Sestettes

I

Thou shalt rejoice for woe:
The pallid goblet old,
That holds thy life’s dull wine,
Is made thereby divine;
Stain’d with a purpler glow,
And wrought in stranger gold.

II

From the suck’d lees of pain,
We have won joy again:
Death shall thee not distress:
That sleepy bitterness
To thy kist lips shall be
The supreme exstasy.

III

Put ashes on your golden body bare,
Puissant as musk, bitter-sweet as to die,
Ashes upon your arms that grow not old,
And on your unassuaged lips of gold:
So we will wanton in love’s sepulchre,
And mock the face of Death with blasphemy.

IV

I love you more than Death: your mournful head,
Your shrouding hair, and your unfathom’d eyes,
And your white body beautiful, alas,
Priestess and victim in love’s holy mass⁠ ⁠…
Your flesh that loves, and loving ever dies⁠ ⁠…
I could not love you more if you were dead.

V

Death is death; the little host that squirms,
The smell, the dark, the coffin clos’d, and I
So soft, so soft; no movement, and no breath;
No ears, no nose, no eyeballs; Death is Death;
The sepulchre, no sight, no sound, no cry,
And always; Death is Death; the worms! the worms

VI

Not for your evil is my spirit sad⁠—
I mourn because you are not really bad;
Because your beauty’s perfect cruelty
Is ever marr’d with pity and distress,
And you still show within your wickedness
The poor stale weakness of humanity.

VII

I am as one that thirsteth for all things,
As one that holdeth to his lips the cup,
With lower’d eyes searching the wine’s dull flame.
No thing may I refuse among all things,
Till, having drain’d unto its dregs the cup,
I may return into the astral flame.

VIII

Heart, we have wholly drain’d the cup of sadness,
And found in sadness no reality;
Now from the night of sadness let us go.
Henceforward let us drain the cup of gladness,
And find in gladness no reality;
From sadness then and gladness let us go.