University of Virginia Library

Is it ironical, a fool enigma,
This sunset show?
The purple stigma,
Black mountain cut upon a saffron glow—
Is it a mammoth joke,
A riddle put for me to guess,
Which having duly honoured, I may smoke,
And go to bed,
And snore,
Having a soothing consciousness
Of something red?
Or is it more?
Ah, is it, is it more?

A dole, perhaps?
The scraps
Tossed from the table of the revelling gods?—
What odds!
I taste them—Lazarus
Was nourished thus!
But, all the same, it surely is a cheat—
Is this the stuff they eat?
A cheat! a cheat!
Then let the garbage be—
Some pig-wash! let it vanish down the sink
Of night! 'tis not for me.
I will not drink
Their draff,
While, throned on high, they quaff
The fragrant sconce—
Has Heaven no cloaca for the nonce?

Say 'tis an anodyne—
It never shall be mine.
I want no opiates—
The best of all their cates
Were gross to balk the meanest sense;
I want to be co-equal with their fates;
I will not be put off with temporal pretence:
I want to be awake, and know, not stand
And stare at waving of a conjuror's hand.

But is it speech
Wherewith they strive to reach
Our poor inadequate souls?
The round earth rolls;
I cannot hear it hum—
The stars are dumb—
The voices of the world are in my ear
A sensuous murmur. Nothing speaks
But man, my fellow—him I hear,
And understand; but beasts and birds
And winds and waves are destitute of words.
What is the alphabet
The gods have set?
What babbling! what delusion!
And in these sunset tints
What gay confusion!
Man prints
His meaning, has a letter
Determinate. I know that it is better
Than all this cumbrous hieroglyph—
The For, the If
Are growth of man's analysis:
The gods in bliss
Scrabble a baby jargon on the skies
For us to analyse!
Cumbrous? nay, idiotic—
A party-coloured symbolism,
The fragments of a shivered prism:
Man gives the swift demotic.

'Tis good to see
The economy
Of poor upstriving man!
Since time began,
He has been sifting
The elements; while God, on chaos drifting,
Sows broadcast all His stuff.
Lavish enough,
No doubt; but why this waste?
See! of these very sunset dies
The virgin chaste
Takes one, and in a harlot's eyes
Another rots. They go by billion billions:
Each blade of grass
Ignores them as they pass;
The spiders in their foul pavilions,
Behold this vulgar gear,
And sneer;
Dull frogs
In bogs
Catch rosy gleams through rushes,
And know that night is near;
Wrong-headed thrushes
Blow bugles to it;
And a wrong-headed poet
Will strut, and strain the cogs
Of the machine, he blushes
To call his Muse, and maunder;
And, marvellous to relate!
These pseudo-messengers of state
Will wander
Where there is no intelligence to meet them,
Nor even a sensorium to greet them.
The very finest of them
Go where there's nought to love them
Or notice them: to cairns, to rocks
Where ravens nurse their young,
To mica-splints from granite-boulders wrung
By channels of the marsh, to stocks
Of old dead willows in a pool as dead.
Can anything be said
To these? The leech
Looks from its muddy lair,
And sees a silly something in the air—
Call you this speech?
O God, if it be speech,
Speak plainer,
If Thou would'st teach
That I shall be a gainer!
The age of picture-alphabets is gone:
We are not now so weak;
We are too old to con
The horn-book of our youth. Time lags—
O, rip this obsolete blazon into rags!
And speak! O, speak!

But, if I be a spectacle
In Thy great theatre, then do Thy will:
Arrange Thy instruments with circumspection;
Summon Thine angels to the vivisection!
But quick! O, quick!
For I am sick,
And very sad.
Thy pupils will be glad.
“See,” Thou exclaim'st, “this ray!
How permanent upon the retina!
How odd that purple hue!
The pineal gland is blue.
I stick this probe
In the posterior lobe—
Behold the cerebellum
A smoky yellow, like old vellum!
Students will please observe
The structure of the optic nerve.
See! nothing could be finer—
That film of pink
Around the hippocampus minor.
Behold!
I touch it, and it turns bright gold.
Again!—as black as ink.
Another lancet—thanks!
That's Manx—
Yes, the delicate pale sea-green
Passing into ultra-marine—
A little blurred—in fact
This brain seems packed
With sunsets. Bring
That battery here; now put your
Negative pole beneath the suture—
That's just the thing.
Now then the other way—
I say! I say!
More chloroform!
(A little more will do no harm)
Now this is the most instructive of all
The phenomena, what in fact we may call
The most obvious justification
Of vivisection in general.
Observe (once! twice!
That's very nice)—
Observe, I say, the incipient relation
Of a quasi-moral activity
To this physical agitation!
Of course, you see. . . .”
Yes, yes, O God,
I feel the prod
Of that dissecting knife.
Instructive, say the pupil angels, very:
And some take notes, and some take sandwiches and sherry;
And some are prying
Into the very substance of my brain—
I feel their fingers!
(My life! my life!)
Yes, yes! it lingers!
The sun, the sun—
Go on! go on!
Blue, yellow, red!
But please remember that I am not dead,
Nor even dying.

Yes, it is hard, but not for you alone.
You speak of cup and throne,
And all that separates Me from you.
It is not that you don't believe:
It is but that you misconceive
The work I have to do.

No throne, no cup,
Nor down, but likest up,
As from a deep black shaft, I look to see
The fabric of My own immensity.
You have the temporal activity, and rejoice
In sweet articulate voice—
Tunes, songs.
To Me no less
Belongs
The fixed, sad fashion of productiveness.
You think that I am wise,
Or cunning, clever as a man is clever.
You think all knowledge with Me lies,
From Me must flow.
I know not if I know—
But this I know, I will work on for ever.
You fret because you are not this and that,
And so you die;
But I,
Who have not sat
Since first into the void I swam,
Obeying Mine own laws,
Persist, because
I am but what I am.

I am old and blind;
I have no speech
“Wherewith to reach”
Your quick-selecting ears.
And yet I mark your tears;
And yet I would be kind.
And so I strain
To speak, as now;
And, in more cheerful vein,
You haply will allow
I make My meaning fairly plain.
Therefore it is I store
Such beauty in the clouds, and on the shore
Make foam-flakes glisten; therefore you have seen
This sunset; therefore 'tis the green
And lusty grass
Hath come to pass,
And flame
Lies sparkling in the dews—
And yet I cannot choose
But do the same!
I am no surgeon,
I have no lancet, but I mingle
Sap for the buds, that they may burgeon,
And tingle
With soft sweet throes
Of parturition vegetal.
And so to all
The surfaces
I outward press,
And hold the very brink
Of speech, that I would think
Speech must come next.
But I can do no more: wherefore I am not vexed;
But you are, being perplexed
With suppositions, scribbling o'er the text
Of natural life. And, seeing that this is so,
And that I cannot know
The innumerous ills,
Therefore I strew the hills
And vallies with delight,
That, day or night,
In sad or merry plight,
You may catch sight
Of some sweet joy that thrills
Your heart.
And what if I impart
The same to frog or newt,
What if I steep the root
Of some old stump in bright vermilion,
And if the spider in his quaint pavilion
Catches a sunbeam where he thought a fly,
Ah, why
Should I not care for such?
I, Who make all things, know it is not much.
And, by analogy I must suppose
They have their woes
Like you:
Therefore I still must strew
Joys that may wait for centuries,
And light at last on Socrates,
Or on the frog, whose eyes
You may have noticed full of bright surprise—
Or have you not? Ah, then
You only think of men!
But I would have no single creature miss
One possible bliss.
And this
Is certain: never be afraid!
I love what I have made.
I know this is not wit,
This is not to be clever,
Or anything whatever.
You see, I am a servant, that is it:
You've hit
The mark—a servant; for the other word—
Why, you are Lord, if any one is Lord.