But who is this so broken with distress
That steals like mist into my loneliness? 
Why art thou weeping there, disconsolate child? 
Thy tears fall like the waters of a well,
And drip in silver notes upon the sands. 
What is thy sorrow?  Ah, what man can tell
The shapeless fancies that unwelcome dwell
Within thy brain, the spectres, dark and wild
That haunt the spirit of a child? 
Mayhap thou weepest for the embattled lands,
The bloody ruin of decaying realms
That a war overwhelms
And buries deep in the dust of history? 
He raises his wet eyes and looks at me,
His boyish face full of a yearning,
An ancient pain,
As of a ghost long dead who yearns to live again,
And answers, “In myself, thy thoughts returning
To other times shall slumber in the past,
And be a child again, and die at last
In the protecting arms of our great Mother
Who bore us both, O well-beloved brother. 
Thou in thy sorry dreams, I in my childish grief,
Thy heart in tears, mine eyes amazed with tears,
Thy sorrow rich with the repining years,
My sorrow frail as childhood, and as brief.” 
Who art thou, haunting boy, nocturnal elf? 
“I am the Dead; the Dead that was thyself.” 
Then falls a darkness on that starless shore. 
Afar I hear the closing of a door....

I see on a sharp hill above the Styx,
The bruised Christ upon his crucifix,
And racked in anguish on his either side
Hang Buddha and Mohammed crucified. 
Their heavy blood falls in a monotone
Like deep well-water dropping on a stone. 
None moves, none breaks the silence; on those roods
Eternal suffering triumphant broods. 
Prometheus from his cliff of wild unrest
Mocks them and draws the vulture to his breast. 
Each year upon a darker Calvary
Are hung the pallid victims of the tree,
And none will watch with them, for none can see
As I once saw, unending agony,
Save where Prometheus from his dizzy place
Regards those sufferers with scornful face,
And his loud laughter rings through empty Space....

I can see nothing now, and only hear
Through the thick atmosphere
A deep perpetual well, that sad and slow,
Intones the knell of ages long ago,
And ages that no man can tell or know,
Whose shadows roll before them on the sky,
Black with forebodings of futurity.

Sweet sounds through midnight, liquid interlude,
Voice of the lonely souls that yearn and brood,
Voice of the unseen Life, the unsubdued,
What wonder that He draweth nigh to taste
Of your cool waters.  Hail thou nameless One,
Fair stranger from a realm beyond the Sun,
Knowing that thou art God I do not fear,—­
Speak to me, raise me from my life’s long dream. 
  “The whole night through thou liest here
Beside the well that waters Lethe’s stream,
And still thou dost not drink; O Man make haste;
Ere long the dawn will pour adown the waste,