THE DYING PANTHEIST TO THE PRIEST

Take your ivory Christ away:

No dying god shall have my knee,

While live gods breathe in this wild wind

And shout from yonder dashing sea.

When March brings back the Adonis flower

No more the white processions meet,

With incense to the risen lord,

About the pillared temple's feet.

From tusk of boar, from thrust of spear

The dead rise not. At Eastertide

The same sun dances on their graves —

Love's darling and the Crucified.

Yet still the year's returning tide

Flows greenly round each ruined plinth,

Breaking on fallen shafts in foam

Of crocus and of hyacinth:

Tossing a spray of swallows high,

To flutter lightly on the breeze

And fleck with tiny spots of shade

The sunshine on the broken frieze.

I know the gray-green asphodels

Still sheet the dim Elysian mead,

And ever by dark Lethe's wells

The poppy sheds her ghostly seed.

And once — O once!— when sunset lay

Blood red across the winter sea,

Where on the sands we drained our flasks

And danced and cried our Evoe!

Among the tossing cakes of ice

And spouting of the frozen spray,

We saw their white limbs twist and whirl —

The ancient sea-gods at their play.

The gold-brown liquor burned my heart,

The icy tempest stung my brow:

The twanging of Apollo's lyre —

I heard it as I hear it now.

O no, the old gods are not dead:

I think that they will never die;

But, I, who lie upon this bed

In mortal anguish — what am I?

A wave that rises with a breath

Above the infinite watery plain,

To foam and sparkle in the sun

A moment ere it sink again.

The eternal undulation runs:

A man, I die: perchance to be,

Next life, a white-throat on the wind,

A daffodil on Tempe's lea.

They lied who said that Pan was dead:

Life was, life is, and life shall be.

So take away your crucifix —

The everliving gods for me!