Page:Modern Czech Poetry, 1920.djvu/67

49

Comrade thou of melancholy, Thou, my vagrant spirit's friend, Underneath what sky hereafter Will our lives of beggary end?

Our annals, silvery and drab, Within what land, when will they wane? When will the music that we cherished Be wafted in a last refrain?

O, bygone love an echo rouses In the heart's chords again. No more! Hail to ourselves, to earth, to dreaming! A requiem to the days of yore.

In golden wine the tyrant mood Of memory we shall immerse. And we shall sing, and shall forget Our love, our fury and our curse. “Torso of Life” (1901).

A house in ruins. On the crannied walls Moss gluttonously crawls And lichens in a spongy rabble.

The yard is rank with nettle-thickets And toad-flax. In the poisoned water-pit Rats have a drinking-lair.