How often,
grim Caricature, must I jingle my bells and kiss your bestial brow? Until
my aim is true - the circle squared - how many missiles forfeit to
the void?
We rack our brains with subtle stratagems and ruin many massive armatures before the splendid creature may be seen for whom our fatal longing makes us sob!
To some their idol will not be revealed, and those doomed players, branded with disgrace, upbraid themselves and lacerate their breasts,
nursing one hope, sepulchral Capitol! - that Death as it fills the sky like another sun will make the flowers of their devising bloom!
I am the knife and the wound it deals, I am the slap and the cheek, I am the wheel and the broken limbs, hangman and victim both!
I am the vampire at my own veins, one of the great lost horde doomed for the rest of time, and beyond, 'to laugh - but smile no more.'
It is a terrible terrain no mortal eye has seen whose image still seduces me this morning as it fades. . .
Sleep is full of miracles! Some impulse in my dream had rid the region I devised of every growing thing,
and proud of the resulting scene I savored in my art the rapturous monotony of metal, water, stone. . .
A maze of stairs and arches formed an endless palace filled with basins where the bright cascades fell into tarnished gold;
....
Waking, dazzled, I was back in my familiar slum and felt returning to my soul the curse of all my cares;
with unrelenting strokes the clock insisted it was noon, and shadows poured out of the sky upon a sluggish world.
