cloaked. 
     Doubt you with the monster’s fry
     All his orbit may exclude;
     Are you of the stiff, the dry,
     Cursing the not understood;
     Grasp you with the monster’s claws;
     Govern with his truncheon-saws;
     Hate, the shadow of a grain;
     You are lost in Westermain: 
     Earthward swoops a vulture sun,
     Nighted upon carrion: 
     Straightway venom wine-cups shout
     Toasts to One whose eyes are out: 
     Flowers along the reeling floor
     Drip henbane and hellebore: 
     Beauty, of her tresses shorn,
     Shrieks as nature’s maniac: 
     Hideousness on hoof and horn
     Tumbles, yapping in her track: 
     Haggard Wisdom, stately once,
     Leers fantastical and trips: 
     Allegory drums the sconce,
     Impiousness nibblenips. 
     Imp that dances, imp that flits,
     Imp o’ the demon-growing girl,
     Maddest! whirl with imp o’ the pits
     Round you, and with them you whirl
     Fast where pours the fountain-rout
     Out of Him whose eyes are out: 
     Multitudes on multitudes,
     Drenched in wallowing devilry: 
     And you ask where you may be,
     In what reek of a lair
     Given to bones and ogre-broods: 
     And they yell you Where. 
     Enter these enchanted woods,
     You who dare.

     A ballad of past meridian

     I

     Last night returning from my twilight walk
     I met the grey mist Death, whose eyeless brow
     Was bent on me, and from his hand of chalk
     He reached me flowers as from a withered bough: 
     O Death, what bitter nosegays givest thou!

     II

     Death said, I gather, and pursued his way. 
     Another stood by me, a shape in stone,
     Sword-hacked and iron-stained, with breasts of clay,
     And metal veins that sometimes fiery shone: 
     O Life, how naked and how hard when known!

     III

     Life said, As thou hast carved me, such am I.
     Then memory, like the nightjar on the pine,
     And sightless hope, a woodlark in night sky,
     Joined notes of Death and Life till night’s decline
     Of Death, of Life, those inwound notes are mine.

     The day of the daughter of Hades

     I

     He who has looked upon Earth
     Deeper than flower and fruit,
     Losing some hue of his mirth,
     As the tree striking rock at the root,
     Unto him shall the marvellous tale
     Of Callistes more humanly come
     With the touch on his breast than a hail
     From the markets that hum.

     II

     Now the youth footed swift to the dawn. 
     ’Twas the season when wintertide,
     In the higher rock-hollows updrawn,
     Leaves meadows to bud, and he spied,
     By light throwing shallow