LINES TO A YOUNG LADY VIOLINIST ON HER PLAYING IN A GREEN DRESS DESIGNED BY THE AUTHOR HER dress clings like a snake of emerald And gold and ruby to her swaying shape; In its constraint she sways, entranced, enthralled, Her teeth set lest her rapture should escape The parted lips --- Oh mouth of pomegranate! Is not Persephone with child of Fate? What sunlit snows of rose and ivory Her breasts are, starting from the green, great moons Filling the blue night with white ecstasy Of rippling rhythms, of tumultuous tunes. Artemis tears the gauzes from her gorge, And violates Hephaestus at his forge. Then the mad lightnings of her magic bow! They rave and roar upon the stricken wood, Swift shrieks of death, solemnities too slow For birth. Infernal lust of dragon-hued Devils, sublimest song of Angel choirs, Echo, and do not utter, her desires! I am Danae in the shower of gold This Zeus flings forth, exhausted and possessed, {13} Each atom of my being raped and rolled Beneath her car of music into rest Deeper than death, more desperate than life, The agony of primaeval slime at strife. I am the ecstasy of infamy. Tossed like a meteor when the Gods play ball, Racked like Ixion, like Pasiphae Torn by the leaping life, with myrrh and gall My throat made bitter, I am crucified Like Christ with my dead selves on either side. She stabs me to the heart with every thrust Of her wild bow, the pitiless hail of sound; Her smile is murder --- the red lips of lust And the white teeth of death! Her eyes profound As hell, and frenzied with hell's love and hate, Gleam grey as God, glare steadier than fate. She gloats upon my torture as I writhe. Her head falls back, her eyes turn back, she shakes And trembles. A sharp spasm takes the lithe Limbs, and her body with her spirit aches. The sweat breaks out on her; there bursts a flood Of shrieks; she bubbles at the mouth with blood. As Satan fell from heaven, so she crashes Upon my corpse; one long ensanguine groan Ends her; the soul has burnt itself to ashes; The spirit is incorporate with its own, The abiding spirit of life, love, and light And liberty, fixed in the infinite. {14} There is the silence, there the night. Therein Nor space nor time nor being may intrude; There is no force to move, no fate to spin, Nor God nor Satan in the solitude. O Pagan and O Panic Pentecost! Lost! lost eternally! --- for ever lost ALEISTER CROWLEY. {15}