The last, silk-floating thought has gone from the
dandelion stem,
And the flesh of the stalk holds up for nothing a blank
diadem.
The night’s flood-winds have lifted my last desire from
me,
And my hollow flesh stands up in the night
abandonedly.
As I stand on this hill, with the whitening cave of the
city beyond,
Helen, I am despoiled of my pride, and my soul turns
fond:
Overhead the nightly heavens like an open, immense
eye.
Like a cat’s distended pupil sparkles with sudden
stars,
As with thoughts that flash and crackle in uncouth
malignancy
They glitter at me, and I fear the fierce snapping of night’s
thought-stars.
Beyond me, up the darkness, goes the gush of the lights
of two towns,
As the breath which rushes upwards from the nostrils of an
immense
Life crouched across the globe, ready, if need be, to
pounce
Across the space upon heaven’s high hostile
eminence.
All round me, but far away, the night’s twin
consciousness roars
With sounds that endlessly swell and sink like the storm of thought
in the brain.
Lifting and falling like slow breaths taken, pulsing like
oars
Immense that beat the blood of the night down its
vein.
The night is immense and awful, Helen, and I am insect
small
In the fur of this hill, clung on to the fur of shaggy, black
heather.
A palpitant speck in the fur of the night, and afraid of
all,
Seeing the world and the sky like creatures hostile
together.
And I in the fur of the world, and you a pale fleck from
the sky,
How we hate each other to-night, hate, you and I,
As the world of activity hates the dream that goes on on
high,
As a man hates the dreaming woman he loves, but who will not
reply.