The Nightmare

A sunset of copper and gold had just broken down and gone to pieces
in the west, and grey colours were crawling over everything in earth
and heaven; also a wind was growing, a wind that laid a cold finger
upon flesh and spirit. The bushes at the back of my garden began to
whisper like conspirators; and then to wave like wild hands in signal.
I was trying to read by the last light that died on the lawn
a long poem of the decadent period, a poem about the old gods
of Babylon and Egypt, about their blazing and obscene temples,
their cruel and colossal faces.

"Or didst thou love the God of Flies who plagued
the Hebrews and was splashed
With wine unto the waist, or Pasht who had green
beryls for her eyes?"

I read this poem because I had to review it for the Daily News;
still it was genuine poetry of its kind. It really gave out
an atmosphere, a fragrant and suffocating smoke that seemed really
to come from the Bondage of Egypt or the Burden of Tyre There is not
much in common (thank God) between my garden with the grey-green
English sky-line beyond it, and these mad visions of painted
palaces huge, headless idols and monstrous solitudes of red
or golden sand. Nevertheless (as I confessed to myself) I can
fancy in such a stormy twilight some such smell of death and fear.
The ruined sunset really looks like one of their ruined temples:
a shattered heap of gold and green marble. A black flapping thing
detaches itself from one of the sombre trees and flutters to another.