Part 15

No longer forth he bounds The lusty animal, afield to roam, But peering in Earth’s entrails, where the gnome Strange themes propounds.

By hunger sharply sped To grasp at weapons ere he learns their use, In each new ring he bears a giant’s thews, An infant’s head.

VII

And ever that old task Of reading what he is and whence he came, Whither to go, finds wilder letters flame Across her mask.

VIII

She hears his wailful prayer, When now to the Invisible he raves To rend him from her, now of his mother craves Her calm, her care.

The thing that shudders most Within him is the burden of his cry. Seen of his dread, she is to his blank eye The eyeless Ghost.

Or sometimes she will seem Heavenly, but her blush, soon wearing white, Veils like a gorsebush in a web of blight, With gold-buds dim.

Once worshipped Prime of Powers, She still was the Implacable: as a beast, She struck him down and dragged him from the feast She crowned with flowers.

XII

Her pomp of glorious hues, Her revelries of ripeness, her kind smile, Her songs, her peeping faces, lure awhile With symbol-clues.

XIII

The mystery she holds For him, inveterately he strains to see, And sight of his obtuseness is the key Among those folds.

XIV

He may entreat, aspire, He may despair, and she has never heed. She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need, Not his desire.

She prompts him to rejoice, Yet scares him on the threshold with the shroud. He deems her cherishing of her best-endowed A wanton’s choice.

XVI

Albeit thereof he has found Firm roadway between lustfulness and pain; Has half transferred the battle to his brain, From bloody ground;

XVII

He will not read her good, Or wise, but with the passion Self obscures; Through that old devil of the thousand lures, Through that dense hood:

XVIII

Through terror, through distrust; The greed to touch, to view, to have, to live: Through all that makes of him a sensitive Abhorring dust.

XIX

Behold his wormy home! And he the wind-whipped, anywhither wave Crazily tumbled on a shingle-grave To waste in foam.

Therefore the wretch inclined Afresh to the Invisible, who, he saith, Can raise him high: with vows of living faith For little signs.

XXI

Some signs he must demand, Some proofs of slaughtered nature; some prized few, To satisfy the senses it is true, And in his hand,

XXII