LITMIR.BIZ

MARTYR À LA MODE

       Table of Contents

      AH God, life, law, so many names you keep,

       You great, you patient Effort, and you Sleep

       That does inform this various dream of living,

       You sleep stretched out for ever, ever giving

       Us out as dreams, you august Sleep

       Coursed round by rhythmic movement of all

       time,

       The constellations, your great heart, the sun

       Fierily pulsing, unable to refrain;

       Since you, vast, outstretched, wordless Sleep

       Permit of no beyond, ah you, whose dreams

       We are, and body of sleep, let it never be said

       I quailed at my appointed function, turned poltroon

       For when at night, from out the full surcharge

       Of a day's experience, sleep does slowly draw

       The harvest, the spent action to itself;

       Leaves me unburdened to begin again;

       At night, I say, when I am gone in sleep,

       Does my slow heart rebel, do my dead hands

       Complain of what the day has had them do?

       Never let it be said I was poltroon

       At this my task of living, this my dream,

       This me which rises from the dark of sleep

       In white flesh robed to drape another dream,

       As lightning comes all white and trembling

       From out the cloud of sleep, looks round about

       One moment, sees, and swift its dream is over,

       In one rich drip it sinks to another sleep,

       And sleep thereby is one more dream enrichened.

       If so the Vast, the God, the Sleep that still grows

       richer

       Have said that I, this mote in the body of sleep

       Must in my transiency pass all through pain,

       Must be a dream of grief, must like a crude

       Dull meteorite flash only into light

       When tearing through the anguish of this life,

       Still in full flight extinct, shall I then turn

       Poltroon, and beg the silent, outspread God

       To alter my one speck of doom, when round me

       burns

       The whole great conflagration of all life,

       Lapped like a body close upon a sleep,

       Hiding and covering in the eternal Sleep

       Within the immense and toilsome life-time,

       heaved

       With ache of dreams that body forth the Sleep?

       Shall I, less than the least red grain of flesh

       Within my body, cry out to the dreaming soul

       That slowly labours in a vast travail,

       To halt the heart, divert the streaming flow

       That carries moons along, and spare the stress

       That crushes me to an unseen atom of fire?

       When pain and all

       And grief are but the same last wonder, Sleep

       Rising to dream in me a small keen dream

       Of sudden anguish, sudden over and spent—

       CROYDON