FENRIS the wolf, and Jörmungand the snake
In the slime and the swamp remorseless wait.
For not the years nor human hopes can break
Valhalla’s sentence thus pronounced by Fate.
“These gods that are the children of men’s dreams—
Virtue and honour, courage and the songs
Men sing about their hearthstones—stolen gleams
In the poor heart unbroken by its wrongs,
“These gods, of man’s refusal of the beast
The half pathetic, wholly fleeting sign
Who in that tenderness are gods the least
Where human weakness finds them most divine,
“These pitiful gods, fabric of mankind’s tears
A dream of what all human hearts have wanted
The vision at the end of all the years
The holy ghost that half the world has haunted,
“These gods are mortal as the heart that shaped them
And in that hour when mankind’s heart must break
These gods who only by that heart escaped them
Fall to the wolf and Jörmungand the snake.”
Fate pauses, but from Hela’s halls is heard
A voice is young when all the gods are dead.
Balder the beautiful has one more word
The word that even Fate must leave unsaid.
“True they depart the half-gods, and the snake
And Fenris come. But in the heart’s defection
I, Balder, bound in Hell for that heart’s sake
I am the life and I the resurrection.
“I, love, being loosed, will take my harp up—so—
Singing what all the world at last will learn
‘The devils come because the half-gods go
But in the end the gods, the gods return.’”
WHEELS 1919.
WHY d’you write about Frascati’s
You who from the balcony leaning
’Neath the lure that was Astarte’s
Find a negroid devil grinning.