048.13
084.1
101.7
101.27
072.10
076.12
115.5
096.16
096.60
003.25
004.72
031.9
070.9
079.6
096.58
096.74
115.4
115.6
117.2
117.6
119.4
132.1
018.3
051.37
077.3
002.12
002.14
031.1
031.5
031.7
031.9
031.11
039.5
041.9
077.14
103.6
104.14
116.3
146.4
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However
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And how and whence the steadfastness, the source?
Death: However far you go, I wait.
Nowhere to flee, however I might strive,
However brief or stilled, or borne on farther turn,
Howls How it howls and whoops
Hue
Whence came your charnel hue of pain and blood?
Discovering there an equal leaden hue,
It was my own; my own face showed that hue,
The door must open, showing why the hue
Huge
I seemed to sink in some huge cosmic pool.
So huge the wings, I wondered what the bird
The leering of a huge and sightless eye.
My face was eaten by a red, huge Thing.
Huh
“Huh. Well, maybe. But I’m sociable, Miss—”
Hulk
While sick men stoked; the black hulk poked
Human And when in closer human haunts I tired,
Part human creatures creeping from their lair.
A giant shape part human, part despair,
Of human form or beast, weird sorcery
In gummy cloths of long and human hair.
No human being could be near her:
I hear them when no human voice is talking
Goddess or devil or only human,
Humblest
And made him one with all earth’s humblest creatures.
Humbly Returning humbly our own love whose force,
Humming
From metal monsters humming voiceless songs.
Hundred
They slit me till a hundred new wounds bled;
Still live a hundred years ago,
Hung
The air hung slumbrous in the drowsy heat,
That hung on our deep sea-graves.
But all the strange and withered things still hung
And in the sky, there hung a baleful glare.
Heretical eyes is casually hung on a chair;
Hungry I saw the hungry flowers toward me crawl
Another mass their hungry pet half-ate,
As of a lost and hungry child. Then die
Hunted Through mighty chambers, hunted and alone,
Hunter What nameless hunter searching for its meat?
Hunters Or hunters canter shouting toward the moor.
For they were deathless hunters, I the dying.
Huntsman
The prehistoric huntsman in his grave,
I am the huntsman of each fleeing kind,
Hurled And on the doors of doom, disdainful, hurled
Then hurled me, shapeless, on a needle-bed.
147.9
067.53
088.11
134.14
002.12
017.4
069.11
073.5
078.13
071.13
079.4
083.14
105.14
139.11
048.17
036.55
072.4
089.11
093.7
104.8
128.10
131.3
140.11
059.8
146.6
080.4
084.5
138.17
015.2
048.16
093.11
105.4
129.15
082.12
087.7
089.7
076.2
079.3
069.8
085.14
059.3
133.3
024.13
084.8
H
Husks
Husky
Hyacinth
Engirt, and hurled me nightward into doom.
How all my time is winnowed, leaving husks
Then ocean received the husks that we heaved
My neck, and heard that husky, gurgling choke
My neck, and heard a husky gurgling choke
For fields of asphodel and hyacinth,
Hylots To see the Hylots of Calair,
Hymen Of Hymen and the gods that watch your way.
Hymn A choral hymn of mad and sweetest pain,
The hymn and song have changed to moan and cry.
Murmurs the music of a magic hymn;
Hypnotic
Locked fast with that hypnotic sun.
177
089.14
031.5
048.21
072.12
104.12
051.34
030.14
051.63
007.30
007.44
110.10
055.16
I
I
I am enraptured of one immortally lovely, with beautiful tresses,
I am enraptured by strange and undreamed-of passionate sinful
caresses
That I seek.
The gifts of my body I bring to a flesh-white and beautiful palace,
I hold all her body a beautiful living white chalice
The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will betray
her.
Her lips and her face and her breasts, all her body I will cover with
kisses,
In my arms I will hold her, passive, but I know her flesh will be
aching
At her feet I have laid the tribute of a burning intolerable passion,
Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips
be ashen,
And all the long night her body to mine I shall press;
I shall teach her the lore of Venus till all her sweet body tremble,
As the amorous maidens were loved in decadent Rome I shall love
her,
Her lips with my lips, her passionate body with mine I shall cover
Never has woman been loved as I shall love her, never
Has man known the terrible glory of woman as I;
Even as I.
Even as I, Oh Myrrhiline,
Thou art loveliest of the things I know;
And I shall join thee, Myrrhiline,
And I shall kiss thy warm, soft lips
And I shall play
That I am the deathless Greek upon an urn
And never shall I find release,
Waiting, watching till I come and join them where,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I sought the poisonous fruit of her;
Yea, all the bitter night I sought the bitter rapture,
All night I bowed before a burning shrine;
And I was more insatiate with satiation,
And still I sought the overpowering drunken rapture,
And so I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night in worship and in love I lay;
All night I dreamed the one long night would last for ever,
I dreamed the night would never turn to day.
And now I cry aloud unto the lonely spaces,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
003.1
003.3
003.4
003.5
003.7
003.11
003.13
003.17
003.21
003.23
003.26
003.29
003.33
003.35
003.37
003.38
004.4
004.10
004.40
004.43
004.73
004.75
004.76
004.79
006.23
007.1
007.2
007.3
007.18
007.25
007.27
007.37
007.38
007.39
007.40
007.49
007.51
I
No more, no more I know the fierce desire of woman,
Unto the utter end I worship thee, beloved,
Unto the end I worship and adore;
I worship thee and ever worship more.
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
Dreaming majestic dreams, I worship thee
I have been made by thee idolatrous;
I close thee, pure and rare as ivory,
Dearest of all dear things that I possess.
And I, who hold that Beauty is supreme,
Worship thee, knowing that I only dream.
Into the shadowland I made my way
I passed and reached the black pool’s rock-strewn edge.
I paused and watched the cryptic waters watch.
I peered amid those waters black and still.
I reached my hands down to the cool, wet depths
DEATH: I offer thee such dreams
I offer thee the moan
I offer thee the vague, vast Hadean domain
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
Go! I can not bear thee, Go!
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
DEATH: I offer thee the wealth
I offer thee phantasmal gems
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
DEATH: Oh Poet, these I offer thee:
I offer thee
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
For this I offer thee:
Oh Poet, this I offer thee,
THE POET (wildly): I yield! I yield! Thy lips, Oh Death!
I weary of the old monotony of things;
All pleasures I have ever found have been as gall.
And now at last I crown me with a coronal
In other stars in old, oblivious years I sought
I took the usual pleasures known to all mankind;
I found or made new pleasures that I shall not tell;
And yet, in all my travels I could only find
I have made love in normal and eccentric ways;
The love of girls more strange on stranger stars I won;
Abysmal secrets, monstrous mysteries, I know;
And I have had terrific grief, and known the cry
Now I am jaded with my long, complete excess;
And I am sick to death with utter weariness
I lived whole cycles of existence; I am wise;
I know that death itself will never bring release;
For ever will I call, and search the frozen skies
Far on the hills, I heard the notes of rapture
I hear a moaning in the dreamless trees;
179
007.55
007.57
007.58
007.60
007.63
008.3
008.5
008.6
008.8
008.13
008.14
011.1
011.9
011.17
011.21
011.22
012.1
012.3
012.5
012.7
012.10
012.17
012.18
012.22
012.26
012.27
012.38
012.43
012.45
012.50
012.53
013.1
013.5
013.7
013.9
013.13
013.14
013.15
013.17
013.18
013.22
013.23
013.25
013.27
013.29
013.30
013.31
015.9
015.42
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
I turn to this,
And find that what I thought so great is but
Ah, God, that I could draw instead of write,
That I could picture worlds I’ve never known,
That I to cosmic realms could take my flight!
Ah, God! That I had genius, mad and great,
To paint the things I never shall relate.
Did I embrace her wildly, did I hold
Did I a lovely deathless form enfold?
I do not know. There is an ache that fills
Some thing I find not though I ever seek.
There is a language I would fain employ,
And I, who long for fairer melodies
So great, I clawed my face to bleeding strips,
But everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
For I was his, that horror of the dead.
Ere I, by night and darkness, am bereft
I have wandered in spirit,
I have drunk at the fountains
Of the gods, I inherit
I have dwelt in the palace
Now I fully awaken
From the way I have taken
Where I entered the traces
Of a glory I have drunken,
And the ways that I cherished.
Shall I wander in the hollows
Where shall I find you?
And then I turned, and looked within your eyes,
I sought it in far lands of timeless travel
I sought, but sought in vain.
Through space’s dead debris I wandered, wondered
And end, there too I sought.
I searched the years that hold all things immortal
I sought my spirit’s goal.
I peered far down the final future ages,
I watched the universe grow cold and chill;
I read, yet on my trail I wandered still;
I read, yet on my trail I wandered still;
I sought beyond no more.
Still seeking that which I had never found,
I watched on earth the littler things around;
I sought not, nor in worlds that only seem
To be, I thought to find in nearer faces
In eerie borderlands I vainly waited
The phantom that so greatly I desired
I sought in maze of sorcery and bale;
And when in closer human haunts I tired,
I saw I still must fail.
016.2
016.3
025.1
025.2
025.4
025.13
025.14
027.5
027.8
027.9
027.11
028.1
028.9
029.10
029.12
029.14
031.8
033.2
033.3
033.4
033.7
033.9
033.11
033.15
033.21
033.24
033.25
033.40
034.16
036.1
036.8
036.11
036.16
036.17
036.24
036.33
036.34
036.36
036.36
036.40
036.42
036.44
036.46
036.47
036.49
036.53
036.54
036.55
036.56
I
I have not found it sleeping or awaking.
I will not find it till all things shall cease,
I further search with neither hope nor peace
I know this all I ever will be knowing:
I promised you a villanelle,
I promised you a villanelle.
I promised you a villanelle.
I promised you a villanelle;
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of
endless and awful delight;
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
I have riven all darkness to find thee.
I have sundered the stars away;
Like a priest at a shrine I adore thee,
Like a drinker of chloral I dream,
I have burned all my flame at the altar,
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of
soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate,
meshed in the love thou hast sown,
Wine of life and of death I have drunken,
On the nectar of love I have fed,
And my heart is fulfilled of its dream as I walk my enchanted way.
I crawled like one impelled on ways resisted,
I saw the whispering knoll.
I thought I heard the eerie
A sibilance that followed as I stole
I was the first to tinge his pen;
I was the only colour when
I brought him dreams of eternal night,
I gave him the pall of Death’s last blight,
I am the colour deep blood-red,
I, Paradise.
Fourth was I in the coloured host,
I was the sign of royal state,
I am the colour yet to be;
I am the sweet close winding-sheet
One old familiar face I found
“Greetings!” I cried but in the throng
The face was lost and I had guessed
One old familiar face I found.
That I am weary though I’ve gone not far,
And find defeat ere I have much begun;
Therefor am I, with what I have, content,
I adore you,
Thus I close my doors
And I am dead.
Six feet deep I lie;
181
036.57
036.58
036.60
036.63
042.1
042.6
042.12
042.18
043.2
043.4
043.5
043.6
043.9
043.10
043.17
043.25
043.26
043.29
043.30
044.8
045.3
045.4
045.9
045.18
046.2
046.3
046.5
046.6
046.18
046.24
046.26
046.30
046.42
046.45
049.15
049.17
049.18
049.21
050.5
050.6
050.13
052.3
052.7
054.1
054.2
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And I am dead.
I can not close an eye,
I can not move a thigh,
I can not even sigh
For I am dead.
All the rottenness, I dread;
Never more shall I hear sound
And spoiling, lured them. But I could not squirm
When I felt through me spread the germ
Until my dead flesh stirred. I only lay,
I only sighed to feel them play
I lie in my last sleep;
I feel the worms that creep, creep, creep,
I feel the worms that leap
I now have ceased to bloat;
I am the sleeper
Death: I offer you such dreams
I offer you the moan
I offer you my whole vast Hadean domain
Traveler: I scorn you, Death,
I can not bear you. Go!
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
Death: I offer you the wealth
I offer you phantasmal gems
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
Death: Oh Traveler, these I offer you:
I offer all
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
For I will help you find—
Traveler: Not now, not yet. I go my way,
I still have far to go, it’s late.
Death: However far you go, I wait.
Death: We will. We will, and I know when.
Traveler: Not soon for I must find a song—
I dream through realms where naught begins or ends,
Holds me till in unending dooms I smother.
There where I wandered, purple shadows ran
Across a velvet sky. And when I came.
And when I crossed the imperial weaving span
And so I soared on pinions of the night
I seemed to sink in some huge cosmic pool.
Stray hands and heads that crawled; in nests I found
What goal, what new companion did I seek?
Until I felt that tongue or talon stroke
I could not move though mind and spirit broke.
The head most strangely seemed like one I knew;
It watched me, waiting, while I stared as long
It fell in parts, and I was part of it.
Slowly I climbed the worn old attic stairs
054.3
054.4
054.5
054.6
054.7
054.12
054.16
054.25
054.26
054.28
054.30
054.33
054.35
054.36
054.42
064.2
067.1
067.3
067.5
067.7
067.10
067.17
067.18
067.22
067.26
067.27
067.38
067.43
067.45
067.51
067.52
067.53
067.55
067.56
070.10
070.14
071.1
071.4
071.5
071.9
071.13
072.3
072.9
072.11
072.14
073.1
073.9
073.14
074.1
I
For what, I did not know, yet tense, on guard
As I went onward toward those upper lairs.
Then at the top I stood on magic squares
I watched them till, from out the greater dark,
And I drew back, but still the hand with stark,
I stroked the glistening webwork on its head.
Had I, although I knew on what it fed,
In that far, future time where I was fleeing
I came upon a curious great throne
And I, though struggling, in that selfsame hour
I can not find, nor do I seem to place
Make this your home for I will make it yours;
Until, my shaking limbs grown weak, I stepped
Now here, now there I fled; still on it swept.
Vast wings were flapping in the night. I heard
So huge the wings, I wondered what the bird
For in the talons I was fast immured.
And when the talons loosened, I could see
Before I dropped away, for I was free—
As I remember, there were clanging gongs
As I remember, there were flaming tongs
That flayed my flesh, and I was bound by spells
As I remember, in my agony
I begged the gods to save me from such pain.
I heard a sound of cosmic revelry,
The answer came, where I in torment lay,
I knocked upon the portal till with clang
Curled inward, flowerwise. I stood before
And when I saw these titans, thereupon
But when I passed and left them in their gloom,
I looked across the great plain warily.
So, hesitantly, I put forth my foot
I found my leg become a hellish root,
I saw the hungry flowers toward me crawl
Why is it that I tremble, half afraid,
Me fearful? What the sight that I shall find?
I could not turn though fronted by the rack.
And so I slowly raise the shade to greet
And stare and stare in horror as I meet
They crushed me, broke me till I could not rise,
Now was I destined after all to die,
I who had fought so hard to reach my goal?
When I collapsed beneath that burning sky?
Yet, when toward farther desolate wastes I stole,
I thought ironic laughter passed me by.
Each step eternal, on I struggled, trying
To reach the haven I would never find.
I stumbled onward, knowing I must fail,
For they were deathless hunters, I the dying.
183
074.3
074.4
074.5
074.9
074.11
075.2
075.7
076.1
076.3
076.12
077.5
077.10
078.4
078.8
079.1
079.4
079.8
079.11
079.13
080.1
080.5
080.6
080.9
080.10
080.11
080.13
081.1
081.3
081.11
081.13
082.5
082.9
082.11
082.12
083.3
083.8
083.10
083.11
083.13
084.7
085.1
085.2
085.4
085.7
085.8
085.11
085.12
085.13
085.14
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
For my escape I knew what I must pay:
But punish, since their power I dared to test.
The ebony gates, one savage curse I cried,
And I, and all that phantom city, died.
They gave me back my eyes so I could peer
To make my sufferings worse if I should dine.
I know that I’ll by them be watched for ever
That followed through the chamber where I fled.
I found no door, and when all hope lay dead
I tried to scream but heard no sound, no hoarse,
Desparing cry. I crouched against the wall
Nowhere to flee, however I might strive,
I saw from that dim cave where I was hiding
I must, for it arose, its mass dividing
So great I turned and clawed my hands to bone
To flee, but where I crawled, wherever fled,
And everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
For I was its, that horror from the dead.
I struggled onward though my strength was spent
And still it followed, still I heard it gain
Until I stumbled. Fear no longer lent
Me hope. I fell, though flesh itself be rent
And I in all that solitude lie slain.
I saw it then, two trunks that fused as one,
I turned on stealthy step lest something hear me.
Stretched farther than horizons. I could see
Upon it nevermore to leave. I tried
I too was fastened on that tree of death.
All night I heard the tolling of a bell;
All night I heard the cadences of doom
I heard alone the surging tides in motion.
I dreamed the waters of the world had died,
There lay a bed of shells and bones; I spied
I saw the vales and mountains of the deep,
I saw the dwellers of the ocean night,
I saw rise up a substance soft and white
Now I am bored with all things brief and transitory,
And I am sick alike of passion and of glory,
I sink back in the pillows of my deep divan
Caresses, though I find slight joy in amorous
Great wealth have I, a kingdom own, with palaces for pleasure,
I turn away from diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls,
I find no surcease in the unrelieving wine;
I clap, and at the sign
I hear the music’s plaintive sob, watch spins and whirls,
Dance, Cyrenaya, while I watch you swaying slowly,
And sinuous, then I will raise you from the lowly
And if you charm me not, and I grow weary of
Rubies I yet will place in that jet hair above
086.3
086.8
086.13
086.14
087.9
087.12
087.13
088.6
088.7
088.8
088.9
088.11
089.1
089.8
090.10
090.11
090.12
090.14
091.3
091.5
091.6
091.7
091.8
091.9
092.11
093.2
093.12
093.14
094.1
094.2
094.14
095.1
095.5
095.9
095.10
095.13
096.1
096.4
096.8
096.11
096.13
096.19
096.20
096.21
096.23
096.37
096.41
096.43
096.47
I
But I grow weary of your sensuous caresses,
And of your lush young beauty I grow wearier
Than you. I have drained all delights from long impresses
Now I am bored with all things present, all things olden,
I only find more ennui in philosophies,
Doubt everything, doubt that I doubt, and wearily
Me, and I sicken with the languid unsurcease
I know that nothing is worth while, all things are quite
So muse I while the endless, aimless minutes wear
Into the moonlight, Cyrenaya, I would go
To heart’s desire that only I and Allah know,
The maid I love was buried long ago;
I know not whether she was slave or queen;
I only know she died in Mytilene.
If I thus forgot to meet
I have awakened in the fevered midnight noon,
I am the night and the garden and all things swoon
I walk in the steps where the Beloved and I held tryst;
By the breath of its shameless lips I am lightly kissed
Why do I shrink from the soft red mouths of roses
I vainly seek.
The Beloved is gone; I know not the way she has taken;
I am blind in the white embrace of the moon’s hot stream;
I find no rest in the passions with which I am shaken,
The night grows dim and unreal and reeling: do I waken
They left to me my eyes, so I could stare
Around, and see the comrades that I had;
To keep me company lest I go mad:
And yet I could not move. There came a creak,
And then I felt a tongue or talon stroke
How glad I was that I at last awoke!
I saw great shadows across a gibbous moon;
At first I deemed it some mad nightmare-dream,
But from the sundered room I never crept—
I scarce could know the evil that I did;
I am awed, O Love, at knowing this mystery,
I am awed that the moon and stars are so close to me.
I am awed that flower and forest and leaf be shaken
I know there are no princesses, but you
Love comes. I know that I shall never be
He who may lift the spell, and yet I seem
These are the things I love you for: the gray
These things I love, yet words can never tell
The inner beauty I more deeply care
Oh love, it is enough that I may be
Nor I desire it if it held not you;
And I would let it in complete eclipse
I love you for the charm earth gave to you,
I love you for the realms of endless view,
185
096.49
096.50
096.52
096.55
096.61
096.62
096.65
096.67
096.73
096.97
096.100
099.1
099.11
099.14
100.7
101.1
101.3
101.6
101.8
101.11
101.25
101.26
101.27
101.28
101.29
103.9
103.10
103.12
104.10
104.11
104.14
105.2
105.12
105.13
106.11
110.5
110.6
110.7
113.1
113.9
113.10
114.1
114.9
114.11
114.13
115.12
115.13
116.9
116.11
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
I love you for the beauty all can see,
The artistry external, and I find
Then blind, the favored ones; while I, more wise
I come to men with unrequiting passion,
I answer—if they love me in my fashion,
For I give love like sips of precious wine
And I look on with clearer, colder eyes,
That I confused the words you’d plainly spoken.
I am not sorry to have been your lover,
And truths I could not otherwise discover.
I am a fool, for only fools would trust
The acids would not matter, nor I rue
And of my presence, I could feel no sign
Of recognition, nor was I to stay
I merely listened, as I listen still,
And waited, wondered, though I did not know...
I have met darker nights than that of old,
I listen, but I do not hear them fall,
Why am I sad?
Thus am I sad.
Why am I weary?
Thus am I weary.
Why am I old?
Thus am I old.
What do I want?
This do I want.
I bow beneath this fruitless unattaining,
Doubting, I stumble blindly to thy feet,
I seek through chambers of thy strange abode;
I come, weary yet bearing still this load.
I ask no comfort and no ease of thee,
I ask for blankness and the dark, dark earth.
The essence of her is here—but I wish she would hasten!
I hear them in the grass when I am walking
I hear them when no human voice is talking
I hear them in the rubble of defaced land
I hear them in the meadows and in wasteland,
I hear them wide awake or part way resting,
I hear them over thunder, and at midnight gloom;
I hear them when I am not even questing
I hear them in the spring rise and in fall ways,
I hear them by the lake shore and at cliffs of stone;
I hear them in the open and in hallways,
And listen always as I journey on alone.
I am man.
I am the master of each living thing,
I am the huntsman of each fleeing kind,
I am the arrow of the cosmic mind,
I am wisdom of my own self blind,
116.13
117.13
119.7
119.9
119.12
119.13
120.2
120.4
120.9
120.12
121.1
121.13
122.3
122.4
122.7
122.8
122.9
122.13
123.1
123.5
123.6
123.10
123.11
123.15
123.16
123.20
124.1
124.2
124.5
124.8
124.9
124.14
129.16
131.1
131.3
131.5
131.7
131.9
131.10
131.11
131.13
131.14
131.15
131.16
133.1
133.2
133.3
133.4
133.5
I
I am man,
Of man I sing.
I am builder, I am maker,
I am my own final taker,
I am man.
I am slayer, I am slain,
I am fire,
I am sod,
I aspire
I am the empty brain
Of man I tire.
I am sunlight on the hill,
I am mist in midnight hollow,
I am doom that all dooms follow,
I am foam torn free of storm waves cresting,
I am dust in cosmic outways resting,
I am mote
As I note
I am man.
I am all cups that fill,
I am the fleeting dew,
I am all deaths that chill,
I am all life that springs anew,
I am man.
I am sower, I am reaper,
I am wastrel, never keeper,
I am seeker,
While I pass by
I rule the earth
Till I end
As I began,
I am man.
I am instant lost in time,
I am atom lost in space,
I am the triumph of all-seeing eye,
I am the cinder wiped away,
I am night erasing day,
I am nothing as I die,
I am man.
Who knows when I first began?
Now I, at dusk, beside the wall of ancient tombs,
The golden poppy folds and each eternal I
I am telling you goodbye, dear,
And I hope that you won’t cry dear,
If I never take you anywhere again;
Though I know that you are pretty,
I could never love a girl with such a rhyme!
Oh what a classicist am I,
I know all Latin stems and nouns,
187
133.6
133.7
133.8
133.11
133.12
133.13
133.14
133.15
133.16
133.18
133.19
133.20
133.21
133.22
133.23
133.24
133.25
133.26
133.27
133.28
133.29
133.30
133.31
133.32
133.33
133.34
133.35
133.41
133.42
133.45
133.46
133.50
133.51
133.52
133.53
133.54
133.55
133.56
133.57
133.58
134.4
134.16
135.1
135.2
135.3
135.4
135.12
137.1
137.3
188
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
The authors’ names I know by rote,
And in my greatest bliss I am
When I can make my students Cram.
I offer to my students gratis,
Oh what a classicist am I,
And when I die, must be enscrolled
Oh what a classicist am I.
“I beg your pardon, I don’t know you.”
“Well, I guess I’ll be going. I’ll be seeing you.”
I am as mad as mad can be,
For I am as mad as mad can be.
And you and I
There was a young woman I know
I take the bridgeway you already know.
Icon
That doth the icon and the dream inherit,
I’d
Upon the moon, I’d show, strange things that moan,
With mad new colours and queer lines I’d trace
Such a treasure? I’d be missing
Can’t you see that I’d be able
Ideal
In their ideal, idyllic college,
Idol
The idol in my shrine of ebony,
Idolatrous
I have been made by thee idolatrous;
Idols
Or gilded idols undeserving trust,
Idyllic In their ideal, idyllic college,
If
And still it seemed as if great Pan were calling
Malignant, as if guarded by a spell,
As if a wind had musically stirred
As if a wizard’s wand
Unknown what goal, if any goal, lies yonder
Moon, if moon-made they, those drifting shapes
No love endures if love be only passion
And no love lasts if love be only mind,
Traveler: Goodby, but if we meet again—
Your limbs, if limbs you have; nor is it clear
As if there never were an end in store.
To make my sufferings worse if I should dine.
And if you mesmerize
And if you charm me not, and I grow weary of
And if your kisses, like most kisses, mean not love,
Or if, beneath those warmer, clearer skies,
If I thus forgot to meet
Nor I desire it if it held not you;
How fair you were, if you were only fair,
If in your head or heart, there were not room
I answer—if they love me in my fashion,
Their ravage, if they had not come from you.
And scandal, better if unfounded.
If I never take you anywhere again;
137.5
137.9
137.10
137.16
137.19
137.25
137.29
139.2
139.15
142.1
142.10
143.7
144.1
147.14
051.48
025.7
025.9
100.4
135.8
138.19
008.7
008.5
051.4
138.19
015.7
024.12
028.7
034.3
037.11
045.14
051.22
051.23
067.54
077.6
078.7
087.12
096.39
096.43
096.46
099.12
100.7
115.12
116.3
116.4
119.12
121.14
128.4
135.3
I
189
If your name were only Mabel
135.7
If this were done to Minnesota,
138.35
I’ll
I’ll talk of future times and alien shores.
077.12
I know that I’ll by them be watched for ever
087.13
“Well, I guess I’ll be going. I’ll be seeing you.”
139.15
Illa
And La Illaha illa Allah! M’hamed rasul
096.79
Illaha
And La Illaha illa Allah! M’hamed rasul
096.79
Illume And night’s great arch illume.
134.24
Illumes No gleam illumes the hoofprints on the lawn.
040.4
Of sun illumes the mouldy balustrades.
053.10
Illumines
And illumines with mystical light the eyes unseeing.
110.4
Illuming The shadows thickened, but a blaze illuming
015.25
Illusion see also Life-Illusion
You proved illusion not more strong than oaken
120.5
Illusions Romantic dreams, illusions, poetry,
120.13
Illussimae
Illussimae and classicorum
137.21
Illustrate To illustrate their attitudes,
138.16
I’m
I’m quite as good as ears to asses;
137.8
“I’m asking you, Miss Shere. Are you a cruel person?”
139.3
“Ely Forchamer, Miss Shere. I’m white and virtuous and fairly goo—” 139.9
“Huh. Well, maybe. But I’m sociable, Miss—”
139.11
“But I’m perfectly moral.”
139.13
Image To seek some image far behind some portal
036.19
The image and the fanes
109.38
Content to know the image of the dream,
113.11
Images What are the dim dread images that bind
083.5
Imbedded
Imbedded witches’ jewels mystical,
127.8
Immarbled
The beauty of her immarbled by the Greek;
012.32
Immerse Where Death in death all things did not immerse.
107.8
Immortal
Who cared? Once more immortal Pan was playing
015.37
I searched the years that hold all things immortal
036.17
Immortally
I am enraptured of one immortally lovely, with beautiful tresses,
003.1
Immovable
Set, fixed, immovable my head:
054.8
Set, fixed, immovable my bed;
054.9
Set, fixed, immovable myself, now wed
054.10
Immured
For in the talons I was fast immured.
079.8
Impalpable
Impalpable, a brain-shaped thing of dread,
088.3
Impart Is such as gods impart
032.7
Impelled I crawled like one impelled on ways resisted,
045.3
190
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Imperfections
Your imperfections are as fair to me
Imperial My thrones, majestical, imperial, and great,
My thrones majestical, imperial, and great
And when I crossed the imperial weaving span
Impersonal
Who finds impersonal and calm the skies;
Imposed see Self-Imposed
Impotent
Though singly impotent, might be in mass
Impresses
Than you. I have drained all delights from long impresses
Imprisoned
Of some imprisoned thing with old despairs.
Impulse Some impulse urges me to raise the shade;
In
Like the pain in a passionate note
Like a mist that fades in the sodden skies
She will strip herself naked, in splendid and terrible glory array her,
In my arms I will hold her, passive, but I know her flesh will be
aching
The minutes shall wane in delirium, the burning hours pass slowly,
We shall live in a rapturous embrace, in an endless and holy
Till she lie in ecstasy knowing and desiring her sisterhood;
We shall love in our passion in strange and ineffable ways and
dissemble
As the amorous maidens were loved in decadent Rome I shall
love her,
As Sappho of Lesbos was loved in the glory of Greece that is gone;
Thy lips that in the midnight burn,
Thy breasts that seek delight in fire,
Shall lose all Beauty in the end,
Have perished in ruinous gardens fair
But in thine arms, Myrrhiline,
Orchids, lilies grow exotic in these drawings,
In their hidden othertime long fled.
Living in their silence secrets whence no whisper
Prisoned here in time for evermore remembered,
My blood was burning in my veins, and all the torment
And we were fierce and passionate in our embraces,
Lest dawn and barren ashes enter in.
All night in worship and in love I lay;
Yea, all the barren years that linger in their passing,
The idol in my shrine of ebony,
Who ruled in fabulous, forgotten Troy;
In endless repose;
In life’s dead close;
In its dearth;
Passing in pain;
In the stirless dust;
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I
They dwell in dying Mandrikor
They dwell in wasteland and in night.
Uprose gigantic in the endless gloom,
And brooded in that vast and soundless grove.
Trailed countless fingers in the ebon edge
And in the waters saw my own face drown,
And in their solemn state,
Of dwarfs in deep Lethean sands;
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
In whom all Beauty’s graces meet—
The years have passed, yet each long year in passing brings
In other stars in old, oblivious years I sought
Yet everywhere, in every region, there was nought
And yet, in all my travels I could only find
I have made love in normal and eccentric ways;
Nothing in all the universe is left for me,
In vain for peace.
He peered, and in the curtained realms of sleep
He sought the infinite in life, but now
In night.
A dreamer in eternity,
Who asked and answered in a breath
The air hung slumbrous in the drowsy heat,
And over the woods in ecstasy, and swelling
In lyric passion rose the piper’s song,
Above the bacchanal in the forest dwelling
With nymphs and girls in amorous Bacchic moods:
The rapturous music poured in lyric streams
In the glade.
I hear a moaning in the dreamless trees;
Where maidens swoon in midnight ecstasies;
There is a rush of hooves in the break of dawn;
You flare up in the all-consuming flame,
Specter, in swathings of sick scarlet clad,
You stain vermilion vipers in dank glades.
Swoons in the moonless olive grove;
Where flame greets flame in quenchless fire.
With bodies flashing in the sounding seas of foam,
A rapture in the night,
In the breathless, waiting morn;
With a rare old vintage mellowed in wood!
In search of vengeance for an ancient wrong
Inflicted by the gods in elder wars.
His cosmic challenge in an alien world.
And wander in far lands and seas, alone,
That in the later days a boy would come,
In Paphian gardens lost and ruinous.
Was there a goddess in the days of old,
Of lizard-gods in Jupiter,
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Fermented in a wizard’s tomb.
I have wandered in spirit,
I have dwelt in the palace
In your eyes, there is rapture
In your lips that were tender
In the soft, first capture.
In a madness it has perished,
Shall I wander in the hollows
Or be bathed in new glory,
All heaven smouldered in mysterious burning,
And blazed in beauty, deep on topless deep,
We buried her in the solemn fall
We shivered in the quiet air,
I sought it in far lands of timeless travel
I sought, but sought in vain.
And perished in the utmost cosmic tomb,
Long crumbled in primordial pre-time’s span;
In continents and islands that are sunken,
In constellations now to space-dust shrunken
And farther back, when worlds were in their dawning.
In void, in waste, in riddle never guessed,
In those mysterious lands and alien places
I sought not, nor in worlds that only seem
To be, I thought to find in nearer faces
In eerie borderlands I vainly waited
In shadow-ruled dominions darkly fated
I sought in maze of sorcery and bale;
And when in closer human haunts I tired,
Through all the space of worlds in time and spirit,
In search of something lost, but never near it;
In separate deaths, so long,
She walks in charm, adoring nature pleases
Her loveliness in poetry lies never.
Do light thoughts in a light heart dwell,
Should love be told in brede or breve?
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
In the years of the past, in the coming and passing of lovers and
love and the paths love has taken,
In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of the
future, the passions to waken,
Was the tribute then given in vain?
In a furnace of ecstasy whirled,
I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate,
meshed in the love thou hast sown,
There is a faint, far rapture of birds in the breathless beauty of dawn,
And the bitter sleep and the sadness have fled in a strange rebirth.
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft
luminous mist,
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I
The grasses with glimmering dew are jewelled in opal and amethyst,
In night’s eternal pall.
In search of closed escapes.
All things died in my black might,
Fourth was I in the coloured host,
All his great love will end in me,
In my design;
In whose oblivion we shall meet;
In the dark sea-grave.
In the streets now covered deep,
In the depths of gloomy murk:
In the distance sank the coast in the dank
“Greetings!” I cried but in the throng
And years of striving in one moment ended.
Unless in deeper love both are combined;
Then live! Live in this dual love, partake
In sunlight splendid meadows to awake.
And by your side, in beauty’s own rebirth
In your steps on the wakened ways of earth
Oh love consummate in the flesh and spirit,
To fulness in the drowsy summer noons,
Oh hearts encysted in supernal urning.
That has no counterpart in lands of time
And in her movements, languid charms abide.
In my tomb beneath the ground,
In my grave beneath my mound.
In dissolution’s rot. Around,
In my own decomposition. Thick white worms have lolled
I lie in my last sleep;
In ecstasy to reap
In dark liquescence. Mocking maggots peep
Their festful riot in my rotting heap.
Or in my dead flesh foul to float,
And rotten in each swelling pore,
In all the years by time begun,
And the stars in the drowning pools are pale.
In a fabulous land, in a fabulous time,
Not a creature lived in all the land,
And the little red eyes in the serpent’s head
Where it lived and ruled in the endless gloom,
The prehistoric huntsman in his grave,
Trapped in a crevice by great settling boulders.
In his hand a stone-pick; in his mummied eyes
In alien land, by night’s resounding vastness?
Lost in that dim dawn-age he died alone,
That tremble and fall in tide on foaming tide,
Sometimes in cool delight she floats on drifting weeds
The rush of waves that seek in vain
Till at last, in her caverned halls
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And sinks to sleep in a sounding shell.
The wind is wailing in the willow trees tonight;
The flitting figures gather in the pale moonlight
While creatures cower in their burrows, silent all,
Demonic revel holds dark, writhing forms in thrall,
They are curious things that hide in the woods
While scattered leaves in mildewed heaps
Like foam in a tempest scattered and thinned
She will go in the cold moonlight
To her tryst she will go in the night,
She will halt in a secret place
But she, in decadent fall,
And softly rises to rejoice in dawn;
Quiet hangs over all the world; in adoration
And in their solemn state
Of dwarfs in deep Lethean sands;
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
In my domain alone you’ll capture
For in the midnight hours, when sleep descends,
Holds me till in unending dooms I smother.
I seemed to sink in some huge cosmic pool.
And in a sea of purple shadows drowned.
Stray hands and heads that crawled; in nests I found
In swathes of softly searching sentient hair.
It rolled, and spun, and stopped in front of me,
It fell in parts, and I was part of it.
In darkness absolute, and listening hard,
The substance of it in the long ago.
Not woman, man, or child crawled in my lap.
A beak that, darting, closed me in its trap.
In that far, future time where I was fleeing
The hands that wrought it vanished in its power,
And I, though struggling, in that selfsame hour
Felt flesh dissolve in motes of silver tints
Oh little creature, lost in time and space,
As if there never were an end in store.
Vast wings were flapping in the night. I heard
What sight in later hours would haply greet
For in the talons I was fast immured.
As I remember, in my agony
The answer came, where I in torment lay,
Where vast, dark marbles stood in endless miles,
But when I passed and left them in their gloom,
Though singly impotent, might be in mass
And stare and stare in horror as I meet
By bathing me in streams of molten lead.
Would maggots in my starved, gaunt body loll
In all this hideous land the only soul.
My bloodprints in the dead sand marked my trail.
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I
They caught me in the wasteland in the west.
They caught me in the wasteland in the west.
The dark, walled city slowly came in view,
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
And in recurring deaths escape them never.
In that dark chamber, numb with terror, mute,
The unknown color hostile in pursuit
And I in all that solitude lie slain.
In silence absolute the lifeless land
Of bird and fish in nodules like a band
The waters mounted in one surge whose swell
Grew fainter in the silence of its grave;
I heard alone the surging tides in motion.
And in the fading vision of my sleep
I sink back in the pillows of my deep divan
And indolently languish in her languorous
Caresses, though I find slight joy in amorous
And lissome houris, gems and gold in many a measure,
But what is there in wealth? In treasure what but treasure?
I find no surcease in the unrelieving wine;
Rubies I yet will place in that jet hair above
I only find more ennui in philosophies,
Allah! the kneeling figures in devotion pray,
Enchantment grows in this soft after-nightfall noon,
From somewhere in the distance voices fall and swell,
Red roses in the overflowing wine.
Drink! Till you fall in your wine-full sleep!
Is only known in realms where dream-winds blow.
She has been swallowed in the years’ long flow.
I only know she died in Mytilene.
Duty, in her lips caressing!
I have awakened in the fevered midnight noon,
In the breathless rapture of the scented dreamful air;
In the mystical burning pallor of the moon
I walk in the steps where the Beloved and I held tryst;
For something unknown in the flamingly riotous masses
I am blind in the white embrace of the moon’s hot stream;
I find no rest in the passions with which I am shaken,
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
In gummy cloths of long and human hair.
Vast wings were flapping in the still night air;
And in the sky, there hung a baleful glare.
And tottered in a spreading pool of blood;
Enwrapped it in a steaming blood-red shroud:
And veiled the shrieking shape in haze that had
Red phantoms in its bleeding mystery hid.
In all infinity was left no place
Where Death in death all things did not immerse.
Rise in the pale starlight,
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101.2
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103.1
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
A music in the air,
Its voice in one vast song
Rippling the leaves that sleep in a moonless midnight noon.
In splendor of birth and dawning there where the worlds begin:
We have seen in the future time, and space, and the universe
creeping
Than any known in lands that never were,
And young Prince Charming rides in quest of her
That’s natural artifice in you; the way
Slow patterns in the air; the warm embrace
And I would let it in complete eclipse
If in your head or heart, there were not room
Delight in sudden vagaries of your mind.
In this sweet earthly house was not for sleeping
I answer—if they love me in my fashion,
In that bare wall where my fists wildly beat,
In Marmora.
A ruby flares in the glistening sky,
In the marble palace, gold dwarfs cry,
In Marmora.
In a marsh that even the water-snakes spurn,
In Marmora.
But the spell-bound half-beasts lie in their lairs
In Marmora.
In Marmora.
On its shore, mad emeralds burn in the brake,
In Marmora.
That dead body in the ooze.
Feet are ended in a fen—
An empress regnant in an empty tomb—
The thought of Wilde in Piccadilly,
She liked to don herself in raiment
Her own reflections in a mirror.
A paragon, except in virtue,
A beauty, save in soul and body,
In Wonderland; Rothenstein’s portraits done with malice
A single gardenia lies with delicate grace in
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
And they hide in eery lands where the fen-fires gleam.
I hear them in the grass when I am walking
I hear them in the rubble of defaced land
In heat of summer day or cold of winter snow;
I hear them in the meadows and in wasteland,
In all the silences that haunt a vacant room.
I hear them in the spring rise and in fall ways,
I hear them in the open and in hallways,
In love bespoken,
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111.6
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113.3
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I
In bond unbroken,
I am mist in midnight hollow,
I am dust in cosmic outways resting,
Of infant in the crib
I am instant lost in time,
I am atom lost in space,
In aeons closes
In endless deep
But once, for every soul in mosque, at sea, on sand
Past where, once seen, once open, close in no tomorrow,
The golden poppy glows in beauty with the light
And though all poppy seeds in final chaos scatter,
Quite to make it match in verse most anytime;
And to the students in my classes,
And in my greatest bliss I am
Quote scholars dead in Alfred’s time,
In their ideal, idyllic college,
And in this pedagogic cloister,
And perfect students, all in rhythm,
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
And rub out the granules of sleep in their eyes,
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
And they hide in eerie lands where the fen-fires gleam.
Emily Post, and thieves in state;
In front or behind,
Of oak the leaves fall in autumnal haze
Whose whisper in the quiet darkness? Why
Now in the mind come messages unspoken,
Inbetween
But inbetween; whose phosphorescent glow,
Incantation
Till thus, from incantation and invoking,
Incense Burn incense till the fragrant air is odorous,
Inch
And widening inch by inch along the floor
Increase Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
Increasing
Increasing, spreading more and ever more
Incubi And incubi avidly waiting to take
Indestructible
A savage, indestructible enemy.
Indolently
And indolently languish in her languorous
Induce Mobbed him to induce him;
Ineffable We shall love in our passion in strange and ineffable ways and
dissemble
Infant Of infant in the crib
Inferno Inferno, to the waves
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Infinite He sought the infinite in life, but now
Among the greater infinite he quests,
The luminous shadow of the infinite,
Infinity The guessless riddle of infinity.
Beyond the soaring clouds’ infinity;
In all infinity was left no place
Inflicted Inflicted by the gods in elder wars.
Inherit Of the gods, I inherit
That doth the icon and the dream inherit,
There is a room, Beloved, that you’ll inherit;
Inhuman
Yet twined around me with inhuman force.
Ink
Smooth is the liquid ink of the lake,
Inner
Of inner ecstasy and exaltation
And slowly paces to an inner hall,
A glow that develops and flows from the inner being
The inner beauty I more deeply care
Innocence
And thus preserved her innocence.
Insane As fearful as the haunts of the insane.
Insatiate And I was more insatiate with satiation,
Inscrutable
We have read inscrutable symbols on dim, dynastic pages,
Inspiring You have never been inspiring to my pen.
Instant I am instant lost in time,
Instead Ah, God, that I could draw instead of write,
Instead, they sound like Major Hooples
Instruction
Personal instruction.
Intended The years away intended, but for leaping
Intent What shape of evil? What its foul intent?
Interest Now no things interest me,
Intermingled
The gall that intermingled with the myrrh.
Into
Into the shadowland I made my way
Descending into midnight depths that lurked
Emerging into light from shadowed fanes,
And into more than light, to something wholly
Till beauty into perfect beauty swoons;
Like a mist that fades into sodden skies
And languid, warming into life; no dread
Engirt, and hurled me nightward into doom.
Into the moonlight, Cyrenaya, I would go
Intolerable
At her feet I have laid the tribute of a burning intolerable passion,
The intolerable sanctity of sin;
Intoxicate
I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate, meshed
in the love thou hast sown,
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I
With power he grew intoxicate,
Intoxicated
Intoxicated with thy loveliness,
Intoxicating
For one intoxicating night were mine.
Invade Sucking sounds invade the night,
Invading see Space-Invading
Invention
Peopled with ghosts of their invention,
Invisible And sprites invisible attend the meeting,
Invitations
That she had always invitations,
Invoking Till thus, from incantation and invoking,
Inward Curled inward, flowerwise. I stood before
From which a tongue curled inward to my lair,
Ironic I thought ironic laughter passed me by.
Irons
They clamped hot irons on my throbbing head;
Is
Is the voice of Beauty that dies.
Oh, spring is gone
And summer is fled,
And the wind is blowing cold.
Autumn is old
Oh, spring is gone
And summer is fled,
And the wind is blowing cold.
As Sappho of Lesbos was loved in the glory of Greece that is gone;
For a little while, our life is bright,
For a little while, there is light,
Life is the gift to a slave.
Is whispered by the sad wind sighing
The past is forgotten, its lips are dumb,
The tale is told of years of long ago.
But bitter is the end of love and man’s desire,
And I, who hold that Beauty is supreme,
But all is mute forevermore.
Though nothing visible is there
For all is dead, and all is still,
The song of life is but a tedious, bitter moan;
Nothing in all the universe is left for me,
Whose dream of old is gone
Is night.
A frantic whisper with the wind is blended
There is a rush of hooves in the break of dawn;
Pan is gone.
And find that what I thought so great is but
For ever his heart is filled with yearning,
But only and ever his flesh is burning,
And her body is bare.
The table is spread and the flagon red
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For the grape’s red juice there is just one use—
I do not know. There is an ache that fills
There is a language I would fain employ,
Is like the pure, sweet warbling of a bird,
How all my time is winnowed, leaving husks
Thy face is aureoled
Is such as gods impart
To the star that is fairest;
There is magic, there is splendor
In your eyes, there is rapture
Look homeward, angel, for the way is long.
Our thoughts will be more sad than death is
The fire is cold; no fuming censers flare;
So fair she is that beauty hath no graces
Her face is sweeter than those fabled places
Her step is lighter than the summer breezes
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Not always empty is a shell,
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent glory
and glow that relume thee,
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
Is it thine that shall weaken and wane?
As the stars are, my love is eternal.
And its death is the death of the world.
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of
soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
Is the rose to be withered and shrunken?
And the form that it covers is thine.
There is a faint, far rapture of birds in the breathless beauty of dawn,
There is a stir of wakening winds that whisper across the lawn.
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft
luminous mist,
The world is wondrously quiet, so quiet, prophetic of day,
And my heart is fulfilled of its dream as I walk my enchanted way.
He is mine.
But the gulf is cold
Is too exacting for man’s magistry,—
And of no emptiness is unforgetful.
All else is still the realm around,
Stained is the coffin floor
But now that time is gone of yore
Is it the willows shiver and sigh?
And the worm is king for eternity,
For the tale is the grave’s.
All her dreaming, raptured face is white,
022.7
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058.3
I
There is pressure on her blood-red lips,
No other form is near,
The wind is wailing in the willow trees tonight;
Is the dream as it dies.
The world is an opium-dream;
The world of which no tale is handed down.
It is not blessed sleep. It looms as hateful.
Your limbs, if limbs you have; nor is it clear
How strange. How strangely empty is the room.
This being’s face is soft, he shall not pass;
Why is it that I tremble, half afraid,
My hand? Why is my arm so strongly stayed?
But what is there in wealth? In treasure what but treasure?
But ennui still is mine.
Burn incense till the fragrant air is odorous,
Though none is lovelier
I know that nothing is worth while, all things are quite
Drink! For the flagon is full and deep!
Is only known in realms where dream-winds blow.
There is no picture of her dear dead face,
The hot, still air is sweet with heavy perfumes;
The garden is still with a fever that passes all name;
The monstrous spell of the night is an amorous cover
The Beloved is gone; I know not the way she has taken;
Life is a dream between two deaths; a blind
The dying wonder of the world that is,
And found, the one reality is Death.
And find, the one reality is Death.
And all that ever will be known, is Death.
Although my flesh with many knives is slit.
O Love, my world is pouring
Is it the glow so magically bringing
It is the blessing of a Druid’s prayer,
A wind from the spheres that through your shadowy hair is blowing
It is so strange, Beloved, that everything has blended
It is the ceaseless song that love began; unended,
We have found that only the dream is unchanging, O Love, and
eternal,
Is dreamland, out of Space and out of Time.
Oh love, it is enough that I may be
There is a room, Beloved, that you’ll inherit;
A counterpart of what is still to be?
Planks riddled through by worms, that he is wise
My mind, not heart, is now my soul’s true token.
For the grain that is reaped
Smooth is the liquid ink of the lake,
Is as the fall and rise of mist of myrrh.
Mysterious as her sunken palace is,
This is the Wedgwood she lifted, the saki she quaffed, her
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083.3
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096.17
096.24
096.25
096.51
096.67
098.6
099.4
099.10
101.7
101.17
101.18
101.26
102.1
102.7
102.13
102.15
102.20
103.4
109.33
110.11
110.15
111.7
111.9
111.11
112.15
113.14
114.13
118.1
118.10
120.6
120.8
123.8
125.21
127.5
127.12
129.1
202
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
She is new each time that their contents grow, lesser, and lesser.
Heretical eyes is casually hung on a chair;
The essence of her is here—but I wish she would hasten!
I hear them when no human voice is talking
But alas! Your name is Myrtle,
And other such-like things as that is
Which is better than all,
Earth and eternity. Is some voice calling?
Isdem And learn the use of “ge” and “isdem.”
Island Along the summit island lanes of shrubs and trees;
Islands In continents and islands that are sunken,
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
Isles
Her coral isles and shadowy pearls
Ispahan Delights of Ispahan.
Somewhere past Ispahan.
It
How it howls and whoops
How it wildly swoops
And it cries
As it stirs the dust
And bitter all the poison that it brings;
And still it seemed as if great Pan were calling
Was it a half-god or a satyr leaping
There came a sound: Was it a song of gladness
Or was it the old despairing cry of sadness
What did it matter a thousand years ago
What will it matter a thousand years from now
It slumbers deep beneath the fabled hills,
It lies where ashen lips no longer sing—
But everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
And saw it smile with fleshless, gaping lips,
A star they knew before it came.
In a madness it has perished,
I sought it in far lands of timeless travel
I have not found it sleeping or awaking.
I will not find it till all things shall cease,
In search of something lost, but never near it;
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent
glory and glow that relume thee,
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
Was it only for darkness to blind me,
Is it thine that shall weaken and wane?
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of
soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
Yet it seems that a veil rises slowly
And the form that it covers is thine.
It knew me not from all the rest,
Till darkness falls—it never will—
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129.15
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147.7
138.22
131.2
036.21
130.15
141.15
060.4
096.12
096.102
002.12
002.14
002.20
002.23
007.62
015.7
015.19
015.33
015.35
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026.5
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027.13
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029.13
030.44
033.22
036.1
036.57
036.58
037.4
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043.4
043.7
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043.33
043.36
049.20
055.17
I
Is it the willows shiver and sigh?
And it ruled alone.
Where it lived and ruled in the endless gloom,
Through its foul dead realm were it ever to squirm,
All it would find was a plump drowned rat
It reigned on its multiple thrones.
Like a creature unseen as it scurries and passes
Is the dream as it dies.
It is not blessed sleep. It looms as hateful.
Was it an hour? Eternity? A week?—
It rolled, and spun, and stopped in front of me,
It was my own; my own face showed that hue,
It watched me, waiting, while I stared as long
It fell in parts, and I was part of it.
Had I, although I knew on what it fed,
The substance of it in the long ago.
Burst; mindless, mewing as it tried to speak,
The hands that wrought it vanished in its power,
Your limbs, if limbs you have; nor is it clear
Make this your home for I will make it yours;
Aside. The flow turned toward me, and it kept
Now here, now there I fled; still on it swept.
Why is it that I tremble, half afraid,
It merely hinted of the coming week.
A glowing form, it drifted on a course
I must, for it arose, its mass dividing
No hint of what it once resembled, save
And everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
And still it followed, still I heard it gain
I saw it then, two trunks that fused as one,
And burning eyes along each limb. It spun
It lifted toward its dark, devouring lips.
Upon it nevermore to leave. I tried
They know that it will take me years to die,
At first I deemed it some mad nightmare-dream,
Enwrapped it in a steaming blood-red shroud:
Is it the glow so magically bringing
It is the blessing of a Druid’s prayer,
It is so strange, Beloved, that everything has blended
It is the ceaseless song that love began; unended,
Oh love, it is enough that I may be
There will be none with you to help you share it,
And it may be that you will find it lonely,
And it may be that you will find it fair;
And it may be that you will find it only
You will become? It seems so strange to me
The chance, the pattern, call it as one will,
Quite to make it match in verse most anytime;
And it only rhymes with turtle......
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057.12
057.14
057.15
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063.1
063.14
070.1
072.10
073.2
073.5
073.9
073.14
075.7
075.8
075.10
076.11
077.6
077.10
078.5
078.8
083.3
084.14
088.4
089.8
090.7
090.12
091.5
091.9
091.12
091.14
093.12
103.3
105.12
106.4
110.11
110.15
111.9
111.11
114.13
118.3
118.5
118.6
118.7
118.12
122.5
135.9
135.11
204
Its
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Who liked it above or below,
And its faintest breath
The past is forgotten, its lips are dumb,
And beauty passed unto its final perfect beauty,
Its white life away;
In its dearth;
The listening ear; its tones are softly heard
That brought to Mirtylon its doom,
And find its cosmic burial
Its equal can confess.
Through its valleys and its mountains
And the heart holds its ravage,
And its death is the death of the world.
With its drapery hiding all wholly,
And my heart is fulfilled of its dream as I walk my enchanted way.
Where its buried cities sleep
And its glory far was known,
Fronds from out its temples rise;
Of its cold sea-tomb.
Nor ever a hand caressed its fat;
Through its foul dead realm were it ever to squirm,
It reigned on its multiple thrones.
Some arrowed beast crept to its hillside fastness?
While its pale eyes kept watching patiently
I stroked the glistening webwork on its head.
A beak that, darting, closed me in its trap.
The hands that wrought it vanished in its power,
What nameless hunter searching for its meat?
Whence came that unknown color? Was its source
I must, for it arose, its mass dividing
And of its face no vestige could be seen,
And of its flesh the rotten remnants gave
That force demonic brought its eyes their sheen.
Its footsteps shuffling closer on the stone,
For I was its, that horror from the dead.
What shape of evil? What its foul intent?
It lifted toward its dark, devouring lips.
Its branches leafless, yet a budding hand
Grew fainter in the silence of its grave;
That feebly moved its pulpy, eyeless head.
By the breath of its shameless lips I am lightly kissed
Red phantoms in its bleeding mystery hid.
Oblivion had laid its deathless curse
Its voice in one vast song
We were present when space grew heavy with seeds of its own
spawning.
So lovely with its skin so fair; the grace
Yet would it be no Eden to entice.
Nor I desire it if it held not you;
144.2
002.17
004.68
007.35
009.8
009.12
028.6
030.18
030.39
032.10
033.1
033.34
043.24
043.35
044.8
047.4
047.14
047.22
057.10
057.13
057.14
057.20
059.10
073.3
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076.11
079.3
088.1
089.8
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090.6
090.8
090.13
090.14
091.2
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093.5
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101.8
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107.1
109.34
112.3
114.3
115.11
115.12
I
It’s
Itself
I’ve
Ivory
And I would let it in complete eclipse
Its superficial vesture whose arrays
And through its darkened window see no sky:
On the throne a king for its worm-queen pines
On its shore, mad emeralds burn in the brake,
Have seen the golden poppy spread its petals fair
I still have far to go, it’s late.
Or quite agree—it’s all the same; no virtues please
It’s the break of day,
It’s a quarter of twelve,
I know that death itself will never bring release;
Itself from horror at those eyes’ blind sheen.
Itself was lost beyond abysses of the night...
Me hope. I fell, though flesh itself be rent
Of death itself, there now was left no trace,
That I could picture worlds I’ve never known,
That I am weary though I’ve gone not far,
I close thee, pure and rare as ivory,
Jades exquisite, delicately carved ivory,
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125.22
134.5
067.52
096.64
143.4
143.10
013.30
029.8
034.15
091.7
107.3
025.2
050.5
008.6
096.14
J
Jaded
Jades
Janitors
Jar
Jars
Jasmine
Jasper
Jet
Jeweled
Now I am jaded with my long, complete excess;
Jades exquisite, delicately carved ivory,
The janitors would drip with knowledge,
Or any other words to jar ’em;
The flagons and bottles and jars that cover her dresser
Till jasmine, oleander, or full roses’ bloom
Of flowers and marvellous jasper and coral grasses
Rubies I yet will place in that jet hair above
And all the little jeweled blades of grass
Over the jeweled grass,
Jewelled The grasses with glimmering dew are jewelled in opal and amethyst,
Jewels Strange wondrous jewels and diadems
Strange wondrous jewels and diadems
Imbedded witches’ jewels mystical,
Bright jewels on the knowledge tree.
And think the words they drop are jewels.
Join
And I shall join thee, Myrrhiline,
Waiting, watching till I come and join them where,
That streamed to join the nothingness beyond.
Joining Joining your journey, brings our living light to hold you, guide you.
Journey Begins the journey long.
And listen always as I journey on alone.
Joining your journey, brings our living light to hold you, guide you.
Journey’s
Gifts that repaid our journey’s woes,
Joy
Youth and Song and Joy;
Let us have joy while we may;
When thou thy pleasure and joy art taking,
Pass, with all joy that passes,
The vanished joy
And every sound a thing of lyric joy.
Great joy he had.
From each of us he took his joy,
The vanished joy
Though they, with cruel joy, had given me
Caresses, though I find slight joy in amorous
Drink! For the joy of the winking wine!
Drink! For the sheer great joy of drinking!
Joyful
The city rang with joyful call
Joys
For pleasures and joys that she knows not, for a new and monstrous
delight;
More crazed by all the amorous joys thereof;
And all love’s joys that were.
013.25
096.14
138.20
137.12
129.9
096.26
101.24
096.47
082.3
109.10
044.6
012.24
067.24
127.8
137.18
138.2
004.43
006.23
076.14
146.7
096.96
131.16
146.7
049.26
004.30
004.50
005.5
009.13
012.33
028.4
046.8
046.37
067.33
084.12
096.11
098.2
098.7
049.2
003.18
007.26
096.54
J
Juice
Jupiter
Just
Joys that pass and youth too fleet,
For the grape’s red juice there is just one use—
Of lizard-gods in Jupiter,
Are like the secret pools of Jupiter.
Just presences, unseen, unknown
For the grape’s red juice there is just one use—
He had dreams and thoughts of just
Than that just passed held sweeter, fuller dowers;
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030.6
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022.7
046.15
115.8
K
Keep
For we would keep the pleasure and the torment burning,
Only fishes keep a seeming
At me and slyly chuckle while they keep
You’ve come again. You keep me company here,
To keep me company lest I go mad:
Will atom keep
Keeper I am wastrel, never keeper,
Keeping Surely this beauty was not meant for keeping
Kept
And on the wind the strange, low notes kept failing
My dreaming eyes kept searching, seeking, staring
While its pale eyes kept watching patiently
Aside. The flow turned toward me, and it kept
Kill
That fell, all Mandrikor to kill.
Killed The things that mirthful wizards killed
Kind
I am the huntsman of each fleeing kind,
“Miss Shere, are you a kind person?”
King
see also Worm-King
And the worm is king for eternity,
A king who saw but used no eyes for seeing,
For Death the Conqueror at last was king;
On the throne a king for its worm-queen pines
Kingdom What though one kingdom each of you forsake,
A phantom of a kingdom of no sound.
Great wealth have I, a kingdom own, with palaces for pleasure,
KingdomsUpon his fallen kingdoms, God had died.
Kingly Await thy kingly head.
Await your kingly head.
Kings
Of buried kings, and empires perilous;
Have seen the fall of many kings,
Kiss
The passion-born kiss and caress of my maddening desire;
And I shall kiss thy warm, soft lips
A maiden’s kiss
She has yielded to the kiss of night,
For you, or for one kiss from your soft lips.
Kissed By the breath of its shameless lips I am lightly kissed
Kisses see also Fever-Kisses
Her lips and her face and her breasts, all her body I will cover with
kisses,
And drink her kisses as a priceless wine?
And if your kisses, like most kisses, mean not love,
Kissing Made for love, made for kissing;
Kneeling Allah! the kneeling figures in devotion pray,
Knees Especially when their knees are pretty.
007.13
047.19
054.40
077.2
103.12
133.66
133.34
119.1
015.5
036.31
073.3
078.5
010.16
030.47
133.3
139.1
057.19
076.5
107.9
125.19
051.31
053.20
096.13
107.14
012.16
067.16
026.11
030.10
003.6
004.73
016.4
058.1
115.14
101.8
003.13
027.7
096.46
100.2
096.80
138.8
K
Knell
see also Death-Knell
Time has tolled a solemn knell,
From sunken cities rose the solemn knell.
Knells That beat the air to frenzy, dirges, knells.
Knew
For well we knew the holy night must have an ending,
A star they knew before it came.
But we turned too late and we knew our fate
It knew me not from all the rest,
Antistrophes that seven before him knew,
The head most strangely seemed like one I knew;
Had I, although I knew on what it fed,
For my escape I knew what I must pay:
Who knew why Romans didn’t rhyme,
Only do we who knew you feel the source,
Knives Although my flesh with many knives is slit.
Knocked I knocked upon the portal till with clang
Knoll
I saw the whispering knoll.
Upon the whispering knoll.
Knotted see Deep-Knotted
Knotty Of knotty burls along the trunk, and clung
Know
In my arms I will hold her, passive, but I know her flesh will be
aching
Thou art loveliest of the things I know;
Enigmatic regions that no eye can know,
No more, no more I know the fierce desire of woman,
All things that thou wouldst know.
Abysmal secrets, monstrous mysteries, I know;
I know that death itself will never bring release;
He walks where none can know or see,
I do not know. There is an ache that fills
I know this all I ever will be knowing:
For we will know how love
Her garments only know what curves and hollows
So few the days, so much that one could know,
All things that you would know.
Death: We will. We will, and I know when.
For what, I did not know, yet tense, on guard
Changing and new, so hard to know, to trace.
I know that I’ll by them be watched for ever
I know that nothing is worth while, all things are quite
To heart’s desire that only I and Allah know,
Sing, for too soon, too long, thy mouth shall know no singing.
Her eyes are blind; her sweet white limbs but know
I know not whether she was slave or queen;
I only know she died in Mytilene.
The Beloved is gone; I know not the way she has taken;
They know that it will take me years to die,
I scarce could know the evil that I did;
I know there are no princesses, but you
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073.1
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086.3
138.12
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103.4
081.1
045.4
045.20
093.9
003.17
004.40
006.14
007.55
012.42
013.22
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014.9
027.9
036.63
039.5
041.11
050.1
067.42
067.55
074.3
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087.13
096.67
096.100
097.5
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103.3
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Love comes. I know that I shall never be
Content to know the image of the dream,
And you will never know what years drift by.
And waited, wondered, though I did not know...
Or know the song
Where none could know or share.
Though I know that you are pretty,
I know all Latin stems and nouns,
The authors’ names I know by rote,
They also ought to know their Caesar,
“I beg your pardon, I don’t know you.”
Alone know why,
There was a young woman I know
As you begin your final travel, know
I take the bridgeway you already know.
Knowing Till she lie in ecstasy knowing and desiring her sisterhood;
Worship thee, knowing that I only dream.
And knowing that my quest at last must falter
I know this all I ever will be knowing:
I stumbled onward, knowing I must fail,
With wonder past all knowing,
I am awed, O Love, at knowing this mystery,
An emptiness not knowing you are there.
Knowledge
With knowledge of the carrion
Till memory slowly came, and knowledge grew,
Bright jewels on the knowledge tree.
The janitors would drip with knowledge,
Known Has man known the terrible glory of woman as I;
As thou hast never known;
I took the usual pleasures known to all mankind;
And I have had terrific grief, and known the cry
That I could picture worlds I’ve never known,
Have known the fungi of the moon,
And thou hast known the azure mist
And its glory far was known,
Of the splendor known no more,
As you have never known,
Is only known in realms where dream-winds blow.
And all that ever will be known, is Death.
We are deathless, O Love, and deific; we have known the wonder
supernal:
Than any known in lands that never were,
And more for beauty, only known to me.
Knows For pleasures and joys that she knows not, for a new and
monstrous delight;
The sum of all man knows, the sum of all
Who knows when I first began?
Kohl
The kohl that shades your eyes, your breasts with henna tipped,
113.9
113.11
118.4
122.8
133.71
134.6
135.4
137.3
137.5
137.23
139.2
143.8
144.1
146.2
147.14
003.30
008.14
036.15
036.63
085.13
109.25
110.5
118.8
030.31
073.4
137.18
138.20
003.38
012.2
013.13
013.23
025.2
030.2
030.17
047.14
047.18
067.2
099.4
102.20
112.13
113.3
116.14
003.18
102.16
133.58
096.44
L
La
And La Illaha illa Allah! M’hamed rasul
Labors As all the years of Hercules’ great labors,
Labyrinth
You, and you leave the aimless labyrinth
Labyrinths
To chart the labyrinths of long assailing;
Through trackless labyrinths more dark and deep,
Lace
On her brow the moonbeams lie as lace,
Lacked She said she lacked experience;
Lacking All lacking, and all gain.
Ladies With scholastic ladies,
Lady
My lady hath two lovely lips,
Lagoon The mandrakes moaned along the black lagoon,
By a cypress-veiled lagoon.
Laid
At her feet I have laid the tribute of a burning intolerable passion,
Laid bare the mystery of the vast sea-tomb,
Oblivion had laid its deathless curse
Lain
Beautiful youths have long lain dead
Lair
Part human creatures creeping from their lair.
From which a tongue curled inward to my lair,
Would seize their prey and seek their cosmic lair?
Lairs
As I went onward toward those upper lairs.
But the spell-bound half-beasts lie in their lairs
Lake
Smooth is the liquid ink of the lake,
I hear them by the lake shore and at cliffs of stone;
Land
No traveler crosses now the land,
They passed the land where flowers gnaw
She scans the shadows of her land,
In a fabulous land, in a fabulous time,
Not a creature lived in all the land,
In alien land, by night’s resounding vastness?
In all this hideous land the only soul.
In silence absolute the lifeless land
I hear them in the rubble of defaced land
Of unknown timeless land;
Lands see also Outer-Lands
Of all my spectral lands,
And wander in far lands and seas, alone,
Have travelled lands Hesperian,
I sought it in far lands of timeless travel
In those mysterious lands and alien places
That has no counterpart in lands of time
Of all my timeless lands,
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Lanes
Language
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Than any known in lands that never were,
The lands no traveller ever found on earth;
And they hide in eery lands where the fen-fires gleam.
And they hide in eerie lands where the fen-fires gleam.
Seaweed fills deserted lanes;
The lanes where hopeful virgins tumbled.
Along the summit island lanes of shrubs and trees;
There is a language I would fain employ,
Languid The willow branches’ languid tendrils sank,
And in her movements, languid charms abide.
And languid, warming into life; no dread
Me, and I sicken with the languid unsurcease
Languish
And indolently languish in her languorous
Languorous
And indolently languish in her languorous
Are languorous with dreams of mighty doom,
Lantern Deserted city streets, and fog, and lantern glow.
Lap
Not woman, man, or child crawled in my lap.
Larger Now wherefor do you make this larger room
Last
All night I dreamed the one long night would last for ever,
And now at last I crown me with a coronal
At last are wise
A last, wild note from the distant hills comes drifting—
He stood at last before the citadel
Until the last oblivion.
Whence the last birds are winging?
And knowing that my quest at last must falter
I gave him the pall of Death’s last blight,
I lie in my last sleep;
Till at last, in her caverned halls
And when at last my captors bore me through
How glad I was that I at last awoke!
For Death the Conqueror at last was king;
My life-illusion has at last been broken,
Lasting Your soul’s desire, all lasting rapture,
Lasts
And no love lasts if love be only mind,
Late
But we turned too late and we knew our fate
I still have far to go, it’s late.
Lately That tremble and shiver with passions that lately were?
Later
Lo, all the later days are long and dull and weary,
That in the later days a boy would come,
To perish when my later footsteps came;
What sight in later hours would haply greet
Building on to what goal later,
Latest Her latest lover’s love was such
Latin
I know all Latin stems and nouns,
And any Latin phrase can quote,
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L
Laugh Her laugh was like a silver bell.
Laughing
And all the laughing nymphs that make earth fair;
Laughing, she flashes down the shifting tides of green,
Laughter For song and laughter, now the wind’s regret;
Sunlight and seawind, laughter, song.
Sunlight and seawind, laughter, song....
There will spring no laughter
Their enigmatic laughter filled the aisles;
I thought ironic laughter passed me by.
That saw her but heard neither her voice nor her laughter.
Laurel Crowned thrice with cypress, endless times with laurel,
Laves
Or rests where an ocean current laves
Lawn
No gleam illumes the hoofprints on the lawn.
There is a stir of wakening winds that whisper across the lawn.
She will rest on the lawn;
Lay
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
And so I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night in worship and in love I lay;
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
Till the engines failed and we lay there gaoled
The sun lay warm along our way,
The sun lay warm along our way.
Until my dead flesh stirred. I only lay,
The answer came, where I in torment lay,
I found no door, and when all hope lay dead
There lay a bed of shells and bones; I spied
And naked lay the true design, the trick.
Lead
And the skies are lead,
By bathing me in streams of molten lead.
Leaden Discovering there an equal leaden hue,
Leaf
Liliths look beyond the sketchbook’s leaf,
I am awed that flower and forest and leaf be shaken
Leafless Its branches leafless, yet a budding hand
Leafy
A leafy light and shadow-patterned heliation
League Caught me with safety but a league away.
Leagues For many a thousand leagues around
Of purple leagues, violet hippogriffs
Lean
With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
Leap
I feel the worms that leap
Leaping Was it a half-god or a satyr leaping
From the dust of forgotten worlds to whole new systems leaping
The years away intended, but for leaping
Learn
And learn the use of “ge” and “isdem.”
Learned Expound a learned fourth dimension
Learning Such dazzling stores of useless learning!
Least
Even the least. Beauty must die.
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Leave
Leaven
Leaves
Leaving
Led
Leered
Leering
Left
Leg
Legend
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
All the least lines that spelled
Leave them to enchantment where you left them lingering
To capture moods that change or leave;
Yet do you leave the dark and lonely waste
You, and you leave the aimless labyrinth
Upon it nevermore to leave. I tried
And leave behind me all the weary works of man,
Farewell, good friend. You leave us now. And yet,
And the lotus of their leaven,
Or the rustle of leaves that drift with the wind,
The dry dead leaves
Die, with the leaves that drift
But fulness leaves no unassuaged desires,
While scattered leaves in mildewed heaps
Or vanishing leaves that drift off with the wind,
Rippling the leaves that sleep in a moonless midnight noon.
Of oak the leaves fall in autumnal haze
Drifting as leaves but urgent with a force
How all my time is winnowed, leaving husks
Leaving the night more luminous than light of the moon;
Past them the leopards led me on and on
He leered so vilely, Horror could not save
The leering of a huge and sightless eye.
Leave them to enchantment where you left them lingering
For none are left the tale to tell.
Nothing in all the universe is left for me,
Wherein no seed nor any fruit are left,
We left her staring at the musty pall,
And left her lovely body to oblivion;
We left her far more quiet body lying there:
We left no mark to show her grave,
We only left her body lying still and deep;
We left her only to the waiting earth that gave
But when I passed and left them in their gloom,
They left me morsels, curious and queer,
They left to me my eyes, so I could stare
They left me also rotten corpses there
And then they left me, lonely. lying where
Of death itself, there now was left no trace,
In all infinity was left no place
Means ditched by your girl and left by your friend,
I found my leg become a hellish root,
Where legend prophesied divinity,
The legend saith: for each, the golden poppy blooms
The legend saith: for each, nepenthe follows sorrow,
The legend saith: when each lone traveller passes by,
To poppy legend olden.
The legend saith: wherefor does any legend matter?
Upon my tomb, this legend bold:
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L
Legends Heard legends not by earthly voices told,
Legions By the legions of the pest.
Legs
Breast tip a vine; the striding legs for feet
Leman A reveller creeps where his leman sleeps—
Lend
So shalt thou thy beauty lend
Length At length all motion ceased, upon a crag.
Lengthen
Enough, while drowsy minutes lengthen to hours golden,
Lengthening
The swart hand crawled, through mid-air lengthening,
Lent
Until I stumbled. Fear no longer lent
Leopards Quick to my side two black, sleek leopards sprang
Past them the leopards led me on and on
Lesbian Rose and fell and rose through all the Lesbian night;
She lies where the Lesbian poppies nod,
Lesbos As Sappho of Lesbos was loved in the glory of Greece that is gone;
Less
And the living walked less like men
And weary drag of minutes grows less dolorous,
And life less like a tomb.
Lesser She is new each time that their contents grow, lesser, and lesser.
Lesson With each lesson came complete
Lessons Would chant their perfect lessons with ’m.
Lest
Lest dawn and barren ashes enter in.
I turned on stealthy step lest something hear me.
To keep me company lest I go mad:
Let
Then let us love tonight,
Let us have joy while we may;
Let us give over ourselves to delight,
Let us forget the passing of years,
Let us forget vain sorrow and tears
So let us love, Myrrhiline,
To the host! Clink! Clink! Let the glasses chink!
Let one long, lingering note through night come stealing,
And I would let it in complete eclipse
Lethal By cryptic tarns aglow with lethal flame,
Lethal waters sleep and swoon
Lethean Of dwarfs in deep Lethean sands;
Of dwarfs in deep Lethean sands;
Lichens Where lichens creep on crumbled fanes
Lidded see Heavy-Lidded, Smoky-Lidded
Lids
Behind the amber lids they dimly dream,
Lie
Till she lie in ecstasy knowing and desiring her sisterhood;
Thou shalt lie.
Lie only shards of that dread doom
The roses, crushed, lie scattered everywhere;
Six feet deep I lie;
I lie in my last sleep;
On her brow the moonbeams lie as lace,
Whatever on the other side should lie,
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And I in all that solitude lie slain.
And all around, the weary corpses lie;
But the spell-bound half-beasts lie in their lairs
Lies
And all the beauty of that night now lies decaying,
She lies where the Lesbian poppies nod,
It lies where ashen lips no longer sing—
Unknown what goal, if any goal, lies yonder
Her loveliness in poetry lies never.
Mark where dead Atlantis lies
Lies upon the dead drowned men.
Six feet deep my corpse lies, drowned
The dust of centuries lies on her head;
No voice remains to tell me where she lies,
Surely the loveliness that men say lies
She hated all lies, save her own,
A single gardenia lies with delicate grace in
Life
Even as Song and Life and Love,
Beauty and Love and Life must die,
For a little while, our life is bright,
Life is the gift to a slave.
And weariness of life oppresses me;
Its white life away;
The song of life is but a tedious, bitter moan;
He sought the infinite in life, but now
Monotony of life an empty show?
And farther still when life was yet to come,
No life or mind or trace of vanished lore,
With wine of life.
Wine of life and of death I have drunken,
And crystal clear, of life and love and rapture,
But they whose life was barren are most fretful,
Symbol of beauty, love, and life, and healing,
But phantoms; life and death part each of other;
And languid, warming into life; no dread
Of aimless life, of aimless death. Long since
With love, and life, and death, and even with ennui;
And life less like a tomb.
Live riotously, ere thy life for death be traded,
Life is a dream between two deaths; a blind
Are merely words that mean no more than life.
The sum of hope and faith and life, the sum
Upon all things of life and time and space;
Not anywhere was life nor anything,
I am all life that springs anew,
His life, his love, his song;
For they are life and love to me,
Finding that life from end to end
Life-Illusion
My life-illusion has at last been broken,
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L
Lifeless Weird, lifeless birds that talked and harshly sang.
What followed me across the lifeless plain?
In silence absolute the lifeless land
Lifeless Else beauty were as lifeless as a tomb.
Life’s
In life’s dead close;
Lifetime Beyond the lifetime of the sun.
Lift
He who may lift the spell, and yet I seem
Nor lift a burden from my crumpled shoulders;
Lifted
It lifted toward its dark, devouring lips.
And from those giant caverns’ lifted gloom
This is the Wedgwood she lifted, the saki she quaffed, her
Lifts
She lifts her young faun face to greet the flushing sky, bids
Light
For a little while, there is light,
He strove to bring a light.
For ever mounting past the realm of light,
Do light thoughts in a light heart dwell,
Do light thoughts in a light heart dwell,
So little light, so many corridors,
Emerging into light from shadowed fanes,
And into more than light, to something wholly
With soft, light golden limbs to dance and follow,
Oh light that never shone for me one ray,
Never a light to mark the trail
A leafy light and shadow-patterned heliation
And when my steed permitted me to light,
And light that never shone
And illumines with mystical light the eyes unseeing.
Leaving the night more luminous than light of the moon;
When light shone out of the mystical ebb and flow:
The fall of footsteps light and pantherine
The golden poppy glows in beauty with the light
Joining your journey, brings our living light to hold you, guide you.
Lighter Her step is lighter than the summer breezes
Lighting Lighting swamps and tarns unholy
Lightly There touches his body lightly a shiver,
She slumbers lightly here,
By the breath of its shameless lips I am lightly kissed
And wood-winds lightly grieve
Lights see also Witch-Lights
The Northern Lights crept down with pulsing streamers
That glowed with fitful lights, and each one starred
Like
see also Rat-Like, Such-Like
Like the voice of a wind that shivers and passes
Like the pain in a passionate note
Like the voiceless cry
Like a perishing star,
Like the wind, and the trees, and the rain,
Like the rows of poppies scattered and thinned,
Like a mist that fades in the sodden skies
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Liked
Lilies
Liliths
Lily
Limb
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond shall
not sever
Is like the pure, sweet warbling of a bird,
Where night was like a shroud before an altar
Like a priest at a shrine I adore thee,
Like a drinker of chloral I dream,
Like a flame, like a splendor supernal,
And conceals like a curtain the shrine,
I crawled like one impelled on ways resisted,
My royal robes like a purple ghost
Yet we like a woman came to cloy.
And the living walked less like men
Are these shadows, now, like finger-tips,
Like all his deeds, his very name unknown,
Like a creature unseen as it scurries and passes
Like the ghost of an echoing note
Like the rustle of small
Like the sound of the sea or the rain,
Like foam in a tempest scattered and thinned
Like a mist that fades into sodden skies
The head most strangely seemed like one I knew;
A metal titan shapen like a cone,
A tolling like a myriad decibels
Made mutterings that sounded like low glee.
Those glittering swords that shone like splintered glass,
The sun stared on me like a blood-red eye,
Like me uncertain of their final fate
Of bird and fish in nodules like a band
The tolling came like measures for a spell.
And life less like a tomb.
And if your kisses, like most kisses, mean not love,
The heavens like a dead, colossal hearse
Like cardinal numbers adding without end;
For I give love like sips of precious wine
Are like the secret pools of Jupiter.
Her laugh was like a silver bell.
Like a steak half roasted there.
Instead, they sound like Major Hooples
She liked the texture of a lily,
She liked to don herself in raiment
Who liked it above or below,
Where the lilies bloom above;
Orchids, lilies grow exotic in these drawings,
Only spectral lilies grow
Liliths look beyond the sketchbook’s leaf,
see also Tiger-Lily
Lily and poppy and rose are gone,
She liked the texture of a lily,
And burning eyes along each limb. It spun
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L
Limbed see White-Limbed
Limbs There where the gnarled limbs twisted
Though ye colours pass, though his limbs be fleet,
With soft, light golden limbs to dance and follow,
Your limbs, if limbs you have; nor is it clear
Until, my shaking limbs grown weak, I stepped
To limbs alive with wormlike, writhing fur,
Her eyes are blind; her sweet white limbs but know
Limited Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Limits Within the limits of his nose,
Line
see Pipe-Line
Lineaments
My own the lineaments that seemed to be
Lines
With mad new colours and queer lines I’d trace
All the least lines that spelled
Linger Yea, all the barren years that linger in their passing,
That we who linger here will not forget, can not forget
Lingering
Leave them to enchantment where you left them lingering
Let one long, lingering note through night come stealing,
Lipped see Poppy-Lipped
Lips
Her lips and her face and her breasts, all her body I will cover with
kisses,
Her eyes will close at my lips on the feverish brow above;
Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips
be ashen,
Her lips with my lips, her passionate body with mine I shall cover
Thy lips that in the midnight burn,
Yea, thy lips that softly smile,
The lips of the singers of Greece are still,
The past is forgotten, its lips are dumb,
And I shall kiss thy warm, soft lips
With lips that to thine own lips burn,
With lips that to thine own lips burn,
The lips of her of Troy,
The soft, red lips? The shadowy eyes?
THE POET (wildly): I yield! I yield! Thy lips, Oh Death!
To pagan Pan their passionate lips were singing
With breasts of fire, and passionate lips to slake,
Her body and her rose-red lips to mine,
It lies where ashen lips no longer sing—
And saw it smile with fleshless, gaping lips,
In your lips that were tender
There is pressure on her blood-red lips,
The lips of Egypt, Troy,
It lifted toward its dark, devouring lips.
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Of your bright lips, all pleasure that your flesh possesses,
Love, ere thy lips dead lips alone adore.
Drink! For the red-stained lips of your lover!
My lady hath two lovely lips,
Duty, in her lips caressing!
By the breath of its shameless lips I am lightly kissed
For the soft flowers awaiting the lips of the lover
Of lips too tender; your precise array.
For you, or for one kiss from your soft lips.
Lips parting and closing over the draught her
Liquescence
In dark liquescence. Mocking maggots peep
Liquid Smooth is the liquid ink of the lake,
Lissome And lissome houris, gems and gold in many a measure,
List
Where, drowsy and drunken and dreaming, nod and list
Listen I merely listened, as I listen still,
I listen, but I do not hear them fall,
And listen always as I journey on alone.
Listened I merely listened, as I listen still,
We listened to the strange rain
We listened to these strange tall dreams
Listening
The listening ear; its tones are softly heard
In darkness absolute, and listening hard,
Listless Away, and listless hours voluptuously flaunting
Lit
Skeins of fluctuant color, lit
Stared at my own dead eyes unearthly lit.
Lithe
Where the little lithe worm still tumbles and crawls,
With the lithe Persian,
Little
A little while,
For a little while, our life is bright,
For a little while, there is light,
To watch a little creature pick
So little, yet to do so well,
So little light, so many corridors,
And the little red eyes in the serpent’s head
Where the little lithe worm still tumbles and crawls,
Where the trees form a little dark room:
Oh little creature, lost in time and space,
Oh little creature, whether old or young,
Oh little creature, here’s a tale of doom....
Unto my feet a little trickle crept
And all the little jeweled blades of grass
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The little gods dream an apocalyptic dream;
The little gods sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
The little gods hide where the fen-fires gleam.
The little gods then will tremble and waken
The little gods will answer their elders and rise.
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L
The little gods will walk from hill and from highlands,
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The little gods dream their apocalyptic dream;
Littler I watched on earth the littler things around;
Live
We shall live in a rapturous embrace, in an endless and holy
Only now do we live.
You only live when all worth living’s lost.
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul such
a madness and fury will sweep?
Then live! Live in this dual love, partake
Then live! Live with the green, lush trees returning
Live with all things of earth and airy splendor,
Live riotously, ere thy life for death be traded,
A million million men will live and pass,
Still live a hundred years ago,
Lived
I lived whole cycles of existence; I am wise;
That once a poet lived and loved and died,
And they who merely lived are first to sigh:
There lived and there ruled on a crumbling throne
Not a creature lived in all the land,
Where it lived and ruled in the endless gloom,
A million million men have lived and passed,
We have lived through cycles of birth and change, through cosmic
ages,
Livid
Of desolation and the livid dead,
Beneath twin moons of livid red.
Living I hold all her body a beautiful living white chalice
Living in their silence secrets whence no whisper
And the living walked less like men
Along the walls dwelt living mummies, bound
The strange cocoon, not living yet nor dead
And there were living, ancient mummies bound
Blessed be the living for they will be dead.
From the fury of living.
I am the master of each living thing,
Joining your journey, brings our living light to hold you, guide you.
Living’s You only live when all worth living’s lost.
Lizard-Gods
Of lizard-gods in Jupiter,
Lo
Lo, all the later days are long and dull and weary,
Load
I come, weary yet bearing still this load.
Loathing
With thorns of loathing on a fevered brow?
Locked Locked fast with that hypnotic sun.
Logs
Rise from half-decaying logs
Loins
Over his loins his deep eyes rove.
Loll
Would maggots in my starved, gaunt body loll
Lolled In my own decomposition. Thick white worms have lolled
Lone
Through lone
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222
Lonely
Long
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
The legend saith: when each lone traveller passes by,
Desolate, lonely, and far,
And now I cry aloud unto the lonely spaces,
A lonely traveler on another star;
The lonely, lovely sea-maidens call,
Winging your vast way lonely and alone
Yet do you leave the dark and lonely waste
Where breakers and lonely waters roar,
Desolate, lonely, and far
And then they left me, lonely. lying where
And it may be that you will find it lonely,
Oh, the nights are long
And the long nights near
Oh, the nights are long
And all the long night her body to mine I shall press;
Beautiful youths have long lain dead
The years of the past have long since flown,
In their hidden othertime long fled.
Beckoning to rites forgotten long ago:
But all night long we worshipped at our pagan altar,
Yea, love and more than love were all the long night’s portion,
All night I dreamed the one long night would last for ever,
Lo, all the later days are long and dull and weary,
The tale is told of years of long ago.
Forget, with the long, final forgetting
The years have passed, yet each long year in passing brings
Now I am jaded with my long, complete excess;
When down the hillside came a long, low crying,
All night long.
For a promised trysting, a god long due, she yearns,
Beyond the rocks there are fair bodies with long tresses,
Of Time and Space, and strode upon his long
To tell of pomp and splendour long unknown,
And bound me with long coils of dusky gold?
And I, who long for fairer melodies
With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
To chart the labyrinths of long assailing;
With scrutiny of systems long forgotten,
Long crumbled in primordial pre-time’s span;
So long, so far, so distant have you flown
Look homeward, angel, for the way is long.
In separate deaths, so long,
So long ago.
Each drunken reveller has long since gone;
For a long and mystic sleep
Let one long, lingering note through night come stealing,
Death: Not long, not long....
He wins the long awaited separation
Where peasants till starved earth and long dead ground.
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L
It watched me, waiting, while I stared as long
The substance of it in the long ago.
Of aimless life, of aimless death. Long since
On long, metallic clang, the brazen door
With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
To every branch. The tree had long since died,
Than you. I have drained all delights from long impresses
Begins the journey long.
Sing, for too soon, too long, thy mouth shall know no singing.
The maid I love was buried long ago;
She has been swallowed in the years’ long flow.
In gummy cloths of long and human hair.
Out of the night, there came a shrill long scream,
So long as there was never danger;
They sleep a long sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
They sleep a long sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
Long-Dead
Long-dead creatures murmur and sigh
Longer It lies where ashen lips no longer sing—
And longer ways before you yet to wander
Until I stumbled. Fear no longer lent
Longer blinder
Longing Her eyes with longing, her face with fever burns;
Longings My mind with longings for some ancient thing,
Look
Liliths look beyond the sketchbook’s leaf,
Look homeward, angel, for the way is long.
And I look on with clearer, colder eyes,
Looked But everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
And then I turned, and looked within your eyes,
I looked across the great plain warily.
And everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
Loom
For beauty of the mind, where, as on a loom
Loomed Where writhing trees loomed tall to shroud the sky,
Fantastic shapes and forms loomed everywhere
Looms It is not blessed sleep. It looms as hateful.
Loosened
And when the talons loosened, I could see
Looted And looted fields;
Lord
A music-maker, lord of sorcery.
Lordly Not a thing disputed the lordly worm
Lore
I shall teach her the lore of Venus till all her sweet body tremble,
No life or mind or trace of vanished lore,
Lose
Shall lose all Beauty in the end,
Lost
Sorrowing and sorrowing for lost days golden,
Lost amid their dreamlands, your captured phantoms dream.
You only live when all worth living’s lost.
In Paphian gardens lost and ruinous.
And haunting as some fabulous lost stream,
Shall even as my lost days be foredone,
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224
Lostly
Lotus
Loud
Love
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Itself was lost beyond abysses of the night...
Where only courage of lost hope could ravel
In search of something lost, but never near it;
You will come back to me, lost lover,
You will come back some day, lost lover,
Anguish of some lost thing’s cry or call
We were won and lost of a mad young boy.
Lost Atlantis slumbers deep,
Lost Atlantis slumbers well
Before we had lost the shore.
The face was lost and I had guessed
Lost in that dim dawn-age he died alone,
Oh little creature, lost in time and space,
As of a lost and hungry child. Then die
Were errors that have lost their hold on me.
I am instant lost in time,
I am atom lost in space,
Restoring all things lost and small things broken.
And phantoms that seemed hopelessly and lostly
And the lotus of their leaven,
There was a sound, gigantically loud,
Of our love.
We shall love in our passion in strange and ineffable ways and
dissemble
As the amorous maidens were loved in decadent Rome I shall
love her,
Never has woman been loved as I shall love her, never
Even as Song and Life and Love,
Even as one who loves thee, Love,
By the girls they gave their love.
Beauty and Love and Life must die,
Then let us love tonight,
So let us love, Myrrhiline,
Yea, we would love till all our senses swoon;
That love and passion weary all too soon.
And all the love and wondrous beauty of my beloved
The beauty, terror, and the pain of love.
Yea, love and more than love were all the long night’s portion,
All night in worship and in love I lay;
But Time will pass, and Love will pass, and all Love’s pleasure,
The years and love are gone, and thou art gone, beloved,
But bitter is the end of love and man’s desire,
All things that thou dost love,
I have made love in normal and eccentric ways;
The love of girls more strange on stranger stars I won;
Love and wine.
Love, and Death are born.
And how my love that burns herein so deep
For we will know how love
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L
For love, the dell where hired maenads moan.
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Has love become an aquarelle?
Should love be told in brede or breve?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast brought
me this feverous love to consume me,
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
For a love that was fleeting as day?
In the years of the past, in the coming and passing of lovers and
love and the paths love has taken,
There was never love greater than mine, so destroying, so ravaging,
ravishing, rapturous, deep;
Mine the love that can fade not or falter,
As the stars are, my love is eternal.
I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate,
meshed in the love thou hast sown,
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment
ere worship and love were to perish?
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
On the nectar of love I have fed,
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft
luminous mist,
Once he was pale with love of me,
We were the colours that his love
All his great love will end in me,
And crystal clear, of life and love and rapture,
No love endures if love be only passion
And no love lasts if love be only mind,
Unless in deeper love both are combined;
Then live! Live in this dual love, partake
A greater wealth your greater love assures
Oh love consummate in the flesh and spirit,
Than which no love can have supremer worth.
Oh love compassionate and strangely tender,
Symbol of beauty, love, and life, and healing,
All things that you might love,
With love, and life, and death, and even with ennui;
And if your kisses, like most kisses, mean not love,
Love, ere thy lips dead lips alone adore.
The maid I love was buried long ago;
Made for love, made for kissing;
Wherein sweet terms, as Love, and Hope, and God,
O Love, a flower closes
O Love, my world is pouring
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
O Love, my heart adoring
Binds you, O Love.
Comes love, and all the beauty that love possesses,
Comes love, and all the beauty that love possesses,
I am awed, O Love, at knowing this mystery,
O Love, the world so shadowy and dim
So luminous, O Love, the shrine so holy,
So faint the dream, O Love, and yet so fair.
It is the ceaseless song that love began; unended,
We are deathless, O Love, and deific; we have known the wonder
supernal:
We have found that only the dream is unchanging, O Love, and
eternal,
These are the things I love you for: the gray
These things I love, yet words can never tell
Oh love, it is enough that I may be
I love you for the charm earth gave to you,
I love you for the realms of endless view,
I love you for the beauty all can see,
I answer—if they love me in my fashion,
For I give love like sips of precious wine
From love or faith or trust—fools—who believe
Her latest lover’s love was such
In love bespoken,
His life, his love, his song;
I could never love a girl with such a rhyme!
For they are life and love to me,
Ennobled by your grace, your love—beside you,
Returning humbly our own love whose force,
Loved As the amorous maidens were loved in decadent Rome I shall love
her,
As Sappho of Lesbos was loved in the glory of Greece that is gone;
Never has woman been loved as I shall love her, never
Hermaphroditus, loved and lover,
That once a poet lived and loved and died,
My loved one made soft cooing sounds, and so
Love comes. I know that I shall never be
She loved no man, so she would boast,
She loved alone and loved she most
She loved to play a dangerous game
Lovelier Though none is lovelier
A princess are, with beauty lovelier
Loveliest Thou art loveliest of the things I know;
The loveliest girl to give him strange delight;
Loveliness
Enigmatic loveliness of enigmatic figures,
A chant to loveliness and strange, unfathomed glory,
Intoxicated with thy loveliness,
Naught by thy loveliness
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L
Her loveliness in poetry lies never.
For, and the loveliness you watch so well.
Surely the loveliness that men say lies
Lovely I am enraptured of one immortally lovely, with beautiful tresses,
Thy lovely face uplifted now,
Thou art as lovely as that ancient queen
Lovely as any girl the world has seen,
The lonely, lovely sea-maidens call,
Most lovely, half satanic, half divine,
Did I a lovely deathless form enfold?
And left her lovely body to oblivion;
While maidens lovely, smiling, fair,
My lady hath two lovely lips,
So lovely with its skin so fair; the grace
You are the fairest of the lovely whom
Lover
Hermaphroditus, loved and lover,
You will come back to me, lost lover,
You will come back some day, lost lover,
Oh sweet beloved and enchanted lover—
Drink! For the red-stained lips of your lover!
She had a lover for her wondrous grace;
For the soft flowers awaiting the lips of the lover
I am not sorry to have been your lover,
Lovers In the years of the past, in the coming and passing of lovers and love
and the paths love has taken,
In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of the
future, the passions to waken,
And lovers, fat ones, old ones, came
Lover’s Her latest lover’s love was such
Loves
Even as one who loves thee, Love,
In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of the
future, the passions to waken,
Two loves, two deaths, two flameless fires, ashen,
Love’s Thy body fevered with love’s desire,
And we were love-sick, yea, and sick with all love’s poison,
Love’s beauty and love’s torment and love’s fever-kisses,
Yea, all love’s lyric horror all were sweet;
A mute triumphal song with love’s refrain.
But Time will pass, and Love will pass, and all Love’s pleasure,
To love’s sad paradise.
And all love’s joys that were.
Love-Sick
And we were love-sick, yea, and sick with all love’s poison,
Loving Deep loving, dark thinking,
Low
When down the hillside came a long, low crying,
And on the wind the strange, low notes kept failing
Why are the marsh-weeds drooping low?
Made mutterings that sounded like low glee.
And only echo answer a low call.
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228
Lowering
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
‘Neath the lowering skies
Lowly And sinuous, then I will raise you from the lowly
Luminous
The luminous shadow of the infinite,
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft luminous
mist,
So luminous, O Love, the shrine so holy,
Leaving the night more luminous than light of the moon;
Lunar Of lunar sorcerers; a thousand hells
Lure
Past golden poppy’s lure,
Lured
And spoiling, lured them. But I could not squirm
Lurid
Death-fevers mottled you with lurid shades.
Luring Solemn all you picture them, solemn and so luring,
Lurk
Where the strange sea-creatures lurk.
Lurked Descending into midnight depths that lurked
Luscious By the luscious curtains gleaming.
Lush
Then live! Live with the green, lush trees returning
And of your lush young beauty I grow wearier
Lust
Thy terrible lust,
Where ancient gods assuaged their lust consuming
Oh color of destruction, rage, and lust,
Lust, and the red, red wine!
Lust, and the red, red wine!
For green corpses he did lust,
My Lust, and Fury, and crimson shame,
Lute
To a silent lute.
Lutes
The sound of perished lutes
The sound of ancient lutes
Lying
Rest, with the dear things lying
We left her far more quiet body lying there:
We only left her body lying still and deep;
He scans the regions lying all around,
With only rotting corpses lying by,
And then they left me, lonely. lying where
And awful things were lying all around—
Lyric
Yea, all love’s lyric horror all were sweet;
In lyric passion rose the piper’s song,
The rapturous music poured in lyric streams
A lyric ecstasy, a sad, sweet note,
And every sound a thing of lyric joy.
Lyrical Once lyrical with pagan melody.
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M
M
’M
Mabel
Machen
Mad
Why, there each young M.A. would go to,
Would chant their perfect lessons with ’m.
If your name were only Mabel
And Machen to read when she thinks of the fabulous chalice.
see also Half-Mad
Of a passion swayed not by reason, a passion ungovernable, mad;
A choral hymn of mad and sweetest pain,
Oh color hideous, appalling, mad,
With mad new colours and queer lines I’d trace
Ah, God! That I had genius, mad and great,
Orion’s mad, metallic queen;
Thy purple haunted eyes are mad
For his mad eyes;
Of the mad matriarch who sate
Made mad songs and patterns of,
We were won and lost of a mad young boy.
To keep me company lest I go mad:
At first I deemed it some mad nightmare-dream,
And everything was red and strange and mad;
On its shore, mad emeralds burn in the brake,
I am as mad as mad can be,
For I am as mad as mad can be.
Maddening
The passion-born kiss and caress of my maddening desire;
Made
see also Moon-Made
That made our veins and pulses wildly beat.
I have been made by thee idolatrous;
Into the shadowland I made my way
I found or made new pleasures that I shall not tell;
I have made love in normal and eccentric ways;
That made Serise’s red dwarfs glad.
Or as the futile, giant music made
Made mad songs and patterns of,
And made him one with all earth’s humblest creatures.
Of some gray form that made a rattling sound.
My loved one made soft cooing sounds, and so
The dawn, when those great wings had made retreat;
Made mutterings that sounded like low glee.
What sense of overhanging doom has made
Made for love, made for kissing;
A nameless and sorcerous glory has made me weak:
Of some white form that made a rattling sound;
These charnel horrors made me sick and weak,
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Madness
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
She often made the first down payment,
In a madness it has perished,
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul such
a madness and fury will sweep?
They added madness to my frantic cries
Maenads For love, the dell where hired maenads moan.
Maggots In dark liquescence. Mocking maggots peep
Would maggots in my starved, gaunt body loll
Magic There is magic, there is splendor
For magic black.
And magic garlands flung
Then at the top I stood on magic squares
The magic towers, the skyward thrusting spires,
With magic murmurs making
Murmurs the music of a magic hymn;
When Nielsen with a pen of magic drew
Magically
Is it the glow so magically bringing
Magistry Is too exacting for man’s magistry,—
Magnificently
Of them, bound, yet magnificently free;
Maid
To claim the maid for whose desire he strove?
His pagan pipes for semigod and maid;
The maid I love was buried long ago;
Maiden Every youth and maiden must
Maiden voices are mute;
Maidens see also Sea-Maidens
As the amorous maidens were loved in decadent Rome I shall love
her,
Beautiful maidens have their bed
Where maidens swoon in midnight ecstasies;
While maidens lovely, smiling, fair,
Maiden’s A maiden’s kiss
A girdle that slips from a maiden’s hips—
Maids By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
Majestic Dreaming majestic dreams, I worship thee
Majestical
My thrones, majestical, imperial, and great,
My thrones majestical, imperial, and great
Major Instead, they sound like Major Hooples
Make
And all the laughing nymphs that make earth fair;
Make this your home for I will make it yours;
To make my sufferings worse if I should dine.
Make you fair for admiring.
To make the unison of this half-heard overtone;
Now wherefor do you make this larger room
That you make these to that a sacrifice,
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M
Quite to make it match in verse most anytime;
When I can make my students Cram.
Maker see also Music-Maker
I am builder, I am maker,
Makes And champak fragrance makes the drowsy senses swoon,
The true believer makes his own faith all along
Making With magic murmurs making
Malefic Malefic, purposive, with alien force
Malevolence
Whose gaunt trunks guarded with malevolence
Malice In Wonderland; Rothenstein’s portraits done with malice
Malices To ponder old, unsated malices.
Malicious
Not too malicious; the strangeness of Harry Clarke’s Poe;
Malign A slave of her passion, my passion, our ecstasy secret, malign;
Of that malign, close-hidden ebon pool.
Who cast on me a mystic spell malign,
Malignant
Malignant, as if guarded by a spell,
Mammon
What though you walk by Mammon unattended,
Man
Has man known the terrible glory of woman as I;
Of half-gods outcast from the world of man?
And traveled backward past the age of man
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul such
a madness and fury will sweep?
Where no man walks, and shall not ever see,
Or gold that never yet no man befriended,
Not woman, man, or child crawled in my lap.
And leave behind me all the weary works of man,
The sum of all man knows, the sum of all
A slain man moans on a pointed stake
She loved no man, so she would boast,
I am man.
I am man,
Of man I sing.
I am man.
Of man I tire.
I am man.
I am man.
I am man.
I am man.
That once was man.
There was a young man—such a pity!—
Man-Bat
Footprints of a man-bat woven
Mandragoral
Wildly, wildly, round features mandragoral
Mandrake
231
135.9
137.10
133.8
096.88
134.20
109.21
088.5
011.8
129.6
127.15
129.7
003.10
011.14
027.3
024.12
051.1
003.38
015.36
036.18
043.16
050.10
051.3
075.11
096.98
102.16
125.23
128.9
133.1
133.6
133.7
133.12
133.19
133.27
133.32
133.50
133.57
133.72
145.1
126.13
068.4
232
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Deep stems twining around the mandrake,
Mandrakes
Why do the mandrakes fear to die?
The mandrakes moaned along the black lagoon,
Mandrakes writhe and witch-fires burn,
Mandrikor
They dwell in dying Mandrikor
That fell, all Mandrikor to kill.
Mankind
I took the usual pleasures known to all mankind;
Man’s But bitter is the end of love and man’s desire,
Man’s Is too exacting for man’s magistry,—
Many
For many a thousand leagues around
Have seen the fall of many kings,
So little light, so many corridors,
Desired of many but achieved by few.
And lissome houris, gems and gold in many a measure,
Although my flesh with many knives is slit.
Marble In the marble palace, gold dwarfs cry,
From the palace, a marble monster whines,
Marbles Where vast, dark marbles stood in endless miles,
March The sands of time are thick, the days march slow;
Unmeaning march from nothingness to night,
Mark
You are the brand that sears, the mark of shame,
We left no mark to show her grave,
Mark where dead Atlantis lies
Never a light to mark the trail
Tortures would mark the finish of my quest.
Marked My bloodprints in the dead sand marked my trail.
Marmora
In Marmora.
In Marmora.
In Marmora.
In Marmora.
In Marmora.
In Marmora.
Mars poured on you the bane of baleful beams,
Mars
Marsh In a marsh that even the water-snakes spurn,
Marsh-Weeds
Why are the marsh-weeds drooping low?
Marts
The roads to distant marts; and Allah’s blessed foretell
Marvellous
As gods might worship Beauty marvellous.
Of flowers and marvellous jasper and coral grasses
Masher “Masher. Disgusting.”
Mass
Though singly impotent, might be in mass
Another mass their hungry pet half-ate,
I must, for it arose, its mass dividing
Masses For something unknown in the flamingly riotous masses
038.5
056.12
105.3
125.10
010.1
010.16
013.13
007.61
050.12
010.9
030.10
050.2
068.12
096.16
103.4
125.6
125.18
081.10
007.46
102.2
017.7
035.9
047.25
056.6
086.4
085.10
125.4
125.8
125.12
125.16
125.20
125.24
017.15
125.9
056.2
096.94
008.4
101.24
139.14
082.7
087.7
089.8
101.23
M
I am the master of each living thing,
Of modes that will not match despite your pains.
Quite to make it match in verse most anytime;
Matriarch
Of the mad matriarch who sate
Matron Hetaira, matron, virgin bringing
Matter What did it matter a thousand years ago
What will it matter a thousand years from now
The acids would not matter, nor I rue
The legend saith: wherefor does any legend matter?
Matters “Us, you and me. What matters except us?”
“A great deal matters. Who are you?”
May
Let us have joy while we may;
May sing of her are vain;
So dark whichever pathway one may go,
He who may lift the spell, and yet I seem
Oh love, it is enough that I may be
Perfection gains by contrast and may be
And it may be that you will find it lonely,
And it may be that you will find it fair;
And it may be that you will find it only
Maybe “Huh. Well, maybe. But I’m sociable, Miss—”
Maze
My weary mind has travelled all the stellar maze
I sought in maze of sorcery and bale;
Beyond the black beyond the stellar maze.
Me
And weariness of life oppresses me;
Where silence ruled yet something waited me
DEATH: Ah Poet, scorn me not,
And now at last I crown me with a coronal
Nothing in all the universe is left for me,
Who cast on me a mystic spell malign,
And bound me with long coils of dusky gold?
And after this, there came to me one green
And of that thing there came to me a fear
Of thine eyes holdeth me.
You will come back to me,
You will come back to me, lost lover,
Come back, come back to me,
You caught me, bound me, with a spell,
Enchanted me with dreams that weave;
Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast brought
me this feverous love to consume me,
Was it only for darkness to blind me,
Art thou only a phantom before me,
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of soul;
is it passion or poison I cherish?
Once he was pale with love of me,
All his great love will end in me,
It knew me not from all the rest,
Match
233
133.2
117.8
135.9
046.31
049.25
026.1
026.5
121.13
134.19
139.7
139.8
004.50
041.14
050.3
113.10
114.13
117.11
118.5
118.6
118.7
139.11
013.19
036.54
127.20
007.54
011.5
012.44
013.7
013.26
027.3
027.4
029.1
029.9
032.2
039.2
039.7
039.20
042.4
042.5
043.1
043.7
043.11
043.25
046.10
046.43
049.20
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Oh light that never shone for me one ray,
Oh bells that shall not ever ring for me,
About me, who am dead.
That presses on my grave and me, rolled
When I felt through me spread the germ
At me and slyly chuckle while they keep
Death: Ah Traveler, scorn me not
Holds me till in unending dooms I smother.
With wings of beating purple flew to me
And when my steed permitted me to light,
It rolled, and spun, and stopped in front of me,
It watched me, waiting, while I stared as long
Yet twined around me with inhuman force.
A beak that, darting, closed me in its trap.
You’ve come again. You keep me company here,
And watch, or seem to watch, me for your face
Aside. The flow turned toward me, and it kept
Around me, solid walls of no escape,
Before me, one closed portal, and the flow
I begged the gods to save me from such pain.
Past them the leopards led me on and on
I saw the hungry flowers toward me crawl
A deep force pulls me toward the window-blind,
Some impulse urges me to raise the shade;
Me fearful? What the sight that I shall find?
By bathing me in streams of molten lead.
They slit me till a hundred new wounds bled;
They burned me, bound me with deep-knotted ties;
They crushed me, broke me till I could not rise,
Then hurled me, shapeless, on a needle-bed.
Though they, with cruel joy, had given me
The sun stared on me like a blood-red eye,
I thought ironic laughter passed me by.
Though they who tortured me were far behind,
They caught me in the wasteland in the west.
Caught me with safety but a league away.
They dragged me back with never pause for rest.
And when at last my captors bore me through
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
Like me uncertain of their final fate
Rejected. Nameless others near me sit.
They gave me back my eyes so I could peer
They left me morsels, curious and queer,
That swiftly toward me now began to fall,
Engirt, and hurled me nightward into doom.
And after this, there came to me one green
And of that thing swept over me a fear
What followed me across the lifeless plain?
Me hope. I fell, though flesh itself be rent
051.57
051.58
054.15
054.22
054.26
054.40
067.44
070.14
071.7
071.12
073.2
073.9
074.14
075.14
077.2
077.4
078.5
078.9
078.10
080.10
081.9
082.12
083.1
083.2
083.8
084.4
084.5
084.6
084.7
084.8
084.12
085.5
085.8
085.9
086.1
086.2
086.5
086.12
087.1
087.3
087.8
087.9
087.11
088.13
089.14
090.1
090.9
091.1
091.7
M
235
One fleshy tentacle, raised me beside
091.13
I turned on stealthy step lest something hear me.
092.11
Behind, the thirsting tips upon me, warm,
092.13
That nightmare sculpture, running fast, was near me....
092.14
Now no things interest me,
096.3
Things of small worth to me.
096.18
Me from my ennui with your body naked wholly,
096.40
And if you charm me not, and I grow weary of
096.43
Me, and I sicken with the languid unsurcease
096.65
And leave behind me all the weary works of man,
096.98
No voice remains to tell me where she lies,
099.9
A nameless and sorcerous glory has made me weak:
101.22
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
103.1
They know that it will take me years to die,
103.3
They would not burn me quickly on their spit;
103.5
How much more exquisite to hear me cry
103.6
And bloated carrion rats that near me sit!
103.8
They left to me my eyes, so I could stare
103.9
They left me also rotten corpses there
103.11
To keep me company lest I go mad:
103.12
And then they left me, lonely. lying where
103.13
These charnel horrors made me sick and weak,
104.9
I am awed that the moon and stars are so close to me.
110.6
The subtle pleasure that you give to me,
114.10
And more for beauty, only known to me.
116.14
Your moods are dear to me, and all the ways
117.1
Your imperfections are as fair to me
117.9
You will become? It seems so strange to me
118.12
I answer—if they love me in my fashion,
119.12
For you have taught a thousand things to me,
120.10
Were errors that have lost their hold on me.
120.14
Came near me, passed, and faintly died away;
122.2
137.17
For they are life and love to me,
“Us, you and me. What matters except us?”
139.7
Nothing on earth can bother me,
142.2
None of these things can bother me
142.9
Meadowlark’s
From a meadowlark’s passionate throat,
063.4
Meadows
Where only the wind and the wide, waste meadows have their home, 020.5
That drifts from the vacant meadows of the sea.
020.12
In sunlight splendid meadows to awake.
051.35
I hear them in the meadows and in wasteland,
131.7
Meads On the meads that are rarest,
033.10
Mean
And if your kisses, like most kisses, mean not love,
096.46
Are merely words that mean no more than life.
102.4
Meaning Assume new meaning and become the prick
121.10
Means Means ditched by your girl and left by your friend,
142.8
Meant Surely this beauty was not meant for keeping
119.1
236
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Or think that those sweet words were meant to be
Measure Were better than their hideous, measure wrongs.
And lissome houris, gems and gold in many a measure,
Measured
The rooted feet that walked with measured stride.
Measureless
Them fill the air with measureless strong beat—
Measurelessly
Atop a mountain measurelessly high
Measures
The tolling came like measures for a spell.
Meat
What nameless hunter searching for its meat?
Meet
In whom all Beauty’s graces meet—
In whose oblivion we shall meet;
Traveler: Goodby, but if we meet again—
And stare and stare in horror as I meet
If I thus forgot to meet
Meeting And sprites invisible attend the meeting,
Meets Meets the mysterious woman’s stare
Melancholy
And melancholy, dream away the afternoon
Mellowed
With a rare old vintage mellowed in wood!
Melodies And I, who long for fairer melodies
Melody Once lyrical with pagan melody.
Memories
Memories only wander where
Are sick with memories awesome, eerie, fateful,
Memory Vainly recalling old wraiths of memory,
The memory of the elder ecstasy has faded,
The face that haunts thy memory?
Till memory slowly came, and knowledge grew,
Men
All men, all things, all hopes, my burning dreams of fire;
My destiny, and found what men can never guess;
Lies upon the dead drowned men.
And the living walked less like men
While sick men stoked; the black hulk poked
A million million men have lived and passed,
A million million men will live and pass,
Surely the loveliness that men say lies
I come to men with unrequiting passion,
Men’s And dead men’s bones.
Mercurial
They saw Mercurial cities rust
Merely And they who merely lived are first to sigh:
It merely hinted of the coming week.
Are merely words that mean no more than life.
I merely listened, as I listen still,
Meshed I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate, meshed
121.4
080.8
096.16
091.10
079.2
089.2
094.8
079.3
012.52
046.46
067.54
083.13
100.7
051.38
055.15
096.56
022.10
028.9
012.37
047.6
070.5
006.6
007.47
012.47
073.4
013.6
013.10
047.36
048.6
048.17
102.12
102.14
119.3
119.9
057.16
030.35
051.18
084.14
102.4
122.7
M
in the love thou hast sown,
Mesmerize
And if you mesmerize
To brilliant flame, whose splendors mesmerize,
Messages
Now in the mind come messages unspoken,
Messenger
Foul messenger of war and holocaust,
I have met darker nights than that of old,
Metal
A metal titan shapen like a cone,
From metal monsters humming voiceless songs.
Metallic Orion’s mad, metallic queen;
On long, metallic clang, the brazen door
Mewing Burst; mindless, mewing as it tried to speak,
Mews
There’s one small shape that mews upon a spit;
M’hamed
And La Illaha illa Allah! M’hamed rasul
Miasmal Where miasmal stenches slowly
Mice
The very mice absorb their wisdom,
Mid-Air The swart hand crawled, through mid-air lengthening,
Midnight
Thy lips that in the midnight burn,
Descending into midnight depths that lurked
Where maidens swoon in midnight ecstasies;
For in the midnight hours, when sleep descends,
That clove through midnight where no other stirred,
I have awakened in the fevered midnight noon,
Rippling the leaves that sleep in a moonless midnight noon.
I hear them over thunder, and at midnight gloom;
I am mist in midnight hollow,
Midnight’s
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
Midst
The midst of her things: a girdle, as though to chasten
Might As gods might worship Beauty marvellous.
All things died in my black might,
All things that you might love,
Though singly impotent, might be in mass
Nowhere to flee, however I might strive,
Mightier Through mightier gulfs where still the purple rule
Mighty They saw the mighty Atthla fall
Through mighty chambers, hunted and alone,
Are languorous with dreams of mighty doom,
Mildewed
While scattered leaves in mildewed heaps
Miles
Where vast, dark marbles stood in endless miles,
Sheer cliff and rockfall miles below. There, sliding
And the miles of rotten bogs.
Million A thousand million years ago,
237
043.26
096.39
119.6
147.10
017.18
122.9
076.6
080.4
030.22
081.2
075.10
087.5
096.79
126.6
138.21
074.10
004.5
011.19
015.44
070.9
079.5
101.1
111.4
131.10
133.21
029.3
090.3
129.14
008.4
046.7
067.41
082.7
088.11
071.10
030.37
076.2
127.13
062.9
081.10
089.4
126.8
030.38
238
Mimmih
Mind
Mindless
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
A million million men have lived and passed,
A million million men will live and pass,
102.12
102.14
Archibald Mimmih ran a neat
My weary mind has travelled all the stellar maze
My mind with longings for some ancient thing,
No life or mind or trace of vanished lore,
And no love lasts if love be only mind,
The face that haunts your heart and mind.
I could not move though mind and spirit broke.
With formless terrors running through my mind?
For beauty of the mind, where, as on a loom
Delight in sudden vagaries of your mind.
My mind, not heart, is now my soul’s true token.
I am the arrow of the cosmic mind,
And she didn’t mind,
Now in the mind come messages unspoken,
140.1
013.19
027.10
036.38
051.23
067.47
072.14
083.4
116.5
117.14
120.8
133.4
144.4
147.10
Burst; mindless, mewing as it tried to speak,
And the mind’s decision,
Till her body be mine.
And all the long night her body to mine I shall press;
Her lips with my lips, her passionate body with mine I shall cover
For one intoxicating night were mine.
All time and space were mine, and mine was every sky:
The rose, the grape, and a god are mine!
Her body and her rose-red lips to mine,
There was never love greater than mine, so destroying, so
ravaging, ravishing, rapturous, deep;
Mine the love that can fade not or falter,
He is mine.
Around and see the comrades that are mine;
But ennui still is mine.
And all your days, and mine, a vain device.
And should a mouth as pleasureful as mine
Minnesota
If this were done to Minnesota,
Minutes The minutes shall wane in delirium, the burning hours pass slowly,
And weary drag of minutes grows less dolorous,
Enough, while drowsy minutes lengthen to hours golden,
So muse I while the endless, aimless minutes wear
Mirror Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
Her own reflections in a mirror.
Fingers raised; there hangs her mirror—poor mirror—
Mirth
And the echoing mirth of a sullen mutter,
Devoid of mirth, devoid of feeling;
Mirthful The things that mirthful wizards killed
Mirthless Their mirthless muttering through the palace rang.
Mind’s
Mine
075.10
033.35
003.12
003.26
003.35
007.20
013.21
023.6
027.6
043.14
043.19
046.48
087.10
096.24
118.14
119.10
138.35
003.25
096.29
096.58
096.73
043.4
128.12
129.3
062.6
128.34
030.47
081.8
M
239
Mirtylon That brought to Mirtylon its doom,
030.18
Miss
“Miss Shere, are you a kind person?”
139.1
“I’m asking you, Miss Shere. Are you a cruel person?”
139.3
“Saturday night then, Miss Shere. What time?”
139.5
“Ely Forchamer, Miss Shere. I’m white and virtuous and fairly goo—” 139.9
“Huh. Well, maybe. But I’m sociable, Miss—”
139.11
“But Miss Shere—”
139.17
Misshapen
And baleful boles of strange misshapen growths
011.3
Missing Such a treasure? I’d be missing
100.4
Mist
Like a mist that fades in the sodden skies
001.13
As the mist and the rain;
009.16
And thou hast known the azure mist
030.17
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft luminous
mist,
044.5
That almost hissed or the shimmering mist
048.15
Like a mist that fades into sodden skies
063.13
Concealed with opalescent mist whose fall
127.3
Is as the fall and rise of mist of myrrh.
127.5
I am mist in midnight hollow,
133.21
Mistily And mistily shone the ghostly
045.13
Until, once more, when mistily comes the morn,
069.13
Mistress When thou at the breasts of thy mistress art slaking
005.1
Mists
A gray dusk mists the air
053.6
The vanished mists of time enshroud him, hide him;
059.14
Misty
And all the air was misty as a cloud.
106.8
Moan
Of the wind will moan
002.28
The hymn and song have changed to moan and cry.
007.44
I offer thee the moan
012.3
The song of life is but a tedious, bitter moan;
013.2
Upon the moon, I’d show, strange things that moan,
025.7
For love, the dell where hired maenads moan.
040.8
I offer you the moan
067.3
Moaned
The mandrakes moaned along the black lagoon,
105.3
Moaning
015.42
I hear a moaning in the dreamless trees;
Moans Trembling, he moans on the trodden grass;
018.6
A slain man moans on a pointed stake
125.23
Mobbed Mobbed him to induce him;
140.10
Mocking
In dark liquescence. Mocking maggots peep
054.39
Mode
More modish than the current mode;
128.6
Model A model professorial wonder,
138.31
Modes Of modes that will not match despite your pains.
117.8
Modish More modish than the current mode;
128.6
Molten By bathing me in streams of molten lead.
084.4
Moly
And flowers fair as moly
109.13
Moment
240
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
But a moment will come and death destroy
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment ere
worship and love were to perish?
And years of striving in one moment ended.
004.33
Where dwindling monitors of night had sundered
Monotone
When the cold monotone
Monotonous
Weary of all desires grown monotonous,
Monotony
I weary of the old monotony of things;
Monotony of life an empty show?
Monster
From the palace, a marble monster whines,
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The monster gods dream an apocalyptic dream;
The monster gods sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
The monster gods hid where the fen-fires gleam.
The monster gods then will tremble and waken
The monster gods will answer the Ancient Ones and rise.
The monster gods will walk then from hills and from highlands,
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The monster gods dream an apocalyptic dream,
Monsters
Fishes swim and monsters creep
From metal monsters humming voiceless songs.
Monstrous
For pleasures and joys that she knows not, for a new and monstrous
delight;
With monstrous fires aflame.
Abysmal secrets, monstrous mysteries, I know;
With dazzle of a monstrous flame,
With monstrous fires aflame.
A monstrous form surged on and searched with cry
The monstrous spell of the night is an amorous cover
Moods With nymphs and girls in amorous Bacchic moods:
To capture moods that change or leave;
Your moods are dear to me, and all the ways
Moon Upon the moon, I’d show, strange things that moan,
Have known the fungi of the moon,
By seas that thunder vainly to the moon;
Moon, if moon-made they, those drifting shapes
But something from the dark side of the moon
Now day dies, and night falls, and that great summer moon
In the mystical burning pallor of the moon
I saw great shadows across a gibbous moon;
From any moon.
I am awed that the moon and stars are so close to me.
036.9
Monitors
043.27
051.7
002.27
096.7
013.1
026.4
125.18
141.1
141.2
141.3
141.4
141.9
141.12
141.13
141.17
141.18
047.3
080.4
003.18
012.25
013.22
030.42
067.25
089.6
101.18
015.28
042.11
117.1
025.7
030.2
031.4
045.14
075.12
096.85
101.4
105.2
109.32
110.6
M
Leaving the night more luminous than light of the moon;
Moonbeams
On her brow the moonbeams lie as lace,
Moon-Dim
Chaunting of moon-dim princesses whose clime
Moonfaced
Great big moonfaced politicians,
Moonglow
Along starroads with only moonglow paven
Moonless
Swoons in the moonless olive grove;
Rippling the leaves that sleep in a moonless midnight noon.
Moonlight
The flitting figures gather in the pale moonlight
She will go in the cold moonlight
You drift upon the moonlight hovering near
Into the moonlight, Cyrenaya, I would go
Moon-Made
Moon, if moon-made they, those drifting shapes
Moonrays
She will halt where the moonrays trace
Moons Beneath twin moons of livid red.
Where moons are high, and only dream-winds stir,
Out of the dark where the black moons creep,
Moon’s I am blind in the white embrace of the moon’s hot stream;
Moonstruck
Moonstruck, voiceless, yet their sorceress-eyes agleam,
Moor
Or hunters canter shouting toward the moor.
Moral “But I’m perfectly moral.”
Morals She had no scruples and no morals
Morbid The growth of seeds of morbid beauty, sown
More
And I was more insatiate with satiation,
More crazed by all the amorous joys thereof;
Yea, love and more than love were all the long night’s portion,
No more, no more I know the fierce desire of woman,
I worship thee and ever worship more.
More ghostly than the faint starlight.
More fabulous than all the gems of fame,
The love of girls more strange on stranger stars I won;
Who cared? Once more immortal Pan was playing
We left her far more quiet body lying there:
I sought beyond no more.
Through trackless labyrinths more dark and deep,
Our thoughts will be more sad than death is
Of the splendor known no more,
We turned and set forth once more,
And into more than light, to something wholly
Beauty more vital for your hearts to capture,
Never more shall I hear sound
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113.13
142.3
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018.2
111.4
061.3
065.1
077.3
096.97
045.14
065.11
030.36
113.6
125.2
101.27
006.22
069.8
139.13
128.39
025.6
007.25
007.26
007.33
007.55
007.60
010.8
012.23
013.18
015.37
035.7
036.40
036.62
039.4
047.18
048.2
051.11
051.13
054.16
242
Morn
Morning
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
More fabulous than all the gems of fame.
Until, once more, when mistily comes the morn,
Increasing, spreading more and ever more
Of revelers turned statue, and no more
One thought more torturing usurped my brain,
Then thousand ships and more; shapes great and wee
And drowsyhead gives way to dreams more slumberous,
I only find more ennui in philosophies,
Drink deep the cup, ere thou canst drink no more;
Are merely words that mean no more than life.
How much more exquisite to hear me cry
And fair things yet more fair,
Leaving the night more luminous than light of the moon;
The inner beauty I more deeply care
Differed so, each from each, and this one more
And more for beauty, only known to me.
As your more supernatal beauty, since
Then blind, the favored ones; while I, more wise
You proved illusion not more strong than oaken
And for thy wine, than earthly wine more sweet,
And for thy bread, than my bread more sustaining,
More modish than the current mode;
Or else they’re much more dumb than geese are.
The school was more than popular
In the breathless, waiting morn;
Awaiting morn.
Until, once more, when mistily comes the morn,
She drinks the earthly and heavenly beauty of morning;
Morsels They left me morsels, curious and queer,
Mortal Never will mortal outlive the tomb—
The mortal flesh that dies?
Nor ever have; and since this mortal bond
Mosque But once, for every soul in mosque, at sea, on sand
Moss
An unseen step on the creeping moss—
Most
We will pass from rapture to rapture and plumb the most utter
abysses
Most lovely, half satanic, half divine,
Far silver bells with Song’s most sweet alloy.
We were most high;
For all things die, but they die most regretful
But they whose life was barren are most fretful,
The days for which the heart should be most grateful
The head most strangely seemed like one I knew;
And if your kisses, like most kisses, mean not love,
She loved alone and loved she most
Quite to make it match in verse most anytime;
Mote
I am mote
Motes Felt flesh dissolve in motes of silver tints
067.23
069.13
078.6
081.7
084.10
095.7
096.28
096.61
097.2
102.4
103.6
109.23
111.2
114.11
115.7
116.14
117.10
119.7
120.5
124.3
124.4
128.6
137.24
140.5
021.6
065.8
069.13
066.13
087.11
004.37
012.49
050.11
134.2
056.3
003.15
027.2
028.8
046.36
051.15
051.17
070.4
073.1
096.46
128.11
135.9
133.25
076.13
M
Motion At length all motion ceased, upon a crag.
I heard alone the surging tides in motion.
Mottled Death-fevers mottled you with lurid shades.
Mould All the slime and mould that slowly spread
Moulds Moulds her breast.
Mouldy Of sun illumes the mouldy balustrades.
Mound In my grave beneath my mound.
On the old and grass-covered mound
Mountain
Atop a mountain measurelessly high
Nor that thou roll away the mountain boulders
Mountains
Through its valleys and its mountains
I saw the vales and mountains of the deep,
The mountains and the rivers whisper: Death.
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
Mounted
The waters mounted in one surge whose swell
Mounting
For ever mounting past the realm of light,
This never ending night of mounting pain,
Mourn And watched a queen of Saturn mourn
The mouth where something dark was trickling through.
Mouth A thought my tongueless mouth could never speak;
And your mouth poppy-lipped,
Sing, for too soon, too long, thy mouth shall know no singing.
Who can blame the mouth that sips
And should a mouth as pleasureful as mine
Mouths And on my flesh their mouths, devouring, fall.
Why do I shrink from the soft red mouths of roses
Move
I can not move a thigh,
She will move through the moveless shade
I could not move though mind and spirit broke.
But could not move or even draw one breath:
And yet I could not move. There came a creak,
Of phantoms move;
You move: the unexpected things you say;
Moved That feebly moved its pulpy, eyeless head.
Moveless
She will move through the moveless shade
Movements
And in her movements, languid charms abide.
Moves Moves from worlds without to enchanted worlds within.
Moving No moving thing, no blade of grass. One tree
Mowed There was a red, raw dripping thing that mowed
Mr
And Mr. Briggs would watch their English,
243
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094.14
017.14
054.14
066.8
053.10
054.18
065.15
089.2
124.10
033.1
095.9
102.11
130.1
130.17
141.1
141.17
094.5
024.9
084.13
030.11
073.8
084.11
096.45
097.5
100.3
119.10
082.14
101.11
054.5
065.7
072.14
093.13
104.10
109.36
114.5
095.14
065.7
053.5
111.8
093.3
106.1
138.39
244
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
“Tut-tut, Mr. Forchamer. You’re not. You’re homely.”
“Nine o’clock Saturday night, Mr. Forchamer.”
Much So few the days, so much that one could know,
And find defeat ere I have much begun;
How much more exquisite to hear me cry
Or much greater,
Or else they’re much more dumb than geese are.
Muezzin Till evetide falls, and the Muezzin call to prayer
Muffled Across the boiling seas’ own muffled boom;
Multiple It reigned on its multiple thrones.
Multiplied
Of worm that multiplied on worm
Mummied
In his hand a stone-pick; in his mummied eyes
Mummies
Along the walls dwelt living mummies, bound
And there were living, ancient mummies bound
Murderer’s
The dripping symbol of a murderer’s hands.
Murk
In the depths of gloomy murk:
Murmur That murmur of things that wane,
Murmur of all things that wane,
Long-dead creatures murmur and sigh
That murmur to their sad-eyed pupils.
Murmuring
Sometimes she dreams to music of murmuring waves
Murmurs
With magic murmurs making
Murmurs the music of a magic hymn;
Muse
Be still, O Muse! what syllables soever,
So muse I while the endless, aimless minutes wear
Music The rapturous music poured in lyric streams
Or as the futile, giant music made
Sometimes she dreams to music of murmuring waves
A music in the air,
Murmurs the music of a magic hymn;
Musically
As if a wind had musically stirred
Music-Maker
A music-maker, lord of sorcery.
Music’s I hear the music’s plaintive sob, watch spins and whirls,
Must
All to death must go.
Must die;
Beauty and Love and Life must die,
Even the least. Beauty must die.
Every youth and maiden must
For well we knew the holy night must have an ending,
For Beauty ever must dissolve and die;
And knowing that my quest at last must falter
139.10
139.18
050.1
050.6
103.6
133.64
137.24
096.77
094.3
057.20
054.27
059.5
072.7
104.7
017.8
047.38
001.10
063.10
125.7
138.4
060.8
109.21
110.10
041.13
096.73
015.30
031.3
060.8
109.22
110.10
028.7
113.12
096.23
004.20
004.22
004.29
004.34
004.45
007.15
007.42
036.15
M
Musty
Mute
Muted
Mutter
Muttered
I saw I still must fail.
Traveler: Not soon for I must find a song—
The door must open, showing why the hue
I stumbled onward, knowing I must fail,
For my escape I knew what I must pay:
I must, for it arose, its mass dividing
And when I die, must be enscrolled
We left her staring at the musty pall,
But the musty tale can never be told
Maiden voices are mute;
A mute triumphal song with love’s refrain.
But all is mute forevermore.
Mute tongues will tell remembered hemlocks
In that dark chamber, numb with terror, mute,
Can escape to tell of muted grief.
And the echoing mirth of a sullen mutter,
Away; the specters by the gnarled trunk muttered
Muttering
Their mirthless muttering through the palace rang.
Mutterings
Made mutterings that sounded like low glee.
My
The gifts of my body I bring to a flesh-white and beautiful palace,
The passion-born kiss and caress of my maddening desire;
A slave of her passion, my passion, our ecstasy secret, malign;
Her eyes will close at my lips on the feverish brow above;
In my arms I will hold her, passive, but I know her flesh will be
aching
Her lips with my lips, her passionate body with mine I shall cover
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
My blood was burning in my veins, and all the torment
And all the love and wondrous beauty of my beloved
And so I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
The idol in my shrine of ebony,
Into the shadowland I made my way
I reached my hands down to the cool, wet depths
And in the waters saw my own face drown,
Offends my nostrils,
My thrones, majestical, imperial, and great,
Of all my spectral lands,
All men, all things, all hopes, my burning dreams of fire;
My destiny, and found what men can never guess;
And yet, in all my travels I could only find
My soul’s death-knell.
My weary mind has travelled all the stellar maze
Now I am jaded with my long, complete excess;
That I to cosmic realms could take my flight!
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078.13
085.13
086.3
089.8
137.25
035.3
057.21
004.65
007.32
010.4
039.16
088.10
006.12
062.6
045.19
081.8
082.4
003.5
003.6
003.10
003.14
003.17
003.35
007.1
007.5
007.19
007.37
007.51
007.63
008.7
011.1
011.22
011.24
012.9
012.15
012.19
013.6
013.10
013.15
013.16
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
My mind with longings for some ancient thing,
So great, I clawed my face to bleeding strips,
How all my days are as an aria played
How all my time is winnowed, leaving husks
Of hope; and how my hours are unavailing
And how my love that burns herein so deep
Shall even as my lost days be foredone,
And knowing that my quest at last must falter
I sought my spirit’s goal.
My dreaming eyes kept searching, seeking, staring
I read, yet on my trail I wandered still;
To perish when my later footsteps came;
I have burned all my flame at the altar,
As the stars are, my love is eternal.
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
And my heart is fulfilled of its dream as I walk my enchanted way.
All things died in my black might,
He was possessed with my red flame,
My Lust, and Fury, and crimson shame,
My royal robes like a purple ghost
In my design;
Thus I close my doors
Set, fixed, immovable my head:
Set, fixed, immovable my bed;
In my tomb beneath the ground,
In my grave beneath my mound.
Six feet deep my corpse lies, drowned
That presses on my grave and me, rolled
In my own decomposition. Thick white worms have lolled
Their dripping tongues from my soft flesh that, old
Until my dead flesh stirred. I only lay,
And wriggle through my gray
I lie in my last sleep;
Their festful riot in my rotting heap.
Or in my dead flesh foul to float,
My corpse was once a festering sore
My body will not pour
My bones are hoar
I offer you my whole vast Hadean domain
Offends my nostrils. Go!
My thrones majestical, imperial, and great
Of all my timeless lands,
In my domain alone you’ll capture
Traveler: Not now, not yet. I go my way,
And when my steed permitted me to light,
My old companions waited all around:
My neck, and heard that husky, gurgling choke
It was my own; my own face showed that hue,
027.10
029.10
031.1
031.5
031.9
031.11
031.12
036.15
036.24
036.31
036.36
036.52
043.17
043.23
043.28
044.8
046.7
046.21
046.22
046.27
046.44
052.7
054.8
054.9
054.17
054.18
054.19
054.22
054.23
054.24
054.28
054.31
054.33
054.41
054.44
054.48
054.53
054.55
067.5
067.9
067.15
067.19
067.48
067.51
071.12
072.2
072.12
073.5
M
My own the lineaments that seemed to be
Stared at my own dead eyes unearthly lit.
My loved one made soft cooing sounds, and so
Not woman, man, or child crawled in my lap.
Unto my feet a little trickle crept
Until, my shaking limbs grown weak, I stepped
That flayed my flesh, and I was bound by spells
As I remember, in my agony
Then beating to the chambers of my brain
Quick to my side two black, sleek leopards sprang
So, hesitantly, I put forth my foot
I found my leg become a hellish root,
And on my flesh their mouths, devouring, fall.
With formless terrors running through my mind?
My hand? Why is my arm so strongly stayed?
They clamped hot irons on my throbbing head;
They poured fresh acid on my blinding eyes;
They added madness to my frantic cries
One thought more torturing usurped my brain,
A thought my tongueless mouth could never speak;
I who had fought so hard to reach my goal?
Would maggots in my starved, gaunt body loll
My bloodprints in the dead sand marked my trail.
For my escape I knew what I must pay:
Tortures would mark the finish of my quest.
And when at last my captors bore me through
They gave me back my eyes so I could peer
To make my sufferings worse if I should dine.
And stood tremendous to my caverned room,
From which a tongue curled inward to my lair,
So great I turned and clawed my hands to bone
I struggled onward though my strength was spent
And in the fading vision of my sleep
I sink back in the pillows of my deep divan
Come forth my slaves and eunuchs and the dancing girls:
Me from my ennui with your body naked wholly,
My withered heart, stained as with vermeil and rich vair,
My lady hath two lovely lips,
Delirium over my shaken soul now passes,
Although my flesh with many knives is slit.
They left to me my eyes, so I could stare
My neck, and heard a husky gurgling choke
My face was eaten by a red, huge Thing.
And both my hands were covered with that red,
O Love, my world is pouring
O Love, my heart adoring
Though all my days were added one by one,
I answer—if they love me in my fashion,
To those that bless, and by my charm, are blessed.
247
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075.1
075.11
078.1
078.4
080.6
080.9
080.12
081.5
082.9
082.11
082.14
083.4
083.6
084.1
084.2
084.3
084.10
084.11
085.2
085.3
085.10
086.3
086.4
086.12
087.9
087.12
089.10
089.13
090.10
091.3
095.12
096.8
096.22
096.40
096.76
100.1
101.21
103.4
103.9
104.12
105.14
106.9
109.33
109.37
115.1
119.12
119.14
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
My life-illusion has at last been broken,
My mind, not heart, is now my soul’s true token.
And of my presence, I could feel no sign
Only you, and the past, my dearest
And for thy bread, than my bread more sustaining,
In that bare wall where my fists wildly beat,
Nor that thou give my sightless eyes to see,
Nor lift a burden from my crumpled shoulders;
I am wisdom of my own self blind,
I am my own final taker,
But when my span
You have never been inspiring to my pen.
And to the students in my classes,
And in my greatest bliss I am
When I can make my students Cram.
I offer to my students gratis,
Upon my tomb, this legend bold:
Myriad A tolling like a myriad decibels
Myrrh The gall that intermingled with the myrrh.
Unclothe you, scent you with nard, myrrh, olibanum,
Is as the fall and rise of mist of myrrh.
Myrrhiline
Even as I, Oh Myrrhiline,
Thou art beautiful, Myrrhiline,
But even thou, Oh Myrrhiline,
And I shall join thee, Myrrhiline,
And even so, Myrrhiline,
So let us love, Myrrhiline,
But in thine arms, Myrrhiline,
Myrtle But alas! Your name is Myrtle,
Myself Set, fixed, immovable myself, now wed
Mysteries
Abysmal secrets, monstrous mysteries, I know;
Mysterious
Witching, haunted, haunting, mysterious faces
All heaven smouldered in mysterious burning,
In those mysterious lands and alien places
Meets the mysterious woman’s stare
Mysterious as her sunken palace is,
Mystery For him who sought the mystery,
The sea’s eternal mystery,
Stood out, half-open pods showed mystery
Laid bare the mystery of the vast sea-tomb,
Red phantoms in its bleeding mystery hid.
I am awed, O Love, at knowing this mystery,
Mystic For him whose mystic sleep
Who cast on me a mystic spell malign,
For a long and mystic sleep
With mystic earth, thereof for ever choking,
120.1
120.8
122.3
123.19
124.4
124.7
124.12
124.13
133.5
133.11
133.59
135.6
137.7
137.9
137.10
137.16
137.26
080.3
007.4
096.35
127.5
004.10
004.39
004.41
004.43
004.47
004.71
004.80
135.10
054.10
013.22
006.15
034.10
036.45
055.15
127.12
014.25
020.10
093.6
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106.14
110.5
014.22
027.3
047.35
068.5
M
Mystical
Mytilene
Out of the mystical spaces flung beyond,
In the mystical burning pallor of the moon
And illumines with mystical light the eyes unseeing.
When light shone out of the mystical ebb and flow:
Imbedded witches’ jewels mystical,
I only know she died in Mytilene.
249
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101.4
110.4
112.2
127.8
099.14
N
Naked
She will strip herself naked, in splendid and terrible glory array her,
Of naked hearts, and dust
The naked torso of a goddess glowing
Me from my ennui with your body naked wholly,
And naked lay the true design, the trick.
Name Like all his deeds, his very name unknown,
Where banners of his proud name float unfurled,
Of secret worlds that have no name or place.
The garden is still with a fever that passes all name;
If your name were only Mabel
But alas! Your name is Myrtle,
Nameless And fearful regions of a nameless fright,
What nameless hunter searching for its meat?
Rejected. Nameless others near me sit.
A nameless and sorcerous glory has made me weak:
Names The names of all the Roman towns;
The authors’ names I know by rote,
Nard
Unclothe you, scent you with nard, myrrh, olibanum,
Natural That’s natural artifice in you; the way
Nature She walks in charm, adoring nature pleases
All nature whispers but her one word: Death.
Till Nature teems
Naught Naught by thy loveliness
I dream through realms where naught begins or ends,
Near
And the long nights near
But everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
In search of something lost, but never near it;
No other form is near,
You drift upon the moonlight hovering near
Rejected. Nameless others near me sit.
And everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
That nightmare sculpture, running fast, was near me....
And bloated carrion rats that near me sit!
Came near me, passed, and faintly died away;
No human being could be near her:
Who came from near and came from far
Nearer To be, I thought to find in nearer faces
Nearest Nothing of farthest or nearest,
Neat
Archibald Mimmih ran a neat
’Neath ‘Neath the lowering skies
Neck
My neck, and heard that husky, gurgling choke
My neck, and heard a husky gurgling choke
Necklace
003.9
039.14
092.4
096.40
121.12
059.13
069.4
070.8
101.17
135.7
135.10
025.8
079.3
087.8
101.22
137.4
137.5
096.35
114.4
041.7
102.9
109.24
032.9
070.10
002.26
029.12
037.4
058.10
077.3
087.8
090.12
092.14
103.8
122.2
128.10
140.7
036.47
123.17
140.1
002.22
072.12
104.12
N
And a pebble necklace around his head
Necrophilic
The dark star’s necrophilic race.
Nectar The nectar of their chalice
On the nectar of love I have fed,
Needle-Bed
Then hurled me, shapeless, on a needle-bed.
Neither I further search with neither hope nor peace
And neither dawn nor darkness shades her clime.
Neither thing will walk again.
That saw her but heard neither her voice nor her laughter.
Nepenthe The legend saith: for each, nepenthe follows sorrow,
Nests
Stray hands and heads that crawled; in nests I found
Never Never has woman been loved as I shall love her, never
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond shall not
sever
Never a rose will deathlessly bloom,
Never will Beauty escape the grave,
Never will mortal outlive the tomb—
Never again will a dead girl thrill
For us the future never will come,
And never will the present cease,
And never shall I find release,
I dreamed the night would never turn to day.
And never footsteps tread the ground.
As thou hast never known;
Of golden voices that will never speak;
My destiny, and found what men can never guess;
I know that death itself will never bring release;
That I could picture worlds I’ve never known,
To paint the things I never shall relate.
In void, in waste, in riddle never guessed,
Still seeking that which I had never found,
In search of something lost, but never near it;
Her loveliness in poetry lies never.
There was never love greater than mine, so destroying, so ravaging,
ravishing, rapturous, deep;
Or gold that never yet no man befriended,
Oh light that never shone for me one ray,
But never changes, never fades,
Never more shall I hear sound
Till darkness falls—it never will—
Her vigil never will be done:
Never a light to mark the trail
But the musty tale can never be told
Of the pulpy head that never grows old,
As you have never known,
And though you never talk (do you have tongue?)
As if there never were an end in store.
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053.8
126.16
129.4
134.7
072.3
003.37
003.39
004.35
004.36
004.37
004.66
004.69
004.78
004.79
007.40
010.12
012.2
012.34
013.10
013.30
025.2
025.14
036.30
036.42
037.4
041.15
043.14
051.3
051.57
053.7
054.16
055.17
055.18
056.6
057.21
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
A thought my tongueless mouth could never speak;
This never ending night of mounting pain,
To reach the haven I would never find.
They dragged me back with never pause for rest.
And in recurring deaths escape them never.
Take, or the taking never will be thine;
But from the sundered room I never crept—
And light that never shone
Than any known in lands that never were,
Love comes. I know that I shall never be
These things I love, yet words can never tell
Thought fashions worlds that earth can never share,
And you will never know what years drift by.
What they are told, the falseness never find
So long as there was never danger;
I am wastrel, never keeper,
Never finder,
If I never take you anywhere again;
You have never been inspiring to my pen.
I could never love a girl with such a rhyme!
Are things that never ought to bore ’em.
Nevermore
Upon it nevermore to leave. I tried
Never-Setting
The crimson, never-setting sun,
New
For pleasures and joys that she knows not, for a new and monstrous
delight;
I found or made new pleasures that I shall not tell;
With mad new colours and queer lines I’d trace
Or be bathed in new glory,
What goal, what new companion did I seek?
Changing and new, so hard to know, to trace.
They slit me till a hundred new wounds bled;
We have dwelt with new suns and watched the old stars die;
From the dust of forgotten worlds to whole new systems leaping
Phantasmal realms of faëry, strange and new,
Radiant and ever-freshening, ever new,
Assume new meaning and become the prick
She is new each time that their contents grow, lesser, and lesser.
Nielsen When Nielsen with a pen of magic drew
Night
All the night.
And all the long night her body to mine I shall press;
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I sought the poisonous fruit of her;
Yea, all the bitter night I sought the bitter rapture,
Rose and fell and rose through all the Lesbian night;
For well we knew the holy night must have an ending,
But all night long we worshipped at our pagan altar,
All night I bowed before a burning shrine;
084.11
084.13
085.12
086.5
087.14
097.6
105.13
109.27
113.3
113.9
114.9
116.7
118.4
121.7
128.14
133.34
133.36
135.3
135.6
135.12
137.22
093.12
055.10
003.18
013.14
025.9
033.29
072.9
077.8
084.5
112.6
112.9
113.5
115.10
121.10
129.12
113.4
003.20
003.26
007.1
007.2
007.3
007.6
007.15
007.17
007.18
N
For one intoxicating night were mine.
All night in worship and in love I lay;
All night I dreamed the one long night would last for ever,
I dreamed the night would never turn to day.
And all the beauty of that night now lies decaying,
The vacant spaces of the weary night;
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
They dwell in wasteland and in night.
In night.
Is night.
Till night had cooled the burning winds of day;
Tremble upon the scented air of night,
All night long.
A rapture in the night,
That rose from out the gulfs of utter night,
Ere I, by night and darkness, am bereft
Itself was lost beyond abysses of the night...
Where dwindling monitors of night had sundered
Where night was like a shroud before an altar
The night that brings a sleep.
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
Strange was the night, and stranger
I brought him dreams of eternal night,
When the night came down again.
Let one long, lingering note through night come stealing,
Eternal night, and earth damp, black, and cold
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
She has yielded to the kiss of night,
And taloned shapes of evil stalk, for one night free,
To her tryst she will go in the night,
She will dream as the night wanes slowly,
Night be gone.
And so I soared on pinions of the night
Vast wings were flapping in the night. I heard
This never ending night of mounting pain,
All night I heard the tolling of a bell;
All night I heard the cadences of doom
I saw the dwellers of the ocean night,
All present, past, and future worlds; and day, and night;
Now day dies, and night falls, and that great summer moon
Drink! For the night and the fruit of the vine!
I am the night and the garden and all things swoon
The monstrous spell of the night is an amorous cover
The night grows dim and unreal and reeling: do I waken
Unmeaning march from nothingness to night,
253
007.20
007.38
007.39
007.40
007.43
007.50
007.51
007.63
010.5
014.8
014.15
015.6
015.10
015.16
021.2
024.11
031.8
034.15
036.9
036.13
036.64
043.4
045.5
046.5
048.8
051.61
054.21
056.1
056.5
056.9
058.1
061.11
065.3
065.19
066.4
071.9
079.1
084.13
094.1
094.2
095.10
096.71
096.85
098.4
101.3
101.18
101.29
102.2
254
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Vast wings were flapping in the still night air;
Out of the night, there came a shrill long scream,
Sleep the dim night away
And voices shake the night
So soft the sound that stirs the night so slowly,
Leaving the night more luminous than light of the moon;
All night the blood-red ruby glares,
Sucking sounds invade the night,
I am night erasing day,
Of black and radiant night.
“Saturday night then, Miss Shere. What time?”
“Nine o’clock Saturday night, Mr. Forchamer.”
Evening to night, and night to afterglow,
Nightfall see After-Nightfall
Nightingale
The clear, pure warble of a nightingale
Nightingale’s
From a nightingale’s golden throat,
Nightmare
What nightmare bore you, hateful blight of red?
That nightmare sculpture, running fast, was near me....
Foul nightmare creatures peering through the air:
Nightmare-Dream
At first I deemed it some mad nightmare-dream,
Nights Oh, the nights are long
And the long nights near
Oh, the nights are long
And unforgotten nights
Of nights that seemed eternities, of vain
Of days and nights that are an old and tiring story,
I have met darker nights than that of old,
Night’s Yea, love and more than love were all the long night’s portion,
Within those precincts of the spectral night’s
In night’s eternal pall.
In alien land, by night’s resounding vastness?
And night’s great arch illume.
Nightward
Nightward and deeper.
Engirt, and hurled me nightward into doom.
Night-Wind
Why has the night-wind ceased to blow?
Nine
“Nine o’clock Saturday night, Mr. Forchamer.”
Nirvana And dream caravans of Nirvana are beholden,
And past Nirvana waits eternal vision, pure,
No
Living in their silence secrets whence no whisper
Enigmatic regions that no eye can know,
No more, no more I know the fierce desire of woman,
No traveler crosses now the land,
But found no other than the great refrain:
105.1
105.9
109.7
109.15
110.14
111.2
125.13
126.9
133.55
134.12
139.5
139.18
147.13
021.5
001.4
017.1
092.14
104.4
105.12
002.3
002.26
002.33
039.17
070.6
096.5
122.9
007.33
011.15
045.12
059.12
134.24
064.4
089.14
056.4
139.18
096.59
134.8
006.11
006.14
007.55
010.17
014.19
N
Out of oblivion, no voice will stir
It lies where ashen lips no longer sing—
That tongue hath no harsh syllable to annoy
And of his face, there was no vestige seen,
Wherein no seed nor any fruit are left,
And hath no waking to no dawn nor sun.
But the eyes have no vision,
Could wing no flight,
We left no mark to show her grave,
No life or mind or trace of vanished lore,
I sought beyond no more.
The fire is cold; no fuming censers flare;
No gleam illumes the hoofprints on the lawn.
So fair she is that beauty hath no graces
Of the splendor known no more,
But no voice shall speak again
The twilight brought no ease from the hot
Where no man walks, and shall not ever see,
Or gold that never yet no man befriended,
But fulness leaves no unassuaged desires,
And to no futile dream of death aspires,
And of no emptiness is unforgetful.
No love endures if love be only passion
And no love lasts if love be only mind,
Than which no love can have supremer worth.
There will spring no laughter
That has no counterpart in lands of time
No glare
There are no eyes to see,
No voice to tell of days that were,
No ears to hear her footsteps die away.
A phantom of a kingdom of no sound.
No other form is near,
The world of which no tale is handed down.
Of secret worlds that have no name or place.
Pursued and pounced; an arm that had no source
And languid, warming into life; no dread
A king who saw but used no eyes for seeing,
Around me, solid walls of no escape,
That clove through midnight where no other stirred,
Of revelers turned statue, and no more
I found no door, and when all hope lay dead
I tried to scream but heard no sound, no hoarse,
And of its face no vestige could be seen,
No hint of what it once resembled, save
Until I stumbled. Fear no longer lent
Had hooves, the arms no hands but splaying fall
No moving thing, no blade of grass. One tree
Now no things interest me,
255
026.9
027.13
028.5
029.5
031.6
031.14
033.33
034.13
035.9
036.38
036.40
040.3
040.4
041.1
047.18
047.33
048.13
050.10
051.3
051.19
051.20
051.21
051.22
051.23
051.49
052.5
053.3
053.9
053.11
053.12
053.13
053.20
058.10
068.14
070.8
074.13
075.6
076.5
078.9
079.5
081.7
088.7
088.8
090.5
090.7
091.6
092.7
093.3
096.3
256
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
I find no surcease in the unrelieving wine;
Or quite agree—it’s all the same; no virtues please
Drink deep the cup, ere thou canst drink no more;
Sing, for too soon, too long, thy mouth shall know no singing.
No voice remains to tell me where she lies,
There is no picture of her dear dead face,
I find no rest in the passions with which I am shaken,
Are merely words that mean no more than life.
Wan hands and heads that had no trace of wound,
Of death itself, there now was left no trace,
Contained no thought or dust of thing or race;
In all infinity was left no place
I know there are no princesses, but you
Yet would it be no Eden to entice.
The lands no traveller ever found on earth;
And through its darkened window see no sky:
Than they, sow seeds for harvests of no reaping.
And of my presence, I could feel no sign
Felt deeper silence broken by no sound,
No hope, no faith, no fear, no trust remaining
I ask no comfort and no ease of thee,
She loved no man, so she would boast,
No human being could be near her:
Believed no truth except what pleased her;
Yet saw no cause why gossip seized her.
With her sweet self, she had no quarrels,
She had no scruples and no morals
I hear them when no human voice is talking
Past where, once seen, once open, close in no tomorrow,
Nod
She lies where the Lesbian poppies nod,
Where, drowsy and drunken and dreaming, nod and list
Nodules Of bird and fish in nodules like a band
Noisome A noisome pool as once before.
None
For none are left the tale to tell.
He walks where none can know or see,
There was none before you,
There will be none after.
For there will come none after,
Though none is lovelier
Where none are seen:
There will be none with you to help you share it,
Where none could know or share.
For surely none would think of spurning
None of these things can bother me
Noon
Enchantment grows in this soft after-nightfall noon,
I have awakened in the fevered midnight noon,
On fields of noon,
Rippling the leaves that sleep in a moonless midnight noon.
Noons To fulness in the drowsy summer noons,
Nor
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond shall
096.20
096.64
097.2
097.5
099.9
099.10
101.28
102.4
104.3
107.3
107.6
107.7
113.1
115.11
116.12
118.2
119.8
122.3
122.10
124.6
124.9
128.9
128.10
128.30
128.32
128.37
128.39
131.3
134.10
019.2
101.9
093.8
054.54
010.24
014.9
052.1
052.2
052.8
096.51
109.12
118.3
134.6
138.37
142.9
096.89
101.1
109.28
111.4
051.51
N
not sever
Wherein no seed nor any fruit are left,
And hath no waking to no dawn nor sun.
I sought not, nor in worlds that only seem
I further search with neither hope nor peace
Nor always full the charming sleeve—
Nor ever have; and since this mortal bond
And neither dawn nor darkness shades her clime.
Nor ever a hand caressed its fat;
The strange cocoon, not living yet nor dead
I can not find, nor do I seem to place
Your limbs, if limbs you have; nor is it clear
Not anywhere was life nor anything,
Nor vestige of the worlds of old; and now,
Nor I desire it if it held not you;
The acids would not matter, nor I rue
Of recognition, nor was I to stay
Nor that thou roll away the mountain boulders
Nor that thou give my sightless eyes to see,
Nor lift a burden from my crumpled shoulders;
That saw her but heard neither her voice nor her laughter.
Not on earth nor anywhere
Normal I have made love in normal and eccentric ways;
Northern The Northern Lights crept down with pulsing streamers
Northerly
And back; and purple suns flamed northerly
North-Wind
And the north-wind—hark!
Nose
Within the limits of his nose,
Nostrils Offends my nostrils,
Offends my nostrils. Go!
Not
For pleasures and joys that she knows not, for a new and monstrous
delight;
Of a passion swayed not by reason, a passion ungovernable, mad;
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond shall
not sever
Go! I can not bear thee, Go!
DEATH: Turn not, Oh Poet, wait!
DEATH: Ah Poet, scorn me not,
I found or made new pleasures that I shall not tell;
The earth could not contain
We shall not weep
We shall not weep
We shall not weep
We shall not weep,
I do not know. There is an ache that fills
Some thing I find not though I ever seek.
He leered so vilely, Horror could not save
And when they oped they could not find
Still farther where not even stars were flaring
257
003.39
031.6
031.14
036.46
036.60
042.17
050.11
053.8
057.13
075.3
077.5
077.6
107.12
107.13
115.12
121.13
122.4
124.10
124.12
124.13
129.4
133.65
013.17
034.1
071.3
002.11
138.25
012.9
067.9
003.18
003.22
003.39
012.10
012.11
012.44
013.14
014.16
014.21
014.24
014.27
014.31
027.9
027.11
029.7
030.43
036.29
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
I sought not, nor in worlds that only seem
I have not found it sleeping or awaking.
I will not find it till all things shall cease,
For song, not she, doth gain.
Not always empty is a shell,
Of the phantoms that are not, but seem?
Mine the love that can fade not or falter,
There could not be so still a sea
It knew me not from all the rest,
That I am weary though I’ve gone not far,
Where no man walks, and shall not ever see,
That flowered not, and all things weep to die,
Oh bells that shall not ever ring for me,
I can not close an eye,
I can not move a thigh,
I can not even sigh
And spoiling, lured them. But I could not squirm
My body will not pour
Stares with an eye she can not shun.
Not a creature lived in all the land,
Not a thing disputed the lordly worm
I can not bear you. Go!
Death: Turn not, oh Traveler, wait!
Death: Ah Traveler, scorn me not
Traveler: Not now, not yet. I go my way,
Traveler: Not soon for I must find a song—
Death: Not long, not long....
It is not blessed sleep. It looms as hateful.
Where all things are, yet are not; time and space
I could not move though mind and spirit broke.
For what, I did not know, yet tense, on guard
The strange cocoon, not living yet nor dead
Not woman, man, or child crawled in my lap.
I can not find, nor do I seem to place
This being’s face is soft, he shall not pass;
I could not turn though fronted by the rack.
They crushed me, broke me till I could not rise,
To burn, to break; their pleasure not to slay
But could not move or even draw one breath:
And dreams that can not be.
And of the empty dreams that were not worth desiring,
And if you charm me not, and I grow weary of
And if your kisses, like most kisses, mean not love,
I know not whether she was slave or queen;
The Beloved is gone; I know not the way she has taken;
They would not burn me quickly on their spit;
And yet I could not move. There came a creak,
Where Death in death all things did not immerse.
Not anywhere was life nor anything,
Nor I desire it if it held not you;
036.46
036.57
036.58
041.16
042.16
043.12
043.19
048.11
049.20
050.5
050.10
051.16
051.58
054.4
054.5
054.6
054.25
054.53
055.4
057.6
057.11
067.10
067.11
067.44
067.51
067.56
067.57
070.1
070.11
072.14
074.3
075.3
075.11
077.5
082.2
083.10
084.7
086.7
093.13
096.6
096.32
096.43
096.46
099.11
101.26
103.5
104.10
107.8
107.12
115.12
N
Beauty possesses, but would not care
If in your head or heart, there were not room
Of modes that will not match despite your pains.
An emptiness not knowing you are there.
Surely this beauty was not meant for keeping
In this sweet earthly house was not for sleeping
You proved illusion not more strong than oaken
My mind, not heart, is now my soul’s true token.
I am not sorry to have been your lover,
And truths I could not otherwise discover.
The acids would not matter, nor I rue
Their ravage, if they had not come from you.
And waited, wondered, though I did not know...
Heard legends not by earthly voices told,
I listen, but I do not hear them fall,
She claimed that thoughts, not deeds, pervert you—
Not too malicious; the strangeness of Harry Clarke’s Poe;
I hear them when I am not even questing
Not on earth nor anywhere
Say, sixty-five, not one day under,
“Certainly not.”
“Tut-tut, Mr. Forchamer. You’re not. You’re homely.”
That we who linger here will not forget, can not forget
Note
Like the pain in a passionate note
A last, wild note from the distant hills comes drifting—
A lyric ecstasy, a sad, sweet note,
Let one long, lingering note through night come stealing,
Like the ghost of an echoing note
As I note
Notes
And on the wind the strange, low notes kept failing
Far on the hills, I heard the notes of rapture
Nothing Though nothing visible is there
Nothing in all the universe is left for me,
For nothing suffices
These, these are gone, nothing of them remains
I know that nothing is worth while, all things are quite
Nothing remains of her; her ancient bed
That all would pass, that nothing would abide.
Where nothing else remains.
That nothing exists but the vision, the thought supreme.
Nothing of farthest or nearest,
Nothing of future or present,
I am nothing as I die,
Nothing on earth can bother me,
Nothingness
That streamed to join the nothingness beyond.
Unmeaning march from nothingness to night,
Nought Yet everywhere, in every region, there was nought
Nouns I know all Latin stems and nouns,
Now
Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips
259
116.2
116.4
117.8
118.8
119.1
119.4
120.5
120.8
120.9
120.12
121.13
121.14
122.8
122.11
122.13
128.27
129.7
131.11
133.65
138.32
139.4
139.10
146.3
001.3
015.47
021.3
051.61
063.3
133.26
015.5
015.9
010.6
013.26
033.37
051.8
096.67
099.3
107.11
109.39
112.16
123.17
123.18
133.56
142.2
076.14
102.2
013.11
137.3
260
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
be ashen,
Thy lovely face uplifted now,
Thy body now so passionate
Only now do we live.
And all the beauty of that night now lies decaying,
And now I cry aloud unto the lonely spaces,
No traveler crosses now the land,
And now at last I crown me with a coronal
Now I am jaded with my long, complete excess;
He sought the infinite in life, but now
Then, on this paper now so blank and white,
What will it matter a thousand years from now
They gazed on stars that now are dust,
Now I fully awaken
In constellations now to space-dust shrunken
For song and laughter, now the wind’s regret;
In the streets now covered deep,
Set, fixed, immovable myself, now wed
I now have ceased to bloat;
Worms now have ceased to gloat,
But now that time is gone of yore
Are these shadows, now, like finger-tips,
Traveler: Not now, not yet. I go my way,
He turns, and now returns to unheard choral
Now here, now there I fled; still on it swept.
Now was I destined after all to die,
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
That swiftly toward me now began to fall,
The ocean beds were open now, and free,
Now I am bored with all things brief and transitory,
Now no things interest me,
Now I am bored with all things present, all things olden,
Now day dies, and night falls, and that great summer moon
Delirium over my shaken soul now passes,
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
Of death itself, there now was left no trace,
Nor vestige of the worlds of old; and now,
Now wherefor do you make this larger room
My mind, not heart, is now my soul’s true token.
Now I, at dusk, beside the wall of ancient tombs,
Farewell, good friend. You leave us now. And yet,
Now in the mind come messages unspoken,
Nowhere Nowhere to flee, however I might strive,
Numb In that dark chamber, numb with terror, mute,
Numbers Like cardinal numbers adding without end;
Nymphs Nymphs to play.
With nymphs and girls in amorous Bacchic moods:
And all the laughing nymphs that make earth fair;
003.23
004.18
004.21
004.70
007.43
007.49
010.17
013.7
013.25
014.4
025.5
026.5
030.33
033.9
036.23
040.5
047.34
054.10
054.42
054.43
054.51
058.7
067.51
068.6
078.8
085.1
087.1
088.13
095.2
096.1
096.3
096.55
096.85
101.21
103.1
107.3
107.13
118.9
120.8
134.4
146.1
147.10
088.11
088.10
115.2
015.8
015.28
051.39
O
O
Be still, O Muse! what syllables soever,
O Cyrenaya, take away the sweet, dark gum,
O Love, a flower closes
O Love, my world is pouring
O Love, my heart adoring
Binds you, O Love.
I am awed, O Love, at knowing this mystery,
O Love, the world so shadowy and dim
So luminous, O Love, the shrine so holy,
So faint the dream, O Love, and yet so fair.
We are deathless, O Love, and deific; we have known the
wonder supernal:
We have found that only the dream is unchanging, O Love, and
eternal,
Oak
Of oak the leaves fall in autumnal haze
Oaken You proved illusion not more strong than oaken
Oblivion Oblivion.
Out of oblivion, no voice will stir
Until the last oblivion.
And left her lovely body to oblivion;
In whose oblivion we shall meet;
Oblivion had laid its deathless curse
And oblivion saw strange worlds begin to glow.
Oblivious
Of the oblivious years.
In other stars in old, oblivious years I sought
Occasions
And paid for all, on some occasions.
Ocean Then ocean received the husks that we heaved
Or rests where an ocean current laves
Engulfed again the riddles of the ocean;
The ocean beds were open now, and free,
I saw the dwellers of the ocean night,
O’clock “Nine o’clock Saturday night, Mr. Forchamer.”
Odorous
Burn incense till the fragrant air is odorous,
Of
see also Dreamed-Of, Pieces-of-Eight, Undreamed-Of
Like the voice of a wind that shivers and passes
Of flowers that die,
That murmur of things that wane,
Like the rows of poppies scattered and thinned,
Or the rustle of leaves that drift with the wind,
Is the voice of Beauty that dies.
041.13
096.34
109.1
109.33
109.37
109.40
110.5
110.9
110.13
110.16
112.13
112.15
147.2
120.5
014.20
026.9
030.52
035.6
046.46
107.1
112.4
009.24
013.9
128.20
048.21
060.10
094.11
095.2
095.10
139.18
096.25
001.1
001.6
001.10
001.11
001.12
001.14
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Has the cold of death
Of summer flown.
Of the wind will moan
I am enraptured of one immortally lovely, with beautiful tresses,
With beauty of face and of body as the deathlessly beautiful Greek;
The gifts of my body I bring to a flesh-white and beautiful palace,
The passion-born kiss and caress of my maddening desire;
For wine of fire.
A slave of her passion, my passion, our ecstasy secret, malign;
The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will betray
her.
Of our love.
At her feet I have laid the tribute of a burning intolerable passion,
Of a passion swayed not by reason, a passion ungovernable, mad;
I shall teach her the lore of Venus till all her sweet body tremble,
As Sappho of Lesbos was loved in the glory of Greece that is gone;
Has man known the terrible glory of woman as I;
Thou art loveliest of the things I know;
Let us forget the passing of years,
The years of the past have long since flown,
The flowers of old are overblown,
And the song of Beauty for ever dying
The lips of the singers of Greece are still,
As one who of strange pleasure sips,
When thou at the breasts of thy mistress art slaking
Remember the days that will come of the breaking
Of Venus’s trust,
Strange, grave women dream of some strange pleasure
Vainly recalling old wraiths of memory,
Can escape to tell of muted grief.
Enigmatic loveliness of enigmatic figures,
Graven deep the riddle of their deep despair.
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I sought the poisonous fruit of her;
The intolerable sanctity of sin;
And all the love and wondrous beauty of my beloved
The beauty, terror, and the pain of love.
A choral hymn of mad and sweetest pain,
And so I lay between the arms of my beloved,
And all the beauty of that night now lies decaying,
The sands of time are thick, the days march slow;
The memory of the elder ecstasy has faded,
The tale is told of years of long ago.
The vacant spaces of the weary night;
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
And weariness of life oppresses me;
No more, no more I know the fierce desire of woman,
But bitter is the end of love and man’s desire,
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
002.18
002.24
002.28
003.1
003.2
003.5
003.6
003.8
003.10
003.11
003.16
003.21
003.22
003.29
003.34
003.38
004.40
004.52
004.55
004.56
004.61
004.64
004.74
005.1
005.3
005.4
006.3
006.6
006.12
006.13
006.20
007.1
007.2
007.10
007.19
007.28
007.30
007.37
007.43
007.46
007.47
007.48
007.50
007.51
007.54
007.55
007.61
007.63
O
The idol in my shrine of ebony,
Dearest of all dear things that I possess.
Of the oblivious years.
And underneath the shroud of gloom
Lie only shards of that dread doom
The cold apocalypse of sand.
And baleful boles of strange misshapen growths
Of that malign, close-hidden ebon pool.
Within those precincts of the spectral night’s
Of Acherontic streams;
The poppies of the dead
Of all my spectral lands,
Of dwarfs in deep Lethean sands;
More fabulous than all the gems of fame,
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
The lips of her of Troy,
The beauty of her immarbled by the Greek;
Of golden voices that will never speak;
The sound of perished lutes
The glory of
I weary of the old monotony of things;
The song of life is but a tedious, bitter moan;
All men, all things, all hopes, my burning dreams of fire;
Of dead desire.
The love of girls more strange on stranger stars I won;
Of star and sun.
Of bitter woe.
I lived whole cycles of existence; I am wise;
Beyond the shadows of the shrouded deep
He peered, and in the curtained realms of sleep
Has claimed the everlasting vow of him who coldly rests
Whose dream of old is gone
To read the tale of star and sun,
The guessless riddle of infinity.
Of death.
A song of pagan passion, wild and sweet;
Till night had cooled the burning winds of day;
Far on the hills, I heard the notes of rapture
Tremble upon the scented air of night,
Garlands of rose and violet, and wreaths of vine;
From Pan’s wild pipes, the god’s own song of yearning
There came a sound: Was it a song of gladness
For Youth, and Spring, and the woodland feast of Pan?
Or was it the old despairing cry of sadness
Of half-gods outcast from the world of man?
There is a rush of hooves in the break of dawn;
Weary of pomp and power, gorged with glut,
What nightmare bore you, hateful blight of red?
Of desolation and the livid dead,
263
008.7
008.8
009.24
010.14
010.15
010.20
011.3
011.14
011.15
012.4
012.12
012.19
012.21
012.23
012.30
012.31
012.32
012.34
012.35
012.39
013.1
013.2
013.6
013.8
013.18
013.20
013.24
013.29
014.1
014.2
014.7
014.13
014.18
014.26
014.36
015.4
015.6
015.9
015.10
015.22
015.31
015.33
015.34
015.35
015.36
015.46
016.1
017.1
017.3
264
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Whence came your charnel hue of pain and blood?
You are the brand that sears, the mark of shame,
The dripping symbol of a murderer’s hands.
Apocalyptic prophet of our doom,
Specter, in swathings of sick scarlet clad,
Whence came you, spawn of what abysmal womb?
Mars poured on you the bane of baleful beams,
Oh color of destruction, rage, and lust,
Foul messenger of war and holocaust,
Symbol of Armageddon, rot of rust,
With breasts of fire, and passionate lips to slake,
With bodies flashing in the sounding seas of foam,
That drifts from the vacant meadows of the sea.
A passionate burst of song from a golden throat,
The clear, pure warble of a nightingale
A wine-red toast to the health of the host—
For the good of the town, with the spirits—Down!
Flesh and the grape and a wreath of vine!
He passed beyond the utmost realm of stars,
In search of vengeance for an ancient wrong
Of Time and Space, and strode upon his long
From all the hate of all those bitter scars.
For ever mounting past the realm of light,
That rose from out the gulfs of utter night,
And on the doors of doom, disdainful, hurled
Ah, God, that I could draw instead of write,
The growth of seeds of morbid beauty, sown
And fearful regions of a nameless fright,
Phantasmal things of beauty and of death,
Vampirish beings of a stellar race,
Monotony of life an empty show?
With thorns of loathing on a fevered brow?
Out of oblivion, no voice will stir
To tell of pomp and splendour long unknown,
Of buried kings, and empires perilous;
The older glory of the days that were
Was there a goddess in the days of old,
And bound me with long coils of dusky gold?
A phantom of the dead, forgotten Greek.
Is like the pure, sweet warbling of a bird,
And every sound a thing of lyric joy.
With all the dreadful cerements of the grave,
And of his face, there was no vestige seen,
And of that thing there came to me a fear
For I was his, that horror of the dead.
Have known the fungi of the moon,
Of lizard-gods in Jupiter,
Have seen the fall of many kings,
And watched a queen of Saturn mourn
017.4
017.7
017.8
017.10
017.11
017.12
017.15
017.17
017.18
017.19
019.1
020.7
020.12
021.1
021.5
022.3
022.11
023.2
024.1
024.3
024.6
024.8
024.9
024.11
024.13
025.1
025.6
025.8
025.10
025.11
026.4
026.8
026.9
026.10
026.11
026.12
027.1
027.4
027.14
028.3
028.4
029.2
029.5
029.9
029.14
030.2
030.6
030.10
030.11
O
The death of pale-green bloated things.
To see the Hylots of Calair,
And drunk a wine of amethyst
Of sights and sounds of outer space,
With knowledge of the carrion
Beneath twin moons of livid red.
With dazzle of a monstrous flame,
With visions of the stellar pits,
Beyond the age of any sun;
Of every age and every sky.
Of hope; and how my hours are unavailing
To chart the labyrinths of long assailing;
Of thine eyes holdeth me.
The beauty of thy features,
Of the gods, I inherit
The nectar of their chalice
And the lotus of their leaven,
Of their paradisal heaven.
From the sweep of vast spaces
Of a dream supernal.
Of a glory I have drunken,
Out of the mystical spaces flung beyond,
The luminous shadow of the infinite,
Skeins of fluctuant color, lit
With skirling fires of weird, vast fanes,
And surge of falling flame of far dominions,
Itself was lost beyond abysses of the night...
I sought it in far lands of timeless travel
Athwart the circling citadel of stars,
Where only courage of lost hope could ravel
The secret of eternal avatars.
With scrutiny of systems long forgotten,
Amid all worlds of time and dust begotten
Where dwindling monitors of night had sundered
And traveled backward past the age of man
The spheres that spin of chance the blind and dumb,
The scattered symbols of those closing pages
No life or mind or trace of vanished lore,
From utmost regions of strange realms returning,
I sought in maze of sorcery and bale;
Through all the space of worlds in time and spirit,
In search of something lost, but never near it;
Pebbles and beetles and layers of earth,
Or the open arms, or the eyes of glass;
With wine of life.
Of naked hearts, and dust
Of wasted years;
Of slow, fierce grief.
The storied queens of old?
265
030.12
030.14
030.19
030.26
030.31
030.36
030.42
030.46
030.50
030.56
031.9
031.10
032.2
032.5
033.4
033.5
033.6
033.8
033.13
033.16
033.21
034.2
034.5
034.6
034.7
034.8
034.15
036.1
036.2
036.3
036.4
036.5
036.7
036.9
036.18
036.28
036.35
036.38
036.43
036.54
037.2
037.4
038.6
038.14
039.12
039.14
039.15
039.18
041.10
266
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
May sing of her are vain;
White poppy of the crimson eve—
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of
endless and awful delight;
Like a drinker of chloral I dream,
Of the phantoms that are not, but seem?
In the years of the past, in the coming and passing of lovers and
love and the paths love has taken,
In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of the
future, the passions to waken,
In a furnace of ecstasy whirled,
And its death is the death of the world.
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of
soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
Wine of life and of death I have drunken,
On the nectar of love I have fed,
There is a faint, far rapture of birds in the breathless beauty of dawn,
There is a stir of wakening winds that whisper across the lawn.
And a presence of something supernal drifts over the springsweet earth,
The world is wondrously quiet, so quiet, prophetic of day,
And my heart is fulfilled of its dream as I walk my enchanted way.
Fore-glimpse of after-hell.
Anguish of some lost thing’s cry or call
In search of closed escapes.
I brought him dreams of eternal night,
I gave him the pall of Death’s last blight,
Once he was pale with love of me,
He had dreams and thoughts of just
I was the sign of royal state,
Of the mad matriarch who sate
Made mad songs and patterns of,
From each of us he took his joy,
We were won and lost of a mad young boy.
Sunken walls of crumbling stone
Whisper of the days of old,
Of the splendor known no more,
In the depths of gloomy murk:
From the stricken hosts of those plague-filled coasts
By the legions of the pest.
As we strode the streets of Tyre
Of those who came to praise this day
As we strode down the streets of Tyre.
Of those the days before the quest.
Or purple, dear to children of the dust,
And years of striving in one moment ended.
These, these are gone, nothing of them remains
Except the fair, faint dream of beauty slowly
And crystal clear, of life and love and rapture,
041.14
042.2
043.2
043.10
043.12
043.13
043.15
043.22
043.24
043.25
043.29
043.30
044.1
044.2
044.3
044.7
044.8
045.8
045.10
045.16
046.5
046.6
046.10
046.15
046.30
046.31
046.35
046.37
046.39
047.11
047.12
047.18
047.38
048.1
048.20
049.1
049.3
049.7
049.16
051.2
051.7
051.8
051.9
051.12
O
And to no futile dream of death aspires,
And of no emptiness is unforgetful.
The ever fresh design of your own fashion.
Of the dual flower that alone endures;
What though one kingdom each of you forsake,
For fields of asphodel and hyacinth,
Of water, fire, earth and air attend you,
Of pagany, divinely young Apollo,
In your steps on the wakened ways of earth
Live with all things of earth and airy splendor,
Of them, bound, yet magnificently free;
Symbol of beauty, love, and life, and healing,
Of Hymen and the gods that watch your way.
That has no counterpart in lands of time
Of sun illumes the mouldy balustrades.
No voice to tell of days that were,
A phantom of a kingdom of no sound.
Of worm that multiplied on worm
But now that time is gone of yore
Of arabesques the blood-red sun,
Amid a realm of sorcery,
Out of the window’s smouldering red
She scans the shadows of her land,
The blood-red waving wastes of sand
Of burning, baleful scarlet spun
Beyond the lifetime of the sun.
A worm that was born of the deep sea-slime,
Saw only a realm of wet black sand
And the slimy things of the slimy dead
Of its cold sea-tomb.
Of the realm that rose from stale sea-waves,
Of the white worm-king and the fat white fold,
Of the pulpy head that never grows old,
She has yielded to the kiss of night,
She dreams of fear.
What did he seek, this wayfarer of old?
The vanished mists of time enshroud him, hide him;
Laughing, she flashes down the shifting tides of green,
With beauty of frail and waving fronds go wide,
Sometimes she dreams to music of murmuring waves
The rush of waves that seek in vain
Phantasmal fire burns the band of sorcery,
And taloned shapes of evil stalk, for one night free,
And a rat-like sound of pitter and patter.
And the echoing mirth of a sullen mutter,
And the dirge of a wind that whispers and dies
Like the ghost of an echoing note
Like the rustle of small
Like the sound of the sea or the rain,
267
051.20
051.21
051.28
051.30
051.31
051.34
051.40
051.44
051.45
051.54
051.60
051.62
051.63
053.3
053.10
053.12
053.20
054.27
054.51
055.2
055.3
055.5
055.9
055.11
055.14
055.20
057.3
057.8
057.9
057.10
057.22
057.23
057.24
058.1
058.4
059.9
059.14
060.1
060.7
060.8
060.18
061.9
061.11
062.5
062.6
062.7
063.3
063.5
063.9
268
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Murmur of all things that wane,
Of the woods to a spot forlorn,
Till the coming of dawn.
She waits the coming of the golden guest;
She drinks the earthly and heavenly beauty of morning;
Of Acherontic streams;
The poppies of the dead
Of all my timeless lands,
Of dwarfs in deep Lethean sands;
More fabulous than all the gems of fame.
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
The lips of Egypt, Troy,
Of golden voices that again will speak;
The sound of ancient lutes
The glory of
Of flesh and spirit, and attains the crown
Of inner ecstasy and exaltation
Desired of many but achieved by few.
The world of which no tale is handed down.
From towers topless as the realms of sleep
Where banners of his proud name float unfurled,
Each vespertime, he wearies of the view
As fearful as the haunts of the insane.
Of nights that seemed eternities, of vain
Of secret worlds that have no name or place.
But phantoms; life and death part each of other;
Of purple leagues, violet hippogriffs
With wings of beating purple flew to me
And so I soared on pinions of the night
And in a sea of purple shadows drowned.
Out of a dusky corner came the stare
Of some gray form that made a rattling sound.
In swathes of softly searching sentient hair.
As of some ancient corpse about to speak....
It rolled, and spun, and stopped in front of me,
Bloodless, the blind eyes of eternity,
As all the years of Hercules’ great labors,
It fell in parts, and I was part of it.
Of some imprisoned thing with old despairs.
The substance of it in the long ago.
But all at once the shell of that cocoon
But something from the dark side of the moon
Of aimless life, of aimless death. Long since
Felt flesh dissolve in motes of silver tints
I’ll talk of future times and alien shores.
Oh little creature, here’s a tale of doom....
Around me, solid walls of no escape,
Of this fresh pool of thin and brilliant blue.
The burning harpy eyes, head of a hag,
063.10
065.6
065.20
066.6
066.13
067.4
067.12
067.19
067.21
067.23
067.30
067.31
067.34
067.35
067.39
068.10
068.11
068.12
068.14
069.3
069.4
069.9
070.3
070.6
070.8
070.12
071.6
071.7
071.9
071.14
072.5
072.6
072.8
072.13
073.2
073.7
073.10
073.14
074.8
075.8
075.9
075.12
076.10
076.13
077.12
077.13
078.9
078.14
079.12
O
Of lunar sorcerers; a thousand hells
I heard a sound of cosmic revelry,
Then beating to the chambers of my brain
With eyes of golden fury; while a score
Of revelers turned statue, and no more
And all the little jeweled blades of grass
What sense of overhanging doom has made
The leering of a huge and sightless eye.
By bathing me in streams of molten lead.
This never ending night of mounting pain,
It merely hinted of the coming week.
Tortures would mark the finish of my quest.
Like me uncertain of their final fate
The chewed remains of something used for bait;
Impalpable, a brain-shaped thing of dread,
That pierced the blackness of a starless sky
As of a lost and hungry child. Then die
The face a group of eyes above a blur
With all the dreadful cerements of the grave
And of its face no vestige could be seen,
And of its flesh the rotten remnants gave
No hint of what it once resembled, save
And of that thing swept over me a fear
What shape of evil? What its foul intent?
The naked torso of a goddess glowing
Of creepers, and where head should be was growing
A tuft of slender tentacles, a crest
Of blue-red veins erect, a spiral swarm.
Then came the rush of hoofbeats and, soft-pressed
No moving thing, no blade of grass. One tree
Of human form or beast, weird sorcery
Of bird and fish in nodules like a band
Of knotty burls along the trunk, and clung
I too was fastened on that tree of death.
All night I heard the tolling of a bell;
All night I heard the cadences of doom
Laid bare the mystery of the vast sea-tomb,
Of wave that smote against colossal wave.
Engulfed again the riddles of the ocean;
Grew fainter in the silence of its grave;
I dreamed the waters of the world had died,
There lay a bed of shells and bones; I spied
A city of a vast antiquity.
I saw the vales and mountains of the deep,
I saw the dwellers of the ocean night,
And in the fading vision of my sleep
And I am sick alike of passion and of glory,
Of days and nights that are an old and tiring story,
Weary of all desires grown monotonous,
269
080.7
080.11
080.12
081.6
081.7
082.3
083.7
083.14
084.4
084.13
084.14
086.4
087.3
087.6
088.3
089.3
089.7
089.12
090.2
090.5
090.6
090.7
090.9
091.2
092.4
092.8
092.9
092.10
092.12
093.3
093.7
093.8
093.9
093.14
094.1
094.2
094.6
094.10
094.11
094.13
095.1
095.5
095.6
095.9
095.10
095.12
096.4
096.5
096.7
270
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
I sink back in the pillows of my deep divan
Delights of Ispahan.
Things of small worth to me.
And weary drag of minutes grows less dolorous,
And of the empty dreams that were not worth desiring,
When of this pastime tiring.
The green-flecked amber of your smoky-lidded eyes.
And if you charm me not, and I grow weary of
But I grow weary of your sensuous caresses,
And of your lush young beauty I grow wearier
Of your bright lips, all pleasure that your flesh possesses,
And dream caravans of Nirvana are beholden,
Of earthly ecstasy.
And faintly comes the echo of a traveler’s song,
Of caravans that throng
Rich ends, and soft the tinkle of a camel’s bell
And leave behind me all the weary works of man,
Drink! For the joy of the winking wine!
Drink! For the red-stained lips of your lover!
Drink! For the night and the fruit of the vine!
Drink! For the sheer great joy of drinking!
The dust of centuries lies on her head;
Nothing remains of her; her ancient bed
The endless silence of the endless dead;
There is no picture of her dear dead face,
In the breathless rapture of the scented dreamful air;
In the mystical burning pallor of the moon
By the breath of its shameless lips I am lightly kissed
Why do I shrink from the soft red mouths of roses
Dreaming of Her.
The monstrous spell of the night is an amorous cover
For the soft flowers awaiting the lips of the lover
With a sweet rapture of shame.
Of flowers and marvellous jasper and coral grasses
I am blind in the white embrace of the moon’s hot stream;
All things are symbols of eternal death—
The ruined relics of the ancient past,
The dying wonder of the world that is,
The sum of all man knows, the sum of all
The years since Time began, the sum of thought,
The sum of hope and faith and life, the sum
Of all the stars and all the universe,
Wan hands and heads that had no trace of wound,
Of some white form that made a rattling sound;
In gummy cloths of long and human hair.
As of a yellow corpse about to speak....
Out of the night, there came a shrill long scream,
The charnel sounds of awful slaughtering.
And tottered in a spreading pool of blood;
096.8
096.12
096.18
096.29
096.32
096.33
096.38
096.43
096.49
096.50
096.53
096.59
096.66
096.92
096.93
096.95
096.98
098.2
098.3
098.4
098.7
099.2
099.3
099.6
099.10
101.2
101.4
101.8
101.11
101.15
101.18
101.19
101.20
101.24
101.27
102.5
102.6
102.7
102.16
102.17
102.18
102.19
104.3
104.6
104.8
104.13
105.9
105.11
106.2
O
271
There was a crackle as of blazing wood,
106.7
Upon all things of life and time and space;
107.2
Of death itself, there now was left no trace,
107.3
Contained no thought or dust of thing or race;
107.6
Nor vestige of the worlds of old; and now,
107.13
Dream of forgetful day,
109.6
The worlds of sleep and waking,
109.17
On fields of noon,
109.28
With refluence of flame
109.30
Of phantoms move;
109.36
Out of the well of the heart and the heart’s recesses
110.1
Murmurs the music of a magic hymn;
110.10
It is the blessing of a Druid’s prayer,
110.15
A flame of the stars, Beloved, burns out of the far-flung spaces
111.1
Leaving the night more luminous than light of the moon;
111.2
A wind from worlds beyond blows out of foreign places
111.3
Your eyes, Beloved, are filled with the beauty of strange stars glowing 111.5
In splendor of birth and dawning there where the worlds begin:
111.6
To make the unison of this half-heard overtone;
111.10
When light shone out of the mystical ebb and flow:
112.2
We were present when space grew heavy with seeds of its own
spawning.
112.3
We have lived through cycles of birth and change, through cosmic
ages,
112.5
From the dust of forgotten worlds to whole new systems leaping
112.9
When Nielsen with a pen of magic drew
113.4
Phantasmal realms of faëry, strange and new,
113.5
And young Prince Charming rides in quest of her
113.7
Content to know the image of the dream,
113.11
A music-maker, lord of sorcery.
113.12
Chaunting of moon-dim princesses whose clime
113.13
113.14
Is dreamland, out of Space and out of Time.
Your hair’s soft brown of gold; your hands that trace
114.6
Of lips too tender; your precise array.
114.8
Of sleepy hours that time and plenty send;
115.4
Of beauty’s rarest harvests, and the hours
115.6
You are the fairest of the lovely whom
116.1
For beauty of the mind, where, as on a loom
116.5
For things external, but of higher worth,
116.10
I love you for the realms of endless view,
116.11
You care for that warm house of all your own,
117.2
Of modes that will not match despite your pains.
117.8
Delight in sudden vagaries of your mind.
117.14
A counterpart of what is still to be?
118.10
Encysted from the sight of other eyes;
119.2
Than they, sow seeds for harvests of no reaping.
119.8
For I give love like sips of precious wine
119.13
The deadly hardness of reality,
120.11
Till acids of experience undeceive
121.8
272
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Of daggers, fair appearances retreat
The fall of footsteps light and pantherine
And of my presence, I could feel no sign
Of recognition, nor was I to stay
I have met darker nights than that of old,
From the fury of living.
Nothing of farthest or nearest,
Nothing of future or present,
I seek through chambers of thy strange abode;
I ask no comfort and no ease of thee,
Out of the west, foul breezes sweep,
Out of the dark where the black moons creep,
With the breath of the web-faced things asleep
Out of the sky, a black star shines,
Smooth is the liquid ink of the lake,
And the miles of rotten bogs.
Footprints of a man-bat woven
With the fresher tracks of cloven
Are like the secret pools of Jupiter.
Is as the fall and rise of mist of myrrh.
Her eyes of eidotrope,
Are languorous with dreams of mighty doom,
She liked the texture of a lily,
The sight of goblets cool and rounded,
The thought of Wilde in Piccadilly,
Devoid of mirth, devoid of feeling;
Not too malicious; the strangeness of Harry Clarke’s Poe;
And Machen to read when she thinks of the fabulous chalice.
The midst of her things: a girdle, as though to chasten
The essence of her is here—but I wish she would hasten!
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
Their elders have promised them a day of returning,
And rub out the granules of sleep from their eyes:
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
Along the summit island lanes of shrubs and trees;
I hear them in the rubble of defaced land
In heat of summer day or cold of winter snow;
I hear them by the lake shore and at cliffs of stone;
I am the master of each living thing,
I am the huntsman of each fleeing kind,
I am the arrow of the cosmic mind,
I am wisdom of my own self blind,
Of man I sing.
Of man I tire.
I am foam torn free of storm waves cresting,
From the riddle of the rib
Of infant in the crib
I am the triumph of all-seeing eye,
121.11
122.1
122.3
122.4
122.9
123.12
123.17
123.18
124.5
124.9
125.1
125.2
125.3
125.17
125.21
126.8
126.13
126.14
127.2
127.5
127.11
127.13
128.1
128.2
128.3
128.34
129.7
129.8
129.14
129.16
130.1
130.5
130.10
130.16
130.17
131.2
131.5
131.6
131.14
133.2
133.3
133.4
133.5
133.7
133.19
133.23
133.39
133.44
133.53
O
Of right or wrong,
Of why the plan
Of unknown timeless land;
Now I, at dusk, beside the wall of ancient tombs,
Of black and radiant night.
And a smell of dandelions was
The names of all the Roman towns;
To prove the brilliance of their wits,
Peopled with ghosts of their invention,
And learn the use of “ge” and “isdem.”
Within the limits of his nose,
For surely none would think of spurning
Such dazzling stores of useless learning!
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The elder gods have promised a day of returning
And rub out the granules of sleep in their eyes,
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
None of these things can bother me
Till a quarter of twelve,
It’s the break of day,
It’s a quarter of twelve,
And drew gas for the whole of Sauk City!
Enriching us, of your own everlasting glow.
Of oak the leaves fall in autumnal haze
Down the far closure of the valley, sky,
Off
Or vanishing leaves that drift off with the wind,
Offends Offends my nostrils,
Offends my nostrils. Go!
Offensive
“You’re offensive. That’s what you are.”
Offer
DEATH: I offer thee such dreams
I offer thee the moan
I offer thee the vague, vast Hadean domain
DEATH: I offer thee the wealth
I offer thee phantasmal gems
DEATH: Oh Poet, these I offer thee:
I offer thee
For this I offer thee:
Oh Poet, this I offer thee,
Death: I offer you such dreams
I offer you the moan
I offer you my whole vast Hadean domain
Death: I offer you the wealth
I offer you phantasmal gems
Death: Oh Traveler, these I offer you:
I offer all
I offer to my students gratis,
Often
She often made the first down payment,
273
133.69
133.70
134.3
134.4
134.12
136.11
137.4
138.10
138.14
138.22
138.25
138.37
138.38
141.1
141.5
141.10
141.16
141.17
142.9
143.2
143.4
143.10
145.5
146.9
147.2
147.6
063.12
012.9
067.9
139.12
012.1
012.3
012.5
012.18
012.22
012.27
012.38
012.45
012.50
067.1
067.3
067.5
067.18
067.22
067.27
067.38
137.16
128.7
274
Oh
Old
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Forsaken often, she forsook
Oh, spring is gone
Oh, the nights are long
Oh, spring is gone
Oh, the nights are long
Even as I, Oh Myrrhiline,
But even thou, Oh Myrrhiline,
DEATH: Turn not, Oh Poet, wait!
DEATH: Oh Poet, these I offer thee:
Oh Poet, this I offer thee,
THE POET (wildly): I yield! I yield! Thy lips, Oh Death!
Oh color hideous, appalling, mad,
Oh color of destruction, rage, and lust,
Oh enchantment that entices,
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft luminous
mist,
Oh sweet beloved and enchanted lover—
Oh love consummate in the flesh and spirit,
Oh love compassionate and strangely tender,
Oh hearts encysted in supernal urning.
Oh light that never shone for me one ray,
Oh bells that shall not ever ring for me,
Death: Turn not, oh Traveler, wait!
Death: Oh Traveler, these I offer you:
Oh heart, cease beating; eyes, close; sight, be wrong:
Oh little creature, lost in time and space,
Oh little creature, whether old or young,
Oh little creature, here’s a tale of doom....
Oh love, it is enough that I may be
Oh what a classicist am I,
Oh what a classicist am I,
“Oh hail to thee, and et to Brute;
Oh what a classicist am I.
see also Age-Old
Autumn is old
The flowers of old are overblown,
Vainly recalling old wraiths of memory,
I weary of the old monotony of things;
In other stars in old, oblivious years I sought
And old ennui.
Whose dream of old is gone
Or was it the old despairing cry of sadness
He seeks to allay the old desire,
With a rare old vintage mellowed in wood!
Was there a goddess in the days of old,
Thine eyes were old when God was born,
Valerian! Thine eyes are old
And the old stars are sunken
The storied queens of old?
128.23
002.1
002.3
002.31
002.33
004.10
004.41
012.11
012.27
012.50
012.53
017.9
017.17
033.39
044.5
051.27
051.47
051.55
051.56
051.57
051.58
067.11
067.27
073.12
077.1
077.9
077.13
114.13
137.1
137.19
137.27
137.29
002.10
004.56
006.6
013.1
013.9
013.28
014.13
015.35
018.10
022.10
027.1
030.9
030.49
033.23
041.10
O
Whisper of the days of old,
One old familiar face I found
One old familiar face I found.
Old prophecies alone accompany her.
Their dripping tongues from my soft flesh that, old
Silent, still, old, dead;
As deathless and old as the deathless sea,
Of the pulpy head that never grows old,
What did he seek, this wayfarer of old?
On the old and grass-covered mound
My old companions waited all around:
Slowly I climbed the worn old attic stairs
Of some imprisoned thing with old despairs.
Oh little creature, whether old or young,
Of days and nights that are an old and tiring story,
Nor vestige of the worlds of old; and now,
We have dwelt with new suns and watched the old stars die;
With weary steps to the old, original end.
I have met darker nights than that of old,
Why am I old?
Thus am I old.
To ponder old, unsated malices.
And lovers, fat ones, old ones, came
Would be as old as papa Perkins,
Who plainly wasn’t old enough?
Olden And forget worlds olden?
When all the olden days are over,
With olden dead endeavor all erased,
Now I am bored with all things present, all things olden,
To poppy legend olden.
Older
The older glory of the days that were
Oldest And outer, oldest galaxies that wane;
Oleander Till jasmine, oleander, or full roses’ bloom
Olibanum
Unclothe you, scent you with nard, myrrh, olibanum,
Olive
Swoons in the moonless olive grove;
Olive-Grove
Danced and revelled amid the olive-grove?
On
Her eyes will close at my lips on the feverish brow above;
On the dead earth;
On the autumnal gust;
Where lichens creep on crumbled fanes
The love of girls more strange on stranger stars I won;
A lonely traveler on another star;
And fixed for ever on the shoreless sea.
And on the wind the strange, low notes kept failing
Far on the hills, I heard the notes of rapture
Mars poured on you the bane of baleful beams,
Trembling, he moans on the trodden grass;
275
047.12
049.15
049.21
053.15
054.24
054.58
057.17
057.24
059.9
065.15
072.2
074.1
074.8
077.9
096.5
107.13
112.6
112.12
122.9
123.11
123.15
127.15
128.15
138.30
138.34
033.30
039.1
051.6
096.55
134.18
026.12
036.6
096.26
096.35
018.2
015.18
003.14
009.10
009.18
010.2
013.18
014.11
014.30
015.5
015.9
017.15
018.6
276
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And on the salt sea-wind there comes a wild, sweet sighing
And on the doors of doom, disdainful, hurled
Then, on this paper now so blank and white,
With thorns of loathing on a fevered brow?
Who cast on me a mystic spell malign,
On curious corpses, gold and green.
They gazed on stars that now are dust,
They gorged on wonders vanished, dead.
With torture on their burning spits.
On the meads that are rarest,
And blazed in beauty, deep on topless deep,
Where sand and tides on shattered cities roll,
I read, yet on my trail I wandered still;
I watched on earth the littler things around;
On the nectar of love I have fed,
I crawled like one impelled on ways resisted,
On a purple throne.
On the cities sleeping there
On Atlantis dreaming, dreaming
On the sunken shore.
For the plague germs fed on the sick and the dead
On which such sunfire beat.
That hung on our deep sea-graves.
And Psyche hover on the summer air.
In your steps on the wakened ways of earth
All the flesh on which fat worms have fed;
That presses on my grave and me, rolled
Of worm that multiplied on worm
An unseen step on the creeping moss—
But spectral flame on the puff-pod floss
There lived and there ruled on a crumbling throne
It reigned on its multiple thrones.
There is pressure on her blood-red lips,
On her brow the moonbeams lie as lace,
Or was he bent on dark adventure, bold,
That tremble and fall in tide on foaming tide,
The rocks on a sunken shore.
Sometimes in cool delight she floats on drifting weeds
Arabesques on a tomb.
She will sink on the cold, cold ground,
On the old and grass-covered mound
She will rest on the lawn;
Will watch while she waits on the stone;
And glowing brightlier, awakening seem the skies, on
And so I soared on pinions of the night
For what, I did not know, yet tense, on guard
Then at the top I stood on magic squares
With signs unreadable, on each the shard
I stroked the glistening webwork on its head.
020.11
024.13
025.5
026.8
027.3
030.24
030.33
030.34
030.48
033.10
034.11
036.22
036.36
036.44
043.30
045.3
046.32
047.9
047.17
047.21
048.5
048.12
048.16
051.37
051.45
054.13
054.22
054.27
056.3
056.7
057.2
057.20
058.5
058.9
059.11
060.9
060.11
060.12
065.12
065.13
065.15
065.18
065.22
066.11
071.9
074.3
074.5
074.7
075.2
O
Once
Had I, although I knew on what it fed,
Now here, now there I fled; still on it swept.
On long, metallic clang, the brazen door
Past them the leopards led me on and on
And on my flesh their mouths, devouring, fall.
Whatever on the other side should lie,
They clamped hot irons on my throbbing head;
They poured fresh acid on my blinding eyes;
Then hurled me, shapeless, on a needle-bed.
The sun stared on me like a blood-red eye,
Each step eternal, on I struggled, trying
A glowing form, it drifted on a course
A monstrous form surged on and searched with cry
Its footsteps shuffling closer on the stone,
I turned on stealthy step lest something hear me.
I too was fastened on that tree of death.
And weird encrusted forms on every side.
The dust of centuries lies on her head;
They would not burn me quickly on their spit;
There was a shape, on which a scarlet flood
And DOOM had fallen on the universe.
On fields of noon,
We have read inscrutable symbols on dim, dynastic pages,
For beauty of the mind, where, as on a loom
The lands no traveller ever found on earth;
And I look on with clearer, colder eyes,
Were errors that have lost their hold on me.
On the throne a king for its worm-queen pines
On its shore, mad emeralds burn in the brake,
A slain man moans on a pointed stake
And paid for all, on some occasions.
Heretical eyes is casually hung on a chair;
On bridges, river trails, on every gentle breeze.
And listen always as I journey on alone.
I am sunlight on the hill,
Building on to what goal later,
Not on earth nor anywhere
But once, for every soul in mosque, at sea, on sand
However brief or stilled, or borne on farther turn,
Falling on the window-pane
On which the cool green rain gleams.
Bright jewels on the knowledge tree.
Nothing on earth can bother me,
The cat on the fence, and world conditions,
Here on the hillside by the great gnarled boughs
Once lyrical with pagan melody.
Who cared? Once more immortal Pan was playing
That once a poet lived and loved and died,
And once thy purple eyes went blind
277
075.7
078.8
081.2
081.9
082.14
083.12
084.1
084.2
084.8
085.5
085.11
088.4
089.6
090.13
092.11
093.14
095.8
099.2
103.5
106.3
107.4
109.28
112.7
116.5
116.12
120.2
120.14
125.19
125.22
125.23
128.20
129.15
131.4
131.16
133.20
133.62
133.65
134.2
134.14
136.2
136.10
137.18
142.2
142.4
147.1
012.37
015.37
026.6
030.41
278
One
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
That once ran red as blood
And we will part, as once we parted
No gleam illumes the hoofprints on the lawn.
Once he was pale with love of me,
We turned and set forth once more,
My corpse was once a festering sore
A noisome pool as once before.
Until, once more, when mistily comes the morn,
But all at once the shell of that cocoon
No hint of what it once resembled, save
And all strange things once covered by the sea
That once was man.
But once, for every soul in mosque, at sea, on sand
Past where, once seen, once open, close in no tomorrow,
The golden poppy once again will grow to bloom
I am enraptured of one immortally lovely, with beautiful tresses,
Even as one who loves thee, Love,
As one who of strange pleasure sips,
For one intoxicating night were mine.
All night I dreamed the one long night would last for ever,
Thy one Beloved, fair and sweet,
To solve one dark, strange riddle, a sage
For the grape’s red juice there is just one use—
And after this, there came to me one green
Even as one who hath a quiet sleep,
And still for this one dream all else forsaking
I crawled like one impelled on ways resisted,
And one by one with the setting sun
One old familiar face I found
One old familiar face I found.
So few the days, so much that one could know,
So dark whichever pathway one may go,
And years of striving in one moment ended.
What though one kingdom each of you forsake,
Oh light that never shone for me one ray,
Let one long, lingering note through night come stealing,
And made him one with all earth’s humblest creatures.
And taloned shapes of evil stalk, for one night free,
The head most strangely seemed like one I knew;
That glowed with fitful lights, and each one starred
My loved one made soft cooing sounds, and so
Before me, one closed portal, and the flow
One thought more torturing usurped my brain,
The ebony gates, one savage curse I cried,
There’s one small shape that mews upon a spit;
And after this, there came to me one green
I saw it then, two trunks that fused as one,
One fleshy tentacle, raised me beside
Save one upon a dais standing tall,
039.11
039.22
040.4
046.10
048.2
054.48
054.54
069.13
075.9
090.7
095.3
133.72
134.2
134.10
134.23
003.1
004.3
004.74
007.20
007.39
012.51
014.33
022.7
029.1
031.13
036.59
045.3
048.23
049.15
049.21
050.1
050.3
051.7
051.31
051.57
051.61
059.8
061.11
073.1
074.6
075.1
078.10
084.10
086.13
087.5
090.1
091.9
091.13
092.3
O
Ones
Only
279
No moving thing, no blade of grass. One tree
093.3
But could not move or even draw one breath:
093.13
The waters mounted in one surge whose swell
094.5
All nature whispers but her one word: Death.
102.9
And found, the one reality is Death.
102.13
And find, the one reality is Death.
102.15
Its voice in one vast song
109.34
We are one with the stars, Beloved, and witnessed the young sun’s
dawning
112.1
Though all my days were added one by one,
115.1
Differed so, each from each, and this one more
115.7
For you, or for one kiss from your soft lips.
115.14
Are these bright ways foredue to that one whom
118.11
Yield grace to only one, deny the rest?
119.11
The chance, the pattern, call it as one will,
122.5
From the one reciting there.
136.6
Say, sixty-five, not one day under,
138.32
Then blind, the favored ones; while I, more wise
119.7
And lovers, fat ones, old ones, came
128.15
The monster gods will answer the Ancient Ones and rise.
141.12
Only now do we live.
004.70
But only an ancient, buried passion sings.
007.64
Worship thee, knowing that I only dream.
008.14
Lie only shards of that dread doom
010.15
And yet, in all my travels I could only find
013.15
You only live when all worth living’s lost.
017.20
But only and ever his flesh is burning,
018.11
Where only the wind and the wide, waste meadows have their home, 020.5
With only the withered trees to watch us passing by;
035.2
We only left her body lying still and deep;
035.10
We left her only to the waiting earth that gave
035.11
Where only courage of lost hope could ravel
036.3
Then only, from those vacant spaces driven,
036.39
I sought not, nor in worlds that only seem
036.46
Along starroads with only moonglow paven
037.6
Her garments only know what curves and hollows
041.11
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent glory
and glow that relume thee,
043.3
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
043.4
Was it only for darkness to blind me,
043.7
Art thou only a phantom before me,
043.11
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment ere
worship and love were to perish?
043.27
I was the only colour when
046.3
His sunken eyes could only see
046.11
Memories only wander where
047.6
Only slimy creatures stare
047.8
Only fishes keep a seeming
047.19
280
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Only phantom poppies blow,
047.29
Only spectral lilies grow
047.30
Only growths and fishes dwell
047.37
No love endures if love be only passion
051.22
And no love lasts if love be only mind,
051.23
Only you.
052.4
Until my dead flesh stirred. I only lay,
054.28
I only sighed to feel them play
054.30
Saw only a realm of wet black sand
057.8
To this he gives his only adoration,
068.13
Whose source could only, be some fearful shape
078.11
In all this hideous land the only soul.
085.6
I only find more ennui in philosophies,
096.61
To heart’s desire that only I and Allah know,
096.100
Is only known in realms where dream-winds blow.
099.4
I only know she died in Mytilene.
099.14
Or only sleep?
101.30
With only rotting corpses lying by,
103.7
We have found that only the dream is unchanging, O Love, and
eternal,
112.15
Where moons are high, and only dream-winds stir,
113.6
How fair you were, if you were only fair,
116.3
And more for beauty, only known to me.
116.14
And it may be that you will find it only
118.7
Yield grace to only one, deny the rest?
119.11
I am a fool, for only fools would trust
121.1
And only echo answer a low call.
122.12
Only you, and the past, my dearest
123.19
If your name were only Mabel
135.7
And it only rhymes with turtle......
135.11
The coeds only get along
138.6
Goddess or devil or only human,
140.11
Only do we who knew you feel the source,
146.8
Onward Borne onward yet by that same ceaseless yearning,
036.41
Then wanders onward while the shadows fall,
069.12
As I went onward toward those upper lairs.
074.4
I stumbled onward, knowing I must fail,
085.13
I struggled onward though my strength was spent
091.3
Ooze
That dead body in the ooze.
126.12
Opal
The grasses with glimmering dew are jewelled in opal and amethyst, 044.6
Opalescent
Concealed with opalescent mist whose fall
127.3
Ope
And ope
127.14
Oped
And when they oped they could not find
030.43
Open
see also Half-Open
Or the open arms, or the eyes of glass;
038.14
The door must open, showing why the hue
078.13
The ocean beds were open now, and free,
095.2
And four-dimension vaults revolve and open wide;
130.14
O
I hear them in the open and in hallways,
Past where, once seen, once open, close in no tomorrow,
When four-dimensioned vaults revolve and open wide;
Opens A tiger-lily opens and fails and closes
Opium Bring hashish, cannabis, or sleepy opium,
Opium-Dream
The world is an opium-dream;
Oppresses
And weariness of life oppresses me;
Or
Or the rustle of leaves that drift with the wind,
I found or made new pleasures that I shall not tell;
He walks where none can know or see,
Was it a half-god or a satyr leaping
Or was it the old despairing cry of sadness
Or as the futile, giant music made
Or remain by the willows
Or be bathed in new glory,
Or from transitory
No life or mind or trace of vanished lore,
I have not found it sleeping or awaking.
Or the open arms, or the eyes of glass;
To capture moods that change or leave;
Should love be told in brede or breve?
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul such
a madness and fury will sweep?
Mine the love that can fade not or falter,
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of
soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
Anguish of some lost thing’s cry or call
That almost hissed or the shimmering mist
Or purple, dear to children of the dust,
Or gold that never yet no man befriended,
Or gilded idols undeserving trust,
Or space;
Or in my dead flesh foul to float,
Or was he bent on dark adventure, bold,
Or whirls
Or rests where an ocean current laves
Or speeds
Like the sound of the sea or the rain,
Or vanishing leaves that drift off with the wind,
Barren or fertile, rich or thin and poor,
Or hunters canter shouting toward the moor.
Of secret worlds that have no name or place.
I dream through realms where naught begins or ends,
Until I felt that tongue or talon stroke
Not woman, man, or child crawled in my lap.
And watch, or seem to watch, me for your face
Oh little creature, whether old or young,
281
131.15
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101.14
096.31
064.1
007.54
001.12
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015.19
015.35
031.3
033.27
033.29
033.31
036.38
036.57
038.14
042.11
042.14
043.16
043.19
043.25
045.10
048.15
051.2
051.3
051.4
053.4
054.44
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060.2
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063.9
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069.6
069.8
070.8
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077.4
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Of human form or beast, weird sorcery
But could not move or even draw one breath:
Till jasmine, oleander, or full roses’ bloom
Bring hashish, cannabis, or sleepy opium,
Or quite agree—it’s all the same; no virtues please
Take, or the taking never will be thine;
I know not whether she was slave or queen;
Or if, beneath those warmer, clearer skies,
Or only sleep?
And then I felt a tongue or talon stroke
Contained no thought or dust of thing or race;
For you, or for one kiss from your soft lips.
If in your head or heart, there were not room
Or think that those sweet words were meant to be
From love or faith or trust—fools—who believe
Nothing of farthest or nearest,
Nothing of future or present,
Because she sometimes fell or stumbled;
In heat of summer day or cold of winter snow;
I hear them wide awake or part way resting,
Or much greater,
Or starfire care
Of right or wrong,
Or know the song
Where none could know or share.
However brief or stilled, or borne on farther turn,
Or any other words to jar ’em;
Or else they’re much more dumb than geese are.
Goddess or devil or only human,
Or twilight’s fall
Who liked it above or below,
In front or behind,
Orb’s
Ever the orb’s fantastic glare
Orchid A venomous, waiting, and phallic orchid dozes.
Orchids Orchids, lilies grow exotic in these drawings,
Tumescent orchids swart with hair.
Original With weary steps to the old, original end.
Orion’s Orion’s mad, metallic queen;
Other In other stars in old, oblivious years I sought
But found no other than the great refrain:
Where other universes flow.
No other form is near,
But phantoms; life and death part each of other;
That clove through midnight where no other stirred,
Whatever on the other side should lie,
And all around their other victims wait,
Encysted from the sight of other eyes;
Or any other words to jar ’em;
And other such-like things as that is
093.7
093.13
096.26
096.31
096.64
097.6
099.11
099.12
101.30
104.11
107.6
115.14
116.4
121.4
121.6
123.17
123.18
128.22
131.6
131.9
133.64
133.68
133.69
133.71
134.6
134.14
137.12
137.24
140.11
143.5
144.2
144.3
055.13
101.13
006.1
030.16
112.12
030.22
013.9
014.19
030.40
058.10
070.12
079.5
083.12
087.2
119.2
137.12
137.15
O
283
Others Rejected. Nameless others near me sit.
087.8
Othertime
In their hidden othertime long fled.
006.4
Otherwise
And truths I could not otherwise discover.
120.12
Ought Are things that never ought to bore ’em.
137.22
They also ought to know their Caesar,
137.23
Our
A slave of her passion, my passion, our ecstasy secret, malign;
003.10
Of our love.
003.16
Our desire with breast to breast and body to body we shall be slaking 003.19
We shall love in our passion in strange and ineffable ways and
dissemble
003.31
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond shall
not sever
003.39
For a little while, our life is bright,
004.31
And we were fierce and passionate in our embraces,
007.11
Yea, we would love till all our senses swoon;
07.14
But all night long we worshipped at our pagan altar,
007.17
That made our veins and pulses wildly beat.
007.24
Our worship went beyond our own dim comprehension,
007.29
But dawn destroyed our passionate delight.
007.52
Apocalyptic prophet of our doom,
017.10
Our task was done.
035.8
Our thoughts will be more sad than death is
039.4
But we turned too late and we knew our fate
048.3
That hung on our deep sea-graves.
048.16
The shadows slipped from our side.
048.24
And celebrate our festival.
049.4
The sun lay warm along our way,
049.8
And cast them for our footfall where
049.13
The sun lay warm along our way.
049.14
Gifts that repaid our journey’s woes,
049.26
Returning humbly our own love whose force,
146.6
Joining your journey, brings our living light to hold you, guide you.
146.7
Ours
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond shall
not sever
003.39
Ourselves
Let us give over ourselves to delight,
004.51
Out
That rose from out the gulfs of utter night,
024.11
Out of oblivion, no voice will stir
026.9
Out of the mystical spaces flung beyond,
034.2
Fronds from out its temples rise;
047.22
Shine bright, ring out, attend the sweet assay
051.59
Out of the window’s smouldering red
055.5
Out of a dusky corner came the stare
072.5
I watched them till, from out the greater dark,
074.9
Some warning voice calls out: Go back—go back!
083.9
Stood out, half-open pods showed mystery
093.6
Out of the night, there came a shrill long scream,
105.9
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Out of the well of the heart and the heart’s recesses
A flame of the stars, Beloved, burns out of the far-flung spaces
A wind from worlds beyond blows out of foreign places
When light shone out of the mystical ebb and flow:
Is dreamland, out of Space and out of Time.
And point out ways to rapturous rebirth;
Out of the west, foul breezes sweep,
Out of the dark where the black moons creep,
Out of the sky, a black star shines,
And rub out the granules of sleep from their eyes:
And rub out the granules of sleep in their eyes,
Outcast Of half-gods outcast from the world of man?
Outer Of sights and sounds of outer space,
And outer, oldest galaxies that wane;
Outer-Lands
The outer-lands where all’s a dream, and dream-winds blow
Outlasting
Treasure outlasting cities fair but fleeting.
Outlined Outlined the revellers dancing through the woods,
Outlive Never will mortal outlive the tomb—
Outside Were they strange creatures from Outside that soon
Outward Rose-pink, and outward thrusting from each bare
Outways I am dust in cosmic outways resting,
Over
Let us give over ourselves to delight,
And over the woods in ecstasy, and swelling
Over his breasts his fingers hover,
Over his loins his deep eyes rove.
Through them and over them—what shall be found
When all the olden days are over,
And a presence of something supernal drifts over the springsweet earth,
And over all a choral singing.
Over the treetops, under the boughs,
Over the dreaming grass;
Quiet hangs over all the world; in adoration
And of that thing swept over me a fear
Wonder and beauty and terror are hanging all over,
Delirium over my shaken soul now passes,
Over the jeweled grass,
For the times that are over,
Lips parting and closing over the draught her
I hear them over thunder, and at midnight gloom;
Over all the tall wet grass.
While over us the wind at twilight soughs,
Overblown
The flowers of old are overblown,
Will be as perished poppies overblown
Overflowing
Red roses in the overflowing wine.
110.1
111.1
111.3
112.2
113.14
124.11
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036.6
096.101
051.42
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092.5
133.24
004.51
015.13
018.3
018.4
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039.1
044.3
049.27
062.8
065.2
066.5
090.9
101.16
101.21
109.10
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129.2
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136.12
147.3
004.56
026.13
097.8
O
Overflung
And garlands overflung
Overhanging
What sense of overhanging doom has made
Overlook
And overlook the underlying thrust,
Overpowering
And still I sought the overpowering drunken rapture,
Overrun That her domain has overrun.
Overscents
Quite overscents the room,
Overspread
With that wild color overspread,
Overtaken
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
Overtone
To make the unison of this half-heard overtone;
Owed And for the rest, she owed, and owed.
Own
With lips that to thine own lips burn,
Our worship went beyond our own dim comprehension,
And in the waters saw my own face drown,
From Pan’s wild pipes, the god’s own song of yearning
Poems for Beauty’s own enraptured ear.
The ever fresh design of your own fashion.
And by your side, in beauty’s own rebirth
In my own decomposition. Thick white worms have lolled
It was my own; my own face showed that hue,
My own the lineaments that seemed to be
Stared at my own dead eyes unearthly lit.
Across the boiling seas’ own muffled boom;
Great wealth have I, a kingdom own, with palaces for pleasure,
We were present when space grew heavy with seeds of its own
spawning.
You care for that warm house of all your own,
Her own reflections in a mirror.
She hated all lies, save her own,
I am wisdom of my own self blind,
I am my own final taker,
The true believer makes his own faith all along
Returning humbly our own love whose force,
Enriching us, of your own everlasting glow.
Oyster Each pedagogue, a happy oyster,
285
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083.7
121.3
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141.11
111.10
128.8
004.77
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011.24
015.31
028.14
051.28
051.43
054.23
073.5
073.6
073.11
094.3
096.13
112.3
117.2
128.12
128.29
133.5
133.11
134.20
146.6
146.9
138.24
P
Paced
Paces
Pagan
So endlessly, so wearily, you paced
And slowly paces to an inner hall,
But all night long we worshipped at our pagan altar,
Once lyrical with pagan melody.
A song of pagan passion, wild and sweet;
To pagan Pan their passionate lips were singing
His pagan pipes for semigod and maid;
Of pagany, divinely young Apollo,
That play for pagan festival.
Pages
The scattered symbols of those closing pages
We have read inscrutable symbols on dim, dynastic pages,
For she paid half, when they went Dutch,
And paid for all, on some occasions.
Paid
They paid him to seduce ’em!
Pain
Like the pain in a passionate note
The beauty, terror, and the pain of love.
A choral hymn of mad and sweetest pain,
Passing in pain;
Whence came your charnel hue of pain and blood?
Pain, and a choral delight;
An eagerness; and pain upon his features
As dreaded as some strange disease’s pain,
I begged the gods to save me from such pain.
This never ending night of mounting pain,
All pleasure and all pain,
Pains
Ecstasy pains him with a quiver,
Of modes that will not match despite your pains.
Paint
To paint the things I never shall relate.
Palace The gifts of my body I bring to a flesh-white and beautiful palace,
I have dwelt in the palace
Their mirthless muttering through the palace rang.
In the marble palace, gold dwarfs cry,
Before the palace a beacon flares,
From the palace, a marble monster whines,
Mysterious as her sunken palace is,
Palaces Great wealth have I, a kingdom own, with palaces for pleasure,
Pale
And there are pale, fair faces calling for caresses
Once he was pale with love of me,
And the stars in the drowning pools are pale.
The flitting figures gather in the pale moonlight
While its pale eyes kept watching patiently
Rise in the pale starlight,
037.5
069.10
007.17
012.37
015.4
015.23
015.38
051.44
067.37
036.35
112.7
128.19
128.20
140.12
001.3
007.28
007.30
009.14
017.4
021.4
059.6
070.2
080.10
084.13
096.69
018.7
117.8
025.14
003.5
033.7
081.8
125.6
125.14
125.18
127.12
096.13
020.3
046.10
056.8
061.3
073.3
109.14
P
Pale-Green
The death of pale-green bloated things.
Pall
We left her staring at the musty pall,
In night’s eternal pall.
I gave him the pall of Death’s last blight,
Pallor
In the mystical burning pallor of the moon
Pan
And still it seemed as if great Pan were calling
As though sly Pan had used his pipes to capture
To pagan Pan their passionate lips were singing
For Youth, and Spring, and the woodland feast of Pan?
Who cared? Once more immortal Pan was playing
Pan is gone.
Pane
see Window-Pane
Pan’s
From Pan’s wild pipes, the god’s own song of yearning
Pantherine
The fall of footsteps light and pantherine
The footsteps pantherine upon the ground.
Papa
Would be as old as papa Perkins,
Paper
Then, on this paper now so blank and white,
Paphian By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
In Paphian gardens lost and ruinous.
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
Parade And fugues parade from hearts that grieve?
Paradisal Of their paradisal heaven.
Paradise I, Paradise.
To love’s sad paradise.
Though this were Paradise, and Paradise
Paragon A paragon, except in virtue,
Pardon “I beg your pardon, I don’t know you.”
Part
And we will part, as once we parted
Then live! Live in this dual love, partake
But phantoms; life and death part each of other;
Part human creatures creeping from their lair.
It fell in parts, and I was part of it.
A giant shape part human, part despair,
I hear them wide awake or part way resting,
Parted And we will part, as once we parted
Participant
We have been participant and passer-by.
Parting Lips parting and closing over the draught her
Parts
It fell in parts, and I was part of it.
Patiently While its pale eyes kept watching patiently
Pass
We will pass from rapture to rapture and plumb the most utter
abysses
The minutes shall wane in delirium, the burning hours pass slowly,
We shall pass.
But Time will pass, and Love will pass, and all Love’s pleasure,
Pass, with all joy that passes,
Pass, with pleasure that fades
287
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045.12
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101.4
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015.11
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015.37
015.48
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122.1
122.14
138.30
025.5
012.30
026.14
067.30
042.8
033.8
046.24
096.42
115.9
128.25
139.2
039.22
051.29
070.12
072.4
073.14
089.11
131.9
039.22
112.8
129.2
073.14
073.3
003.15
003.25
004.48
007.41
009.13
009.15
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
The presences pass everywhere
Tremors across his white flesh pass.
And pass, as all things pass, deeming the dumb
Secret the winds that hollowly pass
Though ye colours pass, though his limbs be fleet,
As the wind she will pass.
This being’s face is soft, he shall not pass;
Joys that pass and youth too fleet,
A million million men will live and pass,
That all would pass, that nothing would abide.
And footsteps seem to pass
While I pass by
And beauty passed unto its final perfect beauty,
I passed and reached the black pool’s rock-strewn edge.
The years have passed, yet each long year in passing brings
For he has passed from stage to stage,
He passed beyond the utmost realm of stars,
They passed the land where flowers gnaw
And then passed by.
But when I passed and left them in their gloom,
I thought ironic laughter passed me by.
A million million men have lived and passed,
Than that just passed held sweeter, fuller dowers;
Came near me, passed, and faintly died away;
010.7
018.8
026.3
038.2
046.47
065.4
082.2
100.5
102.14
107.11
109.11
133.41
007.35
011.9
013.3
014.32
024.1
030.23
046.40
081.13
085.8
102.12
115.8
122.2
We have been participant and passer-by.
Like the voice of a wind that shivers and passes
Pass, with all joy that passes,
Like a creature unseen as it scurries and passes
That scarcely passes soon
The garden is still with a fever that passes all name;
Delirium over my shaken soul now passes,
The legend saith: when each lone traveller passes by,
Passing Let us forget the passing of years,
Yea, all the barren years that linger in their passing,
Passing in pain;
The years have passed, yet each long year in passing brings
With only the withered trees to watch us passing by;
In the years of the past, in the coming and passing of lovers and love
and the paths love has taken,
Passion A slave of her passion, my passion, our ecstasy secret, malign;
At her feet I have laid the tribute of a burning intolerable passion,
Of a passion swayed not by reason, a passion ungovernable, mad;
We shall love in our passion in strange and ineffable ways and
dissemble
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond shall
not sever
And she was cool, yet hers was all the passion,
That love and passion weary all too soon.
112.8
001.1
009.13
063.1
096.57
101.17
101.21
134.13
004.52
007.59
009.14
013.3
035.2
Passed
Passer-by
Passes
043.13
003.10
003.21
003.22
003.31
003.39
007.7
007.16
P
But only an ancient, buried passion sings.
A song of pagan passion, wild and sweet;
In lyric passion rose the piper’s song,
Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast brought
me this feverous love to consume me,
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of
soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
No love endures if love be only passion
And I am sick alike of passion and of glory,
I come to men with unrequiting passion,
Passionate
Like the pain in a passionate note
I am enraptured by strange and undreamed-of passionate sinful
caresses
Her lips with my lips, her passionate body with mine I shall cover
Thy body now so passionate
And we were fierce and passionate in our embraces,
But dawn destroyed our passionate delight.
To pagan Pan their passionate lips were singing
With breasts of fire, and passionate lips to slake,
A passionate burst of song from a golden throat,
From a meadowlark’s passionate throat,
Passion-Born
The passion-born kiss and caress of my maddening desire;
Passionlessly
Passionlessly waiting till the spell shall be broken
Passions In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of the
future, the passions to waken,
That tremble and shiver with passions that lately were?
I find no rest in the passions with which I am shaken,
And violet depths with flameful passions gleam.
Passion’s Freeing them to follow passion’s sorcery.
Passive In my arms I will hold her, passive, but I know her flesh will be
aching
Past
The years of the past have long since flown,
The past is forgotten, its lips are dumb,
For ever mounting past the realm of light,
And traveled backward past the age of man
In the years of the past, in the coming and passing of lovers and
love and the paths love has taken,
All past and future. Traveler, stay!
Past them the leopards led me on and on
All present, past, and future worlds; and day, and night;
Somewhere past Ispahan.
The ruined relics of the ancient past,
With wonder past all knowing,
To birth, we have witnessed the past and present blend;
Only you, and the past, my dearest
And past Nirvana waits eternal vision, pure,
289
007.64
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051.22
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119.9
001.3
003.3
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004.21
007.11
007.52
015.23
019.1
021.1
063.4
003.6
006.7
043.15
101.12
101.28
127.10
006.8
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004.55
004.68
024.9
036.18
043.13
067.50
081.9
096.71
096.102
102.6
109.25
112.10
123.19
134.8
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Past golden poppy’s lure,
Past where, once seen, once open, close in no tomorrow,
And past the winding river’s end you gaze,
Pastime When of this pastime tiring.
Pastures The weedy pastures and the drowned, the dead;
Path
Upon an endless path forever going
To seek, beneath the flower-heads, a path.
The primrose path she rarely took
Paths
In the years of the past, in the coming and passing of lovers and
love and the paths love has taken,
Pathway So dark whichever pathway one may go,
Patter And a rat-like sound of pitter and patter.
Pattern The chance, the pattern, call it as one will,
Patterned
see Shadow-Patterned
Patterns Made mad songs and patterns of,
Slow patterns in the air; the warm embrace
The spinning threads weave patterns rich and rare,
Pause
Pause, rest, turn back while still your wings are strong,
They dragged me back with never pause for rest.
Paused I paused and watched the cryptic waters watch.
Pave
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
Paven Along starroads with only moonglow paven
Pay
For my escape I knew what I must pay:
Payment She often made the first down payment,
Peace
Peace.
In vain for peace.
I further search with neither hope nor peace
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft
luminous mist,
Pearls
Her coral isles and shadowy pearls
I turn away from diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls,
Peasants Where peasants till starved earth and long dead ground.
Pebble And a pebble necklace around his head
Pebbles Pebbles and beetles and layers of earth,
Pedagogic
And in this pedagogic cloister,
Pedagogue
Each pedagogue, a happy oyster,
Pedants The pedants utter strange conceits
Peep
In dark liquescence. Mocking maggots peep
Peer
They gave me back my eyes so I could peer
Peered I peered amid those waters black and still.
He peered, and in the curtained realms of sleep
His vision, and he peered across the darkling sky
I peered far down the final future ages,
Peering Foul nightmare creatures peering through the air:
Pen
I was the first to tinge his pen;
134.9
134.10
147.4
096.33
095.11
036.61
082.10
128.21
043.13
050.3
062.5
122.5
046.35
114.7
116.6
037.13
086.5
011.17
029.3
090.3
037.6
086.3
128.7
004.83
013.32
036.60
044.5
060.4
096.19
069.7
038.15
038.6
138.23
138.24
138.9
054.39
087.9
011.21
014.2
014.17
036.33
104.4
046.2
P
When Nielsen with a pen of magic drew
You have never been inspiring to my pen.
Peopled Peopled with ghosts of their invention,
Perfect And beauty passed unto its final perfect beauty,
Whose perfect euphony would be as clear
Till beauty into perfect beauty swoons;
And perfect students, all in rhythm,
Would chant their perfect lessons with ’m.
Perfection
Perfection gains by contrast and may be
Perfectly “But I’m perfectly moral.”
Perfume Stand waiting to perfume and powder and softly caress her,
Perfumes
The hot, still air is sweet with heavy perfumes;
Perilous Of buried kings, and empires perilous;
Perish To perish when my later footsteps came;
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment
ere worship and love were to perish?
Perished Have perished in ruinous gardens fair
The sound of perished lutes
Will be as perished poppies overblown
In a madness it has perished,
And perished in the utmost cosmic tomb,
Perishing Like a perishing star,
Perkins Would be as old as papa Perkins,
Permitted
And when my steed permitted me to light,
Persian With the lithe Persian,
Person “Miss Shere, are you a kind person?”
“I’m asking you, Miss Shere. Are you a cruel person?”
Personal Personal instruction.
Pervert She claimed that thoughts, not deeds, pervert you—
Pest
By the legions of the pest.
Pet
Another mass their hungry pet half-ate,
Petals
Petals tremulous with dew at dawn
For youth, a ravished poppy’s petals blown:
Blown petals that fall,
From having watched the dead rose petals strew
Fling wide the roses, ere the petals all be faded,
Have seen the golden poppy spread its petals fair
The golden petals burn,
Phallic A venomous, waiting, and phallic orchid dozes.
Phantasmal
I offer thee phantasmal gems
Phantasmal things of beauty and of death,
Phantasmal fire burns the band of sorcery,
I offer you phantasmal gems
Phantasmal realms of faëry, strange and new,
Phantom
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043.27
004.59
012.35
026.13
033.22
036.10
001.8
138.30
071.12
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139.3
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048.20
087.7
004.58
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097.1
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A phantom of the dead, forgotten Greek.
The phantom that so greatly I desired
Art thou only a phantom before me,
Only phantom poppies blow,
A phantom of a kingdom of no sound.
And I, and all that phantom city, died.
The little gods sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
They sleep a long sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
The monster gods sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
They sleep a long sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
Phantoms
Lost amid their dreamlands, your captured phantoms dream.
Of the phantoms that are not, but seem?
And phantoms that seemed hopelessly and lostly
But phantoms; life and death part each of other;
Red phantoms in its bleeding mystery hid.
Of phantoms move;
Phials We will pour ashes from the phials
Philological
And philological relations,
Philosophies
I only find more ennui in philosophies,
Phosphorescent
Phosphorescent creatures go
But inbetween; whose phosphorescent glow,
Phrase And any Latin phrase can quote,
Phrases Remember phrases with a vague surprise
Your polished phrases spoken carefully,
Piccadilly The thought of Wilde in Piccadilly,
Pick
see also Stone-Pick
To watch a little creature pick
Picture Solemn all you picture them, solemn and so luring,
That I could picture worlds I’ve never known,
There is no picture of her dear dead face,
Pieces-of-Eight
Working hard for pieces-of-eight,
Pierced That pierced the blackness of a starless sky
Pilgrimage
Abyssal pilgrimage undaunted, strong
Pillow A cool dark pillow, a comforting bed,
She will pillow her head
Pillows I sink back in the pillows of my deep divan
Pines
On the throne a king for its worm-queen pines
Pinions Where soaring pinions
And so I soared on pinions of the night
Pink
see Rose-Pink
Pipe-Line
Ran a pipe-line that tapped him,
Piper’s In lyric passion rose the piper’s song,
027.14
036.53
043.11
047.29
053.20
086.14
130.3
130.19
141.3
141.19
006.24
043.12
045.15
070.12
106.14
109.36
039.10
137.14
096.61
047.27
075.4
137.6
120.3
121.2
128.3
030.15
006.17
025.2
099.10
142.6
089.3
024.7
038.13
065.14
096.8
125.19
034.12
071.9
145.4
015.14
P
Pipes
As though sly Pan had used his pipes to capture
From Pan’s wild pipes, the god’s own song of yearning
His pagan pipes for semigod and maid;
Pit
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
Pits
With visions of the stellar pits,
Pitter
And a rat-like sound of pitter and patter.
Pity
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft
luminous mist,
And win the prof’s eternal pity,
There was a young man—such a pity!—
Place
She will halt in a secret place
Of secret worlds that have no name or place.
I can not find, nor do I seem to place
Rubies I yet will place in that jet hair above
In all infinity was left no place
Placed As the forgotten girls who placed them there.
Places In those mysterious lands and alien places
Her face is sweeter than those fabled places
A wind from worlds beyond blows out of foreign places
Plague For the plague germs fed on the sick and the dead
From heat and plague as they died,
Plague-Filled
From the stricken hosts of those plague-filled coasts
Plain
I looked across the great plain warily.
What followed me across the lifeless plain?
Plainly That I confused the words you’d plainly spoken.
Who plainly wasn’t old enough?
Plaintive I hear the music’s plaintive sob, watch spins and whirls,
Plan
Of why the plan
Planes From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
Planet For thee, the gods a planet would destroy.
Upon the ruined planet dwell
Planks Planks riddled through by worms, that he is wise
Plants Soft plants and creatures, dead, that still draw breath.
Platitudes
Exhume forgotten platitudes
Play
And I shall play
Nymphs to play.
Revel and welcome, games and play
I only sighed to feel them play
That play for pagan festival.
She loved to play a dangerous game
To play God,
Played How all my days are as an aria played
Playing Who cared? Once more immortal Pan was playing
Please Or quite agree—it’s all the same; no virtues please
Pleased Believed no truth except what pleased her;
293
015.11
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015.38
087.1
103.1
030.46
062.5
044.5
138.7
145.1
065.9
070.8
077.5
096.47
107.7
004.60
036.45
041.3
111.3
048.5
048.22
048.1
082.5
091.1
120.4
138.34
096.23
133.70
130.16
141.16
008.12
010.21
120.6
025.12
138.15
004.75
015.8
049.5
054.30
067.37
128.13
133.17
031.1
015.37
096.64
128.30
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Pleases She walks in charm, adoring nature pleases
Pleasure As one who of strange pleasure sips,
When thou thy pleasure and joy art taking,
Strange, grave women dream of some strange pleasure
For we would keep the pleasure and the torment burning,
But Time will pass, and Love will pass, and all Love’s pleasure,
Pass, with pleasure that fades
To burn, to break; their pleasure not to slay
Great wealth have I, a kingdom own, with palaces for pleasure,
Of your bright lips, all pleasure that your flesh possesses,
All pleasure and all pain,
Drink! For the pleasure, forget sad thinking!
The subtle pleasure that you give to me,
Pleasureful
And should a mouth as pleasureful as mine
Pleasures
For pleasures and joys that she knows not, for a new and
monstrous delight;
All pleasures I have ever found have been as gall.
I took the usual pleasures known to all mankind;
I found or made new pleasures that I shall not tell;
Plenilune
Have seen the blood-red plenilune.
Plenty Of sleepy hours that time and plenty send;
Plumb We will pass from rapture to rapture and plumb the most utter
abysses
Plump All it would find was a plump drowned rat
Pod
see Puff-Pod
Pods
Stood out, half-open pods showed mystery
Poe
Not too malicious; the strangeness of Harry Clarke’s Poe;
Poems Poems for Beauty’s own enraptured ear.
Poems ripe, red, rich, and rare,
Poet
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
DEATH: Turn not, Oh Poet, wait!
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
DEATH: Oh Poet, these I offer thee:
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
DEATH: Ah Poet, scorn me not,
Oh Poet, this I offer thee,
THE POET (wildly): I yield! I yield! Thy lips, Oh Death!
That once a poet lived and loved and died,
Poetry Her loveliness in poetry lies never.
Romantic dreams, illusions, poetry,
Poets
By forgotten poets told.
Pogany There stand her books, the Willy Pogany Alice
Point
And point out ways to rapturous rebirth;
Pointed A slain man moans on a pointed stake
Poison And we were love-sick, yea, and sick with all love’s poison,
041.7
004.74
005.5
006.3
007.13
007.41
009.15
086.7
096.13
096.53
096.69
098.5
114.10
119.10
003.18
013.5
013.13
013.14
030.4
115.4
003.15
057.15
093.6
129.7
028.14
136.7
012.7
012.11
012.17
012.26
012.27
012.43
012.44
012.50
012.53
026.6
041.15
120.13
047.15
129.5
124.11
125.23
007.9
P
And bitter all the poison that it brings;
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of
soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
Poisonous
Poisonous and beautiful and dead;
All night I sought the poisonous fruit of her;
Dim citadel, all dank and poisonous,
Poked While sick men stoked; the black hulk poked
Polished And polished ebony,
Your polished phrases spoken carefully,
Politicians
Great big moonfaced politicians,
Pomp
Weary of pomp and power, gorged with glut,
Pool
Of that malign, close-hidden ebon pool.
Within the pool so fathomless and dark.
A noisome pool as once before.
I seemed to sink in some huge cosmic pool.
Of this fresh pool of thin and brilliant blue.
And tottered in a spreading pool of blood;
Pools
And the stars in the drowning pools are pale.
Are like the secret pools of Jupiter.
Pool’s
I passed and reached the black pool’s rock-strewn edge.
Pomp
To tell of pomp and splendour long unknown,
To ponder old, unsated malices.
Poor
Barren or fertile, rich or thin and poor,
Fingers raised; there hangs her mirror—poor mirror—
Poppies Like the rows of poppies scattered and thinned,
Forget, with the blown poppies forgetting
The poppies of the dead
She lies where the Lesbian poppies nod,
Will be as perished poppies overblown
Only phantom poppies blow,
The poppies of the dead
Poppy Lily and poppy and rose are gone,
The poppy yielded you demented dreams,
White poppy of the crimson eve—
Shall the poppy be flameless and dead?
The legend saith: for each, the golden poppy blooms
Have seen the golden poppy spread its petals fair
The golden poppy glows in beauty with the light
The golden poppy folds and each eternal I
To poppy legend olden.
And though all poppy seeds in final chaos scatter,
The golden poppy once again will grow to bloom
Poppy-Lipped
And your mouth poppy-lipped,
Poppy’s For youth, a ravished poppy’s petals blown:
Past golden poppy’s lure,
Popular The school was more than popular
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007.2
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048.17
096.15
121.2
142.3
016.1
011.14
011.20
054.54
071.13
078.14
106.2
056.8
127.2
011.9
026.10
127.15
069.6
129.3
001.11
009.21
012.12
019.2
026.13
047.29
067.12
004.57
017.13
042.2
043.32
134.1
134.5
134.11
134.16
134.18
134.22
134.23
096.45
040.6
134.9
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Pore
And rotten in each swelling pore,
Porphyry The flowing porphyry
Portal To seek some image far behind some portal
Before me, one closed portal, and the flow
I knocked upon the portal till with clang
Portion Yea, love and more than love were all the long night’s portion,
Portraits In Wonderland; Rothenstein’s portraits done with malice
Possess Dearest of all dear things that I possess.
Possessed He was possessed with my red flame,
Possesses Of your bright lips, all pleasure that your flesh possesses,
Comes love, and all the beauty that love possesses,
Beauty possesses, but would not care
Post
Emily Post, and thieves in state;
Post-Historic
When post-historic revels will unfetter them,
When post-historic revels will unfetter them,
Pounced Pursued and pounced; an arm that had no source
Pour
We will pour ashes from the phials
My body will not pour
That seemed to pour from where the horror stood;
Poured The rapturous music poured in lyric streams
Mars poured on you the bane of baleful beams,
They poured fresh acid on my blinding eyes;
Pouring And giant fountains pouring down the wide skylanes.
O Love, my world is pouring
Powder Stand waiting to perfume and powder and softly caress her,
Power Weary of pomp and power, gorged with glut,
With power he grew intoxicate,
The hands that wrought it vanished in its power,
But punish, since their power I dared to test.
Praise
Of those who came to praise this day
Pray
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Allah! the kneeling figures in devotion pray,
Prayer Till evetide falls, and the Muezzin call to prayer
It is the blessing of a Druid’s prayer,
Precincts Within those precincts of the spectral night’s
Precious For I give love like sips of precious wine
Precipices
To fall amid colossal precipices.
Precise Of lips too tender; your precise array.
Prehistoric
The prehistoric huntsman in his grave,
Presence And a presence of something supernal drifts over the springsweet earth,
And of my presence, I could feel no sign
Presences
054.49
032.1
036.19
078.10
081.1
007.33
129.6
008.8
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096.53
110.2
116.2
142.5
130.6
141.6
074.13
039.10
054.53
106.6
015.30
017.15
084.2
034.9
109.33
129.10
016.1
046.29
076.11
086.8
049.3
042.3
042.9
042.15
042.19
096.80
096.77
110.15
011.15
119.13
079.14
114.8
059.3
044.3
122.3
P
The presences pass everywhere
Just presences, unseen, unknown
While ghostly presences writhed wan and weary
Present And never will the present cease,
Now I am bored with all things present, all things olden,
All present, past, and future worlds; and day, and night;
We were present when space grew heavy with seeds of its own
spawning.
To birth, we have witnessed the past and present blend;
Nothing of future or present,
Preserve That still preserve dark ancient stains
Preserved
And thus preserved her innocence.
Press
And all the long night her body to mine I shall press;
Pressed see Soft-Pressed
Presses That presses on my grave and me, rolled
Pressure There is pressure on her blood-red lips,
Pre-Time’s
Long crumbled in primordial pre-time’s span;
Pretty Though I know that you are pretty,
Especially when their knees are pretty.
Prey
Would seize their prey and seek their cosmic lair?
Priceless And drink her kisses as a priceless wine?
Prick
Assume new meaning and become the prick
Priest
Like a priest at a shrine I adore thee,
Primordial
Long crumbled in primordial pre-time’s span;
Primrose The primrose path she rarely took
Prince And young Prince Charming rides in quest of her
Princess A princess are, with beauty lovelier
Princesses
I know there are no princesses, but you
Chaunting of moon-dim princesses whose clime
Prisoned Prisoned here in time for evermore remembered,
Prof
And every prof, a second Firkins,
For who could ever be a prof.
Prof’s
And win the prof’s eternal pity,
Professorial
A model professorial wonder,
Progressing
Progressing slowly underneath the door
Promised For a promised trysting, a god long due, she yearns,
I promised you a villanelle,
I promised you a villanelle.
I promised you a villanelle.
I promised you a villanelle;
Their elders have promised them a day of returning,
The elder gods have promised a day of returning
Prophecies
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003.26
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058.5
036.20
135.4
138.8
105.8
027.7
121.10
043.9
036.20
128.21
113.7
113.2
113.1
113.13
006.19
138.29
138.33
138.7
138.31
078.2
019.7
042.1
042.6
042.12
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Old prophecies alone accompany her.
Prophesied
Where legend prophesied divinity,
Prophet Apocalyptic prophet of our doom,
Prophetic
The world is wondrously quiet, so quiet, prophetic of day,
Protruded
Alone protruded from the desert sand,
Proud Where banners of his proud name float unfurled,
Prove
To prove the brilliance of their wits,
Proved His realms were vacua, he proved his vow
You proved illusion not more strong than oaken
Psyche And Psyche hover on the summer air.
Puff-Pod But spectral flame on the puff-pod floss
Pulls
A deep force pulls me toward the window-blind,
Pulpy
Of the pulpy head that never grows old,
That feebly moved its pulpy, eyeless head.
Pulses That made our veins and pulses wildly beat.
Pulsing The Northern Lights crept down with pulsing streamers
Quicksilver, pulsing with a deep soft tone
Punish But punish, since their power I dared to test.
Pupils That murmur to their sad-eyed pupils.
Pure
I close thee, pure and rare as ivory,
The clear, pure warble of a nightingale
Is like the pure, sweet warbling of a bird,
And past Nirvana waits eternal vision, pure,
Purer
Purer than earthly creatures’,
Purple Thy purple eyes, Valerian,
Thy purple haunted eyes are mad
And once thy purple eyes went blind
Their purple vision fade and die,
Purple
My royal robes like a purple ghost
On a purple throne.
Or purple, dear to children of the dust,
There where I wandered, purple shadows ran
Across a purple ground to purple cliffs
And back; and purple suns flamed northerly
Of purple leagues, violet hippogriffs
With wings of beating purple flew to me
Through mightier gulfs where still the purple rule
Held sway, with purple dreamlands all around.
And in a sea of purple shadows drowned.
Purpose What total purpose wrought such total doom;
Purposive
Malefic, purposive, with alien force
Pursued Pursued and pounced; an arm that had no source
Pursuit The unknown color hostile in pursuit
Put
So, hesitantly, I put forth my foot
053.15
037.12
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051.37
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083.1
057.24
095.14
007.24
034.1
076.7
086.8
138.4
008.6
021.5
028.3
134.8
032.6
030.1
030.30
030.41
030.54
046.25
046.27
046.32
051.2
071.1
071.2
071.3
071.6
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088.5
074.13
088.12
082.9
Q
Quaffed This is the Wedgwood she lifted, the saki she quaffed, her
Quarrels With her sweet self, she had no quarrels,
Quarter Till a quarter of twelve,
It’s a quarter of twelve,
Queen see also Worm-Queen
Slave and queen and dancing-girl, wondrous fair,
Thou art as lovely as that ancient queen
And watched a queen of Saturn mourn
Orion’s mad, metallic queen;
I know not whether she was slave or queen;
Queens The storied queens of old?
Queer With mad new colours and queer lines I’d trace
They left me morsels, curious and queer,
Her queer, ensorcelled eyes
Quenchless
Where flame greets flame in quenchless fire.
Quest And knowing that my quest at last must falter
Upon a fruitless quest.
Of those the days before the quest.
Tortures would mark the finish of my quest.
And young Prince Charming rides in quest of her
Questing I hear them when I am not even questing
Quests Among the greater infinite he quests,
Quick Quick to my side two black, sleek leopards sprang
Quickly They would not burn me quickly on their spit;
Quicksilver
Quicksilver, pulsing with a deep soft tone
Quiet
Even as one who hath a quiet sleep,
We shivered in the quiet air,
We left her far more quiet body lying there:
The world is wondrously quiet, so quiet, prophetic of day,
But a smile has crossed her quiet face—
Quiet hangs over all the world; in adoration
The vacant halls were quiet as a tomb.
Whose whisper in the quiet darkness? Why
Quite
Quite overscents the room,
Or quite agree—it’s all the same; no virtues please
I know that nothing is worth while, all things are quite
Her vestures; both were quite revealing.
Quite to make it match in verse most anytime;
I’m quite as good as ears to asses;
Quiver Ecstasy pains him with a quiver,
Quote And any Latin phrase can quote,
Quote scholars dead in Alfred’s time,
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127.1
018.12
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036.32
049.16
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113.7
131.11
014.5
081.5
103.5
076.7
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035.5
035.7
044.7
058.11
066.5
081.14
147.8
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096.67
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135.9
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R
Race
Rack
Rack’s
Radiance
Radiant
Rage
Raiment
Rain
Raise
Raised
Ran
Random
Rang
Rant
Rapture
Vampirish beings of a stellar race,
The dark star’s necrophilic race.
Contained no thought or dust of thing or race;
I could not turn though fronted by the rack.
Beyond the rack’s red searing agony
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent glory
and glow that relume thee,
The radiant god ascends with warmth eternal,
Radiant and ever-freshening, ever new,
Of black and radiant night.
Oh color of destruction, rage, and lust,
She liked to don herself in raiment
Like the wind, and the trees, and the rain,
As the mist and the rain;
Like the sound of the sea or the rain,
We listened to the strange rain
On which the cool green rain gleams.
Some impulse urges me to raise the shade;
And so I slowly raise the shade to greet
And sinuous, then I will raise you from the lowly
One fleshy tentacle, raised me beside
Fingers raised; there hangs her mirror—poor mirror—
That once ran red as blood
There where I wandered, purple shadows ran
Archibald Mimmih ran a neat
Ran a pipe-line that tapped him,
Random child
The city rang with joyful call
Their mirthless muttering through the palace rang.
Would rant and dream and drowse and doze.
The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will
betray her.
We will pass from rapture to rapture and plumb the most utter
abysses
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond shall
not sever
Yea, all the bitter night I sought the bitter rapture,
And still I sought the overpowering drunken rapture,
Far on the hills, I heard the notes of rapture
A rapture in the night,
In your eyes, there is rapture
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture
of endless and awful delight;
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009.16
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136.10
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091.13
129.3
039.11
071.1
140.1
145.4
133.47
049.2
081.8
138.26
003.11
003.15
003.39
007.3
007.27
015.9
021.2
033.18
043.2
R
Raptured
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture
of soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
There is a faint, far rapture of birds in the breathless beauty
of dawn,
And crystal clear, of life and love and rapture,
She hears the birds’ glad rapture and singing glee;
Your soul’s desire, all lasting rapture,
In the breathless rapture of the scented dreamful air;
With a sweet rapture of shame.
All her dreaming, raptured face is white,
Raptures Thine eyes that for strange raptures yearn,
Remembered raptures haunting
Rapturous
We shall live in a rapturous embrace, in an endless and holy
The rapturous music poured in lyric streams
Her flesh a torment, her body a rapturous ache
There was never love greater than mine, so destroying, so ravaging,
ravishing, rapturous, deep;
And point out ways to rapturous rebirth;
Rare
I close thee, pure and rare as ivory,
With a rare old vintage mellowed in wood!
The spinning threads weave patterns rich and rare,
Whose rare
Poems ripe, red, rich, and rare,
Rarely The primrose path she rarely took
Rarest On the meads that are rarest,
Of beauty’s rarest harvests, and the hours
Rasul
And La Illaha illa Allah! M’hamed rasul
Rat
All it would find was a plump drowned rat
Rat-Like And a rat-like sound of pitter and patter.
Rats
And bloated carrion rats that near me sit!
Rattling Of some gray form that made a rattling sound.
Of some white form that made a rattling sound;
Ravage And the heart holds its ravage,
Dead eyes will greet dead eyes, and ravage
Their ravage, if they had not come from you.
Ravaging
There was never love greater than mine, so destroying, so ravaging,
ravishing, rapturous, deep;
Ravel
Where only courage of lost hope could ravel
Ravished
For youth, a ravished poppy’s petals blown:
Ravishing
And all the swooning, sick, and ravishing caresses
There was never love greater than mine, so destroying, so ravaging,
ravishing, rapturous, deep;
Raw
There was a red, raw dripping thing that mowed
Ray
Oh light that never shone for me one ray,
301
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008.6
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127.9
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128.21
033.10
115.6
096.79
057.15
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103.8
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104.6
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121.14
043.14
036.3
040.6
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Reach
Reached
Read
Real
Reality
Realm
Realms
Reap
Reaped
Reaper
Reaping
Reason
Rebirth
Recalling
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
I who had fought so hard to reach my goal?
To reach the haven I would never find.
I passed and reached the black pool’s rock-strewn edge.
I reached my hands down to the cool, wet depths
The branching arms that reached with taloned tips,
To read the tale of star and sun,
I read, yet on my trail I wandered still;
We have read inscrutable symbols on dim, dynastic pages,
And Machen to read when she thinks of the fabulous chalice.
And dreams become the real.
The real world dreams,
And found, the one reality is Death.
And find, the one reality is Death.
The deadly hardness of reality,
He passed beyond the utmost realm of stars,
For ever mounting past the realm of light,
All else is still the realm around,
Amid a realm of sorcery,
Saw only a realm of wet black sand
Through its foul dead realm were it ever to squirm,
Of the realm that rose from stale sea-waves,
She rules a realm decayed from elder days,
He peered, and in the curtained realms of sleep
That I to cosmic realms could take my flight!
Summoned from realms unknown to earthly dreamers
From utmost regions of strange realms returning,
From towers topless as the realms of sleep
I dream through realms where naught begins or ends,
Is only known in realms where dream-winds blow.
His realms were vacua, he proved his vow
Phantasmal realms of faëry, strange and new,
I love you for the realms of endless view,
In ecstasy to reap
For the grain that is reaped
She reaped the whirlwind she had sown,
I am sower, I am reaper,
Than they, sow seeds for harvests of no reaping.
Of a passion swayed not by reason, a passion ungovernable, mad;
Till senses reeled, and time and reason fled,
And the bitter sleep and the sadness have fled in a strange rebirth.
And by your side, in beauty’s own rebirth
For dawn’s rebirth.
And point out ways to rapturous rebirth;
Vainly recalling old wraiths of memory,
Received Then ocean received the husks that we heaved
Recesses Out of the well of the heart and the heart’s recesses
Reciting From the one reciting there.
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Recognition
Of recognition, nor was I to stay
Recurring
And in recurring deaths escape them never.
Red
see also Blood-Red, Blue-Red, Rose-Red, Wine-red
Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips
be ashen,
Are black and gold and red,
The soft, red lips? The shadowy eyes?
What nightmare bore you, hateful blight of red?
The table is spread and the flagon red
For the grape’s red juice there is just one use—
Lust, and the red, red wine!
Lust, and the red, red wine!
That made Serise’s red dwarfs glad.
Beneath twin moons of livid red.
That once ran red as blood
Red
He was possessed with my red flame,
Out of the window’s smouldering red
The tarns run red where the fen-fires toss—
And the little red eyes in the serpent’s head
Are black and gold and red.
Beyond the rack’s red searing agony
Beyond the violet, within the red?
Red roses in the overflowing wine.
Why do I shrink from the soft red mouths of roses
My face was eaten by a red, huge Thing.
There was a red, raw dripping thing that mowed
And both my hands were covered with that red,
And everything was red and strange and mad;
Red phantoms in its bleeding mystery hid.
Poems ripe, red, rich, and rare,
Red-Stained
Drink! For the red-stained lips of your lover!
Reeled Till senses reeled, and time and reason fled,
Reeling The night grows dim and unreal and reeling: do I waken
Reflections
Her own reflections in a mirror.
Refluence
With refluence of flame
Refluent Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent
glory and glow that relume thee,
Refrain A mute triumphal song with love’s refrain.
But found no other than the great refrain:
Region Yet everywhere, in every region, there was nought
Regions Enigmatic regions that no eye can know,
And fearful regions of a nameless fright,
From utmost regions of strange realms returning,
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Regret
Regretful
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
He scans the regions lying all around,
An empress regnant in an empty tomb—
For song and laughter, now the wind’s regret;
For all things die, but they die most regretful
For thee to reign.
For you to reign.
Reigned It reigned on its multiple thrones.
Rejected
Rejected. Nameless others near me sit.
Rejoice And softly rises to rejoice in dawn;
Relate To paint the things I never shall relate.
Relations And philological relations,
Release And never shall I find release,
I know that death itself will never bring release;
Relics
The ruined relics of the ancient past,
Reluctantly
And hanging creepers that reluctantly
Relume Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent glory
and glow that relume thee,
Remain Their secrets will remain untold
While there remain but few—how few!—brief dusks
Or remain by the willows
Remaining
No hope, no faith, no fear, no trust remaining
Remains These, these are gone, nothing of them remains
The chewed remains of something used for bait;
Nothing remains of her; her ancient bed
No voice remains to tell me where she lies,
Where nothing else remains.
Remarkable
Who burped a remarkable ditty,
Remember
Remember the days that will come of the breaking
Remember the dust.
As I remember, there were clanging gongs
As I remember, there were flaming tongs
As I remember, in my agony
Remember phrases with a vague surprise
Remembered
Prisoned here in time for evermore remembered,
Mute tongues will tell remembered hemlocks
Remembered raptures haunting
Remnants
And of its flesh the rotten remnants gave
Remote Remote, savage,
Rent
Me hope. I fell, though flesh itself be rent
Repaid Gifts that repaid our journey’s woes,
Reign
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Replacing
A fuller dream replacing that that wanes.
Repose In endless repose;
Resembled
No hint of what it once resembled, save
Resisted I crawled like one impelled on ways resisted,
Resounding
In alien land, by night’s resounding vastness?
Rest
Rest, with the cold ground resting
Rest, with the dear things lying
Pause, rest, turn back while still your wings are strong,
It knew me not from all the rest,
She will rest on the lawn;
They dragged me back with never pause for rest.
I find no rest in the passions with which I am shaken,
Yield grace to only one, deny the rest?
And for the rest, she owed, and owed.
Resting Rest, with the cold ground resting
I hear them wide awake or part way resting,
I am dust in cosmic outways resting,
Resting beneath the shadow curtain falling
Restoring
Restoring all things lost and small things broken.
Rests
Has claimed the everlasting vow of him who coldly rests
Or rests where an ocean current laves
Retreat The dawn, when those great wings had made retreat;
Of daggers, fair appearances retreat
Return You will return;
You will return;
Returning
From utmost regions of strange realms returning,
Then live! Live with the green, lush trees returning
Their elders have promised them a day of returning,
The elder gods have promised a day of returning
Returning humbly our own love whose force,
Returns He turns, and now returns to unheard choral
Reveal All things their form reveal,
Reveal the symmetry that should be shown
Revealing
Her vestures; both were quite revealing.
Revel
Revel and welcome, games and play
The harvest, and to revel deep
Demonic revel holds dark, writhing forms in thrall,
Revelers Of revelers turned statue, and no more
Revelled Danced and revelled amid the olive-grove?
Reveller A reveller creeps where his leman sleeps—
Each drunken reveller has long since gone;
Revellers Outlined the revellers dancing through the woods,
A drunken girl where the revellers whirl—
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Revelry From the sea, a wind; the revelry has ended;
I heard a sound of cosmic revelry,
Revels When post-historic revels will unfetter them,
When post-historic revels will unfetter them,
Revolve And four-dimension vaults revolve and open wide;
When four-dimensioned vaults revolve and open wide;
Reward What shall reward the delver’s toil
Rhyme I could never love a girl with such a rhyme!
Who knew why Romans didn’t rhyme,
Rhymes And it only rhymes with turtle......
Rhythm And perfect students, all in rhythm,
Rib
From the riddle of the rib
Rich
Barren or fertile, rich or thin and poor,
My withered heart, stained as with vermeil and rich vair,
Rich ends, and soft the tinkle of a camel’s bell
Though every hour were rich with a great store
The spinning threads weave patterns rich and rare,
Poems ripe, red, rich, and rare,
Riddle Graven deep the riddle of their deep despair.
The guessless riddle of infinity.
To solve one dark, strange riddle, a sage
The greatest riddle and though vassal claimed the vassalage
In void, in waste, in riddle never guessed,
From the riddle of the rib
Riddled Planks riddled through by worms, that he is wise
Riddles Engulfed again the riddles of the ocean;
Ride
He sees them ride, and hears the ringing horn.
Rides
And young Prince Charming rides in quest of her
Right
Of right or wrong,
They’re always right, they can’t be wrong,
Rim
The sun’s rim slides above the flaming, far horizon,
Ring
Oh bells that shall not ever ring for me,
Shine bright, ring out, attend the sweet assay
Ring upon ring, with stone walls sevenfold deep,
Ringed Ringed all around with sentinels that swayed,
There, ringed with dark trees holy,
Ringing He sees them ride, and hears the ringing horn.
Riot
Their festful riot in my rotting heap.
Riotous For something unknown in the flamingly riotous masses
Riotously
Live riotously, ere thy life for death be traded,
Ripe
Poems ripe, red, rich, and rare,
Rippling Where the rippling waters ebb and flow between
Rippling the leaves that sleep in a moonless midnight noon.
Rise
Fronds from out its temples rise;
They crushed me, broke me till I could not rise,
I saw rise up a substance soft and white
Rise in the pale starlight,
Rise from half-decaying logs
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And rise
Is as the fall and rise of mist of myrrh.
The little gods will answer their elders and rise.
The monster gods will answer the Ancient Ones and rise.
Risen
Risen a spectre from the dead
Rise
I hear them in the spring rise and in fall ways,
Rises
Yet it seems that a veil rises slowly
And softly rises to rejoice in dawn;
Rites
Beckoning to rites forgotten long ago:
When time had ceased, when every world was riven,
Riven
I have riven all darkness to find thee.
And through the riven air, there harshly swept
River
On bridges, river trails, on every gentle breeze.
Rivers The mountains and the rivers whisper: Death.
River’s And past the winding river’s end you gaze,
Roads The roads to distant marts; and Allah’s blessed foretell
Roar
Where breakers and lonely waters roar,
Then all the seas united with a roar
Roasted Like a steak half roasted there.
Robes My royal robes like a purple ghost
Rockfall Sheer cliff and rockfall miles below. There, sliding
Rock-Fall
Where the rock-fall caught him with a sad surprise
Rocks Beyond the rocks there are fair bodies with long tresses,
The rocks on a sunken shore.
Rock-Strewn
I passed and reached the black pool’s rock-strewn edge.
Roll
Where sand and tides on shattered cities roll,
Nor that thou roll away the mountain boulders
Rolled That presses on my grave and me, rolled
It rolled, and spun, and stopped in front of me,
Roman The names of all the Roman towns;
Romans Who knew why Romans didn’t rhyme,
Romantic
Romantic dreams, illusions, poetry,
Rome
As the amorous maidens were loved in decadent Rome I shall
love her,
Roof
Where all seemed dead beneath the branch-twined roof
Room Where the trees form a little dark room:
How strange. How strangely empty is the room.
And stood tremendous to my caverned room,
Quite overscents the room,
But from the sundered room I never crept—
If in your head or heart, there were not room
There is a room, Beloved, that you’ll inherit;
Now wherefor do you make this larger room
In all the silences that haunt a vacant room.
Root
I found my leg become a hellish root,
Rooted The rooted feet that walked with measured stride.
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Roots
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Secret the roots that enter the ground,
Long are the roots that enter the soil
Rose
Never a rose will deathlessly bloom,
Lily and poppy and rose are gone,
Rose and fell and rose through all the Lesbian night;
Sleep, with the white rose that slumbers
In lyric passion rose the piper’s song,
Garlands of rose and violet, and wreaths of vine;
The rose and the violet bind her hair;
The rose, the grape, and a god are mine!
That rose from out the gulfs of utter night,
That stir the wakened rose;
Is the rose to be withered and shrunken?
The wreath, the garland, and the rose,
Of the realm that rose from stale sea-waves,
From having watched the dead rose petals strew
From sunken cities rose the solemn knell.
Rose-Pink
Rose-pink, and outward thrusting from each bare
Rose-Red
Her body and her rose-red lips to mine,
Roses
The roses, crushed, lie scattered everywhere;
Where the fabled roses bloomed.
Fling wide the roses, ere the petals all be faded,
Red roses in the overflowing wine.
Why do I shrink from the soft red mouths of roses
Deeply the folded roses
Roses’ Till jasmine, oleander, or full roses’ bloom
Rot
While empty cities rot away
Symbol of Armageddon, rot of rust,
In dissolution’s rot. Around,
Rote
The authors’ names I know by rote,
Rothenstein’s
In Wonderland; Rothenstein’s portraits done with malice
Rotten Thy rotten breath
And rotten in each swelling pore,
And rotten to the very core,
Your rotten breath
And of its flesh the rotten remnants gave
They left me also rotten corpses there
And the miles of rotten bogs.
Rottenness
And all his flesh to rottenness was slave;
All the rottenness, I dread;
Rotting Their festful riot in my rotting heap.
With only rotting corpses lying by,
Round Wildly, wildly, round features mandragoral
Round the bend,
Rounded The sight of goblets cool and rounded,
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Rove
Rows
Over his loins his deep eyes rove.
Like the rows of poppies scattered and thinned,
The changing fancy and the careful rows
Royal
My royal robes like a purple ghost
I was the sign of royal state,
Rub
And rub out the granules of sleep from their eyes:
And rub out the granules of sleep in their eyes,
Rubble Across the rubble, creeping, crawling, gliding,
I hear them in the rubble of defaced land
Rubenstein
Elizabeth Arden, Walska, and Rubenstein;
Rubies Blue rubies won by stealth
Blue rubies won by stealth
I turn away from diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls,
Rubies I yet will place in that jet hair above
Ruby
A ruby flares in the glistening sky,
Swart talons toward the ruby turn,
All night the blood-red ruby glares,
Rue
The acids would not matter, nor I rue
Ruined Upon the ruined planet dwell
The ruined relics of the ancient past,
Ruinous Have perished in ruinous gardens fair
In Paphian gardens lost and ruinous.
Ruins
Watch upon the ruins gleaming
Rule
Through mightier gulfs where still the purple rule
I rule the earth
Ruled
see also Shadow-Ruled
Who ruled in fabulous, forgotten Troy;
Where silence ruled yet something waited me
There lived and there ruled on a crumbling throne
And it ruled alone.
Where it lived and ruled in the endless gloom,
She rules a realm decayed from elder days,
Run
The tarns run red where the fen-fires toss—
Running With formless terrors running through my mind?
That nightmare sculpture, running fast, was near me....
Running wild
Rush
There is a rush of hooves in the break of dawn;
The rush of waves that seek in vain
Then came the rush of hoofbeats and, soft-pressed
Rust
Symbol of Armageddon, rot of rust,
They saw Mercurial cities rust
Rustle Or the rustle of leaves that drift with the wind,
Like the rustle of small
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Sabers The head sprang high; but slashed by unseen sabers
Sacrifice That you make these to that a sacrifice,
Sacrosanct
Heavy-lidded, somber-eyed, sacrosanct and sinful
Sad
Is whispered by the sad wind sighing
A lyric ecstasy, a sad, sweet note,
Our thoughts will be more sad than death is
Where the rock-fall caught him with a sad surprise
To love’s sad paradise.
And houris sad songs croon.
Drink! For the pleasure, forget sad thinking!
Why am I sad?
Thus am I sad.
Sad-Eyed
That murmur to their sad-eyed pupils.
Sadness Or was it the old despairing cry of sadness
And the bitter sleep and the sadness have fled in a strange rebirth.
Safety Caught me with safety but a league away.
Sage
To solve one dark, strange riddle, a sage
Said
She said she lacked experience;
Saith
The legend saith: for each, the golden poppy blooms
The legend saith: for each, nepenthe follows sorrow,
The legend saith: when each lone traveller passes by,
The legend saith: wherefor does any legend matter?
Saki
This is the Wedgwood she lifted, the saki she quaffed, her
Salt
And on the salt sea-wind there comes a wild, sweet sighing
Same
Borne onward yet by that same ceaseless yearning,
Or quite agree—it’s all the same; no virtues please
Sanctity The intolerable sanctity of sin;
And holy sin and sanctity were wed.
Sand
The cold apocalypse of sand.
Where sand and tides on shattered cities roll,
The blood-red waving wastes of sand
Saw only a realm of wet black sand
My bloodprints in the dead sand marked my trail.
Alone protruded from the desert sand,
But once, for every soul in mosque, at sea, on sand
Sands
The sands of time are thick, the days march slow;
Of dwarfs in deep Lethean sands;
You drift along the desert’s burning sands;
Of dwarfs in deep Lethean sands;
Sang
Weird, lifeless birds that talked and harshly sang.
Sank
The willow branches’ languid tendrils sank,
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S
In the distance sank the coast in the dank
Sappho As Sappho of Lesbos was loved in the glory of Greece that is gone;
The songs that Sappho sung,
The songs that Sappho sung
Sat
Where sat an even greater, stranger being,
Satanic Most lovely, half satanic, half divine,
Sate
Of the mad matriarch who sate
Satiation And I was more insatiate with satiation,
Saturday “Saturday night then, Miss Shere. What time?”
“Nine o’clock Saturday night, Mr. Forchamer.”
Saturn And watched a queen of Saturn mourn
Satyr
Was it a half-god or a satyr leaping
A form that clings to a satyr sings,
Sauk
And drew gas for the whole of Sauk City!
Savage Remote, savage,
A savage, indestructible enemy.
The ebony gates, one savage curse I cried,
Save
To any save themselves alone,
He leered so vilely, Horror could not save
I begged the gods to save me from such pain.
No hint of what it once resembled, save
Save one upon a dais standing tall,
A beauty, save in soul and body,
She hated all lies, save her own,
Saw
And in the waters saw my own face drown,
But everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
And saw it smile with fleshless, gaping lips,
And saw the space-invading star
Thine eyes were stricken when they saw
They saw Mercurial cities rust
They saw the mighty Atthla fall
I saw I still must fail.
I saw the whispering knoll.
Saw only a realm of wet black sand
A king who saw but used no eyes for seeing,
And when I saw these titans, thereupon
I saw the hungry flowers toward me crawl
I saw from that dim cave where I was hiding
And everywhere I looked, I saw it near,
I saw it then, two trunks that fused as one,
I saw the vales and mountains of the deep,
I saw the dwellers of the ocean night,
I saw rise up a substance soft and white
I saw great shadows across a gibbous moon;
And oblivion saw strange worlds begin to glow.
Yet saw no cause why gossip seized her.
That saw her but heard neither her voice nor her laughter.
Say
While we say,
You move: the unexpected things you say;
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Surely the loveliness that men say lies
Say, sixty-five, not one day under,
Says
That says, These things shall be, and they are so:
Scaled Whose black, scaled body had for head a beak,
Scandal And scandal, better if unfounded.
Scans
She scans the shadows of her land,
He scans the regions lying all around,
Scarce I scarce could know the evil that I did;
Scarcely That scarcely passes soon
Scarlet What evil source your awful scarlet flood?
Specter, in swathings of sick scarlet clad,
Of burning, baleful scarlet spun
There was a shape, on which a scarlet flood
Scars
From all the hate of all those bitter scars.
Scatter And though all poppy seeds in final chaos scatter,
Scattered
Like the rows of poppies scattered and thinned,
The scattered symbols of those closing pages
The roses, crushed, lie scattered everywhere;
While scattered leaves in mildewed heaps
Like foam in a tempest scattered and thinned
Scent
Unclothe you, scent you with nard, myrrh, olibanum,
Scented The scented hair above thy brow,
Tremble upon the scented air of night,
In the breathless rapture of the scented dreamful air;
Scholars Quote scholars dead in Alfred’s time,
Scholastic
With scholastic ladies,
School School to teach seduction;
The school was more than popular
Score
With eyes of golden fury; while a score
Scorn
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
DEATH: Ah Poet, scorn me not,
Traveler: I scorn you, Death,
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
Death: Ah Traveler, scorn me not
Scream I tried to scream but heard no sound, no hoarse,
Out of the night, there came a shrill long scream,
Scruples She had no scruples and no morals
Scrutiny With scrutiny of systems long forgotten,
Sculptors’
Throughout the sculptors’ workshop, uncomplete
Sculpture
That nightmare sculpture, running fast, was near me....
119.3
138.32
122.6
075.13
128.4
055.9
069.5
106.11
096.57
017.2
017.11
055.14
106.3
024.8
134.22
001.11
036.35
040.1
062.9
063.11
096.35
004.19
015.10
101.2
138.11
140.6
140.2
140.5
081.6
012.7
012.17
012.26
012.43
012.44
067.7
067.17
067.26
067.43
067.44
088.8
105.9
128.39
036.5
092.2
092.14
S
Scurries Like a creature unseen as it scurries and passes
Sea
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
And fixed for ever on the shoreless sea.
From the sea, a wind; the revelry has ended;
That drifts from the vacant meadows of the sea.
There could not be so still a sea
As deathless and old as the deathless sea,
Like the sound of the sea or the rain,
Toward the sea.
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
And in a sea of purple shadows drowned.
And all strange things once covered by the sea
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
But once, for every soul in mosque, at sea, on sand
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
Sea-Creatures
Where the strange sea-creatures lurk.
Sea-Friends
Where sea-friends dwell,
Sea-Grave
In the dark sea-grave.
Sea-Graves
That hung on our deep sea-graves.
Sea-Maidens
The lonely, lovely sea-maidens call,
Search For ever will I call, and search the frozen skies
In search of vengeance for an ancient wrong
I further search with neither hope nor peace
In search of something lost, but never near it;
In search of closed escapes.
Searched
I searched the years that hold all things immortal
A monstrous form surged on and searched with cry
Searching
My dreaming eyes kept searching, seeking, staring
In swathes of softly searching sentient hair.
What nameless hunter searching for its meat?
Searing Beyond the rack’s red searing agony
Sears
You are the brand that sears, the mark of shame,
Seas
The dried-up seas, the deserts drear.
With bodies flashing in the sounding seas of foam,
And wander in far lands and seas, alone,
By seas that thunder vainly to the moon;
Then all the seas united with a roar
The bell beneath the seas, beyond the shore.
Seas’
Across the boiling seas’ own muffled boom;
Sea’s
The sea’s eternal mystery,
Sea-Slime
A worm that was born of the deep sea-slime,
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063.1
012.30
014.30
015.41
020.12
048.11
057.17
063.9
066.16
067.30
071.14
095.3
130.15
134.2
141.15
047.41
060.22
047.5
048.16
020.6
013.31
024.3
036.60
037.4
045.16
036.17
089.6
036.31
072.8
079.3
084.9
017.7
010.19
020.7
025.3
031.4
094.9
094.12
094.3
020.10
057.3
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Sea-Tides
Sea-tides ebb and flow;
Sea-Tomb
Of its cold sea-tomb.
Laid bare the mystery of the vast sea-tomb,
Sea-Waves
Of the realm that rose from stale sea-waves,
Sea-Weary
Awaited us, sea-weary all,
Seaweed
Seaweed fills deserted lanes;
Seawind Sunlight and seawind, laughter, song.
Sunlight and seawind, laughter, song....
Sea-Wind
And on the salt sea-wind there comes a wild, sweet sighing
Second And every prof, a second Firkins,
Secret A slave of her passion, my passion, our ecstasy secret, malign;
The secret of eternal avatars.
Secret the roots that enter the ground,
Secret the winds that hollowly pass
She will halt in a secret place
Of secret worlds that have no name or place.
Are like the secret pools of Jupiter.
Secrets The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will betray
her.
Living in their silence secrets whence no whisper
Abysmal secrets, monstrous mysteries, I know;
Their secrets will remain untold
Seduce They paid him to seduce ’em!
Seduction
School to teach seduction;
See
He walks where none can know or see,
To see the Hylots of Calair,
His sunken eyes could only see
Where no man walks, and shall not ever see,
There are no eyes to see,
And when the talons loosened, I could see
Around and see the comrades that are mine;
Stretched farther than horizons. I could see
Around, and see the comrades that I had;
I love you for the beauty all can see,
And through its darkened window see no sky:
Nor that thou give my sightless eyes to see,
Can’t you see that I’d be able
Seed
Wherein no seed nor any fruit are left,
Seeds
The growth of seeds of morbid beauty, sown
We were present when space grew heavy with seeds of its own
spawning.
Than they, sow seeds for harvests of no reaping.
047.7
057.10
094.6
057.22
049.6
047.23
049.22
049.28
020.11
138.29
003.10
036.4
038.1
038.2
065.9
070.8
127.2
003.11
006.11
013.22
030.51
140.12
140.2
014.9
030.14
046.11
050.10
053.11
079.11
087.10
093.2
103.10
116.13
118.2
124.12
135.8
031.6
025.6
112.3
119.8
S
And though all poppy seeds in final chaos scatter,
see also All-Seeing
A king who saw but used no eyes for seeing,
“Well, I guess I’ll be going. I’ll be seeing you.”
Seek
That I seek.
Thy breasts that seek delight in fire,
Some thing I find not though I ever seek.
To seek some image far behind some portal
What did he seek, this wayfarer of old?
The rush of waves that seek in vain
And Aphrodite, every dream you seek;
What goal, what new companion did I seek?
To seek, beneath the flower-heads, a path.
I vainly seek.
Would seize their prey and seek their cosmic lair?
I seek through chambers of thy strange abode;
Seeker I am seeker,
Seeking My dreaming eyes kept searching, seeking, staring
Still seeking that which I had never found,
Seeks
He seeks to allay the old desire,
Seem
I sought not, nor in worlds that only seem
Of the phantoms that are not, but seem?
And glowing brightlier, awakening seem the skies, on
And watch, or seem to watch, me for your face
I can not find, nor do I seem to place
And footsteps seem to pass
He who may lift the spell, and yet I seem
Seemed Where all seemed dead beneath the branch-twined roof
And still it seemed as if great Pan were calling
And phantoms that seemed hopelessly and lostly
Of nights that seemed eternities, of vain
I seemed to sink in some huge cosmic pool.
The head most strangely seemed like one I knew;
My own the lineaments that seemed to be
Terror and death seemed stalking everywhere,
That seemed to pour from where the horror stood;
Seeming Only fishes keep a seeming
Seems Yet it seems that a veil rises slowly
She seems
And fair seems everything.
You will become? It seems so strange to me
Seen
Lovely as any girl the world has seen,
And of his face, there was no vestige seen,
Have seen the blood-red plenilune.
Have seen the fall of many kings,
And of its face no vestige could be seen,
Where none are seen:
We have seen in the future time, and space, and the universe
creeping
Seeing
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134.22
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003.4
004.8
027.11
036.19
059.9
060.18
067.32
072.9
082.10
101.25
105.8
124.5
133.35
036.31
036.42
018.10
036.46
043.12
066.11
077.4
077.5
109.11
113.10
011.7
015.7
045.15
070.6
071.13
073.1
073.6
105.5
106.6
047.19
043.33
053.19
096.90
118.12
008.11
029.5
030.4
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090.5
109.12
112.11
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Have seen the golden poppy spread its petals fair
Past where, once seen, once open, close in no tomorrow,
Sees
He sees them ride, and hears the ringing horn.
Seize
Would seize their prey and seek their cosmic lair?
Seized Yet saw no cause why gossip seized her.
Self
With her sweet self, she had no quarrels,
I am wisdom of my own self blind,
Self-Imposed
Was self-imposed.
Selfsame And I, though struggling, in that selfsame hour
Semigod His pagan pipes for semigod and maid;
Send
The elements their four-fold essence send you,
Of sleepy hours that time and plenty send;
Sense
What sense of overhanging doom has made
Senses Yea, we would love till all our senses swoon;
Till senses reeled, and time and reason fled,
And champak fragrance makes the drowsy senses swoon,
Sensuous
But I grow weary of your sensuous caresses,
Sentient In swathes of softly searching sentient hair.
A sentient entity from hell, alive.
Sentinels
Ringed all around with sentinels that swayed,
Separate In separate deaths, so long,
Separation
He wins the long awaited separation
Sere
Fields sere.
The desolation tomblike, sere,
Serise’s That made Serise’s red dwarfs glad.
Serpent’s
And the little red eyes in the serpent’s head
Set
We turned and set forth once more,
Set, fixed, immovable my head:
Set, fixed, immovable my bed;
Set, fixed, immovable myself, now wed
Setting see also Never-Setting
Come back with setting suns
And one by one with the setting sun
Settle
Shrieking, thus to settle whose
Settling Trapped in a crevice by great settling boulders.
Seven Antistrophes that seven before him knew,
Sevenfold
Ring upon ring, with stone walls sevenfold deep,
Sever
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond shall
not sever
Shade She will move through the moveless shade
Some impulse urges me to raise the shade;
And so I slowly raise the shade to greet
Shades Death-fevers mottled you with lurid shades.
134.5
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069.14
105.8
128.32
128.37
133.5
014.23
076.12
015.38
051.41
115.4
083.7
007.14
007.34
096.88
096.49
072.8
088.14
011.10
039.23
068.9
002.30
010.18
030.32
057.7
048.2
054.8
054.9
054.10
039.8
048.23
126.11
059.4
068.7
069.1
003.39
065.7
083.2
083.11
017.14
S
And neither dawn nor darkness shades her clime.
Shades The kohl that shades your eyes, your breasts with henna tipped,
Shadow The luminous shadow of the infinite,
Resting beneath the shadow curtain falling
Shadowed
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
Emerging into light from shadowed fanes,
Shadowland
Into the shadowland I made my way
Shadow-Patterned
A leafy light and shadow-patterned heliation
Shadow-Ruled
In shadow-ruled dominions darkly fated
Shadows
Beyond the shadows of the shrouded deep
The shadows thickened, but a blaze illuming
Than shadows that crept with the sun, and slept
The shadows slipped from our side.
She scans the shadows of her land,
Are these shadows, now, like finger-tips,
Then wanders onward while the shadows fall,
There where I wandered, purple shadows ran
And in a sea of purple shadows drowned.
I saw great shadows across a gibbous moon;
Shadowy
The soft, red lips? The shadowy eyes?
A warning cry—the shadowy forms are shifting:
Shadowy growths and shadowy skies
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Her coral isles and shadowy pearls
O Love, the world so shadowy and dim
A wind from the spheres that through your shadowy hair is blowing
Shake And voices shake the night
Shaken Delirium over my shaken soul now passes,
I find no rest in the passions with which I am shaken,
I am awed that flower and forest and leaf be shaken
Shaking Until, my shaking limbs grown weak, I stepped
Shall
Our desire with breast to breast and body to body we shall be slaking
Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips
be ashen,
The minutes shall wane in delirium, the burning hours pass slowly,
And all the long night her body to mine I shall press;
We shall live in a rapturous embrace, in an endless and holy
I shall teach her the lore of Venus till all her sweet body tremble,
We shall love in our passion in strange and ineffable ways and
dissemble
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034.5
147.5
043.4
051.10
011.1
066.7
036.51
014.1
015.25
048.7
048.24
055.9
058.7
069.12
071.1
071.14
105.2
012.48
015.45
047.24
056.1
056.5
056.9
060.4
110.9
111.7
109.15
101.21
101.28
110.7
078.4
003.19
003.23
003.25
003.26
003.27
003.29
003.31
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As the amorous maidens were loved in decadent Rome I shall
love her,
Her lips with my lips, her passionate body with mine I shall cover
Never has woman been loved as I shall love her, never
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond shall
not sever
Shall lose all Beauty in the end,
And I shall join thee, Myrrhiline,
We shall pass.
And I shall kiss thy warm, soft lips
And I shall play
And never shall I find release,
Passionlessly waiting till the spell shall be broken
I found or made new pleasures that I shall not tell;
We shall not weep
We shall not weep
We shall not weep
We shall not weep,
To paint the things I never shall relate.
Valerian! Thine eyes shall shut,
Shall even as my lost days be foredone,
Shall I wander in the hollows
Where shall I find you?
I will not find it till all things shall cease,
Through them and over them—what shall be found
What shall reward the delver’s toil
Is it thine that shall weaken and wane?
Shall the poppy be flameless and dead?
In whose oblivion we shall meet;
But no voice shall speak again
Where no man walks, and shall not ever see,
Surely shall Aphrodite give you greeting,
Oh bells that shall not ever ring for me,
Never more shall I hear sound
This being’s face is soft, he shall not pass;
Me fearful? What the sight that I shall find?
Sing, for too soon, too long, thy mouth shall know no singing.
Blessed be the unborn for they shall be dead.
Love comes. I know that I shall never be
That says, These things shall be, and they are so:
Shalt
Thou shalt die,
So shalt thou thy beauty lend
And thou shalt go;
Thou shalt lie.
After a while shalt go.
Shambled
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
Shame You are the brand that sears, the mark of shame,
003.33
003.35
003.37
003.39
004.11
004.43
004.48
004.73
004.75
004.79
006.7
013.14
014.21
014.24
014.27
014.31
025.14
030.53
031.12
033.25
033.40
036.58
038.3
038.11
043.20
043.32
046.46
047.33
050.10
051.36
051.58
054.16
082.2
083.8
097.5
108.3
113.9
122.6
004.1
004.12
004.15
004.24
004.42
029.3
090.3
017.7
S
My Lust, and Fury, and crimson shame,
With a sweet rapture of shame.
Shameless
By the breath of its shameless lips I am lightly kissed
Shape Whose source could only, be some fearful shape
There’s one small shape that mews upon a spit;
A giant shape part human, part despair,
What shape of evil? What its foul intent?
There was a shape, on which a scarlet flood
And veiled the shrieking shape in haze that had
Shaped see Brain-Shaped
Shapeless
Then hurled me, shapeless, on a needle-bed.
Shapen A metal titan shapen like a cone,
Shapes Moon, if moon-made they, those drifting shapes
And taloned shapes of evil stalk, for one night free,
Fantastic shapes and forms loomed everywhere
Then thousand ships and more; shapes great and wee
Shard
With signs unreadable, on each the shard
Shards Lie only shards of that dread doom
Share
Thought fashions worlds that earth can never share,
There will be none with you to help you share it,
Where none could know or share.
Shattered
Where sand and tides on shattered cities roll,
She
She will strip herself naked, in splendid and terrible glory array her,
For pleasures and joys that she knows not, for a new and
monstrous delight;
Till she lie in ecstasy knowing and desiring her sisterhood;
And she was cool, yet hers was all the passion,
She lies where the Lesbian poppies nod,
For a promised trysting, a god long due, she yearns,
So fair she is that beauty hath no graces
She walks in charm, adoring nature pleases
To worship where she goes.
What words convey how closelier she follows
For song, not she, doth gain.
She walks with stately grace.
She walks with dust and dreams.
And she alone has beauty, grave and gray.
She seems
Stares with an eye she can not shun.
She scans the shadows of her land,
She has yielded to the kiss of night,
She slumbers lightly here,
She dreams of fear.
Laughing, she flashes down the shifting tides of green,
Sometimes she dreams to music of murmuring waves
Sometimes in cool delight she floats on drifting weeds
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046.22
101.20
101.8
078.11
087.5
089.11
091.2
106.3
106.13
084.8
076.6
045.14
061.11
092.1
095.7
074.7
010.15
116.7
118.3
134.6
036.22
003.9
003.18
003.30
007.7
019.2
019.7
041.1
041.7
041.8
041.9
041.16
053.1
053.16
053.18
053.19
055.4
055.9
058.1
058.2
058.4
060.1
060.8
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She falls,
She will go in the cold moonlight
To her tryst she will go in the night,
As the wind she will pass.
She will move through the moveless shade
She will halt in a secret place
She will halt where the moonrays trace
She will sink on the cold, cold ground,
She will pillow her head
She will rest on the lawn;
She will dream as the night wanes slowly,
Will watch while she waits on the stone;
But she, in decadent fall,
She wakens with the dew yet cool upon her eyelids
She lifts her young faun face to greet the flushing sky, bids
She waits the coming of the golden guest;
She drinks the earthly and heavenly beauty of morning;
She hears the birds’ glad rapture and singing glee;
Dawn breaks abroad; then happily she dances, turning
She has been swallowed in the years’ long flow.
No voice remains to tell me where she lies,
I know not whether she was slave or queen;
She had a lover for her wondrous grace;
I only know she died in Mytilene.
The Beloved is gone; I know not the way she has taken;
She rules a realm decayed from elder days,
She liked the texture of a lily,
She liked to don herself in raiment
She often made the first down payment,
And for the rest, she owed, and owed.
She loved no man, so she would boast,
She loved alone and loved she most
She loved to play a dangerous game
That she had always invitations,
For she paid half, when they went Dutch,
The primrose path she rarely took
Because she sometimes fell or stumbled;
Forsaken often, she forsook
She claimed that thoughts, not deeds, pervert you—
She hated all lies, save her own,
She reaped the whirlwind she had sown,
With her sweet self, she had no quarrels,
She said she lacked experience;
She had no scruples and no morals
This is the Wedgwood she lifted, the saki she quaffed, her
And Machen to read when she thinks of the fabulous chalice.
She is new each time that their contents grow, lesser, and lesser.
The essence of her is here—but I wish she would hasten!
And she didn’t mind,
060.23
065.1
065.3
065.4
065.7
065.9
065.11
065.13
065.14
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065.19
065.22
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066.1
066.3
066.6
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066.14
066.15
099.8
099.9
099.11
099.13
099.14
101.26
127.17
128.1
128.5
128.7
128.8
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128.13
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128.19
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129.1
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144.4
S
Sheen
321
Itself from horror at those eyes’ blind sheen.
029.8
That force demonic brought its eyes their sheen.
090.8
Sheer
Sheer cliff and rockfall miles below. There, sliding
089.4
Drink! For the sheer great joy of drinking!
098.7
Shell
Not always empty is a shell,
042.16
And sinks to sleep in a sounding shell.
060.24
But all at once the shell of that cocoon
075.9
Shells
There lay a bed of shells and bones; I spied
095.5
Shere
“Miss Shere, are you a kind person?”
139.1
“I’m asking you, Miss Shere. Are you a cruel person?”
139.3
“Saturday night then, Miss Shere. What time?”
139.5
“Ely Forchamer, Miss Shere. I’m white and virtuous and fairly goo—” 139.9
“But Miss Shere—”
139.17
Shifting A warning cry—the shadowy forms are shifting:
015.45
Laughing, she flashes down the shifting tides of green,
060.1
Shimmering
That almost hissed or the shimmering mist
048.15
Floats up, and bathes the burning air still shimmering,
096.86
Shimmering everywhere.
101.5
Shine
Shine bright, ring out, attend the sweet assay
051.59
Shines Out of the sky, a black star shines,
125.17
Shining And shining eyes bespoke caresses, slow
075.5
Ships
Then thousand ships and more; shapes great and wee
095.7
Shiver There touches his body lightly a shiver,
018.5
Is it the willows shiver and sigh?
056.10
That tremble and shiver with passions that lately were?
101.12
Shivered We shivered in the quiet air,
035.5
Shivers Like the voice of a wind that shivers and passes
001.1
Shoddy Her thoughts and deeds alike were shoddy.
128.28
Shone And mistily shone the ghostly
045.13
Oh light that never shone for me one ray,
051.57
Those glittering swords that shone like splintered glass,
082.6
And light that never shone
109.27
When light shone out of the mystical ebb and flow:
112.2
047.21
Shore
On the sunken shore.
Before we had lost the shore.
048.4
The rocks on a sunken shore.
060.11
The bell beneath the seas, beyond the shore.
094.12
On its shore, mad emeralds burn in the brake,
125.22
I hear them by the lake shore and at cliffs of stone;
131.14
Shoreless
And fixed for ever on the shoreless sea.
014.30
Shores I’ll talk of future times and alien shores.
077.12
Short
The days are short
002.8
Should Contains what a flagon always should!
022.6
Should love be told in brede or breve?
042.14
The days for which the heart should be most grateful
070.4
Whatever on the other side should lie,
083.12
To make my sufferings worse if I should dine.
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Of creepers, and where head should be was growing
Reveal the symmetry that should be shown
And should a mouth as pleasureful as mine
Shoulders
Bearing the world upon his broken shoulders,
Nor lift a burden from my crumpled shoulders;
Shouting
Or hunters canter shouting toward the moor.
Show
Upon the moon, I’d show, strange things that moan,
Monotony of life an empty show?
We left no mark to show her grave,
Showed It was my own; my own face showed that hue,
Stood out, half-open pods showed mystery
Showed everywhere, while flopping creatures died.
Showing The door must open, showing why the hue
Shown Reveal the symmetry that should be shown
Shrieking
And veiled the shrieking shape in haze that had
Shrieking, thus to settle whose
Shrill
Out of the night, there came a shrill long scream,
Shrine All night I bowed before a burning shrine;
The idol in my shrine of ebony,
Like a priest at a shrine I adore thee,
And conceals like a curtain the shrine,
So luminous, O Love, the shrine so holy,
Shrink Why do I shrink from the soft red mouths of roses
Shroud And underneath the shroud of gloom
Where writhing trees loomed tall to shroud the sky,
Where night was like a shroud before an altar
Enwrapped it in a steaming blood-red shroud:
Shrouded
Beyond the shadows of the shrouded deep
Shrubs Along the summit island lanes of shrubs and trees;
Shrunken
In constellations now to space-dust shrunken
Is the rose to be withered and shrunken?
Shuffling Its footsteps shuffling closer on the stone,
Shun
Stares with an eye she can not shun.
Shut
Valerian! Thine eyes shall shut,
Sibilance A sibilance that followed as I stole
Sick
see also Love-Sick
And we were love-sick, yea, and sick with all love’s poison,
And all the swooning, sick, and ravishing caresses
And I am sick to death with utter weariness
Specter, in swathings of sick scarlet clad,
Valerian, thine eyes were sick
For sick flames and the crawling dust,
For the plague germs fed on the sick and the dead
While sick men stoked; the black hulk poked
092.8
117.4
119.10
059.2
124.13
069.8
025.7
026.4
035.9
073.5
093.6
095.4
078.13
117.4
106.13
126.11
105.9
007.18
008.7
043.9
043.34
110.13
101.11
010.14
011.2
036.13
106.4
014.1
131.2
036.23
043.31
090.13
055.4
030.53
045.18
007.9
007.23
013.27
017.11
030.13
046.14
048.5
048.17
S
Sicken
Side
Sides
Sigh
Sighed
Sighing
Sight
Sightless
Sights
Sign
Signs
Silence
Silences
Silent
Silver
Sick, still, and weary, while they ate their way;
Are sick with memories awesome, eerie, fateful,
And I am sick alike of passion and of glory,
These charnel horrors made me sick and weak,
Me, and I sicken with the languid unsurcease
The shadows slipped from our side.
And by your side, in beauty’s own rebirth
But something from the dark side of the moon
Quick to my side two black, sleek leopards sprang
Whatever on the other side should lie,
And weird encrusted forms on every side.
From dawn to dusk her white sides feel
And they who merely lived are first to sigh:
I can not even sigh
Is it the willows shiver and sigh?
Long-dead creatures murmur and sigh
I only sighed to feel them play
Is whispered by the sad wind sighing
And on the salt sea-wind there comes a wild, sweet sighing
Oh heart, cease beating; eyes, close; sight, be wrong:
What sight in later hours would haply greet
Me fearful? What the sight that I shall find?
Encysted from the sight of other eyes;
The sight of goblets cool and rounded,
For him whose sightless eyes
The leering of a huge and sightless eye.
Nor that thou give my sightless eyes to see,
Of sights and sounds of outer space,
I was the sign of royal state,
I clap, and at the sign
And of my presence, I could feel no sign
With signs unreadable, on each the shard
Living in their silence secrets whence no whisper
Where silence ruled yet something waited me
For silence unto silence died away.
In silence absolute the lifeless land
Grew fainter in the silence of its grave;
The endless silence of the endless dead;
Felt deeper silence broken by no sound,
In all the silences that haunt a vacant room.
To a silent lute.
Unbodied things hold silent sway
Silent, still, old, dead;
While creatures cower in their burrows, silent all,
And silver flutes
Far silver bells with Song’s most sweet alloy.
And silver flutes
Felt flesh dissolve in motes of silver tints
Her laugh was like a silver bell.
323
054.29
070.5
096.4
104.9
096.65
048.24
051.43
075.12
081.5
083.12
095.8
060.17
051.18
054.6
056.10
125.7
054.30
004.62
020.11
073.12
079.6
083.8
119.2
128.2
014.28
083.14
124.12
030.26
046.30
096.21
122.3
074.7
006.11
011.5
080.14
093.1
094.13
099.6
122.10
131.12
004.67
010.10
054.58
061.5
012.36
028.8
067.36
076.13
128.33
324
Sin
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
The intolerable sanctity of sin;
And holy sin and sanctity were wed.
Since
The years of the past have long since flown,
Each drunken reveller has long since gone;
Since ten thousand years ago.
Nor ever have; and since this mortal bond
Of aimless life, of aimless death. Long since
But punish, since their power I dared to test.
To every branch. The tree had long since died,
The years since Time began, the sum of thought,
As your more supernatal beauty, since
Sinful
I am enraptured by strange and undreamed-of passionate sinful
caresses
Heavy-lidded, somber-eyed, sacrosanct and sinful
Sing
It lies where ashen lips no longer sing—
May sing of her are vain;
And the cicadas sing,
Sing, for too soon, too long, thy mouth shall know no singing.
Of man I sing.
Singers The lips of the singers of Greece are still,
Singing To pagan Pan their passionate lips were singing
And over all a choral singing.
She hears the birds’ glad rapture and singing glee;
Sing, for too soon, too long, thy mouth shall know no singing.
To birth the song that all the spheres are singing?
Single A single gardenia lies with delicate grace in
Becomes that single soul, the unity beholden
Single-ish
And every error, he would single-ish!
Singly Though singly impotent, might be in mass
Sings
But only an ancient, buried passion sings.
A form that clings to a satyr sings,
Sink
She will sink on the cold, cold ground,
And sinks to sleep in a sounding shell.
I seemed to sink in some huge cosmic pool.
I sink back in the pillows of my deep divan
Sinuous And arms as sinuous as snakes,
And twist their sinuous downward course—
And sinuous, then I will raise you from the lowly
Sips
As one who of strange pleasure sips,
Who can blame the mouth that sips
For I give love like sips of precious wine
Sisterhood
Till she lie in ecstasy knowing and desiring her sisterhood;
Sit
Rejected. Nameless others near me sit.
And bloated carrion rats that near me sit!
They blandly sit upon their stools
Six
Six feet deep I lie;
Six feet deep my corpse lies, drowned
007.10
007.36
004.55
040.2
047.10
050.11
076.10
086.8
093.10
102.17
117.10
003.3
006.9
027.13
041.14
096.87
097.5
133.7
004.64
015.23
049.27
066.14
097.5
110.12
129.13
134.17
138.40
082.7
007.64
023.5
065.13
060.24
071.13
096.8
020.2
038.10
096.41
004.74
100.3
119.13
003.30
087.8
103.8
138.1
054.2
054.19
S
325
Corruption. Six feet deep
054.32
Six feet deep.
054.34
Sixty-Five
Say, sixty-five, not one day under,
138.32
Skeins Skeins of fluctuant color, lit
034.6
Sketchbook’s
Liliths look beyond the sketchbook’s leaf,
006.10
Skies
Like a mist that fades in the sodden skies
001.13
And the skies are lead,
002.6
’Neath the lowering skies
002.22
For ever will I call, and search the frozen skies
013.31
And all the glory faded from the skies.
034.17
Shadowy growths and shadowy skies
047.24
That glimmer beneath her sunless, wind-departed skies.
060.5
Like a mist that fades into sodden skies
063.13
And glowing brightlier, awakening seem the skies, on
066.11
Through sullen skies empurpled with vast flame.
071.8
Or if, beneath those warmer, clearer skies,
099.12
So lovely with its skin so fair; the grace
114.3
Who finds impersonal and calm the skies;
120.7
Burn beneath the stagnant skies,
126.4
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
130.7
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
141.7
Skirling With skirling fires of weird, vast fanes,
034.7
Sky
Where writhing trees loomed tall to shroud the sky,
011.2
All time and space were mine, and mine was every sky:
013.21
His vision, and he peered across the darkling sky
014.17
Of every age and every sky.
030.56
Her world and sky.
035.4
She lifts her young faun face to greet the flushing sky, bids
066.3
Across a velvet sky. And when I came.
071.4
When I collapsed beneath that burning sky?
085.4
That pierced the blackness of a starless sky
089.3
And in the sky, there hung a baleful glare.
105.4
118.2
And through its darkened window see no sky:
A ruby flares in the glistening sky,
125.5
Out of the sky, a black star shines,
125.17
Down the far closure of the valley, sky,
147.6
Skylanes And giant fountains pouring down the wide skylanes.
034.9
Skyward The magic towers, the skyward thrusting spires,
086.10
Slain
Attempts to flee from depths where hope was slain;
070.7
And I in all that solitude lie slain.
091.8
A slain man moans on a pointed stake
125.23
I am slayer, I am slain,
133.13
Slake
With breasts of fire, and passionate lips to slake,
019.1
Slaking Our desire with breast to breast and body to body we shall be slaking 003.19
When thou at the breasts of thy mistress art slaking
005.1
Slashed The head sprang high; but slashed by unseen sabers
073.13
Slaughtering
326
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
The charnel sounds of awful slaughtering.
A slave of her passion, my passion, our ecstasy secret, malign;
Life is the gift to a slave.
Slave and queen and dancing-girl, wondrous fair,
And all his flesh to rottenness was slave;
I know not whether she was slave or queen;
Slaves Come forth my slaves and eunuchs and the dancing girls:
Slay
To burn, to break; their pleasure not to slay
Slayer I am slayer, I am slain,
Sleek
Quick to my side two black, sleek leopards sprang
Sleep
Sleep, with autumn sleeping,
Sleep, with the white rose that slumbers
He peered, and in the curtained realms of sleep
For him whose mystic sleep
Even as one who hath a quiet sleep,
Her birth and sleep.
The night that brings a sleep.
And the bitter sleep and the sadness have fled in a strange rebirth.
Where its buried cities sleep
For a long and mystic sleep
I lie in my last sleep;
And sinks to sleep in a sounding shell.
From towers topless as the realms of sleep
It is not blessed sleep. It looms as hateful.
For in the midnight hours, when sleep descends,
And in the fading vision of my sleep
Drink! Till you fall in your wine-full sleep!
Or only sleep?
Sleep the dim night away
The worlds of sleep and waking,
Rippling the leaves that sleep in a moonless midnight noon.
Lethal waters sleep and swoon
The little gods sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
And rub out the granules of sleep from their eyes:
They sleep a long sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
The monster gods sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
And rub out the granules of sleep in their eyes,
They sleep a long sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
Sleeper I am the sleeper
Sleeping Sleeping beneath the grass;
Sleep, with autumn sleeping,
What forms were those that through the forest sleeping
I have not found it sleeping or awaking.
On the cities sleeping there
Through the still, sleeping glade
Whom spells will fetter sleeping till the true
In this sweet earthly house was not for sleeping
Sleeps A reveller creeps where his leman sleeps—
Where he sleeps with the dead.
Slave
105.11
003.10
004.38
006.18
029.6
099.11
096.22
086.7
133.13
081.5
009.5
009.7
014.2
014.22
031.13
035.12
036.64
044.4
047.4
047.35
054.33
060.24
069.3
070.1
070.9
095.12
098.8
101.30
109.7
109.17
111.4
126.1
130.3
130.10
130.19
141.3
141.10
141.19
064.2
004.44
009.5
015.17
036.57
047.9
065.5
113.8
119.4
023.7
065.16
S
Sleepy
Bring hashish, cannabis, or sleepy opium,
Of sleepy hours that time and plenty send;
Sleeve Nor always full the charming sleeve—
Slender A tuft of slender tentacles, a crest
Slender-Hipped
Your body slender-hipped.
Slept
Than shadows that crept with the sun, and slept
Slides
The sun’s rim slides above the flaming, far horizon,
Sliding Sheer cliff and rockfall miles below. There, sliding
Slight
Caresses, though I find slight joy in amorous
Twice excellent; thus your slight flaws evince
Slime
see also Sea-Slime
All the slime and mould that slowly spread
Slimy
Only slimy creatures stare
And the slimy things of the slimy dead
Slipped The shadows slipped from our side.
Slips
A girdle that slips from a maiden’s hips—
Slit
They slit me till a hundred new wounds bled;
Though they are broken too, and their flesh slit.
Although my flesh with many knives is slit.
Slow
The sands of time are thick, the days march slow;
Of slow, fierce grief.
And shining eyes bespoke caresses, slow
Slow patterns in the air; the warm embrace
Slowly The minutes shall wane in delirium, the burning hours pass slowly,
Yet it seems that a veil rises slowly
Except the fair, faint dream of beauty slowly
All the slime and mould that slowly spread
She will dream as the night wanes slowly,
And slowly paces to an inner hall,
Till memory slowly came, and knowledge grew,
Slowly I climbed the worn old attic stairs
Progressing slowly underneath the door
And so I slowly raise the shade to greet
The dark, walled city slowly came in view,
Dance, Cyrenaya, while I watch you swaying slowly,
Grown faint, the winds drift slowly
So soft the sound that stirs the night so slowly,
Where miasmal stenches slowly
Slumbering
In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of the
future, the passions to waken,
Slumberous
And drowsyhead gives way to dreams more slumberous,
Slumbers
Sleep, with the white rose that slumbers
It slumbers deep beneath the fabled hills,
Lost Atlantis slumbers deep,
Lost Atlantis slumbers well
327
096.31
115.4
042.17
092.9
096.48
048.7
066.9
089.4
096.11
117.12
054.14
047.8
057.9
048.24
023.3
084.5
087.4
103.4
007.46
039.18
075.5
114.7
003.25
043.33
051.9
054.14
065.19
069.10
073.4
074.1
078.2
083.11
086.9
096.37
109.9
110.14
126.6
043.15
096.28
009.7
027.12
047.1
047.40
328
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
She slumbers lightly here,
Slumbrous
The air hung slumbrous in the drowsy heat,
Sly
As though sly Pan had used his pipes to capture
Slyly
At me and slyly chuckle while they keep
Small
Like the rustle of small
There’s one small shape that mews upon a spit;
Things of small worth to me.
Restoring all things lost and small things broken.
Smaller What end smaller
Smell
And a smell of dandelions was
Smile
Yea, thy lips that softly smile,
And saw it smile with fleshless, gaping lips,
But a smile has crossed her quiet face—
Smiling While maidens lovely, smiling, fair,
Smoky-Lidded
The green-flecked amber of your smoky-lidded eyes.
Smooth Smooth is the liquid ink of the lake,
Smote Of wave that smote against colossal wave.
Smother Holds me till in unending dooms I smother.
Smouldered
All heaven smouldered in mysterious burning,
Smouldering
Out of the window’s smouldering red
Snakes see also Water-Snakes
And arms as sinuous as snakes,
Snow
In heat of summer day or cold of winter snow;
So
So shalt thou thy beauty lend
Thy body now so passionate
And even so, Myrrhiline,
So let us love, Myrrhiline,
Solemn all you picture them, solemn and so luring,
And so I lay between the arms of my beloved,
Within the pool so fathomless and dark.
And find that what I thought so great is but
Then, on this paper now so blank and white,
He leered so vilely, Horror could not save
So great, I clawed my face to bleeding strips,
And how my love that burns herein so deep
The phantom that so greatly I desired
So long, so far, so distant have you flown
So endlessly, so wearily, you paced
In separate deaths, so long,
So long ago.
So fair she is that beauty hath no graces
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
So little, yet to do so well,
Is love so limited, pray tell?
058.2
015.2
015.11
054.40
063.5
087.5
096.18
147.12
133.63
136.11
004.16
029.13
058.11
049.11
096.38
125.21
094.10
070.14
034.10
055.5
020.2
131.6
004.12
004.21
004.47
004.71
006.17
007.37
011.20
016.3
025.5
029.7
029.10
031.11
036.53
037.1
037.5
039.23
039.24
041.1
042.3
042.9
042.10
042.15
S
Is love so limited, pray tell?
There was never love greater than mine, so destroying, so ravaging,
ravishing, rapturous, deep;
The world is wondrously quiet, so quiet, prophetic of day,
There could not be so still a sea
So few the days, so much that one could know,
So little light, so many corridors,
So dark whichever pathway one may go,
So great the gap, and firmly barred the doors,
And so I soared on pinions of the night
My loved one made soft cooing sounds, and so
Changing and new, so hard to know, to trace.
With blood that had so curious a glow;
So huge the wings, I wondered what the bird
So, hesitantly, I put forth my foot
My hand? Why is my arm so strongly stayed?
And so I slowly raise the shade to greet
I who had fought so hard to reach my goal?
They gave me back my eyes so I could peer
So great I turned and clawed my hands to bone
So muse I while the endless, aimless minutes wear
They left to me my eyes, so I could stare
I am awed that the moon and stars are so close to me.
O Love, the world so shadowy and dim
Is it the glow so magically bringing
So luminous, O Love, the shrine so holy,
So soft the sound that stirs the night so slowly,
So faint the dream, O Love, and yet so fair.
It is so strange, Beloved, that everything has blended
So lovely with its skin so fair; the grace
For, and the loveliness you watch so well.
With you. and you so beautiful and fair.
Differed so, each from each, and this one more
You will become? It seems so strange to me
What they appeared. But there are some so blind
Them, and the words so beautiful and sweet
That says, These things shall be, and they are so:
So deeply dark and fair
She loved no man, so she would boast,
So long as there was never danger;
So dig and delve,
Soared And so I soared on pinions of the night
Soaring Where soaring pinions
Beyond the soaring clouds’ infinity;
Sob
I hear the music’s plaintive sob, watch spins and whirls,
Sociable “Huh. Well, maybe. But I’m sociable, Miss—”
Sod
I am sod,
Sodden Like a mist that fades in the sodden skies
Like a mist that fades into sodden skies
329
042.19
043.14
044.7
048.11
050.1
050.2
050.3
050.4
071.9
075.1
077.8
078.12
079.4
082.9
083.6
083.11
085.2
087.9
090.10
096.73
103.9
110.6
110.9
110.11
110.13
110.14
110.16
111.9
114.3
114.12
114.14
115.7
118.12
121.5
121.9
122.6
127.6
128.9
128.14
143.9
071.9
034.12
037.10
096.23
139.11
133.15
001.13
063.13
330
Soever
Soft
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Be still, O Muse! what syllables soever,
And I shall kiss thy warm, soft lips
The soft, red lips? The shadowy eyes?
Soft plants and creatures, dead, that still draw breath.
In the soft, first capture.
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft
luminous mist,
With soft, light golden limbs to dance and follow,
Their dripping tongues from my soft flesh that, old
My loved one made soft cooing sounds, and so
Quicksilver, pulsing with a deep soft tone
This being’s face is soft, he shall not pass;
I saw rise up a substance soft and white
Enchantment grows in this soft after-nightfall noon,
Rich ends, and soft the tinkle of a camel’s bell
Why do I shrink from the soft red mouths of roses
For the soft flowers awaiting the lips of the lover
So soft the sound that stirs the night so slowly,
Your hair’s soft brown of gold; your hands that trace
For you, or for one kiss from your soft lips.
Softer By softer gold than gold.
Softly
Yea, thy lips that softly smile,
The listening ear; its tones are softly heard
And softly rises to rejoice in dawn;
In swathes of softly searching sentient hair.
Till softly falls away
Stand waiting to perfume and powder and softly caress her,
Soft-Pressed
Then came the rush of hoofbeats and, soft-pressed
Soil
Long are the roots that enter the soil
Solemn Solemn all you picture them, solemn and so luring,
Gave way, the willows five with solemn droop
And in their solemn state,
We buried her in the solemn fall
Time has tolled a solemn knell,
Trees solemn and soundless and tall
And in their solemn state
From sunken cities rose the solemn knell.
Solid
Around me, solid walls of no escape,
Solitude And I in all that solitude lie slain.
Solution Wherefor, solution distant as a star,
Solve
To solve one dark, strange riddle, a sage
Somber-Eyed
Heavy-lidded, somber-eyed, sacrosanct and sinful
Some
Strange, grave women dream of some strange pleasure
My mind with longings for some ancient thing,
Some thing I find not though I ever seek.
And haunting as some fabulous lost stream,
To seek some image far behind some portal
041.13
004.73
012.48
025.12
033.20
044.5
051.46
054.24
075.1
076.7
082.2
095.13
096.89
096.95
101.11
101.19
110.14
114.6
115.14
032.4
004.16
028.6
066.2
072.8
096.81
129.10
092.12
038.9
006.17
011.12
012.14
035.1
047.39
065.21
067.14
094.4
078.9
091.8
050.7
014.33
006.9
006.3
027.10
027.11
028.13
036.19
S
331
You will come back some day, lost lover,
Anguish of some lost thing’s cry or call
Some arrowed beast crept to its hillside fastness?
As dreaded as some strange disease’s pain,
I seemed to sink in some huge cosmic pool.
Of some gray form that made a rattling sound.
As of some ancient corpse about to speak....
Of some imprisoned thing with old despairs.
Whose source could only, be some fearful shape
Some impulse urges me to raise the shade;
Some warning voice calls out: Go back—go back!
Of some white form that made a rattling sound;
At first I deemed it some mad nightmare-dream,
The air from some vast stellar carnage bled
What they appeared. But there are some so blind
And paid for all, on some occasions.
Earth and eternity. Is some voice calling?
039.19
045.10
059.10
070.2
071.13
072.6
072.13
074.8
078.11
083.2
083.9
104.6
105.12
106.12
121.5
128.20
147.7
Was someone here?
Something
Where silence ruled yet something waited me
In search of something lost, but never near it;
And a presence of something supernal drifts over the springsweet earth,
And into more than light, to something wholly
The mouth where something dark was trickling through.
But something from the dark side of the moon
The chewed remains of something used for bait;
I turned on stealthy step lest something hear me.
For something unknown in the flamingly riotous masses
Sometimes
Sometimes her gleaming eyes
Sometimes she dreams to music of murmuring waves
Sometimes in cool delight she floats on drifting weeds
Because she sometimes fell or stumbled;
Somewhere
From somewhere in the distance voices fall and swell,
Somewhere past Ispahan.
Song
Even as Song and Life and Love,
Youth and Song and Joy;
And the song of Beauty for ever dying
A mute triumphal song with love’s refrain.
The hymn and song have changed to moan and cry.
The song of life is but a tedious, bitter moan;
A song of pagan passion, wild and sweet;
In lyric passion rose the piper’s song,
From Pan’s wild pipes, the god’s own song of yearning
There came a sound: Was it a song of gladness
A passionate burst of song from a golden throat,
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A golden throat, a golden song that fail—
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
For song and laughter, now the wind’s regret;
For song, not she, doth gain.
Sunlight and seawind, laughter, song.
Sunlight and seawind, laughter, song....
Traveler: Not soon for I must find a song—
And faintly comes the echo of a traveler’s song,
Its voice in one vast song
To birth the song that all the spheres are singing?
It is the ceaseless song that love began; unended,
Or know the song
His life, his love, his song;
Songs
The songs that Sappho sung,
For songs as wondrous as this wondrous dream,
Made mad songs and patterns of,
The songs that Sappho sung
From metal monsters humming voiceless songs.
And houris sad songs croon.
Strange songs filled the air
Song’s Far silver bells with Song’s most sweet alloy.
Soon
That love and passion weary all too soon.
By fumbling fingers, and forgotten soon,
Traveler: Not soon for I must find a song—
That scarcely passes soon
Sing, for too soon, too long, thy mouth shall know no singing.
Drink! For you’ll soon have the earth for a cover!
Were they strange creatures from Outside that soon
Soon-to-be-Forgotten
The soon-to-be-forgotten future days.
Soothe To soothe white flesh that for caresses aches.
Sorcerers
Of lunar sorcerers; a thousand hells
Sorceress-Eyes
Moonstruck, voiceless, yet their sorceress-eyes agleam,
Sorcerous
A nameless and sorcerous glory has made me weak:
Sorcery Freeing them to follow passion’s sorcery.
I sought in maze of sorcery and bale;
Amid a realm of sorcery,
Phantasmal fire burns the band of sorcery,
Of human form or beast, weird sorcery
A music-maker, lord of sorcery.
Sore
My corpse was once a festering sore
Sorrow Let us forget vain sorrow and tears
All substances and dreams, all sorrow, all delight,
The legend saith: for each, nepenthe follows sorrow,
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Sorrowing
Sorrowing and sorrowing for lost days golden,
Sorry
I am not sorry to have been your lover,
Soughs While over us the wind at twilight soughs,
Sought All night I sought the poisonous fruit of her;
Yea, all the bitter night I sought the bitter rapture,
And still I sought the overpowering drunken rapture,
In other stars in old, oblivious years I sought
He sought the infinite in life, but now
For him who sought the mystery,
I sought it in far lands of timeless travel
I sought, but sought in vain.
And end, there too I sought.
I sought my spirit’s goal.
I sought beyond no more.
I sought not, nor in worlds that only seem
I sought in maze of sorcery and bale;
Soul
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul
such a madness and fury will sweep?
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of
soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
Soul? Dead.
In all this hideous land the only soul.
Delirium over my shaken soul now passes,
A beauty, save in soul and body,
But once, for every soul in mosque, at sea, on sand
Becomes that single soul, the unity beholden
Soul’s
My soul’s death-knell.
Your soul’s desire, all lasting rapture,
My mind, not heart, is now my soul’s true token.
Sound The sound of perished lutes
There came a sound: Was it a song of gladness
And every sound a thing of lyric joy.
A phantom of a kingdom of no sound.
Never more shall I hear sound
And a rat-like sound of pitter and patter.
Like the sound of the sea or the rain,
The sound of ancient lutes
Of some gray form that made a rattling sound.
I heard a sound of cosmic revelry,
I tried to scream but heard no sound, no hoarse,
Of some white form that made a rattling sound;
There was a sound, gigantically loud,
So soft the sound that stirs the night so slowly,
Felt deeper silence broken by no sound,
Instead, they sound like Major Hooples
Sounded Made mutterings that sounded like low glee.
Sounding
With bodies flashing in the sounding seas of foam,
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And sinks to sleep in a sounding shell.
Soundless
And brooded in that vast and soundless grove.
Trees solemn and soundless and tall
Sounds Of sights and sounds of outer space,
My loved one made soft cooing sounds, and so
The charnel sounds of awful slaughtering.
Sucking sounds invade the night,
Source What evil source your awful scarlet flood?
When he finds their source?
Pursued and pounced; an arm that had no source
Whose source could only, be some fearful shape
Whence came that unknown color? Was its source
Only do we who knew you feel the source,
And how and whence the steadfastness, the source?
Sow
Than they, sow seeds for harvests of no reaping.
Sower I am sower, I am reaper,
Sown
The growth of seeds of morbid beauty, sown
I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate,
meshed in the love thou hast sown,
She reaped the whirlwind she had sown,
Space
All time and space were mine, and mine was every sky:
Of Time and Space, and strode upon his long
Of sights and sounds of outer space,
Through all the space of worlds in time and spirit,
Or space;
Where all things are, yet are not; time and space
That filled all worlds, all space; vibrations freeing
Oh little creature, lost in time and space,
Upon all things of life and time and space;
We were present when space grew heavy with seeds of its own
spawning.
We have seen in the future time, and space, and the universe
creeping
Is dreamland, out of Space and out of Time.
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
I am atom lost in space,
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
Space-Dust
In constellations now to space-dust shrunken
Space-Invading
And saw the space-invading star
Spaces And now I cry aloud unto the lonely spaces,
The vacant spaces of the weary night;
From the sweep of vast spaces
Out of the mystical spaces flung beyond,
Then only, from those vacant spaces driven,
A flame of the stars, Beloved, burns out of the far-flung spaces
Space’s Through space’s dead debris I wandered, wondered
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Span
Long crumbled in primordial pre-time’s span;
And when I crossed the imperial weaving span
But when my span
Spawn Whence came you, spawn of what abysmal womb?
Spawning
Still farther back before the stars were spawning
We were present when space grew heavy with seeds of its own
spawning.
Speak Of golden voices that will never speak;
But no voice shall speak again
Of golden voices that again will speak;
As of some ancient corpse about to speak....
Burst; mindless, mewing as it tried to speak,
A thought my tongueless mouth could never speak;
As of a yellow corpse about to speak....
Species To forty thousand species, Woman
Specter Specter, in swathings of sick scarlet clad,
Specters Away; the specters by the gnarled trunk muttered
Spectral Within those precincts of the spectral night’s
Of all my spectral lands,
Only spectral lilies grow
But spectral flame on the puff-pod floss
Spectre Risen a spectre from the dead
Speeds Or speeds
Spell
Passionlessly waiting till the spell shall be broken
Malignant, as if guarded by a spell,
Who cast on me a mystic spell malign,
You caught me, bound me, with a spell,
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment
ere worship and love were to perish?
This hill, haunted by a deathly spell,
The tolling came like measures for a spell.
The monstrous spell of the night is an amorous cover
He who may lift the spell, and yet I seem
Spell-Bound
But the spell-bound half-beasts lie in their lairs
Spelled All the least lines that spelled
Spells
That flayed my flesh, and I was bound by spells
Whom spells will fetter sleeping till the true
Spent
I struggled onward though my strength was spent
Spew
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
Spheres The spheres that spin of chance the blind and dumb,
To birth the song that all the spheres are singing?
A wind from the spheres that through your shadowy hair is blowing
Spied
There lay a bed of shells and bones; I spied
Spin
The spheres that spin of chance the blind and dumb,
Spinning The spinning threads weave patterns rich and rare,
Spins
I hear the music’s plaintive sob, watch spins and whirls,
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Of blue-red veins erect, a spiral swarm.
The magic towers, the skyward thrusting spires,
I have wandered in spirit,
Through all the space of worlds in time and spirit,
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of
endless and awful delight;
Then flesh and spirit, unceasing springs, uncover—
Oh love consummate in the flesh and spirit,
Of flesh and spirit, and attains the crown
I could not move though mind and spirit broke.
Spirits For the good of the town, with the spirits—Down!
Spirit’s I sought my spirit’s goal.
Spit
There’s one small shape that mews upon a spit;
They would not burn me quickly on their spit;
Spits
With torture on their burning spits.
Splaying Had hooves, the arms no hands but splaying fall
Spleen Hatred and spleen.
Splendid She will strip herself naked, in splendid and terrible glory array her,
In sunlight splendid meadows to awake.
Splendor Like a flame, like a splendor supernal,
Of the splendor known no more,
Live with all things of earth and airy splendor,
In splendor of birth and dawning there where the worlds begin:
Splendors
To brilliant flame, whose splendors mesmerize,
Splendour
For splendour unknown.
To tell of pomp and splendour long unknown,
There is magic, there is splendor
Splintered
Those glittering swords that shone like splintered glass,
Spoiling And spoiling, lured them. But I could not squirm
The worms with endless, spoiling flesh are glad.
Spoken That I confused the words you’d plainly spoken.
Your polished phrases spoken carefully,
Spontaneous
Spontaneous as yours,
Spot
Of the woods to a spot forlorn,
Sprang The head sprang high; but slashed by unseen sabers
Quick to my side two black, sleek leopards sprang
Spread The table is spread and the flagon red
All the slime and mould that slowly spread
When I felt through me spread the germ
Body? Spread.
For ever spread.
Have seen the golden poppy spread its petals fair
Spreading
Increasing, spreading more and ever more
And tottered in a spreading pool of blood;
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Spring
Springing
Oh, spring is gone
Oh, spring is gone
For Youth, and Spring, and the woodland feast of Pan?
There will spring no laughter
I hear them in the spring rise and in fall ways,
Where the asphodels are springing?
Springs Then flesh and spirit, unceasing springs, uncover—
The trees, the birds, the fleeting springs, the years,
For the springs that are gone.
I am all life that springs anew,
Spring-Sweet
And a presence of something supernal drifts over the springsweet earth,
Springtide
Springtide waning, Beauty sweet,
Sprites And sprites invisible attend the meeting,
Spun
Of burning, baleful scarlet spun
It rolled, and spun, and stopped in front of me,
And burning eyes along each limb. It spun
In a marsh that even the water-snakes spurn,
Spurning For surely none would think of spurning
Squares Then at the top I stood on magic squares
Squirm And spoiling, lured them. But I could not squirm
Through its foul dead realm were it ever to squirm,
Stage
For he has passed from stage to stage,
Stagnant Burn beneath the stagnant skies,
Stain
You stain vermilion vipers in dank glades.
Stained see also Red-Stained
For feast and wine, the grass stained darkly yet;
Stained is the coffin floor
My withered heart, stained as with vermeil and rich vair,
Stains That still preserve dark ancient stains
Stairs
Slowly I climbed the worn old attic stairs
Stake
A slain man moans on a pointed stake
Stale
Of the realm that rose from stale sea-waves,
Stalk
And taloned shapes of evil stalk, for one night free,
Stalking Terror and death seemed stalking everywhere,
Stand
There stand her books, the Willy Pogany Alice
Stand waiting to perfume and powder and softly caress her,
Standing
Save one upon a dais standing tall,
Star
Like a perishing star,
Of star and sun.
A lonely traveler on another star;
To read the tale of star and sun,
And saw the space-invading star
A star they knew before it came.
To the star that is fairest;
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Wherefor, solution distant as a star,
As a cindering star,
Out of the sky, a black star shines,
A star
Only slimy creatures stare
Meets the mysterious woman’s stare
Out of a dusky corner came the stare
And stare and stare in horror as I meet
They left to me my eyes, so I could stare
And from a dusky corner came the stare
It watched me, waiting, while I stared as long
Stared at my own dead eyes unearthly lit.
The sun stared on me like a blood-red eye,
Stares with an eye she can not shun.
Or starfire care
We left her staring at the musty pall,
My dreaming eyes kept searching, seeking, staring
Her timeless vision staring still
And I drew back, but still the hand with stark,
That pierced the blackness of a starless sky
More ghostly than the faint starlight.
Rise in the pale starlight,
That glowed with fitful lights, and each one starred
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Along starroads with only moonglow paven
In other stars in old, oblivious years I sought
The love of girls more strange on stranger stars I won;
He passed beyond the utmost realm of stars,
They gazed on stars that now are dust,
And the old stars are sunken
Athwart the circling citadel of stars,
Still farther back before the stars were spawning
Still farther where not even stars were flaring
I have sundered the stars away;
As the stars are, my love is eternal.
And the stars in the drowning pools are pale.
Of all the stars and all the universe,
I am awed that the moon and stars are so close to me.
A flame of the stars, Beloved, burns out of the far-flung spaces
Your eyes, Beloved, are filled with the beauty of strange stars
glowing
We are one with the stars, Beloved, and witnessed the young
sun’s dawning
We have dwelt with new suns and watched the old stars die;
Star’s
The dark star’s necrophilic race.
Starved Where peasants till starved earth and long dead ground.
Would maggots in my starved, gaunt body loll
State
And in their solemn state,
I was the sign of royal state,
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Stare
Stared
Stares
Starfire
Staring
Stark
Starless
Starlight
Starred
Starroads
Stars
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And in their solemn state
Emily Post, and thieves in state;
Stately She walks with stately grace.
Statue Of revelers turned statue, and no more
Stay
All past and future. Traveler, stay!
Of recognition, nor was I to stay
Stayed My hand? Why is my arm so strongly stayed?
Steadfastness
And how and whence the steadfastness, the source?
Steadily And steadily grew strange and stranger.
Steak
Like a steak half roasted there.
Stealing Let one long, lingering note through night come stealing,
Stealth Blue rubies won by stealth
Blue rubies won by stealth
Stealthy I turned on stealthy step lest something hear me.
Steaming
Enwrapped it in a steaming blood-red shroud:
Steed
And when my steed permitted me to light,
Stellar My weary mind has travelled all the stellar maze
Vampirish beings of a stellar race,
With visions of the stellar pits,
The air from some vast stellar carnage bled
Beyond the black beyond the stellar maze.
Stems Deep stems twining around the mandrake,
I know all Latin stems and nouns,
Stenches Where miasmal stenches slowly
Step
Her step is lighter than the summer breezes
An unseen step on the creeping moss—
Each step eternal, on I struggled, trying
And every forward step a weary strain.
I turned on stealthy step lest something hear me.
Stepped Until, my shaking limbs grown weak, I stepped
Steps
With whispering steps through the willow-grasses,
In your steps on the wakened ways of earth
With whispering steps through the wildwood grasses,
I walk in the steps where the Beloved and I held tryst;
With weary steps to the old, original end.
Stifling And stifling tropic heat;
Still
The lips of the singers of Greece are still,
And still I sought the overpowering drunken rapture,
That still preserve dark ancient stains
For all is dead, and all is still,
I peered amid those waters black and still.
And still it seemed as if great Pan were calling
And still to flushed and heated faces burning,
Soft plants and creatures, dead, that still draw breath.
We only left her body lying still and deep;
And farther still when life was yet to come,
Still farther back before the stars were spawning
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Still farther where not even stars were flaring
I read, yet on my trail I wandered still;
Still seeking that which I had never found,
I saw I still must fail.
And still for this one dream all else forsaking
Pause, rest, turn back while still your wings are strong,
Be still, O Muse! what syllables soever,
There could not be so still a sea
But still assail the deeper firmament.
All else is still the realm around,
Sick, still, and weary, while they ate their way;
Silent, still, old, dead;
Her timeless vision staring still
Where the little lithe worm still tumbles and crawls,
Cover the form whose hand still gropes.
Through the still, sleeping glade
I still have far to go, it’s late.
Through mightier gulfs where still the purple rule
And I drew back, but still the hand with stark,
Now here, now there I fled; still on it swept.
And still it followed, still I heard it gain
But all the strange and withered things still hung
But ennui still is mine.
Floats up, and bathes the burning air still shimmering,
The hot, still air is sweet with heavy perfumes;
The garden is still with a fever that passes all name;
Vast wings were flapping in the still night air;
And still those vast wings beat that sullen tune;
To all the world; and dearer still are those
A counterpart of what is still to be?
I merely listened, as I listen still,
I come, weary yet bearing still this load.
Still live a hundred years ago,
Stilled However brief or stilled, or borne on farther turn,
Still-Eluding
The still-eluding dream.
Stir
Out of oblivion, no voice will stir
That stir the wakened rose;
There is a stir of wakening winds that whisper across the lawn.
Her eyelids vaguely stir;
Where moons are high, and only dream-winds stir,
Stirless In the stirless dust;
Stirred As if a wind had musically stirred
Until my dead flesh stirred. I only lay,
That clove through midnight where no other stirred,
Stirs
As it stirs the dust
So soft the sound that stirs the night so slowly,
Stoked While sick men stoked; the black hulk poked
Stole
A sibilance that followed as I stole
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Yet, when toward farther desolate wastes I stole,
Sunken walls of crumbling stone
Will watch while she waits on the stone;
Ring upon ring, with stone walls sevenfold deep,
Its footsteps shuffling closer on the stone,
I hear them by the lake shore and at cliffs of stone;
Stone-Pick
In his hand a stone-pick; in his mummied eyes
Stood
He stood at last before the citadel
When Atlantis stood alone
Then at the top I stood on magic squares
Curled inward, flowerwise. I stood before
Where vast, dark marbles stood in endless miles,
And stood tremendous to my caverned room,
Stood out, half-open pods showed mystery
That seemed to pour from where the horror stood;
Stools They blandly sit upon their stools
Stopped It rolled, and spun, and stopped in front of me,
Store
As if there never were an end in store.
Though every hour were rich with a great store
Stores Such dazzling stores of useless learning!
Storied The storied queens of old?
Storm I am foam torn free of storm waves cresting,
Story
Of days and nights that are an old and tiring story,
Strain And every forward step a weary strain.
Strange I am enraptured by strange and undreamed-of passionate sinful
caresses
The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will betray
her.
We shall love in our passion in strange and ineffable ways and
dissemble
Thine eyes that for strange raptures yearn,
As one who of strange pleasure sips,
Strange, grave women dream of some strange pleasure
A chant to loveliness and strange, unfathomed glory,
And baleful boles of strange misshapen growths
Strange wondrous jewels and diadems
The love of girls more strange on stranger stars I won;
To solve one dark, strange riddle, a sage
And on the wind the strange, low notes kept failing
The loveliest girl to give him strange delight;
There are strange eyes that beckon, white breasts and bodies crying
Upon the moon, I’d show, strange things that moan,
From utmost regions of strange realms returning,
And the bitter sleep and the sadness have fled in a strange rebirth.
Strange was the night, and stranger
Where the strange sea-creatures lurk.
Strange witch-lights flare,
Strange wondrous jewels and diadems
Stone
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As dreaded as some strange disease’s pain,
The strange cocoon, not living yet nor dead
How strange. How strangely empty is the room.
But all the strange and withered things still hung
And all strange things once covered by the sea
Were they strange creatures from Outside that soon
And everything was red and strange and mad;
Your eyes, Beloved, are filled with the beauty of strange stars glowing
It is so strange, Beloved, that everything has blended
And oblivion saw strange worlds begin to glow.
Phantasmal realms of faëry, strange and new,
You will become? It seems so strange to me
I seek through chambers of thy strange abode;
And steadily grew strange and stranger.
We listened to the strange rain
Strange songs filled the air
We listened to these strange tall dreams
The pedants utter strange conceits
Oh love compassionate and strangely tender,
The head most strangely seemed like one I knew;
How strange. How strangely empty is the room.
Strangeness
Not too malicious; the strangeness of Harry Clarke’s Poe;
Stranger The love of girls more strange on stranger stars I won;
Strange was the night, and stranger
Where sat an even greater, stranger being,
Stranger than ever came
And steadily grew strange and stranger.
Stray
Stray hands and heads that crawled; in nests I found
Stream And haunting as some fabulous lost stream,
Who follows an endless stream
I am blind in the white embrace of the moon’s hot stream;
Streamed
That streamed to join the nothingness beyond.
Streamers
The Northern Lights crept down with pulsing streamers
Streams Of Acherontic streams;
The rapturous music poured in lyric streams
That streams from her glowing body bare
Of Acherontic streams;
By bathing me in streams of molten lead.
Streets In the streets now covered deep,
As we strode the streets of Tyre
As we strode down the streets of Tyre.
Deserted city streets, and fog, and lantern glow.
Strength I struggled onward though my strength was spent
Strengthening
Tremendous fingers, growing, strengthening,
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Stretched
Stretched farther than horizons. I could see
Strew
From having watched the dead rose petals strew
Strewn see Rock-Strewn
Stricken Thine eyes were stricken when they saw
From the stricken hosts of those plague-filled coasts
Stride The rooted feet that walked with measured stride.
Striding Breast tip a vine; the striding legs for feet
Strip
She will strip herself naked, in splendid and terrible glory array
her,
Strips
So great, I clawed my face to bleeding strips,
Strive
Nowhere to flee, however I might strive,
Striving And years of striving in one moment ended.
Strode Of Time and Space, and strode upon his long
As we strode the streets of Tyre
As we strode down the streets of Tyre.
As we, triumphant, strode along,
Stroke Until I felt that tongue or talon stroke
And then I felt a tongue or talon stroke
Stroked I stroked the glistening webwork on its head.
Strong Abyssal pilgrimage undaunted, strong
Pause, rest, turn back while still your wings are strong,
Them fill the air with measureless strong beat—
You proved illusion not more strong than oaken
Strongly My hand? Why is my arm so strongly stayed?
Strove He strove to bring a light.
To claim the maid for whose desire he strove?
Strown From flowers strown upon the ground
Struggled
Each step eternal, on I struggled, trying
I struggled onward though my strength was spent
Struggling
And I, though struggling, in that selfsame hour
Students And to the students in my classes,
When I can make my students Cram.
I offer to my students gratis,
And perfect students, all in rhythm,
Stumble Doubting, I stumble blindly to thy feet,
Stumbled
I stumbled onward, knowing I must fail,
Until I stumbled. Fear no longer lent
Because she sometimes fell or stumbled;
Substance
The substance of it in the long ago.
I saw rise up a substance soft and white
Substances
All substances and creatures from the bond
All substances and dreams, all sorrow, all delight,
Subtle The subtle pleasure that you give to me,
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DEATH: I offer thee such dreams
Is such as gods impart
What total purpose wrought such total doom;
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul
such a madness and fury will sweep?
On which such sunfire beat.
Death: I offer you such dreams
I begged the gods to save me from such pain.
Such a treasure? I’d be missing
Her latest lover’s love was such
I could never love a girl with such a rhyme!
Such dazzling stores of useless learning!
There was a young man—such a pity!—
Such-Like
And other such-like things as that is
Sucking Sucking sounds invade the night,
Sudden Delight in sudden vagaries of your mind.
Sufferings
To make my sufferings worse if I should dine.
Suffices For nothing suffices
Sullen And the echoing mirth of a sullen mutter,
Through sullen skies empurpled with vast flame.
And still those vast wings beat that sullen tune;
Sum
The sum of all man knows, the sum of all
The years since Time began, the sum of thought,
The sum of hope and faith and life, the sum
Summer And summer is fled,
Of summer flown.
And summer is fled,
Her step is lighter than the summer breezes
And Psyche hover on the summer air.
To fulness in the drowsy summer noons,
Now day dies, and night falls, and that great summer moon
The summer blooms.
In heat of summer day or cold of winter snow;
Summit Along the summit island lanes of shrubs and trees;
Summoned
Summoned from realms unknown to earthly dreamers
Sun
Of star and sun.
To read the tale of star and sun,
Beyond the age of any sun;
And hath no waking to no dawn nor sun.
Than shadows that crept with the sun, and slept
And one by one with the setting sun
The sun lay warm along our way,
The sun lay warm along our way.
Of sun illumes the mouldy balustrades.
Of arabesques the blood-red sun,
Her face has watched the dying sun.
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Sundered
The crimson, never-setting sun,
Locked fast with that hypnotic sun.
Beyond the lifetime of the sun.
The sun stared on me like a blood-red eye,
Where dwindling monitors of night had sundered
I have sundered the stars away;
But from the sundered room I never crept—
Sunfire On which such sunfire beat.
Sung
The songs that Sappho sung,
The songs that Sappho sung
Sunk
Sunk beneath the washing wave;
Sunken And the old stars are sunken
In continents and islands that are sunken,
His sunken eyes could only see
Sunken walls of crumbling stone
On the sunken shore.
The rocks on a sunken shore.
From sunken cities rose the solemn knell.
Mysterious as her sunken palace is,
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
Sunless That glimmer beneath her sunless, wind-departed skies.
Sunlight Sunlight and seawind, laughter, song.
Sunlight and seawind, laughter, song....
In sunlight splendid meadows to awake.
I am sunlight on the hill,
Sunlit For sunlit earth:
Suns
And the suns eternal,
Come back with setting suns
And back; and purple suns flamed northerly
We have dwelt with new suns and watched the old stars die;
Sun’s
The sun’s rim slides above the flaming, far horizon,
We are one with the stars, Beloved, and witnessed the young sun’s
dawning
Superficial
Its superficial vesture whose arrays
Supernal Of a dream supernal.
Like a flame, like a splendor supernal,
And a presence of something supernal drifts over the springsweet earth,
Oh hearts encysted in supernal urning.
Fire, supernal.
We are deathless, O Love, and deific; we have known the
wonder supernal:
Supernatal
With supernatal art.
As your more supernatal beauty, since
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Supplemented
Her gestures supplemented well
Supreme And I, who hold that Beauty is supreme,
That nothing exists but the vision, the thought supreme.
Supremer
Than which no love can have supremer worth.
Surcease
I find no surcease in the unrelieving wine;
Surely Surely shall Aphrodite give you greeting,
Surely this beauty was not meant for keeping
Surely the loveliness that men say lies
He surely was a classic beauty.”
For surely none would think of spurning
Surfeit And when thy surfeit comes, then die! and die a-flinging
Surge
And surge of falling flame of far dominions,
The waters mounted in one surge whose swell
Surged A monstrous form surged on and searched with cry
Surging I heard alone the surging tides in motion.
Surprise Where the rock-fall caught him with a sad surprise
Remember phrases with a vague surprise
Sustaining
And for thy bread, than my bread more sustaining,
Swallowed
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
She has been swallowed in the years’ long flow.
Swamps Lighting swamps and tarns unholy
Swarm Of blue-red veins erect, a spiral swarm.
Swart
Tumescent orchids swart with hair.
The swart hand crawled, through mid-air lengthening,
Swart talons toward the ruby turn,
Swathes In swathes of softly searching sentient hair.
Swathings
Specter, in swathings of sick scarlet clad,
Sway
Unbodied things hold silent sway
Held sway, with purple dreamlands all around.
Swayed Of a passion swayed not by reason, a passion ungovernable, mad;
Ringed all around with sentinels that swayed,
Swaying And body to body, drunken forms were swaying
Dance, Cyrenaya, while I watch you swaying slowly,
Sweep From the sweep of vast spaces
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul such
a madness and fury will sweep?
Tides around Atlantis sweep,
Out of the west, foul breezes sweep,
Sweet see also Spring-Sweet
I shall teach her the lore of Venus till all her sweet body tremble,
Yea, all love’s lyric horror all were sweet;
Drunken with beauty and sweet ecstasy,
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Thy one Beloved, fair and sweet,
A song of pagan passion, wild and sweet;
And on the salt sea-wind there comes a wild, sweet sighing
A lyric ecstasy, a sad, sweet note,
Is like the pure, sweet warbling of a bird,
Far silver bells with Song’s most sweet alloy.
I am the sweet close winding-sheet
Oh sweet beloved and enchanted lover—
Shine bright, ring out, attend the sweet assay
O Cyrenaya, take away the sweet, dark gum,
Her eyes are blind; her sweet white limbs but know
Springtide waning, Beauty sweet,
The hot, still air is sweet with heavy perfumes;
With a sweet rapture of shame.
Wherein sweet terms, as Love, and Hope, and God,
In this sweet earthly house was not for sleeping
Or think that those sweet words were meant to be
Them, and the words so beautiful and sweet
And the fallen sweet clover,
And for thy wine, than earthly wine more sweet,
With her sweet self, she had no quarrels,
Sweeter Her face is sweeter than those fabled places
Than that just passed held sweeter, fuller dowers;
Sweetest A choral hymn of mad and sweetest pain,
Swell
The waters mounted in one surge whose swell
From somewhere in the distance voices fall and swell,
Swelling And over the woods in ecstasy, and swelling
And rotten in each swelling pore,
Swept Now here, now there I fled; still on it swept.
And of that thing swept over me a fear
And through the riven air, there harshly swept
Swiftly That swiftly toward me now began to fall,
Swim
Fishes swim and monsters creep
Swimming
Swimming through Atlantis doomed;
Swoon Yea, we would love till all our senses swoon;
Where maidens swoon in midnight ecstasies;
And champak fragrance makes the drowsy senses swoon,
I am the night and the garden and all things swoon
Lethal waters sleep and swoon
Swooning
And all the swooning, sick, and ravishing caresses
Swoons Swoons in the moonless olive grove;
Till beauty into perfect beauty swoons;
Swoops How it wildly swoops
Swords Those glittering swords that shone like splintered glass,
Syllable That tongue hath no harsh syllable to annoy
Syllables Be still, O Muse! what syllables soever,
Symbol The dripping symbol of a murderer’s hands.
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Symbol of Armageddon, rot of rust,
Symbol of beauty, love, and life, and healing,
Symbols The scattered symbols of those closing pages
All things are symbols of eternal death—
We have read inscrutable symbols on dim, dynastic pages,
Symmetry
Reveal the symmetry that should be shown
Systems
With scrutiny of systems long forgotten,
From the dust of forgotten worlds to whole new systems leaping
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Table
Take
The table is spread and the flagon red
That I to cosmic realms could take my flight!
And incubi avidly waiting to take
O Cyrenaya, take away the sweet, dark gum,
And take the caravan
Take, or the taking never will be thine;
They know that it will take me years to die,
If I never take you anywhere again;
I take the bridgeway you already know.
Taken From the way I have taken
In the years of the past, in the coming and passing of lovers and
love and the paths love has taken,
The Beloved is gone; I know not the way she has taken;
Taker I am my own final taker,
Taking When thou thy pleasure and joy art taking,
Take, or the taking never will be thine;
Tale
The tale is told of years of long ago.
For none are left the tale to tell.
To read the tale of star and sun,
The world of which no tale is handed down.
Oh little creature, here’s a tale of doom....
Unending, a tale, even to him who tells, unknown.
Talk
And though you never talk (do you have tongue?)
I’ll talk of future times and alien shores.
Talked Weird, lifeless birds that talked and harshly sang.
Talking I hear them when no human voice is talking
“What are you talking about?”
Tall
Where writhing trees loomed tall to shroud the sky,
Trees solemn and soundless and tall
Save one upon a dais standing tall,
Tall candles there were dreaming
We listened to these strange tall dreams
Over all the tall wet grass.
Talon Until I felt that tongue or talon stroke
And then I felt a tongue or talon stroke
Taloned And taloned shapes of evil stalk, for one night free,
The branching arms that reached with taloned tips,
Talons With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
For in the talons I was fast immured.
And when the talons loosened, I could see
With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
Swart talons toward the ruby turn,
Tame
All colours else were wan and tame,
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Tapped Ran a pipe-line that tapped him,
Tarns
By cryptic tarns aglow with lethal flame,
The tarns run red where the fen-fires toss—
Lighting swamps and tarns unholy
Task
Our task was done.
Tatters With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
Taught For you have taught a thousand things to me,
Teach I shall teach her the lore of Venus till all her sweet body tremble,
School to teach seduction;
Tears
Let us forget vain sorrow and tears
Their flame and their tears;
Tedious The song of life is but a tedious, bitter moan;
Teems Till Nature teems
Tell
Can escape to tell of muted grief.
For none are left the tale to tell.
I found or made new pleasures that I shall not tell;
To tell of pomp and splendour long unknown,
Mute tongues will tell remembered hemlocks
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
Is love so limited, pray tell?
No voice to tell of days that were,
No voice remains to tell me where she lies,
These things I love, yet words can never tell
Telling I am telling you goodbye, dear,
Tells
Unending, a tale, even to him who tells, unknown.
Tempest Like foam in a tempest scattered and thinned
Temples Fronds from out its temples rise;
Ten
Since ten thousand years ago.
Tender In your lips that were tender
Oh love compassionate and strangely tender,
Of lips too tender; your precise array.
Tendrils The willow branches’ languid tendrils sank,
Tense For what, I did not know, yet tense, on guard
Tentacle One fleshy tentacle, raised me beside
Tentacles
A tuft of slender tentacles, a crest
Terms Wherein sweet terms, as Love, and Hope, and God,
Terrible She will strip herself naked, in splendid and terrible glory array her,
Has man known the terrible glory of woman as I;
Thy terrible lust,
Terrific And I have had terrific grief, and known the cry
Terror The beauty, terror, and the pain of love.
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft
luminous mist,
In that dark chamber, numb with terror, mute,
Wonder and beauty and terror are hanging all over,
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Terrors
Test
Texture
Than
That
Terror and death seemed stalking everywhere,
With formless terrors running through my mind?
But punish, since their power I dared to test.
She liked the texture of a lily,
Yea, love and more than love were all the long night’s portion,
More ghostly than the faint starlight.
More fabulous than all the gems of fame,
But found no other than the great refrain:
By softer gold than gold.
Purer than earthly creatures’,
Our thoughts will be more sad than death is
Her face is sweeter than those fabled places
Her step is lighter than the summer breezes
There was never love greater than mine, so destroying, so ravaging,
ravishing, rapturous, deep;
Than shadows that crept with the sun, and slept
And into more than light, to something wholly
Than which no love can have supremer worth.
More fabulous than all the gems of fame.
Were better than their hideous, measure wrongs.
Stretched farther than horizons. I could see
Than you. I have drained all delights from long impresses
Are merely words that mean no more than life.
Stranger than ever came
Leaving the night more luminous than light of the moon;
Than any known in lands that never were,
Than that just passed held sweeter, fuller dowers;
Than they, sow seeds for harvests of no reaping.
You proved illusion not more strong than oaken
I have met darker nights than that of old,
And for thy wine, than earthly wine more sweet,
And for thy bread, than my bread more sustaining,
More modish than the current mode;
Greater than
Or else they’re much more dumb than geese are.
The school was more than popular
Which is better than all,
Like the voice of a wind that shivers and passes
Of flowers that die,
That murmur of things that wane,
Or the rustle of leaves that drift with the wind,
Like a mist that fades in the sodden skies
Is the voice of Beauty that dies.
That I seek.
For pleasures and joys that she knows not, for a new and
monstrous delight;
As Sappho of Lesbos was loved in the glory of Greece that is gone;
Thy lips that in the midnight burn,
Thine eyes that for strange raptures yearn,
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Thy breasts that seek delight in fire,
Yea, thy lips that softly smile,
Thy cheeks that glow,
That I am the deathless Greek upon an urn
With lips that to thine own lips burn,
Remember the days that will come of the breaking
Enigmatic regions that no eye can know,
The gall that intermingled with the myrrh.
That love and passion weary all too soon.
That made our veins and pulses wildly beat.
And all the beauty of that night now lies decaying,
Yea, all the barren years that linger in their passing,
And bitter all the poison that it brings;
Dearest of all dear things that I possess.
Thou art as lovely as that ancient queen
And I, who hold that Beauty is supreme,
Worship thee, knowing that I only dream.
Sleep, with the white rose that slumbers
Pass, with all joy that passes,
Pass, with pleasure that fades
Die, with the leaves that drift
Die, with Beauty that dies
That still preserve dark ancient stains
Lie only shards of that dread doom
That fell, all Mandrikor to kill.
And brooded in that vast and soundless grove.
Ringed all around with sentinels that swayed,
And hanging creepers that reluctantly
Of that malign, close-hidden ebon pool.
Descending into midnight depths that lurked
The songs that Sappho sung,
Of golden voices that will never speak;
All things that thou dost love,
All things that thou wouldst know.
The face that haunts thy memory?
The mortal flesh that dies?
I found or made new pleasures that I shall not tell;
I know that death itself will never bring release;
What forms were those that through the forest sleeping
And find that what I thought so great is but
You are the brand that sears, the mark of shame,
To soothe white flesh that for caresses aches.
There are strange eyes that beckon, white breasts and bodies crying
That drifts from the vacant meadows of the sea.
A golden throat, a golden song that fail—
A girdle that slips from a maiden’s hips—
A form that clings to a satyr sings,
That rose from out the gulfs of utter night,
Ah, God, that I could draw instead of write,
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That I could picture worlds I’ve never known,
That I to cosmic realms could take my flight!
Upon the moon, I’d show, strange things that moan,
Soft plants and creatures, dead, that still draw breath.
Ah, God! That I had genius, mad and great,
That in the later days a boy would come,
That once a poet lived and loved and died,
The older glory of the days that were
I do not know. There is an ache that fills
That tongue hath no harsh syllable to annoy
Would use that tongue’s undreamed-of ecstasies
And of that thing there came to me a fear
And turned to flee that corpse’s hideous head.
For I was his, that horror of the dead.
That blasted all the worlds that were.
That brought to Mirtylon its doom,
That made Serise’s red dwarfs glad.
They gazed on stars that now are dust,
The things that mirthful wizards killed
On the meads that are rarest,
To the star that is fairest;
In your lips that were tender
And the ways that I cherished.
Oh enchantment that entices,
We left her only to the waiting earth that gave
And outer, oldest galaxies that wane;
And knowing that my quest at last must falter
I searched the years that hold all things immortal
In continents and islands that are sunken,
The spheres that spin of chance the blind and dumb,
Borne onward yet by that same ceaseless yearning,
Still seeking that which I had never found,
I sought not, nor in worlds that only seem
The phantom that so greatly I desired
The night that brings a sleep.
Secret the roots that enter the ground,
Secret the winds that hollowly pass
Long are the roots that enter the soil
That once ran red as blood
So fair she is that beauty hath no graces
That stir the wakened rose;
Enchanted me with dreams that weave;
And fugues parade from hearts that grieve?
To capture moods that change or leave;
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent
glory and glow that relume thee,
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else
were as shadowed as night?
For a love that was fleeting as day?
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Of the phantoms that are not, but seem?
Mine the love that can fade not or falter,
Is it thine that shall weaken and wane?
Yet it seems that a veil rises slowly
And the form that it covers is thine.
There is a stir of wakening winds that whisper across the lawn.
From a trunk, that withered, blighted bole,
And phantoms that seemed hopelessly and lostly
A sibilance that followed as I stole
We were the colours that his love
Than shadows that crept with the sun, and slept
That almost hissed or the shimmering mist
That hung on our deep sea-graves.
Then ocean received the husks that we heaved
Gifts that repaid our journey’s woes,
So few the days, so much that one could know,
That I am weary though I’ve gone not far,
Or gold that never yet no man befriended,
A fuller dream replacing that that wanes.
That flowered not, and all things weep to die,
Of the dual flower that alone endures;
And all the laughing nymphs that make earth fair;
That doth the icon and the dream inherit,
Oh light that never shone for me one ray,
Oh bells that shall not ever ring for me,
Of Hymen and the gods that watch your way.
That has no counterpart in lands of time
No voice to tell of days that were,
All the slime and mould that slowly spread
That presses on my grave and me, rolled
Their dripping tongues from my soft flesh that, old
Of worm that multiplied on worm
I feel the worms that creep, creep, creep,
I feel the worms that leap
But now that time is gone of yore
With that wild color overspread,
That her domain has overrun.
Locked fast with that hypnotic sun.
Lost in that dim dawn-age he died alone,
That glimmer beneath her sunless, wind-departed skies.
That tremble and fall in tide on foaming tide,
That enters her wide domain.
The rush of waves that seek in vain
That streams from her glowing body bare
They are curious things that hide in the woods
And the dirge of a wind that whispers and dies
Blown petals that fall,
Murmur of all things that wane,
Or vanishing leaves that drift off with the wind,
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T
Like a mist that fades into sodden skies
The songs that Sappho sung
Of golden voices that again will speak;
That play for pagan festival.
All things that you might love,
All things that you would know.
The face that haunts your heart and mind.
Antistrophes that seven before him knew,
Of nights that seemed eternities, of vain
Of secret worlds that have no name or place.
Stray hands and heads that crawled; in nests I found
Of some gray form that made a rattling sound.
Until I felt that tongue or talon stroke
My neck, and heard that husky, gurgling choke
It was my own; my own face showed that hue,
My own the lineaments that seemed to be
That glowed with fitful lights, and each one starred
Pursued and pounced; an arm that had no source
But all at once the shell of that cocoon
A beak that, darting, closed me in its trap.
In that far, future time where I was fleeing
That filled all worlds, all space; vibrations freeing
The hands that wrought it vanished in its power,
And I, though struggling, in that selfsame hour
That streamed to join the nothingness beyond.
With blood that had so curious a glow;
That clove through midnight where no other stirred,
That beat the air to frenzy, dirges, knells.
That flayed my flesh, and I was bound by spells
Weird, lifeless birds that talked and harshly sang.
Made mutterings that sounded like low glee.
Those glittering swords that shone like splintered glass,
Why is it that I tremble, half afraid,
What are the dim dread images that bind
Me fearful? What the sight that I shall find?
When I collapsed beneath that burning sky?
And I, and all that phantom city, died.
There’s one small shape that mews upon a spit;
Around and see the comrades that are mine;
I know that I’ll by them be watched for ever
Whence came that unknown color? Was its source
That followed through the chamber where I fled.
In that dark chamber, numb with terror, mute,
That swiftly toward me now began to fall,
I saw from that dim cave where I was hiding
That pierced the blackness of a starless sky
That force demonic brought its eyes their sheen.
And of that thing swept over me a fear
For I was its, that horror from the dead.
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And I in all that solitude lie slain.
I saw it then, two trunks that fused as one,
The rooted feet that walked with measured stride.
The branching arms that reached with taloned tips,
That nightmare sculpture, running fast, was near me....
I too was fastened on that tree of death.
Of wave that smote against colossal wave.
That feebly moved its pulpy, eyeless head.
Of days and nights that are an old and tiring story,
And dreams that can not be.
And of the empty dreams that were not worth desiring,
The kohl that shades your eyes, your breasts with henna tipped,
Rubies I yet will place in that jet hair above
Of your bright lips, all pleasure that your flesh possesses,
And all love’s joys that were.
That scarcely passes soon
Doubt everything, doubt that I doubt, and wearily
I know that nothing is worth while, all things are quite
Futile, futility as well; that all things wane,
Now day dies, and night falls, and that great summer moon
Of caravans that throng
To heart’s desire that only I and Allah know,
Who can blame the mouth that sips
Joys that pass and youth too fleet,
That tremble and shiver with passions that lately were?
The garden is still with a fever that passes all name;
Are merely words that mean no more than life.
The dying wonder of the world that is,
And all that ever will be known, is Death.
They know that it will take me years to die,
And bloated carrion rats that near me sit!
Around, and see the comrades that I had;
Wan hands and heads that had no trace of wound,
Of some white form that made a rattling sound;
How glad I was that I at last awoke!
And still those vast wings beat that sullen tune;
Were they strange creatures from Outside that soon
There was a red, raw dripping thing that mowed
That seemed to pour from where the horror stood;
And both my hands were covered with that red,
I scarce could know the evil that I did;
And veiled the shrieking shape in haze that had
That all would pass, that nothing would abide.
And light that never shone
Comes love, and all the beauty that love possesses,
A glow that develops and flows from the inner being
I am awed that the moon and stars are so close to me.
I am awed that flower and forest and leaf be shaken
With ghostly winds that whisper to them, Awaken.
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T
To birth the song that all the spheres are singing?
So soft the sound that stirs the night so slowly,
Rippling the leaves that sleep in a moonless midnight noon.
A wind from the spheres that through your shadowy hair is blowing
It is so strange, Beloved, that everything has blended
It is the ceaseless song that love began; unended,
We have found that only the dream is unchanging, O Love,
and eternal,
That nothing exists but the vision, the thought supreme.
Than any known in lands that never were,
Love comes. I know that I shall never be
Your hair’s soft brown of gold; your hands that trace
The subtle pleasure that you give to me,
Oh love, it is enough that I may be
Of sleepy hours that time and plenty send;
Than that just passed held sweeter, fuller dowers;
Thought fashions worlds that earth can never share,
You care for that warm house of all your own,
Reveal the symmetry that should be shown
Of modes that will not match despite your pains.
There is a room, Beloved, that you’ll inherit;
And it may be that you will find it lonely,
And it may be that you will find it fair;
And it may be that you will find it only
Are these bright ways foredue to that one whom
That you make these to that a sacrifice,
Surely the loveliness that men say lies
To those that bless, and by my charm, are blessed.
That I confused the words you’d plainly spoken.
Planks riddled through by worms, that he is wise
Were errors that have lost their hold on me.
Or think that those sweet words were meant to be
That says, These things shall be, and they are so:
I have met darker nights than that of old,
For the winds that have blown,
And the days that are dead,
For the springs that are gone.
For the times that are over,
For the grain that is reaped
In that bare wall where my fists wildly beat,
Nor that thou roll away the mountain boulders
Nor that thou give my sightless eyes to see,
In a marsh that even the water-snakes spurn,
That dead body in the ooze.
That she had always invitations,
She claimed that thoughts, not deeds, pervert you—
That saw her but heard neither her voice nor her laughter.
The flagons and bottles and jars that cover her dresser
She is new each time that their contents grow, lesser, and lesser.
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That’s
The
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
In all the silences that haunt a vacant room.
All the least lines that spelled
I am doom that all dooms follow,
I am all cups that fill,
I am all deaths that chill,
I am all life that springs anew,
That once was man.
Becomes that single soul, the unity beholden
And I hope that you won’t cry dear,
Though I know that you are pretty,
That your words are clever, witty,
Can’t you see that I’d be able
And other such-like things as that is
Are things that never ought to bore ’em.
That murmur to their sad-eyed pupils.
Finding that life from end to end
Ran a pipe-line that tapped him,
That we who linger here will not forget, can not forget
That’s natural artifice in you; the way
“You’re offensive. That’s what you are.”
Like the voice of a wind that shivers and passes
With whispering steps through the willow-grasses,
Like the pain in a passionate note
Like the voiceless cry
Like the wind, and the trees, and the rain,
Like the rows of poppies scattered and thinned,
Or the rustle of leaves that drift with the wind,
Like a mist that fades in the sodden skies
Is the voice of Beauty that dies.
Oh, the nights are long
And the days are dead,
And the trees are bare
And the skies are lead,
And the wind is blowing cold.
The days are short
And the days are dark,
And the north-wind—hark!
About the eaves,
The dry dead leaves
Has the cold of death
From the Arctic gloom.
‘Neath the lowering skies
As it stirs the dust
The days are drear,
And the long nights near
When the cold monotone
Of the wind will moan
Oh, the nights are long
And the days are dead,
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T
And the wind is blowing cold.
With beauty of face and of body as the deathlessly beautiful Greek;
The gifts of my body I bring to a flesh-white and beautiful palace,
The passion-born kiss and caress of my maddening desire;
The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will
betray her.
Her eyes will close at my lips on the feverish brow above;
We will pass from rapture to rapture and plumb the most utter
abysses
All the night.
At her feet I have laid the tribute of a burning intolerable passion,
The minutes shall wane in delirium, the burning hours pass slowly,
And all the long night her body to mine I shall press;
I shall teach her the lore of Venus till all her sweet body tremble,
As the amorous maidens were loved in decadent Rome I shall
love her,
As Sappho of Lesbos was loved in the glory of Greece that is gone;
Till the dawn.
Has man known the terrible glory of woman as I;
Thy lips that in the midnight burn,
Shall lose all Beauty in the end,
The scented hair above thy brow,
Where the lilies bloom above;
By the girls they gave their love.
Even the least. Beauty must die.
Never will Beauty escape the grave,
Never will mortal outlive the tomb—
Life is the gift to a slave.
Thou art loveliest of the things I know;
Sleeping beneath the grass;
Let us forget the passing of years,
The years of the past have long since flown,
The flowers of old are overblown,
As the forgotten girls who placed them there.
And the song of Beauty for ever dying
Is whispered by the sad wind sighing
The lips of the singers of Greece are still,
The past is forgotten, its lips are dumb,
For us the future never will come,
And while the fleeting hours away;
That I am the deathless Greek upon an urn
And never will the present cease,
When thou at the breasts of thy mistress art slaking
Remember the days that will come of the breaking
Remember the dust.
Passionlessly waiting till the spell shall be broken
Liliths look beyond the sketchbook’s leaf,
Graven deep the riddle of their deep despair.
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
All night I sought the poisonous fruit of her;
Yea, all the bitter night I sought the bitter rapture,
The gall that intermingled with the myrrh.
My blood was burning in my veins, and all the torment
Rose and fell and rose through all the Lesbian night;
And she was cool, yet hers was all the passion,
And all the ecstasy and dolorous delight.
The intolerable sanctity of sin;
For we would keep the pleasure and the torment burning,
For well we knew the holy night must have an ending,
And all the love and wondrous beauty of my beloved
And all the swooning, sick, and ravishing caresses
More crazed by all the amorous joys thereof;
And still I sought the overpowering drunken rapture,
The beauty, terror, and the pain of love.
Yea, love and more than love were all the long night’s portion,
And so I lay between the arms of my beloved,
All night I dreamed the one long night would last for ever,
I dreamed the night would never turn to day.
And all the beauty of that night now lies decaying,
The hymn and song have changed to moan and cry.
Lo, all the later days are long and dull and weary,
The sands of time are thick, the days march slow;
The memory of the elder ecstasy has faded,
The tale is told of years of long ago.
And now I cry aloud unto the lonely spaces,
The vacant spaces of the weary night;
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
The years and love are gone, and thou art gone, beloved,
No more, no more I know the fierce desire of woman,
For gall and ash are all the ecstasy.
Unto the utter end I worship thee, beloved,
Unto the end I worship and adore;
Yea, all the barren years that linger in their passing,
But bitter is the end of love and man’s desire,
And bitter all the poison that it brings;
All night I lay between the arms of my beloved,
The idol in my shrine of ebony,
Lovely as any girl the world has seen,
For thee, the gods a planet would destroy.
Rest, with the cold ground resting
Rest, with the dear things lying
And the tired day;
Sleep, with the white rose that slumbers
Dream, with the flowers dreaming,
On the dead earth;
Dream, with the brown grass withering
As the mist and the rain;
Die, with the leaves that drift
007.2
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007.6
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T
On the autumnal gust;
In the stirless dust;
Forget, with the blown poppies forgetting
Forget, with the long, final forgetting
Of the oblivious years.
The presences pass everywhere
More ghostly than the faint starlight.
And never footsteps tread the ground.
And underneath the shroud of gloom
No traveler crosses now the land,
The desolation tomblike, sere,
The dried-up seas, the deserts drear.
The cold apocalypse of sand.
Upon the ruined planet dwell
For none are left the tale to tell.
Into the shadowland I made my way
Where writhing trees loomed tall to shroud the sky,
Uprose gigantic in the endless gloom,
Where all seemed dead beneath the branch-twined roof
I passed and reached the black pool’s rock-strewn edge.
Gave way, the willows five with solemn droop
Trailed countless fingers in the ebon edge
Within those precincts of the spectral night’s
I paused and watched the cryptic waters watch.
The willow branches’ languid tendrils sank,
Within the pool so fathomless and dark.
I reached my hands down to the cool, wet depths
And by the dark caress was claimed forever,
And in the waters saw my own face drown,
I offer thee the moan
I offer thee the vague, vast Hadean domain
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
The poppies of the dead
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
DEATH: I offer thee the wealth
More fabulous than all the gems of fame,
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
The songs that Sappho sung,
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
The lips of her of Troy,
The beauty of her immarbled by the Greek;
The vanished joy
The sound of perished lutes
The glory of
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
The face that haunts thy memory?
The soft, red lips? The shadowy eyes?
The mortal flesh that dies?
THE POET (wildly): I yield! I yield! Thy lips, Oh Death!
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
I weary of the old monotony of things;
The song of life is but a tedious, bitter moan;
The years have passed, yet each long year in passing brings
I took the usual pleasures known to all mankind;
The love of girls more strange on stranger stars I won;
My weary mind has travelled all the stellar maze
And I have had terrific grief, and known the cry
Nothing in all the universe is left for me,
For ever will I call, and search the frozen skies
Beyond the shadows of the shrouded deep
He peered, and in the curtained realms of sleep
He sought the infinite in life, but now
Among the greater infinite he quests,
And death, the great, from whom he held his vow
Has claimed the everlasting vow of him who coldly rests
Before the greater dream whose dawn
The earth could not contain
His vision, and he peered across the darkling sky
To read the tale of star and sun,
But found no other than the great refrain:
For him who sought the mystery,
The guessless riddle of infinity.
And fixed for ever on the shoreless sea.
The greatest riddle and though vassal claimed the vassalage
Twilight upon the hills and woods was dying,
The air hung slumbrous in the drowsy heat,
When down the hillside came a long, low crying,
And on the wind the strange, low notes kept failing
Till night had cooled the burning winds of day;
Far on the hills, I heard the notes of rapture
Tremble upon the scented air of night,
The loveliest girl to give him strange delight;
And over the woods in ecstasy, and swelling
In lyric passion rose the piper’s song,
Above the bacchanal in the forest dwelling
What forms were those that through the forest sleeping
Danced and revelled amid the olive-grove?
To claim the maid for whose desire he strove?
The shadows thickened, but a blaze illuming
Outlined the revellers dancing through the woods,
The rapturous music poured in lyric streams
From Pan’s wild pipes, the god’s own song of yearning
For Youth, and Spring, and the woodland feast of Pan?
Or was it the old despairing cry of sadness
Of half-gods outcast from the world of man?
In the glade.
From the sea, a wind; the revelry has ended;
I hear a moaning in the dreamless trees;
A frantic whisper with the wind is blended
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A warning cry—the shadowy forms are shifting:
There is a rush of hooves in the break of dawn;
A last, wild note from the distant hills comes drifting—
Of desolation and the livid dead,
You flare up in the all-consuming flame,
You drift along the desert’s burning sands;
You are the brand that sears, the mark of shame,
The dripping symbol of a murderer’s hands.
The poppy yielded you demented dreams,
Mars poured on you the bane of baleful beams,
Swoons in the moonless olive grove;
Trembling, he moans on the trodden grass;
He seeks to allay the old desire,
She lies where the Lesbian poppies nod,
For the white-limbed god.
The rose and the violet bind her hair;
Beyond the rocks there are fair bodies with long tresses,
Where only the wind and the wide, waste meadows have their home,
The lonely, lovely sea-maidens call,
With bodies flashing in the sounding seas of foam,
The white-caps and the foam their coronal.
The sea’s eternal mystery,
And on the salt sea-wind there comes a wild, sweet sighing
That drifts from the vacant meadows of the sea.
A rapture in the night,
The clear, pure warble of a nightingale
In the breathless, waiting morn;
The glasses clink for a Bacchic drink—
What, ho! For the Bacchic brotherhood!
A wine-red toast to the health of the host—
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
The table is spread and the flagon red
For the grape’s red juice there is just one use—
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
To the host! Clink! Clink! Let the glasses chink!
For the good of the town, with the spirits—Down!
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
A drunken girl where the revellers whirl—
Flesh and the grape and a wreath of vine!
Lust, and the red, red wine!
The rose, the grape, and a god are mine!
Lust, and the red, red wine!
He passed beyond the utmost realm of stars,
Beyond the heavens’ great celestial throng,
Inflicted by the gods in elder wars.
He burst asunder all the whelming bars
From all the hate of all those bitter scars.
For ever mounting past the realm of light,
He stood at last before the citadel
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
That rose from out the gulfs of utter night,
And on the doors of doom, disdainful, hurled
The growth of seeds of morbid beauty, sown
Upon the moon, I’d show, strange things that moan,
To paint the things I never shall relate.
That in the later days a boy would come,
And pass, as all things pass, deeming the dumb
The older glory of the days that were
Was there a goddess in the days of old,
It slumbers deep beneath the fabled hills,
A phantom of the dead, forgotten Greek.
Is like the pure, sweet warbling of a bird,
The listening ear; its tones are softly heard
With all the dreadful cerements of the grave,
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
For I was his, that horror of the dead.
Have known the fungi of the moon,
Have seen the blood-red plenilune.
Thine eyes were at the avatar
And saw the space-invading star
That blasted all the worlds that were.
Have seen the fall of many kings,
The death of pale-green bloated things.
To see the Hylots of Calair,
And thou hast known the azure mist
They passed the land where flowers gnaw
The dark star’s necrophilic race.
With knowledge of the carrion
They saw the mighty Atthla fall
With visions of the stellar pits,
The things that mirthful wizards killed
Beyond the age of any sun;
Until the last oblivion.
For they are blinded with the glut
The flowing porphyry
The beauty of thy features,
I have drunk at the fountains
Of the gods, I inherit
The nectar of their chalice
And the lotus of their leaven,
I have dwelt in the palace
On the meads that are rarest,
From the way I have taken
To the star that is fairest;
From the sweep of vast spaces
And the suns eternal,
Where I entered the traces
In the soft, first capture.
And the old stars are sunken
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T
And the ways that I cherished.
Shall I wander in the hollows
Where the asphodels are springing?
Or remain by the willows
Whence the last birds are winging?
But the eyes have no vision,
And the heart holds its ravage,
And the mind’s decision,
The Northern Lights crept down with pulsing streamers
Out of the mystical spaces flung beyond,
The luminous shadow of the infinite,
And giant fountains pouring down the wide skylanes.
And where the heart’s transcendent vision, unreturning,
Itself was lost beyond abysses of the night...
And all the glory faded from the skies.
We buried her in the solemn fall
With only the withered trees to watch us passing by;
We left her staring at the musty pall,
We shivered in the quiet air,
We left her only to the waiting earth that gave
Athwart the circling citadel of stars,
The secret of eternal avatars.
And perished in the utmost cosmic tomb,
I searched the years that hold all things immortal
And traveled backward past the age of man
Still farther back before the stars were spawning
The spheres that spin of chance the blind and dumb,
I peered far down the final future ages,
I watched the universe grow cold and chill;
The scattered symbols of those closing pages
I watched on earth the littler things around;
The still-eluding dream.
The phantom that so greatly I desired
The night that brings a sleep.
Through all the space of worlds in time and spirit,
Beyond the soaring clouds’ infinity;
Look homeward, angel, for the way is long.
Secret the roots that enter the ground,
Secret the winds that hollowly pass
Under the grass?
Deep stems twining around the mandrake,
The blood’s full worth.
Long are the roots that enter the soil
What shall reward the delver’s toil
Or the open arms, or the eyes of glass;
Under the grass.
When all the olden days are over,
We will pour ashes from the phials
The roses, crushed, lie scattered everywhere;
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
The fire is cold; no fuming censers flare;
No gleam illumes the hoofprints on the lawn.
For song and laughter, now the wind’s regret;
For feast and wine, the grass stained darkly yet;
For love, the dell where hired maenads moan.
Her step is lighter than the summer breezes
That stir the wakened rose;
The storied queens of old?
White poppy of the crimson eve—
Nor always full the charming sleeve—
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of
endless and awful delight;
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent glory
and glow that relume thee,
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else were
as shadowed as night?
I have sundered the stars away;
Of the phantoms that are not, but seem?
In the years of the past, in the coming and passing of lovers and
love and the paths love has taken,
In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of the
future, the passions to waken,
I have burned all my flame at the altar,
Was the tribute then given in vain?
Mine the love that can fade not or falter,
As the stars are, my love is eternal.
And its death is the death of the world.
I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate,
meshed in the love thou hast sown,
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment
ere worship and love were to perish?
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
On the nectar of love I have fed,
Is the rose to be withered and shrunken?
Shall the poppy be flameless and dead?
And conceals like a curtain the shrine,
And the form that it covers is thine.
There is a faint, far rapture of birds in the breathless beauty of dawn,
There is a stir of wakening winds that whisper across the lawn.
And a presence of something supernal drifts over the springsweet earth,
And the bitter sleep and the sadness have fled in a strange rebirth.
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft
luminous mist,
The grasses with glimmering dew are jewelled in opal and amethyst,
The world is wondrously quiet, so quiet, prophetic of day,
There where the gnarled limbs twisted
I saw the whispering knoll.
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T
Strange was the night, and stranger
I thought I heard the eerie
And mistily shone the ghostly
Away; the specters by the gnarled trunk muttered
Upon the whispering knoll.
I was the first to tinge his pen;
I was the only colour when
I gave him the pall of Death’s last blight,
For sick flames and the crawling dust,
I am the colour deep blood-red,
Risen a spectre from the dead
Fourth was I in the coloured host,
I was the sign of royal state,
Of the mad matriarch who sate
We were the colours that his love
I am the colour yet to be;
I am the sweet close winding-sheet
Sunk beneath the washing wave;
In the dark sea-grave.
On the cities sleeping there
Whisper of the days of old,
But the gulf is cold
Of the splendor known no more,
Watch upon the ruins gleaming
On the sunken shore.
Where the fabled roses bloomed.
In the streets now covered deep,
Lies upon the dead drowned men.
In the depths of gloomy murk:
Where the strange sea-creatures lurk.
From the stricken hosts of those plague-filled coasts
Before we had lost the shore.
For the plague germs fed on the sick and the dead
And the living walked less like men
Than shadows that crept with the sun, and slept
When the night came down again.
In the distance sank the coast in the dank
The twilight brought no ease from the hot
Inferno, to the waves
That almost hissed or the shimmering mist
While sick men stoked; the black hulk poked
Her bow toward the cleaner west
Till the engines failed and we lay there gaoled
By the legions of the pest.
Then ocean received the husks that we heaved
And one by one with the setting sun
The shadows slipped from our side.
As we strode the streets of Tyre
The city rang with joyful call
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
As we strode down the streets of Tyre.
The sun lay warm along our way,
A heady fragrance filled the air
From flowers strown upon the ground
The garlands from their brows unbound
The sun lay warm along our way.
Of those the days before the quest.
“Greetings!” I cried but in the throng
The face was lost and I had guessed
It knew me not from all the rest,
And everywhere the women flinging
The wreath, the garland, and the rose,
So few the days, so much that one could know,
So great the gap, and firmly barred the doors,
But still assail the deeper firmament.
Or purple, dear to children of the dust,
Yet do you leave the dark and lonely waste
Except the fair, faint dream of beauty slowly
The ever fresh design of your own fashion.
Of the dual flower that alone endures;
You, and you leave the aimless labyrinth
And Psyche hover on the summer air.
And sprites invisible attend the meeting,
And all the laughing nymphs that make earth fair;
The elements their four-fold essence send you,
In your steps on the wakened ways of earth
Oh love consummate in the flesh and spirit,
That doth the icon and the dream inherit,
That doth the icon and the dream inherit,
Then live! Live with the green, lush trees returning
To fulness in the drowsy summer noons,
Shine bright, ring out, attend the sweet assay
Of Hymen and the gods that watch your way.
A gray dusk mists the air
Of sun illumes the mouldy balustrades.
The three
All else is still the realm around,
To coffin. earth, the dead.
All the rottenness, I dread;
All the flesh on which fat worms have fed;
All the slime and mould that slowly spread
In my tomb beneath the ground,
When I felt through me spread the germ
I feel the worms that creep, creep, creep,
I feel the worms that leap
The harvest, and to revel deep
Stained is the coffin floor
And rotten to the very core,
Beyond the window’s tracery
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T
Of arabesques the blood-red sun,
Out of the window’s smouldering red
In all the years by time begun,
Her face has watched the dying sun.
She scans the shadows of her land,
The crimson, never-setting sun,
The blood-red waving wastes of sand
Ever the orb’s fantastic glare
Meets the mysterious woman’s stare
Beyond the lifetime of the sun.
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Why are the marsh-weeds drooping low?
An unseen step on the creeping moss—
Why has the night-wind ceased to blow?
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Never a light to mark the trail
But spectral flame on the puff-pod floss
And the stars in the drowning pools are pale.
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Is it the willows shiver and sigh?
The tarns run red where the fen-fires toss—
Why do the mandrakes fear to die?
A worm that was born of the deep sea-slime,
Not a creature lived in all the land,
And the little red eyes in the serpent’s head
And the slimy things of the slimy dead
Not a thing disputed the lordly worm
Where it lived and ruled in the endless gloom,
As deathless and old as the deathless sea,
And the worm is king for eternity,
But the musty tale can never be told
Of the realm that rose from stale sea-waves,
Of the white worm-king and the fat white fold,
Of the pulpy head that never grows old,
For the tale is the grave’s.
She has yielded to the kiss of night,
On her brow the moonbeams lie as lace,
Bearing the world upon his broken shoulders,
The prehistoric huntsman in his grave,
Where the rock-fall caught him with a sad surprise
The vanished mists of time enshroud him, hide him;
Laughing, she flashes down the shifting tides of green,
Where the rippling waters ebb and flow between
The rocks on a sunken shore.
The rush of waves that seek in vain
To capture a breast, to hold the hair
The wind is wailing in the willow trees tonight;
The flitting figures gather in the pale moonlight
Phantasmal fire burns the band of sorcery,
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
The bat-things weave,
They are curious things that hide in the woods
And cower behind the black tree boles
Where the little lithe worm still tumbles and crawls,
And the echoing mirth of a sullen mutter,
And the dirge of a wind that whispers and dies
Over the treetops, under the boughs,
Cover the form whose hand still gropes.
With whispering steps through the wildwood grasses,
Like the ghost of an echoing note
Like the rustle of small
Like the sound of the sea or the rain,
Or vanishing leaves that drift off with the wind,
Is the dream as it dies.
The world is an opium-dream;
I am the sleeper
She will go in the cold moonlight
Over the dreaming grass;
To her tryst she will go in the night,
As the wind she will pass.
Through the still, sleeping glade
Of the woods to a spot forlorn,
She will move through the moveless shade
Where the trees form a little dark room:
She will halt where the moonrays trace
She will sink on the cold, cold ground,
On the old and grass-covered mound
Where he sleeps with the dead.
She will rest on the lawn;
She will dream as the night wanes slowly,
Till the coming of dawn.
Will watch while she waits on the stone;
She wakens with the dew yet cool upon her eyelids
She lifts her young faun face to greet the flushing sky, bids
Quiet hangs over all the world; in adoration
She waits the coming of the golden guest;
The sun’s rim slides above the flaming, far horizon,
The radiant god ascends with warmth eternal,
And glowing brightlier, awakening seem the skies, on
She drinks the earthly and heavenly beauty of morning;
She hears the birds’ glad rapture and singing glee;
Toward the sea.
I offer you the moan
The poppies of the dead
Death: I offer you the wealth
More fabulous than all the gems of fame.
The songs that Sappho sung
By Paphian maids in gardens swallowed of the sea;
The lips of Egypt, Troy,
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T
The vanished joy
The sound of ancient lutes
The glory of
The face that haunts your heart and mind.
Blood-brother, boon companion to the yew,
From having watched the dead rose petals strew
He wins the long awaited separation
Of flesh and spirit, and attains the crown
The world of which no tale is handed down.
He barricades himself against the world:
From towers topless as the realms of sleep
He scans the regions lying all around,
Or hunters canter shouting toward the moor.
Each vespertime, he wearies of the view
Then wanders onward while the shadows fall,
Until, once more, when mistily comes the morn,
He sees them ride, and hears the ringing horn.
As fearful as the haunts of the insane.
The days for which the heart should be most grateful
For in the midnight hours, when sleep descends,
And when I crossed the imperial weaving span
And so I soared on pinions of the night
Through mightier gulfs where still the purple rule
Out of a dusky corner came the stare
Along the walls dwelt living mummies, bound
The head most strangely seemed like one I knew;
My own the lineaments that seemed to be
Bloodless, the blind eyes of eternity,
The mouth where something dark was trickling through.
As all the years of Hercules’ great labors,
The head sprang high; but slashed by unseen sabers
Slowly I climbed the worn old attic stairs
Then at the top I stood on magic squares
With signs unreadable, on each the shard
I watched them till, from out the greater dark,
The swart hand crawled, through mid-air lengthening,
And I drew back, but still the hand with stark,
I stroked the glistening webwork on its head.
The strange cocoon, not living yet nor dead
The substance of it in the long ago.
But all at once the shell of that cocoon
But something from the dark side of the moon
All substances and creatures from the bond
The hands that wrought it vanished in its power,
That streamed to join the nothingness beyond.
You drift upon the moonlight hovering near
How strange. How strangely empty is the room.
Progressing slowly underneath the door
And widening inch by inch along the floor
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Aside. The flow turned toward me, and it kept
Before me, one closed portal, and the flow
The door must open, showing why the hue
Vast wings were flapping in the night. I heard
Them fill the air with measureless strong beat—
So huge the wings, I wondered what the bird
The dawn, when those great wings had made retreat;
For in the talons I was fast immured.
And when the talons loosened, I could see
The burning harpy eyes, head of a hag,
That beat the air to frenzy, dirges, knells.
I begged the gods to save me from such pain.
Then beating to the chambers of my brain
The answer came, where I in torment lay,
I knocked upon the portal till with clang
On long, metallic clang, the brazen door
Their mirthless muttering through the palace rang.
Past them the leopards led me on and on
Their enigmatic laughter filled the aisles;
The vacant halls were quiet as a tomb.
The fleshly flowers whispered avidly:
And all the little jeweled blades of grass
I looked across the great plain warily.
To seek, beneath the flower-heads, a path.
I saw the hungry flowers toward me crawl
A deep force pulls me toward the window-blind,
Some impulse urges me to raise the shade;
What are the dim dread images that bind
Me fearful? What the sight that I shall find?
I could not turn though fronted by the rack.
And so I slowly raise the shade to greet
Whatever on the other side should lie,
The leering of a huge and sightless eye.
Beyond the rack’s red searing agony
It merely hinted of the coming week.
The sun stared on me like a blood-red eye,
In all this hideous land the only soul.
My bloodprints in the dead sand marked my trail.
To reach the haven I would never find.
For they were deathless hunters, I the dying.
They caught me in the wasteland in the west.
Tortures would mark the finish of my quest.
Back through the desert for those fiends to flay,
The dark, walled city slowly came in view,
The magic towers, the skyward thrusting spires,
The windows burning bright with eldritch fires;
The ebony gates, one savage curse I cried,
The chewed remains of something used for bait;
Around and see the comrades that are mine;
078.5
078.10
078.13
079.1
079.2
079.4
079.7
079.8
079.11
079.12
080.2
080.10
080.12
080.13
081.1
081.2
081.8
081.9
081.12
081.14
082.1
082.3
082.5
082.10
082.12
083.1
083.2
083.5
083.8
083.10
083.11
083.12
083.14
084.9
084.14
085.5
085.6
085.10
085.12
085.14
086.1
086.4
086.6
086.9
086.10
086.11
086.13
087.6
087.10
T
Beyond the violet, within the red?
That followed through the chamber where I fled.
Desparing cry. I crouched against the wall
The unknown color hostile in pursuit
That pierced the blackness of a starless sky
Across the rubble, creeping, crawling, gliding,
The face a group of eyes above a blur
With all the dreadful cerements of the grave
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
And of its flesh the rotten remnants gave
Its footsteps shuffling closer on the stone,
For I was its, that horror from the dead.
What followed me across the lifeless plain?
The rooted feet that walked with measured stride.
The branching arms that reached with taloned tips,
Throughout the sculptors’ workshop, uncomplete
The naked torso of a goddess glowing
Breast tip a vine; the striding legs for feet
Had hooves, the arms no hands but splaying fall
Then came the rush of hoofbeats and, soft-pressed
Behind, the thirsting tips upon me, warm,
In silence absolute the lifeless land
Alone protruded from the desert sand,
Of knotty burls along the trunk, and clung
To every branch. The tree had long since died,
But all the strange and withered things still hung
All night I heard the tolling of a bell;
All night I heard the cadences of doom
Across the boiling seas’ own muffled boom;
From sunken cities rose the solemn knell.
The waters mounted in one surge whose swell
Laid bare the mystery of the vast sea-tomb,
The tolling came like measures for a spell.
Then all the seas united with a roar
Engulfed again the riddles of the ocean;
The bell beneath the seas, beyond the shore.
Grew fainter in the silence of its grave;
I heard alone the surging tides in motion.
I dreamed the waters of the world had died,
The ocean beds were open now, and free,
And all strange things once covered by the sea
I saw the vales and mountains of the deep,
I saw the dwellers of the ocean night,
The weedy pastures and the drowned, the dead;
And in the fading vision of my sleep
I sink back in the pillows of my deep divan
With the lithe Persian,
I find no surcease in the unrelieving wine;
I clap, and at the sign
373
088.2
088.6
088.9
088.12
089.3
089.5
089.12
090.2
090.3
090.6
090.13
090.14
091.1
091.10
091.11
092.2
092.4
092.6
092.7
092.12
092.13
093.1
093.4
093.9
093.10
093.11
094.1
094.2
094.3
094.4
094.5
094.6
094.8
094.9
094.11
094.12
094.13
094.14
095.1
095.2
095.3
095.9
095.10
095.11
095.12
096.8
096.9
096.20
096.21
374
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Come forth my slaves and eunuchs and the dancing girls:
I hear the music’s plaintive sob, watch spins and whirls,
Burn incense till the fragrant air is odorous,
Quite overscents the room,
And of the empty dreams that were not worth desiring,
O Cyrenaya, take away the sweet, dark gum,
The green-flecked amber of your smoky-lidded eyes.
And sinuous, then I will raise you from the lowly
The kohl that shades your eyes, your breasts with henna tipped,
And melancholy, dream away the afternoon
Or quite agree—it’s all the same; no virtues please
Me, and I sicken with the languid unsurcease
So muse I while the endless, aimless minutes wear
Till evetide falls, and the Muezzin call to prayer
The faithful, with far chaunting.
Allah! the kneeling figures in devotion pray,
Floats up, and bathes the burning air still shimmering,
And the cicadas sing,
And champak fragrance makes the drowsy senses swoon,
From somewhere in the distance voices fall and swell,
And faintly comes the echo of a traveler’s song,
The roads to distant marts; and Allah’s blessed foretell
Rich ends, and soft the tinkle of a camel’s bell
Begins the journey long.
Into the moonlight, Cyrenaya, I would go
And leave behind me all the weary works of man,
And take the caravan
The outer-lands where all’s a dream, and dream-winds blow
Fling wide the roses, ere the petals all be faded,
Drink deep the cup, ere thou canst drink no more;
Take, or the taking never will be thine;
Red roses in the overflowing wine.
Drink! For you’ll soon have the earth for a cover!
Drink! For the joy of the winking wine!
Drink! For the red-stained lips of your lover!
Drink! For the night and the fruit of the vine!
Drink! For the pleasure, forget sad thinking!
Drink! For the flagon is full and deep!
Drink! For the sheer great joy of drinking!
The maid I love was buried long ago;
The dust of centuries lies on her head;
The endless silence of the endless dead;
She has been swallowed in the years’ long flow.
Who can blame the mouth that sips
I have awakened in the fevered midnight noon,
In the breathless rapture of the scented dreamful air;
I am the night and the garden and all things swoon
In the mystical burning pallor of the moon
I walk in the steps where the Beloved and I held tryst;
096.22
096.23
096.25
096.27
096.32
096.34
096.38
096.41
096.44
096.56
096.64
096.65
096.73
096.77
096.78
096.80
096.86
096.87
096.88
096.91
096.92
096.94
096.95
096.96
096.97
096.98
096.99
096.101
097.1
097.2
097.6
097.8
098.1
098.2
098.3
098.4
098.5
098.6
098.7
099.1
099.2
099.6
099.8
100.3
101.1
101.2
101.3
101.4
101.6
T
The hot, still air is sweet with heavy perfumes;
By the breath of its shameless lips I am lightly kissed
The summer blooms.
Why do I shrink from the soft red mouths of roses
The garden is still with a fever that passes all name;
The monstrous spell of the night is an amorous cover
For the soft flowers awaiting the lips of the lover
For something unknown in the flamingly riotous masses
The Beloved is gone; I know not the way she has taken;
I am blind in the white embrace of the moon’s hot stream;
I find no rest in the passions with which I am shaken,
The night grows dim and unreal and reeling: do I waken
The ruined relics of the ancient past,
The dying wonder of the world that is,
The soon-to-be-forgotten future days.
The trees, the birds, the fleeting springs, the years,
The mountains and the rivers whisper: Death.
And found, the one reality is Death.
And find, the one reality is Death.
The sum of all man knows, the sum of all
The years since Time began, the sum of thought,
The sum of hope and faith and life, the sum
Of all the stars and all the universe,
And all around, the weary corpses lie;
Around, and see the comrades that I had;
The worms with endless, spoiling flesh are glad.
Foul nightmare creatures peering through the air:
And from a dusky corner came the stare
Vast wings were flapping in the still night air;
The mandrakes moaned along the black lagoon,
And in the sky, there hung a baleful glare.
Out of the night, there came a shrill long scream,
And through the riven air, there harshly swept
The charnel sounds of awful slaughtering.
But from the sundered room I never crept—
That seemed to pour from where the horror stood;
And all the air was misty as a cloud.
I scarce could know the evil that I did;
The air from some vast stellar carnage bled
And veiled the shrieking shape in haze that had
And DOOM had fallen on the universe.
The heavens like a dead, colossal hearse
For Death the Conqueror at last was king;
Nor vestige of the worlds of old; and now,
Blessed be the dead for they are dead.
Blessed be the living for they will be dead.
Blessed be the unborn for they shall be dead.
Upon the crimson eve,
Deeply the folded roses
375
101.7
101.8
101.10
101.11
101.17
101.18
101.19
101.23
101.26
101.27
101.28
101.29
102.6
102.7
102.8
102.10
102.11
102.13
102.15
102.16
102.17
102.18
102.19
103.2
103.10
103.14
104.4
104.5
105.1
105.3
105.4
105.9
105.10
105.11
105.13
106.6
106.8
106.11
106.12
106.13
107.4
107.5
107.9
107.13
108.1
108.2
108.3
109.2
109.5
376
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Sleep the dim night away
109.7
Grown faint, the winds drift slowly
109.9
Over the jeweled grass,
109.10
Rise in the pale starlight,
109.14
And voices shake the night
109.15
The worlds of sleep and waking,
109.17
And dreams become the real.
109.19
The real world dreams,
109.20
A music in the air,
109.22
The image and the fanes
109.38
Out of the well of the heart and the heart’s recesses
110.1
Comes love, and all the beauty that love possesses,
110.2
A glow that develops and flows from the inner being
110.3
And illumines with mystical light the eyes unseeing.
110.4
I am awed that the moon and stars are so close to me.
110.6
O Love, the world so shadowy and dim
110.9
Murmurs the music of a magic hymn;
110.10
Is it the glow so magically bringing
110.11
To birth the song that all the spheres are singing?
110.12
So luminous, O Love, the shrine so holy,
110.13
So soft the sound that stirs the night so slowly,
110.14
It is the blessing of a Druid’s prayer,
110.15
So faint the dream, O Love, and yet so fair.
110.16
A flame of the stars, Beloved, burns out of the far-flung spaces
111.1
Leaving the night more luminous than light of the moon;
111.2
Rippling the leaves that sleep in a moonless midnight noon.
111.4
Your eyes, Beloved, are filled with the beauty of strange stars glowing 111.5
In splendor of birth and dawning there where the worlds begin:
111.6
A wind from the spheres that through your shadowy hair is blowing 111.7
To make the unison of this half-heard overtone;
111.10
It is the ceaseless song that love began; unended,
111.11
We are one with the stars, Beloved, and witnessed the young sun’s
dawning
112.1
When light shone out of the mystical ebb and flow:
112.2
We have dwelt with new suns and watched the old stars die;
112.6
From the dust of forgotten worlds to whole new systems leaping
112.9
To birth, we have witnessed the past and present blend;
112.10
We have seen in the future time, and space, and the universe
creeping
112.11
With weary steps to the old, original end.
112.12
We are deathless, O Love, and deific; we have known the
wonder supernal:
112.13
We have been the dreamed-of, the dreamer, the fugitive dream:
112.14
We have found that only the dream is unchanging, O Love,
and eternal,
112.15
That nothing exists but the vision, the thought supreme.
112.16
Whom spells will fetter sleeping till the true
113.8
He who may lift the spell, and yet I seem
113.10
Content to know the image of the dream,
113.11
T
These are the things I love you for: the gray
So lovely with its skin so fair; the grace
That’s natural artifice in you; the way
You move: the unexpected things you say;
Slow patterns in the air; the warm embrace
The subtle pleasure that you give to me,
The inner beauty I more deeply care
For, and the loveliness you watch so well.
Of beauty’s rarest harvests, and the hours
You are the fairest of the lovely whom
For beauty of the mind, where, as on a loom
The spinning threads weave patterns rich and rare,
I love you for the charm earth gave to you,
I love you for the realms of endless view,
The lands no traveller ever found on earth;
I love you for the beauty all can see,
Your moods are dear to me, and all the ways
Reveal the symmetry that should be shown
To all the world; and dearer still are those
Arrays and disarrays the house contains,
The changing fancy and the careful rows
The artistry external, and I find
Encysted from the sight of other eyes;
Surely the loveliness that men say lies
The years away intended, but for leaping
Then blind, the favored ones; while I, more wise
Yield grace to only one, deny the rest?
That I confused the words you’d plainly spoken.
Who finds impersonal and calm the skies;
The deadly hardness of reality,
And overlook the underlying thrust,
What they are told, the falseness never find
Them, and the words so beautiful and sweet
Assume new meaning and become the prick
And naked lay the true design, the trick.
The acids would not matter, nor I rue
The fall of footsteps light and pantherine
The chance, the pattern, call it as one will,
The footsteps pantherine upon the ground.
For the winds that have blown,
And the days that are dead,
For the springs that are gone.
For the times that are over,
For the grain that is reaped
And the fallen sweet clover,
From the fury of living.
Only you, and the past, my dearest
Nor that thou roll away the mountain boulders
I ask for blankness and the dark, dark earth.
377
114.1
114.3
114.4
114.5
114.7
114.10
114.11
114.12
115.6
116.1
116.5
116.6
116.9
116.11
116.12
116.13
117.1
117.4
117.5
117.6
117.7
117.13
119.2
119.3
119.5
119.7
119.11
120.4
120.7
120.11
121.3
121.7
121.9
121.10
121.12
121.13
122.1
122.5
122.14
123.2
123.3
123.4
123.7
123.8
123.9
123.12
123.19
124.10
124.14
378
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Out of the west, foul breezes sweep,
Out of the dark where the black moons creep,
With the breath of the web-faced things asleep
A ruby flares in the glistening sky,
In the marble palace, gold dwarfs cry,
In a marsh that even the water-snakes spurn,
Swart talons toward the ruby turn,
All night the blood-red ruby glares,
Before the palace a beacon flares,
But the spell-bound half-beasts lie in their lairs
Out of the sky, a black star shines,
From the palace, a marble monster whines,
On the throne a king for its worm-queen pines
Smooth is the liquid ink of the lake,
On its shore, mad emeralds burn in the brake,
Burn beneath the stagnant skies,
And the miles of rotten bogs.
Sucking sounds invade the night,
That dead body in the ooze.
With the fresher tracks of cloven
Are like the secret pools of Jupiter.
Is as the fall and rise of mist of myrrh.
Behind the amber lids they dimly dream,
Beyond the black beyond the stellar maze.
She liked the texture of a lily,
The sight of goblets cool and rounded,
The thought of Wilde in Piccadilly,
More modish than the current mode;
She often made the first down payment,
And for the rest, she owed, and owed.
The primrose path she rarely took
The lanes where hopeful virgins tumbled.
She reaped the whirlwind she had sown,
This is the Wedgwood she lifted, the saki she quaffed, her
Lips parting and closing over the draught her
There stand her books, the Willy Pogany Alice
Not too malicious; the strangeness of Harry Clarke’s Poe;
And Machen to read when she thinks of the fabulous chalice.
The flagons and bottles and jars that cover her dresser
The midst of her things: a girdle, as though to chasten
The essence of her is here—but I wish she would hasten!
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The little gods dream an apocalyptic dream;
The little gods sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
The little gods hide where the fen-fires gleam.
And ashes consume what the elders condemn.
The little gods then will tremble and waken
And rub out the granules of sleep from their eyes:
The little gods will answer their elders and rise.
125.1
125.2
125.3
125.5
125.6
125.9
125.11
125.13
125.14
125.15
125.17
125.18
125.19
125.21
125.22
126.4
126.8
126.9
126.12
126.14
127.2
127.5
127.7
127.20
128.1
128.2
128.3
128.6
128.7
128.8
128.21
128.24
128.31
129.1
129.2
129.5
129.7
129.8
129.9
129.14
129.16
130.1
130.2
130.3
130.4
130.8
130.9
130.10
130.12
T
The little gods will walk from hill and from highlands,
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The little gods dream their apocalyptic dream;
And they hide in eery lands where the fen-fires gleam.
I hear them in the grass when I am walking
Along the summit island lanes of shrubs and trees;
I hear them in the rubble of defaced land
I hear them in the meadows and in wasteland,
In all the silences that haunt a vacant room.
I hear them in the spring rise and in fall ways,
I hear them by the lake shore and at cliffs of stone;
I hear them in the open and in hallways,
Here at the house you dwelled
Here, by the hand you held
All the least lines that spelled
I am the master of each living thing,
I am the huntsman of each fleeing kind,
I am the arrow of the cosmic mind,
The great Creator,
I am the empty brain
I am sunlight on the hill,
I am the fleeting dew,
From the riddle of the rib
I rule the earth
From the cry
Of infant in the crib
Round the bend,
I am the triumph of all-seeing eye,
I am the cinder wiped away,
As the unknown force disposes
Of why the plan
Or know the song
The legend saith: for each, the golden poppy blooms
Now I, at dusk, beside the wall of ancient tombs,
Have seen the golden poppy spread its petals fair
The legend saith: for each, nepenthe follows sorrow,
The golden poppy glows in beauty with the light
The legend saith: when each lone traveller passes by,
The golden petals burn,
The golden poppy folds and each eternal I
Becomes that single soul, the unity beholden
The legend saith: wherefor does any legend matter?
The true believer makes his own faith all along
The golden poppy once again will grow to bloom
We listened to the strange rain
Falling on the window-pane
By the luscious curtains gleaming.
Strange songs filled the air
379
130.13
130.15
130.17
130.18
130.20
131.1
131.2
131.5
131.7
131.12
131.13
131.14
131.15
132.1
132.3
132.5
133.2
133.3
133.4
133.10
133.18
133.20
133.29
133.39
133.42
133.43
133.44
133.49
133.53
133.54
133.61
133.70
133.71
134.1
134.4
134.5
134.7
134.11
134.13
134.15
134.16
134.17
134.19
134.20
134.23
136.1
136.2
136.4
136.5
380
Thee
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
From the one reciting there.
On which the cool green rain gleams.
Over all the tall wet grass.
The names of all the Roman towns;
The authors’ names I know by rote,
And to the students in my classes,
Bright jewels on the knowledge tree.
And think the words they drop are jewels.
The coeds only get along
And win the prof’s eternal pity,
The pedants utter strange conceits
To prove the brilliance of their wits,
The janitors would drip with knowledge,
The very mice absorb their wisdom,
And learn the use of “ge” and “isdem.”
Within the limits of his nose,
The school was more than popular
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The monster gods dream an apocalyptic dream;
The monster gods sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
The monster gods hid where the fen-fires gleam.
The elder gods have promised a day of returning
And ashes consume what the elder gods condemn.
The monster gods then will tremble and waken
And rub out the granules of sleep in their eyes,
The monster gods will answer the Ancient Ones and rise.
The monster gods will walk then from hills and from highlands,
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The monster gods dream an apocalyptic dream,
And they hide in eerie lands where the fen-fires gleam.
The cat on the fence, and world conditions,
It’s the break of day,
And drew gas for the whole of Sauk City!
Only do we who knew you feel the source,
Here on the hillside by the great gnarled boughs
Of oak the leaves fall in autumnal haze
While over us the wind at twilight soughs,
And past the winding river’s end you gaze,
Resting beneath the shadow curtain falling
Down the far closure of the valley, sky,
Whose whisper in the quiet darkness? Why
And how and whence the steadfastness, the source?
Now in the mind come messages unspoken,
I take the bridgeway you already know.
Even as one who loves thee, Love,
And I shall join thee, Myrrhiline,
Unto the utter end I worship thee, beloved,
I worship thee and ever worship more.
136.6
136.10
136.12
137.4
137.5
137.7
137.18
138.2
138.6
138.7
138.9
138.10
138.20
138.21
138.22
138.25
140.5
141.1
141.2
141.3
141.4
141.5
141.8
141.9
141.10
141.12
141.13
141.15
141.17
141.18
141.20
142.4
143.4
145.5
146.8
147.1
147.2
147.3
147.4
147.5
147.6
147.8
147.9
147.10
147.14
004.3
004.43
007.57
007.60
T
Their
381
Dreaming majestic dreams, I worship thee
008.3
I have been made by thee idolatrous;
008.5
I close thee, pure and rare as ivory,
008.6
For thee, the gods a planet would destroy.
008.12
Worship thee, knowing that I only dream.
008.14
DEATH: I offer thee such dreams
012.1
I offer thee the moan
012.3
I offer thee the vague, vast Hadean domain
012.5
For thee to reign.
012.6
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
012.7
Go! I can not bear thee, Go!
012.10
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
012.17
DEATH: I offer thee the wealth
012.18
I offer thee phantasmal gems
012.22
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
012.26
DEATH: Oh Poet, these I offer thee:
012.27
I offer thee
012.38
THE POET: I scorn thee, Death.
012.43
For this I offer thee:
012.45
Oh Poet, this I offer thee,
012.50
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent glory
and glow that relume thee,
043.3
I have riven all darkness to find thee.
043.5
Like a priest at a shrine I adore thee,
043.9
I ask no comfort and no ease of thee,
124.9
“Oh hail to thee, and et to Brute;
137.27
To their tomb.
002.16
Beautiful maidens have their bed
004.25
By the girls they gave their love.
004.28
In their hidden othertime long fled.
006.4
Living in their silence secrets whence no whisper
006.11
Graven deep the riddle of their deep despair.
006.20
Moonstruck, voiceless, yet their sorceress-eyes agleam,
006.22
Lost amid their dreamlands, your captured phantoms dream.
006.24
Yea, all the barren years that linger in their passing,
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Their flame and their tears;
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And in their solemn state,
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Upon their brows, forgotten girls were flinging
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To pagan Pan their passionate lips were singing
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Where ancient gods assuaged their lust consuming
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The white-caps and the foam their coronal.
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With torture on their burning spits.
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Their secrets will remain untold
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Their purple vision fade and die,
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The nectar of their chalice
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And the lotus of their leaven,
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Of their paradisal heaven.
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And farther back, when worlds were in their dawning.
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And twist their sinuous downward course—
When he finds their source?
Their gentle drapes enfold.
The garlands from their brows unbound
The elements their four-fold essence send you,
Their dripping tongues from my soft flesh that, old
Sick, still, and weary, while they ate their way;
Their festful riot in my rotting heap.
While creatures cower in their burrows, silent all,
Their wild eyes glare.
With their faces dissolved and deathly heads
And in their solemn state
Part human creatures creeping from their lair.
Were better than their hideous, measure wrongs.
Their mirthless muttering through the palace rang.
Their enigmatic laughter filled the aisles;
But when I passed and left them in their gloom,
And on my flesh their mouths, devouring, fall.
To burn, to break; their pleasure not to slay
But punish, since their power I dared to test.
And all around their other victims wait,
Like me uncertain of their final fate
Though they are broken too, and their flesh slit.
Another mass their hungry pet half-ate,
That force demonic brought its eyes their sheen.
They would not burn me quickly on their spit;
Would seize their prey and seek their cosmic lair?
All things their form reveal,
Were errors that have lost their hold on me.
Their ravage, if they had not come from you.
But the spell-bound half-beasts lie in their lairs
She is new each time that their contents grow, lesser, and lesser.
Their elders have promised them a day of returning,
And rub out the granules of sleep from their eyes:
The little gods will answer their elders and rise.
The little gods dream their apocalyptic dream;
They also ought to know their Caesar,
They blandly sit upon their stools
That murmur to their sad-eyed pupils.
Especially when their knees are pretty.
To prove the brilliance of their wits,
Peopled with ghosts of their invention,
To illustrate their attitudes,
In their ideal, idyllic college,
The very mice absorb their wisdom,
Would chant their perfect lessons with ’m.
And Mr. Briggs would watch their English,
And rub out the granules of sleep in their eyes,
As the forgotten girls who placed them there.
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Freeing them to follow passion’s sorcery.
Solemn all you picture them, solemn and so luring,
Leave them to enchantment where you left them lingering
Waiting, watching till I come and join them where,
Through them and over them—what shall be found
And cast them for our footfall where
These, these are gone, nothing of them remains
Of them, bound, yet magnificently free;
And spoiling, lured them. But I could not squirm
I only sighed to feel them play
He sees them ride, and hears the ringing horn.
I watched them till, from out the greater dark,
Them fill the air with measureless strong beat—
Past them the leopards led me on and on
But when I passed and left them in their gloom,
I know that I’ll by them be watched for ever
And in recurring deaths escape them never.
With ghostly winds that whisper to them, Awaken.
Them, and the words so beautiful and sweet
I listen, but I do not hear them fall,
Their elders have promised them a day of returning,
When post-historic revels will unfetter them,
I hear them in the grass when I am walking
I hear them when no human voice is talking
I hear them in the rubble of defaced land
I hear them in the meadows and in wasteland,
I hear them wide awake or part way resting,
I hear them over thunder, and at midnight gloom;
I hear them when I am not even questing
I hear them in the spring rise and in fall ways,
I hear them by the lake shore and at cliffs of stone;
I hear them in the open and in hallways,
When post-historic revels will unfetter them,
Themselves
To any save themselves alone,
Then
Then let us love tonight,
Then, on this paper now so blank and white,
And then I turned, and looked within your eyes,
Then only, from those vacant spaces driven,
Was the tribute then given in vain?
Then dreamlikely they uttered
And then passed by.
Then ocean received the husks that we heaved
Then flesh and spirit, unceasing springs, uncover—
Then live! Live in this dual love, partake
Then live! Live with the green, lush trees returning
Dawn breaks abroad; then happily she dances, turning
Then wanders onward while the shadows fall,
Then at the top I stood on magic squares
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Then beating to the chambers of my brain
Then hurled me, shapeless, on a needle-bed.
As of a lost and hungry child. Then die
I saw it then, two trunks that fused as one,
Then came the rush of hoofbeats and, soft-pressed
Then all the seas united with a roar
Then thousand ships and more; shapes great and wee
And sinuous, then I will raise you from the lowly
And when thy surfeit comes, then die! and die a-flinging
And then they left me, lonely. lying where
And then I felt a tongue or talon stroke
Then blind, the favored ones; while I, more wise
The little gods then will tremble and waken
“Saturday night then, Miss Shere. What time?”
The monster gods then will tremble and waken
The monster gods will walk then from hills and from highlands,
Then away, away,
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond shall not
sever
For a little while, there is light,
As the forgotten girls who placed them there.
There will be,
Though nothing visible is there
Yet everywhere, in every region, there was nought
There came a sound: Was it a song of gladness
There is a rush of hooves in the break of dawn;
There touches his body lightly a shiver,
Beyond the rocks there are fair bodies with long tresses,
And there are pale, fair faces calling for caresses
There are strange eyes that beckon, white breasts and bodies crying
And on the salt sea-wind there comes a wild, sweet sighing
For the grape’s red juice there is just one use—
Was there a goddess in the days of old,
I do not know. There is an ache that fills
There is a language I would fain employ,
And after this, there came to me one green
And of his face, there was no vestige seen,
And of that thing there came to me a fear
There is magic, there is splendor
In your eyes, there is rapture
We left her far more quiet body lying there:
And end, there too I sought.
There was never love greater than mine, so destroying, so ravaging,
ravishing, rapturous, deep;
There is a faint, far rapture of birds in the breathless beauty of dawn,
There is a stir of wakening winds that whisper across the lawn.
Oh love, there is terror and pity and peace in the gray soft luminous
mist,
There where the gnarled limbs twisted
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On the cities sleeping there
There could not be so still a sea
Till the engines failed and we lay there gaoled
There was none before you,
There will be none after.
There will spring no laughter
For there will come none after,
There are no eyes to see,
There lived and there ruled on a crumbling throne
There is pressure on her blood-red lips,
There, ringed with dark trees holy,
Discovering there an equal leaden hue,
There where I wandered, purple shadows ran
As if there never were an end in store.
Now here, now there I fled; still on it swept.
As I remember, there were clanging gongs
As I remember, there were flaming tongs
Sheer cliff and rockfall miles below. There, sliding
And after this, there came to me one green
There lay a bed of shells and bones; I spied
But what is there in wealth? In treasure what but treasure?
There is no picture of her dear dead face,
They left me also rotten corpses there
There were great cobwebs hanging everywhere,
And there were living, ancient mummies bound
And yet I could not move. There came a creak,
And in the sky, there hung a baleful glare.
Out of the night, there came a shrill long scream,
And through the riven air, there harshly swept
There was a red, raw dripping thing that mowed
There was a shape, on which a scarlet flood
There was a sound, gigantically loud,
There was a crackle as of blazing wood,
Of death itself, there now was left no trace,
In splendor of birth and dawning there where the worlds begin:
I know there are no princesses, but you
If in your head or heart, there were not room
There is a room, Beloved, that you’ll inherit;
There will be none with you to help you share it,
An emptiness not knowing you are there.
What they appeared. But there are some so blind
So long as there was never danger;
Fingers raised; there hangs her mirror—poor mirror—
There stand her books, the Willy Pogany Alice
Tall candles there were dreaming
From the one reciting there.
Like a steak half roasted there.
Why, there each young M.A. would go to,
There was a young woman I know
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There always was farther to go.
There was a young man—such a pity!—
Therefor Therefor am I, with what I have, content,
Thereof More crazed by all the amorous joys thereof;
With mystic earth, thereof for ever choking,
There’s There’s one small shape that mews upon a spit;
Thereupon
And when I saw these titans, thereupon
These Orchids, lilies grow exotic in these drawings,
DEATH: Oh Poet, these I offer thee:
These, these are gone, nothing of them remains
Are these shadows, now, like finger-tips,
Death: Oh Traveler, these I offer you:
And when I saw these titans, thereupon
These charnel horrors made me sick and weak,
These are the things I love you for: the gray
These things I love, yet words can never tell
Are these bright ways foredue to that one whom
That you make these to that a sacrifice,
That says, These things shall be, and they are so:
We listened to these strange tall dreams
None of these things can bother me
They
By the girls they gave their love.
They dwell in dying Mandrikor
They dwell in wasteland and in night.
Thine eyes were stricken when they saw
They passed the land where flowers gnaw
They gazed on stars that now are dust,
They gorged on wonders vanished, dead.
They saw Mercurial cities rust
They saw the mighty Atthla fall
And when they oped they could not find
A star they knew before it came.
For they are blinded with the glut
Moon, if moon-made they, those drifting shapes
Then dreamlikely they uttered
From heat and plague as they died,
For all things die, but they die most regretful
But they whose life was barren are most fretful,
And they who merely lived are first to sigh:
Sick, still, and weary, while they ate their way;
At me and slyly chuckle while they keep
They found him deep within an ancient cave
They are curious things that hide in the woods
They clamped hot irons on my throbbing head;
They poured fresh acid on my blinding eyes;
They added madness to my frantic cries
They slit me till a hundred new wounds bled;
They burned me, bound me with deep-knotted ties;
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T
They crushed me, broke me till I could not rise,
Though they, with cruel joy, had given me
Though they who tortured me were far behind,
For they were deathless hunters, I the dying.
They caught me in the wasteland in the west.
They dragged me back with never pause for rest.
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
Though they are broken too, and their flesh slit.
They gave me back my eyes so I could peer
They left me morsels, curious and queer,
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
They know that it will take me years to die,
They would not burn me quickly on their spit;
They left to me my eyes, so I could stare
They left me also rotten corpses there
And then they left me, lonely. lying where
Were they strange creatures from Outside that soon
Blessed be the dead for they are dead.
Blessed be the living for they will be dead.
Blessed be the unborn for they shall be dead.
Than they, sow seeds for harvests of no reaping.
I answer—if they love me in my fashion,
What they appeared. But there are some so blind
What they are told, the falseness never find
Their ravage, if they had not come from you.
That says, These things shall be, and they are so:
Behind the amber lids they dimly dream,
For she paid half, when they went Dutch,
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
They sleep a long sleep by faëry’s phantom fountains,
And they hide in eery lands where the fen-fires gleam.
For they are life and love to me,
They also ought to know their Caesar,
They blandly sit upon their stools
And think the words they drop are jewels.
Instead, they sound like Major Hooples
They’re always right, they can’t be wrong,
They paid him to seduce ’em!
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
They sleep a long sleep by Faëry’s phantom fountains,
And they hide in eerie lands where the fen-fires gleam.
Till with derrick they capped him,
They’re Or else they’re much more dumb than geese are.
They’re always right, they can’t be wrong,
Thick The sands of time are thick, the days march slow;
In my own decomposition. Thick white worms have lolled
Thickened
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The shadows thickened, but a blaze illuming
Thieves Emily Post, and thieves in state;
Thigh I can not move a thigh,
Thin
Barren or fertile, rich or thin and poor,
Of this fresh pool of thin and brilliant blue.
Thine Thine eyes that for strange raptures yearn,
With lips that to thine own lips burn,
But in thine arms, Myrrhiline,
Thine eyes were at the avatar
Thine eyes were old when God was born,
Valerian, thine eyes were sick
Thine eyes were stricken when they saw
Thine eyes, Valerian, are full
Valerian! Thine eyes are filled
Valerian! Thine eyes are old
Valerian! Thine eyes shall shut,
Of thine eyes holdeth me.
Is it thine that shall weaken and wane?
And the form that it covers is thine.
Take, or the taking never will be thine;
Thing My mind with longings for some ancient thing,
Some thing I find not though I ever seek.
And every sound a thing of lyric joy.
And of that thing there came to me a fear
Not a thing disputed the lordly worm
Of some imprisoned thing with old despairs.
And of that thing swept over me a fear
No moving thing, no blade of grass. One tree
My face was eaten by a red, huge Thing.
There was a red, raw dripping thing that mowed
Contained no thought or dust of thing or race;
Neither thing will walk again.
I am the master of each living thing,
Things see also Bat-Things
That murmur of things that wane,
Thou art loveliest of the things I know;
Dearest of all dear things that I possess.
Rest, with the dear things lying
Unbodied things hold silent sway
All things that thou dost love,
All things that thou wouldst know.
I weary of the old monotony of things;
All men, all things, all hopes, my burning dreams of fire;
Upon the moon, I’d show, strange things that moan,
Phantasmal things of beauty and of death,
To paint the things I never shall relate.
And pass, as all things pass, deeming the dumb
The death of pale-green bloated things.
The things that mirthful wizards killed
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I searched the years that hold all things immortal
I watched on earth the littler things around;
I will not find it till all things shall cease,
All things died in my black might,
For all things die, but they die most regretful
That flowered not, and all things weep to die,
Live with all things of earth and airy splendor,
And the slimy things of the slimy dead
They are curious things that hide in the woods
Murmur of all things that wane,
All things that you might love,
All things that you would know.
Where all things are, yet are not; time and space
Impalpable, a brain-shaped thing of dread,
But all the strange and withered things still hung
And all strange things once covered by the sea
Now I am bored with all things brief and transitory,
Now no things interest me,
Things of small worth to me.
Now I am bored with all things present, all things olden,
With all things disagree,
I know that nothing is worth while, all things are quite
Futile, futility as well; that all things wane,
I am the night and the garden and all things swoon
All things are symbols of eternal death—
And awful things were lying all around—
Upon all things of life and time and space;
Where Death in death all things did not immerse.
All things their form reveal,
And fair things yet more fair,
These are the things I love you for: the gray
You move: the unexpected things you say;
These things I love, yet words can never tell
For things external, but of higher worth,
For you have taught a thousand things to me,
That says, These things shall be, and they are so:
With the breath of the web-faced things asleep
The midst of her things: a girdle, as though to chasten
And other such-like things as that is
Are things that never ought to bore ’em.
None of these things can bother me
Restoring all things lost and small things broken.
Thing’s Anguish of some lost thing’s cry or call
Think Or think that those sweet words were meant to be
And think the words they drop are jewels.
For surely none would think of spurning
Thinking
Drink! For the pleasure, forget sad thinking!
Deep loving, dark thinking,
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Thinks And Machen to read when she thinks of the fabulous chalice.
Thinned Like the rows of poppies scattered and thinned,
Like foam in a tempest scattered and thinned
Thirsting
Behind, the thirsting tips upon me, warm,
This
For this I offer thee:
Oh Poet, this I offer thee,
I turn to this,
Then, on this paper now so blank and white,
For songs as wondrous as this wondrous dream,
And after this, there came to me one green
And still for this one dream all else forsaking
I know this all I ever will be knowing:
Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast brought
me this feverous love to consume me,
This hill, haunted by a deathly spell,
Of those who came to praise this day
Nor ever have; and since this mortal bond
Then live! Live in this dual love, partake
What did he seek, this wayfarer of old?
To this he gives his only adoration,
Make this your home for I will make it yours;
Of this fresh pool of thin and brilliant blue.
This being’s face is soft, he shall not pass;
This never ending night of mounting pain,
In all this hideous land the only soul.
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
And after this, there came to me one green
When of this pastime tiring.
Enchantment grows in this soft after-nightfall noon,
Now they have buried me in this dark pit,
I am awed, O Love, at knowing this mystery,
To make the unison of this half-heard overtone;
Differed so, each from each, and this one more
Though this were Paradise, and Paradise
Now wherefor do you make this larger room
Surely this beauty was not meant for keeping
In this sweet earthly house was not for sleeping
This do I want.
I bow beneath this fruitless unattaining,
I come, weary yet bearing still this load.
This is the Wedgwood she lifted, the saki she quaffed, her
Upon my tomb, this legend bold:
And in this pedagogic cloister,
If this were done to Minnesota,
Thorns With thorns of loathing on a fevered brow?
Those Within those precincts of the spectral night’s
I peered amid those waters black and still.
What forms were those that through the forest sleeping
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T
From all the hate of all those bitter scars.
Itself from horror at those eyes’ blind sheen.
The scattered symbols of those closing pages
Then only, from those vacant spaces driven,
In those mysterious lands and alien places
Her face is sweeter than those fabled places
Moon, if moon-made they, those drifting shapes
From the stricken hosts of those plague-filled coasts
Of those who came to praise this day
Of those the days before the quest.
As I went onward toward those upper lairs.
The dawn, when those great wings had made retreat;
Those glittering swords that shone like splintered glass,
Back through the desert for those fiends to flay,
And from those giant caverns’ lifted gloom
Or if, beneath those warmer, clearer skies,
And still those vast wings beat that sullen tune;
To all the world; and dearer still are those
To those that bless, and by my charm, are blessed.
Or think that those sweet words were meant to be
Thou
Thou shalt die,
So shalt thou thy beauty lend
And thou shalt go;
Thou shalt lie.
Thou art beautiful, Myrrhiline,
Thou art loveliest of the things I know;
But even thou, Oh Myrrhiline,
When thou at the breasts of thy mistress art slaking
When thou thy pleasure and joy art taking,
The years and love are gone, and thou art gone, beloved,
Thou art as lovely as that ancient queen
As thou hast never known;
All things that thou dost love,
All things that thou wouldst know.
Hast thou forgot
And thou hast known the azure mist
Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast brought
me this feverous love to consume me,
Art thou only a phantom before me,
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of soul;
is it passion or poison I cherish?
I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate,
meshed in the love thou hast sown,
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment
ere worship and love were to perish?
Drink deep the cup, ere thou canst drink no more;
Nor that thou roll away the mountain boulders
Nor that thou give my sightless eyes to see,
Though Though we die.
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041.3
045.14
048.1
049.3
049.16
074.4
079.7
082.6
086.6
094.7
099.12
105.6
117.5
119.14
121.4
004.1
004.12
004.15
004.24
004.39
004.40
004.41
005.1
005.5
007.53
008.9
012.2
012.41
012.42
012.46
030.17
043.1
043.11
043.25
043.26
043.27
097.2
124.10
124.12
003.40
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Though nothing visible is there
The greatest riddle and though vassal claimed the vassalage
As though sly Pan had used his pipes to capture
Some thing I find not though I ever seek.
Though ye colours pass, though his limbs be fleet,
That I am weary though I’ve gone not far,
What though you walk by Mammon unattended,
What though one kingdom each of you forsake,
I could not move though mind and spirit broke.
And I, though struggling, in that selfsame hour
And though you never talk (do you have tongue?)
Though endlessly we traversed far abysses,
Though singly impotent, might be in mass
I could not turn though fronted by the rack.
Though they, with cruel joy, had given me
Though they who tortured me were far behind,
Though they are broken too, and their flesh slit.
I struggled onward though my strength was spent
Me hope. I fell, though flesh itself be rent
Caresses, though I find slight joy in amorous
Though none is lovelier
Though all my days were added one by one,
Though every day were filled with benison
Though every hour were rich with a great store
Though this were Paradise, and Paradise
And waited, wondered, though I did not know...
The midst of her things: a girdle, as though to chasten
And though all poppy seeds in final chaos scatter,
Though I know that you are pretty,
Thought And find that what I thought so great is but
Before a vaster deep beyond all thought,
To be, I thought to find in nearer faces
I thought I heard the eerie
One thought more torturing usurped my brain,
A thought my tongueless mouth could never speak;
I thought ironic laughter passed me by.
The years since Time began, the sum of thought,
Contained no thought or dust of thing or race;
That nothing exists but the vision, the thought supreme.
Thought fashions worlds that earth can never share,
The thought of Wilde in Piccadilly,
Thoughts
Our thoughts will be more sad than death is
Do light thoughts in a light heart dwell,
He had dreams and thoughts of just
She claimed that thoughts, not deeds, pervert you—
Her thoughts and deeds alike were shoddy.
Thousand
For many a thousand leagues around
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014.35
015.11
027.11
046.47
050.5
051.1
051.31
072.14
076.12
077.11
079.9
082.7
083.10
084.12
085.9
087.4
091.3
091.7
096.11
096.51
115.1
115.3
115.5
115.9
122.8
129.14
134.22
135.4
016.3
036.14
036.47
045.9
084.10
084.11
085.8
102.17
107.6
112.16
116.7
128.3
039.4
042.7
046.15
128.27
128.28
010.9
T
A thousand and a thousand years ago,
What did it matter a thousand years ago
What will it matter a thousand years from now
A thousand million years ago,
Since ten thousand years ago.
A thousand and a thousand years ago,
Of lunar sorcerers; a thousand hells
Then thousand ships and more; shapes great and wee
A thousand and a thousand years have fled;
For you have taught a thousand things to me,
To forty thousand species, Woman
Thrall Demonic revel holds dark, writhing forms in thrall,
Threads The spinning threads weave patterns rich and rare,
Three The three
Thrice Crowned thrice with cypress, endless times with laurel,
Thrill
Never again will a dead girl thrill
Throat From a nightingale’s golden throat,
A passionate burst of song from a golden throat,
A golden throat, a golden song that fail—
From a meadowlark’s passionate throat,
Throbbing
They clamped hot irons on my throbbing head;
Throne On a purple throne.
There lived and there ruled on a crumbling throne
I came upon a curious great throne
On the throne a king for its worm-queen pines
Thrones My thrones, majestical, imperial, and great,
It reigned on its multiple thrones.
My thrones majestical, imperial, and great
Throng Beyond the heavens’ great celestial throng,
“Greetings!” I cried but in the throng
Of caravans that throng
Wherein a cloudlike throng
Through With whispering steps through the willow-grasses,
Through lone
Rose and fell and rose through all the Lesbian night;
What forms were those that through the forest sleeping
Outlined the revellers dancing through the woods,
Through its valleys and its mountains
Through space’s dead debris I wandered, wondered
Through trackless labyrinths more dark and deep,
Through all the space of worlds in time and spirit,
Through them and over them—what shall be found
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul
such a madness and fury will sweep?
Swimming through Atlantis doomed;
Let one long, lingering note through night come stealing,
When I felt through me spread the germ
And wriggle through my gray
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026.1
026.5
030.38
047.10
067.40
080.7
095.7
099.7
120.10
140.9
061.7
116.6
053.14
068.1
004.66
001.4
021.1
021.7
063.4
084.1
046.32
057.2
076.3
125.19
012.15
057.20
067.15
024.2
049.17
096.93
109.35
001.2
002.29
007.6
015.17
015.26
033.1
036.11
036.62
037.2
038.3
043.16
047.28
051.61
054.26
054.31
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Through its foul dead realm were it ever to squirm,
With whispering steps through the wildwood grasses,
Through the still, sleeping glade
She will move through the moveless shade
I dream through realms where naught begins or ends,
Through sullen skies empurpled with vast flame.
Through mightier gulfs where still the purple rule
The mouth where something dark was trickling through.
The swart hand crawled, through mid-air lengthening,
Through mighty chambers, hunted and alone,
That clove through midnight where no other stirred,
Their mirthless muttering through the palace rang.
With formless terrors running through my mind?
Back through the desert for those fiends to flay,
And when at last my captors bore me through
That followed through the chamber where I fled.
Foul nightmare creatures peering through the air:
And through the riven air, there harshly swept
A wind from the spheres that through your shadowy hair is blowing
We have lived through cycles of birth and change, through
cosmic ages,
And through its darkened window see no sky:
Planks riddled through by worms, that he is wise
I seek through chambers of thy strange abode;
Throughout
Throughout the sculptors’ workshop, uncomplete
Thrust And overlook the underlying thrust,
Thrusting
The magic towers, the skyward thrusting spires,
Rose-pink, and outward thrusting from each bare
Thunder I hear them over thunder, and at midnight gloom;
Thus
Thus I close my doors
Till thus, from incantation and invoking,
If I thus forgot to meet
Twice excellent; thus your slight flaws evince
Thus am I sad.
Thus am I weary.
Thus am I old.
Shrieking, thus to settle whose
And thus preserved her innocence.
Thy
Thy lips that in the midnight burn,
Thy body fevered with love’s desire,
Thy breasts that seek delight in fire,
So shalt thou thy beauty lend
Yea, thy lips that softly smile,
Thy cheeks that glow,
Thy lovely face uplifted now,
The scented hair above thy brow,
Thy body now so passionate
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065.5
065.7
070.10
071.8
071.10
073.8
074.10
076.2
079.5
081.8
083.4
086.6
086.12
088.6
104.4
105.10
111.7
112.5
118.2
120.6
124.5
092.2
121.3
086.10
092.5
131.10
052.7
068.8
100.7
117.12
123.5
123.10
123.15
126.11
128.40
004.5
004.7
004.8
004.12
004.16
004.17
004.18
004.19
004.21
T
And I shall kiss thy warm, soft lips
When thou at the breasts of thy mistress art slaking
Thy terrible lust,
When thou thy pleasure and joy art taking,
Intoxicated with thy loveliness,
Thy rotten breath
Await thy kingly head.
The face that haunts thy memory?
Thy one Beloved, fair and sweet,
THE POET (wildly): I yield! I yield! Thy lips, Oh Death!
Thy purple eyes, Valerian,
Thy purple haunted eyes are mad
And once thy purple eyes went blind
Thy face is aureoled
The beauty of thy features,
Naught by thy loveliness
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of
endless and awful delight;
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent
glory and glow that relume thee,
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
Live riotously, ere thy life for death be traded,
Love, ere thy lips dead lips alone adore.
Sing, for too soon, too long, thy mouth shall know no singing.
And when thy surfeit comes, then die! and die a-flinging
Doubting, I stumble blindly to thy feet,
And for thy wine, than earthly wine more sweet,
And for thy bread, than my bread more sustaining,
I seek through chambers of thy strange abode;
Tide
That tremble and fall in tide on foaming tide,
Tides
see also Sea-Tides
Where sand and tides on shattered cities roll,
Tides around Atlantis sweep,
Laughing, she flashes down the shifting tides of green,
They burned me, bound me with deep-knotted ties;
I heard alone the surging tides in motion.
Tiger-Lily
A tiger-lily opens and fails and closes
Till
Till her body be mine.
Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips
be ashen,
I shall teach her the lore of Venus till all her sweet body tremble,
Till she lie in ecstasy knowing and desiring her sisterhood;
Till the dawn.
Passionlessly waiting till the spell shall be broken
Waiting, watching till I come and join them where,
Yea, we would love till all our senses swoon;
Till senses reeled, and time and reason fled,
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005.1
005.2
005.5
008.1
012.8
012.16
012.47
012.51
012.53
030.1
030.30
030.41
032.3
032.5
032.9
043.2
043.3
043.28
097.3
097.4
097.5
097.7
124.2
124.3
124.4
124.5
060.9
036.22
047.32
060.1
084.6
094.14
101.14
003.12
003.23
003.29
003.30
003.36
006.7
006.23
007.14
007.34
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Till night had cooled the burning winds of day;
I will not find it till all things shall cease,
Till the engines failed and we lay there gaoled
Till beauty into perfect beauty swoons;
Till darkness falls—it never will—
Till at last, in her caverned halls
Till the coming of dawn.
Till thus, from incantation and invoking,
Where peasants till starved earth and long dead ground.
Holds me till in unending dooms I smother.
Till memory slowly came, and knowledge grew,
I watched them till, from out the greater dark,
I knocked upon the portal till with clang
They slit me till a hundred new wounds bled;
They crushed me, broke me till I could not rise,
Burn incense till the fragrant air is odorous,
Till jasmine, oleander, or full roses’ bloom
Till evetide falls, and the Muezzin call to prayer
Till softly falls away
Withdraw till dawn comes gray.
Drink! Till you fall in your wine-full sleep!
Till Nature teems
Whom spells will fetter sleeping till the true
Till acids of experience undeceive
Till I end
Till a quarter of twelve,
Till with derrick they capped him,
To Death and Time.
Prisoned here in time for evermore remembered,
Till senses reeled, and time and reason fled,
But Time will pass, and Love will pass, and all Love’s pleasure,
The sands of time are thick, the days march slow;
And the tired day;
All time and space were mine, and mine was every sky:
Of Time and Space, and strode upon his long
Amid all worlds of time and dust begotten
When time had ceased, when every world was riven,
Through all the space of worlds in time and spirit,
Time has tolled a solemn knell,
That has no counterpart in lands of time
But now that time is gone of yore
In all the years by time begun,
In a fabulous land, in a fabulous time,
The vanished mists of time enshroud him, hide him;
Where all things are, yet are not; time and space
In that far, future time where I was fleeing
Oh little creature, lost in time and space,
The years since Time began, the sum of thought,
Upon all things of life and time and space;
015.6
036.58
048.19
051.53
055.17
060.21
065.20
068.8
069.7
070.14
073.4
074.9
081.1
084.5
084.7
096.25
096.26
096.77
096.81
096.84
098.8
109.24
113.8
121.8
133.45
143.2
145.3
004.13
006.19
007.34
007.41
007.46
009.6
013.21
024.6
036.7
036.37
037.2
047.39
053.3
054.51
055.6
057.1
059.14
070.11
076.1
077.1
102.17
107.2
T
We have seen in the future time, and space, and the universe
creeping
Is dreamland, out of Space and out of Time.
Of sleepy hours that time and plenty send;
She is new each time that their contents grow, lesser, and lesser.
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
I am instant lost in time,
Quote scholars dead in Alfred’s time,
“Saturday night then, Miss Shere. What time?”
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
Time-Gulfs
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
Timeless I sought it in far lands of timeless travel
Her timeless vision staring still
Of all my timeless lands,
Of unknown timeless land;
Times Crowned thrice with cypress, endless times with laurel,
I’ll talk of future times and alien shores.
For the times that are over,
Time’s see Pre-Time’s
Tinge
I was the first to tinge his pen;
Tinkle Rich ends, and soft the tinkle of a camel’s bell
Tints
Felt flesh dissolve in motes of silver tints
Tip
Breast tip a vine; the striding legs for feet
Tipped The kohl that shades your eyes, your breasts with henna tipped,
Tips
see also Finger-Tips
The branching arms that reached with taloned tips,
Behind, the thirsting tips upon me, warm,
Tire
Of man I tire.
Tired
And when in closer human haunts I tired,
Tiring Of days and nights that are an old and tiring story,
When of this pastime tiring.
Titan
A metal titan shapen like a cone,
Titans And when I saw these titans, thereupon
To
see also Soon-to-be-Forgotten
To their tomb.
The gifts of my body I bring to a flesh-white and beautiful palace,
We will pass from rapture to rapture and plumb the most utter
abysses
Our desire with breast to breast and body to body we shall be slaking
And all the long night her body to mine I shall press;
To dust and ash will turn.
To Death and Time.
All to death must go.
Life is the gift to a slave.
Let us give over ourselves to delight,
To a silent lute.
With lips that to thine own lips burn,
397
112.11
113.14
115.4
129.12
130.11
133.51
138.11
139.5
141.11
130.16
141.16
036.1
055.19
067.19
134.3
068.1
077.12
123.7
046.2
096.95
076.13
092.6
096.44
091.11
092.13
133.19
036.55
096.5
096.33
076.6
081.11
002.16
003.5
003.15
003.19
003.26
004.9
004.13
004.20
004.38
004.51
004.67
004.77
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Freeing them to follow passion’s sorcery.
Can escape to tell of muted grief.
Beckoning to rites forgotten long ago:
Leave them to enchantment where you left them lingering
A chant to loveliness and strange, unfathomed glory,
I dreamed the night would never turn to day.
The hymn and song have changed to moan and cry.
That fell, all Mandrikor to kill.
To any save themselves alone,
For none are left the tale to tell.
Where writhing trees loomed tall to shroud the sky,
I reached my hands down to the cool, wet depths
For thee to reign.
I took the usual pleasures known to all mankind;
And I am sick to death with utter weariness
He strove to bring a light.
To read the tale of star and sun,
For he has passed from stage to stage,
To solve one dark, strange riddle, a sage
Nymphs to play.
As though sly Pan had used his pipes to capture
The loveliest girl to give him strange delight;
To claim the maid for whose desire he strove?
To pagan Pan their passionate lips were singing
And still to flushed and heated faces burning,
And body to body, drunken forms were swaying
I turn to this,
He seeks to allay the old desire,
With breasts of fire, and passionate lips to slake,
To soothe white flesh that for caresses aches.
A wine-red toast to the health of the host—
To the host! Clink! Clink! Let the glasses chink!
A form that clings to a satyr sings,
That I to cosmic realms could take my flight!
To paint the things I never shall relate.
To tell of pomp and splendour long unknown,
Her body and her rose-red lips to mine,
That tongue hath no harsh syllable to annoy
And after this, there came to me one green
And all his flesh to rottenness was slave;
And of that thing there came to me a fear
So great, I clawed my face to bleeding strips,
And turned to flee that corpse’s hideous head.
To see the Hylots of Calair,
To watch a little creature pick
That brought to Mirtylon its doom,
To the star that is fairest;
Except to blind you;—
Summoned from realms unknown to earthly dreamers
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006.12
006.16
006.21
007.31
007.40
007.44
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010.23
010.24
011.2
011.22
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013.13
013.27
014.3
014.18
014.32
014.33
015.8
015.11
015.12
015.20
015.23
015.29
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016.2
018.10
019.1
020.4
022.3
022.9
023.5
025.4
025.14
026.10
027.6
028.5
029.1
029.6
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034.4
T
With only the withered trees to watch us passing by;
And left her lovely body to oblivion;
We left no mark to show her grave,
We left her only to the waiting earth that gave
To seek some image far behind some portal
In constellations now to space-dust shrunken
And farther still when life was yet to come,
To be, I thought to find in nearer faces
To be, I thought to find in nearer faces
To perish when my later footsteps came;
And longer ways before you yet to wander
And incubi avidly waiting to take
You will come back to me,
You will come back to me, lost lover,
Come back, come back to me,
Upon her to bestow;
To worship where she goes.
So little, yet to do so well,
To capture moods that change or leave;
Thou hast given me passion, desire, and flame; thou hast
brought me this feverous love to consume me,
I have riven all darkness to find thee.
Was it only for darkness to blind me,
In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of the
future, the passions to waken,
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment
ere worship and love were to perish?
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
and increase and devour alone?
Is the rose to be withered and shrunken?
I was the first to tinge his pen;
Yet we like a woman came to cloy.
I am the colour yet to be;
Inferno, to the waves
Of those who came to praise this day
Or purple, dear to children of the dust,
And into more than light, to something wholly
Beauty more vital for your hearts to capture,
That flowered not, and all things weep to die,
And they who merely lived are first to sigh:
And to no futile dream of death aspires,
In sunlight splendid meadows to awake.
With soft, light golden limbs to dance and follow,
To fulness in the drowsy summer noons,
There are no eyes to see,
No voice to tell of days that were,
No ears to hear her footsteps die away.
To coffin. earth, the dead.
I only sighed to feel them play
399
035.2
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035.9
035.11
036.19
036.23
036.26
036.47
036.47
036.52
037.9
038.7
039.2
039.7
039.20
041.2
041.8
042.10
042.11
043.1
043.5
043.7
043.15
043.27
043.28
043.31
046.2
046.38
046.42
048.14
049.3
051.2
051.11
051.13
051.16
051.18
051.20
051.35
051.46
051.51
053.11
053.12
053.13
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
In ecstasy to reap
The harvest, and to revel deep
I now have ceased to bloat;
Worms now have ceased to gloat,
Or in my dead flesh foul to float,
And rotten to the very core,
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Why has the night-wind ceased to blow?
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Never a light to mark the trail
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Why do the mandrakes fear to die?
Through its foul dead realm were it ever to squirm,
She has yielded to the kiss of night,
Some arrowed beast crept to its hillside fastness?
Sometimes she dreams to music of murmuring waves
To capture an errant eel
From dawn to dusk her white sides feel
To capture a breast, to hold the hair
And sinks to sleep in a sounding shell.
To her tryst she will go in the night,
Of the woods to a spot forlorn,
And softly rises to rejoice in dawn;
She lifts her young faun face to greet the flushing sky, bids
For you to reign.
I still have far to go, it’s late.
Blood-brother, boon companion to the yew,
He turns, and now returns to unheard choral
To this he gives his only adoration,
And slowly paces to an inner hall,
Attempts to flee from depths where hope was slain;
Across a purple ground to purple cliffs
With wings of beating purple flew to me
And when my steed permitted me to light,
I seemed to sink in some huge cosmic pool.
As of some ancient corpse about to speak....
My own the lineaments that seemed to be
Burst; mindless, mewing as it tried to speak,
That streamed to join the nothingness beyond.
And watch, or seem to watch, me for your face
I can not find, nor do I seem to place
Changing and new, so hard to know, to trace.
To fall amid colossal precipices.
That beat the air to frenzy, dirges, knells.
I begged the gods to save me from such pain.
Then beating to the chambers of my brain
Quick to my side two black, sleek leopards sprang
To seek, beneath the flower-heads, a path.
Some impulse urges me to raise the shade;
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056.4
056.5
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060.8
060.15
060.17
060.19
060.24
065.3
065.6
066.2
066.3
067.6
067.52
068.2
068.6
068.13
069.10
070.7
071.2
071.7
071.12
071.13
072.13
073.6
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076.14
077.4
077.5
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080.2
080.10
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081.5
082.10
083.2
T
And so I slowly raise the shade to greet
They added madness to my frantic cries
Now was I destined after all to die,
I who had fought so hard to reach my goal?
To reach the haven I would never find.
Back through the desert for those fiends to flay,
To burn, to break; their pleasure not to slay
But punish, since their power I dared to test.
To make my sufferings worse if I should dine.
I tried to scream but heard no sound, no hoarse,
Nowhere to flee, however I might strive,
That swiftly toward me now began to fall,
To limbs alive with wormlike, writhing fur,
And stood tremendous to my caverned room,
From which a tongue curled inward to my lair,
And after this, there came to me one green
So great I turned and clawed my hands to bone
To flee, but where I crawled, wherever fled,
To every branch. The tree had long since died,
Upon it nevermore to leave. I tried
Things of small worth to me.
And drowsyhead gives way to dreams more slumberous,
To love’s sad paradise.
Enough, while drowsy minutes lengthen to hours golden,
Till evetide falls, and the Muezzin call to prayer
The roads to distant marts; and Allah’s blessed foretell
To heart’s desire that only I and Allah know,
No voice remains to tell me where she lies,
If I thus forgot to meet
Unmeaning march from nothingness to night,
They know that it will take me years to die,
How much more exquisite to hear me cry
They left to me my eyes, so I could stare
To keep me company lest I go mad:
As of a yellow corpse about to speak....
That seemed to pour from where the horror stood;
And footsteps seem to pass
I am awed that the moon and stars are so close to me.
With ghostly winds that whisper to them, Awaken.
To birth the song that all the spheres are singing?
Moves from worlds without to enchanted worlds within.
To make the unison of this half-heard overtone;
Unending, a tale, even to him who tells, unknown.
And oblivion saw strange worlds begin to glow.
From the dust of forgotten worlds to whole new systems leaping
To birth, we have witnessed the past and present blend;
With weary steps to the old, original end.
Content to know the image of the dream,
The subtle pleasure that you give to me,
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Yet would it be no Eden to entice.
I love you for the charm earth gave to you,
And more for beauty, only known to me.
Your moods are dear to me, and all the ways
To all the world; and dearer still are those
Your imperfections are as fair to me
There will be none with you to help you share it,
A counterpart of what is still to be?
Are these bright ways foredue to that one whom
You will become? It seems so strange to me
That you make these to that a sacrifice,
To brilliant flame, whose splendors mesmerize,
I come to men with unrequiting passion,
Yield grace to only one, deny the rest?
To those that bless, and by my charm, are blessed.
I am not sorry to have been your lover,
For you have taught a thousand things to me,
Or think that those sweet words were meant to be
Of recognition, nor was I to stay
Doubting, I stumble blindly to thy feet,
And point out ways to rapturous rebirth;
Nor that thou give my sightless eyes to see,
Shrieking, thus to settle whose
To ponder old, unsated malices.
She liked to don herself in raiment
She loved to play a dangerous game
And Machen to read when she thinks of the fabulous chalice.
Stand waiting to perfume and powder and softly caress her,
The midst of her things: a girdle, as though to chasten
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
To play God,
Building on to what goal later,
To poppy legend olden.
The golden poppy once again will grow to bloom
You have never been inspiring to my pen.
Quite to make it match in verse most anytime;
We listened to the strange rain
We listened to these strange tall dreams
And to the students in my classes,
I’m quite as good as ears to asses;
Or any other words to jar ’em;
I offer to my students gratis,
For they are life and love to me,
Are things that never ought to bore ’em.
They also ought to know their Caesar,
“Oh hail to thee, and et to Brute;
That murmur to their sad-eyed pupils.
To prove the brilliance of their wits,
To illustrate their attitudes,
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And wonder what we’re conning to.
If this were done to Minnesota,
Why, there each young M.A. would go to,
School to teach seduction;
And asked to go to Hades.
To forty thousand species, Woman
Mobbed him to induce him;
They paid him to seduce ’em!
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
Finding that life from end to end
There always was farther to go.
Joining your journey, brings our living light to hold you, guide you.
Evening to night, and night to afterglow,
Toast
A wine-red toast to the health of the host—
Toil
What shall reward the delver’s toil
Token My mind, not heart, is now my soul’s true token.
For you were token.
Told
The tale is told of years of long ago.
Should love be told in brede or breve?
By forgotten poets told.
But the musty tale can never be told
What they are told, the falseness never find
Heard legends not by earthly voices told,
Tolled Time has tolled a solemn knell,
Tolling A tolling like a myriad decibels
All night I heard the tolling of a bell;
The tolling came like measures for a spell.
Tomb see also Sea-Tomb
To their tomb.
Never will mortal outlive the tomb—
Fermented in a wizard’s tomb.
And perished in the utmost cosmic tomb,
In my tomb beneath the ground,
Arabesques on a tomb.
The vacant halls were quiet as a tomb.
And life less like a tomb.
Else beauty were as lifeless as a tomb.
An empress regnant in an empty tomb—
Upon my tomb, this legend bold:
Tomblike
The desolation tomblike, sere,
Tombs Now I, at dusk, beside the wall of ancient tombs,
Tomorrow
Past where, once seen, once open, close in no tomorrow,
Tone
Quicksilver, pulsing with a deep soft tone
Tones The listening ear; its tones are softly heard
Tongs As I remember, there were flaming tongs
Tongue An unknown golden tongue where every word
That tongue hath no harsh syllable to annoy
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Until I felt that tongue or talon stroke
And though you never talk (do you have tongue?)
From which a tongue curled inward to my lair,
And then I felt a tongue or talon stroke
Tongueless
A thought my tongueless mouth could never speak;
Tongues Mute tongues will tell remembered hemlocks
Their dripping tongues from my soft flesh that, old
Tongue’s Would use that tongue’s undreamed-of ecstasies
Tonight Then let us love tonight,
The wind is wailing in the willow trees tonight;
Too
That love and passion weary all too soon.
And end, there too I sought.
But we turned too late and we knew our fate
Is too exacting for man’s magistry,—
Though they are broken too, and their flesh slit.
I too was fastened on that tree of death.
Sing, for too soon, too long, thy mouth shall know no singing.
Joys that pass and youth too fleet,
Of lips too tender; your precise array.
Not too malicious; the strangeness of Harry Clarke’s Poe;129.7
Took
I took the usual pleasures known to all mankind;
From each of us he took his joy,
The primrose path she rarely took
Top
Then at the top I stood on magic squares
Topless And blazed in beauty, deep on topless deep,
From towers topless as the realms of sleep
Torment My blood was burning in my veins, and all the torment
For we would keep the pleasure and the torment burning,
Love’s beauty and love’s torment and love’s fever-kisses,
Her flesh a torment, her body a rapturous ache
The answer came, where I in torment lay,
Tormented
Witch-forms tormented, from dark demon danger,
Torn
I am foam torn free of storm waves cresting,
Torso
The naked torso of a goddess glowing
Torture With torture on their burning spits.
Tortured Though they who tortured me were far behind,
Tortures Tortures would mark the finish of my quest.
Torturing
One thought more torturing usurped my brain,
Toss
The tarns run red where the fen-fires toss—
Total
What total purpose wrought such total doom;
Tottered And tottered in a spreading pool of blood;
Touches There touches his body lightly a shiver,
Toward Her bow toward the cleaner west
Toward the sea.
Or hunters canter shouting toward the moor.
As I went onward toward those upper lairs.
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Aside. The flow turned toward me, and it kept
I saw the hungry flowers toward me crawl
A deep force pulls me toward the window-blind,
Yet, when toward farther desolate wastes I stole,
That swiftly toward me now began to fall,
It lifted toward its dark, devouring lips.
Swart talons toward the ruby turn,
Towers From towers topless as the realms of sleep
The magic towers, the skyward thrusting spires,
Town
For the good of the town, with the spirits—Down!
Towns The names of all the Roman towns;
Trace
With mad new colours and queer lines I’d trace
No life or mind or trace of vanished lore,
She will halt where the moonrays trace
Changing and new, so hard to know, to trace.
Wan hands and heads that had no trace of wound,
Of death itself, there now was left no trace,
Your hair’s soft brown of gold; your hands that trace
Tracery Beyond the window’s tracery
Traces Where I entered the traces
Track By forest track
Trackless
Through trackless labyrinths more dark and deep,
Tracks With the fresher tracks of cloven
Traded Live riotously, ere thy life for death be traded,
Trail
I read, yet on my trail I wandered still;
Never a light to mark the trail
My bloodprints in the dead sand marked my trail.
Trailed Trailed countless fingers in the ebon edge
On bridges, river trails, on every gentle breeze.
Transcendent
And where the heart’s transcendent vision, unreturning,
Transitory
Or from transitory
Now I am bored with all things brief and transitory,
Trap
A beak that, darting, closed me in its trap.
Trapped Trapped in a crevice by great settling boulders.
Travel I sought it in far lands of timeless travel
As you begin your final travel, know
Traveled And traveled backward past the age of man
Traveler No traveler crosses now the land,
A lonely traveler on another star;
Traveler: I scorn you, Death,
Death: Turn not, oh Traveler, wait!
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
Death: Oh Traveler, these I offer you:
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
Death: Ah Traveler, scorn me not
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All past and future. Traveler, stay!
Traveler: Not now, not yet. I go my way,
Traveler: Goodby, but if we meet again—
Traveler: Not soon for I must find a song—
Traveler’s
And faintly comes the echo of a traveler’s song,
Travelled
My weary mind has travelled all the stellar maze
Have travelled lands Hesperian,
Traveller The lands no traveller ever found on earth;
The legend saith: when each lone traveller passes by,
Travels And yet, in all my travels I could only find
Traversed
Though endlessly we traversed far abysses,
Tread And never footsteps tread the ground.
Treasure
Treasure outlasting cities fair but fleeting.
But what is there in wealth? In treasure what but treasure?
Such a treasure? I’d be missing
Tree
And cower behind the black tree boles
No moving thing, no blade of grass. One tree
To every branch. The tree had long since died,
I too was fastened on that tree of death.
Bright jewels on the knowledge tree.
Trees
Like the wind, and the trees, and the rain,
And the trees are bare
Where writhing trees loomed tall to shroud the sky,
I hear a moaning in the dreamless trees;
With only the withered trees to watch us passing by;
Then live! Live with the green, lush trees returning
The wind is wailing in the willow trees tonight;
Where the trees form a little dark room:
There, ringed with dark trees holy,
Trees solemn and soundless and tall
The trees, the birds, the fleeting springs, the years,
Along the summit island lanes of shrubs and trees;
Treetops Over the treetops, under the boughs,
Tremble I shall teach her the lore of Venus till all her sweet body tremble,
Tremble upon the scented air of night,
That tremble and fall in tide on foaming tide,
Why is it that I tremble, half afraid,
That tremble and shiver with passions that lately were?
The little gods then will tremble and waken
The monster gods then will tremble and waken
Trembling
Trembling, he moans on the trodden grass;
Tremendous
Tremendous fingers, growing, strengthening,
And stood tremendous to my caverned room,
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Tremors Tremors across his white flesh pass.
Tremulous
Petals tremulous with dew at dawn
Tresses I am enraptured of one immortally lovely, with beautiful tresses,
Beyond the rocks there are fair bodies with long tresses,
Tribute At her feet I have laid the tribute of a burning intolerable passion,
Was the tribute then given in vain?
Trick
And naked lay the true design, the trick.
Trickle Unto my feet a little trickle crept
Trickling The mouth where something dark was trickling through.
Tried
Burst; mindless, mewing as it tried to speak,
I tried to scream but heard no sound, no hoarse,
Upon it nevermore to leave. I tried
Triumph I am the triumph of all-seeing eye,
Triumphal
A mute triumphal song with love’s refrain.
Triumphant
As we, triumphant, strode along,
Trodden Trembling, he moans on the trodden grass;
Tropic And stifling tropic heat;
Troy
Who ruled in fabulous, forgotten Troy;
The lips of her of Troy,
The lips of Egypt, Troy,
Trysting For a promised trysting, a god long due, she yearns,
True
Grace, true believers, with burnouses flowing gracile,
Whom spells will fetter sleeping till the true
My mind, not heart, is now my soul’s true token.
And naked lay the true design, the trick.
The true believer makes his own faith all along
Trunk From a trunk, that withered, blighted bole,
Away; the specters by the gnarled trunk muttered
Of knotty burls along the trunk, and clung
Trunks Whose gaunt trunks guarded with malevolence
I saw it then, two trunks that fused as one,
Trust
Of Venus’s trust,
Or gilded idols undeserving trust,
I am a fool, for only fools would trust
From love or faith or trust—fools—who believe
No hope, no faith, no fear, no trust remaining
Truth Believed no truth except what pleased her;
Truths And truths I could not otherwise discover.
Trying Each step eternal, on I struggled, trying
Tryst
To her tryst she will go in the night,
I walk in the steps where the Beloved and I held tryst;
Tuft
A tuft of slender tentacles, a crest
Tumbled The lanes where hopeful virgins tumbled.
Tumbles Where the little lithe worm still tumbles and crawls,
Tumescent
Tumescent orchids swart with hair.
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A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And still those vast wings beat that sullen tune;
To dust and ash will turn.
I dreamed the night would never turn to day.
DEATH: Turn not, Oh Poet, wait!
I turn to this,
Pause, rest, turn back while still your wings are strong,
Death: Turn not, oh Traveler, wait!
I could not turn though fronted by the rack.
I turn away from diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls,
Swart talons toward the ruby turn,
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
However brief or stilled, or borne on farther turn,
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
Turned And turned to flee that corpse’s hideous head.
And then I turned, and looked within your eyes,
We turned and set forth once more,
But we turned too late and we knew our fate
Aside. The flow turned toward me, and it kept
Of revelers turned statue, and no more
So great I turned and clawed my hands to bone
I turned on stealthy step lest something hear me.
Turning Dawn breaks abroad; then happily she dances, turning
Turns He turns, and now returns to unheard choral
Turtle And it only rhymes with turtle......
Tut-tut “Tut-tut, Mr. Forchamer. You’re not. You’re homely.”
Twelve Till a quarter of twelve,
It’s a quarter of twelve,
Twice Twice excellent; thus your slight flaws evince
Twilight Twilight upon the hills and woods was dying,
The twilight brought no ease from the hot
While over us the wind at twilight soughs,
Twilight’s
Or twilight’s fall
Twin
Beneath twin moons of livid red.
Twined see also Branch-Twined
Yet twined around me with inhuman force.
Twining Deep stems twining around the mandrake,
Twist
And twist their sinuous downward course—
Twisted There where the gnarled limbs twisted
Two
Two loves, two deaths, two flameless fires, ashen,
Quick to my side two black, sleek leopards sprang
I saw it then, two trunks that fused as one,
My lady hath two lovely lips,
Life is a dream between two deaths; a blind
Tyre
As we strode the streets of Tyre
As we strode down the streets of Tyre.
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U
Unassuaged
But fulness leaves no unassuaged desires,
Unattaining
I bow beneath this fruitless unattaining,
Unattended
What though you walk by Mammon unattended,
Unbodied
Unbodied things hold silent sway
Unborn Blessed be the unborn for they shall be dead.
Unbound
The garlands from their brows unbound
Unbroken
In bond unbroken,
Unceasing
Then flesh and spirit, unceasing springs, uncover—
Uncertain
Like me uncertain of their final fate
Unchanging
We have found that only the dream is unchanging, O Love, and
eternal,
Unclothe
Unclothe you, scent you with nard, myrrh, olibanum,
Uncomplete
Throughout the sculptors’ workshop, uncomplete
Uncover Then flesh and spirit, unceasing springs, uncover—
Undaunted
Abyssal pilgrimage undaunted, strong
Undeceive
Till acids of experience undeceive
Under Under the grass?
Under the grass.
Over the treetops, under the boughs,
Say, sixty-five, not one day under,
Underlying
And overlook the underlying thrust,
Underneath
And underneath the shroud of gloom
Progressing slowly underneath the door
Undeserving
Or gilded idols undeserving trust,
Undone And certainty, by doubt and change, undone,
Undreamed-Of
I am enraptured by strange and undreamed-of passionate sinful
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caresses
Would use that tongue’s undreamed-of ecstasies
Unearthly
Stared at my own dead eyes unearthly lit.
Unended
It is the ceaseless song that love began; unended,
Unending
Holds me till in unending dooms I smother.
Unending, a tale, even to him who tells, unknown.
Unexpected
You move: the unexpected things you say;
Unfathomed
A chant to loveliness and strange, unfathomed glory,
Unfetter
When post-historic revels will unfetter them,
When post-historic revels will unfetter them,
Unforgetful
And of no emptiness is unforgetful.
Unforgotten
And unforgotten nights
Unfounded
And scandal, better if unfounded.
Unfurled
Where banners of his proud name float unfurled,
Ungovernable
Of a passion swayed not by reason, a passion ungovernable, mad;
Unheard
He turns, and now returns to unheard choral
Unholy Lighting swamps and tarns unholy
Unhuman
Where far, unhuman beings’ dark embrace
Unison To make the unison of this half-heard overtone;
United Then all the seas united with a roar
Unity
Becomes that single soul, the unity beholden
Universe
Nothing in all the universe is left for me,
I watched the universe grow cold and chill;
Of all the stars and all the universe,
And DOOM had fallen on the universe.
We have seen in the future time, and space, and the universe
creeping
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
Universes
Where other universes flow.
Unknown
For splendour unknown.
Just presences, unseen, unknown
To tell of pomp and splendour long unknown,
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U
An unknown golden tongue where every word
Summoned from realms unknown to earthly dreamers
Unknown what goal, if any goal, lies yonder
Like all his deeds, his very name unknown,
Whence came that unknown color? Was its source
The unknown color hostile in pursuit
For something unknown in the flamingly riotous masses
And beauty yet unknown,
Unending, a tale, even to him who tells, unknown.
As the unknown force disposes
Of unknown timeless land;
Unless Unless in deeper love both are combined;
Unmeaning
Unmeaning march from nothingness to night,
Unreadable
With signs unreadable, on each the shard
Unreal The night grows dim and unreal and reeling: do I waken
Unrelieving
I find no surcease in the unrelieving wine;
Unrequiting
I come to men with unrequiting passion,
Unreturning
And where the heart’s transcendent vision, unreturning,
Unsated To ponder old, unsated malices.
Unseeing
And illumines with mystical light the eyes unseeing.
Unseen Just presences, unseen, unknown
An unseen step on the creeping moss—
Like a creature unseen as it scurries and passes
The head sprang high; but slashed by unseen sabers
Unspoken
Now in the mind come messages unspoken,
Unsurcease
Me, and I sicken with the languid unsurcease
Until
Until the last oblivion.
Until your birthsite was become effaced.
Until my dead flesh stirred. I only lay,
Until, once more, when mistily comes the morn,
Until I felt that tongue or talon stroke
Until, my shaking limbs grown weak, I stepped
Until I stumbled. Fear no longer lent
Until, between
Unto
Yield his body unto dust,
And beauty passed unto its final perfect beauty,
And now I cry aloud unto the lonely spaces,
Unto the utter end I worship thee, beloved,
Unto the end I worship and adore;
Unto my feet a little trickle crept
For silence unto silence died away.
411
028.2
034.4
037.11
059.13
088.1
088.12
101.23
109.26
111.12
133.61
134.3
051.25
102.2
074.7
101.29
096.20
119.9
034.14
127.15
110.4
010.22
056.3
063.1
073.13
147.10
096.65
030.52
037.7
054.28
069.13
072.11
078.4
091.6
109.16
004.46
007.35
007.49
007.57
007.58
078.1
080.14
412
Untold
Up
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Their secrets will remain untold
see also Dried-Up
You flare up in the all-consuming flame,
I saw rise up a substance soft and white
Floats up, and bathes the burning air still shimmering,
Uplifted Thy lovely face uplifted now,
Upon
That I am the deathless Greek upon an urn
Upon the ruined planet dwell
Twilight upon the hills and woods was dying,
Tremble upon the scented air of night,
Upon their brows, forgotten girls were flinging
Of Time and Space, and strode upon his long
Upon the moon, I’d show, strange things that moan,
Upon a fruitless quest.
Upon an endless path forever going
Died upon birth.
Upon her to bestow;
Upon the whispering knoll.
Watch upon the ruins gleaming
Lies upon the dead drowned men.
From flowers strown upon the ground
Bearing the world upon his broken shoulders,
An eagerness; and pain upon his features
Yet all who gaze upon him walk beside him.
She wakens with the dew yet cool upon her eyelids
Ring upon ring, with stone walls sevenfold deep,
I came upon a curious great throne
You drift upon the moonlight hovering near
At length all motion ceased, upon a crag.
I knocked upon the portal till with clang
There’s one small shape that mews upon a spit;
Save one upon a dais standing tall,
Behind, the thirsting tips upon me, warm,
Upon it nevermore to leave. I tried
Upon all things of life and time and space;
Upon his fallen kingdoms, God had died.
Upon the crimson eve,
The footsteps pantherine upon the ground.
Upon my tomb, this legend bold:
They blandly sit upon their stools
Upper As I went onward toward those upper lairs.
Uprose Uprose gigantic in the endless gloom,
Urgent Drifting as leaves but urgent with a force
Urges
Some impulse urges me to raise the shade;
Urn
That I am the deathless Greek upon an urn
Urning Oh hearts encysted in supernal urning.
Us
Then let us love tonight,
Let us have joy while we may;
Let us give over ourselves to delight,
030.51
017.5
095.13
096.86
004.18
004.76
010.21
015.1
015.10
015.21
024.6
025.7
036.32
036.61
039.6
041.2
045.20
047.20
047.36
049.10
059.2
059.6
059.16
066.1
069.1
076.3
077.3
079.10
081.1
087.5
092.3
092.13
093.12
107.2
107.14
109.2
122.14
137.26
138.1
074.4
011.4
147.11
083.2
004.76
051.56
004.49
004.50
004.51
U
Use
Used
Useless
Usual
Usurped
Utmost
Utter
Uttered
Let us forget the passing of years,
Let us forget vain sorrow and tears
For us the future never will come,
So let us love, Myrrhiline,
With only the withered trees to watch us passing by;
From each of us he took his joy,
Awaited us, sea-weary all,
“Us, you and me. What matters except us?”
Farewell, good friend. You leave us now. And yet,
How greatly you have guided us. We go
Enriching us, of your own everlasting glow.
While over us the wind at twilight soughs,
For the grape’s red juice there is just one use—
Would use that tongue’s undreamed-of ecstasies
And learn the use of “ge” and “isdem.”
As though sly Pan had used his pipes to capture
A king who saw but used no eyes for seeing,
The chewed remains of something used for bait;
Such dazzling stores of useless learning!
I took the usual pleasures known to all mankind;
One thought more torturing usurped my brain,
He passed beyond the utmost realm of stars,
And perished in the utmost cosmic tomb,
From utmost regions of strange realms returning,
We will pass from rapture to rapture and plumb the most
utter abysses
Unto the utter end I worship thee, beloved,
And I am sick to death with utter weariness
That rose from out the gulfs of utter night,
The pedants utter strange conceits
Then dreamlikely they uttered
413
004.52
004.53
004.69
004.71
035.2
046.37
049.6
139.7
146.1
146.4
146.9
147.3
022.7
028.10
138.22
015.11
076.5
087.6
138.38
013.13
084.10
024.1
036.10
036.43
003.15
007.57
013.27
024.11
138.9
045.17
V
Vacant The vacant spaces of the weary night;
That drifts from the vacant meadows of the sea.
Then only, from those vacant spaces driven,
The vacant halls were quiet as a tomb.
In all the silences that haunt a vacant room.
Vacua His realms were vacua, he proved his vow
Vagaries Delight in sudden vagaries of your mind.
Vague I offer thee the vague, vast Hadean domain
Remember phrases with a vague surprise
Vaguely Her eyelids vaguely stir;
Vain
Let us forget vain sorrow and tears
In vain for peace.
I sought, but sought in vain.
May sing of her are vain;
Was the tribute then given in vain?
The rush of waves that seek in vain
Of nights that seemed eternities, of vain
And all your days, and mine, a vain device.
Vainly Vainly recalling old wraiths of memory,
In eerie borderlands I vainly waited
I vainly seek.
Vair
My withered heart, stained as with vermeil and rich vair,
Valerian Thy purple eyes, Valerian,
Valerian, thine eyes were sick
Thine eyes, Valerian, are full
Valerian! Valerian!
Valerian! Thine eyes are filled
Valerian! Thine eyes are old
Valerian! Thine eyes shall shut,
Vales
I saw the vales and mountains of the deep,
Valley Down the far closure of the valley, sky,
Valleys Through its valleys and its mountains
Vampirish
Vampirish beings of a stellar race,
Vanished
The vanished joy
They gorged on wonders vanished, dead.
No life or mind or trace of vanished lore,
The vanished mists of time enshroud him, hide him;
The vanished joy
The hands that wrought it vanished in its power,
Vanishing
Or vanishing leaves that drift off with the wind,
007.50
020.12
036.39
081.14
131.12
107.10
117.14
012.5
120.3
058.6
004.53
013.32
036.8
041.14
043.18
060.18
070.6
118.14
006.6
036.49
101.25
096.76
030.1
030.13
030.25
030.29
030.45
030.49
030.53
095.9
147.6
033.1
025.11
012.33
030.34
036.38
059.14
067.33
076.11
063.12
V
Vassal The greatest riddle and though vassal claimed the vassalage
Vassalage
The greatest riddle and though vassal claimed the vassalage
Vast
And brooded in that vast and soundless grove.
I offer thee the vague, vast Hadean domain
From the sweep of vast spaces
With skirling fires of weird, vast fanes,
Winging your vast way lonely and alone
I offer you my whole vast Hadean domain
Through sullen skies empurpled with vast flame.
Vast wings were flapping in the night. I heard
Where vast, dark marbles stood in endless miles,
Laid bare the mystery of the vast sea-tomb,
A city of a vast antiquity.
Vast wings were flapping in the still night air;
And still those vast wings beat that sullen tune;
The air from some vast stellar carnage bled
Its voice in one vast song
Vaster Before a vaster deep beyond all thought,
Vastness In alien land, by night’s resounding vastness?
Vaults And four-dimension vaults revolve and open wide;
When four-dimensioned vaults revolve and open wide;
Veil
Yet it seems that a veil rises slowly
Veiled see also Cypress-Veiled
And veiled the shrieking shape in haze that had
Veins
My blood was burning in my veins, and all the torment
That made our veins and pulses wildly beat.
Of blue-red veins erect, a spiral swarm.
Velvet Across a velvet sky. And when I came.
Vengeance
In search of vengeance for an ancient wrong
Venomous
A venomous, waiting, and phallic orchid dozes.
Venus I shall teach her the lore of Venus till all her sweet body tremble,
Venus’s Of Venus’s trust,
Vermeil My withered heart, stained as with vermeil and rich vair,
Vermilion
You stain vermilion vipers in dank glades.
Verse
Quite to make it match in verse most anytime;
Very
And rotten to the very core,
Like all his deeds, his very name unknown,
The very mice absorb their wisdom,
Vespertime
Each vespertime, he wearies of the view
Vestige And of his face, there was no vestige seen,
And of its face no vestige could be seen,
Nor vestige of the worlds of old; and now,
Vesture Its superficial vesture whose arrays
Vestures Her vestures; both were quite revealing.
415
014.35
014.35
011.6
012.5
033.13
034.7
037.3
067.5
071.8
079.1
081.10
094.6
095.6
105.1
105.6
106.12
109.34
036.14
059.12
130.14
141.14
043.33
106.13
007.5
007.24
092.10
071.4
024.3
101.13
003.29
005.4
096.76
017.16
135.9
054.50
059.13
138.21
069.9
029.5
090.5
107.13
117.3
128.36
416
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Vibrations
That filled all worlds, all space; vibrations freeing
076.8
Victims And all around their other victims wait,
087.2
View
Each vespertime, he wearies of the view
069.9
The dark, walled city slowly came in view,
086.9
I love you for the realms of endless view,
116.11
Vigil
Her vigil never will be done:
055.18
Vilely
He leered so vilely, Horror could not save
029.7
Villanelle
I promised you a villanelle,
042.1
I promised you a villanelle.
042.6
I promised you a villanelle.
042.12
I promised you a villanelle;
042.18
Vine
Garlands of rose and violet, and wreaths of vine;
015.22
Flesh and the grape and a wreath of vine!
023.2
Breast tip a vine; the striding legs for feet
092.6
Drink! For the night and the fruit of the vine!
098.4
Vintage With a rare old vintage mellowed in wood!
022.10
Violet Garlands of rose and violet, and wreaths of vine;
015.22
The rose and the violet bind her hair;
019.6
Of purple leagues, violet hippogriffs
071.6
Beyond the violet, within the red?
088.2
And violet depths with flameful passions gleam.
127.10
Vipers You stain vermilion vipers in dank glades.
017.16
Virgin Hetaira, matron, virgin bringing
049.25
Virgins The lanes where hopeful virgins tumbled.
128.24
Virtue A paragon, except in virtue,
128.25
Virtues Or quite agree—it’s all the same; no virtues please
096.64
Virtuous “Ely Forchamer, Miss Shere. I’m white and virtuous and fairly goo—” 139.9
Visible Though nothing visible is there
010.6
Vision His vision, and he peered across the darkling sky
014.17
Their purple vision fade and die,
030.54
But the eyes have no vision,
033.33
And where the heart’s transcendent vision, unreturning,
034.14
Her timeless vision staring still
055.19
And in the fading vision of my sleep
095.12
That nothing exists but the vision, the thought supreme.
112.16
And past Nirvana waits eternal vision, pure,
134.8
Visions With visions of the stellar pits,
030.46
Vital
Beauty more vital for your hearts to capture,
051.13
Voice
Like the voice of a wind that shivers and passes
001.1
Is the voice of Beauty that dies.
001.14
Out of oblivion, no voice will stir
026.9
But no voice shall speak again
047.33
No voice to tell of days that were,
053.12
Some warning voice calls out: Go back—go back!
083.9
No voice remains to tell me where she lies,
099.9
Its voice in one vast song
109.34
That saw her but heard neither her voice nor her laughter.
129.4
V
Voiceless
I hear them when no human voice is talking
Earth and eternity. Is some voice calling?
Like the voiceless cry
Moonstruck, voiceless, yet their sorceress-eyes agleam,
From metal monsters humming voiceless songs.
Voices Maiden voices are mute;
Of golden voices that will never speak;
Of golden voices that again will speak;
From somewhere in the distance voices fall and swell,
And voices shake the night
Heard legends not by earthly voices told,
Void
In void, in waste, in riddle never guessed,
Voluptuously
Away, and listless hours voluptuously flaunting
Vow
And death, the great, from whom he held his vow
Has claimed the everlasting vow of him who coldly rests
His realms were vacua, he proved his vow
417
131.3
147.7
001.5
006.22
080.4
004.65
012.34
067.34
096.91
109.15
122.11
036.30
096.74
014.6
014.7
107.10
W
Wa
Bismillah wa Allahu Akbar! when with facile
Wailing The wind is wailing in the willow trees tonight;
Wait
DEATH: Turn not, Oh Poet, wait!
Will wait, alone.
Death: Turn not, oh Traveler, wait!
Death: However far you go, I wait.
And all around their other victims wait,
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The little gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
The monster gods wait in the heart of the mountains,
Waited Where silence ruled yet something waited me
In eerie borderlands I vainly waited
My old companions waited all around:
And waited, wondered, though I did not know...
Waiting Passionlessly waiting till the spell shall be broken
Waiting, watching till I come and join them where,
In the breathless, waiting morn;
We left her only to the waiting earth that gave
And incubi avidly waiting to take
It watched me, waiting, while I stared as long
A venomous, waiting, and phallic orchid dozes.
Stand waiting to perfume and powder and softly caress her,
Waits
Will watch while she waits on the stone;
She waits the coming of the golden guest;
And past Nirvana waits eternal vision, pure,
Waken In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of
the future, the passions to waken,
The night grows dim and unreal and reeling: do I waken
The little gods then will tremble and waken
The monster gods then will tremble and waken
Wakened
That stir the wakened rose;
In your steps on the wakened ways of earth
Wakening
There is a stir of wakening winds that whisper across the lawn.
Wakens She wakens with the dew yet cool upon her eyelids
Waking The worlds of sleep and waking,
Walk
And my heart is fulfilled of its dream as I walk my enchanted way.
What though you walk by Mammon unattended,
Yet all who gaze upon him walk beside him.
I walk in the steps where the Beloved and I held tryst;
Neither thing will walk again.
096.82
061.1
012.11
065.24
067.11
067.53
087.2
130.1
130.17
141.1
141.17
011.5
036.49
072.2
122.8
006.7
006.23
021.6
035.11
038.7
073.9
101.13
129.10
065.22
066.6
134.8
043.15
101.29
130.9
141.9
041.6
051.45
044.2
066.1
109.17
044.8
051.1
059.16
101.6
126.16
W
The little gods will walk from hill and from highlands,
The monster gods will walk then from hills and from highlands,
Walked And the living walked less like men
The rooted feet that walked with measured stride.
Walking I hear them in the grass when I am walking
Walks He walks where none can know or see,
She walks in charm, adoring nature pleases
Where no man walks, and shall not ever see,
She walks with stately grace.
She walks with dust and dreams.
Wall
Desparing cry. I crouched against the wall
In that bare wall where my fists wildly beat,
Now I, at dusk, beside the wall of ancient tombs,
Walled The dark, walled city slowly came in view,
Walls
Sunken walls of crumbling stone
Ring upon ring, with stone walls sevenfold deep,
Along the walls dwelt living mummies, bound
Around me, solid walls of no escape,
Walpurgis
Walpurgis Eve.
Walska Elizabeth Arden, Walska, and Rubenstein;
Wan
While ghostly presences writhed wan and weary
All colours else were wan and tame,
Wan hands and heads that had no trace of wound,
Wand As if a wizard’s wand
Wander And wander in far lands and seas, alone,
Shall I wander in the hollows
And longer ways before you yet to wander
Memories only wander where
Wandered
I have wandered in spirit,
Through space’s dead debris I wandered, wondered
I read, yet on my trail I wandered still;
There where I wandered, purple shadows ran
Wanders Then wanders onward while the shadows fall,
Wane That murmur of things that wane,
The minutes shall wane in delirium, the burning hours pass slowly,
And outer, oldest galaxies that wane;
Is it thine that shall weaken and wane?
Murmur of all things that wane,
Futile, futility as well; that all things wane,
Wanes A fuller dream replacing that that wanes.
She will dream as the night wanes slowly,
Waning Springtide waning, Beauty sweet,
Want
What do I want?
This do I want.
War
Foul messenger of war and holocaust,
Warble The clear, pure warble of a nightingale
419
130.13
141.13
048.6
091.10
131.1
014.9
041.7
050.10
053.1
053.16
088.9
124.7
134.4
086.9
047.11
069.1
072.7
078.9
061.12
129.11
045.11
046.23
104.3
034.3
025.3
033.25
037.9
047.6
033.2
036.11
036.36
071.1
069.12
001.10
003.25
036.6
043.20
063.10
096.68
051.14
065.19
100.6
123.16
123.20
017.18
021.5
420
Warbling
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Is like the pure, sweet warbling of a bird,
I looked across the great plain warily.
And I shall kiss thy warm, soft lips
The sun lay warm along our way,
The sun lay warm along our way.
Behind, the thirsting tips upon me, warm,
Slow patterns in the air; the warm embrace
You care for that warm house of all your own,
Warmer Or if, beneath those warmer, clearer skies,
Warming
And languid, warming into life; no dread
Warmth The radiant god ascends with warmth eternal,
Warning A warning cry—the shadowy forms are shifting:
Some warning voice calls out: Go back—go back!
Wars
Inflicted by the gods in elder wars.
Was
As Sappho of Lesbos was loved in the glory of Greece that is gone;
My blood was burning in my veins, and all the torment
And she was cool, yet hers was all the passion,
And I was more insatiate with satiation,
And by the dark caress was claimed forever,
Yet everywhere, in every region, there was nought
All time and space were mine, and mine was every sky:
Was self-imposed.
Twilight upon the hills and woods was dying,
Was it a half-god or a satyr leaping
There came a sound: Was it a song of gladness
Or was it the old despairing cry of sadness
Who cared? Once more immortal Pan was playing
And by a hideous world was crucified
Was there a goddess in the days of old,
And of his face, there was no vestige seen,
And all his flesh to rottenness was slave;
For I was his, that horror of the dead.
Thine eyes were old when God was born,
Itself was lost beyond abysses of the night...
Our task was done.
Where night was like a shroud before an altar
And farther still when life was yet to come,
When time had ceased, when every world was riven,
Until your birthsite was become effaced.
Was it only for darkness to blind me,
For a love that was fleeting as day?
There was never love greater than mine, so destroying, so ravaging,
ravishing, rapturous, deep;
Was the tribute then given in vain?
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment
ere worship and love were to perish?
Ere the flame was to fade from thy face, and my love to consume
Warily
Warm
028.3
082.5
004.73
049.8
049.14
092.13
114.7
117.2
099.12
075.6
066.10
015.45
083.9
024.4
003.34
007.5
007.7
007.25
011.23
013.11
013.21
014.23
015.1
015.19
015.33
015.35
015.37
026.7
027.1
029.5
029.6
029.14
030.9
034.15
035.8
036.13
036.26
036.37
037.7
043.7
043.8
043.14
043.18
043.27
W
and increase and devour alone?
Strange was the night, and stranger
I was the first to tinge his pen;
I was the only colour when
He was half-mad;
Once he was pale with love of me,
He was possessed with my red flame,
Fourth was I in the coloured host,
I was the sign of royal state,
And its glory far was known,
The face was lost and I had guessed
But they whose life was barren are most fretful,
There was none before you,
My corpse was once a festering sore
A worm that was born of the deep sea-slime,
All it would find was a plump drowned rat
Was someone here?
Or was he bent on dark adventure, bold,
Attempts to flee from depths where hope was slain;
Was it an hour? Eternity? A week?—
It was my own; my own face showed that hue,
The mouth where something dark was trickling through.
It fell in parts, and I was part of it.
In that far, future time where I was fleeing
For in the talons I was fast immured.
Before I dropped away, for I was free—
That flayed my flesh, and I was bound by spells
Now was I destined after all to die,
Whence came that unknown color? Was its source
I saw from that dim cave where I was hiding
For I was its, that horror from the dead.
I struggled onward though my strength was spent
Of creepers, and where head should be was growing
That nightmare sculpture, running fast, was near me....
I too was fastened on that tree of death.
The maid I love was buried long ago;
I know not whether she was slave or queen;
How glad I was that I at last awoke!
My face was eaten by a red, huge Thing.
There was a red, raw dripping thing that mowed
There was a shape, on which a scarlet flood
There was a sound, gigantically loud,
There was a crackle as of blazing wood,
And all the air was misty as a cloud.
And everything was red and strange and mad;
Of death itself, there now was left no trace,
In all infinity was left no place
For Death the Conqueror at last was king;
Not anywhere was life nor anything,
421
043.28
045.5
046.2
046.3
046.4
046.10
046.21
046.26
046.30
047.14
049.18
051.17
052.1
054.48
057.3
057.15
058.12
059.11
070.7
072.10
073.5
073.8
073.14
076.1
079.8
079.13
080.6
085.1
088.1
089.1
090.14
091.3
092.8
092.14
093.14
099.1
099.11
104.14
105.14
106.1
106.3
106.5
106.7
106.8
106.10
107.3
107.7
107.9
107.12
422
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Surely this beauty was not meant for keeping
119.1
In this sweet earthly house was not for sleeping
119.4
Of recognition, nor was I to stay
122.4
So long as there was never danger;
128.14
Her latest lover’s love was such
128.17
Her laugh was like a silver bell.
128.33
That once was man.
133.72
And a smell of dandelions was
136.11
He surely was a classic beauty.”
137.28
The school was more than popular
140.5
There was a young woman I know
144.1
There always was farther to go.
144.5
There was a young man—such a pity!—
145.1
Washing Sunk beneath the washing wave;
047.2
Wasn’t Who plainly wasn’t old enough?
138.34
Waste Where only the wind and the wide, waste meadows have their home, 020.5
In void, in waste, in riddle never guessed,
036.30
Yet do you leave the dark and lonely waste
051.5
Wasted Of wasted years;
039.15
Wasteland
They dwell in wasteland and in night.
010.5
Wasteland
They caught me in the wasteland in the west.
086.1
I hear them in the meadows and in wasteland,
131.7
Wastes The blood-red waving wastes of sand
055.11
Yet, when toward farther desolate wastes I stole,
085.7
Wastrel I am wastrel, never keeper,
133.34
Watch I paused and watched the cryptic waters watch.
011.17
To watch a little creature pick
030.15
With only the withered trees to watch us passing by;
035.2
Watch upon the ruins gleaming
047.20
Of Hymen and the gods that watch your way.
051.63
Will watch while she waits on the stone;
065.22
And watch, or seem to watch, me for your face
077.4
And watch, or seem to watch, me for your face
077.4
096.23
I hear the music’s plaintive sob, watch spins and whirls,
Dance, Cyrenaya, while I watch you swaying slowly,
096.37
For, and the loveliness you watch so well.
114.12
And Mr. Briggs would watch their English,
138.39
Watched
I paused and watched the cryptic waters watch.
011.17
And watched a queen of Saturn mourn
030.11
I watched the universe grow cold and chill;
036.34
I watched on earth the littler things around;
036.44
Her face has watched the dying sun.
055.8
From having watched the dead rose petals strew
068.3
It watched me, waiting, while I stared as long
073.9
I watched them till, from out the greater dark,
074.9
I know that I’ll by them be watched for ever
087.13
W
We have dwelt with new suns and watched the old stars die;
Watching
Waiting, watching till I come and join them where,
While its pale eyes kept watching patiently
Water Of water, fire, earth and air attend you,
Air and water creatures fight,
Waters I paused and watched the cryptic waters watch.
I peered amid those waters black and still.
And in the waters saw my own face drown,
Into the shadowland I made my way
Gave way, the willows five with solemn droop
Where the rippling waters ebb and flow between
Where breakers and lonely waters roar,
The waters mounted in one surge whose swell
I dreamed the waters of the world had died,
Lethal waters sleep and swoon
Water-Snakes
In a marsh that even the water-snakes spurn,
Wave
Sunk beneath the washing wave;
Of wave that smote against colossal wave.
Waves see also Sea-Waves
Inferno, to the waves
Sometimes she dreams to music of murmuring waves
The rush of waves that seek in vain
I am foam torn free of storm waves cresting,
Waving The blood-red waving wastes of sand
With beauty of frail and waving fronds go wide,
Way
From the way I have taken
Winging your vast way lonely and alone
Look homeward, angel, for the way is long.
And my heart is fulfilled of its dream as I walk my enchanted way.
The sun lay warm along our way,
The sun lay warm along our way.
Of Hymen and the gods that watch your way.
Sick, still, and weary, while they ate their way;
Traveler: Not now, not yet. I go my way,
And drowsyhead gives way to dreams more slumberous,
The Beloved is gone; I know not the way she has taken;
That’s natural artifice in you; the way
I hear them wide awake or part way resting,
Wayfarer
What did he seek, this wayfarer of old?
Ways
We shall love in our passion in strange and ineffable ways and
dissemble
I have made love in normal and eccentric ways;
And the ways that I cherished.
And longer ways before you yet to wander
I crawled like one impelled on ways resisted,
In your steps on the wakened ways of earth
423
112.6
006.23
073.3
051.40
126.10
011.17
011.21
011.24
011.1
011.12
060.3
060.13
094.5
095.1
126.1
125.9
047.2
094.10
048.14
060.8
060.18
133.23
055.11
060.7
033.11
037.3
037.14
044.8
049.8
049.14
051.63
054.29
067.51
096.28
101.26
114.4
131.9
059.9
003.31
013.17
033.24
037.9
045.3
051.45
424
We
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Your moods are dear to me, and all the ways
Are these bright ways foredue to that one whom
And point out ways to rapturous rebirth;
I hear them in the spring rise and in fall ways,
We will pass from rapture to rapture and plumb the most utter
abysses
Our desire with breast to breast and body to body we shall be slaking
We shall live in a rapturous embrace, in an endless and holy
We shall love in our passion in strange and ineffable ways and
dissemble
Though we die.
We shall pass.
Let us have joy while we may;
While we say,
Only now do we live.
And we were love-sick, yea, and sick with all love’s poison,
And we were fierce and passionate in our embraces,
For we would keep the pleasure and the torment burning,
Yea, we would love till all our senses swoon;
For well we knew the holy night must have an ending,
But all night long we worshipped at our pagan altar,
We shall not weep
We shall not weep
We shall not weep
We shall not weep,
We buried her in the solemn fall
We left her staring at the musty pall,
We shivered in the quiet air,
We left her far more quiet body lying there:
We left no mark to show her grave,
We only left her body lying still and deep;
We left her only to the waiting earth that gave
For we will know how love
We will pour ashes from the phials
And we will part, as once we parted
And we will part, as once we parted
We were the colours that his love
We were most high;
Yet we like a woman came to cloy.
We were won and lost of a mad young boy.
In whose oblivion we shall meet;
We turned and set forth once more,
But we turned too late and we knew our fate
Before we had lost the shore.
Till the engines failed and we lay there gaoled
Then ocean received the husks that we heaved
As we strode the streets of Tyre
As we strode down the streets of Tyre.
As we, triumphant, strode along,
117.1
118.11
124.11
131.13
003.15
003.19
003.27
003.31
003.40
004.48
004.50
004.54
004.70
007.9
007.11
007.13
007.14
007.15
007.17
014.21
014.24
014.27
014.31
035.1
035.3
035.5
035.7
035.9
035.10
035.11
039.5
039.10
039.22
039.22
046.34
046.36
046.38
046.39
046.46
048.2
048.3
048.4
048.19
048.21
049.1
049.7
049.19
W
Traveler: Goodby, but if we meet again—
Death: We will. We will, and I know when.
Though endlessly we traversed far abysses,
We are one with the stars, Beloved, and witnessed the young sun’s
dawning
We were present when space grew heavy with seeds of its own
spawning.
We have lived through cycles of birth and change, through
cosmic ages,
We have dwelt with new suns and watched the old stars die;
We have read inscrutable symbols on dim, dynastic pages,
We have been participant and passer-by.
To birth, we have witnessed the past and present blend;
We have seen in the future time, and space, and the universe
creeping
We are deathless, O Love, and deific; we have known the
wonder supernal:
We have been the dreamed-of, the dreamer, the fugitive dream:
We have found that only the dream is unchanging, O Love,
and eternal,
We listened to the strange rain
We listened to these strange tall dreams
That we who linger here will not forget, can not forget
How greatly you have guided us. We go
Only do we who knew you feel the source,
Weak Until, my shaking limbs grown weak, I stepped
A nameless and sorcerous glory has made me weak:
These charnel horrors made me sick and weak,
Weaken Is it thine that shall weaken and wane?
Weaker Briefer, weaker,
Wealth DEATH: I offer thee the wealth
A greater wealth your greater love assures
Death: I offer you the wealth
Great wealth have I, a kingdom own, with palaces for pleasure,
But what is there in wealth? In treasure what but treasure?
Wear
So muse I while the endless, aimless minutes wear
Wearier And of your lush young beauty I grow wearier
Wearies Each vespertime, he wearies of the view
Wearily So endlessly, so wearily, you paced
Doubt everything, doubt that I doubt, and wearily
Weariness
And weariness of life oppresses me;
But weariness.
And I am sick to death with utter weariness
Weary see also Sea-Weary
That love and passion weary all too soon.
Lo, all the later days are long and dull and weary,
The vacant spaces of the weary night;
I weary of the old monotony of things;
425
067.54
067.55
079.9
112.1
112.3
112.5
112.6
112.7
112.8
112.10
112.11
112.13
112.14
112.15
136.1
136.9
146.3
146.4
146.8
078.4
101.22
104.9
043.20
133.37
012.18
051.32
067.18
096.13
096.17
096.73
096.50
069.9
037.5
096.62
007.54
013.12
013.27
007.16
007.45
007.50
013.1
426
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
My weary mind has travelled all the stellar maze
Weary of pomp and power, gorged with glut,
While ghostly presences writhed wan and weary
That I am weary though I’ve gone not far,
Sick, still, and weary, while they ate their way;
And every forward step a weary strain.
Weary of all desires grown monotonous,
And weary drag of minutes grows less dolorous,
And if you charm me not, and I grow weary of
But I grow weary of your sensuous caresses,
And leave behind me all the weary works of man,
And all around, the weary corpses lie;
With weary steps to the old, original end.
Why am I weary?
Thus am I weary.
I come, weary yet bearing still this load.
Weave Enchanted me with dreams that weave;
The bat-things weave,
The spinning threads weave patterns rich and rare,
Weaving And when I crossed the imperial weaving span
Webbed Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of
soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
Web-Faced
With the breath of the web-faced things asleep
Webwork
I stroked the glistening webwork on its head.
Wed
And holy sin and sanctity were wed.
Set, fixed, immovable myself, now wed
Wedgwood
This is the Wedgwood she lifted, the saki she quaffed, her
Wee
Then thousand ships and more; shapes great and wee
Weeds see also Marsh-Weeds
Sometimes in cool delight she floats on drifting weeds
Weedy The weedy pastures and the drowned, the dead;
Week Was it an hour? Eternity? A week?—
It merely hinted of the coming week.
Weep We shall not weep
We shall not weep
We shall not weep
We shall not weep,
That flowered not, and all things weep to die,
Weird With skirling fires of weird, vast fanes,
Weird, lifeless birds that talked and harshly sang.
Of human form or beast, weird sorcery
And weird encrusted forms on every side.
Welcome
Revel and welcome, games and play
Well
For well we knew the holy night must have an ending,
So little, yet to do so well,
013.19
016.1
045.11
050.5
054.29
091.4
096.7
096.29
096.43
096.49
096.98
103.2
112.12
123.6
123.10
124.8
042.5
061.10
116.6
071.5
043.25
125.3
075.2
007.36
054.10
129.1
095.7
060.12
095.11
072.10
084.14
014.21
014.24
014.27
014.31
051.16
034.7
081.4
093.7
095.8
049.5
007.15
042.10
W
Went
Were
Lost Atlantis slumbers well
Futile, futility as well; that all things wane,
Out of the well of the heart and the heart’s recesses
For, and the loveliness you watch so well.
Her gestures supplemented well
“Huh. Well, maybe. But I’m sociable, Miss—”
“Well, I guess I’ll be going. I’ll be seeing you.”
Our worship went beyond our own dim comprehension,
And once thy purple eyes went blind
As I went onward toward those upper lairs.
For she paid half, when they went Dutch,
As the amorous maidens were loved in decadent Rome I shall
love her,
And we were love-sick, yea, and sick with all love’s poison,
And we were fierce and passionate in our embraces,
For one intoxicating night were mine.
Yea, all love’s lyric horror all were sweet;
Yea, love and more than love were all the long night’s portion,
And holy sin and sanctity were wed.
All time and space were mine, and mine was every sky:
And still it seemed as if great Pan were calling
What forms were those that through the forest sleeping
Upon their brows, forgotten girls were flinging
To pagan Pan their passionate lips were singing
And body to body, drunken forms were swaying
The older glory of the days that were
Thine eyes were at the avatar
That blasted all the worlds that were.
Thine eyes were old when God was born,
Valerian, thine eyes were sick
Thine eyes were stricken when they saw
In your lips that were tender
And farther back, when worlds were in their dawning.
Still farther back before the stars were spawning
Still farther where not even stars were flaring
Is it only a mirror for love that I find in the beauty that else
were as shadowed as night?
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment
ere worship and love were to perish?
All colours else were wan and tame,
We were the colours that his love
We were most high;
We were won and lost of a mad young boy.
No voice to tell of days that were,
Whose white fat folds were covered with grime,
Through its foul dead realm were it ever to squirm,
As if there never were an end in store.
Vast wings were flapping in the night. I heard
As I remember, there were clanging gongs
427
047.40
096.68
110.1
114.12
128.35
139.11
139.15
007.29
030.41
074.4
128.19
003.33
007.9
007.11
007.20
007.22
007.33
007.36
013.21
015.7
015.17
015.21
015.23
015.39
026.12
030.5
030.8
030.9
030.13
030.21
033.19
036.25
036.27
036.29
043.4
043.27
046.23
046.34
046.36
046.39
053.12
057.4
057.14
078.7
079.1
080.1
428
We’re
West
Wet
What
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
As I remember, there were flaming tongs
Were better than their hideous, measure wrongs.
The vacant halls were quiet as a tomb.
Though they who tortured me were far behind,
For they were deathless hunters, I the dying.
The ocean beds were open now, and free,
And of the empty dreams that were not worth desiring,
And all love’s joys that were.
That tremble and shiver with passions that lately were?
There were great cobwebs hanging everywhere,
And awful things were lying all around—
And there were living, ancient mummies bound
Vast wings were flapping in the still night air;
Were they strange creatures from Outside that soon
And both my hands were covered with that red,
His realms were vacua, he proved his vow
We were present when space grew heavy with seeds of its own
spawning.
Than any known in lands that never were,
Though all my days were added one by one,
Though every day were filled with benison
Though every hour were rich with a great store
Though this were Paradise, and Paradise
How fair you were, if you were only fair,
If in your head or heart, there were not room
Else beauty were as lifeless as a tomb.
Were errors that have lost their hold on me.
Or think that those sweet words were meant to be
Her thoughts and deeds alike were shoddy.
Her vestures; both were quite revealing.
For you were token.
If your name were only Mabel
Tall candles there were dreaming
If this were done to Minnesota,
And wonder what we’re conning to.
Her bow toward the cleaner west
They caught me in the wasteland in the west.
Out of the west, foul breezes sweep,
I reached my hands down to the cool, wet depths
Saw only a realm of wet black sand
Over all the tall wet grass.
My destiny, and found what men can never guess;
What forms were those that through the forest sleeping
And find that what I thought so great is but
What nightmare bore you, hateful blight of red?
What evil source your awful scarlet flood?
Whence came you, spawn of what abysmal womb?
What, ho! For the Bacchic brotherhood!
Contains what a flagon always should!
080.5
080.8
081.14
085.9
085.14
095.2
096.32
096.54
101.12
104.1
104.2
104.7
105.1
105.7
106.9
107.10
112.3
113.3
115.1
115.3
115.5
115.9
116.3
116.4
116.8
120.14
121.4
128.28
128.36
132.6
135.7
136.3
138.35
138.18
048.18
086.1
125.1
011.22
057.8
136.12
013.10
015.17
016.3
017.1
017.2
017.12
022.2
022.6
W
What did it matter a thousand years ago
What will it matter a thousand years from now
What total purpose wrought such total doom;
Unknown what goal, if any goal, lies yonder
Through them and over them—what shall be found
What shall reward the delver’s toil
What words convey how closelier she follows
Her garments only know what curves and hollows
Be still, O Muse! what syllables soever,
Therefor am I, with what I have, content,
What though you walk by Mammon unattended,
What though one kingdom each of you forsake,
What did he seek, this wayfarer of old?
What goal, what new companion did I seek?
For what, I did not know, yet tense, on guard
Had I, although I knew on what it fed,
What form you have, for always you appear
What nameless hunter searching for its meat?
So huge the wings, I wondered what the bird
What sight in later hours would haply greet
What are the dim dread images that bind
What sense of overhanging doom has made
Me fearful? What the sight that I shall find?
For my escape I knew what I must pay:
No hint of what it once resembled, save
What followed me across the lifeless plain?
What shape of evil? What its foul intent?
But what is there in wealth? In treasure what but treasure?
And you will never know what years drift by.
A counterpart of what is still to be?
What they appeared. But there are some so blind
What they are told, the falseness never find
What do I want?
Believed no truth except what pleased her;
And ashes consume what the elders condemn.
Building on to what goal later,
What end smaller
Oh what a classicist am I,
Oh what a classicist am I,
Oh what a classicist am I.
And wonder what we’re conning to.
“Saturday night then, Miss Shere. What time?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Us, you and me. What matters except us?”
“You’re offensive. That’s what you are.”
And ashes consume what the elder gods condemn.
Whatever
Whatever on the other side should lie,
429
026.1
026.5
036.12
037.11
038.3
038.11
041.9
041.11
041.13
050.13
051.1
051.31
059.9
072.9
074.3
075.7
077.7
079.3
079.4
079.6
083.5
083.7
083.8
086.3
090.7
091.1
091.2
096.17
118.4
118.10
121.5
121.7
123.16
128.30
130.8
133.62
133.63
137.1
137.19
137.29
138.18
139.5
139.6
139.7
139.12
141.8
083.12
430
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Whelming
He burst asunder all the whelming bars
When When the cold monotone
When thou at the breasts of thy mistress art slaking
When thou thy pleasure and joy art taking,
When down the hillside came a long, low crying,
You only live when all worth living’s lost.
Thine eyes were old when God was born,
Thine eyes were stricken when they saw
And when they oped they could not find
And farther back, when worlds were in their dawning.
And farther still when life was yet to come,
When time had ceased, when every world was riven,
To perish when my later footsteps came;
And when in closer human haunts I tired,
When he finds their source?
When all the olden days are over,
When Atlantis stood alone
When the night came down again.
When I felt through me spread the germ
Death: We will. We will, and I know when.
Until, once more, when mistily comes the morn,
For in the midnight hours, when sleep descends,
Across a velvet sky. And when I came.
And when I crossed the imperial weaving span
And when my steed permitted me to light,
The dawn, when those great wings had made retreat;
And when the talons loosened, I could see
And when I saw these titans, thereupon
But when I passed and left them in their gloom,
When I collapsed beneath that burning sky?
Yet, when toward farther desolate wastes I stole,
And when at last my captors bore me through
I found no door, and when all hope lay dead
When of this pastime tiring.
Bismillah wa Allahu Akbar! when with facile
And when thy surfeit comes, then die! and die a-flinging
When light shone out of the mystical ebb and flow:
We were present when space grew heavy with seeds of its
own spawning.
When Nielsen with a pen of magic drew
For she paid half, when they went Dutch,
And Machen to read when she thinks of the fabulous chalice.
When post-historic revels will unfetter them,
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
I hear them in the grass when I am walking
I hear them when no human voice is talking
I hear them when I am not even questing
024.5
002.27
005.1
005.5
015.3
017.20
030.9
030.21
030.43
036.25
036.26
036.37
036.52
036.55
038.12
039.1
047.13
048.8
054.26
067.55
069.13
070.9
071.4
071.5
071.12
079.7
079.11
081.11
081.13
085.4
085.7
086.12
088.7
096.33
096.82
097.7
112.2
112.3
113.4
128.19
129.8
130.6
130.7
130.11
131.1
131.3
131.11
W
Who knows when I first began?
But when my span
The legend saith: when each lone traveller passes by,
When I can make my students Cram.
And when I die, must be enscrolled
Especially when their knees are pretty.
When post-historic revels will unfetter them,
When skies turn to flame in a universe burning,
When death has been captured and time overtaken,
When four-dimensioned vaults revolve and open wide;
Whence Living in their silence secrets whence no whisper
Whence came your charnel hue of pain and blood?
Whence came you, spawn of what abysmal womb?
Whence the last birds are winging?
I was the only colour when
Whence came that unknown color? Was its source
And how and whence the steadfastness, the source?
Where Where the lilies bloom above;
Leave them to enchantment where you left them lingering
Waiting, watching till I come and join them where,
Where lichens creep on crumbled fanes
Where writhing trees loomed tall to shroud the sky,
Where silence ruled yet something waited me
Where all seemed dead beneath the branch-twined roof
He walks where none can know or see,
Where ancient gods assuaged their lust consuming
Where maidens swoon in midnight ecstasies;
Where flame greets flame in quenchless fire.
She lies where the Lesbian poppies nod,
Where only the wind and the wide, waste meadows have their home,
A drunken girl where the revellers whirl—
A reveller creeps where his leman sleeps—
It lies where ashen lips no longer sing—
An unknown golden tongue where every word
They passed the land where flowers gnaw
Where other universes flow.
Where I entered the traces
Where the asphodels are springing?
Where shall I find you?
Where soaring pinions
And where the heart’s transcendent vision, unreturning,
Where only courage of lost hope could ravel
Where dwindling monitors of night had sundered
Where night was like a shroud before an altar
Where sand and tides on shattered cities roll,
Still farther where not even stars were flaring
Where legend prophesied divinity,
For love, the dell where hired maenads moan.
Where asphodels do grow.
431
133.58
133.59
134.13
137.10
137.25
138.8
141.6
141.7
141.11
141.14
006.11
017.4
017.12
033.28
046.3
088.1
147.9
004.26
006.21
006.23
010.2
011.2
011.5
011.7
014.9
015.27
015.44
018.12
019.2
020.5
023.1
023.7
027.13
028.2
030.23
030.40
033.15
033.26
033.40
034.12
034.14
036.3
036.9
036.13
036.22
036.29
037.12
040.8
041.4
432
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
To worship where she goes.
There where the gnarled limbs twisted
Where its buried cities sleep
Memories only wander where
Mark where dead Atlantis lies
Where the fabled roses bloomed.
Where the strange sea-creatures lurk.
And cast them for our footfall where
Where no man walks, and shall not ever see,
The tarns run red where the fen-fires toss—
Where it lived and ruled in the endless gloom,
Where the rock-fall caught him with a sad surprise
Where the rippling waters ebb and flow between
Or rests where an ocean current laves
Where breakers and lonely waters roar,
Where sea-friends dwell,
Where the little lithe worm still tumbles and crawls,
Where the trees form a little dark room:
She will halt where the moonrays trace
Where he sleeps with the dead.
Where banners of his proud name float unfurled,
Where peasants till starved earth and long dead ground.
Attempts to flee from depths where hope was slain;
I dream through realms where naught begins or ends,
Where all things are, yet are not; time and space
Where far, unhuman beings’ dark embrace
There where I wandered, purple shadows ran
Through mightier gulfs where still the purple rule
The mouth where something dark was trickling through.
In that far, future time where I was fleeing
Where sat an even greater, stranger being,
That clove through midnight where no other stirred,
The answer came, where I in torment lay,
Where vast, dark marbles stood in endless miles,
That followed through the chamber where I fled.
I saw from that dim cave where I was hiding
To flee, but where I crawled, wherever fled,
Of creepers, and where head should be was growing
The outer-lands where all’s a dream, and dream-winds blow
Is only known in realms where dream-winds blow.
No voice remains to tell me where she lies,
I walk in the steps where the Beloved and I held tryst;
Where, drowsy and drunken and dreaming, nod and list
And then they left me, lonely. lying where
That seemed to pour from where the horror stood;
Where Death in death all things did not immerse.
Where none are seen:
Where nothing else remains.
In splendor of birth and dawning there where the worlds begin:
041.8
045.1
047.4
047.6
047.25
047.31
047.41
049.13
050.10
056.11
057.12
059.7
060.3
060.10
060.13
060.22
062.4
065.10
065.11
065.16
069.4
069.7
070.7
070.10
070.11
070.13
071.1
071.10
073.8
076.1
076.4
079.5
080.13
081.10
088.6
089.1
090.11
092.8
096.101
099.4
099.9
101.6
101.9
103.13
106.6
107.8
109.12
109.39
111.6
W
Wherefor
Wherein
433
Where moons are high, and only dream-winds stir,
For beauty of the mind, where, as on a loom
In that bare wall where my fists wildly beat,
Out of the dark where the black moons creep,
Where miasmal stenches slowly
The lanes where hopeful virgins tumbled.
The little gods hide where the fen-fires gleam.
And they hide in eery lands where the fen-fires gleam.
Where none could know or share.
Past where, once seen, once open, close in no tomorrow,
The monster gods hid where the fen-fires gleam.
And they hide in eerie lands where the fen-fires gleam.
113.6
116.5
124.7
125.2
126.6
128.24
130.4
130.20
134.6
134.10
141.4
141.20
Wherefor, solution distant as a star,
Now wherefor do you make this larger room
The legend saith: wherefor does any legend matter?
050.7
118.9
134.19
Wherein sweet terms, as Love, and Hope, and God,
Wherein a cloudlike throng
Wherever
To flee, but where I crawled, wherever fled,
Whether
Oh little creature, whether old or young,
I know not whether she was slave or queen;
Which Still seeking that which I had never found,
On which such sunfire beat.
Than which no love can have supremer worth.
All the flesh on which fat worms have fed;
The world of which no tale is handed down.
The days for which the heart should be most grateful
From which a tongue curled inward to my lair,
I find no rest in the passions with which I am shaken,
There was a shape, on which a scarlet flood
On which the cool green rain gleams.
Which is better than all,
Whichever
So dark whichever pathway one may go,
While A little while,
For a little while, our life is bright,
For a little while, there is light,
After a while shalt go.
Let us have joy while we may;
While we say,
And while the fleeting hours away;
While empty cities rot away
Pause, rest, turn back while still your wings are strong,
While ghostly presences writhed wan and weary
While sick men stoked; the black hulk poked
While maidens lovely, smiling, fair,
102.3
109.35
090.11
077.9
099.11
036.42
048.12
051.49
054.13
068.14
070.4
089.13
101.28
106.3
136.10
143.6
050.3
004.14
004.31
004.32
004.42
004.50
004.54
004.72
010.11
037.13
045.11
048.17
049.11
434
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Sick, still, and weary, while they ate their way;
At me and slyly chuckle while they keep
While creatures cower in their burrows, silent all,
While scattered leaves in mildewed heaps
Will watch while she waits on the stone;
Then wanders onward while the shadows fall,
While its pale eyes kept watching patiently
It watched me, waiting, while I stared as long
With eyes of golden fury; while a score
Showed everywhere, while flopping creatures died.
Dance, Cyrenaya, while I watch you swaying slowly,
Enough, while drowsy minutes lengthen to hours golden,
I know that nothing is worth while, all things are quite
So muse I while the endless, aimless minutes wear
Then blind, the favored ones; while I, more wise
While I pass by
While over us the wind at twilight soughs,
Whines From the palace, a marble monster whines,
Whirl
A drunken girl where the revellers whirl—
Whirled In a furnace of ecstasy whirled,
Whirls Or whirls
I hear the music’s plaintive sob, watch spins and whirls,
Whirlwind
She reaped the whirlwind she had sown,
Whisper Living in their silence secrets whence no whisper
A frantic whisper with the wind is blended
There is a stir of wakening winds that whisper across the lawn.
Whisper of the days of old,
The mountains and the rivers whisper: Death.
With ghostly winds that whisper to them, Awaken.
Whose whisper in the quiet darkness? Why
Whispered
Is whispered by the sad wind sighing
The fleshly flowers whispered avidly:
Whispering
With whispering steps through the willow-grasses,
I saw the whispering knoll.
Upon the whispering knoll.
With whispering steps through the wildwood grasses,
Whispers
And the dirge of a wind that whispers and dies
All nature whispers but her one word: Death.
White see also Flesh-White
I hold all her body a beautiful living white chalice
Now I shall hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips
be ashen,
Sleep, with the white rose that slumbers
Its white life away;
Tremors across his white flesh pass.
054.29
054.40
061.5
062.9
065.22
069.12
073.3
073.9
081.6
095.4
096.37
096.58
096.67
096.73
119.7
133.41
147.3
125.18
023.1
043.22
060.2
096.23
128.31
006.11
015.43
044.2
047.12
102.11
110.8
147.8
004.62
082.1
001.2
045.4
045.20
063.2
062.7
102.9
003.7
003.23
009.7
009.8
018.8
W
435
To soothe white flesh that for caresses aches.
020.4
There are strange eyes that beckon, white breasts and bodies crying 020.9
Then, on this paper now so blank and white,
025.5
White poppy of the crimson eve—
042.2
White
046.41
In my own decomposition. Thick white worms have lolled
054.23
Whose white fat folds were covered with grime,
057.4
Of the white worm-king and the fat white fold,
057.23
All her dreaming, raptured face is white,
058.3
From dawn to dusk her white sides feel
060.17
I saw rise up a substance soft and white
095.13
Her eyes are blind; her sweet white limbs but know
099.5
I am blind in the white embrace of the moon’s hot stream;
101.27
Of some white form that made a rattling sound;
104.6
“Ely Forchamer, Miss Shere. I’m white and virtuous and fairly goo—” 139.9
White-Caps
The white-caps and the foam their coronal.
020.8
White-Limbed
For the white-limbed god.
019.4
Who
Even as one who loves thee, Love,
004.3
As the forgotten girls who placed them there.
004.60
As one who of strange pleasure sips,
004.74
Who ruled in fabulous, forgotten Troy;
008.10
And I, who hold that Beauty is supreme,
008.13
Has claimed the everlasting vow of him who coldly rests
014.7
For him who sought the mystery,
014.25
Who asked and answered in a breath
014.34
Who cared? Once more immortal Pan was playing
015.37
Who cast on me a mystic spell malign,
027.3
And I, who long for fairer melodies
028.9
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
029.3
Of the mad matriarch who sate
046.31
Of those who came to praise this day
049.3
And they who merely lived are first to sigh:
051.18
054.15
About me, who am dead.
Yet all who gaze upon him walk beside him.
059.16
Who follows an endless stream
064.3
A king who saw but used no eyes for seeing,
076.5
I who had fought so hard to reach my goal?
085.2
Though they who tortured me were far behind,
085.9
Who shambled down the midnight’s empty pave
090.3
Who can blame the mouth that sips
100.3
Unending, a tale, even to him who tells, unknown.
111.12
He who may lift the spell, and yet I seem
113.10
Who finds impersonal and calm the skies;
120.7
From love or faith or trust—fools—who believe
121.6
Who knows when I first began?
133.58
Who knew why Romans didn’t rhyme,
138.12
For who could ever be a prof.
138.33
436
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Who plainly wasn’t old enough?
“A great deal matters. Who are you?”
Who came from near and came from far
Who liked it above or below,
Who burped a remarkable ditty,
That we who linger here will not forget, can not forget
Only do we who knew you feel the source,
Whole I lived whole cycles of existence; I am wise;
I offer you my whole vast Hadean domain
From the dust of forgotten worlds to whole new systems leaping
And drew gas for the whole of Sauk City!
Wholly With its drapery hiding all wholly,
And into more than light, to something wholly
Me from my ennui with your body naked wholly,
Whom In whom all Beauty’s graces meet—
And death, the great, from whom he held his vow
Whom spells will fetter sleeping till the true
You are the fairest of the lovely whom
Are these bright ways foredue to that one whom
Whoops How it howls and whoops
Whose Whose gaunt trunks guarded with malevolence
Whose dream of old is gone
Before the greater dream whose dawn
For him whose mystic sleep
For him whose sightless eyes
To claim the maid for whose desire he strove?
Whose perfect euphony would be as clear
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose soul such
a madness and fury will sweep?
In whose oblivion we shall meet;
But they whose life was barren are most fretful,
Whose white fat folds were covered with grime,
Cover the form whose hand still gropes.
But inbetween; whose phosphorescent glow,
Whose black, scaled body had for head a beak,
Whose source could only, be some fearful shape
The waters mounted in one surge whose swell
Chaunting of moon-dim princesses whose clime
Its superficial vesture whose arrays
To brilliant flame, whose splendors mesmerize,
Shrieking, thus to settle whose
Concealed with opalescent mist whose fall
Whose rare
Returning humbly our own love whose force,
Whose whisper in the quiet darkness? Why
Why
Why are the marsh-weeds drooping low?
Why has the night-wind ceased to blow?
Why do the mandrakes fear to die?
The door must open, showing why the hue
138.34
139.8
140.7
144.2
145.2
146.3
146.8
013.29
067.5
112.9
145.5
043.35
051.11
096.40
012.52
014.6
113.8
116.1
118.11
002.12
011.8
014.13
014.14
014.22
014.28
015.20
028.12
043.16
046.46
051.17
057.4
062.10
075.4
075.13
078.11
094.5
113.13
117.3
119.6
126.11
127.3
127.9
146.6
147.8
056.2
056.4
056.12
078.13
W
437
Why is it that I tremble, half afraid,
083.3
My hand? Why is my arm so strongly stayed?
083.6
Why do I shrink from the soft red mouths of roses
101.11
Why am I sad?
123.1
Why am I weary?
123.6
Why am I old?
123.11
Yet saw no cause why gossip seized her.
128.32
Of why the plan
133.70
Who knew why Romans didn’t rhyme,
138.12
Why, there each young M.A. would go to,
138.36
Alone know why,
143.8
Whose whisper in the quiet darkness? Why
147.8
Wide
Where only the wind and the wide, waste meadows have their home, 020.5
And giant fountains pouring down the wide skylanes.
034.9
With beauty of frail and waving fronds go wide,
060.7
That enters her wide domain.
060.16
Fling wide the roses, ere the petals all be faded,
097.1
And four-dimension vaults revolve and open wide;
130.14
I hear them wide awake or part way resting,
131.9
When four-dimensioned vaults revolve and open wide;
141.14
Widening
And widening inch by inch along the floor
078.3
Wild
A song of pagan passion, wild and sweet;
015.4
From Pan’s wild pipes, the god’s own song of yearning
015.31
A last, wild note from the distant hills comes drifting—
015.47
And on the salt sea-wind there comes a wild, sweet sighing
020.11
With that wild color overspread,
055.7
Their wild eyes glare.
061.8
Running wild
133.48
Wilde The thought of Wilde in Piccadilly,
128.3
Wildly How it wildly swoops
002.14
That made our veins and pulses wildly beat.
007.24
THE POET (wildly): I yield! I yield! Thy lips, Oh Death!
012.53
Did I embrace her wildly, did I hold
027.5
Wildly, wildly, round features mandragoral
068.4
In that bare wall where my fists wildly beat,
124.7
Wildwood
With whispering steps through the wildwood grasses,
063.2
Will
Of the wind will moan
002.28
She will strip herself naked, in splendid and terrible glory array her, 003.9
The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will
betray her.
003.11
Her lips and her face and her breasts, all her body I will cover
with kisses,
003.13
Her eyes will close at my lips on the feverish brow above;
003.14
We will pass from rapture to rapture and plumb the most utter
abysses
003.15
In my arms I will hold her, passive, but I know her flesh will
be aching
003.17
438
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bond
shall not sever
To dust and ash will turn.
But a moment will come and death destroy
Never a rose will deathlessly bloom,
Never will Beauty escape the grave,
Never will mortal outlive the tomb—
Never again will a dead girl thrill
For us the future never will come,
And never will the present cease,
There will be,
Remember the days that will come of the breaking
But Time will pass, and Love will pass, and all Love’s pleasure,
Of golden voices that will never speak;
I know that death itself will never bring release;
For ever will I call, and search the frozen skies
What will it matter a thousand years from now
Out of oblivion, no voice will stir
Will be as perished poppies overblown
Their secrets will remain untold
I will not find it till all things shall cease,
I know this all I ever will be knowing:
You will come back to me,
You will return;
Our thoughts will be more sad than death is
For we will know how love
You will come back to me, lost lover,
We will pour ashes from the phials
Dead eyes will greet dead eyes, and ravage
Mute tongues will tell remembered hemlocks
You will come back some day, lost lover,
You will return;
And we will part, as once we parted
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose
soul such a madness and fury will sweep?
All his great love will end in me,
There will be none after.
There will spring no laughter
For there will come none after,
My body will not pour
Till darkness falls—it never will—
Her vigil never will be done:
She will go in the cold moonlight
To her tryst she will go in the night,
As the wind she will pass.
She will move through the moveless shade
She will halt in a secret place
She will halt where the moonrays trace
She will sink on the cold, cold ground,
003.39
004.9
004.33
004.35
004.36
004.37
004.66
004.69
004.78
004.81
005.3
007.41
012.34
013.30
013.31
026.5
026.9
026.13
030.51
036.58
036.63
039.2
039.3
039.4
039.5
039.7
039.10
039.13
039.16
039.19
039.21
039.22
043.16
046.43
052.2
052.5
052.8
054.53
055.17
055.18
065.1
065.3
065.4
065.7
065.9
065.11
065.13
W
She will pillow her head
She will rest on the lawn;
She will dream as the night wanes slowly,
Will watch while she waits on the stone;
Will wait, alone.
Of golden voices that again will speak;
For I will help you find—
Death: We will. We will, and I know when.
Make this your home for I will make it yours;
And sinuous, then I will raise you from the lowly
Rubies I yet will place in that jet hair above
Take, or the taking never will be thine;
A million million men will live and pass,
And all that ever will be known, is Death.
They know that it will take me years to die,
Blessed be the living for they will be dead.
Whom spells will fetter sleeping till the true
Of modes that will not match despite your pains.
There will be none with you to help you share it,
And you will never know what years drift by.
And it may be that you will find it lonely,
And it may be that you will find it fair;
And it may be that you will find it only
You will become? It seems so strange to me
The chance, the pattern, call it as one will,
Neither thing will walk again.
When post-historic revels will unfetter them,
The little gods then will tremble and waken
The little gods will answer their elders and rise.
The little gods will walk from hill and from highlands,
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
Will atom keep
The golden poppy once again will grow to bloom
“You certainly will.”
When post-historic revels will unfetter them,
The monster gods then will tremble and waken
The monster gods will answer the Ancient Ones and rise.
The monster gods will walk then from hills and from highlands,
They will spew from the sea and climb from sunken islands,
From time-gulfs and planes of space they will glide.
That we who linger here will not forget, can not forget
Willow The willow branches’ languid tendrils sank,
The wind is wailing in the willow trees tonight;
Willow-Fingers
Drowning as willow-fingers drowned, deep—deep—
Willow-Grasses
With whispering steps through the willow-grasses,
439
065.14
065.18
065.19
065.22
065.24
067.34
067.45
067.55
077.10
096.41
096.47
097.6
102.14
102.20
103.3
108.2
113.8
117.8
118.3
118.4
118.5
118.6
118.7
118.12
122.5
126.16
130.6
130.9
130.12
130.13
130.15
130.16
133.66
134.23
139.16
141.6
141.9
141.12
141.13
141.15
141.16
146.3
011.18
061.1
011.25
001.2
440
Willows
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Gave way, the willows five with solemn droop
011.12
Or remain by the willows
033.27
Is it the willows shiver and sigh?
056.10
Willy
There stand her books, the Willy Pogany Alice
129.5
Win
And win the prof’s eternal pity,
138.7
Wind
see also Night-Wind, North-Wind, Sea-Wind
Like the voice of a wind that shivers and passes
001.1
Like the wind, and the trees, and the rain,
001.9
Or the rustle of leaves that drift with the wind,
001.12
And the wind is blowing cold.
002.7
Of the wind will moan
002.28
And the wind is blowing cold.
002.35
Is whispered by the sad wind sighing
004.62
And on the wind the strange, low notes kept failing
015.5
From the sea, a wind; the revelry has ended;
015.41
A frantic whisper with the wind is blended
015.43
Where only the wind and the wide, waste meadows have their home, 020.5
As if a wind had musically stirred
028.7
The wind is wailing in the willow trees tonight;
061.1
And the dirge of a wind that whispers and dies
062.7
Or vanishing leaves that drift off with the wind,
063.12
As the wind she will pass.
065.4
A wind from worlds beyond blows out of foreign places
111.3
A wind from the spheres that through your shadowy hair is blowing 111.7
While over us the wind at twilight soughs,
147.3
Wind-Departed
That glimmer beneath her sunless, wind-departed skies.
060.5
Winding And past the winding river’s end you gaze,
147.4
Winding-Sheet
I am the sweet close winding-sheet
046.45
Window And through its darkened window see no sky:
118.2
Window-Blind
A deep force pulls me toward the window-blind,
083.1
Window-Pane
Falling on the window-pane
136.2
Windows
The windows burning bright with eldritch fires;
086.11
Window’s
Beyond the window’s tracery
055.1
Out of the window’s smouldering red
055.5
Winds see also Dream-Winds
Till night had cooled the burning winds of day;
015.6
Secret the winds that hollowly pass
038.2
There is a stir of wakening winds that whisper across the lawn.
044.2
Grown faint, the winds drift slowly
109.9
With ghostly winds that whisper to them, Awaken.
110.8
For the winds that have blown,
123.2
Wind’s For song and laughter, now the wind’s regret;
040.5
W
Wine
For wine of fire.
Love and wine.
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
Song and the Devil and Wine are good!
Lust, and the red, red wine!
Lust, and the red, red wine!
And drink her kisses as a priceless wine?
And drunk a wine of amethyst
With wine of life.
For feast and wine, the grass stained darkly yet;
Wine of life and of death I have drunken,
I find no surcease in the unrelieving wine;
Red roses in the overflowing wine.
Drink! For the joy of the winking wine!
For I give love like sips of precious wine
And for thy wine, than earthly wine more sweet,
Wine-Full
Drink! Till you fall in your wine-full sleep!
Wine-red
A wine-red toast to the health of the host—
Wing
Could wing no flight,
Winging Whence the last birds are winging?
Winging your vast way lonely and alone
Wings Pause, rest, turn back while still your wings are strong,
With wings of beating purple flew to me
Vast wings were flapping in the night. I heard
So huge the wings, I wondered what the bird
The dawn, when those great wings had made retreat;
Vast wings were flapping in the still night air;
And still those vast wings beat that sullen tune;
Winking
Drink! For the joy of the winking wine!
Wins
He wins the long awaited separation
Winter In heat of summer day or cold of winter snow;
Wiped I am the cinder wiped away,
Wisdom I am wisdom of my own self blind,
The very mice absorb their wisdom,
Wise
I lived whole cycles of existence; I am wise;
At last are wise
Then blind, the favored ones; while I, more wise
Planks riddled through by worms, that he is wise
Wish
The essence of her is here—but I wish she would hasten!
Witches’
Imbedded witches’ jewels mystical,
Witch-Fires
Mandrakes writhe and witch-fires burn,
Witch-Forms
Witch-forms tormented, from dark demon danger,
441
003.8
015.24
022.4
022.8
022.12
023.4
023.8
027.7
030.19
039.12
040.7
043.29
096.20
097.8
098.2
119.13
124.3
098.8
022.3
034.13
033.28
037.3
037.13
071.7
079.1
079.4
079.7
105.1
105.6
098.2
068.9
131.6
133.54
133.5
138.21
013.29
014.29
119.7
120.6
129.16
127.8
125.10
045.7
442
Witching
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Witching, haunted, haunting, mysterious faces
Witch-Lights
Strange witch-lights flare,
With
With whispering steps through the willow-grasses,
Or the rustle of leaves that drift with the wind,
With fitful gust
I am enraptured of one immortally lovely, with beautiful tresses,
With beauty of face and of body as the deathlessly beautiful Greek;
The rapture of flesh, and desire, with all strange secrets I will
betray her.
Her lips and her face and her breasts, all her body I will cover
with kisses,
Our desire with breast to breast and body to body we shall be slaking
Her lips with my lips, her passionate body with mine I shall cover
Thy body fevered with love’s desire,
Petals tremulous with dew at dawn
With lips that to thine own lips burn,
The gall that intermingled with the myrrh.
And we were love-sick, yea, and sick with all love’s poison,
And I was more insatiate with satiation,
A mute triumphal song with love’s refrain.
Intoxicated with thy loveliness,
Drunken with beauty and sweet ecstasy,
Rest, with the cold ground resting
Rest, with the dear things lying
Sleep, with autumn sleeping,
Sleep, with the white rose that slumbers
Dream, with the flowers dreaming,
Dream, with the brown grass withering
Pass, with all joy that passes,
Pass, with pleasure that fades
Die, with the leaves that drift
Die, with Beauty that dies
Forget, with the blown poppies forgetting
Forget, with the long, final forgetting
Whose gaunt trunks guarded with malevolence
Ringed all around with sentinels that swayed,
Gave way, the willows five with solemn droop
With monstrous fires aflame.
Once lyrical with pagan melody.
And now at last I crown me with a coronal
Now I am jaded with my long, complete excess;
And I am sick to death with utter weariness
With nymphs and girls in amorous Bacchic moods:
A frantic whisper with the wind is blended
Weary of pomp and power, gorged with glut,
Death-fevers mottled you with lurid shades.
Ecstasy pains him with a quiver,
006.15
061.6
001.2
001.12
002.21
003.1
003.2
003.11
003.13
003.19
003.35
004.7
004.58
004.77
007.4
007.9
007.25
007.32
008.1
008.2
009.1
009.3
009.5
009.7
009.9
009.11
009.13
009.15
009.17
009.19
009.21
009.23
011.8
011.10
011.12
012.25
012.37
013.7
013.25
013.27
015.28
015.43
016.1
017.14
018.7
W
For ever his heart is filled with yearning,
With breasts of fire, and passionate lips to slake,
Her eyes with longing, her face with fever burns;
Beyond the rocks there are fair bodies with long tresses,
With bodies flashing in the sounding seas of foam,
With a rare old vintage mellowed in wood!
For the good of the town, with the spirits—Down!
With mad new colours and queer lines I’d trace
With thorns of loathing on a fevered brow?
And bound me with long coils of dusky gold?
My mind with longings for some ancient thing,
Far silver bells with Song’s most sweet alloy.
With all the dreadful cerements of the grave,
With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
And saw it smile with fleshless, gaping lips,
Tumescent orchids swart with hair.
With knowledge of the carrion
With dazzle of a monstrous flame,
With visions of the stellar pits,
With torture on their burning spits.
For they are blinded with the glut
With supernatal art.
The Northern Lights crept down with pulsing streamers
With skirling fires of weird, vast fanes,
With only the withered trees to watch us passing by;
With scrutiny of systems long forgotten,
By cryptic tarns aglow with lethal flame,
I further search with neither hope nor peace
Along starroads with only moonglow paven
Come back with setting suns
With wine of life.
You caught me, bound me, with a spell,
Enchanted me with dreams that weave;
I am drunk with thy spirit, thy body, thy beauty, the rapture of
endless and awful delight;
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture of
soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
I am drugged with delirium, burning with beauty, intoxicate,
meshed in the love thou hast sown,
With its drapery hiding all wholly,
The grasses with glimmering dew are jewelled in opal and amethyst,
Once he was pale with love of me,
He was possessed with my red flame,
With power he grew intoxicate,
With empty fanes.
Than shadows that crept with the sun, and slept
And one by one with the setting sun
The city rang with joyful call
Therefor am I, with what I have, content,
443
018.9
019.1
019.5
020.1
020.7
022.10
022.11
025.9
026.8
027.4
027.10
028.8
029.2
029.4
029.13
030.16
030.31
030.42
030.46
030.48
030.55
032.8
034.1
034.7
035.2
036.5
036.50
036.60
037.6
039.8
039.12
042.4
042.5
043.2
043.25
043.26
043.35
044.6
046.10
046.21
046.29
047.26
048.7
048.23
049.2
050.13
444
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
With olden dead endeavor all erased,
With soft, light golden limbs to dance and follow,
Then live! Live with the green, lush trees returning
Live with all things of earth and airy splendor,
She walks with stately grace.
She walks with dust and dreams.
Stares with an eye she can not shun.
With that wild color overspread,
Locked fast with that hypnotic sun.
Whose white fat folds were covered with grime,
Where the rock-fall caught him with a sad surprise
And made him one with all earth’s humblest creatures.
With beauty of frail and waving fronds go wide,
With their faces dissolved and deathly heads
With whispering steps through the wildwood grasses,
Or vanishing leaves that drift off with the wind,
Where he sleeps with the dead.
There, ringed with dark trees holy,
She wakens with the dew yet cool upon her eyelids
The radiant god ascends with warmth eternal,
With monstrous fires aflame.
Crowned thrice with cypress, endless times with laurel,
With mystic earth, thereof for ever choking,
Ring upon ring, with stone walls sevenfold deep,
Are sick with memories awesome, eerie, fateful,
With wings of beating purple flew to me
Through sullen skies empurpled with vast flame.
Held sway, with purple dreamlands all around.
That glowed with fitful lights, and each one starred
With signs unreadable, on each the shard
Of some imprisoned thing with old despairs.
And I drew back, but still the hand with stark,
Yet twined around me with inhuman force.
Quicksilver, pulsing with a deep soft tone
With blood that had so curious a glow;
Them fill the air with measureless strong beat—
I knocked upon the portal till with clang
With eyes of golden fury; while a score
With bright-eyed ecstasy, exultant wrath,
With formless terrors running through my mind?
They burned me, bound me with deep-knotted ties;
Though they, with cruel joy, had given me
Caught me with safety but a league away.
They dragged me back with never pause for rest.
The windows burning bright with eldritch fires;
Malefic, purposive, with alien force
In that dark chamber, numb with terror, mute,
A monstrous form surged on and searched with cry
To limbs alive with wormlike, writhing fur,
051.6
051.46
051.50
051.54
053.1
053.16
055.4
055.7
055.16
057.4
059.7
059.8
060.7
062.3
063.2
063.12
065.16
065.17
066.1
066.10
067.25
068.1
068.5
069.1
070.5
071.7
071.8
071.11
074.6
074.7
074.8
074.11
074.14
076.7
078.12
079.2
081.1
081.6
082.13
083.4
084.6
084.12
086.2
086.5
086.11
088.5
088.10
089.6
089.9
W
445
With all the dreadful cerements of the grave
090.2
With flapping tatters and long talons lean.
090.4
The rooted feet that walked with measured stride.
091.10
The branching arms that reached with taloned tips,
091.11
Then all the seas united with a roar
094.9
Now I am bored with all things brief and transitory,
096.1
With love, and life, and death, and even with ennui;
096.2
With the lithe Persian,
096.9
Great wealth have I, a kingdom own, with palaces for pleasure,
096.13
Unclothe you, scent you with nard, myrrh, olibanum,
096.35
Me from my ennui with your body naked wholly,
096.40
The kohl that shades your eyes, your breasts with henna tipped,
096.44
Now I am bored with all things present, all things olden,
096.55
With all things disagree,
096.63
Me, and I sicken with the languid unsurcease
096.65
My withered heart, stained as with vermeil and rich vair,
096.76
The faithful, with far chaunting.
096.78
Bismillah wa Allahu Akbar! when with facile
096.82
Grace, true believers, with burnouses flowing gracile,
096.83
The hot, still air is sweet with heavy perfumes;
101.7
That tremble and shiver with passions that lately were?
101.12
The garden is still with a fever that passes all name;
101.17
With a sweet rapture of shame.
101.20
I find no rest in the passions with which I am shaken,
101.28
Although my flesh with many knives is slit.
103.4
With only rotting corpses lying by,
103.7
The worms with endless, spoiling flesh are glad.
103.14
And both my hands were covered with that red,
106.9
With magic murmurs making
109.21
With wonder past all knowing,
109.25
With refluence of flame
109.30
And illumines with mystical light the eyes unseeing.
110.4
With ghostly winds that whisper to them, Awaken.
110.8
Your eyes, Beloved, are filled with the beauty of strange stars glowing 111.5
We are one with the stars, Beloved, and witnessed the young sun’s
dawning
112.1
We were present when space grew heavy with seeds of its
own spawning.
112.3
We have dwelt with new suns and watched the old stars die;
112.6
With weary steps to the old, original end.
112.12
A princess are, with beauty lovelier
113.2
When Nielsen with a pen of magic drew
113.4
So lovely with its skin so fair; the grace
114.3
With you. and you so beautiful and fair.
114.14
Though every day were filled with benison
115.3
Though every hour were rich with a great store
115.5
There will be none with you to help you share it,
118.3
I come to men with unrequiting passion,
119.9
And I look on with clearer, colder eyes,
120.2
446
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Remember phrases with a vague surprise
With the breath of the web-faced things asleep
With the fresher tracks of cloven
Concealed with opalescent mist whose fall
And violet depths with flameful passions gleam.
Are languorous with dreams of mighty doom,
With her sweet self, she had no quarrels,
In Wonderland; Rothenstein’s portraits done with malice
A single gardenia lies with delicate grace in
The golden poppy glows in beauty with the light
And it only rhymes with turtle......
I could never love a girl with such a rhyme!
Peopled with ghosts of their invention,
The janitors would drip with knowledge,
Would chant their perfect lessons with ’m.
With each lesson came complete
With scholastic ladies,
Till with derrick they capped him,
Drifting as leaves but urgent with a force
Withdraw
Withdraw till dawn comes gray.
Withered
With only the withered trees to watch us passing by;
Is the rose to be withered and shrunken?
From a trunk, that withered, blighted bole,
But all the strange and withered things still hung
My withered heart, stained as with vermeil and rich vair,
Withering
Dream, with the brown grass withering
Withholden
Delight be withholden?
Within Within those precincts of the spectral night’s
Within the pool so fathomless and dark.
And then I turned, and looked within your eyes,
They found him deep within an ancient cave
Beyond the violet, within the red?
Moves from worlds without to enchanted worlds within.
Within the limits of his nose,
Without
Moves from worlds without to enchanted worlds within.
Like cardinal numbers adding without end;
Witnessed
We are one with the stars, Beloved, and witnessed the young
sun’s dawning
To birth, we have witnessed the past and present blend;
Wits
To prove the brilliance of their wits,
Witty
That your words are clever, witty,
Wizards The things that mirthful wizards killed
Wizard’s Fermented in a wizard’s tomb.
120.3
125.3
126.14
127.3
127.10
127.13
128.37
129.6
129.13
134.11
135.11
135.12
138.14
138.20
138.28
140.3
140.6
145.3
147.11
096.84
035.2
043.31
045.2
093.11
096.76
009.11
033.32
011.15
011.20
034.16
059.1
088.2
111.8
138.25
111.8
115.2
112.1
112.10
138.10
135.5
030.47
030.20
W
As if a wizard’s wand
Woe
Of bitter woe.
Woes
Gifts that repaid our journey’s woes,
Woman Never has woman been loved as I shall love her, never
Has man known the terrible glory of woman as I;
No more, no more I know the fierce desire of woman,
Will a woman be born, or a man ever live through whose
soul such a madness and fury will sweep?
Yet we like a woman came to cloy.
Not woman, man, or child crawled in my lap.
To forty thousand species, Woman
There was a young woman I know
Woman’s
Meets the mysterious woman’s stare
Womb Whence came you, spawn of what abysmal womb?
Women Strange, grave women dream of some strange pleasure
And everywhere the women flinging
Won
Blue rubies won by stealth
The love of girls more strange on stranger stars I won;
We were won and lost of a mad young boy.
Blue rubies won by stealth
Wonder Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture
of soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
Wonder and beauty and terror are hanging all over,
The dying wonder of the world that is,
With I past all knowing,
We are deathless, O Love, and deific; we have known the wonder
supernal:
And wonder what we’re conning to.
A model professorial wonder,
Wondered
Through space’s dead debris I wandered, wondered
So huge the wings, I wondered what the bird
And waited, wondered, though I did not know...
Wonderland
In Wonderland; Rothenstein’s portraits done with malice
Wonders They gorged on wonders vanished, dead.
Wondrous
Slave and queen and dancing-girl, wondrous fair,
And all the love and wondrous beauty of my beloved
Strange wondrous jewels and diadems
For songs as wondrous as this wondrous dream,
Strange wondrous jewels and diadems
She had a lover for her wondrous grace;
Wondrously
The world is wondrously quiet, so quiet, prophetic of day,
Won’t And I hope that you won’t cry dear,
Wood With a rare old vintage mellowed in wood!
There was a crackle as of blazing wood,
447
034.3
013.24
049.26
003.37
003.38
007.55
043.16
046.38
075.11
140.9
144.1
055.15
017.12
006.3
049.23
012.20
013.18
046.39
067.20
043.25
101.16
102.7
109.25
112.13
138.18
138.31
036.11
079.4
122.8
129.6
030.34
006.18
007.19
012.24
028.11
067.24
099.13
044.7
135.2
022.10
106.7
448
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Woodland
For Youth, and Spring, and the woodland feast of Pan?
Woods Twilight upon the hills and woods was dying,
And over the woods in ecstasy, and swelling
Outlined the revellers dancing through the woods,
They are curious things that hide in the woods
Of the woods to a spot forlorn,
Wood-Winds
And wood-winds lightly grieve
Word
An unknown golden tongue where every word
All nature whispers but her one word: Death.
Words What words convey how closelier she follows
Are merely words that mean no more than life.
These things I love, yet words can never tell
That I confused the words you’d plainly spoken.
Or think that those sweet words were meant to be
Them, and the words so beautiful and sweet
That your words are clever, witty,
Or any other words to jar ’em;
And think the words they drop are jewels.
Working
Working hard for pieces-of-eight,
Works And leave behind me all the weary works of man,
Workshop
Throughout the sculptors’ workshop, uncomplete
World Lovely as any girl the world has seen,
Of half-gods outcast from the world of man?
His cosmic challenge in an alien world.
And by a hideous world was crucified
Her world and sky.
When time had ceased, when every world was riven,
And its death is the death of the world.
The world is wondrously quiet, so quiet, prophetic of day,
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Shadowy night and the world to cross—
Bearing the world upon his broken shoulders,
The world is an opium-dream;
Quiet hangs over all the world; in adoration
The world of which no tale is handed down.
He barricades himself against the world:
I dreamed the waters of the world had died,
The dying wonder of the world that is,
The real world dreams,
O Love, my world is pouring
O Love, the world so shadowy and dim
To all the world; and dearer still are those
The cat on the fence, and world conditions,
Worlds That I could picture worlds I’ve never known,
015.34
015.1
015.13
015.26
062.1
065.6
109.3
028.2
102.9
041.9
102.4
114.9
120.4
121.4
121.9
135.5
137.12
138.2
142.6
096.98
092.2
008.11
015.36
024.14
026.7
035.4
036.37
043.24
044.7
056.1
056.5
056.9
059.2
064.1
066.5
068.14
069.2
095.1
102.7
109.20
109.33
110.9
117.5
142.4
025.2
W
That blasted all the worlds that were.
And forget worlds olden?
Amid all worlds of time and dust begotten
And farther back, when worlds were in their dawning.
I sought not, nor in worlds that only seem
Through all the space of worlds in time and spirit,
Of secret worlds that have no name or place.
That filled all worlds, all space; vibrations freeing
All present, past, and future worlds; and day, and night;
Nor vestige of the worlds of old; and now,
The worlds of sleep and waking,
A wind from worlds beyond blows out of foreign places
In splendor of birth and dawning there where the worlds begin:
Moves from worlds without to enchanted worlds within.
And oblivion saw strange worlds begin to glow.
From the dust of forgotten worlds to whole new systems leaping
Thought fashions worlds that earth can never share,
Worm Of worm that multiplied on worm
A worm that was born of the deep sea-slime,
Not a thing disputed the lordly worm
As deathless as ever a worm can be,
And the worm is king for eternity,
Where the little lithe worm still tumbles and crawls,
Worm-King
Of the white worm-king and the fat white fold,
Wormlike
To limbs alive with wormlike, writhing fur,
Worm-Queen
On the throne a king for its worm-queen pines
Worms All the flesh on which fat worms have fed;
In my own decomposition. Thick white worms have lolled
I feel the worms that creep, creep, creep,
I feel the worms that leap
Worms now have ceased to gloat,
The worms with endless, spoiling flesh are glad.
Planks riddled through by worms, that he is wise
Worn
Slowly I climbed the worn old attic stairs
Worse To make my sufferings worse if I should dine.
Worship Our worship went beyond our own dim comprehension,
All night in worship and in love I lay;
Unto the utter end I worship thee, beloved,
Unto the end I worship and adore;
I worship thee and ever worship more.
Dreaming majestic dreams, I worship thee
As gods might worship Beauty marvellous.
Worship thee, knowing that I only dream.
To worship where she goes.
Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment
ere worship and love were to perish?
449
030.8
033.30
036.7
036.25
036.46
037.2
070.8
076.8
096.71
107.13
109.17
111.3
111.6
111.8
112.4
112.9
116.7
054.27
057.3
057.11
057.18
057.19
062.4
057.23
089.9
125.19
054.13
054.23
054.35
054.36
054.43
103.14
120.6
074.1
087.12
007.29
007.38
007.57
007.58
007.60
008.3
008.4
008.14
041.8
043.27
450
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Worshipped
But all night long we worshipped at our pagan altar,
Worth You only live when all worth living’s lost.
The blood’s full worth.
Than which no love can have supremer worth.
Things of small worth to me.
And of the empty dreams that were not worth desiring,
I know that nothing is worth while, all things are quite
For things external, but of higher worth,
Would For we would keep the pleasure and the torment burning,
Yea, we would love till all our senses swoon;
All night I dreamed the one long night would last for ever,
I dreamed the night would never turn to day.
For thee, the gods a planet would destroy.
That in the later days a boy would come,
There is a language I would fain employ,
Would use that tongue’s undreamed-of ecstasies
Whose perfect euphony would be as clear
All it would find was a plump drowned rat
All things that you would know.
What sight in later hours would haply greet
Would maggots in my starved, gaunt body loll
To reach the haven I would never find.
Tortures would mark the finish of my quest.
Into the moonlight, Cyrenaya, I would go
They would not burn me quickly on their spit;
Would seize their prey and seek their cosmic lair?
That all would pass, that nothing would abide.
Yet would it be no Eden to entice.
And I would let it in complete eclipse
Beauty possesses, but would not care
I am a fool, for only fools would trust
The acids would not matter, nor I rue
She loved no man, so she would boast,
The essence of her is here—but I wish she would hasten!
The janitors would drip with knowledge,
Would rant and dream and drowse and doze.
Would chant their perfect lessons with ’m.
Would be as old as papa Perkins,
Why, there each young M.A. would go to,
For surely none would think of spurning
And Mr. Briggs would watch their English,
And every error, he would single-ish!
Wouldst
All things that thou wouldst know.
Wound Wan hands and heads that had no trace of wound,
Wounds They slit me till a hundred new wounds bled;
Woven Thou hast woven a spell, was the chantment for only a moment
ere worship and love were to perish?
007.17
017.20
038.8
051.49
096.18
096.32
096.67
116.10
007.13
007.14
007.39
007.40
008.12
026.2
028.1
028.10
028.12
057.15
067.42
079.6
085.3
085.12
086.4
096.97
103.5
105.8
107.11
115.11
115.13
116.2
121.1
121.13
128.9
129.16
138.20
138.26
138.28
138.30
138.36
138.37
138.39
138.40
012.42
104.3
084.5
043.27
W
Footprints of a man-bat woven
Wraiths Vainly recalling old wraiths of memory,
Wrath With bright-eyed ecstasy, exultant wrath,
Wreath Flesh and the grape and a wreath of vine!
The wreath, the garland, and the rose,
Wreaths Garlands of rose and violet, and wreaths of vine;
Wriggle And wriggle through my gray
Write
Ah, God, that I could draw instead of write,
Writhe Mandrakes writhe and witch-fires burn,
Writhed
While ghostly presences writhed wan and weary
Writhing
Where writhing trees loomed tall to shroud the sky,
Demonic revel holds dark, writhing forms in thrall,
To limbs alive with wormlike, writhing fur,
Wrong In search of vengeance for an ancient wrong
Oh heart, cease beating; eyes, close; sight, be wrong:
Of right or wrong,
They’re always right, they can’t be wrong,
Wrongs Were better than their hideous, measure wrongs.
Wrought
What total purpose wrought such total doom;
The hands that wrought it vanished in its power,
451
126.13
006.6
082.13
023.2
049.24
015.22
054.31
025.1
125.10
045.11
011.2
061.7
089.9
024.3
073.12
133.69
138.5
080.8
036.12
076.11
Y
Ye
Yea
Year
Yearn
Yearning
Yearns
Years
Though ye colours pass, though his limbs be fleet,
Yea, thy lips that softly smile,
Yea, all the bitter night I sought the bitter rapture,
And we were love-sick, yea, and sick with all love’s poison,
Yea, we would love till all our senses swoon;
Yea, all love’s lyric horror all were sweet;
Yea, love and more than love were all the long night’s portion,
Yea, all the barren years that linger in their passing,
The years have passed, yet each long year in passing brings
Thine eyes that for strange raptures yearn,
046.47
004.16
007.3
007.9
007.14
007.22
007.33
007.59
013.3
004.6
From Pan’s wild pipes, the god’s own song of yearning
For ever his heart is filled with yearning,
Borne onward yet by that same ceaseless yearning,
For a promised trysting, a god long due, she yearns,
Let us forget the passing of years,
The years of the past have long since flown,
The tale is told of years of long ago.
The years and love are gone, and thou art gone, beloved,
Yea, all the barren years that linger in their passing,
Of the oblivious years.
A thousand and a thousand years ago,
The years have passed, yet each long year in passing brings
In other stars in old, oblivious years I sought
What did it matter a thousand years ago
What will it matter a thousand years from now
A thousand million years ago,
I searched the years that hold all things immortal
Of wasted years;
In the years of the past, in the coming and passing of lovers and
love and the paths love has taken,
In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of the
future, the passions to waken,
Since ten thousand years ago.
And years of striving in one moment ended.
In all the years by time begun,
A thousand and a thousand years ago,
As all the years of Hercules’ great labors,
A thousand and a thousand years have fled;
The trees, the birds, the fleeting springs, the years,
The years since Time began, the sum of thought,
They know that it will take me years to die,
And you will never know what years drift by.
015.31
018.9
036.41
019.7
004.52
004.55
007.48
007.53
007.59
009.24
012.40
013.3
013.9
026.1
026.5
030.38
036.17
039.15
043.13
043.15
047.10
051.7
055.6
067.40
073.10
099.7
102.10
102.17
103.3
118.4
Y
Years’
Yellow
Yet
Yew
Yield
The years away intended, but for leaping
Still live a hundred years ago,
She has been swallowed in the years’ long flow.
As of a yellow corpse about to speak....
Moonstruck, voiceless, yet their sorceress-eyes agleam,
And she was cool, yet hers was all the passion,
Where silence ruled yet something waited me
The years have passed, yet each long year in passing brings
Yet everywhere, in every region, there was nought
And yet, in all my travels I could only find
And farther still when life was yet to come,
I read, yet on my trail I wandered still;
Borne onward yet by that same ceaseless yearning,
And longer ways before you yet to wander
For feast and wine, the grass stained darkly yet;
So little, yet to do so well,
Yet the radiance is gone from thy face, is it only the refluent
glory and glow that relume thee,
In the years yet to be, in the slumbering lovers and loves of
the future, the passions to waken,
Yet it seems that a veil rises slowly
Yet we like a woman came to cloy.
I am the colour yet to be;
Or gold that never yet no man befriended,
Yet do you leave the dark and lonely waste
Of them, bound, yet magnificently free;
Yet all who gaze upon him walk beside him.
She wakens with the dew yet cool upon her eyelids
Traveler: Not now, not yet. I go my way,
Where all things are, yet are not; time and space
For what, I did not know, yet tense, on guard
Yet twined around me with inhuman force.
The strange cocoon, not living yet nor dead
Yet, when toward farther desolate wastes I stole,
Its branches leafless, yet a budding hand
Rubies I yet will place in that jet hair above
And yet I could not move. There came a creak,
And fair things yet more fair,
And beauty yet unknown,
So faint the dream, O Love, and yet so fair.
He who may lift the spell, and yet I seem
These things I love, yet words can never tell
Yet would it be no Eden to entice.
I come, weary yet bearing still this load.
Yet saw no cause why gossip seized her.
Farewell, good friend. You leave us now. And yet,
Blood-brother, boon companion to the yew,
Yield his body unto dust,
THE POET (wildly): I yield! I yield! Thy lips, Oh Death!
453
119.5
138.17
099.8
104.13
006.22
007.7
011.5
013.3
013.11
013.15
036.26
036.36
036.41
037.9
040.7
042.10
043.3
043.15
043.33
046.38
046.42
051.3
051.5
051.60
059.16
066.1
067.51
070.11
074.3
074.14
075.3
085.7
093.5
096.47
104.10
109.23
109.26
110.16
113.10
114.9
115.11
124.8
128.32
146.1
068.2
004.46
012.53
454
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Yield grace to only one, deny the rest?
Yielded The poppy yielded you demented dreams,
Thou hast webbed me with wonder and yielded me rapture
of soul; is it passion or poison I cherish?
She has yielded to the kiss of night,
Yonder Unknown what goal, if any goal, lies yonder
Yore
But now that time is gone of yore
You
Solemn all you picture them, solemn and so luring,
Leave them to enchantment where you left them lingering
What nightmare bore you, hateful blight of red?
You flare up in the all-consuming flame,
You drift along the desert’s burning sands;
You are the brand that sears, the mark of shame,
Whence came you, spawn of what abysmal womb?
The poppy yielded you demented dreams,
Death-fevers mottled you with lurid shades.
Mars poured on you the bane of baleful beams,
You stain vermilion vipers in dank glades.
You only live when all worth living’s lost.
Except to blind you;—
Where shall I find you?
So long, so far, so distant have you flown
So endlessly, so wearily, you paced
Eternity between you and your haven;
And longer ways before you yet to wander
You will come back to me,
You will return;
You will come back to me, lost lover,
You will come back some day, lost lover,
You will return;
I promised you a villanelle,
You caught me, bound me, with a spell,
I promised you a villanelle.
I promised you a villanelle.
I promised you a villanelle;
What though you walk by Mammon unattended,
Yet do you leave the dark and lonely waste
What though one kingdom each of you forsake,
You, and you leave the aimless labyrinth
Surely shall Aphrodite give you greeting,
Of water, fire, earth and air attend you,
The elements their four-fold essence send you,
There was none before you,
I adore you,
Only you.
After you.
Death: I offer you such dreams
As you have never known,
I offer you the moan
119.11
017.13
043.25
058.1
037.11
054.51
006.17
006.21
017.1
017.5
017.6
017.7
017.12
017.13
017.14
017.15
017.16
017.20
033.38
033.40
037.1
037.5
037.8
037.9
039.2
039.3
039.7
039.19
039.21
042.1
042.4
042.6
042.12
042.18
051.1
051.5
051.31
051.33
051.36
051.40
051.41
052.1
052.3
052.4
052.9
067.1
067.2
067.3
Y
I offer you my whole vast Hadean domain
For you to reign.
Traveler: I scorn you, Death,
I can not bear you. Go!
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
Death: I offer you the wealth
I offer you phantasmal gems
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
Death: Oh Traveler, these I offer you:
And Aphrodite, every dream you seek;
All things that you might love,
All things that you would know.
Traveler: I scorn you, Death.
For I will help you find—
Have you forgot?—
Death: However far you go, I wait.
You’ve come again. You keep me company here,
You drift upon the moonlight hovering near
Your limbs, if limbs you have; nor is it clear
What form you have, for always you appear
And though you never talk (do you have tongue?)
Unclothe you, scent you with nard, myrrh, olibanum,
Make you fair for admiring.
Dance, Cyrenaya, while I watch you swaying slowly,
And if you mesmerize
And sinuous, then I will raise you from the lowly
And if you charm me not, and I grow weary of
Than you. I have drained all delights from long impresses
Drink! Till you fall in your wine-full sleep!
Binds you, O Love.
I know there are no princesses, but you
These are the things I love you for: the gray
Green eyes you hide yourself behind; your face
That’s natural artifice in you; the way
You move: the unexpected things you say;
The subtle pleasure that you give to me,
For, and the loveliness you watch so well.
With you. and you so beautiful and fair.
Nor I desire it if it held not you;
For you, or for one kiss from your soft lips.
You are the fairest of the lovely whom
How fair you were, if you were only fair,
I love you for the charm earth gave to you,
I love you for the realms of endless view,
I love you for the beauty all can see,
You care for that warm house of all your own,
There will be none with you to help you share it,
And you will never know what years drift by.
And it may be that you will find it lonely,
455
067.5
067.6
067.7
067.10
067.17
067.18
067.22
067.26
067.27
067.32
067.41
067.42
067.43
067.45
067.46
067.53
077.2
077.3
077.6
077.7
077.11
096.35
096.36
096.37
096.39
096.41
096.43
096.52
098.8
109.40
113.1
114.1
114.2
114.4
114.5
114.10
114.12
114.14
115.12
115.14
116.1
116.3
116.9
116.11
116.13
117.2
118.3
118.4
118.5
456
You’d
You’ll
Young
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
And it may be that you will find it fair;
And it may be that you will find it only
An emptiness not knowing you are there.
Now wherefor do you make this larger room
You will become? It seems so strange to me
That you make these to that a sacrifice,
You proved illusion not more strong than oaken
For you have taught a thousand things to me,
Their ravage, if they had not come from you.
Only you, and the past, my dearest
She claimed that thoughts, not deeds, pervert you—
Here at the house you dwelled
Here, by the hand you held
For you were token.
I am telling you goodbye, dear,
And I hope that you won’t cry dear,
If I never take you anywhere again;
Though I know that you are pretty,
You have never been inspiring to my pen.
Can’t you see that I’d be able
“Miss Shere, are you a kind person?”
“I beg your pardon, I don’t know you.”
“I’m asking you, Miss Shere. Are you a cruel person?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Us, you and me. What matters except us?”
“A great deal matters. Who are you?”
“You’re offensive. That’s what you are.”
“Well, I guess I’ll be going. I’ll be seeing you.”
“You certainly will.”
And you and I
Farewell, good friend. You leave us now. And yet,
As you begin your final travel, know
How greatly you have guided us. We go
Ennobled by your grace, your love—beside you,
Joining your journey, brings our living light to hold you, guide you.
Only do we who knew you feel the source,
And past the winding river’s end you gaze,
I take the bridgeway you already know.
That I confused the words you’d plainly spoken.
In my domain alone you’ll capture
Drink! For you’ll soon have the earth for a cover!
There is a room, Beloved, that you’ll inherit;
We were won and lost of a mad young boy.
Of pagany, divinely young Apollo,
She lifts her young faun face to greet the flushing sky, bids
Oh little creature, whether old or young,
And of your lush young beauty I grow wearier
We are one with the stars, Beloved, and witnessed the young sun’s
dawning
118.6
118.7
118.8
118.9
118.12
118.13
120.5
120.10
121.14
123.19
128.27
132.1
132.3
132.6
135.1
135.2
135.3
135.4
135.6
135.8
139.1
139.2
139.3
139.6
139.7
139.8
139.12
139.15
139.16
143.7
146.1
146.2
146.4
146.5
146.7
146.8
147.4
147.14
120.4
067.48
098.1
118.1
046.39
051.44
066.3
077.9
096.50
112.1
Y
Your
457
And young Prince Charming rides in quest of her
113.7
Why, there each young M.A. would go to,
138.36
There was a young woman I know
144.1
There was a young man—such a pity!—
145.1
Lost amid their dreamlands, your captured phantoms dream.
006.24
What evil source your awful scarlet flood?
017.2
Whence came your charnel hue of pain and blood?
017.4
In your eyes, there is rapture
033.18
In your lips that were tender
033.19
And then I turned, and looked within your eyes,
034.16
Winging your vast way lonely and alone
037.3
Until your birthsite was become effaced.
037.7
Eternity between you and your haven;
037.8
Pause, rest, turn back while still your wings are strong,
037.13
Beauty more vital for your hearts to capture,
051.13
The ever fresh design of your own fashion.
051.28
A greater wealth your greater love assures
051.32
And by your side, in beauty’s own rebirth
051.43
In your steps on the wakened ways of earth
051.45
Of Hymen and the gods that watch your way.
051.63
Your rotten breath
067.8
Await your kingly head.
067.16
The face that haunts your heart and mind.
067.47
Your soul’s desire, all lasting rapture,
067.49
And watch, or seem to watch, me for your face
077.4
Your limbs, if limbs you have; nor is it clear
077.6
Make this your home for I will make it yours;
077.10
The green-flecked amber of your smoky-lidded eyes.
096.38
Me from my ennui with your body naked wholly,
096.40
The kohl that shades your eyes, your breasts with henna tipped,
096.44
And your mouth poppy-lipped,
096.45
And if your kisses, like most kisses, mean not love,
096.46
Your body slender-hipped.
096.48
But I grow weary of your sensuous caresses,
096.49
And of your lush young beauty I grow wearier
096.50
Of your bright lips, all pleasure that your flesh possesses,
096.53
Drink! For the red-stained lips of your lover!
098.3
Drink! Till you fall in your wine-full sleep!
098.8
Your eyes, Beloved, are filled with the beauty of strange stars glowing 111.5
A wind from the spheres that through your shadowy hair is blowing 111.7
Green eyes you hide yourself behind; your face
114.2
Your hair’s soft brown of gold; your hands that trace
114.6
Of lips too tender; your precise array.
114.8
For you, or for one kiss from your soft lips.
115.14
Your moods are dear to me, and all the ways
117.1
You care for that warm house of all your own,
117.2
Of modes that will not match despite your pains.
117.8
Your imperfections are as fair to me
117.9
As your more supernatal beauty, since
117.10
458
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Twice excellent; thus your slight flaws evince
Delight in sudden vagaries of your mind.
And all your days, and mine, a vain device.
I am not sorry to have been your lover,
Your polished phrases spoken carefully,
That your words are clever, witty,
If your name were only Mabel
But alas! Your name is Myrtle,
“I beg your pardon, I don’t know you.”
Means ditched by your girl and left by your friend,
As you begin your final travel, know
Ennobled by your grace, your love—beside you,
Joining your journey, brings our living light to hold you, guide you.
Enriching us, of your own everlasting glow.
You’re “Tut-tut, Mr. Forchamer. You’re not. You’re homely.”
“You’re offensive. That’s what you are.”
Yours
Spontaneous as yours,
Make this your home for I will make it yours;
Yourself Green eyes you hide yourself behind; your face
Youth Youth and Song and Joy;
Every youth and maiden must
For Youth, and Spring, and the woodland feast of Pan?
For youth, a ravished poppy’s petals blown:
Joys that pass and youth too fleet,
Youths Beautiful youths have long lain dead
You’ve You’ve come again. You keep me company here,
117.12
117.14
118.14
120.9
121.2
135.5
135.7
135.10
139.2
142.8
146.2
146.5
146.7
146.9
139.10
139.12
052.6
077.10
114.2
004.30
004.45
015.34
040.6
100.5
004.27
077.2
INDEX OF POEM TITLES
After Bacchus, Eros
After Sleep
Aftermath
Amphitrite
Aphrodite
At the Bacchic Revel
Aubade
Awakening
040
070
101
020
019
023
032
016
Bacchanalia
Bell, The
Borealis
015
094
034
Capture
Challenger, The
Chant to the Dead
Chaos Resolved
Classicist, The
Cocoon, The
Corpse Speaks, The
Corroding Acids
Creatures, The
Credo
Cypress-Bog, The
086
024
108
050
137
075
054
121
105
102
126
Dark Odyssey
Dead Mistress, The
Deadly Calm, The
Death and the Poet: a Fragment
Death and the Traveler: a Fragment
“Dig and delve”
Doom
Dream Changes, The
Dream that Dies, The
Dream, The
Dream-Horror
Drink!
Drinking Song, A
036
099
120
012
067
143
107
113
063
112
103
098
022
Ecstasy
Elegy
Epilude
Epitaph to a Lady
003
146
052
128
460
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Epithalamium
Escape
Eye, The
051
085
083
Fantastic Sculpture
Fata Morgana
Five Lords, The
Fling Wide the Roses
For the Perishing Aphrodite
Forest Shapes
From the Shadowlands of Memory
Futility
092
033
046
097
043
062
027
026
Glow, The
Golden Poppy
Greatest Regret, The
Grip of Evil Dreams, The
109
134
025
104
Head, The
Hermaphroditus
Hungry Flowers, The
073
018
082
“I am as mad as mad can be,”
I am Man
In Madrikor
In Memoriam: George Sterling
In Memoriam: No Name
In the Attic
In the Pit
Incubus
Ishmael: I
II
142
133
010
014
035
074
087
058
068
069
Largo
Let us Love To-night
[Limerick]
Lines
Little Creature, The
Little Gods Wait, The
Look Homeward, Angel
Lost Atlantis
031
004
145
132
077
130
037
047
Marmora
Metal God, The
Monster Gods, The
Monstrous Form
Moon-Glen Altar, The
Morning of a Nymph, The
Morning Song
125
076
141
089
065
066
044
Index of Poem Titles
461
My Lady Hath Two Lovely Lips
100
Nightmare
Nightmare in Green
029
090
Old Companions, The
On some Drawings
Overtone, The
072
006
111
Pedagogues
Phantom
Philomela
Plague Ship, The
Poet’s Lament, The
Poet’s Language, The
Pool, The
Portrait of a Lady During a Half Hour Wait While She Finished Dressing
Prehistoric Huntsman, The
Prey, The
Purple
138
053
021
048
135
028
078
129
059
079
071
Queen in Other Skies, A
127
Rack, The
Red
Red Specter, The
084
017
106
Sanctity and Sin
Satiation
School of Seduction, The
Second Beauty, The
September Hill
Shadowy Night
Sleeper, The
Solitary
Somewhere Past Ispahan
Song of Autumn, The
Song of Oblivion, The
Song, The
Statues, The
Street Scene...
Surrender
007
013
140
116
147
056
064
131
096
002
009
110
081
139
114
Testament of Desertion, A
There was a Smell of Dandelions
“There was a young woman I know”
This Larger Room
Though all my Days
To Lucasta on her Birthday
123
136
144
118
115
041
462
A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei
To Myrrhiline
To the God of my Fathers
Torturers, The
Tree, The
008
124
080
Twice Excellent Perfection
093
117
Ultimate Vision, The
Under the Grass
Unknown Color, The
095
038
088
Vain Warning
Valerian
Villanelle à la Mode
The Voice of Beauty, The
Voyagers’ Return to Tyre, The
005
030
042
001
049
Water Sprite
What Followed me?
Whispering Knoll, The
Witches’ Sabbath
With Cat-like Tread
Woman Answers, The
Woman at the Window, The
Woodland Pool, The
Worm-King, The
060
091
045
061
122
119
055
011
057
You will Come back
039