V

I plunged through rooms of deepest Tyrian dye;
I tore the veils from mysteries aside;
But grinning pleasure ever met mine eye.
In anguished ecstasy of bliss, I cried;
And through the halls, I heard the echo wane
Until the last, most distant answer sighed:
"The spirit of the world is pain, pain, pain—"
Then from the drowsy distance, there did well
A voice as of a witch before her fane,
Soft-muttering, some Heaven-blasting spell:
"The world is all in vain, the merest tool
Of accident, an anteroom to Hell,
A counterfeit but fairly glinting pool—
Snatch all the joy thou canst, thou human fool!"

VI

And then I searched within myself to find
The how and why of all I heard and saw.
I found but silent Nothing. Wearied, blind,
I strove to learn the omnipresent Law
On whose foundation all these chambers lean.
I found within the artifice no flaw;
And not the slightest secret could I glean.
I searched the winding, labyrinthine halls,
And scanned colossal colonnades between
Whose rows unending space is seen that palls
The straining sight, yet thither lures the eye
With fairy sheen. Through all the outer walls,
No doorway pierced to water, earth or sky:
Is there an answer to the how and why?

VII

And yet I am condemned to live, to be.
What horrid Fate decreed it? Life is blind,
And cannot see the Truth. Oh, but for me
To know, to solve this riddle of the mind!
And yet no whisper through the age's gloom
Has taught the latent answer that I pined;
And finally in a sombre-tinted room,
I sank in languor on the marble floor,
And faintly wondered at my destined doom.
Upon my weary spirit, came once more
A faint remembrance of a former time,
A faint remembrance, I had known before,
That clung about me like an ancient rime:
Death is to the soul but a change of clime.

VIII