Classic Poem

If these dried hearts indeed forget
That holy dew on dusty floor,
The Four Saints strong about the bed,
The God that dies above the door;

Such mysteries as might dwell with men,
The secret like a stooping face
Dim but not distant; and the night
Not of the abyss, but the embrace;

That only dream that ever dared
To carve upon the face of fate,
The colossal face that fills the sky,
A grief that was compassionate—

If these dear riddles seem but dumb
That once were rather loved than known,
The awful cry of God to God
Mad echoes round a man alone.

The Cross a trinket and a trick,
That blinding triangle of truth
Turning through aeons unbegun
Reverberant loves of age and youth.

Let them go forth, go far, and fling
Deserts between them and desire,
Drop down the past and find the first
Cold chaos ere that seed of fire.

Go where the graven gods of fear
Flat-eyed like fishes glare and gape,
Or dim against the revolving void
The shapeless took a shameful shape.

Grope through a sunless dawn and see,
Heaved high against the bursting blue
In piles the heavens might hardly hold,
The huge half-truth the heathens knew.

From the high terraces of the dead
Look on the dead discoloring dawn,
The flat-faced rocks, the livid land,
Where the scrawled likeness first was drawn.

Only the comfort shall be taken
Only the mysteries shall remain;
When in blunt blinded scripts of eld
Your nursery riddle speaks again.

Where choked by hairy cactus-fingers
Or sea-blue weeds like crakens curled,
One sculptured scene of sacrifice
Betrays the password of the world.

Carved as one awful threefold flower
Triple and cloven and yet alone,
The priest, the victim and the god
Wear the same smiling face of stone.