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THE WORM OF DOUBT.
One night I passed through portals of soft sleep,431
More real than life, more sorrowful than truth,
Builded of running waters on the web
Of yellow sands that drift and shift and crumble
For evermore beneath a yellow moon
Low in a purple heaven, when a light wind
Laughs; it was neither day nor night, but both
Blended in one great meek and mournful dimness;
The sun and its pale sister too were there,
And sometimes this and sometimes that did wane
Or wax and brighten or grow dull. Nor light
Nor darkness held the upper hand and quenched
Its rival, but a vast mysteriousness
Hung over all and fretted at the heart
Of everything that moved and did not move,
Within this realm that was not life or death
And yet partook of either. Long I looked.
The sadnesses and gladnesses did fight
For mastery in vain; and a mild music,
Mingled with tears and muffled like the voice
Of many waves, that wash a dreary shore
Far far away in other times and climes,
Brake on mine ears as drowsily as dreams
Of poppied visions faint and wonderful,
Trodden by naked maidens' pink and white
Adorableness. But the speech was doubt,
The spectacle was doubt, the common air
Was nothing more and nothing less than doubt.
Ghostly misgiving gaunt and manifold,
Crept like a curse that struggled with a blessing
And beat it down and breathed through alien lips
A message that belonged to baser things,
And triumphed in its might uncertain. Men
Passed to and fro, and women beautiful
And wanton some; and human and divine
Children who sought for their lost infancy
Like paradise but found it not, and went
Without the joy of incunabula
And motherhood's blue sky with timid stumbling
Steps; fading in the gloom majestical
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Deeper and deeper, in forlornness mute.
A nameless fear did haunt the doomèd place,
With dismal thoughts that grew exceedingly.
Nothing was constant, and no act or fact
Was fixed, but might or might not be and follow
The same old causes; none could guess the fruit,
The burden or the issuings of work,
When mirth and measured pomp's solemnities
Were mixed; the morrow and the present use
Seemed one in spite of differences, and past
And future married strove; uncertainty
Alone was certain, and in all prevailed.
The inhabitants were shy, and through the shadow
That had a silver seam walked up and down,
In search of what they knew not, warily,
With wavering feet; but none did trust another;
While each was simply sure that nought was sure,
And questioned his existence—if he lived
Or lived not, and with aimless empty arms
Toiled at beginnings and beginnings and beginnings
Which had no end and no proportion. Love
Died in its birth, and grim suspiciousness
Grew. Words were frozen on the lips, confessed
And unconfessed at once, and thought hardly
Dared to lift up its eagle wings and pined
For lack of food and sympathy and hope.
And jealousy gnawed at the troubled breast
Of barren wives, and husbands did refuse
The troth which they had plighted yesterday.
And God appeared a phantom, and was bodied
At times in blessèd garments beautiful
And incarnations of sweet Christ-likeness,
Walking in human flesh; and then at times
Was but a gorgeous mist, that mocked the heart
And plagued the head with foolish fantasies;
Who might and might not be, and was apparent
And was not. The Divinity was doubt,
A pious hope, a veil of vastnesses
Betwixt the earth and heaven, a vague unrest,
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Now bedrock of the mighty Multiverse,
And then the thinnest wreath of thinnest cloud
Inpalpable; the matrix of all things,
Oceans and airs and the eternities,
And yet a toy for children or a terror
To chain brute force and iron ignorance down
As with the weight of many atmospheres
In dust of bondage. Then a horror seized
My palsied soul, I did misdoubt myself;
I knew and knew not aught, and everything
Swooned as I swum in awful fog. The dear
Kind sanities and gentle modes of usage,
And daily coin of current intercourse
Melted; and nothing fixed or final stayed
My meaningless blind paces anywhither,
From twilight unto twilight; courtesies
Became a mockery and an empty play
Of shadows duped by shadows, each alike
Meandering through a labyrinthine maze
Of idlenesses. Was I what I seemed?
Did mind exist? Did matter have a root
In sure reality? Was all a vision,
And God and man and the whole moving mass
Of systems only a great shining sham
Phantasmagoria? O I tried to flee
From this pursuing madness, and myself
Who was not I, my friend, my foe, my pressing
Shame and confusion fooling me with gawds
That vanished as I grasped them. But in vain,
By horror of discomfortableness
Hounded, I struggled on, bewildered more
And more. Till I awoke in weary dusk
Of ghostly dawn to weep again, and find
The worm of doubt was busy at my heart,
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