Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/77



strength had fed on this when Death's white arms

Came sleeved in vapors and miasmal dew,

Curling across the jungle's ferny floor,

Becking each fevered brain. On bleak divides,

Where Sleep grew niggardly for nipping cold

That twinged blue lips into a mouthèd curse,

Not back to Seville and its sunny plains

Winged their brief-biding dreams, but once again,

Lords of a palace in Tenochtitlan,

They guarded Montezuma's treasure-hoard.

Gold, like some finny harvest of the sea,

Poured out knee deep around the rifted floors,

Shiny and sparkling,—arms and crowns and rings:

Gold, sweet to toy with as beloved hair,—

To plunge the lustful, crawling fingers down,

Arms elbow deep, and draw them out again,

And watch the glinting metal trickle off,

Even as at night some fisherman, home bound

With speckled cargo in his hollow keel

Caught off Campeche or the Isle of Pines,

Dips in his paddle, lifts it forth again,

And laughs to see the luminous white drops

Fall back in flakes of fire.... Gold was the dream

That cheered that desperate enterprise. And now?...

Victory waited on the arms of Spain,

Fallen was the lovely city by the lake,

The sunny Venice of the western world; 27