But him who thee hath given The good food of the land Or water out of heaven Thou bitest in the hand.
My soul is full of fire, Wrath and tempestuous dirge; I feel but one desire, To find a sword and scourge:
Since man, by right of birth And nature’s gift at least A god upon the earth, Remaineth but a beast,
Ill-ruling, blind and halt, And not by powers’ unknown, Or far-off Heaven’s, fault, But chiefly by his own.
Lies!—let us drink them up, The sweet and bitter lies! Man takes the maddening cup And drinks and dreams and dies.
Pure as revealing morn The angel Truth stands there; But we, oh basely born! Dare not to look at her.
Not by eternal laws Condemn’d to eternal ruth, We suffer; but because We dare not face the truth.
We wreath and sanctify us To the inferior gods; For things which vilify us We lash ourselves with rods.
We rip our veins and bleed Before the gods of mire; For Moloch, without need, Consume our babes in fire;
But the greatest God of all In eternal silence reigns; To His high audience-hall No human soul attains.
A vision of the night. I started in my bed. A finger in the night Was placed upon my head.
A ray of corruption, blue As in encharnel’d air On corpses comes. I knew A Death, a Woman there.
Delirious, knee to knee, They drank of love like wine, He skeleton thin, and she Most beautiful, most divine.
He with his eyes half warm’d Out of their wan eclipse With lipless kisses storm’d Upon her living lips,
And like a vulture quaff’d, And raised his hideous head With joy aloft, and laugh’d Like vultures sipping blood.
The purple, fold by fold, Fell from her, and, unseen, The diadem of gold By which I knew her queen.
Nor he unknown: for at His feet the fiery brand And freezing fetters that Endow him with command.
And on his head a crown Of thirsty thorns of flame That flicker’d up and down In words that went and came
Like God’s, ‘I am of God’; And said, ‘Duty to me Is duty unto God’; And said, ‘Come unto me,
And I will give you rest.’ Then as I wonder’d, lo! I saw the Woman waste To nothing; and he, as tho’
Blood nourisht by her blood, Grow grosser in the gloom And leprous like the toad That battens in the tomb.
And both corrupted pined. And lo! a voice that wept, And then a faint far wind Of laughter; and I slept.