Part
II
Mad Sonnet
Lo, in the night I cry out, in the night,
God! and my voice shall howl into the sky!
I am weary of seeing shapeless things that fly,
And flap into my face in their vile flight;
I am weary of dead things that crowd into my sight,
I am weary of hearing horrible corpses that cry,
God! I am weary of that lidless Eye
That comes and stares at me, O God of light!
All, all the world is become a dead blur,
God! God! and I, stricken with hideous blight,
Crouch in the black corners, and I dare not stir.
I am aweary of my evil plight.
If thou art not a dead corpse in thy sky,
Send thou down Death into my loathed sty!
The House of Youth
Far in the melancholy hills it stands,
Far off; and through the vista of the years,
Down which my soul its helpless journey steers,
It flames a fire to lighten all the lands,
A fire that burns me and a flame that brands
Me, whose dead days pass slow as heavy tears.
The road my footsteps tread is dim and still,
There darkness abides and silence endlessly,
And the low way mine eyes can scarcely see;
And yet the light and sound from that far hill
Like the sky’s fire my weary pathway fill,
So that it seems a place of life to be.
The world is but a background for it there,
There where it stands, loud like a beaten lyre,
And flames blood-red like some vast funeral-pyre,
Whereat my heart to fail doth not forbear;
Of all the things that have been made soe’er
Only the House remains, a quenchless fire.
Ah God, that this thing were not in the world—
The hateful House that flames with light and song
And weary singing all the ages long;
Ah that ev’n this might in the dust be hurl’d,
And crush’d and slain, even as my heart, where curl’d
The kindly armies of the worm do throng.
Yea, surely I have seen it long ago,
Far sunken in the weary dust of time;
Yea surely even that stair so hard to climb
I climb’d, and strode its hallways to and fro;
The which were bright with many lamps aglow,
And loud with choristers in ceaseless chime.
De Profundis
Out of the grave, O God, I call to thee,
Be thou not deaf unto my dolorous cry;
My soul is fallen down into the sty,
And the dead things are crawling over me;
O thou my God, give me the worm to flee,
Out from the pit’s depths I would rise on high.
Again am I fallen down into the grave,
My soul is sunken in the place of slime,
I am too weak its loathed walls to climb,
Thou, only thou, O God, art strong to save;
Lo, in mine eyes the worms have made their cave,
And squatting toads oppress me all the time.
Yea, from this pit I have crawl’d out before;
With groans and cries and many a dolorous fall,
I have climbed up its impregnable wall;
I shall not rise now from its slimy floor;
O God, hear thou my lamentable call,
Or from the grave I come not evermore.
I am become a housing for the toad;
All things are fled wherein I took delight;
There is no joy here, and there is no light;
O God, O God, I have reap’d what I sow’d;
I am become a dead thing in the night,
And in my heart the worms have their abode.
Lo, from my body all my might is fled,
And all the light is gone out of mine eyes;
Mine ears hear only lamentable cries,
And eyeless things stand round about my head;
I am made as a man that slowly dies;
I am made as a man already dead.
Prayer
In Time of Plague
Holy Pestilence, holy Pestilence, gird thee with might,
Holy Pestilence, come thou upon them, come thou at night,
Holy Pestilence, put on thy mantle, put on thy crown,
Holy Pestilence, come on the cities, come and strike down,
Holy Pestilence, let them all perish, touch’d with thy breath,
Holy Pestilence, let them grow rotten, moulding in death,
Holy Pestilence, put on thy garments, a crown on thy head,
Holy Pestilence, let all the nations fall at thy tread,
Holy Pestilence, let them all perish, let them be dead.
Holy Pestilence, then shall the cities sink with thy might,
Holy Pestilence, they shall lie desert, plague-struck at night,
Holy Pestilence, then shall the rulers, crown’d with a crown,
Holy Pestilence, feeling them stricken, reel and fall down,
Holy Pestilence, then shall the nations faint with thy breath,
Holy Pestilence, then shall the valleys be cover’d with death,
Holy Pestilence, peasant with ruler, body with head,
Holy Pestilence, all shall be stricken under thy tread,
Holy Pestilence, all shall be rotten, all shall be dead.
Sestettes
I
Thou shalt rejoice for woe:
The pallid goblet old,
That holds thy life’s dull wine,
Is made thereby divine;
Stain’d with a purpler glow,
And wrought in stranger gold.
II
From the suck’d lees of pain,
We have won joy again:
Death shall thee not distress:
That sleepy bitterness
To thy kist lips shall be
The supreme exstasy.
III
Put ashes on your golden body bare,
Puissant as musk, bitter-sweet as to die,
Ashes upon your arms that grow not old,
And on your unassuaged lips of gold:
So we will wanton in love’s sepulchre,
And mock the face of Death with blasphemy.
IV
I love you more than Death: your mournful head,
Your shrouding hair, and your unfathom’d eyes,
And your white body beautiful, alas,
Priestess and victim in love’s holy mass …
Your flesh that loves, and loving ever dies …
I could not love you more if you were dead.
V
Death is death; the little host that squirms,
The smell, the dark, the coffin clos’d, and I
So soft, so soft; no movement, and no breath;
No ears, no nose, no eyeballs; Death is Death;
The sepulchre, no sight, no sound, no cry,
And always; Death is Death; the worms! the worms
VI
Not for your evil is my spirit sad—
I mourn because you are not really bad;
Because your beauty’s perfect cruelty
Is ever marr’d with pity and distress,
And you still show within your wickedness
The poor stale weakness of humanity.
VII
I am as one that thirsteth for all things,
As one that holdeth to his lips the cup,
With lower’d eyes searching the wine’s dull flame.
No thing may I refuse among all things,
Till, having drain’d unto its dregs the cup,
I may return into the astral flame.
VIII
Heart, we have wholly drain’d the cup of sadness,
And found in sadness no reality;
Now from the night of sadness let us go.
Henceforward let us drain the cup of gladness,
And find in gladness no reality;
From sadness then and gladness let us go.
Sonnet of the Instruments of Death
Adorned daggers, ruby-hilted swords;
Huge mortal serpents in gold volumes roll’d;
All-holy poisons in wrought cups of gold;
Unfailing crucifixes of strong cords;
Mortal baptismal waters without fords,
Wherein lie death’s communicants untold—
Which of these instruments blessed and old,
Is meetest for life’s purple-robed lords?
Ye that commune in death’s ciborium,
Of all the vessels in his sacristy
Which will ye choose to make of you a clod—
Sharp swords, bright lightnings, orient opium?—
All these, brave souls, are of one sanctity;
All ways are good whereby ye pass to God.
Truth
It is not that I have not sought thy face
Ceaselessly through the world’s eternal lie,
More than all things and throughout every place,
Which having seen I were content to die.
But I have sought thee and I have not found;
Wherefore my soul is banish’d from delight,
And sitteth joyless as a madman bound
Seeing vain visions in the loathed night.
I know not even that I do not know,
But all things waver before me to and fro;
As one half head that would be dead I lie.
And thou, Death, if thy face be really fair,
I know not, or but renewal of vanity;
Wherefore mine eyes have seen the last despair.
Hegel
Because my hope is dead, my heart a stone,
I read the words that Hegel once did write—
An idiot gibbering in the dark alone—
Till on my heart and vision fell the night.
Monotony
A dead corpse full of wormy questionings,
Beneath the open sky my soul lies dead,
Shameless and rotten and unburied,
For whom eternity no difference brings.
Only the wind my loathed incense flings
Afar afar; only above my head
Day passes, night returns when day is fled,
Unchangeable return of changeless things.
Unto the dead all things bring only pain,
And evermore my perish’d heart is woe
For the vile worms that gnaw it lying low;
While the dead days, like to an endless chain,
Pass ever o’er my body cruelly slow,
And evermore with pain return again.
Sepulture
My heart is but a tomb, where vain and cold
My dead hopes lie: encoffin’d there my Pride
Lies dead, and my Life’s Gladness crucified,
And there my Morning Joy long turn’d to mould;
And there like once-lov’d corpses dead and old
My Victory that long long since hath died,
And all my Hopes lie shrouded side by side,
For whom no eyes have wept, no dirges toll’d.
And there insensate on the darken’d floor
Despair a maniac still doth howl and scream,
Among all these long dead alive alone;
Among these things I sit upon a throne,
In endless contemplation evermore;
Nor these suffice to break my iron dream.
Miserrimus
In the last hopeless depth of hell’s dark tomb
Wherein I sit for aye with bowed head
In anguish and great sorrow buried
Where never sun the blackness doth illume,
I saw pass by me through the bitter gloom
All them whom life with deepest grief hath fed,
Whom also here among the hopeless dead
Through hell pursueth maniac, gnashing doom.
Me there forever crusht to hopeless stone
They passt by, all the damn’d; they shall not know
Through all eternity but only woe,
Now hear no sound but sound of them that groan.
And unto me that sat than these more low,
These seem’d like happy gods that heaven own;
They past away; and there in hell alone
My heart took up again its ancient woe.
Scorn
Dead am I, and ye triumph o’er me dead,
Ye that within mine eyes have found your home,
Ye that are soft and blind and white like foam,
Ye that have made of me your meat and bread.
Unto the worms I am abandoned;
Over my flesh their loathed cohorts roam;
Upon my heart whereto their hosts have clomb
Their hungry lips shall evermore be fed.
Here am I but a dead corpse in a tomb;
I shall not out from my accurs’d abode,
Inhabited by the dull worm and the toad;
Ye vile sojourners in my rotten room,
Torment me with your everlasting goad!
I scorn you till the end shall come of doom.
The Grave
The loathed worms are crawling over me
All the dead hours; about my buried head
Their soft intolerable mouths are gathered,
And in my dead eyes that have ceas’d to see.
I am full of worms and rotten utterly,
Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.
The lifeless earth lies close against mine eyes;
I know that I have rotted long ago;
My limbs are made one with the worms I know
Where all my head and body putrifies.
So in the earth my coffin’d ordure lies
Within my loathed shambles strait and low.
There is no thing now where my face hath been,
And all my flesh lies soft upon the floor;
Unto my heart the worms have found a door,
And all my body is to the worms akin;
They long time since their feasting did begin,
And they shall part not from me evermore.
Here lie I stretch’d out through the rotting years,
And I am surely weary of the grave,
And I have sometimes thought that I might rave,
And my two perish’d eyes almost shed tears.
There is no one that sees and none that hears;
I shall not out from my corrupted cave.
Here now forever with the lustful worms
I lie within my putrid sunken sty,
And through eternity my soul shall die.
O thou toward whom all my dead spirit squirms!
Forevermore I love thee through all terms
Until the dead stars rot in the black sky.
Mummy
Thou art at last made perfect; from the estate
Of mushy life Death hath thee petrified.
The soft the flowing and the putrified
That made thee up, is by that artist great
Now crystalliz’d unto a changeless state.
That thing thou walkedst, nos’d and ear’d and eyed,
Eternally severely doth abide,
Sunk from the bands of them that drank and ate.
Green mummies walk above thy walled gloom,
Unripen’d mummies; they intemperate
Seek in life’s beauty their high-crowned doom
In vain. But thee no passion doth illume
Stiff in the musked darkness of the tomb
Hard in stiff bands of red and nacarat.
Sepulchral Life
Lo, all the world as some vast corpse long dead,
Fadeth and perisheth and doth decay,
Even as a corpse, in whose unhonor’d clay
The worms have long the inmost secrets read;
Even as a corpse, upon whose lowly head
The sun beats, and the holy rain doth play;
Even as a corpse, whereof the people say,
—We would that these dead bones were buried.
Even so: and in the earth’s vast sepulchre
Our fainting souls their doubtful footsteps bear,
Dreaming of that which no dead men may see;
And in our passage to the second death,
We whisper strange names with our pesty breath,
Of Love, and Honour, and great Victory.
Corpse
A dead corpse crowned with a crown of gold
Sits thron’d beneath the sky’s gigantic pall;
Gold garments from its rotted shoulders fall,
And regal purple robes funereal.
Before its face a vast processional
Goes by with offerings for its great knees cold;
Its soft hand doth a golden sceptre hold;
And in its flesh lie sleeping worms uproll’d.
They that pass ceaseless by see not at all;
They know not that beneath its garments’ fold
Is but a corpse, rotted, and dead, and tall.
He is accurst that sees it dead and old;
He is accurst that sees: the white worms call
For him: for him have funeral dirges toll’d.
Mankind
They do not know that they are wholly dead,
Nor that their bodies are to the worm given o’er;
They pass beneath the sky forevermore;
With their dead flesh the earth is cumbered.
Each day they drink of wine and eat of bread,
And do the things that they have done before;
And yet their hearts are rotten to the core,
And from their eyes the light of life is fled.
Surely the sun is weary of their breath;
They have no ears, and they are dumb and blind;
Long time their bodies hunger for the grave.
How long, O God, shall these dead corpses rave?
When shall the earth be clean of humankind?
When shall the sky cease to behold this death?
The Defilers
O endless idiocy of humankind!
O blatant dead that howl and scream and roar!
O strange dead things the worms have gambled for!
O dull and senseless, foolish, mad and blind!
How long now shall your scent defile the wind?
How long shall you make vile the earth’s wide floor?
How long, how long, O waiting ages hoar,
Shall the white dawn their gaping faces find?
O vile and simple, blind of heart and mind,
When shall your last wave roll forevermore
Back from the sick and long-defiled shore?
When shall the grave the last dead carcass bind?
O shameless humankind! O dead! O dead!
When shall your rottenness be buried?
The Grotesques
I
I saw a dead corpse lying in a tomb,
Long buried and rotten to the core;
Behold this corpse shall know not evermore
Aught that may be outside its wormy room;
It lies uncover’d in the pesty gloom,
Eyeless and earless, on the charnel-floor,
While in its nameless corpse the wormlets hoar
Make in its suppurated brain their room.
And in that charnel that no lights illume,
It shriek’d of things that lay outside its door;
And while the still worms through its soft heart bore,
It lay and reason’d of the ways of doom,
And in its head thoughts mov’d as in a womb;
And in its heart the worms lie evermore.
II
I saw a dead corpse in a haughty car,
Whom in a high tomb phantom horses bore,
Aye to and fro upon the scatter’d floor;
His dead eyes star’d as though they look’d afar,
His gold wheels myriad perish’d souls did mar,
While through his flesh the ravenous wormlets tore;
He in whose eyes the worm was conqueror,
Held his high head unmoved like a star.
And as with loud sound and reverberant jar,
And as with splash of crusht flesh and dull roar,
The death-car thunder’d past the tomb-walls hoar,
Within those dead dominions the dead tsar
Receiv’d his plaudits where dead bodies are;
And in his heart the worms lie evermore.
III
I saw a dead corpse making a strange cry,
With dead feet planted on a high tomb’s floor;
The dead stand round, with faces that implore;
His dead hands bless them, stretched forth on high.
—And art thou God?—and art thou majesty?—
And art thou he whom all the dead adore?—
And art thou he that hath the skies in store?—
Nay, nay, dead dust, dead dust, and vanity.
And wouldst thou rise up to the lighted sky?—
Nay, nay, thy limbs are rotten on the floor;
Thou shalt not out from thy polluted sty;
Thou wouldst become divinity once more,
Thou dreamest of splendour that shall never die;
And in thy heart the worms lie evermore.
IV
I saw a dead corpse lying on the floor
Of a tomb; worms were in its woman’s head,
Its black flesh lay about it shred on shred,
And the dead things slept in its bosom hoar.
And evermore inside that loathed door,
It turn’d itself as one upon a bed,
It turn’d itself as one whom sleep hath fled,
As one that the sweet pangs of passion bore.
And from its passionate mouth’s corrupted sore,
And from its lips that are no longer red,
Came forth love’s accents; and it spake, and said.
—The Pleiades and night’s noon-hours are o’er,
And I am left alone in wearyhead.
And in its heart the worms lie evermore.
Dead Dialogue
| 1st Corpse |
I would now that the sweet light of the sun
Might once again shine down upon my face;
So weary am I of my rottenness.
|
| 2nd Corpse |
Rejoice that now at least thou art done with life;
This thing shall nevermore return.
|
| 1st Corpse |
At last
My body is aweary of the tomb;
It is a hundred years since in the grave
I have lain down between four narrow walls,
Shut up with putrid darkness and the worm.
There is no flesh upon my body now,
That was so long a-rotting; on my shelf
Here am I now nothing but stinking bones,
That have had life beneath the face of the sun.
|
| 3rd Corpse |
I am not yet utterly putrified,
And the worms yet within my flesh abound;
I do repent me that I did not learn
What life was, while I liv’d beneath the sun—
At least then I might think of what I had done;
But I am rotten, and I have not liv’d.
|
| 1st Corpse |
I would that I might leave this place of ordure
And look once more upon the face of the world,
Where the sun is.
|
| 2nd Corpse |
O foolish ragged-bones,
Wouldst thou show forth thy dripping excrements,
And shredded rottenness to the face of day?—
Stink and be still, and leave us here in peace.
|
| 1st Corpse |
Envy me not, O stench, slop-face, dung-eyes;
My bones are clean and dry as the tomb’s walls,
And stink not; as for thee, thou art a sink.
|
| 2nd Corpse |
Envy me not, thou, that I am so sweet
The black worms love me; hungry were that worm
That on thee preys.
|
| 4th Corpse |
Be silent, both ye dead and rotten things;
Lo I, that was unburied yesterday,
Am fair and smooth and firm, and almost sweet;
If that I were not dead, one might me love.
|
| 3rd Corpse |
Is it so sweet a thing, this love, this love?
|
| 2nd Corpse |
Thy lips are green for kissing, and streaks of black
Streak over thee where the worms have not yet been!
|
| 4th Corpse |
Ha, ha, I know wherefore thou speakest so:
Because thy torture is too great for thee,
And the worms’ gnawing, and thy body’s rottenness,
And the rottenness in thy bones and in thy brain!
|
| 1st Corpse |
O beautiful, O dead, O spit upon,
He speaketh well that is but lately dead;
Thy flesh lies all along thee like green slime,
O pudding gravied in thine own dead sauce!
|
| 2nd Corpse |
Rotten one!
|
| 1st Corpse |
Dung-heap!
|
| 2nd Corpse |
Dead one!
|
| 1st Corpse |
Beast! beast! beast!
Therefore perhaps, thou art so early dead?
|
| 2nd Corpse |
They say that those thou lovedst were not men,
O goat-face—Shall I say what was thy death?
|
| 4th Corpse |
Come, come, my brothers, be not so slanderous;
We have all been the same upon the earth.
|
| 3rd Corpse |
Thou sayest true, new brother.
|
| 1st Corpse |
Thou sayest true.
|
2nd Corpse
Aside. |
I shall not suffer anything any more;
I have left all that; I am evermore releas’d;
I shall not struggle and suffer any more;
This seemeth strange and very sweet to me;
And I shall grow accustom’d to the worms.
|
| 5th Corpse |
Rejoice not thou, that thou art fallen
Into a pit where people leave their dung;
There is no reason here for any joy.
|
| Sepulchre |
Be silent, now, ye spindle-shankèd dead!
Ye will learn to be silent when y’are here
For a long time; ye always spout and roar,
At first, before the time of rottenness;
But so I suppose it must be—y’are not the first,
And ye shall not be the last; so fast i’ the world,
So eagerly they are begotten, and they die,
And they are begotten again; just for this end
Hideously propagated evermore.
|
| A voice above singing |
Golden is the sunlight,
When the daylight closes,
Golden blow the roses
Ere the spring is old;
All thy hair is golden,
Falling long and lowly
Round thy bosom holy;
And thy heart is of fine gold!
|
Fragments
I
And since I understood not what so strong
Driveth all these at such exstatic pace,
I too went down and joined in the throng;
And many sitting in a lowly place
I saw, where sense and vision darkness clogs,
With one flat-breasted wife with munched face
And bestial litter as of rats or hogs;
These are all they that eat and multiply
In the same manner with low apes and dogs;
Like these they live and like these they shall die.
—Pass thou from these, said then to me that voice,
And heed not thou the stinking of that sty.
Then saw I them that did with wine rejoice,
Crowning their heads with roses of the earth;
I too sat down and joined in that noise,
But ask’d me soon—Why do all these have mirth?
From these I past, weary of myrrh and wine.
Others apart whose spirits had more dearth
Sat solitary as who would fain divine,
Of seeing and of hearing ill content;
With these I sat, half drunken with the vine,
And sick of visions that aye came and went;
But all the knowledge that their striving found
Was but one vision more than wine had sent;
All these also shall moulder in the ground.
From these I past as from dead flesh and bones.
Then came I where the kings of earth sat crown’d
Neath purple canopies on golden thrones;
These offer’d me part in that changeless state,
Until my soul wearied of brass and brônze.
Others whose sweating nothing could abate
Kingdoms and cities build and overthrow,
Till my soul wonder’d at the striving great
Of all the puppets in that puppet-show:
—Doth the string move them with such urgency,
That all their limbs such strange grimaces show?
—These are all they that do, one made reply;
In all their actions never could I find
What they were doing these things for nor why.
From these I past as from the deaf and blind,
And ever as I went the solemn brawl
Of all these mad and idiot howl’d behind.
I came to those that ceased not to call.
The world unto them, shouting o’er and o’er;
My heart knew not why these so loudly bawl;
And some stood round with faces that implore,
Asking for peace; and ever those that gave
Did but like these delude themselves the more;
But rottenness shall stop all these that rave.
Last, some there were that did with vanity
Toil ever with unwearied hands to save
And to eternize all things great and high;
With these I stay’d, till my heart questioned:
—What are the things thou doëst here and why?
Whereat all these became as persons dead.
Then I arose from among these the last,
And follow’d then where’er my footsteps led;
And among them that reigned then I past,
And among them that ever fain would know,
And among them whose lot with wine was cast;
I past the prophets and the puppet-show,
And among them that joy’d in marble and in song,
And all that Seven tir’d of long ago.
And is this all the meaning of that throng,
This all, O heart, that wast of seeing fain,
But like a circle that still seemeth long
Because it goeth round and round again?
Not in all these doth any reason hide
No more than in the words of the insane.
There is no ground for sorrow; nor in pride
For pride; nor in them that in gladness sate;
Wherefore with none of these shall I abide.
The sought is vanity; the seeking great
Vanity; the not-seeking vanity;
For none of these change I my solemn state.
II
Then since no one could answer unto me
The question, and since no one could me tell
The wherefore of this endless Vanity
Of all the spirits that on earth did dwell,
I said—I go unto the Absolute;
He will perchance release me from this hell.
Him that made noisy what before was mute
I found upon a heap of filthy dung
Low-sitting in the fashion of the brute.
In strange grimaces still his face he wrung,
Up to the chin within that filth immerst,
Which still his busy hands about him flung.
—Do thou those clothes wherein he is inhearst
Take off, said I to one, and do not shirk.
He did, while still that being howl’d and curst.
For there so thick and muddy was the murk,
And he still bore of clothes so thick a weight,
I knew not well what thing therein did lurk.
Three coverings then that one removed straight—
Omniscience, Omnipresence, Omnipotence,
From off the thing that in the ordure sate.
Then did his truth show clear to every sense,
A filthy idiot so foul and low,
That decency the perfect tale prevents.
And I—O thou whose nakedness doth show
Like one not in the womb to fulness brought,
Why are all things that are; if thou dost know?
Then he replied from out the ordure hot:
—Brahma, great Brahma, Everlasting, I!
And I—Not such reply my question sought.
Answer thou me! And he still made reply:
—Brahma, great Brahma! repetition vain.
I asked again: and—Brahma! he did cry.
Then one thereby to me—Why art thou fain
Knowledge to have from It?
It knows not, It;
Why seek for truth among the low insane?
Then he that did within the ordure sit
Out of the filth that lay about his feet
Such things as children make with little wit
Made, and then broke, and did the act repeat.
—I have made all the worlds, he gibbered;
And I his labour with these words did greet.
—Why dost thou these things? why, O why? I said.
No word vouchsaf’d the mouth of him that stank,
But giggling sounds and idiot uttered.
Then seated in that place of ordure rank,
With his two lips he made a cackling sound,
And back within the friendly ordure sank.
Then I with a great sad and awful voice
Cried out—O thou that rottest in this sty,
O thou whose soul in ordure doth rejoice,
What art thou doing these things for and why?
Then one to me—His bliss is not to know
The infiniteness of his own Vanity;
Therefore the soul of him that stinketh so,
Because his sense is blind and deaf and mad
Forever, knoweth not eternal woe.
Lo from the first his soul no reason had;
He thinketh he himself is everything,
And nothing is but him!
He is not sad.
Ignorance, ignorance, shrouds him like a pall;
Therefore thus low upon the fetid floor
He sits, and knoweth naught outside his stall.
And I—He maketh naught outside his store.
Why doth he this? and in this fetid tomb
Sitteth he here in madness evermore?
How long shall iron, awful, gnashing doom
Leave him thus naked old and idiot
Blind deaf and stinking, in the loathed gloom
How long shall This within the ordure squat?
How long shall This cease not to beck and nod?
How long shall This cease not to rot and rot?
And he—This rottenness that seemeth God
More woe than this nor any other mode
Shall know not, till It ceaseth in the sod.
And as a gnat, a viper, or a toad,
Because its nature is not infinite,
It too shall perish in the worm’s abode;
Till then It suppurateth in the night.
III
Then from the world I turn’d my steps afar;
I came there where the holy Trinity
And all the blessed saints in glory are,
And did the beatific vision see,
And how those happy are that once did mourn;
But my heart said—All this is naught to me;
Nor knew I why all these should be reborn.
Where moon-fac’d houris wanton arms do fling
Round Mahmud’s blessed, I past by in scorn,
For my heart dream’d a deeper revelling.
Then came I to that banquet more divine
That Jayadeva and that Jami sing;
And the fair goblet fill’d full of the wine
Brought the cup-bearer clad with wantonness;
And there with the beloved and the vine
My heart grew weary of that blessedness.
From life I past, finding no joy therein.
The vision and the vine and drunkenness
Still like a circle ever closing in.
Then I departed to the final peace,
Sick of what is and shall be and hath been,
Of Brahma, as the drop sinks in the seas:
I past out from the bonds of thee-and-me,
Lost in that Infinite whose being is
Glory in all things and reality;
But therein I that was not I, alas
In that deliverance from me-and-thee
Where all illusion fadeth like to grass,
Found naught that equall’d my undimm’d desire;
—If that reality then real was,
What is that real more than trodden mire?
Then from all being did my spirit pass,
Sick of all being whether low or higher.
Out of that circle unto nothingness
I came, unto Nirvana, the far goal
Of many a holy saint, where visions cease;
But nothingness did not my heart console.
Ah not in nothingness is any peace,
Nor in peace any peace, nor in the whole,
Nor in the vine nor in the vision, nor
In being nor non-being, nor in all
That man hath dream’d of and hath anguisht for.
Nay not in joy nor the vine jovial,
Nor in the perfume of the lov’d one’s breath,
Nay nor in anything anywhere at all;
Nor in illusion; nor what sundereth
Illusion; in the sundering of that chain
There is no joy; and not alas in death
Find I that thing whereof my soul is fain.
All these things also are all vanity
No less than sun and stars that wax and wane
Forever in the everlasting sky.
Envoi
At the End of the Century
Now I am come to the nadir at last, to the absolute sorrow,
Now all the stars are gone out of my sky;
Night everlasting is mine without hope or desire of the morrow,
All my life’s hopes are gone tombwards to die.
All my life’s glories lie perisht around me; and lo with great laughing
Laugh I out loud, and I care not at all;
Here with mine Anguish, my Sorrow, my Madness, my Grief, I sit quaffing
Wine, in high state in my echoing hall.
This is the last night I drink with you, maniac wassailers dreary!
Lift up your goblets and drink ere I go!
Lo, I am easily bor’d, I am easily tired and made weary;
Now at the last I am weary of Woe.
Lo, I that walk in the flower crown’d season of youthfulness golden,
Think ye that all things my gladness can slay?
Sorrow is fitting for dotards and them that are loathsome and olden;
I am as one that goes ever away.
Lo, I laugh out at Grief, lo, I laugh in unending rejoicing,
I that have nightshade entwin’d in my hair;
Heart of me, what dost thou here in the wearisome darkness, revoicing
Yesterday’s stale and forgotten despair?
Now it is midnight; but soon shall the wakening glory of morning
Shine in the East, when the darkness is gone;
Now in my spirit that sat for a time in the darkness of mourning
Waketh in gladness the mystical dawn.
New spring laugheth without—to thy heart it is calling! and o’er thee
Soon shall the banners of dawn be unfurl’d;
Wait thou no longer, O heart, O heart that art strong, for before thee
Lieth the pomp of the great high world!
Now it is midnight; my Anguish, my Mourning, my Sadness, my Sorrow,
Crown you with nightshade, and once more with me
Drink and make merry; farewell! I am here with you now; on the morrow
Sail I over the mighty sea.