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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Reading of Life, and Other Poems
+by George Meredith
+
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+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: A Reading of Life, and Other Poems
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Release Date: September, 1997  [EBook #1042]
+[This file was first posted on September 25, 1997]
+[Most recently updated: June 24, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, A READING OF LIFE, AND OTHER POEMS ***
+
+
+
+
+Scanned and proofed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+A Reading Of Life
+
+
+
+
+Contents:
+
+
+A Reading of Life--The Vital Choice
+A Reading of Life--With The Huntress
+A Reading of Life--With The Persuader
+A Reading of Life--The Test of Manhood
+The Cageing of Ares
+The Night-Walk
+The Hueless Love
+Song In The Songless
+Union In Disseverance
+The Burden of Strength
+The Main Regret
+Alternation
+Hawarden
+At the Close
+Forest History
+A Garden Idyl
+Foresight And Patience
+The Invective of Achilles
+The Invective of Achilles--V. 225
+Marshalling of the Achaians
+Agamemnon in the Fight
+Paris and Diomedes
+Hypnos on Ida
+Clash in Arms of the Achaians And Trojans
+The Horses of Achilles
+The Mares of the Camargue
+
+
+
+Poem:  A Reading of Life--The Vital Choice
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Or shall we run with Artemis
+Or yield the breast to Aphrodite?
+Both are mighty;
+Both give bliss;
+Each can torture if divided;
+Each claims worship undivided,
+In her wake would have us wallow.
+
+II.
+
+Youth must offer on bent knees
+Homage unto one or other;
+Earth, the mother,
+This decrees;
+And unto the pallid Scyther
+Either points us shun we either
+Shun or too devoutly follow.
+
+
+
+Poem:  A Reading of Life--With The Huntress
+
+
+
+Through the water-eye of night,
+Midway between eve and dawn,
+See the chase, the rout, the flight
+In deep forest; oread, faun,
+Goat-foot, antlers laid on neck;
+Ravenous all the line for speed.
+See yon wavy sparkle beck
+Sign of the Virgin Lady's lead.
+Down her course a serpent star
+Coils and shatters at her heels;
+Peals the horn exulting, peals
+Plaintive, is it near or far.
+Huntress, arrowy to pursue,
+In and out of woody glen,
+Under cliffs that tear the blue,
+Over torrent, over fen,
+She and forest, where she skims
+Feathery, darken and relume:
+Those are her white-lightning limbs
+Cleaving loads of leafy gloom.
+Mountains hear her and call back,
+Shrewd with night:  a frosty wail
+Distant:  her the emerald vale
+Folds, and wonders in her track.
+Now her retinue is lean,
+Many rearward; streams the chase
+Eager forth of covert; seen
+One hot tide the rapturous race.
+Quiver-charged and crescent-crowned,
+Up on a flash the lighted mound
+Leaps she, bow to shoulder, shaft
+Strung to barb with archer's craft,
+Legs like plaited lyre-chords, feet
+Songs to see, past pitch of sweet.
+Fearful swiftness they outrun,
+Shaggy wildness, grey or dun,
+Challenge, charge of tusks elude:
+Theirs the dance to tame the rude;
+Beast, and beast in manhood tame,
+Follow we their silver flame.
+Pride of flesh from bondage free,
+Reaping vigour of its waste,
+Marks her servitors, and she
+Sanctifies the unembraced.
+Nought of perilous she reeks;
+Valour clothes her open breast;
+Sweet beyond the thrill of sex;
+Hallowed by the sex confessed.
+Huntress arrowy to pursue,
+Colder she than sunless dew,
+She, that breath of upper air;
+Ay, but never lyrist sang,
+Draught of Bacchus never sprang
+Blood the bliss of Gods to share,
+High o'er sweep of eagle wings,
+Like the run with her, when rings
+Clear her rally, and her dart,
+In the forest's cavern heart,
+Tells of her victorious aim.
+Then is pause and chatter, cheer,
+Laughter at some satyr lame,
+Looks upon the fallen deer,
+Measuring his noble crest;
+Here a favourite in her train,
+Foremost mid her nymphs, caressed;
+All applauded.  Shall she reign
+Worshipped?  O to be with her there!
+She, that breath of nimble air,
+Lifts the breast to giant power.
+Maid and man, and man and maid,
+Who each other would devour
+Elsewhere, by the chase betrayed,
+There are comrades, led by her,
+Maid-preserver, man-maker.
+
+
+
+Poem:  A Reading of Life--With The Persuader
+
+
+
+Who murmurs, hither, hither:  who
+Where nought is audible so fills the ear?
+Where nought is visible can make appear
+A veil with eyes that waver through,
+Like twilight's pledge of blessed night to come,
+Or day most golden?  All unseen and dumb,
+She breathes, she moves, inviting flees,
+Is lost, and leaves the thrilled desire
+To clasp and strike a slackened lyre,
+Till over smiles of hyacinth seas,
+Flame in a crystal vessel sails
+Beneath a dome of jewelled spray,
+For land that drops the rosy day
+On nights of throbbing nightingales.
+
+Landward did the wonder flit,
+Or heart's desire of her, all earth in it.
+We saw the heavens fling down their rose;
+On rapturous waves we saw her glide;
+The pearly sea-shell half enclose;
+The shoal of sea-nymphs flush the tide;
+And we, afire to kiss her feet, no more
+Behold than tracks along a startled shore,
+With brightened edges of dark leaves that feign
+An ambush hoped, as heartless night remain.
+
+More closely, warmly:  hither, hither! she,
+The very she called forth by ripened blood
+For its next breath of being, murmurs; she,
+Allurement; she, fulfilment; she,
+The stream within us urged to flood;
+Man's cry, earth's answer, heaven's consent; O she,
+Maid, woman and divinity;
+Our over-earthly, inner-earthly mate
+Unmated; she, our hunger and our fruit
+Untasted; she our written fate
+Unread; Life's flowering, Life's root:
+Unread, divined; unseen, beheld;
+The evanescent, ever-present she,
+Great Nature's stern necessity
+In radiance clothed, to softness quelled;
+With a sword's edge of sweetness keen to take
+Our breath for bliss, our hearts for fulness break.
+
+The murmur hushes down, the veil is rent.
+Man's cry, earth's answer, heaven's consent,
+Her form is given to pardoned sight,
+And lets our mortal eyes receive
+The sovereign loveliness of celestial white;
+Adored by them who solitarily pace,
+In dusk of the underworld's perpetual eve,
+The paths among the meadow asphodel,
+Remembering.  Never there her face
+Is planetary; reddens to shore sea-shell
+Around such whiteness the enamoured air
+Of noon that clothes her, never there.
+Daughter of light, the joyful light,
+She stands unveiled to nuptial sight,
+Sweet in her disregard of aid
+Divine to conquer or persuade.
+A fountain jets from moss; a flower
+Bends gently where her sunset tresses shower.
+By guerdon of her brilliance may be seen
+With eyelids unabashed the passion's Queen.
+
+Shorn of attendant Graces she can use
+Her natural snares to make her will supreme.
+A simple nymph it is, inclined to muse
+Before the leader foot shall dip in stream:
+One arm at curve along a rounded thigh;
+Her firm new breasts each pointing its own way
+A knee half bent to shade its fellow shy,
+Where innocence, not nature, signals nay.
+The bud of fresh virginity awaits
+The wooer, and all roseate will she burst:
+She touches on the hour of happy mates;
+Still is she unaware she wakens thirst.
+
+And while commanding blissful sight believe
+It holds her as a body strained to breast,
+Down on the underworld's perpetual eve
+She plunges the possessor dispossessed;
+And bids believe that image, heaving warm,
+Is lost to float like torch-smoke after flame;
+The phantom any breeze blows out of form;
+A thirst's delusion, a defeated aim.
+
+The rapture shed the torture weaves;
+The direst blow on human heart she deals:
+The pain to know the seen deceives;
+Nought true but what insufferably feels.
+And stabs of her delicious note,
+That is as heavenly light to hearing, heard
+Through shelter leaves, the laughter from her throat,
+We answer as the midnight's morning's bird.
+
+She laughs, she wakens gleeful cries;
+In her delicious laughter part revealed;
+Yet mother is she more of moans and sighs,
+For longings unappeased and wounds unhealed.
+Yet would she bless, it is her task to bless:
+Yon folded couples, passing under shade,
+Are her rich harvest; bidden caress, caress,
+Consume the fruit in bloom; not disobeyed.
+We dolorous complainers had a dream,
+Wrought on the vacant air from inner fire,
+We saw stand bare of her celestial beam
+The glorious Goddess, and we dared desire.
+
+Thereat are shown reproachful eyes, and lips
+Of upward curl to meanings half obscure;
+And glancing where a wood-nymph lightly skips
+She nods:  at once that creature wears her lure.
+Blush of our being between birth and death:
+Sob of our ripened blood for its next breath:
+Her wily semblance nought of her denies;
+Seems it the Goddess runs, the Goddess hies,
+The generous Goddess yields.  And she can arm
+Her dwarfed and twisted with her secret charm;
+Benevolent as Earth to feed her own.
+Fully shall they be fed, if they beseech.
+But scorn she has for them that walk alone;
+Blanched men, starved women, whom no arts can pleach.
+The men as chief of criminals she disdains,
+And holds the reason in perceptive thought.
+More pitiable, like rivers lacking rains,
+Kissing cold stones, the women shrink for drought.
+Those faceless discords, out of nature strayed,
+Rank of the putrefaction ere decayed,
+In impious singles bear the thorny wreaths:
+Their lives are where harmonious Pleasure breathes
+For couples crowned with flowers that burn in dew.
+Comes there a tremor of night's forest horn
+Across her garden from the insaner crew,
+She darkens to malignity of scorn.
+A shiver courses through her garden-grounds:
+Grunt of the tusky boar, the baying hounds,
+The hunter's shouts, are heard afar, and bring
+Dead on her heart her crimsoned flower of Spring.
+These, the irreverent of Life's design,
+Division between natural and divine
+Would cast; these vaunting barrenness for best,
+In veins of gathered strength Life's tide arrest;
+And these because the roses flood their cheeks,
+Vow them in nature wise as when Love speaks.
+With them is war; and well the Goddess knows
+What undermines the race who mount the rose;
+How the ripe moment, lodged in slumberous hours,
+Enkindled by persuasion overpowers:
+Why weak as are her frailer trailing weeds,
+The strong when Beauty gleams o'er Nature's needs,
+And timely guile unguarded finds them lie.
+They who her sway withstand a sea defy,
+At every point of juncture must be proof;
+Nor look for mercy from the incessant surge
+Her forces mixed of craft and passion urge
+For the one whelming wave to spring aloof.
+She, tenderness, is pitiless to them
+Resisting in her godhead nature's truth.
+No flower their face shall be, but writhen stem;
+Their youth a frost, their age the dirge for youth.
+These miserably disinclined,
+The lamentably unembraced,
+Insult the Pleasures Earth designed
+To people and beflower the waste.
+Wherefore the Pleasures pass them by:
+For death they live, in life they die.
+
+Her head the Goddess from them turns,
+As from grey mounds of ashes in bronze urns.
+She views her quivering couples unconsoled,
+And of her beauty mirror they become,
+Like orchard blossoms, apple, pear and plum,
+Free of the cloud, beneath the flood of gold.
+Crowned with wreaths that burn in dew,
+Her couples whirl, sun-satiated,
+Athirst for shade, they sigh, they wed,
+They play the music made of two:
+Oldest of earth, earth's youngest till earth's end:
+Cunninger than the numbered strings,
+For melodies, for harmonies,
+For mastered discords, and the things
+Not vocable, whose mysteries
+Are inmost Love's, Life's reach of Life extend.
+
+Is it an anguish overflowing shame
+And the tongue's pudency confides to her,
+With eyes of embers, breath of incense myrrh,
+The woman's marrow in some dear youth's name,
+Then is the Goddess tenderness
+Maternal, and she has a sister's tones
+Benign to soothe intemperate distress,
+Divide despair from hope, and sighs from moans.
+Her gentleness imparts exhaling ease
+To those of her milk-bearer votaries
+As warm of bosom-earth as she; of the source
+Direct; erratic but in heart's excess;
+Being mortal and ill-matched for Love's great force;
+Like green leaves caught with flames by his impress.
+And pray they under skies less overcast,
+That swiftly may her star of eve descend,
+Her lustrous morning star fly not too fast,
+To lengthen blissful night will she befriend.
+
+Unfailing her reply to woman's voice
+In supplication instant.  Is it man's,
+She hears, approves his words, her garden scans,
+And him:  the flowers are various, he has choice.
+Perchance his wound is deep; she listens long;
+Enjoys what music fills the plaintive song;
+And marks how he, who would be hawk at poise
+Above the bird, his plaintive song enjoys.
+
+She reads him when his humbled manhood weeps
+To her invoked:  distraction is implored.
+A smile, and he is up on godlike leaps
+Above, with his bright Goddess owned the adored.
+His tales of her declare she condescends;
+Can share his fires, not always goads and rends:
+Moreover, quits a throne, and must enclose
+A queenlier gem than woman's wayside rose.
+She bends, he quickens; she breathes low, he springs
+Enraptured; low she laughs, his woes disperse;
+Aloud she laughs and sweeps his varied strings.
+'Tis taught him how for touch of mournful verse
+Rarely the music made of two ascends,
+And Beauty's Queen some other way is won.
+Or it may solve the riddle, that she lends
+Herself to all, and yields herself to none,
+Save heavenliest:  though claims by men are raised
+In hot assurance under shade of doubt:
+And numerous are the images bepraised
+As Beauty's Queen, should passion head the rout.
+
+Be sure the ruddy hue is Love's:  to woo
+Love's Fountain we must mount the ruddy hue.
+That is her garden's precept, seen where shines
+Her blood-flower, and its unsought neighbour pines.
+Daughter of light, the joyful light,
+She bids her couples face full East,
+Reflecting radiance, even when from her feast
+Their outstretched arms brown deserts disunite,
+The lion-haunted thickets hold apart.
+In love the ruddy hue declares great heart;
+High confidence in her whose aid is lent
+To lovers lifting the tuned instrument,
+Not one of rippled strings and funeral tone.
+And doth the man pursue a tightened zone,
+Then be it as the Laurel God he runs,
+Confirmed to win, with countenance the Sun's.
+
+Should pity bless the tremulous voice of woe
+He lifts for pity, limp his offspring show.
+For him requiring woman's arts to please
+Infantile tastes with babe reluctances,
+No race of giants!  In the woman's veins
+Persuasion ripely runs, through hers the pains.
+Her choice of him, should kind occasion nod,
+Aspiring blends the Titan with the God;
+Yet unto dwarf and mortal, she, submiss
+In her high Lady's mandate, yields the kiss;
+And is it needed that Love's daintier brute
+Be snared as hunter, she will tempt pursuit.
+She is great Nature's ever intimate
+In breast, and doth as ready handmaid wait,
+Until perverted by her senseless male,
+She plays the winding snake, the shrinking snail,
+The flying deer, all tricks of evil fame,
+Elusive to allure, since he grew tame.
+
+Hence has the Goddess, Nature's earliest Power,
+And greatest and most present, with her dower
+Of the transcendent beauty, gained repute
+For meditated guile.  She laughs to hear
+A charge her garden's labyrinths scarce confute,
+Her garden's histories tell of to all near.
+Let it be said, But less upon her guile
+Doth she rely for her immortal smile.
+Still let the rumour spread, and terror screens
+To push her conquests by the simplest means.
+While man abjures not lustihead, nor swerves
+From earth's good labours, Beauty's Queen he serves.
+
+Her spacious garden and her garden's grant
+She offers in reward for handsome cheer:
+Choice of the nymphs whose looks will slant
+The secret down a dewy leer
+Of corner eyelids into haze:
+Many a fair Aphrosyne
+Like flower-bell to honey-bee:
+And here they flicker round the maze
+Bewildering him in heart and head:
+And here they wear the close demure,
+With subtle peeps to reassure:
+Others parade where love has bled,
+And of its crimson weave their mesh:
+Others to snap of fingers leap,
+As bearing breast with love asleep.
+These are her laughters in the flesh.
+Or would she fit a warrior mood,
+She lights her seeming unsubdued,
+And indicates the fortress-key.
+Or is it heart for heart that craves,
+She flecks along a run of waves
+The one to promise deeper sea.
+
+Bands of her limpid primitives,
+Or patterned in the curious braid,
+Are the blest man's; and whatsoever he gives,
+For what he gives is he repaid.
+Good is it if by him 'tis held
+He wins the fairest ever welled
+From Nature's founts:  she whispers it:  Even I
+Not fairer! and forbids him to deny,
+Else little is he lover.  Those he clasps,
+Intent as tempest, worshipful as prayer, -
+And be they doves or be they asps, -
+Must seem to him the sovereignty fair;
+Else counts he soon among life's wholly tamed.
+Him whom from utter savage she reclaimed,
+Half savage must he stay, would he be crowned
+The lover.  Else, past ripeness, deathward bound,
+He reasons; and the totterer Earth detests,
+Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.
+Doth man divide divine Necessity
+From Joy, between the Queen of Beauty's breasts
+A sword is driven; for those most glorious twain
+Present her; armed to bless and to constrain.
+Of this he perishes; not she, the throned
+On rocks that spout their springs to the sacred mounts.
+A loftier Reason out of deeper founts
+Earth's chosen Goddess bears:  by none disowned
+While red blood runs to swell the pulse, she boasts,
+And Beauty, like her star, descends the sky;
+Earth's answer, heaven's consent unto man's cry,
+Uplifted by the innumerable hosts.
+
+Quickened of Nature's eye and ear,
+When the wild sap at high tide smites
+Within us; or benignly clear
+To vision; or as the iris lights
+On fluctuant waters; she is ours
+Till set of man:  the dreamed, the seen;
+Flushing the world with odorous flowers:
+A soft compulsion on terrene
+By heavenly:  and the world is hers
+While hunger after Beauty spurs.
+
+So is it sung in any space
+She fills, with laugh at shallow laws
+Forbidding love's devised embrace,
+The music Beauty from it draws.
+
+
+
+Poem:  A Reading of Life--The Test Of Manhood
+
+
+
+Like a flood river whirled at rocky banks,
+An army issues out of wilderness,
+With battle plucking round its ragged flanks;
+Obstruction in the van; insane excess
+Oft at the heart; yet hard the onward stress
+Unto more spacious, where move ordered ranks,
+And rise hushed temples built of shapely stone,
+The work of hands not pledged to grind or slay.
+They gave our earth a dress of flesh on bone;
+A tongue to speak with answering heaven gave they.
+Then was the gracious birth of man's new day;
+Divided from the haunted night it shone.
+
+That quiet dawn was Reverence; whereof sprang
+Ethereal Beauty in full morningtide.
+Another sun had risen to clasp his bride:
+It was another earth unto him sang.
+
+Came Reverence from the Huntress on her heights?
+From the Persuader came it, in those vales
+Whereunto she melodiously invites,
+Her troops of eager servitors regales?
+Not far those two great Powers of Nature speed
+Disciple steps on earth when sole they lead;
+Nor either points for us the way of flame.
+From him predestined mightier it came;
+His task to hold them both in breast, and yield
+Their dues to each, and of their war be field.
+
+The foes that in repulsion never ceased,
+Must he, who once has been the goodly beast
+Of one or other, at whose beck he ran,
+Constrain to make him serviceable man;
+Offending neither, nor the natural claim
+Each pressed, denying, for his true man's name.
+
+Ah, what a sweat of anguish in that strife
+To hold them fast conjoined within him still;
+Submissive to his will
+Along the road of life!
+And marvel not he wavered if at whiles
+The forward step met frowns, the backward smiles.
+For Pleasure witched him her sweet cup to drain;
+Repentance offered ecstasy in pain.
+Delicious licence called it Nature's cry;
+Ascetic rigours crushed the fleshly sigh;
+A tread on shingle timed his lame advance
+Flung as the die of Bacchanalian Chance,
+He of the troubled marching army leaned
+On godhead visible, on godhead screened;
+The radiant roseate, the curtained white;
+Yet sharp his battle strained through day, through night.
+
+He drank of fictions, till celestial aid
+Might seem accorded when he fawned and prayed;
+Sagely the generous Giver circumspect,
+To choose for grants the egregious, his elect;
+And ever that imagined succour slew
+The soul of brotherhood whence Reverence drew.
+
+In fellowship religion has its founts:
+The solitary his own God reveres:
+Ascend no sacred Mounts
+Our hungers or our fears.
+As only for the numbers Nature's care
+Is shown, and she the personal nothing heeds,
+So to Divinity the spring of prayer
+From brotherhood the one way upward leads.
+Like the sustaining air
+Are both for flowers and weeds.
+But he who claims in spirit to be flower,
+Will find them both an air that doth devour.
+
+Whereby he smelt his treason, who implored
+External gifts bestowed but on the sword;
+Beheld himself, with less and less disguise,
+Through those blood-cataracts which dimmed his eyes,
+His army's foe, condemned to strive and fail;
+See a black adversary's ghost prevail;
+Never, though triumphs hailed him, hope to win
+While still the conflict tore his breast within.
+
+Out of that agony, misread for those
+Imprisoned Powers warring unappeased,
+The ghost of his black adversary rose,
+To smother light, shut heaven, show earth diseased.
+And long with him was wrestling ere emerged
+A mind to read in him the reflex shade
+Of its fierce torment; this way, that way urged;
+By craven compromises hourly swayed.
+
+Crouched as a nestling, still its wings untried,
+The man's mind opened under weight of cloud.
+To penetrate the dark was it endowed;
+Stood day before a vision shooting wide.
+Whereat the spectral enemy lost form;
+The traversed wilderness exposed its track.
+He felt the far advance in looking back;
+Thence trust in his foot forward through the storm.
+
+Under the low-browed tempest's eye of ire,
+That ere it lightened smote a coward heart,
+Earth nerved her chastened son to hail athwart
+All ventures perilous his shrouded Sire;
+A stranger still, religiously divined;
+Not yet with understanding read aright.
+But when the mind, the cherishable mind,
+The multitude's grave shepherd, took full flight,
+Himself as mirror raised among his kind,
+He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight:
+Knew that his force to fly, his will to see,
+His heart enlarged beyond its ribbed domain,
+Had come of many a grip in mastery,
+Which held conjoined the hostile rival twain,
+And of his bosom made him lord, to keep
+The starry roof of his unruffled frame
+Awake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deep
+Below, above, aye with a wistful aim.
+
+The mastering mind in him, by tempests blown,
+By traitor inmates baited, upward burned;
+Perforce of growth, the Master mind discerned,
+The Great Unseen, nowise the Dark Unknown.
+To whom unwittingly did he aspire
+In wilderness, where bitter was his need:
+To whom in blindness, as an earthy seed
+For light and air, he struck through crimson mire.
+But not ere he upheld a forehead lamp,
+And viewed an army, once the seeming doomed,
+All choral in its fruitful garden camp,
+The spiritual the palpable illumed.
+
+This gift of penetration and embrace,
+His prize from tidal battles lost or won,
+Reveals the scheme to animate his race:
+How that it is a warfare but begun;
+Unending; with no Power to interpose;
+No prayer, save for strength to keep his ground,
+Heard of the Highest; never battle's close,
+The victory complete and victor crowned:
+Nor solace in defeat, save from that sense
+Of strength well spent, which is the strength renewed.
+In manhood must he find his competence;
+In his clear mind the spiritual food:
+God being there while he his fight maintains;
+Throughout his mind the Master Mind being there,
+While he rejects the suicide despair;
+Accepts the spur of explicable pains;
+Obedient to Nature, not her slave:
+Her lord, if to her rigid laws he bows;
+Her dust, if with his conscience he plays knave,
+And bids the Passions on the Pleasures browse:-
+Whence Evil in a world unread before;
+That mystery to simple springs resolved.
+His God the Known, diviner to adore,
+Shows Nature's savage riddles kindly solved.
+Inconscient, insensitive, she reigns
+In iron laws, though rapturous fair her face.
+Back to the primal brute shall he retrace
+His path, doth he permit to force her chains
+A soft Persuader coursing through his veins,
+An icy Huntress stringing to the chase:
+What one the flash disdains;
+What one so gives it grace.
+
+But is he rightly manful in her eyes,
+A splendid bloodless knight to gain the skies,
+A blood-hot son of Earth by all her signs,
+Desireing and desireable he shines;
+As peaches, that have caught the sun's uprise
+And kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines.
+Earth fills him with her juices, without fear
+That she will cast him drunken down the steeps.
+All woman is she to this man most dear;
+He sows for bread, and she in spirit reaps:
+She conscient, she sensitive, in him;
+With him enwound, his brave ambition hers:
+By him humaner made; by his keen spurs
+Pricked to race past the pride in giant limb,
+Her crazy adoration of big thews,
+Proud in her primal sons, when crags they hurled,
+Were thunder spitting lightnings on the world
+In daily deeds, and she their evening Muse.
+
+This man, this hero, works not to destroy;
+This godlike--as the rock in ocean stands; -
+He of the myriad eyes, the myriad hands
+Creative; in his edifice has joy.
+How strength may serve for purity is shown
+When he himself can scourge to make it clean.
+Withal his pitch of pride would not disown
+A sober world that walks the balanced mean
+Between its tempters, rarely overthrown:
+And such at times his army's march has been.
+
+Near is he to great Nature in the thought
+Each changing Season intimately saith,
+That nought save apparition knows the death;
+To the God-lighted mind of man 'tis nought.
+She counts not loss a word of any weight;
+It may befal his passions and his greeds
+To lose their treasures, like the vein that bleeds,
+But life gone breathless will she reinstate.
+
+Close on the heart of Earth his bosom beats,
+When he the mandate lodged in it obeys,
+Alive to breast a future wrapped in haze,
+Strike camp, and onward, like the wind's cloud-fleets.
+Unresting she, unresting he, from change
+To change, as rain of cloud, as fruit of rain;
+She feels her blood-tree throbbing in her grain,
+Yet skyward branched, with loftier mark and range.
+
+No miracle the sprout of wheat from clod,
+She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute;
+But he, the flower at head and soil at root,
+Is miracle, guides he the brute to God.
+And that way seems he bound; that way the road,
+With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone,
+Wearifully through forest-tracts unsown,
+He travels, urged by some internal goad.
+
+Dares he behold the thing he is, what thing
+He would become is in his mind its child;
+Astir, demanding birth to light and wing;
+For battle prompt, by pleasure unbeguiled.
+So moves he forth in faith, if he has made
+His mind God's temple, dedicate to truth.
+Earth's nourishing delights, no more gainsaid,
+He tastes, as doth the bridegroom rich in youth.
+Then knows he Love, that beckons and controls;
+The star of sky upon his footway cast;
+Then match in him who holds his tempters fast,
+The body's love and mind's, whereof the soul's.
+Then Earth her man for woman finds at last,
+To speed the pair unto her goal of goals.
+
+Or is't the widowed's dream of her new mate?
+Seen has she virulent days of heat in flood;
+The sly Persuader snaky in his blood;
+With her the barren Huntress alternate;
+His rough refractory off on kicking heels
+To rear; the man dragged rearward, shamed, amazed;
+And as a torrent stream where cattle grazed,
+His tumbled world.  What, then, the faith she feels?
+May not his aspect, like her own so fair
+Reflexively, the central force belie,
+And he, the once wild ocean storming sky,
+Be rebel at the core?  What hope is there?
+
+'Tis that in each recovery he preserves,
+Between his upper and his nether wit,
+Sense of his march ahead, more brightly lit;
+He less the shaken thing of lusts and nerves;
+With such a grasp upon his brute as tells
+Of wisdom from that vile relapsing spun.
+A Sun goes down in wasted fire, a Sun
+Resplendent springs, to faith refreshed compels.
+
+
+
+Poem:  The Cageing Of Ares
+
+
+
+[Iliad, v. V. 385--Dedicated to the Council at The Hague.]
+
+How big of breast our Mother Gaea laughed
+At sight of her boy Giants on the leap
+Each over other as they neighboured home,
+Fronting the day's descent across green slopes,
+And up fired mountain crags their shadows danced.
+Close with them in their fun, she scarce could guess,
+Though these two billowy urchins reeked of craft,
+It signalled some adventurous master-trick
+To set Olympians buzzing in debate,
+Lest it might be their godhead undermined,
+The Tyranny menaced.  Ephialtes high
+On shoulders of his brother Otos waved
+For the bull-bellowings given to grand good news,
+Compact, complexioned in his gleeful roar
+While Otos aped the prisoner's wrists and knees,
+With doleful sniffs between recurrent howls;
+Till Gaea's lap receiving them, they stretched,
+And both upon her bosom shaken to speech,
+Burst the hot story out of throats of both,
+Like rocky head-founts, baffling in their glut
+The hurried spout.  And as when drifting storm
+Disburdened loses clasp of here and yon
+A peak, a forest mound, a valley's gleam
+Of grass and the river's crooks and snaky coils,
+Signification marvellous she caught,
+Through gurglings of triumphant jollity,
+Which now engulphed and now gave eye; at last
+Subsided, and the serious naked deed,
+With mountain-cloud of laughter banked around,
+Stood in her sight confirmed:  she could believe
+That these, her sprouts of promise, her most prized,
+These two made up of lion, bear and fox,
+Her sportive, suckling mammoths, her young joy,
+Still by the reckoning infants among men,
+Had done the deed to strike the Titan host
+In envy dumb, in envious heart elate:
+These two combining strength and craft had snared,
+Enmeshed, bound fast with thongs, discreetly caged
+The blood-shedder, the terrible Lord of War;
+Destroyer, ravager, superb in plumes;
+The barren furrower of anointed fields;
+The scarlet heel in towns, foul smoke to sky,
+Her hated enemy, too long her scourge:
+Great Ares.  And they gagged his trumpet mouth
+When they had seized on his implacable spear,
+Hugged him to reedy helplessness despite
+His godlike fury startled from amaze.
+For he had eyed them nearing him in play,
+The giant cubs, who gambolled and who snarled,
+Unheeding his fell presence, by the mount
+Ossa, beside a brushwood cavern; there
+On Earth's original fisticuffs they called
+For ease of sharp dispute:  whereat the God,
+Approving, deemed that sometime trained to arms,
+Good servitors of Ares they would be,
+And ply the pointed spear to dominate
+Their rebel restless fellows, villain brood
+Vowed to defy Immortals.  So it chanced
+Amusedly he watched them, and as one
+The lusty twain were on him and they had him.
+Breath to us, Powers of air, for laughter loud!
+Cock of Olympus he, superb in plumes!
+Bound like a wheaten sheaf by those two babes!
+Because they knew our Mother Gaea loathed him,
+Knew him the famine, pestilence and waste;
+A desolating fire to blind the sight
+With splendour built of fruitful things in ashes;
+The gory chariot-wheel on cries for justice;
+Her deepest planted and her liveliest voice,
+Heard from the babe as from the broken crone.
+Behold him in his vessel of bronze encased,
+And tumbled down the cave.  But rather look -
+Ah, that the woman tattler had not sought,
+Of all the Gods to let her secret fly,
+Hermes, after the thirteen songful months!
+Prompting the Dexterous to work his arts,
+And shatter earth's delirious holiday,
+Then first, as where the fountain runs a stream,
+Resolving to composure on its throbs.
+But see her in the Seasons through that year;
+That one glad year and the fair opening month.
+Had never our Great Mother such sweet face!
+War with her, gentle war with her, each day
+Her sons and daughters urged; at eve were flung,
+On the morrow stood to challenge; in their strength
+Renewed, indomitable; whereof they won,
+From hourly wrestlings up to shut of lids,
+Her ready secret:  the abounding life
+Returned for valiant labour:  she and they
+Defeated and victorious turn by turn;
+By loss enriched, by overthrow restored.
+Exchange of powers of this conflict came;
+Defacement none, nor ever squandered force.
+Is battle nature's mandate, here it reigned,
+As music unto the hand that smote the strings;
+And she the rosier from their showery brows,
+They fruitful from her ploughed and harrowed breast.
+Back to the primal rational of those
+Who suck the teats of milky earth, and clasp
+Stability in hatred of the insane,
+Man stepped; with wits less fearful to pronounce
+The mortal mind's concept of earth's divorced
+Above; those beautiful, those masterful,
+Those lawless.  High they sit, and if descend,
+Descend to reap, not sowing.  Is it just?
+Earth in her happy children asked that word,
+Whereto within their breast was her reply.
+Those beautiful, those masterful, those lawless,
+Enjoy the life prolonged, outleap the years;
+Yet they ('twas the Great Mother's voice inspired
+The audacious thought), they, glorious over dust,
+Outleap not her; disrooted from her soar,
+To meet the certain fate of earth's divorced,
+And clap lame wings across a wintry haze,
+Up to the farthest bourne:  immortal still,
+Thenceforth innocuous; lovelier than when ruled
+The Tyranny.  This her voice within them told,
+When softly the Great Mother chid her sons
+Not of the giant brood, who did create
+Those lawless Gods, first offspring of our brain
+Set moving by an abject blood, that waked
+To wanton under elements more benign,
+And planted aliens on Olympian heights; -
+Imagination's cradle poesy
+Become a monstrous pressure upon men; -
+Foes of good Gaea; until dispossessed
+By light from her, born of the love of her,
+Their lordship the illumined brain rejects
+For earth's beneficent, the sons of Law,
+Her other name.  So spake she in their heart,
+Among the wheat-blades proud of stalk; beneath
+Young vine-leaves pushing timid fingers forth,
+Confidently to cling.  And when brown corn
+Swayed armied ranks with softened cricket song,
+With gold necks bent for any zephyr's kiss;
+When vine-roots daily down a rubble soil
+Drank fire of heaven athirst to swell the grape;
+When swelled the grape, and in it held a ray,
+Rich issue of the embrace of heaven and earth;
+The very eye of passion drowsed by excess,
+And yet a burning lion for the spring;
+Then in that time of general cherishment,
+Sweet breathing balm and flutes by cool wood-side,
+He the harsh rouser of ire being absent, caged,
+Then did good Gaea's children gratefully
+Lift hymns to Gods they judged, but praised for peace,
+Delightful Peace, that answers Reason's call
+Harmoniously and images her Law;
+Reflects, and though short-lived as then, revives,
+In memories made present on the brain
+By natural yearnings, all the happy scenes;
+The picture of an earth allied to heaven;
+Between them the known smile behind black masks;
+Rightly their various moods interpreted;
+And frolic because toilful children borne
+With larger comprehension of Earth's aim
+At loftier, clearer, sweeter, by their aid.
+
+
+
+Poem:  The Night-Walk
+
+
+
+Awakes for me and leaps from shroud
+All radiantly the moon's own night
+Of folded showers in streamer cloud;
+Our shadows down the highway white
+Or deep in woodland woven-boughed,
+With yon and yon a stem alight.
+
+I see marauder runagates
+Across us shoot their dusky wink;
+I hear the parliament of chats
+In haws beside the river's brink;
+And drops the vole off alder-banks,
+To push his arrow through the stream.
+These busy people had our thanks
+For tickling sight and sound, but theme
+They were not more than breath we drew
+Delighted with our world's embrace:
+The moss-root smell where beeches grew,
+And watered grass in breezy space;
+The silken heights, of ghostly bloom
+Among their folds, by distance draped.
+'Twas Youth, rapacious to consume,
+That cried to have its chaos shaped:
+Absorbing, little noting, still
+Enriched, and thinking it bestowed;
+With wistful looks on each far hill
+For something hidden, something owed.
+Unto his mantled sister, Day
+Had given the secret things we sought
+And she was grave and saintly gay;
+At times she fluttered, spoke her thought;
+She flew on it, then folded wings,
+In meditation passing lone,
+To breathe around the secret things,
+Which have no word, and yet are known;
+Of thirst for them are known, as air
+Is health in blood:  we gained enough
+By this to feel it honest fare;
+Impalpable, not barren, stuff.
+
+A pride of legs in motion kept
+Our spirits to their task meanwhile,
+And what was deepest dreaming slept:
+The posts that named the swallowed mile;
+Beside the straight canal the hut
+Abandoned; near the river's source
+Its infant chirp; the shortest cut;
+The roadway missed; were our discourse;
+At times dear poets, whom some view
+Transcendent or subdued evoked
+To speak the memorable, the true,
+The luminous as a moon uncloaked;
+For proof that there, among earth's dumb,
+A soul had passed and said our best.
+Or it might be we chimed on some
+Historic favourite's astral crest,
+With part to reverence in its gleam,
+And part to rivalry the shout:
+So royal, unuttered, is youth's dream
+Of power within to strike without.
+But most the silences were sweet,
+Like mothers' breasts, to bid it feel
+It lived in such divine conceit
+As envies aught we stamp for real.
+
+To either then an untold tale
+Was Life, and author, hero, we.
+The chapters holding peaks to scale,
+Or depths to fathom, made our glee;
+For we were armed of inner fires,
+Unbled in us the ripe desires;
+And passion rolled a quiet sea,
+Whereon was Love the phantom sail.
+
+
+
+Poem:  The Hueless Love
+
+
+
+Unto that love must we through fire attain,
+Which those two held as breath of common air;
+The hands of whom were given in bond elsewhere;
+Whom Honour was untroubled to restrain.
+
+Midway the road of our life's term they met,
+And one another knew without surprise;
+Nor cared that beauty stood in mutual eyes;
+Nor at their tardy meeting nursed regret.
+
+To them it was revealed how they had found
+The kindred nature and the needed mind;
+The mate by long conspiracy designed;
+The flower to plant in sanctuary ground.
+
+Avowed in vigilant solicitude
+For either, what most lived within each breast
+They let be seen:  yet every human test
+Demanding righteousness approved them good.
+
+She leaned on a strong arm, and little feared
+Abandonment to help if heaved or sank
+Her heart at intervals while Love looked blank,
+Life rosier were she but less revered.
+
+An arm that never shook did not obscure
+Her woman's intuition of the bliss -
+Their tempter's moment o'er the black abyss,
+Across the narrow plank--he could abjure.
+
+Then came a day that clipped for him the thread,
+And their first touch of lips, as he lay cold,
+Was all of earthly in their love untold,
+Beyond all earthly known to them who wed.
+
+So has there come the gust at South-west flung
+By sudden volt on eves of freezing mist,
+When sister snowflake sister snowdrop kissed,
+And one passed out, and one the bell-head hung.
+
+
+
+Poem:  Song In The Songless
+
+
+
+They have no song, the sedges dry,
+And still they sing.
+It is within my breast they sing,
+As I pass by.
+Within my breast they touch a string,
+They wake a sigh.
+There is but sound of sedges dry;
+In me they sing.
+
+
+
+Poem:  Union In Disseverance
+
+
+
+Sunset worn to its last vermilion he;
+She that star overhead in slow descent:
+That white star with the front of angel she;
+He undone in his rays of glory spent
+
+Halo, fair as the bow-shot at his rise,
+He casts round her, and knows his hour of rest
+Incomplete, were the light for which he dies,
+Less like joy of the dove that wings to nest.
+
+Lustrous momently, near on earth she sinks;
+Life's full throb over breathless and abased:
+Yet stand they, though impalpable the links,
+One, more one than the bridally embraced.
+
+
+
+Poem:  The Burden Of Strength
+
+
+
+If that thou hast the gift of strength, then know
+Thy part is to uplift the trodden low;
+Else in a giant's grasp until the end
+A hopeless wrestler shall thy soul contend.
+
+
+
+Poem:  The Main Regret
+
+
+
+[Written for the Charing Cross Album]
+
+I.
+
+Seen, too clear and historic within us, our sins of omission
+Frown when the Autumn days strike us all ruthlessly bare.
+They of our mortal diseases find never healing physician;
+Errors they of the soul, past the one hope to repair.
+
+II.
+
+Sunshine might we have been unto seed under soil, or have scattered
+Seed to ascendant suns brighter than any that shone.
+Even the limp-legged beggar a sick desperado has flattered
+Back to a half-sloughed life cheered by the mere human tone.
+
+
+
+Poem:  Alternation
+
+
+
+Between the fountain and the rill
+I passed, and saw the mighty will
+To leap at sky; the careless run,
+As earth would lead her little son.
+
+Beneath them throbs an urgent well,
+That here is play, and there is war.
+I know not which had most to tell
+Of whence we spring and what we are.
+
+
+
+Poem:  Hawarden
+
+
+
+When comes the lighted day for men to read
+Life's meaning, with the work before their hands
+Till this good gift of breath from debt is freed,
+Earth will not hear her children's wailful bands
+Deplore the chieftain fall'n in sob and dirge;
+Nor they look where is darkness, but on high.
+The sun that dropped down our horizon's verge,
+Illumes his labours through the travelled sky,
+Now seen in sum, most glorious; and 'tis known
+By what our warrior wrought we hold him fast.
+A splendid image built of man has flown;
+His deeds inspired of God outstep a Past.
+Ours the great privilege to have had one
+Among us who celestial tasks has done.
+
+
+
+Poem:  At The Close
+
+
+
+To Thee, dear God of Mercy, both appeal,
+Who straightway sound the call to arms.  Thou know'st;
+And that black spot in each embattled host,
+Spring of the blood-stream, later wilt reveal.
+Now is it red artillery and white steel;
+Till on a day will ring the victor's boast,
+That 'tis Thy chosen towers uppermost,
+Where Thy rejected grovels under heel.
+So in all times of man's descent insane
+To brute, did strength and craft combining strike,
+Even as a God of Armies, his fell blow.
+But at the close he entered Thy domain,
+Dear God of Mercy, and if lion-like
+He tore the fall'n, the Eternal was his Foe.
+
+
+
+Poem:  Forest History
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Beneath the vans of doom did men pass in.
+Heroic who came out; for round them hung
+A wavering phantom's red volcano tongue,
+With league-long lizard tail and fishy fin:
+
+II.
+
+Old Earth's original Dragon; there retired
+To his last fastness; overthrown by few.
+Him a laborious thrust of roadway slew.
+Then man to play devorant straight was fired.
+
+III.
+
+More intimate became the forest fear
+While pillared darkness hatched malicious life
+At either elbow, wolf or gnome or knife
+And wary slid the glance from ear to ear.
+
+IV.
+
+In chillness, like a clouded lantern-ray,
+The forest's heart of fog on mossed morass,
+On purple pool and silky cotton-grass,
+Revealed where lured the swallower byway.
+
+V.
+
+Dead outlook, flattened back with hard rebound
+Off walls of distance, left each mounted height.
+It seemed a giant hag-fiend, churning spite
+Of humble human being, held the ground.
+
+VI.
+
+Through friendless wastes, through treacherous woodland, slow
+The feet sustained by track of feet pursued
+Pained steps, and found the common brotherhood
+By sign of Heaven indifferent, Nature foe.
+
+VII.
+
+Anon a mason's work amazed the sight,
+And long-frocked men, called Brothers, there abode.
+They pointed up, bowed head, and dug and sowed;
+Whereof was shelter, loaf, and warm firelight.
+
+VIII.
+
+What words they taught were nails to scratch the head.
+Benignant works explained the chanting brood.
+Their monastery lit black solitude,
+As one might think a star that heavenward led.
+
+IX.
+
+Uprose a fairer nest for weary feet,
+Like some gold flower nightly inward curled,
+Where gentle maidens fled a roaring world,
+Or played with it, and had their white retreat.
+
+X.
+
+Into big books of metal clasps they pored.
+They governed, even as men; they welcomed lays.
+The treasures women are whose aim is praise,
+Was shown in them:  the Garden half restored.
+
+XI.
+
+A deluge billow scoured the land off seas,
+With widened jaws, and slaughter was its foam.
+For food, for clothing, ambush, refuge, home,
+The lesser savage offered bogs and trees.
+
+XII.
+
+Whence reverence round grey-haired story grew:
+And inmost spots of ancient horror shone
+As temples under beams of trials bygone;
+For in them sang brave times with God in view.
+
+XIII.
+
+Till now trim homesteads bordered spaces green,
+Like night's first little stars through clearing showers.
+Was rumoured how a castle's falcon towers
+The wilderness commanded with fierce mien.
+
+XIV.
+
+Therein a serious Baron stuck his lance;
+For minstrel songs a beauteous Dame would pout.
+Gay knights and sombre, felon or devout,
+Pricked onward, bound for their unsung romance.
+
+XV.
+
+It might be that two errant lords across
+The block of each came edged, and at sharp cry
+They charged forthwith, the better man to try.
+One rode his way, one couched on quiet moss.
+
+XVI.
+
+Perchance a lady sweet, whose lord lay slain,
+The robbers into gruesome durance drew.
+Swift should her hero come, like lightning's blue!
+She prayed for him, as crackling drought for rain.
+
+XVII.
+
+As we, that ere the worst her hero haps,
+Of Angels guided, nigh that loathly den:
+A toady cave beside an ague fen,
+Where long forlorn the lone dog whines and yaps.
+
+XVIII.
+
+By daylight now the forest fear could read
+Itself, and at new wonders chuckling went.
+Straight for the roebuck's neck the bowman spent
+A dart that laughed at distance and at speed.
+
+XIX.
+
+Right loud the bugle's hallali elate
+Rang forth of merry dingles round the tors;
+And deftest hand was he from foreign wars,
+But soon he hailed the home-bred yeoman mate.
+
+XX.
+
+Before the blackbird pecked the turf they woke;
+At dawn the deer's wet nostrils blew their last.
+To forest, haunt of runs and prime repast,
+With paying blows, the yokel strained his yoke.
+
+XXI.
+
+The city urchin mooned on forest air,
+On grassy sweeps and flying arrows, thick
+As swallows o'er smooth streams, and sighed him sick
+For thinking that his dearer home was there.
+
+XXII.
+
+Familiar, still unseized, the forest sprang
+An old-world echo, like no mortal thing.
+The hunter's horn might wind a jocund ring,
+But held in ear it had a chilly clang.
+
+XXIII.
+
+Some shadow lurked aloof of ancient time;
+Some warning haunted any sound prolonged,
+As though the leagues of woodland held them wronged
+To hear an axe and see a township climb.
+
+XXIV.
+
+The forest's erewhile emperor at eve
+Had voice when lowered heavens drummed for gales.
+At midnight a small people danced the dales,
+So thin that they might dwindle through a sieve
+
+XXV.
+
+Ringed mushrooms told of them, and in their throats,
+Old wives that gathered herbs and knew too much.
+The pensioned forester beside his crutch,
+Struck showers from embers at those bodeful notes.
+
+XXVI.
+
+Came then the one, all ear, all eye, all heart;
+Devourer, and insensibly devoured;
+In whom the city over forest flowered,
+The forest wreathed the city's drama-mart.
+
+XXVII.
+
+There found he in new form that Dragon old,
+From tangled solitudes expelled; and taught
+How blindly each its antidote besought;
+For either's breath the needs of either told.
+
+XXVIII.
+
+Now deep in woods, with song no sermon's drone,
+He showed what charm the human concourse works:
+Amid the press of men, what virtue lurks
+Where bubble sacred wells of wildness lone.
+
+XXIX.
+
+Our conquest these:  if haply we retain
+The reverence that ne'er will overrun
+Due boundaries of realms from Nature won,
+Nor let the poet's awe in rapture wane.
+
+
+
+Poem:  A Garden Idyl
+
+
+
+With sagest craft Arachne worked
+Her web, and at a corner lurked,
+Awaiting what should plump her soon,
+To case it in the death-cocoon.
+Sagaciously her home she chose
+For visits that would never close;
+Inside my chalet-porch her feast
+Plucked all the winds but chill North-east.
+
+The finished structure, bar on bar,
+Had snatched from light to form a star,
+And struck on sight, when quick with dews,
+Like music of the very Muse.
+Great artists pass our single sense;
+We hear in seeing, strung to tense;
+Then haply marvel, groan mayhap,
+To think such beauty means a trap.
+But Nature's genius, even man's
+At best, is practical in plans;
+Subservient to the needy thought,
+However rare the weapon wrought.
+As long as Nature holds it good
+To urge her creatures' quest for food
+Will beauty stamp the just intent
+Of weapons upon service bent.
+For beauty is a flower of roots
+Embedded lower than our boots;
+Out of the primal strata springs,
+And shows for crown of useful things
+
+Arachne's dream of prey to size
+Aspired; so she could nigh despise
+The puny specks the breezes round
+Supplied, and let them shake unwound;
+Assured of her fat fly to come;
+Perhaps a blue, the spider's plum;
+Who takes the fatal odds in fight,
+And gives repast an appetite,
+By plunging, whizzing, till his wings
+Are webbed, and in the lists he swings,
+A shrouded lump, for her to see
+Her banquet in her victory.
+
+This matron of the unnumbered threads,
+One day of dandelions' heads
+Distributing their gray perruques
+Up every gust, I watched with looks
+Discreet beside the chalet-door;
+And gracefully a light wind bore,
+Direct upon my webster's wall,
+A monster in the form of ball;
+The mildest captive ever snared,
+That neither struggled nor despaired,
+On half the net invading hung,
+And plain as in her mother tongue,
+While low the weaver cursed her lures,
+Remarked, "You have me; I am yours."
+
+Thrice magnified, in phantom shape,
+Her dream of size she saw, agape.
+Midway the vast round-raying beard
+A desiccated midge appeared;
+Whose body pricked the name of meal,
+Whose hair had growth in earth's unreal;
+Provocative of dread and wrath,
+Contempt and horror, in one froth,
+Inextricable, insensible,
+His poison presence there would dwell,
+Declaring him her dream fulfilled,
+A catch to compliment the skilled;
+And she reduced to beaky skin,
+Disgraceful among kith and kin
+
+Against her corner, humped and aged,
+Arachne wrinkled, past enraged,
+Beyond disgust or hope in guile.
+Ridiculously volatile
+He seemed to her last spark of mind;
+And that in pallid ash declined
+Beneath the blow by knowledge dealt,
+Wherein throughout her frame she felt
+That he, the light wind's libertine,
+Without a scoff, without a grin,
+And mannered like the courtly few,
+Who merely danced when light winds blew,
+Impervious to beak and claws,
+Tradition's ruinous Whitebeard was;
+Of whom, as actors in old scenes,
+Had grannam weavers warned their weans,
+With word, that less than feather-weight,
+He smote the web like bolt of Fate.
+
+This muted drama, hour by hour,
+I watched amid a world in flower,
+Ere yet Autumnal threads had laid
+Their gray-blue o'er the grass's blade,
+And still along the garden-run
+The blindworm stretched him, drunk of sun.
+Arachne crouched unmoved; perchance
+Her visitor performed a dance;
+She puckered thinner; he the same
+As when on that light wind he came.
+
+Next day was told what deeds of night
+Were done; the web had vanished quite;
+With it the strange opposing pair;
+And listless waved on vacant air,
+For her adieu to heart's content,
+A solitary filament.
+
+
+
+Poem:  Foresight And Patience
+
+
+
+Sprung of the father blood, the mother brain,
+Are they who point our pathway and sustain.
+They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired.
+When they do meet, it is our earth inspired.
+
+To see Life's formless offspring and subdue
+Desire of times unripe, we have these two,
+Whose union is right reason:  join they hands,
+The world shall know itself and where it stands;
+What cowering angel and what upright beast
+Make man, behold, nor count the low the least,
+Nor less the stars have round it than its flowers.
+When these two meet, a point of time is ours.
+
+As in a land of waterfalls, that flow
+Smooth for the leap on their great voice below,
+Some eddies near the brink borne swift along,
+Will capture hearing with the liquid song,
+So, while the headlong world's imperious force
+Resounded under, heard I these discourse.
+
+First words, where down my woodland walk she led,
+To her blind sister Patience, Foresight said:
+
+- Your faith in me appals, to shake my own,
+When still I find you in this mire alone.
+
+- The few steps taken at a funeral pace
+By men had slain me but for those you trace.
+
+- Look I once back, a broken pinion I:
+Black as the rebel angels rained from sky!
+
+- Needs must you drink of me while here you live,
+And make me rich in feeling I can give.
+
+- A brave To-be is dawn upon my brow:
+Yet must I read my sister for the How.
+My daisy better knows her God of beams
+Than doth an eagle that to mount him seems.
+She hath the secret never fieriest reach
+Of wing shall master till men hear her teach.
+
+- Liker the clod flaked by the driving plough,
+My semblance when I have you not as now.
+The quiet creatures who escape mishap
+Bear likeness to pure growths of the green sap:
+A picture of the settled peace desired
+By cowards shunning strife or strivers tired.
+I listen at their breasts:  is there no jar
+Of wrestlings and of stranglings, dead they are,
+And such a picture as the piercing mind
+Ranks beneath vegetation.  Not resigned
+Are my true pupils while the world is brute.
+What edict of the stronger keeps me mute,
+Stronger impels the motion of my heart.
+I am not Resignation's counterpart.
+If that I teach, 'tis little the dry word,
+Content, but how to savour hope deferred.
+We come of earth, and rich of earth may be;
+Soon carrion if very earth are we!
+The coursing veins, the constant breath, the use
+Of sleep, declare that strife allows short truce;
+Unless we clasp decay, accept defeat,
+And pass despised; "a-cold for lack of heat,"
+Like other corpses, but without death's plea.
+
+- My sister calls for battle; is it she?
+
+- Rather a world of pressing men in arms,
+Than stagnant, where the sensual piper charms
+Each drowsy malady and coiling vice
+With dreams of ease whereof the soul pays price!
+No home is here for peace while evil breeds,
+While error governs, none; and must the seeds
+You sow, you that for long have reaped disdain,
+Lie barren at the doorway of the brain,
+Let stout contention drive deep furrows, blood
+Moisten, and make new channels of its flood!
+
+- My sober little maid, when we meet first,
+Drinks of me ever with an eager thirst.
+So can I not of her till circumstance
+Drugs cravings.  Here we see how men advance
+A doubtful foot, but circle if much stirred,
+Like dead weeds on whipped waters.  Shout the word
+Prompting their hungers, and they grandly march,
+As to band-music under Victory's arch.
+Thus was it, and thus is it; save that then
+The beauty of frank animals had men.
+
+- Observe them, and down rearward for a term,
+Gaze to the primal twistings of the worm.
+Thence look this way, across the fields that show
+Men's early form of speech for Yes and No.
+My sister a bruised infant's utterance had;
+And issuing stronger, to mankind 'twas mad.
+I knew my home where I had choice to feel
+The toad beneath a harrow or a heel.
+
+- Speak of this Age.
+
+- When you it shall discern
+Bright as you are, to me the Age will turn.
+
+- For neither of us has it any care;
+Its learning is through Science to despair.
+
+- Despair lies down and grovels, grapples not
+With evil, casts the burden of its lot.
+This Age climbs earth.
+
+- To challenge heaven.
+
+- Not less
+The lower deeps.  It laughs at Happiness!
+That know I, though the echoes of it wail,
+For one step upward on the crags you scale.
+Brave is the Age wherein the word will rust,
+Which means our soul asleep or body's lust,
+Until from warmth of many breasts, that beat
+A temperate common music, sunlike heat
+The happiness not predatory sheds!
+
+- But your fierce Yes and No of butting heads,
+Now rages to outdo a horny Past.
+Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vast
+Are thrown by every novel light upraised.
+The world's whole round smokes ominously, amazed
+And trembling as its pregnant AEtna swells.
+Combustibles on hot combustibles
+Run piling, for one spark to roll in fire
+The mountain-torrent of infernal ire
+And leave the track of devils where men built.
+Perceptive of a doom, the sinner's guilt
+Confesses in a cry for help shrill loud,
+If drops the chillness of a passing cloud,
+To conscience, reason, human love; in vain:
+None save they but the souls which them contain.
+No extramural God, the God within
+Alone gives aid to city charged with sin.
+A world that for the spur of fool and knave,
+Sweats in its laboratory, what shall save?
+But men who ply their wits in such a school,
+Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.
+
+- Much have I studied hard Necessity!
+To know her Wisdom's mother, and that we
+May deem the harshness of her later cries
+In labour a sure goad to prick the wise,
+If men among the warnings which convulse,
+Can gravely dread without the craven's pulse.
+Long ere the rising of this Age of ours,
+The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers.
+Of human lusts and lassitudes they spring,
+And are as lasting as the parent thing.
+Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill,
+They might o'ermatch and have mankind at will.
+
+Behold such army gathering:  ours the spur,
+No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer.
+Not fool or knave is now the enemy
+O'ershadowing men, 'tis Folly, Knavery!
+A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach.
+Now must the brother soul alive in each,
+His traitorous individual devildom
+Hold subject lest the grand destruction come.
+Dimly men see it menacing apace
+To overthrow, perchance uproot the race.
+Within, without, they are a field of tares:
+Fruitfuller for them when the contest squares,
+And wherefore warrior service they must yield,
+Shines visible as life on either field.
+That is my comfort, following shock on shock,
+Which sets faith quaking on their firmest rock.
+Since with his weapons, all the arms of Night,
+Frail men have challenged Lucifer to fight,
+Have matched in hostile ranks, enrolled, erect,
+The human and Satanic intellect,
+Determined for their uses to control
+What forces on the earth and under roll,
+Their granite rock runs igneous; now they stand
+Pledged to the heavens for safety of their land.
+They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are:
+Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war.
+
+- My sister, as I read them in my glass,
+Their field of tares they take for pasture grass.
+How waken them that have not any bent
+Save browsing--the concrete indifferent!
+Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff:
+They fear not for the race when full the trough.
+They have much fear of giving up the ghost;
+And these are of mankind the unnumbered host.
+
+- If I could see with you, and did not faint
+In beating wing, the future I would paint.
+Those massed indifferents will learn to quake:
+Now meanwhile is another mass awake,
+Once denser than the grunters of the sty.
+If I could see with you!  Could I but fly!
+
+- The length of days that you with them have housed,
+An outcast else, approves their cause espoused.
+
+- O true, they have a cause, and woe for us,
+While still they have a cause too piteous!
+Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined,
+They walk no longer with a stumbler blind,
+And quicken in the virtue of their cause,
+To think me a poor mouther of old saws!
+I wait the issue of a battling Age;
+The toilers with your "troughsters" now engage;
+Instructing them through their acutest sense,
+How close the dangers of indifference!
+Already have my people shown their worth,
+More love they light, which folds the love of Earth.
+That love to love of labour leads:  thence love
+Of humankind--earth's incense flung above.
+
+- Admit some other features:  Faithless, mean;
+Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene;
+Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells
+On Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles;
+And if I bid it face what _I_ observe,
+Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!
+
+- Oft has your prophet, for reward of toil,
+Seen nests of seeming cockatrices coil:
+Disowned them as the unholiest of Time,
+Which were his offspring, born of flame on slime.
+Nor him, their sire, have known the filial fry:
+As little as Time's earliest knew the sky.
+Perchance among them shoots a lustrous flame
+At intervals, in proof of whom they came.
+To strengthen our foundations is the task
+Of this tough Age; not in your beams to bask,
+Though, lighted by your beams, down mining caves
+The rock it blasts, the hoarded foulness braves.
+My sister sees no round beyond her mood;
+To hawk this Age has dressed her head in hood.
+Out of the course of ancient ruts and grooves,
+It moves:  O much for me to say it moves!
+About his AEthiop Highlands Nile is Nile,
+Though not the stream of the paternal smile:
+And where his tide of nourishment he drives,
+An Abyssinian wantonness revives.
+Calm as his lotus-leaf to-day he swims;
+He is the yellow crops, the rounded limbs,
+The Past yet flowing, the fair time that fills;
+Breath of all mouths and grist of many mills.
+
+To-morrow, warning none with tempest-showers,
+He is the vast Insensate who devours
+His golden promise over leagues of seed,
+Then sits in a smooth lake upon the deed.
+The races which on barbarous force begin,
+Inherit onward of their origin,
+And cancelled blessings will the current length
+Reveal till they know need of shaping strength.
+'Tis not in men to recognize the need
+Before they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed.
+Then may sharp suffering their nature grind;
+Of rabble passions grow the chieftain Mind.
+Yet mark where still broad Nile boasts thousands fed,
+For tens up the safe mountains at his head.
+Few would be fed, not far his course prolong,
+Save for the troublous blood which makes him strong.
+
+- That rings of truth!  More do your people thrive;
+Your Many are more merrily alive
+Than erewhile when I gloried in the page
+Of radiant singer and anointed sage.
+Greece was my lamp:  burnt out for lack of oil;
+Rome, Python Rome, prey of its robber spoil!
+All structures built upon a narrow space
+Must fall, from having not your hosts for base.
+O thrice must one be you, to see them shift
+Along their desert flats, here dash, there drift;
+With faith, that of privations and spilt blood,
+Comes Reason armed to clear or bank the flood!
+And thrice must one be you, to wait release
+From duress in the swamp of their increase.
+At which oppressive scene, beyond arrest,
+A darkness not with stars of heaven dressed,
+Philosophers behold; desponding view.
+Your Many nourished, starved my brilliant few;
+Then flinging heels, as charioteers the reins,
+Dive down the fumy AEtna of their brains.
+Belated vessels on a rising sea,
+They seem:  they pass!
+
+- But not Philosophy!
+
+- Ay, be we faithful to ourselves:  despise
+Nought but the coward in us!  That way lies
+The wisdom making passage through our slough.
+Am I not heard, my head to Earth shall bow;
+Like her, shall wait to see, and seeing wait.
+Philosophy is Life's one match for Fate.
+That photosphere of our high fountain One,
+Our spirit's Lord and Reason's fostering sun,
+Philosophy, shall light us in the shade,
+Warm in the frost, make Good our aim and aid.
+Companioned by the sweetest, ay renewed,
+Unconquerable, whose aim for aid is Good!
+Advantage to the Many:  that we name
+God's voice; have there the surety in our aim.
+This thought unto my sister do I owe,
+And irony and satire off me throw.
+They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds,
+Where numbers crave their sustenance in words.
+Now let the perils thicken:  clearer seen,
+Your Chieftain Mind mounts over them serene.
+Who never yet of scattered lamps was born
+To speed a world, a marching world to warn,
+But sunward from the vivid Many springs,
+Counts conquest but a step, and through disaster sings.
+
+
+
+
+Fragments of the Iliad in English Hexameter Verse
+
+
+
+
+Poem:  The Invective of Achilles
+
+
+
+[Iliad, B. I. V. 149]
+
+"Heigh me! brazen of front, thou glutton for plunder, how can one,
+Servant here to thy mandates, heed thee among our Achaians,
+Either the mission hie on or stoutly do fight with the foemen?
+I, not hither I fared on account of the spear-armed Trojans,
+Pledged to the combat; they unto me have in nowise a harm done;
+Never have they, of a truth, come lifting my horses or oxen;
+Never in deep-soiled Phthia, the nurser of heroes, my harvests
+Ravaged, they; for between us is numbered full many a darksome
+Mountain, ay, therewith too the stretch of the windy sea-waters.
+O hugely shameless! thee did we follow to hearten thee, justice
+Pluck from the Dardans for him, Menelaos, thee too, thou dog-eyed!
+Whereof little thy thought is, nought whatever thou reckest.
+Worse, it is thou whose threat 'tis to ravish my prize from me, portion
+Won with much labour, the which my gift from the sons of Achaia.
+Never, in sooth, have I known my prize equal thine when Achaians
+Gave some flourishing populous Trojan town up to pillage.
+Nay, sure, mine were the hands did most in the storm of the combat,
+Yet when came peradventure share of the booty amongst us,
+Bigger to thee went the prize, while I some small blessed thing bore
+Off to the ships, my share of reward for my toil in the bloodshed!
+So now go I to Phthia, for better by much it beseems me
+Homeward go with my beaked ships now, and I hold not in prospect,
+I being outraged, thou mayst gather here plunder and wealth-store."
+
+
+
+Poem:  The Invective of Achilles--V. 225
+
+
+
+"Bibber besotted, with scowl of a cur, having heart of a deer, thou!
+Never to join to thy warriors armed for the press of the conflict,
+Never for ambush forth with the princeliest sons of Achaia
+Dared thy soul, for to thee that thing would have looked as a death-stroke.
+Sooth, more easy it seems, down the lengthened array of Achaians,
+Snatch at the prize of the one whose voice has been lifted against thee.
+Ravening king of the folk, for that thou hast thy rule over abjects;
+Else, son of Atreus, now were this outrage on me thy last one.
+Nay, but I tell thee, and I do swear a big oath on it likewise:
+Yea, by the sceptre here, and it surely bears branches and leaf-buds
+Never again, since first it was lopped from its trunk on the mountains,
+No more sprouting; for round it all clean has the sharp metal clipped off
+Leaves and the bark; ay, verify now do the sons of Achaia,
+Guardian hands of the counsels of Zeus, pronouncing the judgement,
+Hold it aloft; so now unto thee shall the oath have its portent;
+Loud will the cry for Achilles burst from the sons of Achaia
+Throughout the army, and thou chafe powerless, though in an anguish,
+How to give succour when vast crops down under man-slaying Hector
+Tumble expiring; and thou deep in thee shalt tear at thy heart-strings,
+Rage-wrung, thou, that in nought thou didst honour the flower of Achaians."
+
+
+
+Poem:  Marshalling Of The Achaians
+
+
+
+[Iliad, B. II V. 455]
+
+Like as a terrible fire feeds fast on a forest enormous,
+Up on a mountain height, and the blaze of it radiates round far,
+So on the bright blest arms of the host in their march did the splendour
+Gleam wide round through the circle of air right up to the sky-vault.
+They, now, as when swarm thick in the air multitudinous winged flocks,
+Be it of geese or of cranes or the long-necked troops of the wild-swans,
+Off that Asian mead, by the flow of the waters of Kaistros;
+Hither and yon fly they, and rejoicing in pride of their pinions,
+Clamour, shaped to their ranks, and the mead all about them resoundeth;
+So those numerous tribes from their ships and their shelterings poured forth
+On that plain of Scamander, and horrible rumbled beneath them
+Earth to the quick-paced feet of the men and the tramp of the horse-hooves.
+Stopped they then on the fair-flower'd field of Scamander, their thousands
+Many as leaves and the blossoms born of the flowerful season.
+Even as countless hot-pressed flies in their multitudes traverse,
+Clouds of them, under some herdsman's wonning, where then are the milk-pails
+Also, full of their milk, in the bountiful season of spring-time;
+Even so thickly the long-haired sons of Achaia the plain held,
+Prompt for the dash at the Trojan host, with the passion to crush them.
+Those, likewise, as the goatherds, eyeing their vast flocks of goats, know
+Easily one from the other when all get mixed o'er the pasture,
+So did the chieftains rank them here there in their places for onslaught,
+Hard on the push of the fray; and among them King Agamemnon,
+He, for his eyes and his head, as when Zeus glows glad in his thunder,
+He with the girdle of Ares, he with the breast of Poseidon.
+
+
+
+Poem:  Agamemnon In The Fight
+
+
+
+[Iliad, B. XI. V. 148]
+
+These, then, he left, and away where ranks were now clashing the thickest,
+Onward rushed, and with him rushed all of the bright-greaved Achaians.
+Foot then footmen slew, that were flying from direful compulsion,
+Horse at the horsemen (up from off under them mounted the dust-cloud,
+Up off the plain, raised up cloud-thick by the thundering horse-hooves)
+Hewed with the sword's sharp edge; and so meanwhile Lord Agamemnon
+Followed, chasing and slaughtering aye, on-urgeing the Argives.
+
+Now, as when fire voracious catches the unclipped woodland,
+This way bears it and that the great whirl of the wind, and the scrubwood
+Stretches uptorn, flung forward alength by the fire's fury rageing,
+So beneath Atreides Agamemnon heads of the scattered
+Trojans fell; and in numbers amany the horses, neck-stiffened,
+Rattled their vacant cars down the roadway gaps of the war-field,
+Missing the blameless charioteers, but, for these, they were outstretched
+Flat upon earth, far dearer to vultures than to their home-mates.
+
+
+
+Poem:  Paris And Diomedes
+
+
+
+[Iliad; B. XI V. 378]
+
+So he, with a clear shout of laughter,
+Forth of his ambush leapt, and he vaunted him, uttering thiswise:
+"Hit thou art! not in vain flew the shaft; how by rights it had pierced thee
+Into the undermost gut, therewith to have rived thee of life-breath!
+Following that had the Trojans plucked a new breath from their direst,
+They all frighted of thee, as the goats bleat in flight from a lion."
+Then unto him untroubled made answer stout Diomedes:
+"Bow-puller, jiber, thy bow for thy glorying, spyer at virgins!
+If that thou dared'st face me here out in the open with weapons,
+Nothing then would avail thee thy bow and thy thick shot of arrows.
+Now thou plumest thee vainly because of a graze of my footsole;
+Reck I as were that stroke from a woman or some pettish infant.
+Aye flies blunted the dart of the man that's emasculate, noughtworth!
+Otherwise hits, forth flying from me, and but strikes it the slightest,
+My keen shaft, and it numbers a man of the dead fallen straightway.
+Torn, troth, then are the cheeks of the wife of that man fallen slaughtered,
+Orphans his babes, full surely he reddens the earth with his blood-drops,
+Rotting, round him the birds, more numerous they than the women."
+
+
+
+Poem:  Hypnos On Ida
+
+
+
+[Iliad, B. XIV. V. 283]
+
+They then to fountain-abundant Ida, mother of wild beasts,
+Came, and they first left ocean to fare over mainland at Lektos,
+Where underneath of their feet waved loftiest growths of the woodland.
+There hung Hypnos fast, ere the vision of Zeus was observant,
+Mounted upon a tall pine-tree, tallest of pines that on Ida
+Lustily spring off soil for the shoot up aloft into aether.
+There did he sit well-cloaked by the wide-branched pine for concealment,
+That loud bird, in his form like, that perched high up in the mountains,
+Chalkis is named by the Gods, but of mortals known as Kymindis.
+
+
+
+Poem:  Clash In Arms Of The Achaians And Trojans
+
+
+
+[Iliad, B. XIV.  V. 394]
+
+Not the sea-wave so bellows abroad when it bursts upon shingle,
+Whipped from the sea's deeps up by the terrible blast of the Northwind;
+Nay, nor is ever the roar of the fierce fire's rush so arousing,
+Down along mountain-glades, when it surges to kindle a woodland;
+Nay, nor so tonant thunders the stress of the gale in the oak-trees'
+Foliage-tresses high, when it rages to raveing its utmost;
+As rose then stupendous the Trojan's cry and Achaians',
+Dread upshouting as one when together they clashed in the conflict.
+
+
+
+Poem:  The Horses Of Achilles
+
+
+
+[Iliad, B. XVII. V. 426]
+
+So now the horses of Aiakides, off wide of the war-ground,
+Wept, since first they were ware of their charioteer overthrown there,
+Cast down low in the whirl of the dust under man-slaying Hector.
+Sooth, meanwhile, then did Automedon, brave son of Diores,
+Oft, on the one hand, urge them with flicks of the swift whip, and oft, too,
+Coax entreatingly, hurriedly; whiles did he angrily threaten.
+Vainly, for these would not to the ships, to the Hellespont spacious,
+Backward turn, nor be whipped to the battle among the Achaians.
+Nay, as a pillar remains immovable, fixed on the tombstone,
+Haply, of some dead man or it may be a woman there-under;
+Even like hard stood they there attached to the glorious war-car,
+Earthward bowed with their heads; and of them so lamenting incessant
+Ran the hot teardrops downward on to the earth from their eyelids,
+Mourning their charioteer; all their lustrous manes dusty-clotted,
+Right side and left of the yoke-ring tossed, to the breadth of the yoke-bow.
+Now when the issue of Kronos beheld that sorrow, his head shook
+Pitying them for their grief, these words then he spake in his bosom;
+"Why, ye hapless, gave we to Peleus you, to a mortal
+Master; ye that are ageless both, ye both of you deathless!
+Was it that ye among men most wretched should come to have heart-grief?
+'Tis most true, than the race of these men is there wretcheder nowhere
+Aught over earth's range found that is gifted with breath and has movement."
+
+
+
+Poem:  The Mares Of The Camargue
+
+
+
+[From the Mireio of Mistral]
+
+A hundred mares, all white! their manes
+Like mace-reed of the marshy plains
+Thick-tufted, wavy, free o' the shears:
+And when the fiery squadron rears
+Bursting at speed, each mane appears
+Even as the white scarf of a fay
+Floating upon their necks along the heavens away.
+
+O race of humankind, take shame!
+For never yet a hand could tame,
+Nor bitter spur that rips the flanks subdue
+The mares of the Camargue.  I have known,
+By treason snared, some captives shown;
+Expatriate from their native Rhone,
+Led off, their saline pastures far from view:
+
+And on a day, with prompt rebound,
+They have flung their riders to the ground,
+And at a single gallop, scouring free,
+Wide-nostril'd to the wind, twice ten
+Of long marsh-leagues devour'd, and then,
+Back to the Vacares again,
+After ten years of slavery just to breathe salt sea
+
+For of this savage race unbent,
+The ocean is the element.
+Of old escaped from Neptune's car, full sure,
+Still with the white foam fleck'd are they,
+And when the sea puffs black from grey,
+And ships part cables, loudly neigh
+The stallions of Camargue, all joyful in the roar;
+
+And keen as a whip they lash and crack
+Their tails that drag the dust, and back
+Scratch up the earth, and feel, entering their flesh, where he,
+The God, drives deep his trident teeth,
+Who in one horror, above, beneath,
+Bids storm and watery deluge seethe,
+And shatters to their depths the abysses of the sea.
+
+Cant. iv.
+
+
+
+
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