Canto Seven

The Descent into Night

A MIND absolved from life, made calm to know,

A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang,

He turned to find that wide world-failure's cause.

And sent his gaze into the viewless Vast,

Asleep behind the endless coil of things,

And the ripples of its being are our lives.

And Matter and Mind are its figures or its powers,

The veil was rent that covers Nature's depths:

And the mouth of the black pit of Ignorance;

Raised up its head and looked into his eyes.

From a stark ridge overlooking all that is,

Her wide blank eyes wondering at Time and Form,

And the Abyss whence our beginnings rose.

Watching the birth of all created things.

A vague and lurking Presence everywhere,

A Death figuring as the dark seed of life,

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And from the hollow bosom of the Mask

A fatal Influence upon creatures stole

On life was laid the haunting finger of death

The soul's native will for truth and joy and light.

The being's very turn, Nature's true drive.

In every corner ensconced of conscious life

Interceptor of the listening of the soul,

It captured the oracles of the occult gods,

Cancelled the firm rock-edicts graved by Time,

Erected its bronze pylons of misrule.

Turned from the brilliant nature of the gods

Became themselves a danger and a charm,

Its power could deform divinest things.

All thought with falsehood was besieged, all act

All high attempt with failure or vain success,

The grey Mask whispered and, though no sound was heard,

That bore black fruit of suffering, death and bale.

Invisible, wearing the Night's grey mask,

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Invaders from a dangerous world of power,

In silence the inaudible voices spoke,

No form was seen, yet a dire work was done,

Imposed a law of sin and adverse fate.

Her beauty he saw and the yearning heart in things

Answering to a small ray of truth or love;

Her green of leaves and hue and scent of flowers

And the beauty of women and kindly hearts of men,

And the anguish she has strewn upon her ways,

And her evil and sorrow and last gift of death.

Corrupting watched for Life's maturity

Progress became a purveyor of Death.

Cherished the putrid corpses of dead truths,

Beauty from ugliness and evil drank

And tasted corruption like a high-spiced food.

It hunted the bright smile from Nature's lips

And put fear's crooked look into her eyes.

Replaced by a manufactured virtue and vice

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Afflicting Nature with the dual's lie,

Made evil a relief from spurious good,

And each became an instrument of Hell.

The old simple delights were left to lie

All glory of life was dimmed, tarnished with doubt;

All power was dubbed a tyranny cursed by God

The chase of joy was now a tired hunt;

As from a womb obscure he saw emerge

Hidden behind the fair outsides of life.

Its breath is a subtle poison in men's hearts;

A peril haunted now the common air;

And wherever turned for help or hope his eyes,

He met the prowl and stealthy come and go

A march of goddess figures dark and nude

Appalling footsteps drew invisibly near,

And ominous beings passed him on the road

A charm and sweetness sudden and formidable,

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But hid a fatal meaning in each line

But he alone discerned that screened attack.

A force was there that hid its dreadful steps;

All were beset but knew not of the siege:

Aware of some dark wisdom still withheld

He followed the track of dim tremendous steps

A tract he reached unbuilt and owned by none:

It was a no man's land of evil air,

A borderland between the world and hell.

It was a space where nothing could be true,

A high appearance wrapped a specious void.

Even to itself in the ambiguous heart:

Only by that deception they could live.

The falsehood of the forms this Nature took

A borrowed magic drew them from the Void;

And showed a colour that they could not keep,

Each rainbow brilliance was a splendid lie;

Nothing could be relied on to remain:

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But never out of evil one plucked good:

Truth into falsity grew and death ruled life.

An irony that joined the world's contraries

Put a sardonic rictus on God's face.

And left a cloven hoof-mark on the breast;

Mocked at the sinister comedy of life.

An ominous tread softened its dire footfall

None heard until a dreadful grasp was close.

An air of prophecy felt, a heavenly hope,

The Fiend was visible but cloaked in light;

He armed untruth with Scripture and the Law;

And led to perdition by the heavenward path.

And, when arose the warning from within,

Or took the mind captive in its own net;

Amazing the elect with holy lore

The air was full of treachery and ruse;

Ambush lurked in a smile and peril made

Falsehood came laughing with the eyes of truth;

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The hand one clasped ensleeved a dagger's stab

Agony and danger stalked their trembling prey

Attack sprang suddenly vehement and unseen;

And cried out with an anguished dreadful voice;

All warily walked, for death was ever close;

For all that guarded proved a deadly net,

And brought a glad relief disarming strength,

There was no truce and no safe place to rest;

It was a world of battle and surprise.

All warred against all, but with a common hate

Truth was exiled lest she should dare to speak

Or bring her pride of knowledge to blaspheme

Then the scene changed, but kept its dreadful core:

A capital was there without a State:

He saw a city of ancient Ignorance

There each in his own darkness walked alone:

To live in their own way for their own selves

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There Ego was lord upon his peacock seat

The world turned to them as Heaven to Truth and God.

The sovereign weights of Error's legalised trade,

Ever she watched with her balance and a sword,

The sanctified formulas of her old misrule.

And licence stalked prating of order and right:

True freedom was abhorred and hunted down:

Each group proclaimed its dire and naked Law.

Or a theory passionately believed and praised

A formal practice mailed and iron-shod

Drawn from the savage bowels of the earth

A civic posture rigid and formidable.

Power and utility were their Truth and Right,

Beaks pecked and talons tore all weaker prey.

Nature they obeyed and not a moralist God.

They did what in others they would persecute;

An indignation flamed, a virtuous wrath;

Moblike they stoned a neighbour caught in sin.

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Reasoned ill actions just, sanctioned the scale

Thus was a balance kept, the world could live.

All faith not theirs bled scourged as heresy;

And forced the soul to abandon right or die.

Religion sat upon a blood-stained throne.

And founded unity upon fraud and force.

The ideal was a cynic ridicule's butt;

Spiritual seeking wandered outcasted, —

Or mad chimaera deemed or hypocrite's fake,

Lost in the circuits of the Ignorance.

Here must the traveller of the upward Way —

Pause or pass slowly through that perilous space,

If probed not all discernment's keen spear-point,

Over his shoulder often he must look back

Else stealing up behind a treasonous blow

Pierced through his back by Evil's poignant stake.

Forfeiting the spirit's lonely chance in Time

Marked "missing" in the register of souls,

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The position of a dead remembered star.

Courage their armour, faith their sword, they must walk,

Casting a javelin regard in front,

Hardly even so, the grisly danger past,

They dared at length to breathe and smile once more.

Though Hell claimed rule, the spirit still had power.

Him the heights missioned, him the Abyss desired:

For swift and easy is the downward path,

A greater darkness waited, a worse reign,

Yet to the cloaked the uncloaked is naked worst.

Had never been or else had power no more.

Over mind's border into another world,

Eye could not see but only the soul feel.

And saw himself wandering like a lost soul

Around him crowded grey and squalid huts

Inhuman quarters and demoniac wards.

A misery haunting splendour pressed those fell

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The shadow depths of her strange miracle.

Obscured, deformed by some dire Gorgon spell,

Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised

And, drawing panic to a shuddering kiss

Allured to their abyss the spirit's fall.

As on a scenic film or moving plate

On the dark background of a soulless world

Her dramas of the sorrow of the depths

Epics of horror and grim majesty,

A glut of hideous forms and hideous deeds

In booths of sin and night-repairs of vice

And sordid imaginations etched in flesh,

Abusing Nature's gift her pervert skill

In a mud goblet poured the bacchic wine,

Impure, sadistic, with grimacing mouths,

Came televisioned from the gulfs of Night.

Impatient of all natural shape and poise,

Gave caricature a stark reality,

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And gargoyle masques obscene and terrible

An inexorable evil's worshipper,

A dragon power of reptile energies

And serpent grandeurs couching in the mire

All Nature pulled out of her frame and base

Repulsion stimulated inert desire;

Hatred was trusted with the work of lust

A ritual anguish consecrated death;

A new aesthesis of Inferno's art

Imposed allegiance on the quivering nerves

Too sweet and too harmonious to excite

Beauty was banned, the heart's feeling dulled to sleep

The world was probed for jets of sense-appeal.

And needed sensual prick and jog and lash

Some passion and power and acrid point of life.

Gloried in the shimmering rot of decadence,

And armed with knowledge the primaeval brute.

Mind changed to the image of a rampant beast;

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And lighted its search with the subconscient's flares.

The filth and festering secrets of the Abyss:

This now composed the fetid atmosphere.

To watch its prey with fascinating eyes:

There lolled and laughed a bestial ecstasy;

Crowding and stinging in a monstrous swarm

Thoughts that could poison Nature's heavenliest breath,

Acts that revealed the mystery of Hell.

A race possessed inhabited those parts.

That heaves suppressed by the heart's human law,

Can in a fire and earthquake of the soul

Overthrow the reason, occupy the life

This was for them their being's flaming core.

Hard to the strong, implacable to the weak,

With the stony eyelids of its fixed idea.

In others' suffering felt a thrilled delight

To have power, to be master, was sole virtue and good:

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The cruel destiny of breathing things.

Under a dark dictatorship's breathless weight.

Beings he met who looked like living men

But harboured all that is subhuman, vile

The reason meant for nearness to the gods

Only enhanced by its enlightening ray

Often, a familiar visage studying

Hoping to recognise a look of light,

Discovered suddenly Hell's trademark there,

In the semblance of a fair or virile form

An insolence reigned of cold stone-hearted strength

The huge laughter of a giant cruelty

In that wide cynic den of thinking beasts

There was no touch of sweetness anywhere,

There was no help for suffering, none to save,

Armed with the aegis of tyrannic Power,

And using blood and torture as a seal,

A servile blinkered silence hushed the mind

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While mitred, holding the good shepherd's staff,

The cults and creeds that organise living death

All were deceived or served their own deceit;

There wretchedness believed in its own joy

All that is low and sordid-thoughted, base,

Breathed in a lax content its natural air

Arrogant, gibing at more luminous states

A barriered autarchy excluded light;

It vaunted its norm unique and splendid type:

Flaunting its cross of servitude like a crown,

A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;

And threatening all who dared to listen to truth

A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,

Kept for the fallen soul once deemed a god

A lone discoverer in these menacing realms

Oppressed mid crowd and tramp and noise and flare,

He wrestled with powers that snatched from mind its light

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For now the peopled tracts were left behind;

Around him grew a gaunt spiritual blank,

That left mind bare to an unseen assault,

Stark monstrous messages without control.

Mid barren fields and barns and straggling huts

He faced a sense of death and conscious void.

Whose deathlike poise resisting light and truth

He heard the grisly voices that deny;

A prey to the staring phantoms of the gloom

Driven by a strange will down ever down,

The sky above a communique of Doom,

But felt the horror of the growing Night

Then ceased the abodes of creatures and their forms

All vanished suddenly like a thought expunged;

Void of the dead illusion of a world:

He was alone with the grey python Night.

Which seemed alive but without body or mind,

That it might be for ever nude and sole.

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Attracted to some black and giant mouth

His being from its own vision disappeared

A formless void oppressed his struggling brain,

A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart;

And dragged to extinction in bleak vacancy

Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue.

Hope strangled perished in his empty soul,

And all that helps the spirit in its course.

Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail

As a sea nears a victim bound and still,

Of an implacable eternity

This he must bear, his hope of heaven estranged;

In a slow suffering Time and tortured Space,

A lifeless vacancy was now his breast,

Only remained like a pale motionless ghost

And the dread conviction of a vanquished soul

Self lost and God and touch of happier worlds.

The smothering coils of agony and affright;

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Then peace returned and the soul's sovereign gaze.

Immutable, undying and unborn,

And faced the pain and danger of the world.

He met with his bare spirit naked Hell.

END OF CANTO SEVEN

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