There is a figure with a down-turned torch Carved on a pillar in an olden time, A calm and lovely boy Who comes not to destroy But to lead age back to its golden prime. Thus did an antique sculptor draw thee, Death, With smooth and beauteous brow and faint sweet smile, Nor haggard, gaunt and vile, And thou perhaps art Him to whom men may Unvexed, give up their breath.
But in my soul thou sittest like a dream Among earth's mountains, by her dim-coloured seas; A wild unearthly Shape In thy dark-glimmering cape, Piping a tune of wavering melodies, Thou sittest, ay, thou sittest at the feast Of my brief life among earth's bright-wreathed flowers, Stemming the dancing hours With sombre gleams until abrupt, thou risest And all, at once, is ceased.
There is a camp upon a rounded hill Where men do sleep more closely to the stars, And tree-like shapes stand at its entrances, Beside the small, dark, shadow-soldiery.
Deep in the gloom of days of isolation, Withdrawn, high up from the low, murmuring town, Those shadows sit, drooping around their fires, Or move as winds dark-waving in a wood.
Staring at cattle on a neighbouring hill They are oblivious as is stone or grass--The clouds passed voiceless over, and the sun Rose, and lit trees, and vanished utterly.
Then in the awful beauty of the world, When stars are singing in dark ecstasy, Those ox-like soldiers sit collected round A thin, metallic echo of human song:
And click their feet and clap their hands in time, And wag their heads, and make the white ghost owl Flit from its branch--but still those tree-like shapes Stand like archangels dark-winged in the sky.
And presently the soldiers cease to stir; The thin voice sinks and all at once is dead; They lie down on their planks and hear the wind, And feel the darkness fumbling at their souls.
They lie in rows as stiff as tombs or trees, Their eyeballs imageless, like marble still; And secretly they feel that roof and walls Are gone and that they stare into the sky.
It is so black, so black, so black, so black, Those black-winged shapes have stretched across the world, Have swallowed up the stars, and if the sun Rises again, it will be black, black, black.
In the black glitter of night the grey vapour forest Lies a dark Ghost in the water, motionless, dark, Like a corpse by the bank fallen, and hopelessly rotting Where the thin silver soul of the stars silently dances.
