Collected Works (Vol. III)

LIBER SECUNDUS VEL AMORIS 163 In her machinery of conditioned mood ; Suspending law, suspending amplitude Of all Her function; to espouse her daughter In forced embrace lasciviously rude, Indecorous, shameful to the eternal ‘‘ must ”’ ! Law may be mercy, mercy never just ! Thus I would alter, and divide her ways, And let her wheels grind themselves down to dust. One supernatural event—but one !— Should scale Olympus, shattering the throne Of the A°gis-bearing Father : and the days Of all the Universe be fallen and done. Well then? Thou see How little means Thy Universe to Me? How petty looks Thy will to My desire? Hebe and Hera to Eurydice ? O sceptred Splendour! dost I, knowing all the progress of the earth, The dim procession, altering death and birth, The Seven Stairs, the gusts of life in fire And Love in Life, and all the serpent girth Of sevenfold twining worlds and sevenfold ways And nights made sevenfold of the sevenfold days All the vast scheme evolving into man, And upward, onward, through Olympian haze Into the crowning spiritual mist, Where spirit in the spirit may subsist, Evolve itself in the amazing plan Through many planes, as shining amethyst Melts to the sapphire’s sombre indigo, And lifts, still sapphire, to the ocean glow ; Thence into emerald and the golden light, Till ruby crowns the river’s living flow And glory of colour in the sun’s own flame— Beyond, to colours without sense or name, Impossible to man, whose vivid sight Would blast him with their splendour as they came Flashing through spiritual space, withdrawn Now, and now flung triumphant in the dawn Not of mere sun’s. rise, but before the birth Of a new system on the unfolded lawn Of space beyond the sceptre of the Gods! I, seeing all this, would foil Time’s periods — For one small woman on this-one mear earth, Would spoil the plan of the inane Abodes, Throw out of gear all Nature’s enginery For such a grain of tinsel dust as I, Reluctant to be mangled in the wheel-— Looks other meanness so contemptibly? Yet I persist. Zeus, When Hera to thine Io did refuse Peace, and the gadfly bit like barbéd steel Those limbs with dews of love once lying loose, Thou knowest, O most High When thy vast body boarded her, wrapped round Her senses with a mist of being profound, A flame-like penetration, serpentine, Twining and leaping without end or bound, Inevitable as the grasp of Fate :— Thou, reft of her by envy of thy mate Didst shake the heaven with bellowings undivine, And rooted stars from their primeval state. Not without law, sayest thou? Almighty Zeus, Am I not also mothered of a Muse? Let there be law! untimely to release This soul untinctured of the Stygian dews, Unsprinkled of Lethean lotus-drops ! Life grows so steadily, so sudden stops— (Surely no part in Nature’s moving peace !) Thus, when the young, like tempest-stricken crops Unripe, are blasted in the blossoming spring— This is a miracle, not the other thing! Nature insults herself, blasphemes her God, Thus cutting short the life’s hard happening.