Classic Poem

Is man only a bloody flesh
With the stitching needles of passion and thinking flashing in and out,
A mouth, a phallus, a hand,
Ambition, despair — no more?

Alas, and glory, we are the Abyss, we are the Abyss;
We can climb down the interior mountain walls of a torn and bottomless canyon
And in that brown sunless and starless shadow with the smoky torch of the Ego
Picked chasmed glooms out with our thin rays
Revealing coasts and rings of Valhallas and chanting Heavens,
Terraces of Hell populated with the damned of a million years,
Terrains of divine animals moving in the dawn of time ...

We walk a narrow strip all our days between Madness and Sanity ...
Move but a little to the left and we start a swarm of Furies and Harpies,
And are driven into waters where the tiger-fish lies mightier than Leviathan
And are gulped down deep as Dis in the eternal belly ...

In fear of the Lord we ice over the top of the Pit,
We lay a floor of the ice of complete forgetfulness,
The frozen waters of the turning away of our eyes and our ears to our many neighbours and our feeble tasks:
And we skate in a fearful oblivion of the Eternal on the rind of ourselves ...

" There is no God," says the fool,
And, " There is no Devil," says the imbecile ...
Down in that smithy and matrix-mill the swarthy monsters of Creation
Are smelting and puddling and rolling and hammering the living future,
Preparing great dooms for peoples,
Shaping gigantic new Gods for groping nations,
Brewing blind revolutions and earthquakes of change ...

Lo, when the preparations bulge toward the daylight of the act
Sledgehammers of God come shattering through the ice,
And peoples and nations tumble into the madness of themselves,
And there is famine and pestilence and fury and war,
And the vast slaying of the Old,
And in slaughter and tumult we work the will of Creation ...

The great only are beforehand with the Lord,
Unterrified and with Promethean daring they descend willingly,
With the faint smoky torch they pick black paths toward abysmal Mystery,
Until they are closed in utterly,
Until they lie down in darkness, as dead;
And they are mixed with the stuff of divinities and demons,
They are streaked and layered and infibred with prophecy and power and wisdom,
They steal and drink and endure the eternal fires,
And fighting right and left with a terrible courage they bear back to earth
Loot of creation in song, story and prophecy,
And in many inventions. . . .

And the greatest are they who go down like Dante for a journey of years
And single-handed fight and conquer the Eternal,
In proof that man is the equal of the Gods,
And that he can battle with the Omnipotent until he wrests from immortal hands a soul of his own,
Reborn, the conqueror, hope of our ages ...

He who conquers comes into the last wisdom:
Lo, the divine immensity of life itself wills the creation of human souls,
But has no power to give that birth save as man himself conquers it ...
The Eternal goads us to battle with the Eternal,
The Gods coerce Man to fight the Gods,
As if only that which is won through terror and struggle is worth the winning ...
As if Creation grew only by the clash and war in itself ...