The Age of a Dream (1890)

• Imageries of dreams reveal a gracious age:
  Black armour, falling lace, and altar lights at morn.
  The courtesy of saints, their gentleness and scorn,
  Lights on an earth more fair, than shone from Plato's page:
  The courtesy of knights, fair calm and sacred rage:
  The courtesy of love, sorrow for love's sake borne.
  Vanished, those high conceits! Desolate and forlorn,
  We hunger against hope for the lost heritage.

• Now from the broken tower, what solemn bell still tolls,
  Mourning what piteous death? Answer, O saddened souls!
  Who mourn the death of beauty and the death of grace.

By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross (1895)

• Alone he rides, alone,
  The fair and fatal king:
  Dark night is all his own,
  That strange and solemn thing.

• Which are more full of fate:
  The stars; or those sad eyes?
  Which are more still and great:
  Those brows; or the dark skies?

• Vanquished in life, his death
  By beauty made amends:
  The passing of his breath
  Won his defeated ends.

• Our wearier spirit faints,
  Vexed in the world‘s employ:
  His soul was of the saints;
  And art to him was joy.

• King, tried in fires of woe!
  Men hunger for thy grace:
  And through the night I go,
  Loving thy mournful face.

  Yet, when the city sleeps;
  When all the cries are still:
  The stars and heavenly deeps
  Work out a perfect will.

The Dark Angel (1895)

Full text at Wikisource

• Dark Angel, with thine aching lust
  To rid the world of penitence:
  Malicious Angel, who still dost
  My soul such subtile violence!

• Through thee, the gracious Muses turn,
  To Furies, O mine Enemy!
  And all the things of beauty burn
  With flames of evil ecstasy.

  Because of thee, the land of dreams
  Becomes a gathering place of fears:
  Until tormented slumber seems
  One vehemence of useless tears.

• The ardour of red flame is thine,
  And thine the steely soul of ice:
  Thou poisonest the fair design
  Of nature, with unfair device.

  Apples of ashes, golden bright;
  Waters of bitterness, how sweet!
  O banquet of a foul delight,
  Prepared by thee, dark Paraclete!

• Thou art the whisper in the gloom,
  The hinting tone, the haunting laugh:
  Thou art the adorner of my tomb,
  The minstrel of mine epitaph.

• I fight thee, in the Holy Name!
  Yet, what thou dost, is what God saith:
  Tempter! should I escape thy flame,
  Thou wilt have helped my soul from Death:

  The second Death, that never dies,
  That cannot die, when time is dead:
  Live Death, wherein the lost soul cries,
  Eternally uncomforted.

• Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so,
  Dark Angel! triumph over me:
  Lonely, unto the Lone I go;
  Divine, to the Divinity.