Antinous: A Poem

But slow-treading night came in
Closing the weary eyelids of each sense.
The very consciousness of self and soul
Grew, like a landscape through dim raining, dim.
TheŽ Emperor lay still, so still that now
He half forgot where now he lay, or whence
The sorrow that was still salt on his lips.
All had been something very far, a scroll
Rolled up. The things he felt were like the rim
That haloes round the moon when the night weeps.

His head was bowed into his arms, and they
On the low couch, foreign to his sense, lay.
His closed eyes seemed open to him and seeing
The naked floor, dark, cold, sad and unmeaning.
His hurting breath was all his sense could know.
Out of the falling darkness the wind rose
And fell. A voice swooned in the courts below.
And the Emperor slept.

The gods came now
And bore something away, no sense knows how,
On unseen arms of power and repose.

LISBON, 1915.

End of the Proj