The Tavern Of Despair
Don Marquis
The wraiths of murdered hopes and loves
Come whispering at the door,
Come creeping through the weeping mist
That drapes the barren moor;
But we within have turned the key
‘Gainst Hope and Love and Care,
Where Wit keeps tryst with Folly, at
The Tavern of Despair.
And we have come by divers ways
To keep this merry tryst,
But few of us have kept within
The Narrow Way, I wist;
For we are those whose ampler wits
And hearts have proved our curse—
Foredoomed to ken the better things
And aye to do the worse!
Long since we learned to mock ourselves;
And from self-mockery fell
To heedless laughter in the face
Of Heaven, Earth, and Hell.
We quiver ’neath, and mock, God’s rod;
We feel, and mock, His wrath;
We mock our own blood on the thorns
That rim the “Primrose Path.”
We mock the eerie glimmering shapes
That range the outer wold,
We mock our own cold hearts because
They are so dead and cold;
We flout the things we might have been
Had self to self proved true,
We mock the roses flung away,
We mock the garnered rue;
The fates that gibe have lessoned us;
There sups to-night on earth
No madder crew of wastrels than
This fellowship of mirth. . . .
(Of mirth . . . drink, fools!—nor let it flag
Lest from the outer mist
Creep in that other company
Unbidden to the tryst.
We’re grown so fond of paradox
Perverseness holds us thrall,
So what each jester loves the best
He mocks the most of all;
But as the jest and laugh go round,
Each in his neighbor’s eyes
Reads, while he flouts his heart’s desire,
The knowledge that he lies.
Not one of us but had some pearls
And flung them to the swine,
Not one of us but had some gift—
Some spark of fire divine—
Each might have been God’s minister
In the temple of some art—
Each feels his gift perverted move
Wormlike through his dry heart.
If God called Azrael to Him now
And bade Death bend the bow
Against the saddest heart that beats
Here on this earth below,
Not any sobbing breast would gain
The guerdon of that barb—
The saddest ones are those that wear
The jester’s motley garb.
Whose shout aye loudest rings, and whose
The maddest cranks and quips—
Who mints his soul to laughter’s coin
And wastes it with his lips—
Has grown too sad for sighs and seeks
To cheat himself with mirth;
We fools self-doomed to motley are
The weariest wights on earth!
But yet, for us whose brains and hearts
Strove aye in paths perverse,
Doomed still to know the better things
And still to do the worse,—
What else is there remains for us
But make a jest of care
And set the rafters ringing, in
Our Tavern of Despair?
