Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 31))

I feasted, a guest at life’s bridal,
And plucked with the roses no thorn;
I danced with the daughters of beauty
And sang with the princes of scorn;
I laughed, but, alas! in the revel
A voice like the challenge of doom,
And my joy like a torch in the tempest
Was quenched in a quiet of gloom;
For I glimpsed through a rift in the glory
A wraith, and it leered from a tomb.
Yea, the feast, that wild banquet of shadows,
Went out like a lamp in the wind,
And I was alone and around me
Was only a midnight of mind;
And out of the dead heart of darkness,
In a shroud like a garment of sighs,
There stalked like the shadow of murder
A spectre that cursed with her eyes,
A Memory, hooded with horror,
All red save the death in her eyes!
With my soul all alone in the silence,
With my dead in the dark all alone,
I called to my love, and around me
The silence was wounded with moan.
“All alone, all alone,” and forever
Wailed the wind to the night “all alone,”
And the night, like a forest of whispers,
Breathed back “all alone, all alone”;
And my hope was a city in ashes
And my life was a lingering groan;
And the morrow, that mother of roses,
Placed over my music a stone!
Leonard Van Noppen.

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