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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