University of Virginia Library

I waken at dawn and your head
On the pillow beside me lies;
And I wonder although we were wed
Such an infinite fortnight ago,
“Have the planets stood still in the skies
Since my sweetheart and I were wed,
Since first I awoke, and lo,
On the pillow beside me her head!”

Through our window the wind forspent—
Marauder in garth and wild!—
His opulent burden of scent
Unloads lest he faint by the way;
For the flowers, they were subtly beguiled,
And their dewdrops and manifold scent
Perfume now the crimsoning day
On the wings of the wind forspent.

I look, and I look at your face
Till my thought of you pierces your sleep,
Till your silken lashes unlace,
And your blossomlike lids upheave,
Till your eyes emerge from the deep
As your writhen lashes unlace,
And morn and awakening weave
The wonder and joy in your face.

Then your memory quickens and bids
A blush and a happy sigh
At the lift of your azure lids,
A concord of colour and sound;
And there dawns in your violet eye,
When you open your flowerlike lids,
A thought from the depths profound
As an exqusite memory bids.

And this is your twentieth year,
And your bridegroom is twenty-one;
And our thoughts are as fragrant and clear
As the lucent splendour of noon.
My love is as rich as the sun,
And your love is as tender and clear
As the lily-light of the moon
In the sweetest month of the year.

At once when we waken we rise,
For the earth is as fresh as our thought,
And the heaven-high dome of the skies
A miracle constantly new:
A marvel diurnally wrought,
The earth with its seas and its skies,
Its flowers and its matinal dew,
Awaits us as soon as we rise.

Through the woodland and over the lea
That dips to a golden strand,
Like fugitives seeking the sea
We haste in our morning mood;
Together and hand in hand,
We hurry to reach the sea
Through the purple shade of the wood,
And over the spangled lea.

In our boat on the swell of the tide
We steer for the heart of morn,
And I say to you, “Sweet and my bride,
Should hope be for ever undone,
Should destiny leave us forlorn,
Thus, thus shall we journey, my bride,
Right into the heart of the sun
On the morning or evening tide.”

Could we harbour with sorrow and care,
And friendless, in penury lost,
Remain at the beck of despair
Like prisoners or impotent folk?
Could we chaffer and reckon the cost,
And measure out love till despair
Subdued us, bereft, to a yoke
In harness with sorrow and care?

O, not while the morning is crowned,
And the evening, with roses and gold;
Because like adventurers bound
For a kingdom their faith could create
In a future of beauty untold—
Like hazardous mariners bound
For the haven and wharf of Fate
On a voyage with happiness crowned,

In our boat when the day is done,
On the lift of the evening tide
I should steer for the heart of the sun,
And sigh with my ebbing breath,
“Be resolute, sweet and my bride;
We shall sink with the setting sun,
And shelter our love in death
Since our beautiful day is done.”

But now while our hearts beat high
With youth and unfolding delight,
And the honeymoon in the sky
At her zenith usurps the reign
Of the day as well as the night—
With the honeymoon in the sky
We steer for the shore again
While our bosoms with hope beat high.

Through the tasselled oats and the wheat
We march to the skylark's song,
Where the roses, pallid and sweet,
In delicate pomp parade
The precincts the wild bees throng—
Where the winding byways, sweet
With scent of the roses wade
Through the flowing tide of the wheat.

O hark from the meadows! O hear
The burden the mower sings!
The past, how it hovers near
This uttermost isle of the sea!
Where the stone on the sickle rings
The shadowy past draws near,
And the spirit of eld set free
Revives in the song we hear.

The dawn and the dusk are crowned
With chaplets of roses and gold;
We two are invincibly bound
For a kingdom our faith can create
In a present of beauty untold:
O love, we are certainly bound
For the ultimate haven of Fate
On a voyage with happiness crowned!

When suddenly the world was closed to me,
And every road against my passage barred,
I found a door that opened into space;
I built a lodge celestial for myself,
An outcast's palace in the Milky Way;
I banqueted my body and my soul
On light and sound, the substance of the stars,
Ethereal tissue of eternity;
And took my ease in heaven, the first of men
To be and comprehend the Universe:—
To know how all things are the infinite
Imponderable ether that possessed
Illimitable space with tension (pure
Spontaneous energy, the pristine state
Of matter and its last consummate doom)
Before the galaxies with silver seamed
The swart oblivion of the Universe,
Or pearly nebula began to glow
Upon the sable bosom of the night,
Or any living nerve electric leapt
To elemental ecstasy; and, most
Atoning recompense, to feel myself
Ethereal fabric, exquisitely spun,
Entranced and wreathed of light and sound, the warp
And woof of matter; flesh and blood, a lyre
Of tuneful colours; every nerve, a strain
Of spheral music; body, mind and soul,
Material intensity evolved
From unseen atoms, each a reservoir
And ponderable treasury of power;
Infinitude condensed and garnered up
In ions, to be sifted, blent, sublimed,
Transmuted into life of every grade—
Lightning, the sexes of eternity,
Become a group of chosen elements
In flower and beast, and capable in man
Of knowledge, understanding, rapture, truth.

Therefore it shook me when my senses lost
The full material power of crystal vision
And audience infinite, that could outstare
A million suns, and happily engulf,
As in a sea of sound, harmonic curves
Reverberant through the ether; fathom depths
Profound, and subtle darknesses unplumbed
By asterism remote or shimmering waif,
Comet or meteorite or shooting star;
Resolve the discords of imagined spheres;
Enharmonize divergent galaxies;
In puissant planes arrest and deftly cleave
Irradiance everywhere, from candent fire
Inwove, of blanched intolerant stars that burn
Pellucid flame, unbraiding prismal hues
To stud and gem enamelled firmaments,
And stain the welkin and the steep of space
With shadowy tinctures; grip the tumult high
That echoes through the vast unvaulted courts
Interminable, where the nebulæ,
Evolving constellations, their spindles whirl,
And break it into rhythmic chords, as light
Asunder bursts in blazoned intervals
Against refractive adamant, or drops
In jewelled tears before the cloudless sun:
So being unwearied of the universe,
As of myself and my supernal place,
But faint with glory by my soul conceived,
And by my soul begotten, in the rapt
Cohabitation with eternity,
I left my palace in the Milky Way,
My outlook in the skies, and sought the earth;
For men must still descend to earth to die.

“None should outlive his power,” I said. “Who kills
Himself subdues the conqueror of kings:
Exempt from death is he who takes his life:
My time has come. The native energy
Whereby I exorcised fantastical
Immutability, and in my own
Resemblance reproduced the plastic world,
Beginning to relent, abates the thrust
And tension of my thought, discharges love,
Unwinds the poignant charm of living, frees
Imagination—known eternity,
Confined in lightning, light, or radiant soul,
That breaks atomic chrysalids unseen,
Unthinkable, but certain and innate—
To melt into the ether, and to be
Transmuted to infinity again.
We are the plunging fire, the molten seed
That gladdened, swelled and rent the generous wombs
We harboured in—most wilful, fateful births,
Predestined by ourselves before the world
Or time began, and wholly answerable;
For had we not, beyond all yea or nay,
Escaped alive among the myriad germs
Devoutly squandered from abundant reins
To dower a woman's body with delight,
We had not been. By my own will alone
The ethereal substance, which I am, attained,
And now by my own sovereign will, forgoes,
Self-consciousness; and thus are men supreme:
No other living thing can choose to die.
This franchise and this high prerogative
I show the world:—Men are the Universe
Aware at last, and must not live in fear,
Slaves of the seasons, padded, bolstered up,
Clystered and drenched and dieted and drugged;
Or hateful victims of senility,
Toothless and like an infant checked and schooled;
Or in the dungeon of a sick room drained
By some tabescent horror in their prime;
But when the tide of life begins to turn,
Before the treason of the ebbing wave
Divulges refuse and the barren shore,
Upon the very period of the flood,
Stand out to sea and bend our weathered sails
Against the sunset, valiantly resolved
To win the haven of eternal night.”

Ten lustres of authentic life compact,
And many a visit to the heaven of heavens,
Had thus determined me; so forth I sped
Upon a mountain-top to die alone.

At sunset on the mountain of my choice
I stood above the catafalque of day,
And watched the quilted vapour harness heaven
In chrysolite and ruby of countless hues,
Unnamed, unknown, unthought-of, only guessed
Upon the moment of vicissitude
And pulsing cadence; while the lofty wind's
Unseen battalions swung their shining glaives
Against me, and across the hills behind,
With bridle-bells a-peal and vibrant tread,
Went down into the gloaming and the night.
Suddenly fear, against me stumbling, struck
With heavy foot my heart, that missed a pulse,
Then beat upon my ribs as if to break
The prison of humanity; my blood,
Like snow-dredged water laboured in my veins;
My nerves as pithless as peeled rushes now,
And now as taut as harp-strings, flagged inert
Or hummed with agony; my sight went out;
I strained on tiptoe to escape myself
Like one hung up that barely touches ground;
My arms flung forth, my stiffened fingers spread,
Repulsing death, I fell and clutched the earth.
Without a weapon or a potent drug,
My very will to die had seemed enough
To end the consciousness of matter shrined
In me a while; and so, indeed, it was;
But in the travail of it, fierce revolt
Broke out with this intolerable thought
Thrust through me by the sunset and the wind,
(Deadlier than dying pangs or fabled throes
In hell, or anguish actual in dungeons broached
By vengeance, lust of souls, or lust of gain)—
That being dead we neither see nor hear,
And beauty ceases to renew our blood
With form and colour, light and harmony.

Out of my swoon I wrestled, further roused
To live again by high remembrances.
Being the first to understand himself,
I felt my life the universal will,
My death more terrible than death—in me
More terrible than in all the world beside;
For when I die the Universe shall cease
To know itself. Athwart the tenebrous
Oblivion of the starless infinite
The lightning eddied into nebulæ,
Systems and suns, the earth and life and sex,
That I might see the beauty, hear the music,
The loveliness which is the infinite;
That I might be and know and feel myself
Eternity incarnate in the powers
Material that eat and drink and love,
Beget, imagine, labour, think, invent,
The multitudinous atonement knit
In brain and blood, in marrow, seed and soul
Of all the substance of the Universe.
Wherefore I drove my vision through the world
As in the turf my fingers dug; I drew
The wind's sonorous tune into my ears
As whirlpools suck the sea down; drank the air
In pregnant sighs and lusty bosomfuls;
And felt the mountain underneath me throb.

Uplifted by this freshened will I stood
Erect again upon the mountain-top,
And looked about me, rebeholding earth
As though I ne'er had seen it. In the west
A range irregular of summits, clear
As polished ebony, with giant notch
Dinted the crimson shadow of the sun
That faded into purple. Utmost heights,
Immortal in romance, with forests fledged
And battlefields beneath, keen-crested hung
In air; then loomed uncharactered as dusk
To darkness turned; and sank into the ground
When in the wakeful bosom of the night
The slumbering landlay hushed. Themonthly star,
Whose silver sorcery fills the tidal wave,
Ascendant with the sun, in hidden courts
Her interlunar festival observed;
And through the swarthy battlements no glance
Sidereal from any loophole fell.
I breathed the darkness, fragrant as a wine
Delivered from the lees: it laced my blood
With night's material elixir, old
And mightier than magic; subtly slaked
The Phœnix-ashes of my thoughts, affined
Their diverse elements, and interknit
The myriad fibrilled intellects that store
The engine and the battery of the brain
With power and powers, eternity installed
In ganglioned tissue. Long I stood entranced
Until a rumour in my quickened ears,
A resonance and noise of breathing woke,
Of heavy pinions and a griping step
Unearthly: faint, afar, and sheathed within
The louder wind, but heard, with wonder heard
And terror. On the instant I divined
Divinity.

“My hands—my soul is red
With blood of gods in battle slain; and now,”
I thought, “some deity, in adamant
Accoutred, wheels against me, dragon-drawn
From glowing Muspelheim, or charioted
By Cyclopean craftmanship, and armed
With thunders for celestial vengeance forged.”

In my great day and vigour of my prime
No god could stand against me; but the mood,
That drew me from my palace in the skies
To die alone, unmanned me—was, in truth,
The lowering of the flame of life that means
Surcease of strength; so that I trembled, I
Who hitherto had sought divinity
As champions seek co-rivals, faintly hoped—
Abjectly hoped, insidious night would screen
My presence! Notwithstanding, when the sounds
Heraldic of divine approach increased
In menace, through my tremor flashed again
My old disdain of spirit and Other World.

“The cowardice of immaterial things!”
I muttered. “When our days are nearly done;
Imagination withered; passion, stale
As spilth of blood in shambles; thought, a net
Entangling action; and our sense corrupt
With soul, the pious title of decay,
Then come the treacherous powers to daunt us: gods,
That in the flood and torrent of our lives,
We left bewildered in their ruined fanes,
Or tossed ashore in isles forlorn, or fought
And overthrew, if any durst on sea
Or land abide our onset, face us then
With smooth effrontery, empanoplied
In all their specious terrors, sure
That scorn can hurt us in our impotence,
A supercilious look with anguish pierce
Our naked hearts, and lofty silence wring
Our flayed and bleeding vanity.”

By this
The noise uncouth of supernatural flight,
Archaic jangle of celestial gear,
Rapacious step and breathing arrogant
Outstripped the wind's sonorous pilgrimage,
Till with the very neigh bourhood of dread,
The sheer immediacy of some divine
Appellant's onslaught, power enough to brim
A year's adventurous life (from energies
Material within me disengaged)
In ruddier stains dyed deep my labouring heart,
Restrung my bones, and reattuned my nerves
To quarrel and to cope with the unseen
In visionary essences beheld.
Forth as a wrestler steps I strode, my hands
Advanced palm uppermost, and raked the night
With glances keen from bended brows discharged,
Hearkening, undaunted now, the braided sounds
Phantasmal violently throb and ring
In swift crescendo, as the visitant
Unknown wheeled up the mountain. Savage eyes
Like burning emeralds glared through vapour, streaked
With yellow flame from ruddy nostrils flung;
And on the instant while I held my breath,
Still as the statue of a combatant
About to grapple his antagonist,
Dragon and chariot and charioteer
Swept past me, clearly seen by dulcet light
A molten crescent threw, crowning the brows
Superb of her who trod the chariot floor
With sandalled feet. Umber and gold her locks
In loose adornment clustered, crescent-held;
Or streamed behind unchapleted. One hand
With easy manage curbed the dragon's flight;
The other grasped a glittering spear. Her arms,
Uncovered, fair and firm as woman's flesh
In rounded beauty shone. Her loose simarre,
A fabric of the freshest mountain green,
Rustled above her bosom, and the wind
Wedged it between her thighs and furled it close
About her comely leg. She flung a look
Upon me as she passed; her lips apart;
Her pearly nostrils quivering with her speed;
And on her ardent countenance divine
Virginity mantling to see me there,
While yet her vivid eyes in secret smiled.

“She thinks herself unseen!” I guessed. At once,
Belling my hands, after her down the wind
I shouted, “Holla, Hecate!” I saw
Her swerve and pant like one thrust through that scarce
For pain can breathe. “Holla!” again I cried;
“Diana, Artemis, Selene! Ghost
Or goddess! Deity beheld, halt, halt!”

She dropped the bridle-rein; she dropped her spear;
She wheeled about and gripped in either hand
The chariot's sides, devouring me with eyes
That cracked their sockets. Eyebrows arched beneath
Alarm engraved upon her forehead; wide
Her mouth to drink in wonder at a draught;
And every fibre of her godhead tense
With uttermost amazement: thus she stood
A breathing space, until her eddying hair
Blinded her vision. Swiftly then she turned
And snatched the bridle, whispering the urgentword
That rendered up the dragon to his speed.
I, following hard behind, shouldered the wind
That like an unseen sighing multitude
Oppressed and swarmed upon me. Turf and stone
With every step the dragon's talons showered;
His furnace breath in rhythmic blasts respired
A ruddy gloom that lit his brindled mane;
His leathern pinions wide as latin sails
On curving yards of Berber pirates bent,
With steady motion winged the chariot on,
Fluent upon its whirring wheels that droned
Like mammoth bees, and from the mountain skimmed
A rotatory purchase merely. Far
Outpaced I laboured after, hoping still
An audience of the goddess of the night;
For straight across the dragon's course a stream,
Entangled in the mountains, deeply clave
A tortuous glen, with precipices ribbed,
With rocky caldrons, pools and waterfalls
Intestined, fleeced with shaggy woods, and dark
With necromantic memories, haunt and hold
In faithful ages of unchristened things.

“Now, if the goddess deems that there her flight
May find an end in arboured secrecy,
I, knowing every cavern, nook and vault,
Can take her unawares; or if intense
Emotion of divinity beheld
After millenniums of enfranchisement,
Wherewith invisibility endowed
Celestial being: if, perturbed, she leaves
The way to chance, the briar and the thorn
Will soon ensnare her wheels.”

But when I changed,
On these presumptions, to a measured stride,
Suddenly chariot and charioteer,
Cresting a knoll that broke the steep descent
With upward impulse, climbed against the wind,
And, voyaging aloft, from mountain crossed
To mountain, lightly borne on mighty vans
Revibrant indiscernibly, that wreathed
The outstretched dragon in elastic coils
Of humming speed. I watched as one who sees
A miracle within a miracle.
At length the crescent, like a wandering moon
In mundane paths astray, twinkled at rest
Against a wooded swartness opposite
My stance of wonder. Thither thinking naught
Of hazard, toil, impediment or woe
Allotted all who fling themselves on chance,
I sped across the devious ravine;
And fording thrice the sluggish brook that seemed
With whispered threat to haunt my way unlit
And perilous, down heedlessly and up
By crumbling verges, where the earth exhaled
A spicy redolence of nature's vat,
By scaurs of torrent stone, by ivied cliffs,
Thickets and mossy brinks and brakes of fern,
I reached the virgin deity's retreat,
A vaulted hollow in the mountain-side.
Within it grew the hawthorn and the ash
By briar-roses linked—whose blossoms gleamed
Like shards of pearly lustre mirroring
The dulcet light that shone there; foxgloves piled
Their leaning campaniles about the groined
Embayment in the mountain; somewhere near
The lowly eglantine enriched the night
With incense. Overhung by dewy boughs
The crystal chariot stood, its shafts of gold
Inclined, its jewelled wheels at rest, among
The bracken. On a crag the goddess sat,
Her molten crescent welling silver fire,
While at her feet the unharnessed dragon crouched.

“Goddess!” I cried, ascending, “goddess, hail!”
But at my shout her guardian leapt upright.
The russet plates and crimson—purple, bronze,
Emerald, and topaz-hued—that overlaid
His sinuous body like a latticed bark,
Glowed in the fury of his onslaught; eyes
Illumined with the sombrest blaze of wrath,
His mane erect, his sheathless talons curved,
His folded wings clanking against his houghs,
He hurled himself upon me snorting flame.
My very heart grew pale; my marrow froze;
I rolled my helpless eyes this way and that,
Expecting death; but in the chariot, lo
The spear celestial! Shrill the dragon neighed,
About to overwhelm me; but I stooped,
And underthwart his overhanging bulk
Escaped and seized the weapon, crying out
In triumph inarticulate.

“Put down
My spear,” the goddess said, divinity
Affronted deepening her voluptuous tones
To such a menace, I had almost cast
My life away with that, her proper arm;
But while her absolute command still rang
In my enchanted ear, the dragon, balked
And desperate now, a fresh defiance breathed.
Surging against me with his scalloped vans
Outspread and thundrous, whirlwind-like he whipped
Me up, enshrouding me, and o'er my head
Gnashing his teeth, tossed high his wrinkled snout
In act to grind my skull betwixt his jaws.
No room had I, so closely held, to strike;
But upward through his furrowed brisket, rough
With stumps of wiry hair, I dug and wrought,
Begetting death devoutly as a groom
Begets a son, until his wings relaxed,
Affording ample liberty to drive
The weapon home—and through and out
Among his upper ribs, an ell beyond the chine!
He straddled blindly, shrieking like a horse
Whose stable burns; flounced hither, thither; tore
His dripping breast and broke the shaft across,
Wheeled round and, whining hideously, fell dead.
The gorgeous colours of his plated hide
Burned out and left his carcase dull and grey
As some forgotten lichen-covered log.
His dragon's blood with bitter fragrance laced
The mountain air, and like a smouldering fire
Crept, scorching turf and fern. The battle won,
I leaned against the chariot and addressed
The goddess, faint, but resolute to dare
Another hazard:—“Wanderer of the night,
I am the foe of all the gods. I slew
Apollo, Thor, Aidoneus. Behold
Your dragon dead! Wherewith shall you and I
Contend?”

I spoke thus, high and hard, aware
That deities are daunted, even as men,
By arrogance unlooked for and abrupt.
And truly for a space the goddess, still
Enthroned upon the moss-grown crag, like one
Whose purpose and whose speech are both forestalled,
Lowered at me with a baffled look of hate.
Anon, turning her gaze upon her dead
Attendant fixedly, she left her seat,
Beside the body knelt, and stroked awhile
The heavy mane, inert and withered now.
She sighed, she looked to heaven, she looked to earth,
She searched the horny leaden reptile eyes,
She listened close for any sounds of life,
With such sad gesture, such abandonment
Of deity forlorn, and so divine
A tenderness that I forbore to look.

At last she cast my way a wounded frown,
And whispered in a hueless voice of woe,
“Why did you kill him?”

“Had it been in doubt,”
I answered, drawing near, “I should have known
You now a goddess.”

“Wherefore now?” she asked,
And stood, confronting me.

I said, “Because
Idea of calamity to them
Or theirs the gods conceive not.”

Loftily
She asked, “What can you know of gods?”

“All men,
I answered, “Know the God who made the world;
Then killed His Son in ecstasy of grief
(A wanton slaughter that destroyed Himself)
When He beheld the pleasure of His hands,
That seemed so lovely in the making, turn
To rapine, murder, madness, death and hell.”

Swiftly she said, and wistfully and wan,
“You did not like that god?” and on me showered
The chastened lustre of her mournful eyes,
That with her crescent, languid from dismay,
A dusky local twilight interwove.

“Nor any god,” I said.

Then softly she,
And with the naïveté of divinity,
“Nor goddess?”

And I answered, feigning scorn,
“Nor goddess.”

But she heeded not, and knelt
Again beside her dead protector. “Why,”
With duller anguish than before she wailed,
“Why did you kill him?”

“In my own defence,”
I answered. “Like a child you prate, as gods
Are wont to do. On me unarmed you loosed
Your champion: I encountered him, and won.
Would you have had me die without a blow?”
“You should be dead!” she said, and rose in wrath,
The steel-blue lightning blazing in her eyes,
While ruddy fire her crescent overbrimmed.
“You had beheld me: all who see me die;
And you shall die!”

“If looks could kill,” I said,
“I should be now a cinder at your feet;
But I am stronger than the strongest gods.”

“You! Stronger than the gods! What are you, then?”
She asked, her mouth so near me that her voice
Embalmed the breath I spoke with.

“I am he
That was to come,” I said.

“But are you god?”
She cried, her eyes clashing on mine like flints.

“Not god,” I told her; “man; but such a man
As was not in the world before my time,
And cannot be again.”

“One man is like
Another,” she replied. “The world is full
Of men! This was the only dragon left:
Not all your nation could atone for him!”

I said, “Bethink you: there are men and men.
How many men have had the power to see
Your virgin deity?”

“But four,” she said:
“Endymion, Acteon, Orion, you.
Know you the fate of those whose second-sight
Divined me in the forest or on the hill?”

“I know it well,” I said.

“Do you, indeed!
Then let us hear what mortals say of that,”
She cried with withering malice. “Orion, now:
What is the tale of him?”

“He, having heard
How the sweet goddess of the liberal womb
Had honoured and delighted chosen men,
Determined on a hardier enterprise,
Seduction of a willing deity
Being for him not perilous enough.
Wherefore he swore a Stygian oath to see,
To capture and to ravish you, the chaste
Divinity whom not a god dared touch.
His savage lust it was that couched his eyes,
And showed you naked in your secret bower
About to don your hunting-habit. Fierce
As that ensanguined boar of Calydon
(By you unslipped in wild Ætolia)
Upon your hallowed privacy he crashed
The thicket thorough, seeing, to be seen,
And at the sight of you at once to die;
For in the bosom of his wicked hope
Your glittering instantaneous arrow sang
Infallible as light. So ended he,
The mighty hunter whose renown adorns
In stellar script the figured vault of heaven.”

She scowled upon my version; but she said,
“And of Acteon, then, what tale is told?”

“A wanton boy, he hunted you with dogs,
And tracked you to your bath. Your silver bow
Beyond your reach, the magic of your glance
Undid his nature; and his mongrels tore
Him down and killed him for a rascal stag.
Endymion's fate—”

“You must not speak of him!”

But I replied, “Endymion and I
Pursued you not; but by your own design,
Or by an incommunicable power,
Descried you.”

“Hush!” she said, as though
I had profaned her person, such rebuke
Was in her voice, such distance in her eyes,
Such reverence in her motion, such an awe
Upon her face.

I understood, and said,
With equal inspiration, “You may know
How great I am by this,—that I shall tell
Endymion's story swiftly, truly, yet
Religiously, and with such warrant high,
That you will think your recollection speaks.
You loved him, goddess, with a woman's love,
Him only, in your monthly glory, him
In all your shining centuries, in all
Your sweet millenniums of virginity.
One night on Latmos, as he watched his sheep,
He sang a wistful ditty to the moon
Fragrant with budded passion and the rich
Account of opening manhood. In your heart
That cherished silverly, as maidens should,
A delicate, discarnate thought of him,
The golden message of his sonnet flowered
In roses red as blood; and, ere you knew,
Your deity, enraptured, had put on
The beauty visible that maddens men.
A moment in his sight your loveliness
Appeared, a woman's naked godhood, stained
With blushes of desire, and faded not,
But in his fancy grew. Olympus saw
You instantly; and Jove before your haste
Had comment of your voice, knowing your plea,
Accorded it. He shall not die, Jove said.
Had he beheld you by an impious will,
Reprieve had been impossible. That once
Unwonted ecstasy should overpower
My virgin daughter pleases fate and me.
Therefore the gift bestowed on him unsought,
A vision of impassioned deity,
Shall be Endymion's abiding joy:
He in eternal slumber shall retain
Eternal youth, and in his countenance
Eternally the rapture of his dream.
You laid him in a cave, and every night,
Untouched, unkissed, with maiden vehemence
Adored him even to lunacy, your whole
Divine existence, spirit, sex entranced
In his entrancement; and your daily thoughts
As through the Carian woods you still outstripped
The swiftest nymph that followed in the chase,
Were with Endymion always, poignantly
Transported by the sweet subtlety of Jove's
Decree, that made you the beatified
Beholder nightly, and rememberer
By day, of happiness your image gave
The dreamer—you, the virgin heroine
Of that eternal miracle of love.”

“Alas!” she said, and sank upon the ground,
“The miracle was not eternal. Him,
Endymion—O, my caverned treasure!—him
I have not seen; of him I have not dared
To think with intimate remembrances
For many and many an empty century.”

Faint as a glowworm now, her crescent showed
A wan and fitful lustre; sighs profound
So shook and rent her bosom that she seemed
About to fade and crumble in my sight.
Although the ruthless foe of all the gods,
The instinct of the flesh, an ominous thought,
Eluding thought, constrained me, and I vowed
She should not perish thus.

Two crystal ewers,
A golden platter and an agate cup
Adjusted in a frame (by Vulcan's craft
Of old equipped, the chariot no device
For ease of travel lacked) had stirred a vague
Conjecture when I saw them; now I knew
The goddess's Olympian larder, choice
And frugal. In the golden dish from one
Pellucid pitcher filleted with gems,
Turquoise and ruby, jasper, opal, pearl,
I shook a portion of ambrosia sliced
In manchets of a mouthful daintily;
And from the other, that bore about its neck
A wreath of emerald, ruddy tourmaline,
Topaz and amethyst, I brimmed the cup
With nectar: and the pitchers both appeared
After the service replenished as at first.
I pondered on the marvel; but a sigh,
As of the wind among Æolian strings
Deep shuddering through the night, upon my knees
Beside the goddess brought me speedily.
She ate and drank, and with the sacrament
Of food, the universal pledge of life
And health, her virgin deity regained
The power, the passion, the celestial looks
That filled the picture of Endymion's dream;
And in the mountain-vault her crescent made
A golden day the darkness thronged upon.

Then, “Taste,” she said, “the nurture of the gods,”
And handed me the platter and the cup,
Having appeased her appetite, repaired
Her vigour, and assuaged her grief with less
Than half my offering, so restorative
To every faculty of sense and soul
Was that ethereal fare.

No words can tell
The relish of ambrosia, represent
Aroma, unimagined out of heaven
Until I drank the nectar lips divine
Had tasted. Such a supper never man
Before me palated, and none again
Shall eat in time or in eternity.

My high material nature hitherto
Had vanquished all divinity that dared
Encounter it; but now, to this innate
Supremacy no spirit could withstand,
The food and wine of Other World conjoined
Whatever in their supernatural breed
Advantaged gods against me. By the hand
I took my chance companion of the night,
And from that battle-place with dragon's blood
Perfumed and smouldering sward, we passed beneath
A lowly architrave of banded boughs.
Thence, winding by a path where briars caught
Her green simarre, we gained a bosked abode
Of solitude sequestered from the wind,
That hummed a tune without, and rounded off
The tingling silence there from all the world:
An arbour to possess a goddess in,
With roses hung, and sweet with eglantine,
That sweetens all that mountain's tawny flank.

The deep intolerant sexual rancour stored
In men (who innocently undertake
The death of women in the name of love,
And ruin beauty that beauty may endure
From age to age) augmented, whetted, fired
By paradisean refreshment (life
Itself in melting mouthfuls, and its gold
In potable elixir of the gods)
Incensed me with malignant joy to think
That I should here deflower the undeflowered
Immortal blossom of virginity,
Chasten the chastity of heaven with love,
Invade the roseal bower of deity,
The very maidenhead of maidenhead.
But she, foreboding doom, withdrew her hand
And set a space between.

“What den is this?”
She asked, dismay and doubt in voice and eye—
“I thought you led me to a temple near,
Some sanctuary, some porch, some ruined fane.
This hidden lodge and magic nook, of old
Inhabited by nameless gods, uncouth
Progenitors of deities whose rites
Infect it still with horror, daunts my soul,
Celestial though it be. Conduct me hence,
Unhappy mortal, ere primeval fate
Betray us utterly, and ancient woe
Entangle both in undivine despair.”

“The latest tenants of this secret shade—
They fill it now!”—I said, “are dreams of mine.
My place of inspiration in my youth,
My refuge, study, haunt and hermitage,
The ground is hallowed, goddess: here can come
No horror; only beauty and delight
Inhabit mansions youth has sanctified.”

“Anathema!” she cried. “The enemy!
This was foretold me: I remember now.”
“What was foretold? The prophet? Who was he!”

“Proteus announced it centuries ago—
So many empty centuries ago!”

She panted, paused and paled, her godhead all
Aghast, as in her sapphire eyes arose
Terrific memories from the depth of time.

“O, in the idle sweetness of the years,”
She caught her breath and cried, “the endless years—
A myriad summers, for I followed still
The scent of roses—fate, predicted, passed
Me by it seemed: I never gave it thought;
Or if it lingered with the pageantry
Roaming the background of my tranquil mind,
'Twas merged in legend and Olympian lore
My mother (most belov'd delight of him
Whose lust immortalised mortality)
Leto, sweet breeder of the sun and moon,
Hushed me to sleep with when the world was young
In golden Delos by the Ionian sea.”
“What dead prediction, buried in your heart,
Revives with such an import ominous?”

“Not you!” she cried; “not you!” in violent wrath:
“You are not he the prophet warned me of!
Some lycanthrope in borrowed manhood, some
Detestable fanatic or nympholept,
Or parasite of fame like him that burnt
My temple beautiful in Ephesus;
For I remember your insensate brag
That fell at first unheeded on my ears.
Repeat it now:—you killed them! Come: you killed
Apollo, Thor, Aidoneus! Swear it!—You,
That dared not face a dragon without my spear,
Contend with gods!” And like the bridle bells,
Imagined of an elfin cavalcade,
Her laughter filled the night with ringing scorn.

“I overthrew those three—Apollo, Thor,
Aidoneus.” Temperately I spoke, inured
To all misprision, both of gods and men.
Her sudden anger passed, for in her heart
The teeth of fear had met. “How can one do
A thing insuperable?” she asked. “No man
Could overcome Apollo at any time;
And know you not my brother vanished, long
Before renown went west or north of Rome?”

“I overcame him; but Aidoneus first;
Then Thor,” I said.

“Aidoneus? Never! He,”
She told me, “ended when Apollo did.
But had that sullen monarch's rule endured,
Even you with all your boasted second-sight
Could not have seen, still less encountered, him,
The wearer of the helm invisible.”

I said, speaking like fate, “There is no term,
No brink, no confine to my vision. He
Who can espy electrons in their dance
Atomic, and delight his burnished gaze
In depths of ether, fathomless till now
By sight of god or man, was never yet
Deceived by artifice archaic. Casque
Of darkness, deity impure, obscene
And skulking usage neither hid nor helped
Your sombre God of Hell when once I tracked
Him out. His hateful presence on the earth
Was known to me from boyhood by the high
Poetic gift I have. Unerringly,
When manly years to genius added power,
I sought and found him by the Lucrine shore
Haunting the entrance to the underworld:
Whence far he might not stray for fear of death
(That was his minion once) in countless shapes,
Unknown when he with Jove and Neptune ruled
Their trivial Universe. He saw me come,
And laughed his hellish laugh, for centuries
A rarity, and that my coming caused
The last to wring his fallen countenance.
He grasped his helm, upon a willow hung,
Whose shade obscured the gloomy port of Hell,
And shambled towards me, doubting not to see
Terror and headlong flight. But my strong tread,
Advancing on him, echoed loud as doom
Upon the hollow roof of Tartarus,
And daunted him whose office it had been
And automatic function, to appal
Mankind throughout the ages of his power.”

“Insanity!” the goddess cried: “a wild,
A sacrilegious lie!”

“I saw him quail,”
I said; and when she moved to speak again,
Continued my recital hardily.
“He stood a moment swithering, then he donned
His headpiece, and came at me with dispatch.
Had I remembered Vulcan's magic gift,
Such power has fantasy, I might have failed
To see Aidoneus helmeted; but lust
Of battle so obsessed my mind that Hell's
Belated champion changed nor shape nor bulk
Until my wrath destroyed him utterly;
For when he noted in my fervid gaze
That I beheld him still, and feared him not
Despite the Cyclopean sorcery
Of unseen omnipresence subtly forged
(That once with Neptune's triple spear and Jove's
Compelling thunderbolt ordained the world)
Irrational terror inhibited his power,
Darkened his vision, and delivered him
To my remorseless hands. I gripped his throat
And strangled him; I knelt upon his breast
And crushed his ribs; I battered helm and head
To powder on the stones, and trod and stamped
Him down into the dust, and put an end
For ever to the nether deity.
Forthwith I plucked the brazen gates of Hell
From off their adamantine hinges, tossed
Them far into the middle sea, and took
The facile way, by my heroic deed
Become, at last, I thought, a thoroughfare—
Mistaking the consummate consequence,
For men both break and make beyond their aim.
Yet trembling I went down the Avernine slope,
So dreadful was the gloom, the roar and whine
So shrill and shattering, penetrant and harsh,
The fume of charred humanity so foul,
So noisome, and so sulphurous the antique
Corruption of the air, time out of mind
Unwinnowed, unrenewed; while such a sense
Intolerable of age-long agonies
Invaded every nerve, that the command,
All hope abandon ye who enter here
(Sunk in the ocean with the gates of Hell)
Inscribed itself upon the stagnant smoke
In glittering fire, the image of my doubt.
But soon the tide of power within me rose
To flood again; and when my sight, attuned
To darkness dimly diapered and gilt
By withered beams and lustre in decay
(The relics and despair of ruined light)
Began to search the tract of Hell, it seemed
At first as though the place were empty; voice
Of woe and carnal smell of burning, all
Hypnotic fancy; and the realm itself,
So spacious once, a cavern in the earth
For antiquaries only; and even they
Should have discovered there no vast machines
And horrible inventions of a god's
Revenge; but spoke-sprung wheels with gizzened hubs,
Fruit in a ropy puddle petrified,
Dead vultures, splintered stones, and tattered sieves,
Lumber of specimens unlisted left
To moulder in a cellar underground!
I scarce had time to note a bluish scurf,
Or phosphorescent mildew here and there,
The dregs, the palsied lechery of flame,
Licking with fitful tongue the roasted loins
Of ancient sinfulness that still could writhe
After millenniums of incessant Hell;
Scarce to behold beneath the rocky frown
And sullen drip of precipices, bleached
And bitten, through the marbled ice,
Abominable spongy faces peer,
When silence came with utter darkness down—
Silence more penetrative, darkness more
Essential, vehement, and absolute
Than ear or eye the craftiest could gauge.
I stood intensely strung expecting death,
But sudden miracle befell instead;
For, sweet and fresh, the fragrance of the dew,
The voice of larks, the wind among the trees,
Flowers in the meadow and on the mountains morn,
Filling the region with music and delight
Established day upon the wreck of Hell.
Thus did I kill Aidoneus, thus did I
Annihilate perdition that began
To fade the moment of its monarch's death,
And ceased upon my advent as a dream
Disperses with the sound that gave it shape.
Hardly was Hell abolished, hardly dawn
Had lit his crimson camp-fires in the green
Translucent orient, when the forest leaves
Inquired in silent terror, every blade
Immobile on its rigid stalk—Which way
Against us will destruction come,
Storm, thunder, deluge, and the swords of fire?
And swift and steep it fell! Like mountains hurled
From Utgard, cloud on cloud descended, black,
Convolved and dense, with rain aslant,
And white as burning steel in driven showers,
With funeral darkness for the crest of morn,
And hollow on the resonant floor above
The rumble of the chariot-wheels of death.
Long, golden thongs of lightning leapt and stung;
Fork'd brands, and brands like blue-green icicles
Hissed hot, and spat and crackled through the air
Continual fire in beryl cascades poured;
Irregular, convulsive, peal on peal,
The thunder rent and shook the firmament;
The whole world trembled like a beaten bell.
Forth from the storm, gigantic, ruddy, fierce
As rage itself, the oldest son of earth
Appeared before me, challenge in his eyes,
Thor, with his conquering hammer, Miölnir armed.”

“My northern cousin,” said the goddess, “ceased:
When our tradition ended Thrudheim fell.”

I made no answer, but continued. “Thor,
Aware of my inexorable hate,
My dire hostility, for gods discern
Their enemies without appeal or war
Declared, upheaved his hammer, Miölnir, high
Above his head and brought it down on mine
With all the ancient power of Other World.
Before his merest gesture giant hosts
Had fled without a stroke from many a field;
But never had he met a man in fight.
His dreaded hammer, Miölnir, forged of storm
In Elfheim in the furnace of the dwarfs,
Did me no harm at all. When he beheld
Me standing there unhurt, after a blow
So mighty and direct, he clutched his beard
And glared, astounded by material strength
Invulnerable in men; then heaved once more
His magic mace in both hands like a sledge,
And thundered blow on blow. I moved aside
After a shower of strokes, that struck of old
In Jötunheim might easily have cracked
The skulls of all the Thurses there, and down
The weapon crashed into the earth, to dig
Itself so deep a sepulchre the god
Could not withdraw it ere my arms embraced
Him like a vice, and pinioned his
Against his cloud-girt flanks. All day he strove
And panted in my grasp, the while his bulk
Enormous, and his sinew, bone and nerve,
Of spiritual substance and fibre knit,
Dwindled and shrank, and withered to a wraith
Illusory, that sighed itself away
In tenuous vapour on the evening wind.
That was the end of Thor, the mankind god;
The mighty worker for the sake of work—
Whose work was never seen and still to do;
The bluff, old hero of a hundred fights—
By ineludible enchantment won,
Like every conquest of the Other World.
Crushed to a film in my material clasp
The god of use-and-wont, of daily toil,
The home, the cupboard, tedium, common things,
Still flickered in the sky, a wisp of cloud,
When from the sunset in Olympian state,
Terribly beautiful, Apollo came;
For this was my great day.”

Divinest scorn
Bathing her crescent in a ruddier blush
Than that which damascenes with sanguine fire
The glowing sickle of the harvest-moon,
The goddess silently confronted me,
And looked me in the face; but my great night
Had dawned.

“Your brother, goddess—he, even he,”
I said, “offered me insult: 'tis a way
They have in heaven, and all the heavens: he called
Me, Man, with infinite contempt—a name
I mean to make the greatest of all time,
Of all eternity; and challenged me
To sing against him. Who shall judge? I thought,
Expecting no rejoinder. I shall judge,
Apollo answered. Whereupon I laughed,
So godlike was the word. I asked him then,
What guerdon shall the victor have? He said
The victory—which was great, and manlike even.
The penalty, I said, shall be defeat.
Ay, said the god, defeat; and after, death
In agony: I flay the vanquished: Hell
Eternally to follow:—a reply
Worthy the hatefullest of all the gods.
But if you lose? I asked. I cannot lose,
Apollo answered. Think you so! I said.
And spoke with high disdain: whichever way
The judgment goes 'tis I shall win this bout.
Who first shall sing? He struck his lyre and sang.
Great was the song, melodious and divine,
Preluding darkly in the vast abyss
With heavy sounds and words that summoned up
Benighted chaos or ever gods and men
Or heaven and hell were known, till gathering might,
As in the Olympian mystery of things,
Reunion and disjunction, heaven and hell
With earth between, gods, titans, heroes sprang
Impassioned from the all-conceiving gulf
Big by relentless fate; then sweet as fire
That murmurs in a golden censer lit
To blandish adoration, Love began
A honeyed ecstasy and soon evolved
In gorgeous strains and dazzling cadences,
With rich division fledged and winged aloft,
A soaring descant like a savoury smoke
Of sacrifice that god might offer god.
With crashing resonance of brazen strings,
As lightning to the thunder of his voice,
Apollo uttered next titanic war
And Jove's achievement and supremacy.
A muted passage followed, dissonant
And emphasized with level looks of scorn,
Showing the origin of men, from earth
Impasted by Prometheus, and the breed,
After Deucalion's flood, by miracle
Preserved when stones were dowered with life: a race
Eternally subservient to the gods,
Whom they must worship with profoundest awe—
And chiefly him Apollo, god of light,
Of knowledge, justice, purity and truth.
He finished in Apolline rapture, playing
The spheral music Troy was builded with,
Intolerably sweet, and jubilant
As trumpets of the dawn, to honour now
And magnify the essence of the gods,
Consummate jealousy, wherein himself
Had no superior; and, that I might lose
Courage and hope and fall an easy prey,
In this, the swan-song of Musagetes,
(Although the prophet knew it not) he poured
A fountain of memorial melody
To grace the lofty pæan that extolled
His treacherous vengeance on the satyr. Last”—

“Blasphemous mortal!” cried the goddess. “Death
Assail and choke you now! Hell gnaw your bones!
Apollo treacherous? Noblest god of all,
My brother, most divine and most adored
Theophany of justice, light and truth
Revealed to men! Marsyas? A Silen, foul,
Abominable, bestial, fit for death
A thousand times in monstrous agonies!”
“His song surpassed Apollo's.”

“It never did!
No voice of heaven or earth could equal his;
No flute, no pipe be favourably heard,
Whene'er Apollo deigned to touch his lyre.”

“The prepossession of Olympus! Know
The truth at last,” I said. “Both flute and pipe
Surpassed Apollo's lyre. Pan overcame
(With powerful music of the woods and wilds,
Dancing and mirth and wine and harvest-home,
The mountains and the pastures and the chase)
Apollo's moral ode and heavenly hymn;
And Marsyas also with harmonious flute
Excelled his minstrelsy. The god performed
(A new thing seeming needless in a war
Already won!) a famous masterpiece,
The most uplifting music wrung from strings,
His Trojan overture, when Midas judged
Between Apollo and the venturous faun.
But Marsyas blew a melody so rich
In morn and eve, in midnight and in noon;
So stained with spring that blushes in the snow,
With summer's diverse bloom and autumn's gold,
So passionate and so instinct with love,
In single notes like water in a well
That drops an orb of music lingeringly,
In warbled showers of jewels and streams of sound
Like vintage flowing free, more searching-sweet
Than twilight when the stars at intervals
In shadowy magnificence appear
Till darkness like a bridegroom lifts the veil,
That Midas, though he laughed aloud to see
The eager satyr's crimson cheeks distent
To bursting, crowned him victor; and the joy
Of every hearer, save the deity
Defeated, echoed to the skies. Now, mark
The nature of divinity—of yours,
As of Apollo's, for you slew, with him,
The lovely children fruitful Niobe
Amphion bore: a wife whose generous boast
Of rich maternity and loyal claim,
That he, her spouse, had built a city too,
Bœotian Thebes, with music of his lute,
Deserved a smile well-pleased from gods and men,
Instead of such bereavement as you dealt—
The stolid vengeance of celestial art,
The ruthless spite of noisome chastity!”

“I was a patroness of motherhood!”
She cried in anguish.

“All the gods,” I said,
“Were arrogant in virtues, self-assumed
To palliate their malice. Let me end
This history of divine malevolence.—
Between Apollo and his challenger
The strife was fair, and true award pronounced
Upon the instant issue, the delight
The skill and music of the players gave;
But your theophany of hallowed truth
Adorned the arbiter with ass's ears,
And flayed the genial champion alive!—
Behaviour wanton as Jehovah's trick,
Who set his creatures in a garden fair
Beside a beautiful, a tempting fruit,
And bade them eat it not on pain of death,
Knowing that they would eat it.—Now, no more
Till I have finished, goddess of the night.—
You interrupted when Apollo sang
His treacherous triumph over Marsyas. Last,
Rending a shriek from every lyric string,
Mournful and heinous as the doom portrayed
(The satyr's agony beneath the knife)
He smiled with glittering narrowed eyes of hate,
And ample expectation of revenge,
Immediate, bloody and sufficing even
The anger of a god. Silent I gazed
On that superb divinity a while,
My senses in melodious surges drowned,
Such as on Helicon Mnemosyne
Had joyed in with her daughters; heard by me
Once more, and never to be heard again
By any ear throughout eternity.
The god's conceit of triumph, unexpressed
Delight of mine and still demeanour fed
Until it flamed: You yield without a song,
He cried, malignant even to happy tears,
Whose dew annealed the fury of his glance.
Roused from my reverie not a word I spoke,
But clasped my hands behind me, having no lyre,
And mightily against Apollo's song
That pleased Olympus and established Troy,
I waged the Universe itself, in being
Before Apollo or any god debauched
Imagination. Of the ether first
I sang, one subtile tension of entire
Immaculate energy, omnipotent,
Eternal, stretching taut in bourneless space.
This infinite elastic ether—pure
Dynamic form (no chaos ever was,
But order always, mutable and free
For every change)—possessed no sun, no star,
No meteorite, no atom, or element,
Being a sheer oblivious ecstasy,
Until the lightning wakened and began
A limitation of eternal space
(Which is the ether) in eddying vortices,
(The offspring of the ether energised
Under continual omnipresent strain)
That sought stability in golden drops,
Bisexual electrons, pith and seed
At once of ponderable matter, each
Invisible corpuscle being condensed
From myriads of measures of imponderable
Elastic stuff, and therefore each a packed
Compendium of the Universe, an orb,
A reservoir and continent of power
Incalculable, manifest-occult
Repository of eternity
And hidden treasure of the infinite.
When these electric gems, confederate all
In balanced companies, began to spin
Like planets in a system, every group
Became a candent atom of hydrogen,
First condensation of the infinite.
And these again, these atoms, clustered stars
Of bezeled lightning, instantly conglobed
As passionate molecules, atomic pairs
In most material wedlock interfused
Insatiably, to throng in countless swarms,
Hive upon hive of radiancy insphered
And whirling through immensities of space,
Till into sumptuous nebulæ they swelled,
The seen, the heard, the ponderable at last
From the imponderable, omnipotent,
Eternal ether gloriously evolved.—
Come to the gods! Apollo cried: the gods!
I take them in their turn, I said; and kept
The tenour of my song.—The least of all
The nebulæ, contracting as it cooled,
Flung off the planets, they their moons, to swing
In ample berths miraculously moored
By gravitation in a spatial gulf
Five thousand millions of our mundane miles
Diametrally measured, circumscribed
By Neptune's orbit, centred by the sun,
Haunted by errant comets that wander out
(Obliquely curving through the desolate night
That lies between us and the nearest star)
And driven directly on towards Hercules
In Lyra, planets, comets, and the sun,
Though moored, advancing with the speed of thought,
And representing in colossal form
The balanced clusters of electrons, grouped
To constitute infinitesimal
Atomic parcels of an element,
As solar systems are evolved to be
The mighty members of the universe.
Secreted by the primal atom, all
The other atoms, as the planets cooled,
Became; and all the elements, how much
So ever differing in appearance, weight,
Amount, condition, function, volume (gold
From iodine, argon from iron) wrought
Of the purest ether, in electrons sprang
As lightning from the tension filling space.
Forms of the ether, primal hydrogen,
Azote and oxygen, unstable shapes,
With carbon, most perdurable of all
The elements, forthwith were sifted out
To be the diverse warp and woof of life,
The lowest and the highest, louse and man.—
How came the gods to be? Apollo cried,
Smiting his lyre in wrath. Their day arrived,
I said; but man, whose fault they are, came first.
Then sang I other miracles of time:
Telluric history, brought to light by power
Material in men of resolute
Attention, from the dust of ages, shells,
And scattered limbs and footprints, petrified
In rocky strata, or in fossil mud
Matrixed like scripture for the founder's craft;
Organic stone, wherein whole species, plant
And animal, of their own substance built
Their tomb and monument; shale, lava, marl,
Obsidian, porphyry, syenite, travertine,
Mica and talc, blown sand and drifted sand
In deserts and in oceans, fruitful soil
With forests, pastures, orchards, harvests fledged—
Millennial almanac and open scroll
Of deluge, fire, volcano, glacial drift,
Compacture fierce and winnowing tides of air,
That forged and tempered and engraved the earth,
Enamelled it with sapphire seas and hung
An emerald veil about its nakedness.
Then did I sing the greatest miracle,
The origin of species, devoutly traced
Throughout the scale of being in the deep brain
We honour most to-day; and showed the god
Assuredly—as one who can reveal
By power poetic what the groper fears
To institute—sex, from the ether strained
As lightning, male and female, first and last
Delimitation of eternity:
Immaculate, discarnate, twifold sex,
Electrons, jewel-substance of evolved
Ethereal, uncreated Universe,
In protoplasm embodied, sarcode stuff
Or vegetable, inwoven of the same
Quaternion of elements (vapours three,
Azote and hydrogen, with oxygen,
The great protagonist, and carbon, crowd
And chorus, common tissue of the whole)
Wherein the ether lightened into life
Organical—amœbæ, monera,
Bacteria, diatoms, single cells
That sped through differentiation, changed
Environment and series manifold,
By natural selection and sexual,
Into the rose, the oak-tree and the vine,
And into men and women. And swift again
I sang what no one sang before, or said,
Or thought:—Eternity, which was, and is
None other than the ether, infinite
Unconscious rapture tensely strung in space,
By travail inenarrable and urge
Adventurous of evolution shrined
Dividual in men and women, to know
Itself, to understand the whole and keep
The primal, everlasting ecstasy
Self-conscious in the passionate kiss of love.—
The gods, the gods, the gods! Apollo cried;
But shrilly now and fearfully. To them
I come, I said; and sang the body of man:—
Mucus, the blood unlit; on fire as blood;
In flesh, compact and baked like earthenware;
In nerve, as pith; as mineral in bone;
Fibrous in muscle; and in the viscera,
Vegetal; repeating, in the microcosm,
Electron, atom, system, universe,
With cells and organs, members, moonsand suns.—
The gods, the gods, the gods!—I sang the brain,
A double sponge soaked in the ether, fruit
Hesperian in the garth of space, the goal
Unconscious lightning aimed at when it led
The onset of eternity towards man:
Receiver and recorder, carder, sieve,
Alembic, loom and lyre, and every arm,
Machine and implement for art, war, use,
To put in act the thoughts the body thinks.
I sang the multitudinous cells that bud
And blossom in the trellised protoplasm
Filling the skull, and make the chambers there
Arbours of colour, beauty, fragrance, joy,
By sulphur's gold and purple blooms uplit,
And garlanded with phosphorescent wreaths,
Crimson and ivory and violet.
And then I sang the gods:—Infinity
Confined in atoms, that developed power
In many modes, and changed and counterchanged
Through force and forces to become in us
Terror and hatred, anger, worship, love;
And be projected on itself again—
Fantastic, immaterial eclipse
Of the actual material universe,
The undeciphered fancy, thought, complete
Self-consciousness of man flung blindly forth
To master mystery and to know the unknown.
Vitality?—the ether in densest stones
Asleep, whose thronged electrons, still at ease,
In harbours and empyreal roadsteads ride;
Awake in protoplasm, a formless stir
Or diastase of life, that lends the clot
Of carbon-curdled vapours poetic power
To gather to itself, and to transmute
Diversity of matter into man,
The crown of evolution: this it was
That men supposed to be another thing
Than they, not knowing that the whole
Is one material substance. Gods and God
Are man's mistake: no brain exists
Behind the galaxies, above them or beneath;
No thought inhabiteth eternity,
No reason, no intelligence at all
Till conscious life begins. The ouphs and elves,
The satyrs, centaurs, goblins, gnomes and trolls,
The ancient lands of faery and romance,
Infernal and supernal domiciles,
The dreadful dwellers there, and wonderful
Cosmogony of Other World (perverse
Reflexions of his unenlightened mind
Upon the mirror of eternity,
And on the mirrors of the sun and moon,
The stars, the flowers, the sea, the woods, the wilds)
With immaterial nothings deceived mankind,
Even as his shadow on a darksome way
Looms like a ghost and daunts the pilgrim still.—
I am no ghost! Apollo cried: a god,
And son of god! But now his voice, a thin
And batlike shriek, dismayed himself; his light
Had waned, his figure shrunk, before the truth
The greatness and the terror of my song,
The deep malevolence of Other World
Alone remaining. Fierce from his lyre he struck
Sundering dissonance that might have ended time;
For lo, the gallant-curving horns were warped,
The strings awry and beaded thick with rust!
Again he smote, so savage was his rage,
As with a bestial claw, the tuneless lyre,
And straight the instrument of power, that worked
By poignant melody enchantment strong
As bastioned cities, crumbled into dust.
Swift like a famished werwolf at my throat
He leapt, or vampire fresh from sepulture—
In semblance only, for the fire was out,
His sinew tinder, and his blood a fume.
His empty quiver, every arrow spent—
How long ago!—flapped on his shrivelled haunch
Like a cast slough: not even the knife he skinned
The satyr with was left him. As he sprang
His clenched teeth mouldered in his jaws, his eyes,
Like gathered leaves that in a kiln curl up,
Shrank in their gloomy sockets, and on my flesh
His withered fingers hung like gossamer
The evening breezes trail; for all you gods
Without your weapons or your magic arts,
Your heavens and hells and cyclopean bolts,
Envenomed arrows, casques invisible,
Girdles and shoes of swiftness and gorgon-heads,
Are impotent as palsied eld. I struck
Him down; dismembered him as one might tear
A mannikin in pieces; by breech and neck
I seized and kneaded him, and bent and plied
And wrung him like a rag until he ceased
To be, as in a conjurer's nimble hands
A kerchief vanishes. Thus did I meet,
Thus did I conquer and annihilate
Apollo, Thor, Aidoneus, gods that were.”

“That never were!” the goddess said, and smiled—
Divinity commiserating man's
Simplicity. Her grief and horror past,
Complacent now and beautiful as heaven's
Devoted maiden in the flower of youth
And freshness of her nights, fair as herself,
She bade me know the truth. “These were not gods,”
And loftily she spoke. “At first I feared
I knew not what. So wide and so profound
A gulf divides my solitary time
From those olympiads sweet when every brake
Blossomed with deity undisciplined,
When dryads, hamadryads, oreads, nymphs
Haunted the wilderness and watched my sport,
That things immemorable had fallen away,
Leaving my lonely mind and tranquil thought
A thoroughfare of beauty. Chief of all
Unblessed remembrance are the loathsome Wanes,
Forgotten till you told how in the voice
That named itself Apollo shrillness struck
And fear with dwindled volume: then I knew
A Wane had mocked you. Only voices now,
They once had deity—archaic sprites
Adored by uncouth beings, hardly men,
That ceased or ever Ouranos began
The dynasties of heaven. Unworshipped gods
May haughtily retain divine estate,
While any scion of the race endures
Whose gods they were; but when the blood,
That warmed and fostered them with worship, burns
Entirely out, they wither into sound,
Involving baneful power to personate
The very gods themselves—if time and place
Accord, with second-sight like yours at hand
To see the phantom. I supposed, indeed,
The abhorrences had perished from the world;
But those apparent gods you thought you killed
Were certainly none other than the Wanes
Still at their execrable masquerade.”

“Are you of them?” I asked.

Her crescent flushed
A saffron hue, and from her sparkling eyes
Keen lightnings pierced me. Not a word she spoke.

“If the three deities I slew were Wanes,
Can I believe that no iniquitous
Embodiment of empty sound like them
Encounters me to-night?” I asked, assured
The slain divinities were what they seemed.

“I am the only deity,” she said,
“Remaining on the earth.”

“Since you remain
Might not a remnant of divinity
Frequent the day as you frequent the night?”

“No,” pensively she answered. “All the gods
Except my single self departed hence,
Whither I know not, centuries ago.
Let me recall the past, and let me tell—
What I have never told, since there was none
To hear. Can I remember? Can I bear
To think it? . . . Silent noon in Arcady:
I, in my dragon-car driving at speed,
Compelled to wonderment and awe by fate
Unknown invading heaven and earth—unknown,
But felt: then darkness inexpressible.
The gods could see by day and night, but I,
Renowned for vision, saw not—heard not: out
The darkness blotted every sense save one:
Day blazed by contrast when I shut my eyes.
Then I remembered Proteus. Once I sought
The crafty shepherd of the sea, and bade
Him tell my fortune. Gods must come and go;
But virgin deity outlasts them all,
He said. I thanked him for his prophecy
And left his cave well-pleased. He followed, loath,
But powerless not, to tell the whole of doom.
Until a man shall conquer you, he said,
You cannot pass away: which might have been
A cryptic promise of eternal life;
But in the strangling darkness—No! So long
The horror brooded I believed an end
Of all had come: it had, for all but me.
The faithful beast you slew, my dragon, stood
As motionless as I: I neither heard
His labouring heart nor mine, though every throb,
Uncounted in that dread obsession, seemed
A night of fear. At last a sound arose
Far off, a rumbling deep and low that shook
The earth as thunder shakes it; travelling on,
It filled the air as tempests do; and yet
No louder than a murmur, than a sigh,
The word went round the world, Great Pan is dead!
Soon as the whisper traversed Arcady,
The all-devouring darkness rendered up
The day again; but not the day that was:
Gone were the golden sunbeams; iron skies
O'ercanopied the world. Through the dull air
I hastened to my hidden place of joy.
If I have still Endymion, I thought,
An empty heaven, an empty world, for me
Are terrorless. His image in my mind—
Eternal youth, and in his countenance
Eternal rapture, words of yours or Jove's—
I reached my Latmian bower and found . . . I found
No priceless treasure there: a wind that sighed,
A charnel smell, dead leaves where spiders span
Their dusty webs; a bat, a toad usurped
The mountain-cave Endymion and his dream
(Myself in naked deity beheld)
Had made the very jewel of the earth.
I swore by Styx vengeance more horrible
Than any punishment in Tartarus,
And lit the air in meteoric flight
To high Olympus and the ear of Jove.
Alas, no mortal mind can comprehend,
No words can tell, no thought can think the change!
Where the twelve palaces had soared aloft
In massive splendour, beauty and balanced strength,
The wonder of the gods themselves, there spread
A leprous snow winnowed by icy blasts.
I sought no further. What had chanced I knew:
The intolerant Jewish God, the terrible
Jehovah, subtlest of supernal powers,
By magic more inscrutable than his,
Had conquered Jove and wiped Olympus out.
You know that awful God better than I.
The rumour of His might—

“I know of Him,”
I said, eager to speak. “The sorcery
Whereby he seemed to quell the other gods
Was twofold. First and foremost, reiterant
Assertion of supreme dominion, I
Am I; there is no God but Me, assailed
The Jewish mind for ages, and destroyed
The sense of hearing for the voice of gods
Less arrogant. To make Himself renowned
Beyond all rivalry, in mythic times
Jehovah had proclaimed Himself the world's
Creator, never imagining that men
Would wrest its secret from the Universe.
Howbeit, long before we understood
That all things of themselves evolved, His boast—
He had pronounced the whole creation good!—
Exposed Him to derision:—great, indeed,
The world was and will always be, but good
It never can become:—and worst of worsts,
His chosen race, the Jews, the only folk
In all the world that worshipped Him, had passed
From slavery into slavery, and were then
Writhing beneath the heel of Rome, Jove's might
Incarnate. Some unparagoned device
Alone could raise a God, discredited
So utterly, to eminence again!
Nor was that wanting in the operant part
Of plausible enchantment—reinforced
With iterance unending of the spell
Primeval, I am I; there is no God
Beside. When Jove, divinely errant, chose
To mingle blood with mortals, heroes or gods
Were still the offspring as became a sire
Eternal; but this desperate Deity
Begat a common man, and in His Son,
Not as a natural parent reappears,
But really incarnate, lived on earth
To change the mood of men and make them His.
Now, mark how relative omnipotence
And all divine ascriptions are:—Without
Disquietude, and when it pleased him best,
Triumphant Jove destroyed Jehovah: left
To Rome, Jove's delegate, and by that power
Abandoned to the mercy of the mob,
(Whose God he was!) His claim was laughed to scorn,
And He on Calvary hammered to a cross.
That was your time of darkness! What happened then
On Calvary when Christ was crucified?
The end of Godhead happened once for all:
So interwoven an affinity
Entangled all the gods; so spiritual
A fabric, so essentially allied,
Were all your states and towers of Other World,
A single death of deity involved
The entire extinction of the race divine—
Celestial and infernal; and the ruin
Irremediable of every heaven and hell.”

“That was an accident on Calvary, then!”
The goddess cried enlightened. “Had Jove known
Jehovah would become a man in all
Mortality, he never would have risked
Destruction in permitting men to work
Their will upon his rival. Could he dream
That deity would so forget itself!
Put on without reprieve the flesh of men?
The madness of a god!”

“The irony
Exorbitant of chance,” I said: “pursued
Throughout the centuries with keenest zest;
For only then when all the gods were dead
Or moribund, did men begin to pray
In earnest, and to worship truly—both
Jehovah and his conqueror: the one
As Christ, the Man of Sorrows; the other, Jove,
As God of kings and armies, pride and pomp—
In Rome, besides, his ancient seat of power!”

“If deity went out upon the cross
How comes it I am here?” The goddess asked,
Not now disdainful, but in thoughtful guise,
As having met the master of her fate.

I said, “The point of time on Calvary
When Christ gave up the ghost; the three dark hours
You passed in Arcady, the centuries
Of Christendom in which Jehovah, dead,
Appeared to triumph, are in eternity
One single moment and the same with this
In which we meet.”

The goddess understood;
But asked me of the gods whom I had killed—
“Were they not Wanes, then?”

“No; not Wanes,” I said.
“Unless they were the fittest, how they survived
No one can tell. I know I killed the three.”

“And I?” she said.

By the great power I have
To join the ends of time, and to compress
Eternity into a glowing point,
One teeming moment of imagination
(The active sum of all material force),
Nothing in this or in the Other World
(Extinguished now), no cause, no accident,
No import, no result, no fate (so-called)
That ever did betide is hid from me.
Giving this faculty the rein, I said,
“Goddess and hallowed lamp of stainless youth,
Shining supreme in lilied sovereignty
Because of maidenhood, you are to-night
As beautiful, as fragrant, fresh, and rich
In deity and in divine desire,
As on the evening when you came of age,
And Jove, with such a daughter overjoyed,
Enthroned and crowned you, while the dusky stars
In envy swooned, or hung about you, too
Enchanted with your excellence to dream
Of emulation.”

Wistfully she said,
“But wherefore then do I survive alone?
Athene was a virgin.”

“A sexless one;
Not from Jove's loins, but from his head she sprang:
When the end came she was the first to fade.”

“To fade?” she murmured, while her crescent, filled
Anew with pulsing fire, lit up the night.

“They ceased somehow, they vanished, every god,
Myself excepted, and the three you slew—
I will believe you slew them: but was that
The end of all the kingdoms of the air—
That death on Calvary when Jehovah's treason
Undid Himself and us? May there not be
Celestial homes beyond the stars, a lodge
Above Olympus, a higher heaven than heaven,
Where Jove confederate with Jehovah dwells,
And Juno visits Aphrodite's bower
In sweetest amity? I think there may.”

“A goddess's romance! In bourneless space,
Fulfilled with matter multiform, no room
For any immaterial mite remains.”
“No room,” she cried, “for immaterial things?
But I am immaterial, if you mean,
By immaterial, immortal and divine.”

I was about to say, “Sheer fantasy!
You are not; never were!” but in my veins
The aphrodisian force of Other World
Began a revel as of molten ore,
Tumultuous in the entrails of the earth,
That shatters mountains and upheaves the sea.
Ambrosial food and nectar of the gods,
Whereof I had partaken with careless zest,
Being savoury morsels of essential life,
(I mean the unreal essence of the spirit)
And aureate passion, potable, and pure
As the first lightnings (though impossible,
As the uncharactered inane itself)
No filter and no witchcraft ever tuned
To such a pitch of poignant ecstasy
The senses of her lord, beloved in vain
By some unhappy bride, as that which now
Inspired me.

“Goddess,” I said, “above the stars
I see the dazzling fronts of palaces
That overlook eternity. On one
A crescent burns and beckons: your demesne,
Untenanted and waiting—”

“Forbear deceit!”
She cried: “you said romance; and now you say,
In the same wanton breath, the highest heaven
Exists, with room for me!”

Against her will
To cull the flower of her virginity
Had been my purpose: with the loss
Of maidenhood her deity I knew
Must end at once; and I should then have purged
The Universe of the last exile, last
Inheritress of Other World. But now
Material things or immaterial seemed
The selfsame substance, or it mattered not
Whether they were—betrayal of the truth,
And of my own material being, for which
I suffered torment dire!—while one design
Engulfed as in a vortex all my thoughts:—
In some vertiginous moment of the blood
To win the virgin goddess of the night,
And to possess her with her sweetest will.

“When I derided you, divinity
Adorable above all adoration,
My thoughts,” I said, “were wandering far astray
In labyrinths where human doubt devours
The first-born of the mind. Now I return
To earth, to heaven and hell: nor Jove, nor God
Did ever speak more truly than I in this
I tell you:—Not a gnome or filmy elf,
Demon or angel, hero, deity
Can ever cease to be: they and their realms
Romantic, fairylands, elysiums, bliss
And bale, the peopled universe of man's
Fantastical creation, as the scope
Of vision, trebly harnessed for the strife
Against encroaching distances, against
Minuteness still dividing, and the war
That spectral colours wage upon the stars
In conquest of their nature, substance, growth:
I say as vision widened, deepened, struck
Aloft, extending everywhere, domains
Imaginative, and unsearchable
By keenest lens or prism resolvent, pass
Beyond material ken, advancing swift
As thought, or as the constellations speed
For ever in a goalless infinite.
Above the highest heaven your palace shines
With tenderest light. Thither you will ascend
When you with me fulfil your destiny;
And win high welcome, for the gods await
Your certain advent in their new abode.”
“I doubt you; I distrust you; all you spoke—”

“I thought aloud, affirming crudely things
Debatable to clear my turbid mind,
Awork with your astounding presence here.
The gathered dross, the slag and scoria scummed,
I drain a noble metal unalloyed,
And cast it in the very mold of fate.
Alone and helpless you have none but me:
You must believe, and I must speak, the truth.”

“How shall I know the truth?”

“Yourself,” I said,
“Being divine, are test enough. Reject
The thing you doubt without a second thought.”

“Then what must I believe?”

“Do you believe
The gods exist?” I asked.

“I neither doubt
In my divinest moments that the gods
Exist, nor doubt I shall at last attain
The lofty home of my celestial folk.”

“What would you do to bring that time about?”

“What can I do?” she asked.

“What have you left
Undone? The meaning of your maidenhood,
A bandoned here without a token sent
From any heaven—”

“The meaning?”

“Even this,—
That deity, neglected on the earth,
Contemned, denied or utterly misknown
Since Golgotha and the debacle there
Begun, is yet again to be the world's
Unquestioned glory in a golden age,
Wherewith the times Saturnian shall compare
As winter's pallid gleam and drizzling sky
With the steep sun of summer and its rose.”

“My long terrestrial exile means a new
Beginning of divinity on earth?
Tell me of that!” the goddess cried, her eyes,
Her crescent luminous with hope: “tell—tell
The wonder, the delight, the truth of that!”

“It could not be,” I said; “nor is it high
And holy that the everlasting youth,
Florescent in the ichor of the gods,
Should bloom infertile through millennial years.
Unhappy women—or, it well may be,
The happiest!—can continue maidenhood
Till death at last deflowers the scentless weed;
For women wither and their summertime
Is not so long a war of continence
That all must yield. But with the unfading gods
Who live in the eternal moment, time
Has nought to do; their beauty and their strength
Renew themselves: with every ardent pulse
Desire augments throughout eternity.”

“What are you going to say!”

“That all the change
In both Worlds was, from Calvary till now,
The elaborate accomplishment of fate's
Mature device, our casual meeting here.”

“Is this a horror or a glorious thing?”
The goddess asked the night.

“A glorious thing!
I from my mansion in the Milky Way
Come down to earth to die; you on your beat
Nocturnal round the summer world patrol
The frontier of the north; and lo, we meet!
And we shall mingle—”

“Not even with higher God
Than God would I unite my deity!”

“No; but with man—with me, you shall unite!
The gods have paired with women and begot
Belovëd sons and daughters: dynasties
Divine; but unenduring, and beyond
Restoral banished. Let a greater race
Than any hitherto adored in Heaven,
In Asgard or Olympus—”

“My guardian dead!
No spear! No arrow! God—O, any god
In any heaven or hell, limbo or land
Forgotten, hear and aid me! It is I,
Virginity, your flame-clad maidenhood,
So highly sphered, so holily beseen,
The innocent goddess whom the gods themselves
Adored! And, O sweet stars, my bowermaids long
Agone, why are you hid to-night? Unveil—”

“The very eyes of heaven are closed,” I said,
“That none may see us!”

“I shall see you—I,

A goddess!”

“But by you I would be seen!
My eyes in your unfathomed orbs deep sunk
As in a tide of glory—”

“Never!” she cried.
“Shall the proud legend of my life, the high
Achievement of millennial purity,
Immortal flower of maidenhood, be turned
To laughter, tarnished and undone, and rent
And rifled by a man?—or by a beast?
Or by a devil?—vampire, ghost, or ghoul?
No fiercest, strongest, subtlest male alive
Dare touch me! Go! I bid you go!”

“Your wrath
Betrays your ill-assurance. In your heart,
Installed by Jove when he begot you, love,
A dreaming world long time enchanted, wakes
In uttermost amazement: passion stirs;
The curtains of your mind are drawn, and light—
Not of the moon that borrows daily fire
And nightly freezes it—but sevenfold light
Eternal floods your thought. Clear as the sun,
The secret of celestial ruin dawns
Upon your wonder; for the sin of heaven
That sapped Olympian power, unguessed till now,
Was lodged in you, the cult of maidenhood.
Virginity is never, will never be,
Divine. The worship of an incomplete
Existence?—of one half of a being?—Sin
Unpardonable, and inconceivable
As soon as known! But by this very sin,
The unhallowed worship of virginity
(Achievement of the automatic fates!)
You were preserved a maid; and in your sex
Myriads of virgin years have so matured
Essential deity, so burdened every lode
With golden ore of love, and so fulfilled
Your beauty with the sorcery of heaven,
That he who sees you needs you with a need
No mortal can endure. You goddess, you,
In unreserved divinity, or death!”
She gazed into the darkness; she wrung her hands;
Her bosom heaved, her bosom thronged, with sighs.
But now her soul had yielded, and I knew
That, being a goddess, she would give herself
Without another thought than to be mine.

“Look, goddess, look!” I said, aware how love
Had rolled the years up like a debt discharged,
Erased the cross-hatched shadows of old time,
And lit my face with youth: truly to love
A woman will transfigure any man;
But I, desiring deity, became
The avatar of deity's desire.

She looked, and on the instant stood entranced.
Then slowly from her lips her meaning poured
Like organ music:—“Greater than the gods,
O man, immortal in mortality,
For your delight, for your supreme delight
I kept my maidenhead. Without a doubt—
I know it in my sex and in my soul!—
My womb will teem with daughters fairer far
Than their most happy mother, with many sons
As great as he whose love, so deified,
Will found a mightier dynasty of gods
Than any in the records of all the heavens:
Justice and guerdon due my chastity
Preserved throughout millenniums at a cost—
Now I may say it, now that sudden fate
Unties my virgin knot!—O, at a cost
Incalculable of sleepless centuries
And midnight madness that the muffled skies
Concealed from gods and men! That pallid dream—
Endymion in the Latmian cave?—O, that!—
Tender, and sweet, and beautiful; a thing
To tell about—for slander must be fed
In heaven and earth!—masking forbidden lust
That might have horrified the world with births
More heinous than Chimæra or Minotaur,
Had not occasion, still inopportune,
Undone the evil thought:—at such a cost
The maiden treasure of my deity
Was kept for you to plunder! Every pulse
Exults and every nerve; my bosom swells
Already at the thought of sucklings there—
My babes upon my breast! But this comes first,
The sum and harmony of every joy,—
That I shall suffer and that you shall wreak
Sweet vengeance for millennial chastity,
That my long lonely passion will be shared
With one who loves me and is by me belov'd.”

The bracken was our couch; our bridal sheets,
Her green simarre, by her divinely spread,
The while she wished to hide and would not hide
Her tender shuddering sighs, her flowerlike smiles
That bloomed in swift succession with crystal tears
For dewdrops, and the dazzling blood that welled
In momentaneous surges and overcame
Her face, her neck, her bosom with a tide,
Wherein, as in the mirror of the wave,
An unseen dawn its rosy shadow threw.

She was the virgin goddess of the night;
And she lay down with me; and in my arms
She sacrificed the chastity of heaven;
And swooned with happiness, and whispered close,
“I see my palace on the highest height—
The one you told me of. Thither will we,
So stealthily, when our first boy is born,
And take with sudden wonder all my kin.”

That was the burden of her nuptial song
Until the tumult of her own delight
Invaded all her being. Then—O then,
Her molten crescent dripped with honeyed fire—
A light to love by had we needed light;
With fragrant kisses, like a magic cup
For ever brimming with the wine of life,
Her mouth was at my lips; her golden voice
In murmurs and unworded rapture told
Voluptuous secrets of our rich embrace;
And over us the moonless, starless night
A velvet coverlet of darkness spread.

But when her soul was satiated with love
A little while before the morning broke
Wanton she grew and would not be appeased.
Although her crescent waned, and in its gloom
Her eyes and eyelids withered, and her face
Grew haggard with the ashen stain of death,
Yet would she cling to me, one hungry sense
Alone alive, and “Take me, take me, love,
Or else I die!” she sobbed, her arms and limbs
About me writhen like a serpent's coils.

Once when a momentary lull reprieved
The travail of her body, she shrieked aloud,
“Anathema! A man has conquered me!
The end has come! Insufferable hell
Begin again and disembowel earth
With hotter fire than any stolen from heaven,
To be a living sepulchre of pain
For that pernicious prophet whose presage sly—
Gods!—vanished gods! dead gods!—I heeded not . . .
Because it was to be!” Then at my ear,
And through her grinding teeth, “Save me from death,”
She said—“by love! Save me from death by love!”

Such being the tragic loom of it, and she
And I the warp and woof, I still renewed
The anguish that was ecstasy at first;
But as I drained my life in one resolved
Embrace, her fire went out, her deity
Decayed; and by the sullen clouded dawn
That dredged the sky with dim, diffusive dust,
There vanished from my sight a carrion shape,
With shrivelled dugs, wry mouth and posture foul
As of a naked hag on lewdness bent.

With shrunk veins, empty mind, suspended will,
Scarce had I noted veils and shreds of mist
Hanging upon the mountains and the woods,
And through my marrow felt the morning air
Like curdling venom steal, when death came down,
And brought about tremendous punishment
For my seduction of the goddess, lust
Indulged to frenzy, self-deceit and dark
Betrayal of the ethereal universe.
Without a pang I died; but, shrieking, waked
In the last Hell remaining, Hell unknown
To men before my visit, appalling Hell,
The Hell of Deity where Other World
Intolerable agony endured.

Although the instantaneousness of Hell
Extorted sudden outcry, yet the thought
That immaterial falsehood of the spirit
Had not escaped; but that the gods themselves
A fierier flame, a fiercer torture knew
Than any penalty infernal dealt
The human victims of their wrath divine,
Inventors, patrons, connoisseurs of Hell,
Was as a drop of water on my tongue,
A chord of music, and a breath of wind
Amid the dismal noise, the withering heat,
The awful restlessness, the live despair.

Beside me on the threshold the goddess stood,
As young, as full of zest, and as divine
As when she passed me on the mountain-top.
I also in the splendour of my youth
Entered the dread inferno of the gods;
For, that the anguish there might still surpass
The utmost pain in every other hell,
The spirit and strength of all the denizens,
Restored at once, were to the height maintained
By the pure flame they breathed, the atmosphere
Being also nurture and stimulant, and one
Exhaustive torment of that shrine of woe:
That all the essences of Other World
Should breathe, should feed on Hell like plants on air,
And should become in every artery, nerve,
Secretion, organ, bone and muscle, Hell,
Insufferable Hell, was the supreme
Distinction, the redundancy superb
In hellishness that made the Hell of the Gods
Pre-eminent Hell. But over and above
The general torture native in the air—
So stringent and imbuing that the might
Combined, the majesty and pride of gods,
The highest, Jove, Poseidon, Mulciber,
Ormuzd and Ahriman, Woden, Surtur, Mars,
Could not have borne in silence a moment's throe—
Each individual, from the daintiest elf,
That fed on perfume once and bathed in dew,
To Cyclopean figures vast, of yore
The armourers and farriers of the gods,
Endured the unendurable, impaled
Against a towering cliff of adamant,
Sheer as a waterfall and smooth as glass,
Broad as the bastion of an island realm,
And topaz-hued by reflex of the flame
That filled the wide and lofty vault of Hell,
Its atmosphere: impalement manifold,
The pegs and bolts, the hooks, the skewers and beams
Being of the soul of metal, an element
Unknown on earth, that where it pierces lives
An aching life metallic, in pain itself,
And to the wounded spirit imparting power
Transcendent to experience agonies
That, felt less keenly, with a single pang
Had ended every god. Supine or prone
The fairies, kobolds, dwarfs, by pins and nails
Transfixed like butterflies and beetles, screamed
With stretched mouths, wings a-buzz and wriggling limbs;
And though they wrenched and wrung their bodies,—they,
And every sufferer there, incessantly—
The puncture of the impalement sucked the stake
Like a fierce mouth, such was the energy
Constrictive in the magic metal lodged.
Titans and Thurses huge, dropped from the height,
On ganches pined—such groups of barbs and spikes
As on the walls of orient cities clutched
The mangled malefactor, dying long
In hideous misery: through the bowels thrust,
Hooked by a leg and in both shoulders griped,
The storm-leviathan, enormous Thrym,
Terrific anguish from his cavernous maw
Uttered continually; beside him hung
Uncouthly by the head, his eyehole pierced
By other malice than the wandering Greek's,
His bulk contorted and immanely trussed
On giant prongs that dug through either thigh,
And, curving, gashed his midriff, ocean's son,
The cloud-high Polyphemus, writhed and roared.
Upon a skewer, that through their navels stuck,
Vulcan and Mars, with Venus wedged between,
Bellowed discordant frenzy as they bit
And clawed each other. Juno stitched to Jove
By latticed scythes—austerely, back to back—
Bayed like a she-wolf maddening at the moon,
While her great consort's lion throat unstopped
Pealed out the diapason of all woe:
Chronos with Rhea, Baal with Ashtaroth,
Woden with Freya, such espousal had,
In couples ganched, and howling deep and shrill
Hell's hymenean. There Apollo, racked
Among a grove of scimitars that grew
Like sedges through his deity, suppressed
His tuneless note a moment when he saw
His conqueror come so soon to share his fate;
Thor, clamorous on an antlered couch, pronounced
Infernal welcome; and Aidoneus stabbed
In every limb and organ, lifted up
A piercing voice that for a breath outsoared
The thundrous quire of Hell. This heard and seen
Within the instant of my entrance, more
I could not mark for the appalling pain
That the first breath of Hell instilled, but flung
My unheard cry into the whelming noise,
Absorbed in monstrous torment. Yet I knew,
By the inherent faculty of Hell,
That my divine companion of the night
Impaled throughout her sumptuous deity—
Beside Athene strung upon a stake!—
Wriggled and yelled abominably hurt.

Also I knew (in the one instant still,
Like all the happening in the Hell of the Gods)
That on the adamantine bastion hung
A figure crucified, which was myself;
And that beside myself there hanging, I,
A second time, being he who entered, nailed
Through either palm at arm's length drawn, and through
My feet together pressed, beheld myself
Still standing at the entry, mouth agape
And pouring horror to behold a third
Appearance of myself against the wall
By hands and feet affixed! Then I, the man
I am, the very man, beside the three
Phantasmas of myself was also nailed:
For I, as man, was guilty of the gods,
Guilty of God; and in myself partook
Uniquely of the nature of the gods,
Having supped upon their food, and having loved
A deity, and been by her belov'd.
“Four persons in the Godhead—the Sire, the Son,
The Holy Spirit, and the Evil One,”
The faculty of Hell within me cried;
And in the instant, though that instant seemed
Eternity quadrupled, so intense
My fourfold agony became, the last
Of all the Hells, and the most terrible
Desisted wholly; and I stood once more
Alone upon the mountain of my choice,
And saw the northern dawn awake the world.

The mechanism of automatic fate
Brought it about that when I thought to die
Eternally, I died to live again.
Thus in my night adventure and my death
I purged the world of the last remnant left
Of Other World, the hideous Hell of the Gods,
Of virgin worship, and, in myself, of God—
Pernicious slander of material truth
So terribly avenged in the last Hell.
And thus I made the world a fit abode
For greatness and the men who yet may be;
And can myself with joy become again
The mountains and the ocean, the winds, the flowers,
And life and death, and fear and love and hope,
And tender sorrow and heavy grief, and all
Humanity, and all that thinks and is:
Remaining still the conscious mystery throned
Among the stars, with systems round beset,
By throngs of constellations haunted, discs
Gigantic looming white on every hand,
And married globes whose orbits intertwine,
Whose burnished lights instinct with diverse stains
Revolve about each other deep in space,
Saffron with sapphire, emerald with ruby-red,
And purple stars with topaz doubles sphered,
Or wonderful as instruments attuned
To some new ravishment of keen accord,
In virgin gold and lilac burning bright,
A stellar passion of harmonious fire.
I dare not, must not die: I am the sight
And hearing of the infinite; in me
Matter fulfils itself; before me none
Beheld or heard, imagined, thought or felt;
And though I make the mystery known to men,
It may be none hereafter shall achieve
The perfect purpose of eternity;
It may be that the Universe attains
Self-knowledge only once; and when I cease
To see and hear, imagine, think and feel,
The end may come, and matter, satisfied,
Devolve once more through wanton change, and tides
Of slow relapse, suns, systems, galaxies,
Back to ethereal oblivion, pure
Accomplished darkness, might immaculate
Augmenting everlastingly in space.
Me, therefore, it beseems while life endures,
To haunt my palace in the Milky Way,
And into music change the tumult high
That echoes through the vast, unvaulted courts
Interminable, where the nebulæ
Evolving constellations, their spindles whirl;
Me it beseems to take my joy in heaven,
Revealing glory by my soul conceived,
And by my soul begotten, in the rapt
Cohabitation with eternity.

I felt the world a-spinning on its nave,
I felt it sheering blindly round the sun;
I felt the time had come to find a grave:
I knew it in my heart my days were done.
I took my staff in hand; I took the road,
And wandered out to seek my last abode.
Hearts of gold and hearts of lead
Sing it yet in sun and rain,
“Heel and toe from dawn to dusk,
Round the world and home again.”

O long before the bere was steeped for malt,
And long before the grape was crushed for wine,
The glory of the march without a halt,
The triumph of a stride like yours and mine
Was known to folk like us, who walked about,
To be the sprightliest cordial out and out!
Folk like us, with hearts that beat,
Sang it too in sun and rain—
“Heel and toe from dawn to dusk,
Round the world and home again.”

My feet are heavy now, but on I go,
My head erect beneath the tragic years.
The way is steep, but I would have it so;
And dusty, but I lay the dust with tears,
Though none can see me weep: alone I climb
The rugged path that leads me out of time—
Out of time and out of all,
Singing yet in sun and rain,
“Heel and toe from dawn to dusk,
Round the world and home again.”

Farewell the hope that mocked, farewell despair
That went before me still and made the pace.
The earth is full of graves, and mine was there
Before my life began, my resting-place;
And I shall find it out and with the dead
Lie down for ever, all my sayings said—
Deeds all done and songs all sung,
While others chant in sun and rain,
“Heel and toe from dawn to dusk,
Round the world and home again.”