A Houyhnhnm's Scrapbook/Number 1/Homage to H. P. Lovecraft

The young boy watched, as the sun on the bay
turned honey streaks, (and where the gulls flew past
the sunset flickered,) how the closing day
drew, in its wake, the small skiff of the moon

that sailed up the slate sky: the clouds, like waves,
formed silent blasts that blew across his mind
a stinging spray, from airy seas, till far
he heard a clanging in the wind away.

He dreamed himself a mariner in Space,
one with those Indians, or Arthur, who
in their sad, burning boats, famed toward the sky,
to wake and read their fate in the moon’s face.

A lonely boy, without a sail to spy
in the long land, he dreamed of distant seas,
and the wide, ivory home of the silent moon.
The stars were rich as wine in their star-froth,

and as he dreamed, he felt a velvet tug
at his thin sleeves, and looked about, and saw
beyond all fear and wonder, that he stood
not by a bedroom window, but in a Court

where Arthur, helmeted and sad and gray,
standing before him, formed slow words to hear:
“Now you are come to us,” the old king said,
“you must know we have waited long for you

to sing our losses, though you cannot stay.”
Rewards and plenties were in the boy’s gaze.
There he spied Pontiac, and Billy the Kid,
reckless Orlando, and those dreadful twins

Faustus and Merlin, of whom he had read.
He could not yet believe that he was dead.
“Tell me,” he started. Arthur said, “I will,”
and bending low, he whispered. Like the wind

that riffles through the trees, his words fell forth,
till the young lad was drunk, as on star-froth.
In the clear fields bells sounded, rising slow
as tinkle of first foxes in that land

of the owl’s bush, where toad, tree, stream and moonlight
whispered strange words, and like a horn, the sea
called out his war to him. Then he awoke.
His mother wondered that he seemed so pale.

“Go out and play,” she said; “it’s a bright day.”
He thought of Mordred, and the sea-shell south,
the seven busy sins, and the falling sun.
Of time his presence, he was lost to time,

dreaming of a rich wreckage on the moon.
The night came, Mordred, and his word ran wild:
there is a lucky kingdom we shall lose:
King Agony will win the bony plain.