Reflecting on the Interregnum, 1250 by PrussiAntique, literature
Literature
Reflecting on the Interregnum, 1250
Testament of sleeplessness, hear my mindless murmurs: witness me, inglorious, at the day’s overthrow, the tyranny of silent hours. The sunset offers little by way of insight, of great revelation: questions obsess without recourse. Whereto should I go to find escape from all my present ills? I have here found no silence, little noise in answer to my noise. Liberation from barbarous thoughts is not forthcoming, despite the pyres, the rough colloquy of neophytes. If I ever should, God forbid, make tragedy from meagre thoughts, from a discontentment of little substance: a symptom, hap, of deeper things; of a nameless universal grief. Unhappy wakefulness, many a despotic oeuvre has given me pause. Wherefore this doubt, this reserve of mistrust, when mute compliance would me render a dullard subject sated with my
Midnight fire! On measured wings
Your course and glory gilds and gains.
The starlight pales; the cold moon wanes
Before your lofty wanderings.
Such beauty, glimmering on the rise,
Gleams high upon the painted night
Vermillion and ecstatic light,
And burns a wake through wintry skies.
But whereto bound, when dark and drear,
Sad echoes fill the earth below
With words of loss and grief? And lo,
A promised end now gathers near.
Yet onward go! Brave on, and vast
Encompass the great globe, and stay
The rolling dark that swallows day –
Till hope, like dawn, shines out at last.
Returning from the greying sea,
the level surging of the waves
ringing in my head,
I knew not what to say
when we met in the afternoon.
It had been daybreak when I left,
and you were with me when I woke:
a warmth that lay with me
bound close with homely joy,
all that a man should live to love.
Light promises of swift return,
and words of duty and renown,
and then I was away.
Dawn, day, dusk, night – again;
till twenty years lay in-between.
A minute’s pause of twenty years
and all that we would say remains
unsaid. The waves roll on,
the gulls cry shrilly out,
and sunlight gathers to the west.
Why must this silence linger still?
‘Der Wind pocht leise an die Tür.
Die öffnet sich mit hellem Geklirr.’
Moon-rushes, monochrome tones
of wind-wound marches
‘wie im Märchen’–
my child uttered
while I lay half-awake
in the dead of peace.
I could not, with compassion,
dispel the notion
of a world that could not be;
having drunk my fill,
from a small fount
with a small mouth.
Orisons, pounded into dull ears,
have stuck numb notes
into a dumb head.
The wind whistles where my brain
should fit:
1897
I felt but little joy when we first kissed
before the curtains to a lamp-lit room;
nor can I truly say you will be missed
when you depart, grown sweet with my perfume.
Cruel kindnesses, like ashes on the tongue
have numbed a heart whose praises you have sung
or whispered while we lay awake at night,–
a pause within a discourse of delight
without the burdens that we each must bear:
a sickly wife to whom you must return
with due devotion to her beck and care;
for me, six pounds of ash inside an urn,–
my duty, daily mourned. Quick passion cools.
We part in silence like a pair of fools:
not lovers; merely seekers of respite
from
We Sit Upon The Quay With Sphinxes by PrussiAntique, literature
Literature
We Sit Upon The Quay With Sphinxes
We sit upon the quay with sphinxes,
plying them with words and wine:
yours a vintage old as Rome is;
Istanbul’s a babe to mine,–
drinking as the twin pharoses
rise up from a starry line.
Above us in the rosy aether
thrums a faerie’s silk guitar,–
frosty whirligigs out-whisper
secrets netted from afar,
even as the swelling vesper
crosses over sail and spar.
Behind us are the golden chambers
where the rakes and princelings pass,–
nearby we can hear one clamber
down into the rooms of brass,
where a lady’s locks of amber
darkly frame the looking glass.
Beside us f
Ode to Hushabye Valley by PrussiAntique, literature
Literature
Ode to Hushabye Valley
Hushabye! I came upon this misty land
Unknowing of the splendours hid within:
Such things I ere had scarce partaken in
Here seem complete with beauty, mild and grand.
A face of marble greets me sweet and fair
Beneath the archways of a bygone year;
Yielding of joys that savour quaint and queer;
Embracing all with warmth beyond compare.
Valley of long-lost glories echoing near,
Amidst the kindly voices of a faerie race!
Loveliest is this strange and languid place,
Light with tales of tenderness and love sincere.
Enfold me in your art, and bid me never roam:
Yon castle walls have seemed to me a fonder home.
The waves draw up the low and level strand:
long echoes roll and roar, recede, return
from out this ghostly misted hinterland
of copses thin, and rooted in the sand,
and solitude that deepens turn by turn.
All is still that yet breathes upon the mound,
and all that glori’d once now lies beneath;
to slumber nameless in the nameless ground
in this unknown retreat of half-heard sound,
and trackless sand, and all-forgotten heath.
Who was it first that clomb this grassless height
and look’d upon that changeless Baltic shore
in gladness; or strode down the yawning bight
when daylight yielded to the starless ni
Reflecting on the Interregnum, 1250 by PrussiAntique, literature
Literature
Reflecting on the Interregnum, 1250
Testament of sleeplessness, hear my mindless murmurs: witness me, inglorious, at the day’s overthrow, the tyranny of silent hours. The sunset offers little by way of insight, of great revelation: questions obsess without recourse. Whereto should I go to find escape from all my present ills? I have here found no silence, little noise in answer to my noise. Liberation from barbarous thoughts is not forthcoming, despite the pyres, the rough colloquy of neophytes. If I ever should, God forbid, make tragedy from meagre thoughts, from a discontentment of little substance: a symptom, hap, of deeper things; of a nameless universal grief. Unhappy wakefulness, many a despotic oeuvre has given me pause. Wherefore this doubt, this reserve of mistrust, when mute compliance would me render a dullard subject sated with my
Midnight fire! On measured wings
Your course and glory gilds and gains.
The starlight pales; the cold moon wanes
Before your lofty wanderings.
Such beauty, glimmering on the rise,
Gleams high upon the painted night
Vermillion and ecstatic light,
And burns a wake through wintry skies.
But whereto bound, when dark and drear,
Sad echoes fill the earth below
With words of loss and grief? And lo,
A promised end now gathers near.
Yet onward go! Brave on, and vast
Encompass the great globe, and stay
The rolling dark that swallows day –
Till hope, like dawn, shines out at last.
Returning from the greying sea,
the level surging of the waves
ringing in my head,
I knew not what to say
when we met in the afternoon.
It had been daybreak when I left,
and you were with me when I woke:
a warmth that lay with me
bound close with homely joy,
all that a man should live to love.
Light promises of swift return,
and words of duty and renown,
and then I was away.
Dawn, day, dusk, night – again;
till twenty years lay in-between.
A minute’s pause of twenty years
and all that we would say remains
unsaid. The waves roll on,
the gulls cry shrilly out,
and sunlight gathers to the west.
Why must this silence linger still?
‘Der Wind pocht leise an die Tür.
Die öffnet sich mit hellem Geklirr.’
Moon-rushes, monochrome tones
of wind-wound marches
‘wie im Märchen’–
my child uttered
while I lay half-awake
in the dead of peace.
I could not, with compassion,
dispel the notion
of a world that could not be;
having drunk my fill,
from a small fount
with a small mouth.
Orisons, pounded into dull ears,
have stuck numb notes
into a dumb head.
The wind whistles where my brain
should fit:
1897
I felt but little joy when we first kissed
before the curtains to a lamp-lit room;
nor can I truly say you will be missed
when you depart, grown sweet with my perfume.
Cruel kindnesses, like ashes on the tongue
have numbed a heart whose praises you have sung
or whispered while we lay awake at night,–
a pause within a discourse of delight
without the burdens that we each must bear:
a sickly wife to whom you must return
with due devotion to her beck and care;
for me, six pounds of ash inside an urn,–
my duty, daily mourned. Quick passion cools.
We part in silence like a pair of fools:
not lovers; merely seekers of respite
from
We Sit Upon The Quay With Sphinxes by PrussiAntique, literature
Literature
We Sit Upon The Quay With Sphinxes
We sit upon the quay with sphinxes,
plying them with words and wine:
yours a vintage old as Rome is;
Istanbul’s a babe to mine,–
drinking as the twin pharoses
rise up from a starry line.
Above us in the rosy aether
thrums a faerie’s silk guitar,–
frosty whirligigs out-whisper
secrets netted from afar,
even as the swelling vesper
crosses over sail and spar.
Behind us are the golden chambers
where the rakes and princelings pass,–
nearby we can hear one clamber
down into the rooms of brass,
where a lady’s locks of amber
darkly frame the looking glass.
Beside us f
Ode to Hushabye Valley by PrussiAntique, literature
Literature
Ode to Hushabye Valley
Hushabye! I came upon this misty land
Unknowing of the splendours hid within:
Such things I ere had scarce partaken in
Here seem complete with beauty, mild and grand.
A face of marble greets me sweet and fair
Beneath the archways of a bygone year;
Yielding of joys that savour quaint and queer;
Embracing all with warmth beyond compare.
Valley of long-lost glories echoing near,
Amidst the kindly voices of a faerie race!
Loveliest is this strange and languid place,
Light with tales of tenderness and love sincere.
Enfold me in your art, and bid me never roam:
Yon castle walls have seemed to me a fonder home.
The waves draw up the low and level strand:
long echoes roll and roar, recede, return
from out this ghostly misted hinterland
of copses thin, and rooted in the sand,
and solitude that deepens turn by turn.
All is still that yet breathes upon the mound,
and all that glori’d once now lies beneath;
to slumber nameless in the nameless ground
in this unknown retreat of half-heard sound,
and trackless sand, and all-forgotten heath.
Who was it first that clomb this grassless height
and look’d upon that changeless Baltic shore
in gladness; or strode down the yawning bight
when daylight yielded to the starless ni
Love Lyrics from an Aberration by PrussiAntique, literature
Literature
Love Lyrics from an Aberration
My love! You are here when the moon waxes gibbous
and trembling starlight rests low on the breach;
ascend with me now to those altars amorphous
that rise from an antique and alien beach,
where polyps unravel and pulsate enormous
with tenebrous echoes of R’lyehian speech.
Accursed are the shuddering planets that burble or gloom
in a horror of cosmic proportions;
while maddening flutes greet the shambling doom
that has spawned from the foetid confusion,
and an odious stench permeates to the nethermost room
from the gibbering wreck of our union.
We’ll pass through the unhallowed ebony gates of the Thir