In the grey skirts of the fog seamews skirl desolately,
And flick like bits of paper propelled by a wind
About the flabby sails of a departing ship
Crawling slowly down the low reaches
Of the river.
About the keel there is a bubbling and gurgling
Of grumpy water;
And as the prow noses out a way for itself,
It seems to weave a dream of bubbles and flashing foam,
A dream of strange islands whereto it is bound:
Pearl islands drenched with the dawn.
The palms flash under the immense dark sky,
Down which the sun dives to embrace the earth:
Drums boom and conches bray,
And with a crash of crimson cymbals
Suddenly appears above the polished backs of slaves
A king in a breastplate of gold
Gigantic
Amid tossed roses and swaying dancers
That melt into pale undulations and muffled echoes
'Mid the bubbling of the muddy lumpy water,
And the swirling of the seamews above the sullen river.

The last silk-floating thought has gone from the dandelion stem,
And the flesh of the stalk holds up for nothing a blank diadem.

So night's flood-winds have lifted my last desire from me,
And my hollow flesh stands up in the night like vanity.

As I stand on this hill, with the whitening cave of the city in front
And this Helen beside me, I am blank; being nothing, I bear the brunt

Of the nightly heavens overhead, like an immense, open eye,
Like a cat's distended pupil, that sparkles with little stars
As with thoughts that flash and crackle in far-off malignancy,
So distant, they cannot touch me, whom now nothing mars.

In front of me, yes, up the darkness, goes the gush of the lights of two towns,
As the breath which rushes upwards from the nostrils of an immense
Beast crouched across the globe, ready, if need be, to pounce
Across the space on the cat in heaven's hostile eminence.

All round me, above and below, the night's twin consciousness roars
With sounds that endlessly swell and sink like the storm of thought in the brain,
Lifting and falling, long gasps through the sluices, like silence that pours
Through invisible pulses, slowly, filling the night's dark vein.

The night is immense and awful, yet to me it is nothing at all.
Or rather 'tis I am nothing, here in the fur of the heather
Like an empty dandelion stalk, bereft of connection, small
And nakedly nothing 'twixt world and heaven, two creatures hostile together.

I in the fur of the world, alone; but this Helen close by!
How we hate one another to-night, hate, she and I
To numbness and nothingness; I dead, she refusing to die.
The female whose venom can more than kill, can numb and then nullify.