_Bacchus is gone!_ And with him dancing Folly-- _Bacchus is dead--is dead--_ Oh, Melancholy!
No! No! He is not dead; he has but fled To kindlier lands he knew in days before Men snatched the purple roses from his head. He does but wanton by some liberal shore-- Sun kissed-- And wreathed with vine leaves as of old, With spotted beasts and maidens by his car, And sound of timbrels like a story told Of youth and love and blood and wine and war.
They make me think of battlefields I saw Where butterflies with wings of sulphurous gold Crawled on gray faces death had made obscene That stared with stolid dolls' eyes from the mold. They make me think of pools of wimpled slime, Where lizards bask upon the quaking crust, And crumbling walls where hairy spiders weave And snakes lie coupling in the summer dust.
I think it must have been along the Nile That first these speckled membranes burst the pod, Before the boy-flat breasts of some half-cat Half-man and beryl-eyed Egyptian god. Or first they grew about forgotten tombs The apes inherit in hot jungles where Like xanthic suns through aquid shade of leaves A spotted leopard's dilate pupils stare.
These were the mottled blossoms of Gomorrah, Wreathed on beast-gods by priestly Sodomites, By Baal fires when the talking timbrel's sound Fell from Astarte's groves on full moon nights. They suck a yellow venom from the sun And mid their reedy stocks there comes and goes The forked, black lightning of a serpent's tongue That hisses as his slippery body flows.
Such lilies bloom beside the gates of hell And poison honey festers in their pods, Olid as tales of lust told long ago About the wanton mother of the gods. And I would plant them by the lichened tomb Of that veiled queen who died of leprosy With two red princes smothered in her womb; Their roots would feed on her in secrecy.
Youth is a vale afire with hollyhocks, Robbed by those greedy publicans the bees, Where cuckoos call like fairy story clocks And blue-jays holla in the apple trees. No thunderheads come up with black despair To dim its arching orchard's leafy sheen, But clouds like ivory towers pile in air And gothic woods stand, cloistered, cool and green.
It is a glade where earliest flowers grow, Along the melting snowbanks in the spring, The waxen-stemmed anemones first show, And Madame Woodthrush preens her dainty wing. White hyacinths like masts with flower spars Stand in the woods and dot each bosky lawn, Like distant sails or clusters of pale stars Against an emerald sky at early dawn.