BEHOLD me waiting-waiting for the knife.
A little while, and at a leap I storm
The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform,
The drunken dark, the little death-in-life.
The gods are good to me: I have no wife,
No innocent child, to think of as I near
The fateful minute; nothing all-too dear
Unmans me for my bout of passive strife.
Yet am I tremulous and a trifle sick,
And, face to face with chance, I shrink a little :
My hopes are strong, my will is something weak.
Here comes the basket? Thank you. I am ready.
But, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle :
You carry Cæsar and his fortunes-steady!
You are carried in a basket,
Like a carcase from the shambles,
To the theatre, a cockpit
Where they stretch you on a table.
Then they bid you close your eyelids,
And they mask you with a napkin,
And the anesthetic reaches
Hot and subtle through your being.
And you gasp and reel and shudder
In a rushing, swaying rapture,
While the voices at your elbow
Fade-receding-fainter-farther.
Lights about you shower and tumble, And your blood seems crystallising--Edged and vibrant, yet within you Racked and hurried back and forward.
Then the lights grow fast and furious,
And hear a noise of waters,
you
And you wrestle, blind and dizzy,
In an agony of effort,
Till a sudden lull accepts you,
you sound an utter darkness
And awaken with a struggle
On a hushed, attentive audience.
LIKE as a flamelet blanketed in smoke,
So through the anaesthetic shows my life;
So flashes and so fades my thought, at strife
With the strong stupor that I heave and choke
And sicken at, it is so foully sweet.
Faces look strange from space-and disappear.
Far voices, sudden loud, offend my ear-
And hush as sudden. Then my senses fleet:
All were a blank, save for this dull, new pain
That grinds my leg and foot; and brokenly
Time and the place glimpse on to me again;
And, unsurprised, out of uncertainty,
I wake-relapsing-somewhat faint and fain,
To an immense, complacent dreamery.
LIVED on one's back,
In the long hours of repose,
Life is a practical nightmare-
Hideous asleep or awake.
Ache, and the mattress,
Run into boulders and hummocks,
Glows like a kiln, while the bedclothes―
Tumbling, importunate, daft—
Ramble and roll, and the gas,
Screwed to its lowermost,
An inevitable atom of light,
Haunts, and a stertorous sleeper
Snores me to hate and despair.
All the old time
Surges malignant before me;
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