'The golden trout leaped up to view,
The moorfowl clapped his wings and crew,
The swallow brushed him as she flew.
'He looked upon the glorious sun,
His blood dropped slowly on the stone,
He loved the life so nearly won,
'And then he died. The ravens found
A carcase couched upon the ground,
They said their god had dealt the wound.
'The Eternal Father calmly shook
One page untitled from life's book—
Few words. None ever cared to look.
'Yet woe for life thus idly riven,
He blindly loved what God had given,
And love, some say, has conquered Heaven.'
What Wilfrid Blunt perceives and feels more keenly than greater English poets, more keenly indeed than any English poet except Shelley and Matthew Arnold, are the pathos, the value, the infinite sadness, of these free forest, or desert, lives struck down in the fulness of their strength and beauty by the brutal pursuit of that ravenous and insatiable brute which is Man. It is this emotion which has inspired in him the strange poem named 'Satan Absolved.'
'Satan Absolved' was not written when Mr Henley edited the books of earlier poems, and I imagine that it has scared Mr Henley and displeased him. I do not know this, I have not asked, but I imagine that 'Satan Absolved' must make Mr Henley extremely uncomfortable.
Briefly, the motive of 'Satan Absolved' is the accusation brought by Satan against Man; and against God, as the Creator and Authoriser of Man. This will sound in many ears a profanity; but it is not so, and Satan has sad reason in his arguments. It was a fine and lofty courage which made the author produce it at a moment when the English people are drunk and delirious with the lust of carnage and of conquest, and the great thinker Herbert Spencer has accepted its dedication, whilst the great painter Watts has given it its frontispiece.
It is a poem which will alienate many, affright many, and to many no doubt will appear blasphemous; but it is absolutely true in its hardy and original conception of the sins of mankind against the other races of the earth, and of the hypocrisy, brutality, and avarice of man, clothed and cultured, against man primitive and helpless. It is a cri de coeur, breaking almost involuntarily from a heart swollen with indignation, and scorn, and pain, before the emptiness of creeds, the impudence of prayer and praise, the vileness of aggression and of war-lust.
'Hast Thou not heard their chanting? Nay, Thou dost not hear,
Or Thou hadst loosed Thy hand, like lightning in the clear,
To smite their ribald lips with palsy!'