Dying Men

Sharp with their ills, and lonely in their dying,
The sceptic sick watch by their chamber fire,
With haggard eyes, the evening magnifying
The house-fronts, and the blackening church-spire.

The hour is dead where in some never-crowded
City by time extinguished, desolate,
They live immured in walls by mourning shrouded,
And hear the monumental hinges grate.

Haggard and lone, they gaze at Death unbeaten,
Like grim old wolves, the hieratic sick;
Life and its days identic they have eaten,
Their hate, their fate, diseases clustering thick.

But shaken in their cynical assurance,
And in their haughtiness and pale disgust,
They ask: "Is happiness not in endurance
Of wilful suffering, suffering loved with lust?"

Of old they felt their hearts go out to others;
Benevolent, they pitied alien griefs;
And, like apostles, loved their suffering brothers,
And feared their pride, cabined in dead beliefs.

But now they think that love is more cemented
By cruelty than kindness, which is vain.
What of the few, chance tears they have prevented?
How many more have flowed? Decreed is pain.

Empty the golden islands are, where lingers
In golden mist Dream in a mantle spun
Of purple, skimming foam with idle fingers
From silent gold rained by a teeming sun.

Broken the proud masts, and the waves are churning!
Steer to extinguished ports the vessel's prow:
No lighthouse stretches its immensely burning
Arm to the great stars--dead the fires are now.

Haggard and lone, they gaze at Death unbeaten,
Like grim old wolves, the hieratic sick;
Life and its days identic they have eaten,
Their hate, their fate, diseases clustering thick.

With nails of wood they beat hot foreheads. Cages
Of bones for fevers are their bodies. Blind
Their eyes, their lips like withered parchment pages.
A bitter sand beneath their teeth they grind.

Now in their extinct souls a longing blazes
To sail, and in a new world live again,
Whose sunset like a smoking tripod raises
The God of shade and ebony in its brain;

In a far land of tempests raging madly,
In lands of fury hoarse and livid dreams,
Where man can drown, ferociously and gladly,
His soul and all his heart in fiery streams.

They are the tragic sick sharp with diseases;
Haggard and lone they watch the town fires fade;
And pale facades are waiting till it pleases
Their crumbling bodies have their coffins made.