Danse Macabre - David Park Barnitz

I saw a line of corpses old,

Dead with diseases manifold,

Solemnly dancing'neath the moon.

Their perish'd limbs moved to the tune

Of some worm-orchestra unheard--

A sight enormously absurd.

First in the valse, with fishy eye

Tripped something dead of leprosy,

All silvery like a virgin's breast.

A buried glutton danced with zest,

All greenish and all dropsical,

Like a deform'd and vital ball.

The third was very beautiful,

Of charming small-pox sorelets full;

A small-pox ending, corpse, was thine.

There danced one in that naked line

Whose corpse was rotten with much love;

I wish the white worms joy thereof.

A suicidal corpse came next,

Who wish'd to illustrate the text:

--better to be chewed than to chew;

So he became a worm-ragout

And cholera-corpses weirdly black

Carrying their dead flesh like a sack,

Vals'd graceful beneath the sun.

Blue fever, and Consumption,

And hollow-pated lunacy.

Bowed, in that dance with courtesy

Cover'd with sores from foot to head,

Like flowers in a flower-bed,

Strange plagues all beautifully green

Went pirouetting through the scene;

And shrunken corpses dead of Age.--

These things went dancing o'er the stage.

Smelling of graves and worm-tooth scars,--

Death's musty-meated avatars."

From "The Book of Jade" by David Park Barnitz