Nay -
I. — Nay .
How may we trust Thee, Majesty Supreme!
We whose dim life fleets by, an idle dream,
Amid the ruining welter, and the wash
Of shattered Faiths, and holiest Hopes that flash
To annihilation in a moment, or slow wane,
Till what lay desert desert lies again,
Fooled for an hour with visions of ripe grain,
Withered ere harvest! Oh, the weary round
Of life and death halting within a bound
Of adamant, and fluctuating, ever
Goaded to dissonant, impotent endeavour!
Warring, we swarm to scale a phantom height,
We whose feet fail in some drear infinite!
Piteous human bones upon the waste
Jeer, as we wander, our infatuate haste.
Where now the goal and beacon of strong youth?
Where those far havens of Eternal Truth?
Fabled Atlantis islands of the blest,
In shadowy sunset kingdoms of the West,
If we may reach you, we may find you naught,
Mere human visions, hollow and glamour-fraught!
Where now the morning-land of Love we saw?
Vanished, a pure white snow-wreath in a thaw!
Where youth's high hope to order the wild world?
A once-bright banner, mouldering and furled!
The stern resolve to mould a world within?
Dead in deep jungles of inveterate sin!
Or may the race prove conqueror, tho' we fall?
Through long-vexed infancy the tribes grow tall,
Then slow declining, falter to the grave;
Nor wiser, happier, they who bloom and wave
In their rank ruin: whatsoe'er the gain,
Some earlier glory of the flower will wane!
No sweet sound food, the fruit of wrong and pain.
Ah! dear young children, cankered in the bud,
Surely the harvest battening on your blood
Must be transcendent, ere we may embrace
Meekly the holocaust of all your grace!
Nay! for no triumph splendid as the sun
Were an atonement for the loss of one.
Poor hearts expiring rend with wail sublime
God's vast world-palace, founded upon crime,
Whose ponderous, hell-poised blocks for their cement
Have meek red blood of all the innocent!
Nay, some faint protest of a humblest heart
Should shame and shatter such infernal art!
If He be lord who builds it, we will not
Worship, in how fierce fires soe'er our lot
He appoint for our rebellion! but I deem
'Tis only fever that so makes it seem!
Interminable armies ever wend
O'er maimed and martyred comrades to their end
Of blind, unused extinction, tho' the hope
Of infinite Love and Justice while they grope
Be kindled in their bosoms for a lure,
Fooling their hearts the torture to endure
Of false life longer, ere immersed in night
They feed some monstrous Blossom on the height
Of this infernal column of a world:
For it their souls one refuse-heap were hurled,
Bleeding and writhin5, to annihilation,
For some sleek mortal god to inhale oblation
Of waste breaths, wrung from sentient agony,
A vampire draining life of these who die!
So that fierce carnage, cast in foemen's bronze,
Mounts serpentine to swell Napoleon's
Inhuman triumph, whose proud solitude
Stands pillared, purpled with the people's blood!
The hecatomb of myriad-fold dumb lives
Invokes a clinging curse on Him who thrives
From their long torture; inarticulate calls
Man's beast progenitor! lo! from hopeless falls
Under the precipice of grand endeavour,
Beautiful youths and maidens, mute for ever,
Piteously silent, utter loud reproof
On Him who holds Himself unseen, aloof,
And makes Him sport, engendering their vain
Faith, effort, prayer, the longer to sustain
This miserable mockery of life
Wherewith He endows them, grim and cold, and rife
With cruel humour, with insane, fierce relish
For wine of anguish wrung from tortures hellish
Of souls and bodies! lo! we all pass by,
Saluting Caesar, men who are to die!
Or is it but inevitable, blind
Dull monster Force, that doth terrific grind
Forth idle aspiration, and fond fears,
Illusive bliss, and terror, and wild tears
From one dim, boundless chaos of a womb,
Till, white with horror of the waking doom,
All cower for refuge in their natal tomb?
Hath God, like mortals, a divided will,
Drunkenly reeling from weak good to ill?
Yea, there be throned gods, fallen dignities!
But high beyond we lift our longing eyes!
Ye may not fold your thoughts at such a goal,
Impelled to seek the spiritual Pole,
Ideal lodestar of the pilgrim soul!
What meaneth, then, this horrible array?
Abortions seizing hard breath for a day
When they have mangled, mad with famine-rages,
Foul mates through dark interminable ages,
Loathsome with low lust, anguish, desolation!
Until awakes Man's mournful generation
From the colossal ruin of lost life;
And lo! his infinite, opening eyes are rife
With hunger for eternal days, and good,
Piteously craved as necessary food!
Reveal from whence the holy hunger comes!
For all the mute onlookers turn their thumbs
Doomward around the immense arena spaces,
As Man, the victim, peers in their dread faces,
Implacable, though all the beauty-flower
Of the young gladiator plead with power!
Say, whence this thirst for truth and righteousness,
If there be no eternal Spring to bless,
No Arm to quell the tyrant, or redress
Mad earth's injustice? Mynad-fold we grovel,
A human swine on palace floor, and hovel,
Bound by a Circe, albeit half aware
We are fallen gods in some sublime despair!
O monstrous Nature! human-headed Beast,
Thou cannibal at some unnatural feast
On thine own offspring! who hast whelped the fiend,
And man, whose offal-feeding frenzy gleaned
The hell-field of foul horrors, left unreaped
By devils; his black coward heart full-steeped
In outrage, lies, and murderous lust for pain,
Whom all the unbounded tortures bigots feign
May purge not from the abominable stain!
O monstrous world, where innocent children jostle
Fiends from the pit! where snakes constrict the throstle,
Singing of Paradise! infuse the fire,
And gloat upon her pangs till she expire,
Her music foundering in confusion dire!
Surely there be twin fountains of the world,
And Love brought forth what Hate to ruin hurled!
Love looses lucid waters, and they sing;
But ever one squats to pollute the spring!
Ah, Lord! who willest well! Thy lame hands falter,
While Death and Sin defile Thy Bride before the altar!
Poor Love! and couldst not Thou preserve Thy daughter
From infamy and ravishment and slaughter?
I know not! only know that we are blind.
Thou wilt divide this kingdom of the mind,
Thou threatenest if I dare behold Thy face,
Nor cower obsequious in my native place?
I see Thy doom-engraving fiery finger!
I hear Thy loud anathema — and linger!
Tho' jealous, Thou arraignest for high treason
Our Babylonian banquets of the reason.
We, scowling outcasts, branded sons of Cain,
Hear with a vast, ineffable disdain
Sleek minions of prosperity prate peace!
While wrung upon the rack we claim release,
Or with gnawn entrails clench firm teeth, nor cry;
Let one call to us from the abyss of agony!
Speak Jesus! — lo! we listen ere we die.
How may we trust Thee, Majesty Supreme!
We whose dim life fleets by, an idle dream,
Amid the ruining welter, and the wash
Of shattered Faiths, and holiest Hopes that flash
To annihilation in a moment, or slow wane,
Till what lay desert desert lies again,
Fooled for an hour with visions of ripe grain,
Withered ere harvest! Oh, the weary round
Of life and death halting within a bound
Of adamant, and fluctuating, ever
Goaded to dissonant, impotent endeavour!
Warring, we swarm to scale a phantom height,
We whose feet fail in some drear infinite!
Piteous human bones upon the waste
Jeer, as we wander, our infatuate haste.
Where now the goal and beacon of strong youth?
Where those far havens of Eternal Truth?
Fabled Atlantis islands of the blest,
In shadowy sunset kingdoms of the West,
If we may reach you, we may find you naught,
Mere human visions, hollow and glamour-fraught!
Where now the morning-land of Love we saw?
Vanished, a pure white snow-wreath in a thaw!
Where youth's high hope to order the wild world?
A once-bright banner, mouldering and furled!
The stern resolve to mould a world within?
Dead in deep jungles of inveterate sin!
Or may the race prove conqueror, tho' we fall?
Through long-vexed infancy the tribes grow tall,
Then slow declining, falter to the grave;
Nor wiser, happier, they who bloom and wave
In their rank ruin: whatsoe'er the gain,
Some earlier glory of the flower will wane!
No sweet sound food, the fruit of wrong and pain.
Ah! dear young children, cankered in the bud,
Surely the harvest battening on your blood
Must be transcendent, ere we may embrace
Meekly the holocaust of all your grace!
Nay! for no triumph splendid as the sun
Were an atonement for the loss of one.
Poor hearts expiring rend with wail sublime
God's vast world-palace, founded upon crime,
Whose ponderous, hell-poised blocks for their cement
Have meek red blood of all the innocent!
Nay, some faint protest of a humblest heart
Should shame and shatter such infernal art!
If He be lord who builds it, we will not
Worship, in how fierce fires soe'er our lot
He appoint for our rebellion! but I deem
'Tis only fever that so makes it seem!
Interminable armies ever wend
O'er maimed and martyred comrades to their end
Of blind, unused extinction, tho' the hope
Of infinite Love and Justice while they grope
Be kindled in their bosoms for a lure,
Fooling their hearts the torture to endure
Of false life longer, ere immersed in night
They feed some monstrous Blossom on the height
Of this infernal column of a world:
For it their souls one refuse-heap were hurled,
Bleeding and writhin5, to annihilation,
For some sleek mortal god to inhale oblation
Of waste breaths, wrung from sentient agony,
A vampire draining life of these who die!
So that fierce carnage, cast in foemen's bronze,
Mounts serpentine to swell Napoleon's
Inhuman triumph, whose proud solitude
Stands pillared, purpled with the people's blood!
The hecatomb of myriad-fold dumb lives
Invokes a clinging curse on Him who thrives
From their long torture; inarticulate calls
Man's beast progenitor! lo! from hopeless falls
Under the precipice of grand endeavour,
Beautiful youths and maidens, mute for ever,
Piteously silent, utter loud reproof
On Him who holds Himself unseen, aloof,
And makes Him sport, engendering their vain
Faith, effort, prayer, the longer to sustain
This miserable mockery of life
Wherewith He endows them, grim and cold, and rife
With cruel humour, with insane, fierce relish
For wine of anguish wrung from tortures hellish
Of souls and bodies! lo! we all pass by,
Saluting Caesar, men who are to die!
Or is it but inevitable, blind
Dull monster Force, that doth terrific grind
Forth idle aspiration, and fond fears,
Illusive bliss, and terror, and wild tears
From one dim, boundless chaos of a womb,
Till, white with horror of the waking doom,
All cower for refuge in their natal tomb?
Hath God, like mortals, a divided will,
Drunkenly reeling from weak good to ill?
Yea, there be throned gods, fallen dignities!
But high beyond we lift our longing eyes!
Ye may not fold your thoughts at such a goal,
Impelled to seek the spiritual Pole,
Ideal lodestar of the pilgrim soul!
What meaneth, then, this horrible array?
Abortions seizing hard breath for a day
When they have mangled, mad with famine-rages,
Foul mates through dark interminable ages,
Loathsome with low lust, anguish, desolation!
Until awakes Man's mournful generation
From the colossal ruin of lost life;
And lo! his infinite, opening eyes are rife
With hunger for eternal days, and good,
Piteously craved as necessary food!
Reveal from whence the holy hunger comes!
For all the mute onlookers turn their thumbs
Doomward around the immense arena spaces,
As Man, the victim, peers in their dread faces,
Implacable, though all the beauty-flower
Of the young gladiator plead with power!
Say, whence this thirst for truth and righteousness,
If there be no eternal Spring to bless,
No Arm to quell the tyrant, or redress
Mad earth's injustice? Mynad-fold we grovel,
A human swine on palace floor, and hovel,
Bound by a Circe, albeit half aware
We are fallen gods in some sublime despair!
O monstrous Nature! human-headed Beast,
Thou cannibal at some unnatural feast
On thine own offspring! who hast whelped the fiend,
And man, whose offal-feeding frenzy gleaned
The hell-field of foul horrors, left unreaped
By devils; his black coward heart full-steeped
In outrage, lies, and murderous lust for pain,
Whom all the unbounded tortures bigots feign
May purge not from the abominable stain!
O monstrous world, where innocent children jostle
Fiends from the pit! where snakes constrict the throstle,
Singing of Paradise! infuse the fire,
And gloat upon her pangs till she expire,
Her music foundering in confusion dire!
Surely there be twin fountains of the world,
And Love brought forth what Hate to ruin hurled!
Love looses lucid waters, and they sing;
But ever one squats to pollute the spring!
Ah, Lord! who willest well! Thy lame hands falter,
While Death and Sin defile Thy Bride before the altar!
Poor Love! and couldst not Thou preserve Thy daughter
From infamy and ravishment and slaughter?
I know not! only know that we are blind.
Thou wilt divide this kingdom of the mind,
Thou threatenest if I dare behold Thy face,
Nor cower obsequious in my native place?
I see Thy doom-engraving fiery finger!
I hear Thy loud anathema — and linger!
Tho' jealous, Thou arraignest for high treason
Our Babylonian banquets of the reason.
We, scowling outcasts, branded sons of Cain,
Hear with a vast, ineffable disdain
Sleek minions of prosperity prate peace!
While wrung upon the rack we claim release,
Or with gnawn entrails clench firm teeth, nor cry;
Let one call to us from the abyss of agony!
Speak Jesus! — lo! we listen ere we die.
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