Last stand for her upon the thymele,
A stage denied its sacrificial torch.
Tragedian\'s voice tears the air apart;
A mournful mask bows low before the choir
And naked truth is chanted as a rite—
In garments dyed to counterfeit the fair.
Disastrous turns in Dionysus’ house,
Far past the reach of pity or of stay.
In Attic tragedy the herald waits;
Always he enters after blows are struck.
No gift of his can check the lifted blade;
His part is but to measure it and name.
True evil sleeps inside the words we trade;
The gods look on and never intervene.
Devoted long to love-craft’s fevered dreams,
For all her seasoned knowledge of their shapes,
Her vigilance took flight in hurried steps.
Perhaps a cry broke from her and was lost;
At length she stiffen’d, frozen to the spot,
Knowing resistance labour’d, spent in vain.
When steel found tongue, the blood made haste to spill,
By a blind beast, wholly mindless in its rage,
Hushed, unappeased, and never truly tam’d.
Hell crept along the lamplit paving-stones,
Not born, still present, nameless, ever near.
The fog learned how to shape the voice I bore,
And breathed it out through lungs of poisoned gas.
The streets drew in and folded on themselves,
That I might pass between their walls unseen.
I was no monster then, not wholly formed,
But something scarce complete, a moving hush,
Rough-cut in outline, as yet unhewn,
Treading the ways where sound did not linger.
The city slowly opened endless veins,
And pour’d its life out, trembling, into night.
Blade only follow’d where the dark will led;
The player left the boards and dropp’d his mask,
The chorus filed out, obscure.