Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics)
Page 166
How worn and weary they appeared to be!
Between their feet long dusty fissures clove
The plain in aimless windings to the sea.
One hill there was which, parted from the rest,
Stood where the eastern water curved a-west.
Silent and passionless it stood. I thought
I saw a scar upon its giant breast.
The sun with sullen and portentous gleam
Hung like a menace on the sea’s extreme;
Nor the dead waters, nor the far, bleak bars
Of cloud were conscious of his failing beam.
It was a dismal and a dreadful sight,
That desert in its cold, uncanny light;
No soul but I alone to mark the fear
And imminence of everlasting night!
All presages and prophecies of doom
Glimmered and babbled in the ghastly gloom,
And in the midst of that accursèd scene
A wolf sat howling on a broken tomb.
ELIXER VITAE.
Of life’s elixir I had writ, when sleep
(Pray Heaven it spared him who the writing read!)
Sealed upon my senses with so deep
A stupefaction that men thought me dead.
The centuries stole by with noiseless tread,
Like spectres in the twilight of my dream;
I saw mankind in dim procession sweep
Through life, oblivion at each extreme.
Meanwhile my beard, like Barbarossa’s growing,
Loaded my lap and o’er my knees was flowing.
The generations came with dance and song,
And each observed me curiously there.
Some asked: “Who was he?” Others in the throng
Replied: “A wicked monk who slept at prayer.”
Some said I was a saint, and some a bear —
These all were women. So the young and gay,
Visibly wrinkling as they fared along,
Doddered at last on failing limbs away;
Though some, their footing in my beard entangled,
Fell into its abysses and were strangled.
At last a generation came that walked
More slowly forward to the common tomb,
Then altogether stopped. The women talked
Excitedly; the men, with eyes agloom
Looked darkly on them with a look of doom;
And one cried out: “We are immortal now —
How need we these?” And a dread figure stalked,
Silent, with gleaming axe and shrouded brow,
And all men cried: “Decapitate the women,
Or soon there’ll be no room to stand or swim in!”
So (in my dream) each lovely head was chopped
From its fair shoulders, and but men alone
Were left in all the world. Birth being stopped,
Enough of room remained in every zone,
And Peace ascended Woman’s vacant throne.
Thus, life’s elixir being found (the quacks
Their bread-and-butter in it gladly sopped)
’Twas made worth having by the headsman’s axe.
Seeing which, I gave myself a hearty shaking,
And crumbled all to powder in the waking.
CONVALESCENT.
What! “Out of danger?” Can the slighted Dame
Or canting Pharisee no more defame?
Will Treachery caress my hand no more,
Nor Hatred He alurk about my door? —
Ingratitude, with benefits dismissed,
Not close the loaded palm to make a fist?
Will Envy henceforth not retaliate
For virtues it were vain to emulate?
Will Ignorance my knowledge fail to scout,
Not understanding what ‘tis all about,
Yet feeling in its light so mean and small
That all his little soul is turned to gall?
What! “Out of danger?” Jealousy disarmed?
Greed from exaction magically charmed?
Ambition stayed from trampling whom it meets,
Like horses fugitive in crowded streets?
The Bigot, with his candle, book and bell,
Tongue-tied, unlunged and paralyzed as well?
The Critic righteously to justice haled,
His own ear to the post securely nailed —
What most he dreads unable to inflict,
And powerless to hawk the faults he’s picked?
The liar choked upon his choicest lie,
And impotent alike to villify
Or flatter for the gold of thrifty men
Who hate his person but employ his pen —
Who love and loathe, respectively, the dirt
Belonging to his character and shirt?
What! “Out of danger?” — Nature’s minions all,
Like hounds returning to the huntsman’s call,
Obedient to the unwelcome note
That stays them from the quarry’s bursting throat? —
Famine and Pestilence and Earthquake dire,
Torrent and Tempest, Lightning, Frost and Fire,
The soulless Tiger and the mindless Snake,
The noxious Insect from the stagnant lake
(Automaton malevolences wrought
Out of the substance of Creative Thought) —
These from their immemorial prey restrained,
Their fury baffled and their power chained?
I’m safe? Is that what the physician said?
What! “Out of danger?” Then, by Heaven, I’m dead!
AT THE CLOSE OF THE CANVASS.
‘Twas a Venerable Person, whom I met one Sunday morning,
All appareled as a prophet of a melancholy sect;
And in a jeremaid of objurgatory warning
He lifted up his jodel to the following effect:
O ye sanguinary statesmen, intermit your verbal tussles
O ye editors and orators, consent to hear my lay!
And a little while the digital and maxillary muscles
And attend to what a Venerable Person has to say.
Cease your writing, cease your shouting, cease your wild unearthly lying;
Cease to bandy such expressions as are never, never found
In the letter of a lover; cease “exposing” and “replying” —
Let there be abated fury and a decrement of sound.
For to-morrow will be Monday and the fifth day of November —
Only day of opportunity before the final rush.
Carpe diem! go conciliate each person who’s a member
Of the other party — do it while you can without a blush.
“Lo! the time is close upon you when the madness of the season
Having howled itself to silence, like a Minnesota ‘clone,
Will at last be superseded by the still, small voice of reason,
When the whelpage of your folly you would willingly disown.
“Ah, ‘tis mournful to consider what remorses will be thronging,
With a consciousness of having been so ghastly indiscreet,
When by accident untoward two ex-gentlemen belonging
To the opposite political denominations meet!
“Yes, ‘tis melancholy, truly, to forecast the fierce, unruly
Supersurging of their blushes, like the flushes upon high
When Aurora Borealis lights her circumpolar palace
And in customary manner sets her banner in the sky.
“Each will think: ‘This falsifier knows that I too am a liar.
Curse him for a son of Satan, all unholily compound!
Curse my leader for another! Curse that pelican, my mother!
Would to God that I when little in my victual had been drowned!’”
Then that Venerable Person went away without returning
And, the madness of the season having also taken flight,
All the people soon were bl
ushing like the skies to crimson burning
When Aurora Borealis fires her premises by night.
NOVUM ORGANUM.
In Bacon see the culminating prime
Of Anglo-Saxon intellect and crime.
He dies and Nature, settling his affairs,
Parts his endowments among us, his heirs:
To every one a pinch of brain for seed,
And, to develop it, a pinch of greed.
Each thrifty heir, to make the gift suffice,
Buries the talent to manure the vice.
GEOTHEOS.
As sweet as the look of a lover
Saluting the eyes of a maid,
That blossom to blue as the maid
Is ablush to the glances above her,
The sunshine is gilding the glade
And lifting the lark out of shade.
Sing therefore high praises, and therefore
Sing songs that are ancient as gold,
Of Earth in her garments of gold;
Nor ask of their meaning, nor wherefore
They charm as of yore, for behold!
The Earth is as fair as of old.
Sing songs of the pride of the mountains,
And songs of the strength of the seas,
And the fountains that fall to the seas
From the hands of the hills, and the fountains
That shine in the temples of trees,
In valleys of roses and bees.
Sing songs that are dreamy and tender,
Of slender Arabian palms,
And shadows that circle the palms,
Where caravans, veiled from the splendor,
Are kneeling in blossoms and balms,
In islands of infinite calms.
Barbaric, O Man, was thy runing
When mountains were stained as with wine
By the dawning of Time, and as wine
Were the seas, yet its echoes are crooning,
Achant in the gusty pine
And the pulse of the poet’s line.
YORICK.
Hard by an excavated street one sat
In solitary session on the sand;
And ever and anon he spake and spat
And spake again — a yellow skull in hand,
To which that retrospective Pioneer
Addressed the few remarks that follow here:
“Who are you? Did you come ‘der blains agross,’
Or ‘Horn aroundt’? In days o’ ‘49
Did them thar eye-holes see the Southern Cross
From the Antarctic Sea git up an’ shine?
Or did you drive a bull team ‘all the way
From Pike,’ with Mr. Joseph Bowers? — say!
“Was you in Frisco when the water came
Up to Montgum’ry street? and do you mind
The time when Peters run the faro game —
Jim Peters from old Mississip — behind
Wells Fargo’s, where he subsequent was bust
By Sandy, as regards both bank and crust?
“I wonder was you here when Casey shot
James King o’ William? And did you attend
The neck-tie dance ensuin’? I did not,
But j’ined the rush to Go Creek with my friend
Ed’ard McGowan; for we was resolved
In sech diversions not to be involved.
“Maybe I knowed you; seems to me I’ve seed
Your face afore. I don’t forget a face,
But names I disremember — I’m that breed
Of owls. I’m talking some’at into space
An’ maybe my remarks is too derned free,
Seein’ yer name is unbeknown to me.
“Ther’ was a time, I reckon, when I knowed
Nigh onto every dern galoot in town.
That was as late as ‘50. Now she’s growed
Surprisin’! Yes, me an’ my pardner, Brown,
Was wide acquainted. If ther’ was a cuss
We didn’t know, the cause was — he knowed us.
“Maybe you had that claim adjoinin’ mine
Up thar in Calaveras. Was it you
To which Long Mary took a mighty shine,
An’ throwed squar’ off on Jake the Kangaroo?
I guess if she could see ye now she’d take
Her chance o’ happiness along o’ Jake.
“You ain’t so purty now as you was then:
Yer eyes is nothin’ but two prospect holes,
An’ women which are hitched to better men
Would hardly for sech glances damn their souls,
As Lengthie did. By G —— ! I hope it’s you,
For” (kicks the skull) “I’m Jake the Kangaroo.”
A VISION OF DOOM.
I stood upon a hill. The setting sun
Was crimson with a curse and a portent,
And scarce his angry ray lit up the land
That lay below, whose lurid gloom appeared
Freaked with a moving mist, which, reeking up
From dim tarns hateful with some horrid ban,
Took shapes forbidden and without a name.
Gigantic night-birds, rising from the reeds
With cries discordant, startled all the air,
And bodiless voices babbled in the gloom —
The ghosts of blasphemies long ages stilled,
And shrieks of women, and men’s curses. All
These visible shapes, and sounds no mortal ear
Had ever heard, some spiritual sense
Interpreted, though brokenly; for I
Was haunted by a consciousness of crime,
Some giant guilt, but whose I knew not. All
These things malign, by sight and sound revealed,
Were sin-begotten; that I knew — no more —
And that but dimly, as in dreadful dreams
The sleepy senses babble to the brain
Imperfect witness. As I stood a voice,
But whence it came I knew not, cried aloud
Some words to me in a forgotten tongue,
Yet straight I knew me for a ghost forlorn,
Returned from the illimited inane.
Again, but in a language that I knew,
As in reply to something which in me
Had shaped itself a thought, but found no words,
It spake from the dread mystery about:
”Immortal shadow of a mortal soul
That perished with eternity, attend.
What thou beholdest is as void as thou:
The shadow of a poet’s dream — himself
As thou, his soul as thine, long dead,
But not like thine outlasted by its shade.
His dreams alone survive eternity
As pictures in the unsubstantial void.
Excepting thee and me (and we because
The poet wove us in his thought) remains
Of nature and the universe no part
Or vestige but the poet’s dreams. This dread,
Unspeakable land about thy feet, with all
Its desolation and its terrors — lo!
’T is but a phantom world. So long ago
That God and all the angels since have died
That poet lived — yourself long dead — his mind
Filled with the light of a prophetic fire,
And standing by the Western sea, above
The youngest, fairest city in the world,
Named in another tongue than his for one
Ensainted, saw its populous domain
Plague-smitten with a nameless shame. For there
Red-handed murder rioted; and there
The people gathered gold, nor cared to loose
The assassin’s fingers from the victim’s throat,
But said, each in his vile pursuit engrossed:
’Am I my brother’s keeper? Let the Law
Look to the matter.’ But the Law did not.
And there, O pitiful! the babe was slain
Within its mother’s breast and the same grave
Held babe and mother; and the people smiled,
Still gathering gold, and said: ‘The Law, the Law,’
Then the great poet, touched upon the lips
With a live coal from Truth’s high altar, raised
His arms to heaven and sang a song of doom —
Sang of the time to be, when God should lean
Indignant from the Throne and lift his hand,
And that foul city be no more! — a tale,
A dream, a desolation and a curse!
No vestige of its glory should survive
In fact or memory: its people dead,
Its site forgotten, and its very name
Disputed.”
“Was the prophecy fulfilled?”
The sullen disc of the declining sun
Was crimson with a curse and a portent,
And scarce his angry ray lit up the land
That lay below, whose lurid gloom appeared
Freaked with a moving mist, which, reeking up
From dim tarns hateful with a horrid ban,
Took shapes forbidden and without a name.
Gigantic night-birds, rising from the reeds
With cries discordant, startled all the air,
And bodiless voices babbled in the gloom.
But not to me came any voice again;
And, covering my face with thin, dead hands,
I wept, and woke, and cried aloud to God!
POLITICS.
That land full surely hastens to its end
Where public sycophants in homage bend
The populace to flatter, and repeat
The doubled echoes of its loud conceit.
Lowly their attitude but high their aim,
They creep to eminence through paths of shame,
Till fixed securely in the seats of pow’r,
The dupes they flattered they at last devour.
POESY.
Successive bards pursue Ambition’s fire
That shines, Oblivion, above thy mire.
The latest mounts his predecessor’s trunk,