If Only Tonight We Could Sleep

The Death of Lovers, The Living Flames and Vampires, the poems

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THE DEATH OF LOVERS

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There shall be couches whence faint odours rise,

Divans like sepulchres, deep and profound;

Strange flowers that bloomed beneath diviner skies

The death-bed of our love shall breathe around.

And guarding their last embers till the end,

Our hearts shall be the torches of the shrine,

And their two leaping flames shall fade and blend

In the twin mirrors of your soul and mine.

And through the eve of rose and mystic blue

A beam of love shall pass from me to you,

Like a long sigh charged with a last farewell;

And later still an angel, flinging wide

The gates, shall bring to life with joyful spell

The tarnished mirrors and the flames that died.

 

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THE LIVING FLAME

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They pass before me, these Eyes full of light.

Eyes made magnetic by some angel wise;

The holy brothers pass before my sight.

And cast their diamond fires in my dim eyes.

They keep me from all sin and error grave.

They set me in the path whence Beauty came;

They are my servants, and I am their slave,

And all my soul obeys the living flame.

Beautiful Eyes that gleam with mystic light

As candles lighted at full noon ; the sun

Dims not your flame phantastical and bright.

You sing the dawn; they celebrate life done;

Marching you chant my soul's awakening hymn,

Stars that no sun has ever made grow dim!

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THE METAMORPHOSES OF THE VAMPIRE

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"...I have, dear learned man, the power to rifle

Flesh in my velveted arms, the strength to stifle

Certain, when I am naked, such igniting 

To furnace-heat, as they my flesh are biting,

Who on this mattress swoon, these to enslave me:

The impotent angels would be damned to save me!

 

 

 

 

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