Like torturing dreams the days went by,
With all save self denied;
And Godward went man's desolate cry,
That Christ Himself had cried:
Alone each soul upon its tree
Cried to its kin,—but over me
The darkness that crushed Calvary
When God was crucified.
The present lost, I found, aghast,
A dying heart, a deathless past;
And, ever nigh, and mocking me,
A madness, or a mystery ...
And hour by hour, in peril, passed
A soul toward judgment through the vast ...
Life, a vague tumult in the blood,
Beat on 'gainst flesh and bone;
And in its echoing solitude
The heart tapped like a stone;
Till like some child at dark I stood
That stands fear-frozen in a wood,—
Alone—yet not alone.—
For mine was ghostly company:
Chilled, in the eerie air
I felt myself bend over me,
And point as with despair;
And, horror-thrilled, I turned to see
My body selfless there,
And separate,—a house of clay
That mourned its tenant gone;
Its vacant eyes would fain delay,
Its piteous hands implored to stay
The soul that in it shone.
Where one had been, in mute dismay
Two, merged in mystery, went away—
I and that other One ...
With vision blurred, and bearings lost,
Streamed on amid a phantom host
The man that was a ghost ...
Apart from human years I stood
A naked, probing mind.
Aloof I heard the beating blood,
The far-brought voices of the blood,
Flow round me like a wind;
In an abysmal solitude
I staggered like one blind.—
In wastes uncharted, far from bliss,
I heard a writhing chaos hiss;
And thought, that moved in time no more,
Wept on some wild, pre-natal shore.—
Appalled, the boundless vision burst
Through yawning gulfs of gloom;
To human hunger, human thirst
Infinite hell did loom;
Infinite bale to vision burst
In tracts of nebulous bloom;
And life through peril, lorn, accurst,
Passed on from doom to doom.
The depths were full of throes unknown,
Weird wastes of vomited fire;
Wild mists of thunderous flame were blown
Athwart eclipse; I heard the groan
Of travailing worlds stupendous thrown
Through chaos to expire:
My spirit, cowed with vastness dire,
Gazed, poised in space,—alone,—
Alone as a haunted life that lies
On the death-brink when a dread past cries,
And the live dark burns with eternal eyes.