Assuage me nor allay me nor appease,

Till supreme sleep shall bring me bloodless ease; Till time wax faint in all his periods;

Till fate undo the bondage of the gods,

And lay, to slake and satiate me all through,
Lotus and Lethe on my lips like dew,

And shed around and over and under me

Thick darkness and the insuperable sea.

HYMN TO PROSERPINE.

(AFTER THE PROCLAMATION IN ROME OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH.)

I

Vicisti, Galilæe.

HAVE lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end;

Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.

Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep;

For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep. Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove;

But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love. Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold, A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?

I am sick of singing: the bays burn deep and chafe: I am fain

To rest a little from praise and grievous pleasure and pain. For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath,

We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death.

O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out

in a day!

From your wrath is the world released, redeemed from your chains, men say.

New Gods are crowned in the city; their flowers have broken your rods;

They are merciful, clothed with pity, the

passionate Gods.

young com

But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare; Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were. Time and the Gods are at strife; ye dwell in the midst thereof,

Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love.

to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be

at peace,

Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom

shall cease.

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,

The laurel, the palms and the pæan, the breast of the nymphs in the brake;

Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath;

And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death;

All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre,

Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire.

More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all

these things?

Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings. A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may?

For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day. And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:

Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years?

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;

We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fulness of death.

Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day; But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.

Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in the end;

For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend.

Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides;

But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the foam of the tides.

O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods!

O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!

Though all men abase them before you

all knees bend,

in spirit, and

I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end.

All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows

are cast

Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past:

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,

Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:

Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,

And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,

White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,

Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.

The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;

In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared

as a prey;

In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of

all men's tears;

With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of

years: