158
THE STAR IN THE WEST
My heart's
black
night
must act the sun's eclipse ;
My groans
must play the earthquake , ...
Still as I journey
through
the waste , I see
A silver figure
more divine
arise ;
The Christ usurps the horizon for me,
And He requickens
the forgotten
skies ;
His golden locks are burning
on my eyes ,
And he with rosy finger
points the way ,
The blood -wrought mystic
path of Paradise ,
That leads at last through
yonder
icy spray
Of Death
to the blue vault of the undying
day .
In
the
last
verse
of
“
A Spring
Snow
Storm
in
Wastdale ,"
there
grows
a wavering doubt , which
leaps
out furiously in
the “Preliminary
Invocation
"
in
“ Jephthah ,”
addressed
to A. C. S. , breaking the
shackles
of the
“ improving
idea " of Christ :
Let there be light !-the desecrated
tomb
Gaped
as thy fury smote the Galilean .4
Almost a Shelleyan
slur lies in the last
of the
above
words .
He is no more the mystic Christ , or the gentle
Jesus , but merely a Galilean , of a tribe crude and de
spised .
Very different
do we find Crowley's opinions
,
in
his
later works , regarding this
unfortunate
fakir .
The glamour of enthusiastic
and unsuspecting
youth
soon disappears
to
be swallowed up in the reality of
a maturer
understanding
:
He took the universe
on trust ;
He reconciled
the world
below
With that above ; rolled eloquence
Steel -tired o'er reason's
“ why ? ” and “ whence ? ” .
1 Songs of the Spirit, vol . i, p. 30.
2 Ibid . vol . i, p. 40.
Jephthah , vol . i, p. 64.
3 Ibid . vol. i, p. 43.
4