The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Burning WheelThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The Burning WheelAuthor: Aldous HuxleyRelease date: January 8, 2015 [eBook #47912]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Marc D'Hooghe (Images generously made available by the Hathi Trust)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BURNING WHEEL ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The Burning WheelAuthor: Aldous HuxleyRelease date: January 8, 2015 [eBook #47912]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Marc D'Hooghe (Images generously made available by the Hathi Trust)
Title: The Burning Wheel
Author: Aldous Huxley
Author: Aldous Huxley
Release date: January 8, 2015 [eBook #47912]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Marc D'Hooghe (Images generously made available by the Hathi Trust)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BURNING WHEEL ***
COME MY FRIENDS—'TIS NOT TOO LATE "TO SEEK A NEWER WORLD—IT MAY BE THAT THE GULFS WILL WAN US DOWN—IT MAY BE WESHALL TOUCH THE HAPPY ISLES—YET—OUR PURPOSE HOLDS—TOSAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET.ULYSSES
SPEECH FINELY FRAMED DELIGHTETH THE EARS OF THEM THAT HEAR THE STORY — II MACCAB. XV.
My thanks are due to the Editor of the Nation for permission to reprint "The Mirror," "Variations on a theme of Laforgue" and "Philosophy."
My thanks are due to the Editor of the Nation for permission to reprint "The Mirror," "Variations on a theme of Laforgue" and "Philosophy."
CONTENTS.
The Burning WheelDoors of the TempleVilliers de L'Isle-AdamDarknessMoleThe Two SeasonsTwo RealitiesQuotidian VisionVisionThe MirrorVariations on a Theme of LaforguePhilosophyPhiloclea in the ForestBooks and ThoughtsContrary to Nature and AristotleEscapeThe GardenThe CanalThe Ideal found wantingMisplaced LoveSonnetSentimental SummerThe ChoiceThe Higher SensualismSonnetFormal VersesPerils of the Small HoursComplaintReturn to an Old HomeFragmentThe Walk
THE BURNING WHEEL.Wearied of its own turning,Distressed with its own busy restlessness,Yearning to draw the circumferent pain—The rim that is dizzy with speed—To the motionless centre, there to rest,The wheel must strain through agonyOn agony contracting, returningInto the core of steel.And at last the wheel has rest, is still,Shrunk to an adamant core:Fulfilling its will in fixity.But the yearning atoms, as they grindCloser and closer, more and moreFiercely together, begetA flaming fire upward leaping,Billowing out in a burning,Passionate, fierce desire to findThe infinite calm of the mother's breast.And there the flame is a Christ-child sleeping,Bright, tenderly radiant;All bitterness lost in the infinitePeace of the mother's bosom.But death comes creeping in a tideOf slow oblivion, till the flame in fearWakes from the sleep of its quiet brightnessAnd burns with a darkening passion and pain,Lest, all forgetting in quiet, it perish.And as it burns and anguishes it quickens,Begetting once again the wheel that yearns—Sick with its speed—for the terrible stillnessOf the adamant core and the steel-hard chain.And so once moreShall the wheel revolve till its anguish ceaseIn the iron anguish of fixity;Till once againFlame billows out to infinity,Sinking to a sleep of brightnessIn that vast oblivious peace.DOORS OF THE TEMPLE.Many are the doors of the spirit that leadInto the inmost shrine:And I count the gates of the temple divine,Since the god of the place is God indeed.And these are the gates that God decreedShould lead to his house:—kisses and wine,Cool depths of thought, youth without rest,And calm old age, prayer and desire,The lover's and mother's breast,The fire of sense and the poet's fire.But he that worships the gates alone,Forgetting the shrine beyond, shall seeThe great valves open suddenly,Revealing, not God's radiant throne,But the fires of wrath and agony.VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM.Up from the darkness on the laughing stageA sudden trap-door shot you unawares,Incarnate Tragedy, with your strange airsOf courteous sadness. Nothing could assuageThe secular grief that was your heritage,Passed down the long line to the last that bearsThe name, a gift of yearnings and despairsToo greatly noble for this iron age.Time moved for you not in quotidian beats,But in the long slow rhythm the ages keepIn their immortal symphony. You taughtThat not in the harsh turmoil of the streetsDoes life consist; you bade the soul drink deepOf infinite things, saying: "The rest is naught."DARKNESS.My close-walled soul has never knownThat innermost darkness, dazzling sight,Like the blind point, whence the visions springIn the core of the gazer's chrysolite ...The mystic darkness that laps God's throneIn a splendour beyond imagining,So passing bright.But the many twisted darknessesThat range the city to and fro,In aimless subtlety pass and partAnd ebb and glutinously flow;Darkness of lust and avarice,Of the crippled body and the crooked heart ...These darknesses I know.MOLE.Tunnelled in solid blackness creepsThe old mole-soul, and wakes or sleeps,He knows not which, but tunnels onThrough ages of oblivion;Until at last the long constraintOf each-hand wall is lost, and faintComes daylight creeping from afar,And mole-work grows crepuscular.Tunnel meets air and bursts; mole seesMen hugely walking ... or are they trees?And far horizons smoking blue,And chasing clouds for ever new?Green hills, like lighted lamps aglowOr quenching 'neath the cloud-shadow;Quenching and blazing turn by turn,Spring's great green signals fitfully burn.Mole travels on, but finds the steeringA harder task of pioneeringThan when he thridded through the straitBlind catacombs that ancient fateHad carved for him. Stupid and dumbAnd blind and touchless he had comeA way without a turn; but here,Under the sky, the passengerChooses his own best way; and moleDistracted wanders, yet his holeRegrets not much wherein he crept,But runs, a joyous nympholept,This way and that, by all made mad—River nymph and oread,Ocean's daughters and Lorelei,Combing the silken mystery,The glaucous gold of her rivery tresses—Each haunts the traveller, each possessesThe drunken wavering soul awhile;Then with a phantom's cock-crow smileMocks craving with sheer vanishment.Mole-eyes grow hawk's: knowledge is lentIn grudging driblets that pay highUnconscionable usuryTo unrelenting life. Mole learnsTo travel more secure; the turnsOf his long way less puzzling seem,And all those magic forms that gleamIn airy invitation cheatLess often than they did of old.The earth slopes upward, fold by foldOf quiet hills that meet the goldSerenity of western skies.Over the world's edge with clear eyesOur mole transcendent sees his wayTunnelled in light: he must obeyNecessity again and thridClose catacombs as erst he did,Fate's tunnellings, himself must boreThrough the sunset's inmost core.The guiding walls to each-hand shineLuminous and crystalline;And mole shall tunnel on and on,Till night let fall oblivion.THE TWO SEASONS.Summer, on himself intent,Passed without, for nothing caringSave his own high festival.My windows, blind and winkless staring,Wondered what the pageant meant,Nor ever understood at all.And oh, the pains of sentiment!The loneliness beyond all bearing ...Mucus and spleen and gall!But now that grey November peersIn at my fire-bright window pane?And all its misty spires and treesLoom in upon me through the rainAnd question of the light that cheersThe room within—now my soul seesLife, where of old were sepulchres;And in these new-found sympathiesSinks petty hopes and loves and fears,And knows that life is not in vain.TWO REALITIES.A waggon passed with scarlet wheelsAnd a yellow body, shining new."Splendid!" said I. "How fine it feelsTo be alive, when beauty peelsThe grimy husk from life." And youSaid, "Splendid!" and I thought you'd seenThat waggon blazing down the street;But I looked and saw that your gaze had beenOn a child that was kicking an obsceneBrown ordure with his feet.Our souls are elephants, thought I,Remote behind a prisoning grill,With trunks thrust out to peer and pryAnd pounce upon reality;And each at his own sweet willSeizes the bun that he likes bestAnd passes over all the rest.QUOTIDIAN VISION.There is a sadness in the street,And sullenly the folk I meetDroop their heads as they walk along,Without a smile, without a song.A mist of cold and muffling greyFalls, fold by fold, on another dayThat dies unwept. But suddenly,Under a tunnelled arch I seeOn flank and haunch the chestnut gleamOf horses in a lamplit steam;And the dead world moves for me once moreWith beauty for its living core.VISION.I had been sitting alone with books,Till doubt was a black disease,When I heard the cheerful shout of rooksIn the bare, prophetic trees.Bare trees, prophetic of new birth,You lift your branches clean and freeTo be a beacon to the earth,A flame of wrath for all to see.And the rooks in the branches laugh and shoutTo those that can hear and understand;"Walk through the gloomy ways of doubtWith the torch of vision in your hand."THE MIRROR.Slow-moving moonlight once did passAcross the dreaming looking-glass,Where, sunk inviolably deep,Old secrets unforgotten sleepOf beauties unforgettable.But dusty cobwebs are woven nowAcross that mirror, which of oldSaw fingers drawing back the goldFrom an untroubled brow;And the depths are blinded to the moon,And their secrets forgotten, for ever untold.VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF LAFORGUE.Youth as it opens out disclosesThe sinister metempsychosisOf lilies dead and turned to rosesRed as an angry dawn.But lilies, remember, are grave-side flowers,While slow bright rose-leaves sailAdrift on the music of happiest hours;And those lilies, cold and pale,Hide fiery roses beneath the lawnOf the young bride's parting veil.PHILOSOPHY."God needs no christening,"Pantheist mutters,"Love opens shuttersOn heaven's glistening.Flesh, key-hole listening,Hears what God utters" ...Yes, but God stutters.PHILOCLEA IN THE FOREST.I.'TWas I that leaned to AmoretWith: "What if the briars have tangled Time,Till, lost in the wood-ways, he quite forgetHow plaintive in cities at midnight sounds the chimeOf bells slow-dying from discord to the hush whencethey rose and met."And in the forest we shall live free,Free from the bondage that Time has madeTo hedge our soul from its liberty?We shall not fear what is mighty, and unafraidShall look wide-eyed at beauty, nor shrink from its majesty."But Amoret answered me again:"We are lost in the forest, you and I;Lost, lost, not free, though no bonds restrain;For no spire rises for comfort, no landmark in the sky,And the long glades as they curve from sight are darkwith a nameless pain.And Time creates what he devours,—Music that sweetly dreams itself away,Frail-swung leaves of autumn and the scent of flowers,And the beauty of that poised moment, when the dayHangs 'twixt the quiet of darkness and the mirth of thesunlit hours."II.Mottled and grey and brown they pass,The wood-moths, wheeling, fluttering;And we chase and they vanish; and in the grassAre starry flowers, and the birds singFaint broken songs of the dying spring.And on the beech-bole, smooth and grey,Some lover of an older dayHas carved in time-blurred letteringOne word only—"Alas."III.Lutes, I forbid you! You must never play,When shimmeringly, glimpse by glimpseSeen through the leaves, the silken figures swayIn measured dance. Never at shut of day,When Time perversely loitering limpsThrough endless twilights, should your stringsWhisper of light remembered thingsThat happened long ago and far away:Lutes, I forbid you! You must never play...And you, pale marble statues, far descriedWhere vistas open suddenly,I bid you shew yourselves no more, but hideYour loveliness, lest too much glorifiedBy western radiance slantinglyShot down the glade, you turn from stoneTo living gods, immortal grown,And, ageless, mock my beauty's fleeting pride,You pale, relentless statues, far descried...BOOKS AND THOUGHTS.Old ghosts that death forgot to ferryAcross the Lethe of the years-These are my friends, and at their tearsI weep and with their mirth am merry.On a high tower, whose battlementsGive me all heaven at a glance,I lie long summer nights in trance,Drowsed by the murmurs and the scentsThat rise from earth, while the sky above meMerges its peace with my soul's peace,Deep meeting deep. No stir can move me,Nought break the quiet of my release:In vain the windy sunlight ravesAt the hush and gloom of polar caves."CONTRARY TO NATURE AND ARISTOTLE."One head of my soul's amphisbaenaTurns to the daytime's dust and sweat;But evenings come, when I would forgetThe sordid strife of the arena.And then my other self will creepAlong the scented twilight lanesTo where a little house containsA hoard of books, a gift of sleep.Its windows throw a friendly lightBetween the narrowing shutter slats,And, golden as the eyes of cats,Shine me a welcome through the night.ESCAPE.I seek the quietude of stonesOr of great oxen, dewlap-deepIn meadows of lush grass, where sleepDrifts, tufted, on the air or dronesOn flowery traffic. Sleep atonesFor sin, comforting eyes that weep.O'er me, Lethean darkness, creepUnfelt as tides through dead men's bones!In that metallic sea of hair,Fragrance! I come to drown despairOf wings in dark forgetfulness.No love ... Love is self-known, aspiresTo heights unearthly. I ask less,—Sleep born of satisfied desires.THE GARDEN.There shall be dark trees round me:—I insistOn cypresses: I'm terribly romantic—And glimpsed between shall move the whole Atlantic,Now leaden dull, now subtle with grey mist,Now many jewelled, when the waves are kissedBy revelling sunlight and the corybanticSouth-Western wind: so, troubled, passion-frantic,The poet's mind boils gold and amethyst.There shall be seen the infinite endeavourOf a sad fountain, white against the skyAnd poised as it strains up, but doomed to breakIn weeping music; ever fair and everYoung ... and the bright-eyed wood-gods as they slakeTheir thirst in it, are silent, reverently ...THE CANAL.No dip and dart of swallows wakes the blackSlumber of the canal:—a mirror deadFor lack of loveliness rememberedFrom ancient azures and green trees, for lackOf some white beauty given and flung back,Secret, to her that gave: no sun has bledTo wake an echo here of answering red;The surface stirs to no leaf's wind-blown track.Between unseeing walls the waters rest,Lifeless and hushed, till suddenly a swanGlides from some broader river blue as day,And with the mirrored magic of his breastCreates within that barren water-wayNew life, new loveliness, and passes on.THE IDEAL FOUND WANTING.I'm sick of clownery and Owlglass tricks;Damn the whole crowd of you I I hate you all.The same, night after night, from powdered stallTo sweating gallery, your faces fixIn flux an idiot mean. The ApteryxYou worship is no victory; you callOn old stupidity, God made to crawlFor tempting with world-wisdom's narcotics.I'll break a window through my prison! See,The sunset bleeds among the roofs; comes night,Dark blue and calm as music dying out.Is it escape? No, the laugh's turned on me!I kicked at cardboard, gaped at red limelight;You laughed and cheered my latest knockabout.MISPLACED LOVE.Red wine that slowly leaned and brimmed the shellOf pearl, where lips had touched, as light and swiftAs naked petals of the rose adriftUpon the lazy-luted ritournelleOf summer bee-song: laughing as they fell,Gold memories: dream incense, childhood's gift,Blue as the smoke that far horizons lift,Tenuous as the wings of Ariel:—These treasured things I laid upon the pyre;And the flame kindled, and I fanned it high,And, strong in hope, could watch the crumbling past.Eager I knelt before the waning fire,Phoenix, to greet thine immortality ...But there was naught but ashes at the last.SONNET.Were I to die, you'd break your heart, you say.Well, if it do but bend, I'm satisfied—Bend and rebound—for hearts are temper-tried,Mild steel, not hardened, with the spring and playOf excellent tough swords. It's not that wayThat you'll be perishing. But when I've died,When snap! my light goes out, what will betideYou, if the heart-breaks give you leave to stay?What will be left, I wonder, if you loseAll that you gave me? "All? A year or soOut of a life," you say. But worlds, say I,Of kisses timeless given in ecstasyThat gave me Real You. I die: you goWith me. What's left? Limbs, clothes, a pair of shoes?...SENTIMENTAL SUMMER.The West has plucked its flowers and has thrownThem fading on the night. Out of the sky'sBlack depths there smiles a greeting from those eyes,Where all the Real, all I have ever knownOf the divine is held. And not aloneDo I stand here now ... a presence seems to rise:Your voice sounds near across my memories,And answering fingers brush against my own.Yes, it is you: for evening holds those strandsOf fire and darkness twined in one to makeYour loveliness a web of magic mesh,Whose cross-weft harmony of soul and fleshShadows a thought or glows, when smiles awake,Like sunlight passionate on southern lands.THE CHOICE.Comrade, now that you're merryAnd therefore true,Say—where would you like to dieAnd have your friend to buryWhat once was you?"On the top of a hillWith a peaceful viewOf country where all is still?"...Great God, not I!I'd lie in the streetWhere two streams meetAnd there's noise enough to fillThe outer ear,While within the brain can beatMarches of death and life,Glory and joy and fear,Peace of the sort that movesAnd clash of strifeAnd routs of armies fleeing.There would I shake myself clearOut of the deep-set groovesOf my sluggish being.THE HIGHER SENSUALISM.There's a church by a lake in ItalyStands white on a hill against the sky?And a path of immemorial cobblesLeads up and up, where the pilgrim hobblesPast a score or so of neat reposories,Where you stop and breathe and tell your rosariesTo the shrined terra-cotta mannikins,That expound with the liveliest quirks and grinsKnown texts of Scripture. But no long stayShould the pilgrim make upon his way;But as means to the end these shrines stand hereTo guide to something holier,The church on the hilltop.Your heaven's so,With a path leading up to it past a rowOf votary Priapulids;At each you pause and tell your beadsAlong the quintuple strings of sense:Then on, to face Heaven's eminence,New stimulated, new inspired.SONNET.If that a sparkle of true starshine beThat led my way; if some diviner thingThan common thought urged me to fashioningClose-woven links of burnished poetry;Then all the heaven that one time dwelt in meHas fled, leaving the body triumphing.Dead flesh it seems, with not a dream to bringVisions that better warm immediacy.Why have my visions left me, what could killThat feeble spark, which yet had life and heat?Fulfilment shewed a present rich and fair:I strive to mount, but catch the nearest still:Souls have been drowned between heart's beat and beat,And trapped and tangled in a woman's hair.FORMAL VERSES.I.Mother of all my future memories,Mistress of my new life, which but to-dayBegan, when I beheld, deep in your eyes,My own love mirrored and the warm surpriseOf the first kiss swept both our souls away,Your love has freed me; for I was oppressedBy my own devil, whose unwholesome breathTarnished my youth, leaving to me at bestAge lacking comfort of a soul at restAnd weariness beyond the hope of death.II.Ah, those were days of silent happiness!I never spoke, and had no need to speak,While on the windy down-land, cheek by cheek,The slow-driven sun beheld us. Each caressHad oratory for its own defence;And when I kissed or felt her fingers press,I envied not Demosthenes his Greek,Nor Tully for his Latin eloquence.PERILS OF THE SMALL HOURS.When life burns low as the fire in the grateAnd all the evening's books are read,I sit alone, save for the deadAnd the lovers I have grown to hate.But all at once the narrow gloomOf hatred and despair expandsIn tenderness: thought stretches handsTo welcome to the midnight roomAnother presence:—a memoryOf how last year in the sunlit field,Laughing, you suddenly revealedBeauty in immortality.For so it is; a gesture stripsLife bare of all its make-believe.All unprepared we may receiveOur casual apocalypse.Sheer beauty, then you seemed to stirUnbodied soul; soul sleeps to-night,And love comes, dimming spirit's sight,When body plays interpreter.COMPLAINT.I have tried to remember the familiar places,—The pillared gloom of the beechwoods, the townsby the sea,—I have tried to people the past with dear known faces,But you were haunting me.Like a remorse, insistent, pitiless,You have filled my spirit, you were ever at hand;You have mocked my gods with your new loveliness:Broken the old shrines stand.RETURN TO AN OLD HOME.In this wood—how the hazels have grown!—I left a treasure all my ownOf childish kisses and laughter and pain;Left, till I might come back againTo take from the familiar earthMy hoarded secret and count its worth.And all the spider-work of the years,All the time-spun gossamers,Dewed with each succeeding spring;And the piled up leaves the Autumns flingTo the sweet corruption of death on death....At the sudden stir of my spirit's breathAll scattered. New and fair and brightAs ever it was, before my sightThe treasure lay, and nothing missed.So having handled all and kissed,I put them back, adding one newAnd precious memory of you.FRAGMENT.We're German scholars poring over life,As over a Greek manuscript that's tornAnd stained beyond repair. Our eyes of hornRead one or two poor letters; and what strife,What books on books begotten for their sake!But we enjoy it; and meanwhile neglectThe line that's left us perfect from the wreckedRich argosy, clear beyond doubts to makeConjectures of. So in my universeOf scribbled half-hid meanings you appear,Sole perfect symbol of the highest sphere;And life's great matrix crystal, whose depths nurseSoul's infinite reflections, glows in youWith now uncertain radiance...THE WALK.I. THROUGH THE SUBURBS.Provincial Sunday broods above the town:The street's asleep; through a dim window driftsA small romance that hiccoughs up and downAn air all trills and runs and sudden liftsTo yearning sevenths poised ... not Chopin quite,But, oh, romantic; a tinsel world made brightWith rose and honeysuckle's paper blooms,And where the moon's blue limelight and the gloomsOf last-act scenes of passion are discreet.And when the tinkling stops and leaves the streetBlank in the sunlight of the afternoonYou feel a curtain dropped. Poor little tune!Perhaps our grandmother's dull girlhood daysWere fired by you with radiances of pink,Heavenly, brighter far than she could thinkAnything might be ... till a greater blazeTinged life's horizon, when he kissed her first,Our grandpapa. But a thin ghost still playsIn music down the street, echoing the plaintOf far romance with its own sadder songOf Everyday; and as they walk along,...The young man and the woman, deep immersedIn all the suburb-comedy around ...They seem to catch coherence in the soundOf that ghost-music, and the words come faint:—Oh the months and the days,Oh sleeps and dinners,Oh the planning of waysAnd quotidian means!Oh endless vistas of mutton and greens,Oh weekly mimblings of prayer and praise,Oh Evenings with All the Winners!Monday sends the clothes to the washAnd Saturday brings them home again:Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop mocheAnd Destiny is a sale caboche;But I'll give you heavenIn a dominant seven,And you shall not have lived in vain."In vain," the girl repeats, "in vain, in vain ..."Your suburb's whole philosophy leads there.The ox-stall for our happiness, for pain,Poignant and sweet, the dull narcotic acheOf wretchedness, and in resigned despairA grim contentment ... ashen fruits to slakeA nameless, quenchless thirst. The tinkling rainOf that small sentimental music wetsYour parching suburb: it may sprout ... who knows?...In something red and silken like a rose,In sheaves of almost genuine violets.Faint chords, your sadness, secular, immense,Brims to the bursting this poor Actual heart.For surging through the floodgates that the senseOn sudden lightly opens sweeps the WholeInto the narrow compass of its part.He.Inedited sensation of the soul!You'd have us bless the Hire-Purchase System,Which now allows the poorest vampersTo feel, as they abuse their piano's dampers,That angels have stooped down and kissed 'emWith Ave-Maries from the infinite.But poor old Infinite's dead. Long live his heir,Lord Here-and-Now ... for all the restIs windy nothingness, or at the bestHome-made Chimera, bodied with despair,Headed with formless, foolish hope.She.No, no!We live in verse, for all things rhymeWith something out of space and time.He.But in the suburb here life needs must flowIn journalistic prose ...She.But we have setOur faces towards the further hills, where yetThe wind untainted and unbound may blow.II. FROM THE CREST.So through the squalor, till the sky unfoldsTo right and left its fringes, penned no more,A thin canal, 'twixt shore and ugly shoreOf hovels, poured contiguous from the mouldsOf Gothic horror. Town is left at last,Save for the tentacles that probe,... a squatDun house or two, allotments, plot on plotOf cabbage, jejune, ripe or passed,Chequering with sick yellow or verdigrisThe necropolitan ground; and neat paved waysThat edge the road ... the town's last nerves ... and cease,As if in sudden shame, where hedges raiseTheir dusty greenery on either hand.Their path mounts slowly up the hill;And, as they walk, to right and left expandThe plain and the golden uplands and the blueFaint smoke of distances that fade from view;And at their feet, remote and still?The city spreads itself.He.That glabrous dome that lifts itself so grand,There in the marish, is the omphalos,The navel, umbo, middle, central bossOf the unique, sole, true Cloud-Cuckoo Land.Drowsy with Sunday bells and Sunday beerAfoam in silver rumkins, there it basks,Thinking of labours past and future tasksAnd pondering on the end, forever near,Yet ever distant as the rainbow's spring.For still in Cuckoo-Land they're labouring,With hopes undamped and undiscouraged hearts:A little musty, but superb, they sit,Piecing a god together bit by bitOut of the chaos of his sundered parts.Unmoved, nay pitying, they view the grinsAnd lewd grimaces of the folk that jeer ...The vulgar herd, gross monster at the best,Obscenum Mobile, the uttermost sphere,Alas, too much the mover of the rest,Though they turn sungates to its widdershins ...And in some half a million years perhapsGod may at last be made ... a new, true Pan,An Isis templed in the soul of man,An Aphrodite with her thousand papsStreaming eternal wisdom.Yes, and man's vessel, all pavilioned outWith silk and flags in the fair wind astream,Shall make the port at last, with a great shoutRinging from all her decks, and rocking there shall dreamFor ever, and dream true ... calm in those roadsAs lovers' souls at evening, when they swimBetween the despairing sunset and the dimBlue memories of mountains lost to sightBut, like half fancied, half remembered episodesOf childhood, guessed at through the veils of night.And the worn sailors at the mast who heardThe first far bells and knew the sound for home,Who marked the land-weeds and the sand-stained foamAnd through the storm-blast saw a wildered birdSeek refuge at the mast-head ... these at lastShall earn due praise when all the hubbub's past;And Cuckoo-Landers not a few shall prove.She.You have fast closed the temple gates;You stand without in the noon-tides glow,But the innermost darkness, where God waits,You do not know, you cannot know.