* MOON-MOTH *

Beyond the sun, beside a crystal sea

She ruled her isle of lapis lazuli.

Her palaces of marble, agate, jade

Rose like a sheaf of savage flowers and laid

A splendour on the waves that only night could fade.

And for her nameless sins and cruelties,

Murders of love-mad men and lusts and lies,

Her sentence fell and she was swept away

From flaming pomps and crimes and royal sway,

Hurled from the joy of life, rapt from the light of day.

Yet, being fairest far and loveliest

Of any in a woman’ s body drest,

Fate banished not her beauty from the earth —

Only her evil happiness and mirth,

And left her living dead, doomed to eternal dearth.

The Shadows that do mould our destiny

Willed her a moon-moth evermore to be —

Woman and insect one in mingled state,

A chimera without a peer, or mate,

To ancient Night inscribed and Darkness dedicate.

By day she sleeps, even as the vampires sleep,

Behind her sombre wings, that fold and keep

Her body’ s glory hidden: they are brown,

Grizzled and amber, jagged and slashed adown

With faded serecloth grey — a winding-sheet for gown.

And while she hides within some tawny brake

Her shard but echoes the dead leaf and snake,

Where, tranced in slumber, through the long day’ s prime

Her motley coverings harmonious chime

With sad, crepuscular shades in dusky, twilight rhyme.

Invisible thus; but when returning night

Drowns with a purple torrent all the light,

She rises woman high and spreads her wing,

A rare, unparagoned, unearthly thing

Beyond the dream of joy or grief’ s imagining.

Upon her head two radiant feathery rays

Of crocus fire flash upward; but the gaze

From her dim, poisonous, and anguished eyes

Throbs out with passionate, violet miseries,

In hate that never fades and woe that never dies.

Her body, like the heart of a white rose,

Shines in the petals of her wings and glows;

Her pinions — azure, lilac, marigold —

Wide on the dark deliciously unfold

As any rainbow bright, as any glacier cold.

Lit with her own and inner gleam, she shines

Like a low meteor through the lians and vines,

Flies upward high beyond the forest towers,

Then swoops and hawks along night-hidden bowers,

To hang on murmuring plumes and drink the livid flowers.

Most fair, most foul, at Moira’ s stern decree

The radiant monster wanders wretchedly

Haunting each strand and isle of that lone shore

Where never human eye may see her more,

Or sentient soul delight and tremble and adore.

Yet deep in dreams I often faintly hear,

Like a sad wind that strokes my sleeping ear,

By fairy waters of that far lagoon,

The moon-moth wailing, wailing to the moon

Through many a silver night at hour of plenilune.