LITMIR.BIZ

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of things none dreamed to change:

      A hard sombre heart, a harsh unsmiling mind

      Rejected happiness like a cloying sweet;

      Tranquillity was a tedium and ennui:

      Only by suffering life grew colourful;

      It needed the spice of pain, the salt of tears.

      If one could cease to be, all would be well;

      Else only fierce sensations gave some zest:

      A fury of jealousy burning the gnawed heart,

      The sting of murderous spite and hate and lust,

      The whisper that lures to the pit and treachery’s stroke

      Threw vivid spots on the dull aching hours.

      To watch the drama of infelicity,

      The writhing of creatures under the harrow of doom

      And sorrow’s tragic gaze into the night

      And horror and the hammering heart of fear

      Were the ingredients in Time’s heavy cup

      That pleased and helped to enjoy its bitter taste.

      Of such fierce stuff was made up life’s long hell:

      These were the threads of the dark spider’s-web

      In which the soul was caught, quivering and rapt;

      This was religion, this was Nature’s rule.

      In a fell chapel of iniquity

      To worship a black pitiless image of Power

      Kneeling one must cross hard-hearted stony courts,

      A pavement like a floor of evil fate.

      Each stone was a keen edge of ruthless force

      And glued with the chilled blood from tortured breasts;

      The dry gnarled trees stood up like dying men

      Stiffened into a pose of agony,

      And from each window peered an ominous priest

      Chanting Te Deums for slaughter’s crowning grace,

      Uprooted cities, blasted human homes,

      Burned writhen bodies, the bombshell’s massacre.

      “Our enemies are fallen, are fallen,” they sang,

      “All who once stayed our will are smitten and dead;

      How great we are, how merciful art Thou.”

      Thus thought they to reach God’s impassive throne

      And Him command whom all their acts opposed,

      Magnifying their deeds to touch his skies,

      And make him an accomplice of their crimes.

      There no relenting pity could have place,

      But ruthless strength and iron moods had sway,

      A dateless sovereignty of terror and gloom:

      This took the figure of a darkened God

      Revered by the racked wretchedness he had made,

      Who held in thrall a miserable world,

      And helpless hearts nailed to unceasing woe

      Adored the feet that trampled them into mire.

      It was a world of sorrow and of hate,

      Sorrow with hatred for its lonely joy,

      Hatred with others’ sorrow as its feast;

      A bitter rictus curled the suffering mouth;

      A tragic cruelty saw its ominous chance.

      Hate was the black archangel of that realm;

      It glowed, a sombre jewel in the heart

      Burning the soul with its malignant rays,

      And wallowed in its fell abysm of might.

      These passions even objects seemed to exude, –

      For mind overflowed into the inanimate

      That answered with the wickedness it received, –

      Against their users used malignant powers,

      Hurt without hands and strangely, suddenly slew,

      Appointed as instruments of an unseen doom.

      Or they made themselves a fateful prison wall

      Where men condemned wake through the creeping hours

      Counted by the tollings of an ominous bell.

      An evil environment worsened evil souls:

      All things were conscious there and all perverse.

      In this infernal realm he dared to press

      Even into its deepest pit and darkest core,

      Perturbed its tenebrous base, dared to contest

      Its ancient privileged right and absolute force:

      In Night he plunged to know her dreadful heart,

      In Hell he sought the root and cause of Hell.

      Its anguished gulfs opened in his own breast;

      He listened to clamours of its crowded pain,

      The heart-beats of its fatal loneliness.

      Above was a chill deaf eternity.

      In vague tremendous passages of Doom

      He heard the goblin Voice that guides to slay,

      And faced the enchantments of the demon Sign,

      And traversed the ambush of the opponent Snake.

      In menacing tracts, in tortured solitudes

      Companionless he roamed through desolate ways

      Where the red Wolf waits by the fordless stream

      And Death’s black eagles scream to the precipice,

      And met the hounds of bale who hunt men’s hearts

      Baying across the veldts of Destiny,

      In footless battlefields of the Abyss

      Fought shadowy combats in mute eyeless depths,

      Assaults of Hell endured and Titan strokes

      And bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal.

      A prisoner of a hooded magic Force,

      Captured and trailed in Falsehood’s lethal net

      And often strangled in the noose of grief,

      Or cast in the grim morass of swallowing doubt,

      Or shut into pits of error and despair,

      He drank her poison draughts till none was left.

      In a world where neither hope nor joy could come

      The ordeal he suffered of evil’s absolute reign,

      Yet kept intact his spirit’s radiant truth.

      Incapable of motion or of force,

      In Matter’s blank denial gaoled and blind,

      Pinned to the black inertia of our base

      He treasured between his hands his flickering soul.

      His being ventured into mindless Void,

      Intolerant gulfs that knew not thought nor sense;

      Thought ceased, sense failed, his soul still saw

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