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.
Her pomp of glorious hues, Her revelries of ripeness, her kind smile Her songs, her peeping faces, lure awhile With symbol-clues.
The mystery she holds For him, inveterately he strains to see, And sight of his obtuseness is the key Among those folds.
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.
Albeit thereof he has found Firm roadway between lustfulness and pain; Has half transferred the battle to his brain, From bloody ground;
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:
Through terror, through distrust; The greed to touch, to view, to have, to live Through all that makes of him a sensitive Abhorring dust.
Behold his wormy home! And he the wind-whipped, anywhither wave Crazily tumbled on a shingle-grave To waste in foam.
Therefore the wretch inclines Afresh to the Invisible, who, he saith, Can raise him high: with vows of living faith For little signs.
Some signs he must demand, Some proofs of slaughtered nature; some prized few, To satisfy the senses it is true, And in his hand,
This miracle which saves Himself, himself doth from extinction clutch, By virtue of his worth, contrasting much With brutes and knaves.
From dust, of him abhorred, He would be snatched by Grace discovering worth. ‘Sever me from the hollowness of Earth! Me take, dear Lord!’
She hears him. Him she owes For half her loveliness a love well won By work that lights the shapeless and the dun, Their common foes.
He builds the soaring spires, That sing his soul in stone: of her he draws, Though blind to her, by spelling at her laws, Her purest fires.