Classic Poem

Be proud as Spaniards! Leap for pride, ye fleas!
Henceforth in nature's minim world grandees,
In Phoebus' archives registered are ye —
And this your patent of nobility.
No skipjacks now, nor civiller skip-johns,
Dread Anthropophagi! Specks of living bronze,
I hail you one and all, sans pros or cons,
Descendants from a noble race of dons.

What though that great ancestral flea be gone,
Immortal with immortalizing Donne —
His earthly spots bleached off as Papists gloze
In purgatory fire on Bardolph's nose?
For skimming in the wake, it mocked the care
Of the old boat-god for his farthing fare,
Though Irus' ghost he ne'er frowned blacker on,
The skin and skin-pent druggist crossed the Acheron,
Styx and with Puriphlegethon Cocytus
(The very names, methinks, might thither fright us);
Unchanged it crossed, and shall keep in ghost-light
Of lank half-nothings his, the thinnest sprite,
The sole true something — this in limbo den:
It frightens ghosts as ghosts here frighten men.
Thence crossed unseized, and shall, some fated hour,
Be pulverized by Demogorgon's power,
And given as poison to annihilate souls —
Even now it shrinks them! They shrink in, as moles
(Nature's mute monks, live mandrakes of the ground)
Creep back from light, then listen for its sound —
See but to dread, and dread they know not why —
The natural alien of their negative eye.

'Tis a strange place, this limbo! Not a place,
Yet name it so — where time and weary space
Fettered from flight, with nightmare sense of fleeing,
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;
Lank space, and scytheless Time with branny hands,
Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
Marked but by flit of shades — unmeaning they
As moonlight on the dial of the day.
But that is lovely — looks like human time,
An old man with a steady look sublime,
That stops his earthly task to watch the skies;
But he is blind — a statue hath such eyes —
Yet having moonward turned his face by chance,
Gazes the orb with moonlike countenance,
With scant white hairs, with foretop bald and high,
He gazes still, his eyeless face all eye,
As 'twere an organ full of silent sight;
His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light.
Lip touching lip — all moveless, bust and limb,
He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him!

No such sweet sights doth limbo den immure,
Walled round and made a spirit-jail secure,
By the mere horror of blank nought-at-all,
Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthrall.
A lurid thought is growthless dull privation,
Yet that is but a purgatory curse;
Hell knows a fear far worse —
A fear, a future fate: 'tis positive negation!

Sole Positive of Night!
Antipathist of light!
Fate's only essence! Primal scorpion rod!
The one permitted opposite of God!
Condensed blackness, and abysmal storm
Compacted to one sceptre
Arms the grasp enorm —
The Intercepter!
The substance, that still casts the shadow, death!
The dragon foul and fell!
The unrevealable
And hidden one, whose breath
Gives wind and fuel to the fires of hell!
Ah sole despair
Of both th' eternities in heaven!
Sole interdict of all-bedewing prayer,
The All-compassionate!
Save to the lampads seven
Revealed to none of all th' angelic state,
Save to the lampads seven
That watch the throne of heaven!