The Keys of the Gates of Paradise

The caterpillar on the leaf
Reminds thee of thy mother's grief.
My Eternal Man set in repose,
The Female from his darkness rose;
And she found me beneath a tree,
A mandrake, and in her veil hid me.
Serpent reasonings us entice
Of good and evil, virtue, vice.
Doubt self-jealous, watery folly,
Struggling through Earth's melancholy.
Naked in air, in shame and fear,
Blind in fire, with shield and spear,
Two horrid reasoning cloven fictions,
In doubt which is self-contradiction,
A dark hermaphrodite I stood,—
Rational truth, root of evil and good.
Round me, flew the flaming sword;
Round her, snowy whirlwinds roared,
Freezing her veil, the mundane shell.
I rent the veil where the dead dwell:
When weary man enters his cave,
He meets his Saviour in the grave.
Some find a female garment there,
And some a male, woven with care,
Lest the sexual garments sweet
Should grow a devouring winding-sheet.
One dies! alas! the living and dead!
One is slain, and one is fled!
In vain-glory hatched and nursed,
By double spectres, self-accursed.
My son! my son! thou treatest me
But as I have instructed thee.
On the shadows of the moon,
Climbing through night's highest noon:
In Time's ocean falling, drowned:
In aged ignorance profound,
Holy and cold, I clipped the wings
Of all sublunary things:
And in depths of icy dungeons
Closed the father and the sons;
But, when once I did descry
The Immortal Man that cannot die,
Through evening shades I haste away
To close the labours of the day.
The door of death I open found,
And the worm weaving in the ground:
Thou'rt my mother, from the womb,
Wife, sister, daughter, to the tomb;
Weaving to dreams the sexual strife,
And weeping over the web of life.