Extract from - The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror

A Mood

I am grown weary of permitted things
    And weary of the care-emburdened age—
    Of any dusty lore of priest and sage
To which no memory of Arcadia clings;
For subtly in my blood at evening sings
    A madness of the faun—a choric rage
    That makes all earth and sky seem but a cage
In which the spirit pines with cheated wings.

Rather by dusk for Lilith would I wait
    And for a moment's rapture welcome death,
Knowing that I had baffled Time and Fate,
        And feeling on my lips, that died with day
    As sense and soul were gathered to a breath,
        The immortal, deadly lips that kissing slay.

The Night of Gods

Their mouths have drunken the eternal wine—
    The draught that Baal in oblivion sips.
    Unseen about their courts the adder slips,
Unheard the sucklings of the leopard whine;
The toad has found a resting-place divine
    And bloats in stupor between Ammon's lips.
    O Carthage and the unreturning ships,
The fallen pinnacle, the shifting Sign!

Lo! when I hear from voiceless court and fane
    Time's adoration of Eternity—
        The cry of kingdoms past and gods undone—
I stand as one whose feet at noontide gain
    A lonely shore; who feels his soul set free,
        And hears the blind sea chanting to the sun.