A MIND absolved from life, made calm to know,

That carries the universe in its timeless breadths

The veil was rent that covers Nature's depths:

He saw the fount of the world's lasting pain

And the mouth of the black pit of Ignorance;

The evil guarded at the roots of life

Raised 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 Void

And the Abyss whence our beginnings rose.

Behind appeared a grey carved mask of Night

Watching 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,  

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Seemed to engender and to slay the world.

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 pain

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

A deformation coiled that claimed to be

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

A hostile and perverting Mind at work

In every corner ensconced of conscious life

Corrupted Truth with her own formulas;

Interceptor of the listening of the soul,

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 sown

That bore black fruit of suffering, death and bale.

Out of the chill steppes of a bleak Unseen

Invisible, wearing the Night's grey mask,

Arrived the shadowy dreadful messengers,

Invaders from a dangerous world of power,

Ambassadors of evil's absolute.

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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 written

Imposed 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

Answering to a small ray of truth or love;

He saw her gold sunlight and her far blue sky,

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 Light

Cherished 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 gods

And 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 heart

And put fear's crooked look into her eyes.

The lust that warps the spirit's natural good

Replaced by a manufactured virtue and vice

The frank spontaneous impulse of the soul:

Afflicting Nature with the dual's lie,

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The old simple delights were left to lie

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

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,

Alarmed the air with grandiose unease;

Appalling footsteps drew invisibly near,

Whose very gaze was a calamity:

A charm and sweetness sudden and formidable,

Faces that raised alluring lips and eyes

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

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He followed the track of dim tremendous steps

A tract he reached unbuilt and owned by none:

There all could enter but none stay for long.

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 spacious void.

Even to itself in the ambiguous heart:

A vast deception was the law of things,

A borrowed magic drew them from the Void;

They took a shape and stuff that was not theirs

Nothing could be relied on to remain:

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,

And left a cloven hoof-mark on the breast;

A twisted heart and a strange sombre smile

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None heard until a dreadful grasp was dose.

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 soul

Or took the mind captive in its own net;

His rigorous logic made the false seem true.

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;

Each friend might turn an enemy or spy,

And softly spoke as to a timid friend:

Attack sprang suddenly vehement and unseen;

Fear leaped upon the heart at every turn

And 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,

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;

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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

      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.

There each in his own darkness walked alone:

Only they agreed to differ in Evil's paths,

Or to enforce a common lie and wrong;

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 decrees

The 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 expose

The sanctified formulas of her old misrule.

In high professions wrapped self-will walked wide

And 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.

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But all their private acts belied the pose:

Power and utility were their Truth and Right,

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 of fence,

All faith not theirs bled scourged as heresy;

They questioned, captived, tortured, burned or smote

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 thought

Or mad chimera deemed or hypocrite's fake,

Its passionate instinct trailed through minds obscure

Lost 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.

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Over his shoulder often he must look back

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.

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Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power,

A pride in evil hugged its wretchedness;

A misery haunting splendour pressed those fell

Dun suburbs of the cities of dream-life.

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 charm

And, drawing panic to a shuddering kiss

Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts,

Allured to their abyss the spirit's fall.

Across the field of sight she multiplied

As 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 shade

Her dramas of the sorrow of the depths

Written on the agonised nerves of living things:

Epics of horror and grim majesty,

Turned lust into a decorative art:

Abusing Nature's gift her pervert skill

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Gave caricature a stark reality,

And art-parades of weird distorted forms,

And gargoyle masks 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

Was twisted into an unnatural pose:

Repulsion stimulated inert desire;

Agony was made a red-spiced food for bliss,

And torture took the form of an embrace;

A ritual anguish consecrated death;

Worship was offered to the Undivine.

And cherished in their place sensation's thrills;

The world was probed for jets of sense-appeal.

Mind changed to the image of a rampant beast;

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,

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The filth and festering secrets of the Abyss:

This it called positive fact and real life.

To watch its prey with fascinating eyes:

Around him like a fire with sputtering tongues

There 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 mind

Thoughts that could poison Nature's heavenliest breath,

Forcing reluctant lids assailed the sight

Acts that revealed the mystery of Hell.

All that was there was on this pattern made.

     A race possessed inhabited those parts.

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 made

With 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,

Its party's grim totalitarian reign

The cruel destiny of breathing things.

All on one plan was shaped and standardised

Under a dark dictatorship's breathless weight.

In street and house, in councils and in courts

Beings he met who looked like living men

And climbed in speech upon high wings of thought

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But 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 mind

Only 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 eye

Discovered suddenly Hell's trade-mark 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 and 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,

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,

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Breathed in a laxed content its natural air

And felt no yearning of divine release:

Arrogant, gibing at more luminous states

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 space

Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;

A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,

The pride of its abysmal absolute.

      A lone discoverer in these menacing realms

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 loneliness

That left mind bare to an unseen assault,

An empty page on which all that willed could write

Stark monstrous messages without control.

A travelling dot on downward roads of Dusk

Mid 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 there

Whose deathlike poise resisting light and truth

Made living a bleak gap in nullity.

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He heard the grisly voices that deny;

Assailed by thoughts that swarmed like spectral hordes,

All vanished suddenly like a thought expunged;

His spirit became an empty listening gulf

Void 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 being to annihilate

That it might be for ever nude and sole.

As in a shapeless beast's intangible jaws,

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 suppressed his struggling brain,

A darkness grim and cold oppressed his flesh,

A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart,

Haled by a serpent-force from its warm home

And dragged to extinction in blank 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 died

And all that helps the spirit in its course.

There crawled through every tense and aching nerve

Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail

A nameless and unutterable fear.

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As a sea nears a victim bound and still,

The approach alarmed his mind for ever dumb

Of an implacable eternity

Of pain inhuman and intolerable.

This he must bear, his hope of heaven estranged;

He must ever exist without extinction's peace

In 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 hope

And 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, bore

The smothering coils of agony and affright;

Then peace returned and the soul's sovereign gaze.

To the blank horror a calm Light replied:

Immutable, undying and unborn,

He mastered the tides of Nature with a look:

He met with his bare spirit naked Hell.

END OF CANTO SEVEN

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