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Page 1 of 11910 · PDF PAGE 13
…te loss is infinite loss, That tears are trivial, tears are happiness, That this blind ache is God’s last punishment For love ; that all things in that one thing shent Are damned, that had I loved her less I could have prated in some honeyed strain. Taking a subtle pleasure in my pain. It is my bulk, the mass of my intent, That makes the ruin abject. I had sung Some partial earthquake ; here the universe Crashes with one great curse, Whelming the singer and the song. My tongue Is palsied ; only this chaotic clash Of curses echoes the dire crash…
1910 · PDF PAGE 6
4 ROSA DECIDUA As He is wholly blessing to the wise. This thing invertebrate, this sewer-flood, Compact of treacheries, meannesses, and lies, Horrible thirst, infamous beastliness, Dirt and disease, so sottish wallowing, Yet sensitive to pain so hideous That sometimes he appears all pain, all fear, All hate—so slavish, yet so fierce a king, A tyrant to himself, insidious And cunning as some sordid sorceress ; Incapable of action or control, Yet a black gulph to drown so strong a soul ! . . . He lay close curled within my rose’s heart. There is …
1910 · PDF PAGE 7
…corpse should bleed at the murderer’s touch ! Then, not content, she must needs smutch All my past purifying pain, Turning all life to a thing fouler than Aught yet imaginable to man ! Who asks me for my tears ? She flings the body of my sweet dead child Into my face with hell’s own epitaph, Profanes that shrine Of infinite love and infinite loss, My empty shrine, the one shrine undefiled, My one close-claspèd cross— And hers as much as mine ! Profanes it with a hideous laugh And a lie flung with a curse ; and I must hear, And must not stamp on…
1910 · PDF PAGE 5
…ining its amorphous grey ; All that elastic brilliance passed away ; Minute invading wrinkles where the flesh Is soaked away by the foul thing within Her soul ; the bloom so faint and fresh Smudged to a smoky glow as one may see At sunset in the Factory lands ; the lips Thinned and their colour sickened into slate ; The eyes like common glass ; the hair’s gloss dull ; The muscles gone, all pendulous with fat ; The breath that was more sweet than Lebanon And all the flowers and honey and spice thereof Ripe for my soul’s kiss, eagerly to cull, No…
1910 · PDF PAGE 9
…hipelago Of poison in each sea where life was holy. Their questions have no answer, But all’s converted to the abominable Soul-sickening thing that one is tied to. This is I Just as God in His Nature, wholly Involved therein, its tune, its motive, its quintessence. There were no meaning in Spring’s aspen spell, Where man’s sole treasury, the sky, Made bankrupt of His presence. Only, this God is a black fiend ; Of blood, the babe’s drink, weaned And fattened on—what liquor and meat ? Unnameable By all the giant horrors that haunt hell !