University of Virginia Library

A year ago the secret thing befell
That lays me in my grave.... No name, device,
Atonement, faith can help a man to die:
Upon myself alone I lean, my deeds,
My thoughts, that which I know and am:
Mistake me not; I go despairing down
To dust and deep oblivion.... Once, indeed,
It seemed to me no stronger brain than mine
Repelled the problems of the Universe,
That none so proud against obsession bade
Belief produce its passport, none despised
Opinion so profoundly, served and groomed
A nature so anointed to shake off
The venom of remorse; yet here I lie
A broken man, who stood a year ago
The foremost of his time, the heart and brain
Of Britain and her Empire; unassailed
By calumny, by every faction mourned,
Last victim of the old conspiracy,
The plot eternal none unravels, pierced
By nameless foes, impalpable, unseen,
Yet omnipresent, yet omnipotent;
Undone by mystery, smitten by a thought,
A poisoned arrow from the infinite.
Or is it that my spirit slays itself?
A doubter always, I; and doubt is death—
Therefore to be desired, since all things end?
Death is desirable, but not by doubt:
The doom of doubt is to be pressed to death
By awful certainty as now I lie,
Spectator, sufferer, auditor of pangs
Unbearable, stretched out in deepest Hell
Under the overpowering Universe.

When I became the master of the world
It seemed indeed an admirable ruse—
For all was ruse and compromise I thought—
Whereby the State, in magic leading-strings
Of dialectic, moped and roamed about
Its labyrinthine businesses, or hung
Unheeding on the brink of anarchy.
Miraculous too, it was, to hear men lie
Against each other as the only means
And menstruum of truth; to watch debate
Lixiviate matters till the recrement
Appeared, the perfect, smooth, exhausted sludge
That blinds the electorate and chokes it off.
This was the legacy of patriotism!
And still I deemed it the adjusted helm
Of government, forgetting—folk forget!—
That greatness but a moment dominates
The wayward chance of systems as of men.
Inevitable decadence of powers
Political, in English battlefields
Established, fostered oft with native blood,
Matured in Parliaments, and dying now,
Debased survivals starved amid the rank
Usurping thicket of the Fourth Estate,
Publicity that overthrows cabal,
Affords opinions, nostrums, men and things
Of every standing opportunity,
And is the only true tyrannicide:
This decadence of Parliament I thought
An aftermath, a precious verdigris,
A genial mellowing in the weathered bronze
Of our palladium; for the sorcery
That charms the soul of England, party-led,
Enchanted me and held in every sphere
My spirit spellbound. Pratice and belief?
Antipodes: the one in power and place;
The other to oppose, condemn, destroy:
The Government—the sinner and the sin;
The Opposition—the evangelist
To break its pride, to chasten, scourge and turn
The pageant of its power, a draggled show,
Into the narrow way.

“The Universe—
“This specious Universe,” I thought, “that hangs
“So balanced, so complete, remains within
“Untuned, corrupt, a hidden chaos masked
“With mere cosmetic; wisest thought and best,
“Heroic deed, most beautiful device,
“Consummate law and polity of man
“Seem so to him, but are inane and void;
“For out of chaos only chaos comes.
“The green and sapphire earth embossed with studs
“Of crystal snow at either lonely pole;
“With orient dawn, with sunset in the west,
“The sumptuous rubies of its girdle clasped;
“And wearing gallantly, day in day out,
“Its azure mantle of ethereal dust,
“That turns at night a sable domino
“With stars embroidered....” Beauty, tenderness,
The love, the passion, the humanity,
The soul of man has wasted on the world!

A year ago, I say, this thing befell
That lays me in my grave. I rose in wrath
Against the fools and rabble of the House
That picked at him, the keystone of our bridge,
The linch-pin of the wheel of government,
The genius of the State: “The very soul”—
I had your new philosopheme in mind,
Defending him, my friend, his power and plan—
“The very soul of culture now is trade.
“Think you I love it, I, conservative,
“Afraid of novelty, a child among
“The doctrinaires, a stranger in the House
“Though foremost there; only at home in thought?
“I love it not; but how should that concern
“The automatic forces of the world!
“The Golden Age returns, or rather say,
“That dream fulfils itself; for waking dreams
“Are tokens of our Fate the debtor Time
“Discharges duly in the current coin.
“You had your Age of Stone, your Age of Bronze,
“When baffled wonder, ignorance, terror, awe
“Together knit, made up a soul in man
“That fenced itself about with arts and rites,
“Or found escape and refuge, hope and joy
“In fearless fancy and heroic love.
“Then came the Iron Age, impassioned, brief,
“A century—no more: it ends with us.
“This was the Age the Revolution tore
“Inhuman from the labouring womb of Time
“(Inhuman or over-human; nothing at all
“Is more inherent in humanity
“Than inhumanity). This was the Age,
“That showed once more how one man's might may knead
“The world like dough and bake it in a cake—
“And how the wise man like the fool essays
“To eat his cake and have it. Iron age
“Specific, unmistakable, of guns,
“Of armour-plate, of engines, wheels, machines;
“Of iron knowledge, iron thought: the Age
“Wherein at last the Iron Book of Fate
“Lay open to the world. This Iron Age
“Was Doomsday like a robber in the night
“Rifling the sanctuary; Doomsday and a new
“Authentic Dispensation. First came Law;
“Thereafter, Love; and now Intelligence,
“For now at last we know, and all is now
“Permitted. Not an accident, nor made
“By any power demonic or divine,
“But Matter, Substance, Universe become
“Self-conscious—by its own innate desire
“Invincibly impelled through trials, tests
“Of instinct and brutality—Man crowns
“The adventurous effort: Matter knows itself;
“And Man, the organ of its knowledge, bound
“For ever on this torture-wheel the earth,
“In agony confesses what he is—
“Not God, nor Devil, but Material stuff
“That knows and thinks, imagines and despairs,
“Endures and wills. After the Iron Age
“We reach the Age of Gold—the dream come true
“Of Pagan and of Christian. Soberly
“I say, this twentieth century begins
“No other Age than the Millennium.
“In every time and clime the cry has been
“‘Escape! escape!’ The future beckoned still
“Replete with immaterial happiness,
“And stubborn man imagined things diverse
“From those that have been, and will always be,
“And never can be other than they are.
“But now we know escape impossible;
“And on the tolling of that knowledge comes
“The Golden Age, Millennium, Heaven-and-Hell—
“That have been always though men knew it not;
“For knowledge to the subject of it makes
“The character of things. Oh, Matter means
“That Man shall not escape! A way there is—
“By death; and every leaf resolves again
“To inorganic dust and fumes unseen;
“But the tree dies not; and the sighing woods
“Are powerless not to thrive. I stood one day
“And watched a grove of beeches: fluted stems,
“With knots and bosses where the boiling sap
“Had burst the rind; with intertwining boughs,
“As if they stood impatient for the dance
“And waiting on the word to break the spell
“That held them root-bound. For the younger ones,
“The slender saplings, with their branches draped
“So gracefully about them—sure, the spell
“Had been dissolved already; but they, too,
“Were waiting, haply for the older trees
“To lead the way, or for some idle whim.
“And as I watched I thought: The charm will soon
“Be wrought again before these wanton plants
“Make up their minds to trip it down the hill,
“Forsake their native grove and see the world;
“And the sharpset, remorseless axe may be
“Their only disenchanter, at a time
“When to be conscious of the rising sap
“Would please them well enough, to be assured
“Only of this that they are not yet dead.
“So is it with the nations and the tribes,
“The classes, masses, peoples of the earth:
“The leaves, the men and women, die and rot;
“But the trees stand, Goth, Scythian, Mongol, Jew,
“Foolish and wise, the strong men and the weak,
“The sighing woods, the world-wide wilderness:
“The fixed idea, Humankind, remains
“Until the earth becomes an icicle,
“Or falls into the bosom of the sun.
“Watching the world as once I watched the trees,
“I think how much more happy, more renowned,
“The destiny of those whose long decay
“Distresses tender hearts, if tribes and clans,
“Man, woman, child, in splendid unison
“They had themselves before their spirit broke
“Destroyed the spell of life that held them fast:
“The Red Men of the west, the strength austere,
“The adamantine nerve that worshipped pain;
“Invented cruelties and took delight
“To witness and to die in agony,
“So various, so protracted, so intense
“That to the tortured Indian at the stake—
“A thing of use-and-wont, a festival—
“The Crucifixion seemed a pleasant dream;
“Or that offscouring of the Eastern world,
“The melancholy Celt, whom Latin, Greek
“And Teuton drove through Europe to the rocks,
“The utmost isles and precincts of the sea,
“Who fight for fighting's sake and understand
“No meaning in defeat, having no cause
“At heart, no depth of purpose, no profound
“Desire, no inspiration, no belief,
“A twilight people living in a dream,
“A withered dream they never had themselves,
“A faded heirloom that their fathers dreamt:
“How much more happy these had they destroyed
“The spell of life at once, and so escaped
“An unregarded martyrdom, the consciousness
“Of inefficience and the world's contempt!
“But Matter, firm that Man shall not escape
“While earth remains inhabitable, knits
“His vehement spirit of Material stuff,
“Of longing infinite that will exist.
“Therefore it is that with the starless time
“Of actual knowledge and intelligence
“The Golden Age appears—this darksome dawn
“Of ours, a day-in-night, a night-in-day:
“For whether earth already to its doom
“Reels orbit-slipped, or whether decades hence,
“Or next year, or to-morrow, or to-day
“The weight of ice amassed at either pole
“Shall change our axis till a deluge wipe
“The citied world away, and glacial drift
“Plough up the earth and harrow it again;
“Or whether flame consume us comet-struck;
“Or the earth's crust fall in; or to the sun
“Returning whence it sprang, our orb effete,
“Enwombed in pristine fire once more, become
“The brilliant seed of stars to be, we know
“That men shall cease: their speech, their deeds, their arts,
“The wonder of their being, passion, love,
“Ambition, charity, transcendent thought
“Shall leave no memory, token, sign, or sigh
“In any speck of dust, or nook of space;
“We know that here and now is Heaven-and-Hell;
“This is the Promised Land, the Golden Age,
“This, the Millennium, and the Aftertime,
“The fixed, eternal moment, sounding on.
“So for our purpose let the passing mood
“Suffice: we enter now the Golden Age,
“An early dream of Matter's. Nether-formed
“In molten rocks antique, and woven athwart
“Methodic minerals by the wandering veins
“That traverse ordered masses, Gold implied
“A Golden Age; and when its hour awoke
“In consciousness by simple means of truth
“Perceived at last, the metal once again
“In ancient Ophir shone and newer lands,
“Predestined to be ours, enriched the world
“With rivers, harvests, spathes and pits of gold.
“Get Gold, get Gold; and be the Golden Age!
“So signals Matter from the ends of the earth
“Where'er her chosen people pitch their tents.
“Religion, chivalry, crusade, romance,
“Or war for war's own sake, or art for art,
“Freedom for Man, and Justice for the World
“Are not; or are contained in this—Get Gold!
“One nation must be richer than the rest:
“Let it be ours! it must, it will be ours
“If we continue Matter's best belov'd.”. . .

Right there it was my wondering heart o'erthrew
My argument, and flooded all my thought,
An inundation of humanity
That drowned Material truth. The soldier, starved,
Corrupted, tortured into cowardice!
(All men are brave by nature, and in health,
Well-fed and at their ease, as men should be,
Would scorn to do another's bidding.) Souls
In factories shred! Unwilling sex profaned!
(All women are by nature chaste as fire:
How otherwise could chastity be thought!)
Soft bosoms strewn with ashes; tender hearts,
Dried, tanned and stretched from belted wheel to wheel;
And all the noisomeness that's daily cleansed
In women's tears! The horror of the world
Wherein its wealth and power are rooted fast—
Blossom and savoury fruit, carnation-hued
And teeming with delight for every sense,
Out of the offal and the excrement
Distilled, the essence of humanity
Expressed from putrid masses of mankind:
This surged upon me, sobbing wave on wave
That throttled speech: I stammered to a close,
Then left the House. Borne on this tide I went
By the uncouth embankment where the Thames
In surface eddies coiling and uncoiled,
Entangled by a myriad, myriad keels,
Propellers, paddles, turbines, dredgers, oars,
A ravelled skein, a dismal flood winds down
Its greasy channel: past St. Paul's that looms
Above the thunder of the multitude,
Shouldering the skies; along tumultuous streets
Of warehouse, factory, bank, by dock and wharf,
Until I reached a loathsome region, foul,
Malodorous, dark; in every separate pore
Of noxious atmosphere a separate stench.
Among the barges, plots of pasturage
Like old unhealed abrasions opened up
With sheep like maggots starving in the mud.
The reaches of the tributary Lea,
Enamelled filthily in many hues—
Purple and faded crimson, pallid gold
And swarthy soot in wrinkled creases—gleamed
With dusky iridescence, and bewitched
My wounded fancy like a hellish charm.
Ashamed I tracked the hideous watercourse
And lit upon a swamp, a festering swamp,
An ugly gusset of unholy slime
Where stunted hemlock fought with tufts of sedge.
It lay a little lower than the Lea,
And took a ropy overflow that slunk
Beneath a ruined bridge: tall chimney-stalks
On one side belching smoke; the river bank
Upon another; on the third, relays
Of jangling trains: a piece of mother earth,
Most woebegone, most horrible, for years
Imprisoned, sick with filth and fetid air,
Irrecognizable. Upon the bridge
Some human lumber loafed, a dozen men
Incompetent or drunken; all unfit
For everything except survival. One,
An old man, toothless, tremulous, unclean,
His face and temples crumpled out of shape
By seventy years' essay to thrust and fix
His angularity in useful rounds
Of business, eagerly harangued the group:
“Conceive it, grasp it, hoard it in your minds,
“A new possession that illumines all:
“Self-consciousness is Matter's seamy side;
“Man is the seamy side of the Universe:
“Here for a while the Universe disports
“Itself, a motley clown, wearing its coat
“Of many colours inside out: the truth,
“Nearer than any saying ever came
“Before, in that fantastic image hides.”

“Yes,” cried another, drunk, irrelevant,
Ragged, consumptive, horrible: “My tears
“That scald my sunken cheeks, salter than brine
“With long retention:—why I weep at last,
“Why here, I cannot tell:—this sweated blood
“That brands like vitriol; sobs that shake the world;
“This outcry that might rend the veil, and ring
“Through space to startle slumberous overtones
“Unheard among the silent sinful spheres
“Except when woe awakes them: these avouch
“A Christian and the winepress of his creed.
“I, last of all the Christians, trembling yet,
“Upon the verge and crumbling brink of Hell,
“Assaulted momently by doubts and fears
“Despite the proven panoply of faith,
“And tortured out of all similitude
“To humankind, can pray this meagre prayer—
“‘Lord I believe; help Thou, mine unbelief!’”
He knelt unnoticed by the rest, for these
Were heedless of each other, stripped and flayed
Of all save personality.

“For me,”
Another cried: “I'm atheist, stark: a God
“Would long ago have killed me, I being I,
“A mystery of iniquity.”

“And I,”
Said one, snuffling with half a palate, lips
Of shapeless sponge and rotting nose, “I say
“There is a God: I know His handiwork;
“I bear His marks about me: not a God
“That shifts and doubles with the moods of men;
“But He that Is, the old remorseless Jew
“Who took his pound of flesh on Calvary:
“Him I believe in.”

“Well,” another cried,
Asquint at me: “what do you think of us?
“Great men, I wager, mate?”

“Strange men, at least.
“How were you sifted out and cast away?”

“By being grateful”—thus the eager wretch
Who thought Humanity the seamy side
Of Matter: “gratitude, sheer gratitude
“Destroys the courage, eats the soul out, stuffs
“The pockets of the wise who feel it not.
“Be grateful if you must, but never tell;
“Or else the world will use your gratitude
“To starve you out; and slave or mendicant
“Will be your doom.”

“Astonishing,” I said,
“To find a humorist here.”

“A humorist? Hell!”
Snorted the monster that believed in God.
“No humorists here: we are the men who know.
“Your belletristic prattle! What a lie
“That humour is the salt of literature,
“The truest truth of life! The Book of books?
“Come; what's the humour there? What's Dante's? Grim?
“The humour of the Crucifixion? True;
“The brilliant humour of the fire of Hell,
“And, as you said, the humorousness of us.”

“How can you live?” I cried. “How dare to live?”
“We are the only folk who are alive,”
Their eldest spokesman said. “The seamy side?
“The naked nerves of Matter! Matter loves
“Its aches and pains: it knows itself thereby.
“We hate to labour; love to brood and dream.
“Work cures or kills us; but we won't be cured.
“Matter has need of drunken idlers, fit
“To loaf and think, to understand the world,
“And be its fiercest pangs of consciousness.”
“Let all men,” said the Atheist, “class or mass,
“Tread on the mouths of cowards; scorn success;
“Reject imaginative solace, dreams,
“Delusions of desire; abandon hope;
“And sick or sound, in prison or exempt,
“Or chained or tortured daily, mock the doom
“Of humankind, and with a lewd grimace
“Deride the covert nakedness of Fate—
“So thinly clad, so foolish, so ashamed.”

My soul grew pallid; but I spoke: “Oh fools,
“Unhallowed outcasts, spirits petrified
“In evil, human lumber, self-removed,
“Self-damned, do something were it but to fight
“Among yourselves and find out which is first.
“Forget that men like you afflict the world:
“Think of the great ones”—

Such a husky noise
Broke out about me, spluttering like a vat
O'ercloyed with heat that boils its surfeit off
Bestirred upon a sudden!

“Great ones? Hell!
“We are the great ones, we.”—“Above, beneath,
“About me, or within, nothing is great:
“I only, I am great: greater than thought.
“Spirit and flesh, my casual qualities:
“But I, the individual, I am more
“Than soul and body: insubmissive me.”—
“The Ego? Ha, the Ego! Who shall name,
“Who say it, who define!”—“Why, every man
“Is every instant instantly himself,
“Exactly what he is; no more, no less.”—
“I am the only individual, I:
“The Truth itself is nothing: to believe
“The highest Truth would be to abdicate
“The individual: all things disappear
“Before the sovereign Me.”

From out those cries
Of personality upon the rack
A mellow voice, a voice sustained, arose
With one who stood a head above the rest,
Upstarting from a silent session, he,
Alone of those who hung about the bridge
In tune with Fate and master of the mood.
“I knew the greatest man that ever lived,”
He said, and all gave place, nodding their heads
In quick approval as at something found
By happy chance when diligence had failed.
“I knew the greatest man that ever lived.
“First, let me ask you, have you felt at all
“The torment of the mind when life depends
“On pleasing others—raiment, food, abode
“Extorted by the labour of the hands
“From grudging capital, or won by toil
“Of fettered brains, abuse of gift, or waste
“Of patience in some idle service, theft
“Direct, deceit, or mendicancy? No?
“How can I make you truly apprehend
“The eating cancer in the soul of man
“Dependent for a livelihood? On sin
“The sumptuous worships, empires, orders, arts
“Are 'stablished, nourished, drunken, wanton, mad—
“The inevitable, never-pardoned sin
“Of procreants who fill the earth with souls
“That must be slaves: it is the only sin—
“To thrust a human being on the world:
“I say it simply. Inconceivable
“This agony of indigence! No tongue,
“No sound can utter it: absorbent pain
“That from the blood the iron colour draws,
“Precludes the rich distillment of the seed,
“Unknits the sinews, parches up the heart,
“Consumes unspent the treasury of thought,
“The fund and bullion, mint and coin of speech,
“Palsies the silent wing of fantasy,
“And sucks the marrow from the soul itself.
“Man is the slave of everything he makes:
“This gold and silver, stamped and milled for ease
“Of business, has become his sole concern:
“Enough is not enough: we cannot breathe
“Without it: limpid water, healthy air
“Are costly luxuries, the world has fallen
“So helplessly within the mean control
“Of money! (How the symbol still usurps
“Authority in every province, masks
“The figure, drains the life of actual things!
“No vampire like ideas put to use!)
“This thing cannot be said; but he, the man
“I call the greatest showed the Universe
“The acme of despair. A navvy, all
“The brute; bone, blood and brawn; brows like an ape's,
“Hawk's head, sad eyes deep-sunk, mouth leonine:
“The incarnation of the will to live,
“An instinct absolute. At twenty years
“With pick and shovel none could touch his skill,
“None face him hand to hand, none eat and drink
“With appetite so ravenous, so staunch,
“Such malt-proof brains; more glibly lewd in speech
“Than creatures of debauch all gone to sex,
“But virginal in fancy and in deed.
“One evening in his twentieth year he sat
“Beneath a hawthorn in a bottom-glade
“That fringed the northern suburb where he lived.
“Upon its tranquil shadow every tree
“In golden light stood up, an emerald dome;
“A vagrant wind that idled through the world,
“Fingering the lucent foliage wantonly,
“About the quaint suburban valley trailed
“The scalloped oak-leaves, bronzed and fallen long,
“That caught its rustling mantle as it passed.
“Trees with their wrinkled hides, their manyringed
“Compacted boles, their heavy creaking boughs,
“Their myriad leaves, the green turf thick and sweet,
“Cream of the earth uprisen through fathomed depths
“Of soil and sap: remembrances of these
“Our natal house and only rafters once,
“Our carpet, board and bed, a heritage
“Occult in brain and blood, unguessed by him,
“My man of men, begat a passionate sense
“Of everlastingness; as old, as young,
“As perdurable as the earth itself,
“He couched him in the wood and heard and felt.

“Anon the travelling music of the street
“That distance can etherealize arose
“Among the workmen's houses overhead.
“Old vogue or new, melodious tune or harsh,
“High-hammered in the village, softly stole
“Adown the neighbouring valley, deep, remote,
“Antique, eternal as the world-old mood
“Of him that listened dreaming. Every tree
“Upon its shadow stood; athwart the boughs
‘The wind, uncertain, sighed; the mellow tune
“Like jewelled mist descended; moted shafts
“Of dusky light escaped the journeying clouds
“That hid the ample sun and left his beams
“A deeper hue of topaz, chrysosperm
“To milt the earth with harvest; thick as thoughts
“A thunder of hoofs went by—four grazing hacks
“By some unwonted shadow on the laund
“Perturbed: a skirt, a glancing step, a shriek,
“A ravished woman; and my man of men,
“At one with nature in the ancient way,
“Began his tragic course. A decade spent
“In prison turned him out, insane, corrupt,
“The sheath decayed, the weapon dim and hacked,
“The broken bits, the refuse of himself;
“But with a purpose smouldering in the dust,
“The ashes, embers, brands that had been once
“A proper furnace and a glowing fire,
“With perilous temper in the worn-out blade,
“With wallflower on the ruins, a branch of stars
“To light the outcast in the sunless pit,
“And music beating in the broken heart.
“He sought the ravished woman, and made her his;
“For now the world to him was sex alone,
“And she, the other moiety of the world:
“None other; she, the woman of his deed,
“His fate, the only woman he had known.
“They lived beside the valley, sacro-sanct
“To him by reason of his sudden crime;
“For crime can hallow precincts, titles, tides,
“As certainly as Calvary remains
“The holiest spot on earth. Sometimes he wrought
“With pick and shovel like a thing wound-up;
“Sometimes in lethargy his days were sunk;
“Sometimes his passion for the woman welled
“Like founts of living colour, founts of fire
“That steep the cloudy west in paradise.
“Three years went by, a child with every year;
“Then Fate abruptly gripped him by the throat,
“And asked him of the deeds done in the flesh.
“To feed and clothe the woman his fiercest toil
“Required him still to starve himself. Four mouths
“Beside his own! The hunger of his heart,
“The fury of his appetite, the blood
“That would ferment and flower; the toil, the pain,
“The hopeless time to come for him and his!
“When the third child was twelve months old, and she,
“The lusty mother comelier every day,
“An orchard-tree with blossom and with fruit
“Sweet-scented and mature, this man of men,
“Unwitting how the world shall cease to be,
“And we and all our purpose, passion, power,
“Dissolve like snow in fire and leave no stain,
“Instinctively achieved the greatest deed
“Recorded hitherto; and answered Fate
“With utter arrogance. (The thing is known:
“You read the trial? No; it made no noise.
“That such a thing should happen in the world,
“And pass from knowledge like a shallow jest!)
“Midnight beat out upon suburban bells
“A drowsy madrigal from tower to tower;
“The potent summer moonbeams thronged the room;
“And when their youngest child, asleep at last,
“Released the woman virginal again—
“For every birth restores virginity,
“And a chaste year had filled the flower of hers—
“My hero left his couch upon the floor,
“Approached the bed where with her brood she lay,
“And kneeling whispered in her ear. She blushed—
“How deep a crimson mantling in the light
“With silvery bloom like clusters of the vine!
“She turned and kissed him, smiled and dove-like rose
“As willing as a bride. ‘Outside,’ he said,
“And pointed to the moon. Wondering she went
“Clad in her nightdress. Splendid in the strength
“Of madness . . . (What men do when Time and Fate,
“The rack and torture of the world have driven
“Them mad, reveals their inmost attribute;
“For madness is the flowering of the heart,
“The red rose of the soul) . . . So in the strength
“Of madness, splendid as a god when gods
“Haunted the world for love of womankind,
“He caught her up and bore her to the wood.
“Remembrance of their savage bridal-hour,
“The decade's wasted womb, the later times
“Of hunger, rapture, toil and fruitful love,
“And the last year of longing unrelieved,
“The fire and martyrdom of abstinence
“Became a golden legend when he changed
“The silent alley for the whispering glade,
“The native power and beauty of the night.
“Oh then the spicy odour of the earth,
“The green scent of the boughs with dew refreshed,
“The miracle of fantasy attained,
“Of valiant passion and the wine of life
“Gathered and crushed and emptied to the lees
“Beneath a hawthorn on a grassy couch,
“All dappled with the blossoms of the moon
“That drifted earthward through the darkling tree!
“For this unmannered love discounted Fate
“Upon the very ground his crime had blessed,
“The altar of the coming sacrifice,
“And final triumph of the will to live!
“Her bounteous bosom—hush!—her eager arms,
“Her burning, proud, insatiable sex,
“Her murmurs, molten kisses, deepdrawn sighs;
“Then swift the knife across her milk-white throat,
“And the red fountain gurgling in the grass!
“Felicity for her; but anguish fierce
“On him laid sudden hold and wrung him hard.
“Anon an awful voice broke out in wrath,
“A voice he knew not, from his entrails torn,
“The inarticulate cry of consciousness
“Caught in the wide toils of the Universe,
“Of instant mystery suddenly aware,
“Yet fronting with a deed of loudest note
“The mute, Material Infinitude.
“Forthwith he menaced heaven; stabbed at the moon;
“Shook from his homeless eyes the flood of tears;
“Girded his loins and perfected the work.
“The youngest first: upon the woman's breast
“He laid it softly down; on either hand
“The other two: all dead—crimson and white,
“A posy for the gods, sweet bloodworts culled
“At midnight in a London suburb. Deep
“His lonely sleep and dreamless in the house
“His hands had ravaged. When the morning came
“He gave himself to justice unperturbed.”

As this recital ended breathlessly,
In every countenance, debauched, diseased,
Unmanned, a tender look and terrible
From the unsounded depths of being surged,
O'erflowed the eyes and played about the mouth;
And I, uncovering, bent before these things
That had been men and now were agony—
A random harp of tensest torture stretched
Upon a ruined bridge beside the Lea.

Stunned by this actual knowledge of the soul
At home here in eternal torment; purged
Of feeling, judgement, memory, thought I trod
The beaten towing-path, my palsied brain
A magic mirror of the things I saw:
A well-bred gelding fallen on evil days
Tugged at a flashing rope that dipped and dripped;
A hamlet sweltered by the riverside—
Wharfs, barges, mounds of bricks, carts, gravel, dross,
The whole riparian coil of things involved
In pungencies of steaming tar, manure,
Stale water, bitter smoke, and plaintive once
With unshorn sheep that scrabbled o'er a bridge
Bleating to crop the pasture of the marsh.

Like savage wood-nymphs with their hair on end
The pollard-willows mocked the pleasure-boat,
Or athlete skimming in his shell of splints;
But spectral poplars in the distance kept
The secrets of the wind upgathered close;
And on the verge, where sky and suburb met,
With shadow teeming and with emerald light
The forest beckoned on the voyager.
Thither I hastened, in my waking dream
Oblivious of the way: the firmament,
In quaint mosaic ceiled, of porcelain,
Azure and gray, milky and olive-hued,
Umber and flame, close canopied the earth;
An exaltation of suburban larks
Against the lowering vault shattered their songs;
A ground-bee twanged across the chequered plain;
And then the forest took me. Evening fell.
I marked the lattice-work on swarthy boles
Of lustred chestnuts as I walked about,
And saw the trees keep up a torch-lit dance,
In noiseless chains and figures flitting past.
The cuckoos beat their golden gongs throughout
The echoing forest; finches, sparrows, wrens,
Blackbirds and nightingales in every bough
Descanted music fresh as garlands woven
In Arcady; in hollows where the mist
Began to hang its ghostly tapestry out,
Mistrustful creatures stole from tree to tree—
The fallow deer come from their inner haunts
To snatch a supper of the crusts and crumbs
Left by the Londoner. Bird after bird
Forbore its song as darkness crept abroad,
Till the last lark dropped breathless from the sky:
Only the passionate nightingales poured out
Their uninterpretable carol—wreaths
Of jewels, dewdrops, gold, chaplets of stars
That stained the ashen dusk with diverse fire.

A sudden, silver dissonance, a bell,
A vesper bell, destroyed my stagnant mood.
Then those unhappy things that had been men
And now in dreams of madness, murder, lust
A dread salvation found, usurped my thought.
Into my mind nothing so terrible
Had plunged before; nothing of utter woe,
Until I met these outcasts by the Lea,
Had ever cleft the three-piled artifice
That swathed my life. The eager vesper bell
Invited willing feet. Led by the sound
I reached the forest church and entered, glad
As some lost soul from deep perdition snatched
To serve once more its pleasant flesh and blood,
And every hallowed function of the sense.
(That rooted, barbed antithesis! That lie!)
Twilight against the chancel-casement frowned,
And heaped upon the broidered altar-cloth
A ghostly diaper of coloured gloom;
High in the organ loft a point of gold
Persisted in a wavering flame that beamed
Harmonic hues of dull uncertain dye;
And as the lamplight bathed the fingered keys,
The open diapason moaned and sang,
Like wind and sea within an ocean cave
At nightfall when the new moon overrides
The ebbing brands of sunset. “Peace!” I prayed;
“Peace for a little; give my spirit peace!”
Swift came the shattering thought, “To whom this prayer?
“The surreptitious God Semitic lore
“In Aryan fable foisted cuckoo-wise;
“The God hebdomadal the church exploits;
“The God the harlot swears by—common God
“Of hucksters, gossips, liars, hypocrites,
“Evangelists, dysangelists, infidels?
“The God upon whose shoulders conquerors hang
“The burden of their slaughter—Him whose will
“The God-intoxicated Tamerlane
“Obeyed in Anatolia, crushing down
“A fourfold thousand in a single tomb:
“Alive he buried them in one huge pit,
“And heard with rapture holy as the joy
“He deemed high Heaven partook a stifled roar,
“A murmur and a multitudinous sigh
“Break from the heaving bosom of the earth.
“What God? What God? God of the rack, the stake?
“The big battalions and the heavy purse?
“Why pray at all? What's prayer? The meanest mode,
“The fond delirium power exhausted grants
“A grudged occasion when our uttermost
“Endeavour fails and thought is spent! Pray? Think
“Instead what God is, sanely think; and what
“The sanguine source of our immortal hope;
“Think how some common, drudging neighbourwight
“(Not Hercules nor a titan of the war
“Venerean; no, but any honest Jack)
“Could happily beget for fifty years
“A hundred wholesome children annually;
“How every rosy Jill incloisters germs
“Of many thousand brats; think this, and laugh
“Aloud, delighted with the naïve, the rich
“Conceit of immortality and vast
“Exuberance of the race that swells and throbs
“In every man and woman, strings the nerves,
“Ignites the brain and thunders in the heart
“With God and life eternal. Youth and love
“Demand a Heaven of beauty and delight,
“A Hell of wrath and fear; and valour claims
“Immortal meed of victory! Overthrow
“The cross of Christ. . . .” (Who spoke? I cannot tell;
Belial, or Antichrist, or northern blood
In us that drives us still a-viking far
And wide) . . . “We English need no Hebrew God,
“Whose filthy world in blood of rams and goats
“Uncleansed, exacted finally the bland
“Abstersion of a sacrifice divine.
“Since the reverberant fire of fantasy—
“The furnace and the mould of blood and brain—
“Refashions heaven and earth the world about,
“In consort with the genius of the clime,
“The time, the folk; and since imperial doom,
“Alive at last in thought and deed, awakes
“A pride of origin, and bids us tell
“What power is this that wins and holds the world,
“Shall we not now observantly dethrone
“The valetudinary God of woe,
“The foreign God that died a shameful death,
“Whose gospel tolls denial and contempt
“Of all that flesh and blood delights in, all
“The great, the beautiful, the strong, the wise;
“Exalt instead the nerve, the brain, the blood,
“The power of us, victorious Englishmen,
“Who glad at heart invade the quartered globe,
“Possessing continents, usurping seas;
“And if imagination, salt and sweet,
“That must be served with treasures and with rites,
“Still hankers after ancient images,
“May not the enamoured genius of the race
“Impregnate once again her jewelled womb
“With Odin, Freya, Hulda, Baldur, Thor?
“Hush! hark! aloft a clanging cavalcade,
“The silver bridles, snow-white stallions, helms
“Enchanted, bosoms clad in virgin proof—
“Brunhilda, and the choosers of the slain!
“The cloud above the battle opens: home
“From blood-drenched desert, mountain, valley, veldt,
“With lightning-thong and thunder-hoof we ride
“Across the rainbow to the palaces
“Of Asgard, and the grove of golden fir
“Where high Valhalla stands, heroic haven
“Of all our ancestors! Or shall not we—
“We English that can melt the world up—forge
“A brand-new God, an actual God at last,
“No Evil God to die upon a tree,
“A hale, triumphant God who knows no sin,
“Sorrow nor anguish, nor the fear of death?
“We have that God already—have we not?—
“The rich man's God, of comfort and of ease,
“A God of health and strength, a gracious God,
“Whose law is freedom, and who saves his own
‘By no election of the spirit: no,
“By natural selection and the strife
“For power this honest English God proceeds
“His wonders to perform.” . . . But there the laugh,
Albeit genial, froze about my heart,
Because the music now began to wail
A tenebrous voluntary, limning clear
Before me—as the art of music can
That piled the towers of Troy—in storm-hatched light
The cross of Christ on Calvary as it stood:
A rustic spar athwart a rustic beam,
The sawdust powdering still the scabrous bark,
And the aroma of the fresh-cut tree
Shrouding the scent of blood. The peasant-God
In every vibrant sinew, every nerve
Convulsed, endured the ardent tide of pain
That whelmed and interfused him momently,
Surge upon surge with every sobbing breath.
I saw his soul look out from pallid eaves,
And those dim windows of the Universe,
His faded eyes, that yet benignant shone;
I wept, I knelt, I kissed the wounded feet;
I knew the death of God, the end of Sin.

Forthwith a rustle and a roar of drums,
A thunder of trumpets, and the lofty shriek
Of strings, voluptuous and intense as fire,
Broke from the forest, and the church became
The thoroughfare of twenty centuries.
Barbaric conquerors, armies dyed in blood,
Disciplinants austere, ecstatic nuns,
Crusaders, monarchs, templars, tragic popes,
Heresies, tortures, trances, martyrdoms,
Enslavement, havoc, ruin, and the fugue
Of hellish warfare, endless as the winds
That rave for ever round the storm-tost world,
The twenty centuries of Christendom,
The gorgeous masque, the revelry and rout,
The long-protracted funeral rites of God,
The pageant and the obsequies of Sin
Rolled through the aisle before me. “Who would hoard”—
I cried aloud as that wild orgy passed—
“A purse or two of time when Fate provides
“So great a celebration as the death
“Of God Himself, the utter end of Sin?
“How could mankind in lesser lapse of years
“Than those tremendous centuries conceive
“The esoteric meaning of the Cross—
“That God gave up the ghost on Calvary,
“And bore away the Sin of all the world?
“How could mankind perceive until to-day
“That God and Sin existed not at all;
“That with the death of Christ there also died
“The two insane ideas, God and Sin?
“The ghostly sphere of these illusions bursts
“Asunder only now when age on age
“Of war, blood-drunkenness, the clash of creeds,
“Inhuman kingdoms, popedoms, whoredoms, Hell
“Have drained the dregs of all iniquity;
“So that at last the passionate heart of man,
“The proud imagination, and the dream
“That hovers homeless as the myths decay,
“Exempt from fabulous wonder, rooted deep
“In Substance one and multiform, and breathed
“In all the mystery of the things that are,
“Create indomitable will to truth,
“An open mind at home in space and time,
“A stainless memory splendidly endowed
“With actual knowledge, a Material soul
“At one with the Material Universe.”
The glory of a sane humanity
Had hardly dawned and lightened when the trump
Of doom exhaled a long-enduring sigh,
A sigh, no louder, heard and felt throughout
The quaking earth; and in the zenith reared,
The great white throne and Him that sat thereon
Illumined space insufferably bright.
Against His glance the star-strewn firmament,
As evanescent as a wreath of mist
At sunrise, perished utterly. The dead
Before the throne awaited judgement. Books
Were opened and another book which is
The book of life; and all the dead were judged
Out of the matters written in the books
According to their actions. On the right,
When the eternal sentence was pronounced,
I saw the great ones of the earth appear
Magnificently confident of heaven—
The kings, the conquerors, the wise, the bold.
The rich, the proud, and all the lusty lives
That took their power and pleasure in the world
“Enter, ye blessëd, enter!”—from the throne
The high decree. “Inherit now the realm
“Prepared for you from the beginning, ye
“That used the world I made superb in strength,
“Unparagoned in beauty—ye that loved
“The haughty morning and the radiant night,
“That stored the brilliant hours with generous strife,
“With sweet repose, with passion, and with joy,
“Glorying and revelling in the gifts I gave.
“Created of the self-same stuff as I,
“And all My suns and systems, Matter, strained
“From the great staple of the Universe
“Throughout millenniums of elaborate choice,
“Conscious, self-conscious, free to know, to think,
“To do, all ye that had my world in charge,
“And set yourselves to fill it with delight,
“With noble wars, with beauty and with wealth,
“With hope for man, with hope for life, with life,
“And ever and always life, partake with Me
“To all eternity the joys of heaven.”

Upon the left—shuddering I saw it so—
The Son of Man and His elect appeared,
Apostles, martyrs, votarists, virgins, saints.
The poor in spirit, the mourners and the meek,
And they that hungered after righteousness,
The merciful and all the pure in heart,
Peacemakers and the salt of the earth I saw
Upon the left in sore amazement stand.
“Depart from Me, ye cursëd”—from the throne
The dread decree—“into eternal fire;
“Deniers, slanderers, fools that turned to scorn
“The perfect world I made superb in strength,
“Unparagoned in beauty; ye that stained
“The haughty morning and the radiant night,
“Seasons and tides with liturgies and forms,
“With cries and intercessions, prayers and tears,
“Ashamed to use the glory I had given;
“Ye rancorous poisoners of life that found
“Temptation only where I offered joy,
“My splendid world a charnel-house, and Me
“A God of infelicity and woe,
“A God of everything unfit to live,
“Hating My gifts of intellect, of pride,
“Of strength and freedom. Of the self-same stuff
“As I and all My suns and galaxies,
“The purest Matter, sifted forth and strained
“From the great staple of the Universe
“Throughout millenniums of elaborate choice,
“Conscious, self-conscious, free to know, to think
“To do, having My world in charge, ye set
“Yourselves to drain it of delight, of love,
“Of beauty, passion, power, supplied the void
“With lust, revenge, distress, corruption, hate,
“And made My will to life a will to death.
“Ye hypocrites, that with a holy lie
“Tarnished the cleanliness immaculate
“Of human generation, soiling life
“On to the end from his pellucid fount
“And origin divine, beholding earth
“A leprous crust of Sin, depart from Me
“Into eternal fire prepared for them
“That make my will to live a will to die.”

All this I saw and heard, and of the sight
And utterance unimagined die
Despairing. In my heart of hearts I knew,
As men must know whose will is set to truth,
The death of Christ to be the tragic end
Of God Himself that purged the world of Sin—
A great expedient indeed, and big
With all transvaluation; but to think
The desolating thought, to apprehend
The meaning of the adamantine reign
And power of Evolution in awful terms
Of God and Judgement, overwhelmed my soul;
And now that death at random tortures me,
And delves and fathoms like a busy mole
Tissue and marrow, now that maggots fret
My brain and worms entangle fantasy,
While casual darkness visits me by day,
The shadow of the unknown, and dreams distress
Me nightly—(all my household overhears
The outcry of my waking); now, indeed
Corroding consciousness of manhood gnaws
And macerates the fibre of my mind
With pangs of Hell and impotent remorse,
So horrible and sick that sense of sin,
In that archaic jargon dying hard,
Were Heaven to such unutterable woe.

It is my bones that speak, my skeleton,
The inmost core of me, the soul of soul;
The skeleton's the soul; it must be so.
Once when I held the Wardenship in Hythe
I handled souls; a cryptful there of bones
Unsepulchred is worth a visit. Skull
By skull I searched the infinite abyss
Of empty sockets, till a valiant brow
Engraved and cleft with sword and battle-axe
Divulged its secret. Deep I dug my sight,
Forehead to forehead, eye to eyeless gap
As in a necromantic camera,
Through Time and times to that tempestuous strand
And moonlit battle in the roaring surf.
Between two storms the beaten Saxons fell,
All day pursued by ominous Vortimer
And snared upon the threshold of the sea
By hostile wind and tide, their old allies
Become implacable antagonists.
Thrust forth for flight warkeel on warkeel smote
Amid the ravelled water; twisted prows
Leapt up against the billows, spun aloft
And burst in ragged splinters on the beach.
Their helpless crews together madly hurled
In writhing shoals, a wasted myriad, died.
The remnant toed the tide mark, death behind
And death in front. Extorting stride on stride
The victors pressed them backward to the deep,
Where dead and dying swashed against the limbs
Of coupled combatants and dragged them down,
Unstable shingle tripped and coiling surge
Dislodged the surest foot. From the torn sky
The placid bosom of the barren moon,
Chill mirror of the morning, fitful light
On cloven helmets flung and cleaving brands,
On lips that snarled and eyes instinct with fate.
Yet all unheard warcry and weapon rang,
For high above the din of battle pealed
The instant thunder of the brandished waves
And shattering trumps and cymbals of the blast,
While blood-shot foam in ruby-tinctured scrolls
Unfurled and withered on the darkling shore.
The combat vanished and a pageant thronged
The chamber of the skull, presenting time
Revoked through aeons to the earliest sun
From nebulous stuff condensed which brimmed of yore
That spacious womb the jewelled Zodiac clasps—
Ah, still the biassed Heaven!—I mean the loins
Of ancient night with constellations girt.
At once in molten rings as daughter-cells
Are cleft and cleft again to don the shape
Of perfect organs, from the spinning mass
And staple of the Universe unscaled
Like Saturn's girdles, satellites in germ,
Earth and the neighbouring worlds, our known-unknown
Adopted pagans (Vulcan, Mercury;
The silver Venus, monogram of night
And morning's crest; perfervid Mars that tempts
A mundane hail; majestic Jupiter;
The belted Saturn, prodigal in moons;
Predicted Uranus and Neptune found
Without a lens deep in the brain of man
Upon the utmost verge of solar space)—
Conglobing as they strained the million-miled
Elastic tether gravitation gives,
And shedding asteroids like fiery sweat,
No way perplexed by vagrant comets, ghosts
Perhaps of suns extinct that haunt in vain
The wide, dynamic ether hoping still
To reign resphered, these orbs of ours so cast
Adrift in the infinite, eternally
Assumed the measured pace and lonely path
Celestial. Earth, delivered of its moon
And chilled without and tempered to endure
Barbaric sculpture of the glacier, shaped,
Imbued, adorned by deluges, among the first
Of planets felt the intolerable letch
And prurience of Matter, the mystery,
The viscid passion some call protoplasm
And some call God; a mystery known to me
For what it is, the whence and why unknown
The Universe throughout; then half perceived
Within the dinted skull, as Time revoked
The pageant of Becoming from the storm
And moonlit battle in the crimsoned surf
To the primaeval nebula corrupt
With life, that died and rotted into us,
Our regal sun and pensionary orbs;
And now that like a hive my body hums
With pangs and muffled business of decay,
A mystery deeply seen, retrieved and gripped
In dogged apprehension, or as folk
That perish hunger-clung their chapped lips bathe
In native blood and in their proper flesh
Their muzzles lock: for this is I, the thing
I know and am: 'tis not my mind I speak:
To speak one's mind? the itching vanity
Of cancers, pustules, outcasts, parasites!
It is my bones that speak, my skeleton:
I speak the substance of the Universe.
Yet, lost in sleep, my memory wakes and haunts
Phantasmal regions ignorance of old
In ecstasy invented—bastioned cliffs,
Indissoluble adamant on fire,
By violet seas of burning sulphur washed
And pierced by echoing caves of agony;
Or islands of the evening plumed with fronds,
Wine-coloured tides that in their slumbrous depths
Mirror the purple twilight, golden shores
Where rhythmic billows pulse like stricken lyres,
And happy spirits in a waking dream
Enjoy for ever disembodied bliss.
Yet, yet I know that everywhere is Matter.
Dreams of the dreams of Matter, Heaven and Hell
In massed imaginings arose and flowered
From world-old memories glimmering darkly still
Through brain and bone of phosphorus knit, occult
In carbon, calcium, metals, vapours, earths
That build the body conscious and the soul
Self-conscious. Could these elements elect,
These changeful properties of Matter, one
In all diversity, that chance or doom
Delivered up to be mankind, forget
Their burning passion in the nebula
Though love itself came after? Never doubt
That visions of Elysium and the abyss
Of fire denote enduring thoughts antique
As time of that supernal ecstasy,
When Matter incandescent filled and rent
The shuddering womb of universal space—
Material memories once the scourge of men,
But now resolved and known for what they are.

Yet they torment me? Yes, and terribly:
Because the conscious Matter which I am,
Beginning to surrender consciousness,
Recoils from dissolution and divorce.
To be dispersed in elemental sport
Of heedless energy—the uncontrolled
Imagination of the Universe,
That flashes out an instant nebula
By chance encounter in the spacious dark
Of ancient suns extinct and vagrant, turns
To teeming wonder every water-drop,
Afflicts the human race with hope, attunes
The nightingale, and launches in the deep
The monstrous rorqual: to be left once more
A scattered wreck of groping elements
Without remembrance, judgement, wisdom, choice,
Perturbs the divers stuff that men are of;
Wherefore when sleep in mimicry of death
Dissolves self-consciousness, the hideous dreams
That wake me shrieking. . . .

Let them come again
When sleep rehearses death, or death itself
Takes up the cue: no dreams of mine are they,
But Matter's dreams of old experience wrought
In imperceptive atoms: while I wake
I apprehend and master time and space,
For this self-consciousness is masterdom.