Classic Poem

The Immortal stood frozen amidst
The vast rock of eternity times
And times, a night of vast durance,
Impatient, stifled, stiffen'd, hard'ned;
Till impatience no longer could bear
The hard bondage: rent, rent, the vast solid,
With a crash from immense to immense,
Cracked across into numberless fragments.
The Prophetic wrath, struggling for vent,
Hurls apart, stamping furious to dust
And crumbling with bursting sobs, heaves
The black marble on high into fragments.
Hurl'd apart on all sides as a falling
Rock, the innumerable fragments away
Fell asunder; & horrible vacuum
Beneath him, & on all sides round,
Falling, falling, Los fell & fell,
Sunk precipitant, heavy, down, down,
Times on times, night on night, day on day--
Truth has bounds, Error none--falling, falling,
Years on years, & ages on ages
Still he fell thro' the void, still a void
Found for falling, day & night without end;
For tho' day or night was not, their spaces
Were measur'd by his incessant whirls
In the horrid vacuity bottomless.
The Immortal revolving, indignant,
First in wrath threw his limbs like the babe
New born into our world: wrath subsided,
And contemplative thoughts first arose:
Then aloft his head rear'd in the Abyss
And his downward-borne fall chang'd oblique
Many ages of groans, till there grew
Branchy forms organising the Human
Into finite inflexible organs;
Till in process from falling he bore
Sidelong on the purple air, wafting
The weak breeze in efforts o'erwearied.
Incessant the falling Mind labour'd,
Organising itself, till the Vacuum
Became element, pliant to rise
Or to fall or to swim or to fly,
With ease searching the dire vacuity.