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MYSTERIES: LYRICAL AND DRAMATIC
Yet to the quivering brain three goodly
oifts
The cruelty of Pluto and his might
In the abyss bestow’:
Change, foresight, fear. The pageant whirls
and boils3
Restricted not by space and time, my
dream
Tloresees the doom of Fate ;
My spirit wrestles in the Dream-King’s toils
Always in vain, and Ilope’s forerunners
evleam
Alway one step too late.
Not as when sunlight strikes the counter-
pane ;
Half wakening, sleep rolls back her iron
wave,
And dawn brings blithesomeness ;
Not as wher opiates lull the tortured brain
And sprinkle lotus on the drowsy grave
Of earth’s old bitterness ;
But as when consciousness half rouses up
And hurls back all the gibbering harpy
crowd 3
And sleep’s draught deepeneth,
And all the furies of hell’s belly sup
In the brain’s palaces, and chant aloud
Songs that foretaste of Death.
Maddened, the brain breaks* from beneath
the goad,
Flings off again the foe, and from its
hell
Brings for a moment peace,
Till weariness and her infernal load
Of phantom memory-shapes return to quell
The shaken fortresses.
Till nature reassert her empery,
And the full tide of wakefulness at last
Foam on the shore of sleep
To beat the white cliffs of reality
In vain, because their windy strength is
past,
And only memories weep.
Why is the Finite real? And that world
So larger, so more beautiful and fleet,
So free, so exquisite,
The world of dreams and
impearled
With solitary shaft of Truth?
O children of the Night,
shadows, not
Too sweet,
Are your wide realms for our philoso-
phers,
Who must in hard gray balance-shackles
bind
The essence of all thought :
No sorrier sexton in a grave inters
The nobler children of a poet’s mind
Of wine and gold well wrought.
By the poor sense of touch they judge that
this
Or that is real or not. Have they divined
This simplest spirit-bond,
The joy of some bad woman’s deadly
kiss ;
The thought-flash that well tunes a lover’s
mind
Seas and gray gulfs beyond?
So that which is impalpable to touch,
They judge by touch; the viewless they
decide
By sight; their logic fails,
Their jarring jargon jingles—even such
An empty brazen pot—wise men deride
The clouds that mimic whales.
My world shall be my dreams. Religion
there
And duty may disturb me not at all;
Nor doubts, nor fear of death.
I straddle on no haggard ghostly mare ;
Yea, through my God, I have leapt o’er a
wall !
(As poet David saith.)
The wall that ever girds Earth’s thought with
brass
Is all a silver path my feet beneath,
And o’er its level sward