Unnatural mother to her child, This Venus all imperative! O thou, my bitter joy and wild,-- Farewell forever! I forgive!
Within its frame in shadow fine, The misty glass that still endures Reveals another face than mine,-- The earliest of my portraitures.
A retrospective ghost, with face Of vanished type, steps from the vast Dim mirror of his biding-place In tenebrous, forgotten past.
Gay in his doublet satin-rose, Coloured in bold and vivid way, He seems as if about to pose For Deveria or Boulanger.
Terror of glabrous commoner, His flowing locks in royal guise, Like mane of lion, or sinister King's hair, fall heavy to his thighs.
Romanticist of bold conceit, Knight of an art which strives anew, He hurled himself at Drama's feet, When erst Hernani's trumpet blew.
Night falls. The corners are astir With many shapes and shadows tall. The Unknown--grim stage-carpenter-- Sets up its darksome frights o'er all.
A sudden burst of candles, weird With aureoles, like lamps of death! The room is populous, and bleared With folk brought hither by a breath!
Down step the portraits from the wall,-- A ruddy-litten company! Circling the fireplace in the hall, Where the wood blazes suddenly.
The figures wrested from the tombs Have lost their rigid, frozen mien, The gradual glow of life illumes The Past with flush incarnadine.
A colour lights the faces pale, As in the days of old delight. Friends whom my thought shall never fail, I thank ye, that ye came to-night!
Now eighteen-thirty shows to me Its great and valiant-hearted men. (Ah, like Otranto's pirates, we Who were an hundred, are but ten!)
And one his reddish beard spreads out, Like Barbarossa in his cave. Another his mustachio stout Curls at the ends in fashion suave.
Under the ample fold that cloaks An ever unrevealèd ill, Petrus a cigarette now smokes, Naming it "papelito" still.
Another cometh, fain to tell His visions and his hopes supreme. Like Icarus on the sands he fell, Where lie all broken shafts of dream.
And one a drama hath begot, Planned after some new model's freak, Which, merging all things in its plot, Makes Calderon with Molière speak.
Tom, late forsaken by his Dear, Love's Labour's Lost must low recite; And Fritz to Cidalise makes clear Faust's vision of Walpurgis Night.