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Canto Seven
The Descent into Night A MIND absolved from life, made calm to know, A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang, The seal of tears, the bond of ignorance,He turned to find that wide world-failure's cause. Away he looked from Nature's visible faceAnd sent his gaze into the viewless Vast, The formidable unknown Infinity,Asleep behind the endless coil of things, That carries the universe in its timeless breadthsAnd the ripples of its being are our lives. The worlds are built by its unconscious BreathAnd Matter and Mind are its figures or its powers, Our waking thoughts the output of its dreams.The veil was rent that covers Nature's depths: He saw the fount of the world's lasting painAnd the mouth of the black pit of Ignorance; The evil guarded at the roots of lifeRaised up its head and looked into his eyes. On a dim bank where dies subjective Space,From a stark ridge overlooking all that is, A tenebrous awakened Nescience,Her wide blank eyes wondering at Time and Form, Stared at the inventions of the living VoidAnd the Abyss whence our beginnings rose. Behind appeared a grey carved mask of NightWatching the birth of all created things. A hidden Puissance conscious of its force,A vague and lurking Presence everywhere, A contrary Doom that threatens all things made,A Death figuring as the dark seed of life, Seemed to engender and to slay the world.
Page – 202 Then from the sombre mystery of the gulfs And from the hollow bosom of the Mask Something crept forth that seemed a shapeless Thought.A fatal Influence upon creatures stole Whose lethal touch pursued the immortal spirit,On life was laid the haunting finger of death And overcast with error, grief and painThe soul's native will for truth and joy and light. A deformation coiled that claimed to beThe being's very turn, Nature's true drive. A hostile and perverting Mind at workIn every corner ensconced of conscious life Corrupted Truth with her own formulas;Interceptor of the listening of the soul, Afflicting knowledge with the hue of doubtIt captured the oracles of the occult gods, Effaced the signposts of Life's pilgrimage,Cancelled the firm rock-edicts graved by Time, And on the foundations of the cosmic LawErected its bronze pylons of misrule. Even Light and Love by that cloaked danger's spellTurned from the brilliant nature of the gods To fallen angels and misleading suns,Became themselves a danger and a charm, A perverse sweetness, heaven-born malefice:Its power could deform divinest things. A wind of sorrow breathed upon the world;All thought with falsehood was besieged, all act Stamped with defect or with frustration's sign,All high attempt with failure or vain success, But none could know the reason of his fall.The grey Mask whispered and, though no sound was heard, Yet in the ignorant heart a seed was sownThat bore black fruit of suffering, death and bale. Out of the chill steppes of a bleak UnseenInvisible, wearing the Night's grey mask,
Page – 203 Arrived the shadowy dreadful messengers, Invaders from a dangerous world of power, Ambassadors of evil's absolute.In silence the inaudible voices spoke, Hands that none saw planted the fatal grain,No form was seen, yet a dire work was done, An iron decree in crooked uncials writtenImposed a law of sin and adverse fate. Life looked at him with changed and sombre eyes:Her beauty he saw and the yearning heart in things That with a little happiness is content,Answering to a small ray of truth or love; He saw her gold sunlight and her far blue sky,Her green of leaves and hue and scent of flowers And the charm of children and the love of friendsAnd the beauty of women and kindly hearts of men, But saw too the dreadful Powers that drive her moodsAnd the anguish she has strewn upon her ways, Fate waiting on the unseen steps of menAnd her evil and sorrow and last gift of death. A breath of disillusion and decadenceCorrupting watched for Life's maturity And made to rot the full grain of the soul:Progress became a purveyor of Death. A world that clung to the law of a slain LightCherished the putrid corpses of dead truths, Hailed twisted forms as things free, new and true,Beauty from ugliness and evil drank Feeling themselves guests at a banquet of the godsAnd tasted corruption like a high-spiced food. A darkness settled on the heavy air;It hunted the bright smile from Nature's lips And slew the native confidence in her heartAnd put fear's crooked look into her eyes. The lust that warps the spirit's natural goodReplaced by a manufactured virtue and vice
Page – 204 The frank spontaneous impulse of the soul: Afflicting Nature with the dual's lie, Their twin values whetted a forbidden zest,Made evil a relief from spurious good, The ego battened on righteousness and sinAnd each became an instrument of Hell. In rejected heaps by a monotonous roadThe old simple delights were left to lie On the wasteland of life's descent to Night.All glory of life was dimmed, tarnished with doubt; All beauty ended in an aging face;All power was dubbed a tyranny cursed by God And Truth a fiction needed by the mind:The chase of joy was now a tired hunt; All knowledge was left a questioning Ignorance.
As from a womb obscure he saw emerge The body and visage of a dark UnseenHidden behind the fair outsides of life. Its dangerous commerce is our suffering's cause.Its breath is a subtle poison in men's hearts; All evil starts from that ambiguous face.A peril haunted now the common air; The world grew full of menacing Energies,And wherever turned for help or hope his eyes, In field and house, in street and camp and martHe met the prowl and stealthy come and go Of armed disquieting bodied Influences.A march of goddess figures dark and nude Alarmed the air with grandiose unease;Appalling footsteps drew invisibly near, Shapes that were threats invaded the dream-light,And ominous beings passed him on the road Whose very gaze was a calamity:A charm and sweetness sudden and formidable, Faces that raised alluring lips and eyes
Page – 205 Approached him armed with beauty like a snare, But hid a fatal meaning in each line And could in a moment dangerously change.But he alone discerned that screened attack. A veil upon the inner vision lay,A force was there that hid its dreadful steps; All was belied, yet thought itself the truth;All were beset but knew not of the siege: For none could see the authors of their fall.
Aware of some dark wisdom still withheld That was the seal and warrant of this strength,He followed the track of dim tremendous steps Returning to the night from which they came.A tract he reached unbuilt and owned by none: There all could enter but none stay for long.It was a no man's land of evil air, A crowded neighbourhood without one home,A borderland between the world and hell. There unreality was Nature's lord:It was a space where nothing could be true, For nothing was what it had claimed to be:A high appearance wrapped a specious void. Yet nothing would confess its own pretenceEven to itself in the ambiguous heart: A vast deception was the law of things;Only by that deception they could live. An unsubstantial Nihil guaranteedThe falsehood of the forms this Nature took And made them seem awhile to be and live.A borrowed magic drew them from the Void; They took a shape and stuff that was not theirsAnd showed a colour that they could not keep, Mirrors to a phantasm of reality.Each rainbow brilliance was a splendid lie; A beauty unreal graced a glamour face.Nothing could be relied on to remain:
Page – 206 Joy nurtured tears and good an evil proved, But never out of evil one plucked good: Love ended early in hate, delight killed with pain,Truth into falsity grew and death ruled life. A Power that laughed at the mischiefs of the world,An irony that joined the world's contraries And flung them into each other's arms to strive,Put a sardonic rictus on God's face. Aloof, its influence entered everywhereAnd left a cloven hoof-mark on the breast; A twisted heart and a strange sombre smileMocked at the sinister comedy of life. Announcing the advent of a perilous FormAn ominous tread softened its dire footfall That none might understand or be on guard;None heard until a dreadful grasp was close. Or else all augured a divine approach,An air of prophecy felt, a heavenly hope, Listened for a gospel, watched for a new star.The Fiend was visible but cloaked in light; He seemed a helping angel from the skies:He armed untruth with Scripture and the Law; He deceived with wisdom, with virtue slew the soulAnd led to perdition by the heavenward path. A lavish sense he gave of power and joy,And, when arose the warning from within, He reassured the ear with dulcet tonesOr took the mind captive in its own net; His rigorous logic made the false seem true.Amazing the elect with holy lore He spoke as with the very voice of God.The air was full of treachery and ruse; Truth-speaking was a stratagem in that place;Ambush lurked in a smile and peril made Safety its cover, trust its entry's gate:Falsehood came laughing with the eyes of truth;
Page – 207 Each friend might turn an enemy or spy, The hand one clasped ensleeved a dagger's stab And an embrace could be Doom's iron cage.Agony and danger stalked their trembling prey And softly spoke as to a timid friend:Attack sprang suddenly vehement and unseen; Fear leaped upon the heart at every turnAnd cried out with an anguished dreadful voice; It called for one to save but none came near.All warily walked, for death was ever close; Yet caution seemed a vain expense of care,For all that guarded proved a deadly net, And when after long suspense salvation cameAnd brought a glad relief disarming strength, It served as a smiling passage to worse fate.There was no truce and no safe place to rest; One dared not slumber or put off one's arms:It was a world of battle and surprise. All who were there lived for themselves alone;All warred against all, but with a common hate Turned on the mind that sought some higher good;Truth was exiled lest she should dare to speak And hurt the heart of darkness with her lightOr bring her pride of knowledge to blaspheme The settled anarchy of established things.
Then the scene changed, but kept its dreadful core: Altering its form the life remained the same.A capital was there without a State: It had no ruler, only groups that strove.He saw a city of ancient Ignorance Founded upon a soil that knew not Light.There each in his own darkness walked alone: Only they agreed to differ in Evil's paths,To live in their own way for their own selves Or to enforce a common lie and wrong;
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There Ego was lord upon his peacock seat And Falsehood sat by him, his mate and queen:The world turned to them as Heaven to Truth and God. Injustice justified by firm decreesThe sovereign weights of Error's legalised trade, But all the weights were false and none the same;Ever she watched with her balance and a sword, Lest any sacrilegious word exposeThe sanctified formulas of her old misrule. In high professions wrapped self-will walked wideAnd licence stalked prating of order and right: There was no altar raised to Liberty;True freedom was abhorred and hunted down: Harmony and tolerance nowhere could be seen;Each group proclaimed its dire and naked Law. A frame of ethics knobbed with scriptural rulesOr a theory passionately believed and praised A table seemed of high Heaven's sacred code.A formal practice mailed and iron-shod Gave to a rude and ruthless warrior kindDrawn from the savage bowels of the earth A proud stern poise of harsh nobility,A civic posture rigid and formidable. But all their private acts belied the pose:Power and utility were their Truth and Right, An eagle rapacity clawed its coveted good,Beaks pecked and talons tore all weaker prey. In their sweet secrecy of pleasant sinsNature they obeyed and not a moralist God. Inconscient traders in bundles of contraries,They did what in others they would persecute; When their eyes looked upon their fellow's vice,An indignation flamed, a virtuous wrath; Oblivious of their own deep-hid offence,Moblike they stoned a neighbour caught in sin. A pragmatist judge within passed false decrees,
Page – 209 Posed worst iniquities on equity's base, Reasoned ill actions just, sanctioned the scale Of the merchant ego's interest and desire.Thus was a balance kept, the world could live. A zealot fervour pushed their ruthless cults,All faith not theirs bled scourged as heresy; They questioned, captived, tortured, burned or smoteAnd forced the soul to abandon right or die. Amid her clashing creeds and warring sectsReligion sat upon a blood-stained throne. A hundred tyrannies oppressed and slewAnd founded unity upon fraud and force. Only what seemed was prized as real there:The ideal was a cynic ridicule's butt; Hooted by the crowd, mocked by enlightened wits,Spiritual seeking wandered outcasted, — A dreamer's self-deceiving web of thoughtOr mad chimaera deemed or hypocrite's fake, Its passionate instinct trailed through minds obscureLost in the circuits of the Ignorance. A lie was there the truth and truth a lie.Here must the traveller of the upward Way — For daring Hell's kingdoms winds the heavenly route —Pause or pass slowly through that perilous space, A prayer upon his lips and the great Name.If probed not all discernment's keen spear-point, He might stumble into falsity's endless net.Over his shoulder often he must look back Like one who feels on his neck an enemy's breath;Else stealing up behind a treasonous blow Might prostrate cast and pin to unholy soil,Pierced through his back by Evil's poignant stake. So might one fall on the Eternal's roadForfeiting the spirit's lonely chance in Time And no news of him reach the waiting gods,Marked "missing" in the register of souls,
Page – 210 His name the index of a failing hope, The position of a dead remembered star. Only were safe who kept God in their hearts:Courage their armour, faith their sword, they must walk, The hand ready to smite, the eye to scout,Casting a javelin regard in front, Heroes and soldiers of the army of Light.Hardly even so, the grisly danger past, Released into a calmer purer air,They dared at length to breathe and smile once more. Once more they moved beneath a real sun.Though Hell claimed rule, the spirit still had power. This No-man's-land he passed without debate;Him the heights missioned, him the Abyss desired: None stood across his way, no voice forbade.For swift and easy is the downward path, And now towards the Night was turned his face.
A greater darkness waited, a worse reign, If worse can be where all is evil's extreme;Yet to the cloaked the uncloaked is naked worst. There God and Truth and the supernal LightHad never been or else had power no more. As when one slips in a deep moment's tranceOver mind's border into another world, He crossed a boundary whose stealthy traceEye could not see but only the soul feel. Into an armoured fierce domain he cameAnd saw himself wandering like a lost soul Amid grimed walls and savage slums of Night.Around him crowded grey and squalid huts Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power,Inhuman quarters and demoniac wards. A pride in evil hugged its wretchedness;A misery haunting splendour pressed those fell Dun suburbs of the cities of dream-life.
Page – 211 There Life displayed to the spectator soul The shadow depths of her strange miracle. A strong and fallen goddess without hope,Obscured, deformed by some dire Gorgon spell, As might a harlot empress in a bouge,Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised Her evil face of perilous beauty and charmAnd, drawing panic to a shuddering kiss Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts,Allured to their abyss the spirit's fall. Across his field of sight she multipliedAs on a scenic film or moving plate The implacable splendour of her nightmare pomps.On the dark background of a soulless world She staged between a lurid light and shadeHer dramas of the sorrow of the depths Written on the agonised nerves of living things:Epics of horror and grim majesty, Wry statues spat and stiffened in life's mud,A glut of hideous forms and hideous deeds Paralysed pity in the hardened breast.In booths of sin and night-repairs of vice Styled infamies of the body's concupiscenceAnd sordid imaginations etched in flesh, Turned lust into a decorative art:Abusing Nature's gift her pervert skill Immortalised the sown grain of living death,In a mud goblet poured the bacchic wine, To a satyr gave the thyrsus of a god.Impure, sadistic, with grimacing mouths, Grey foul inventions gruesome and macabreCame televisioned from the gulfs of Night. Her craft ingenious in monstrosity,Impatient of all natural shape and poise, A gape of nude exaggerated lines,Gave caricature a stark reality,
Page – 212 And art-parades of weird distorted forms, And gargoyle masques obscene and terrible Trampled to tormented postures the torn sense.An inexorable evil's worshipper, She made vileness great and sublimated filth;A dragon power of reptile energies And strange epiphanies of grovelling ForceAnd serpent grandeurs couching in the mire Drew adoration to a gleam of slime.All Nature pulled out of her frame and base Was twisted into an unnatural pose:Repulsion stimulated inert desire; Agony was made a red-spiced food for bliss,Hatred was trusted with the work of lust And torture took the form of an embrace;A ritual anguish consecrated death; Worship was offered to the Undivine.A new aesthesis of Inferno's art That trained the mind to love what the soul hates,Imposed allegiance on the quivering nerves And forced the unwilling body to vibrate.Too sweet and too harmonious to excite In this regime that soiled the being's core,Beauty was banned, the heart's feeling dulled to sleep And cherished in their place sensation's thrills;The world was probed for jets of sense-appeal. Here cold material intellect was the judgeAnd needed sensual prick and jog and lash That its hard dryness and dead nerves might feelSome passion and power and acrid point of life. A new philosophy theorised evil's rights,Gloried in the shimmering rot of decadence, Or gave to a python Force persuasive speechAnd armed with knowledge the primaeval brute. Over life and Matter only brooding bowed,Mind changed to the image of a rampant beast;
Page – 213 It scrambled into the pit to dig for truth And lighted its search with the subconscient's flares. Thence bubbling rose sullying the upper air,The filth and festering secrets of the Abyss: This it called positive fact and real life.This now composed the fetid atmosphere. A wild-beast passion crept from secret NightTo watch its prey with fascinating eyes: Around him like a fire with sputtering tonguesThere lolled and laughed a bestial ecstasy; The air was packed with longings brute and fierce;Crowding and stinging in a monstrous swarm Pressed with a noxious hum into his mindThoughts that could poison Nature's heavenliest breath, Forcing reluctant lids assailed the sightActs that revealed the mystery of Hell. All that was there was on this pattern made.
A race possessed inhabited those parts. A force demoniac lurking in man's depthsThat heaves suppressed by the heart's human law, Awed by the calm and sovereign eyes of Thought,Can in a fire and earthquake of the soul Arise and, calling to its native night,Overthrow the reason, occupy the life And stamp its hoof on Nature's shaking ground:This was for them their being's flaming core. A mighty energy, a monster god,Hard to the strong, implacable to the weak, It stared at the harsh unpitying world it madeWith the stony eyelids of its fixed idea. Its heart was drunk with a dire hunger's wine,In others' suffering felt a thrilled delight And of death and ruin the grandiose music heard.To have power, to be master, was sole virtue and good: It claimed the whole world for Evil's living room,
Page – 214 Its party's grim totalitarian reign The cruel destiny of breathing things. All on one plan was shaped and standardisedUnder a dark dictatorship's breathless weight. In street and house, in councils and in courtsBeings he met who looked like living men And climbed in speech upon high wings of thoughtBut harboured all that is subhuman, vile And lower than the lowest reptile's crawl.The reason meant for nearness to the gods And uplift to heavenly scale by the touch of mindOnly enhanced by its enlightening ray Their inborn nature's wry monstrosity.Often, a familiar visage studying Joyfully encountered at some dangerous turn,Hoping to recognise a look of light, His vision warned by the spirit's inward eyeDiscovered suddenly Hell's trademark there, Or saw with the inner sense that cannot err,In the semblance of a fair or virile form The demon and the goblin and the ghoul.An insolence reigned of cold stone-hearted strength Mighty, obeyed, approved by the Titan's law,The huge laughter of a giant cruelty And fierce glad deeds of ogre violence.In that wide cynic den of thinking beasts One looked in vain for a trace of pity or love;There was no touch of sweetness anywhere, But only Force and its acolytes, greed and hate:There was no help for suffering, none to save, None dared resist or speak a noble word.Armed with the aegis of tyrannic Power, Signing the edicts of her dreadful ruleAnd using blood and torture as a seal, Darkness proclaimed her slogans to the world.A servile blinkered silence hushed the mind
Page – 215 Or only it repeated lessons taught, While mitred, holding the good shepherd's staff, Falsehood enthroned on awed and prostrate heartsThe cults and creeds that organise living death And slay the soul on the altar of a lie.All were deceived or served their own deceit; Truth in that stifling atmosphere could not live.There wretchedness believed in its own joy And fear and weakness hugged their abject depths;All that is low and sordid-thoughted, base, All that is drab and poor and miserable,Breathed in a lax content its natural air And felt no yearning of divine release:Arrogant, gibing at more luminous states The people of the gulfs despised the sun.A barriered autarchy excluded light; Fixed in its will to be its own grey self,It vaunted its norm unique and splendid type: It soothed its hunger with a plunderer's dream;Flaunting its cross of servitude like a crown, It clung to its dismal harsh autonomy.A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue; Its hard and shameless clamour filling SpaceAnd threatening all who dared to listen to truth Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;A deafened acquiescence gave its vote, And braggart dogmas shouted in the nightKept for the fallen soul once deemed a god The pride of its abysmal absolute.
A lone discoverer in these menacing realms Guarded like termite cities from the sun,Oppressed mid crowd and tramp and noise and flare, Passing from dusk to deeper dangerous dusk,He wrestled with powers that snatched from mind its light And smote from him their clinging influences.
Page – 216 Soon he emerged in a dim wall-less space. For now the peopled tracts were left behind; He walked between wide banks of failing eve.Around him grew a gaunt spiritual blank, A threatening waste, a sinister lonelinessThat left mind bare to an unseen assault, An empty page on which all that willed could writeStark monstrous messages without control. A travelling dot on downward roads of DuskMid barren fields and barns and straggling huts And a few crooked and phantasmal trees,He faced a sense of death and conscious void. But still a hostile Life unseen was thereWhose deathlike poise resisting light and truth Made living a bleak gap in nullity.He heard the grisly voices that deny; Assailed by thoughts that swarmed like spectral hordes,A prey to the staring phantoms of the gloom And terror approaching with its lethal mouth,Driven by a strange will down ever down, ´The sky above a communique of Doom, He strove to shield his spirit from despair,But felt the horror of the growing Night And the Abyss rising to claim his soul.Then ceased the abodes of creatures and their forms And solitude wrapped him in its voiceless folds.All vanished suddenly like a thought expunged; His spirit became an empty listening gulfVoid of the dead illusion of a world: Nothing was left, not even an evil face.He was alone with the grey python Night. A dense and nameless Nothing conscious, mute,Which seemed alive but without body or mind, Lusted all beings to annihilateThat it might be for ever nude and sole. As in a shapeless beast's intangible jaws,
Page – 217 Gripped, strangled by that lusting viscous blot, Attracted to some black and giant mouth And swallowing throat and a huge belly of doom,His being from its own vision disappeared Drawn towards depths that hungered for its fall.A formless void oppressed his struggling brain, A darkness grim and cold benumbed his flesh,A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart; Haled by a serpent-force from its warm homeAnd dragged to extinction in bleak vacancy Life clung to its seat with cords of gasping breath;Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue. Existence smothered travailed to survive;Hope strangled perished in his empty soul, Belief and memory abolished diedAnd all that helps the spirit in its course. There crawled through every tense and aching nerveLeaving behind its poignant quaking trail A nameless and unutterable fear.As a sea nears a victim bound and still, The approach alarmed his mind for ever dumbOf an implacable eternity Of pain inhuman and intolerable.This he must bear, his hope of heaven estranged; He must ever exist without extinction's peaceIn a slow suffering Time and tortured Space, An anguished nothingness his endless state.A lifeless vacancy was now his breast, And in the place where once was luminous thought,Only remained like a pale motionless ghost An incapacity for faith and hopeAnd the dread conviction of a vanquished soul Immortal still but with its godhead lost,Self lost and God and touch of happier worlds. But he endured, stilled the vain terror, boreThe smothering coils of agony and affright;
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Then peace returned and the soul's sovereign gaze. To the blank horror a calm Light replied:Immutable, undying and unborn, Mighty and mute the Godhead in him wokeAnd faced the pain and danger of the world. He mastered the tides of Nature with a look:He met with his bare spirit naked Hell. END OF CANTO SEVEN Page – 219 |