Self and Soul

It came to me in my sleep,
And I rose in my sleep and went
Out in the night to weep,
Out where the trees were bent.
With my soul, it seemed, I stood
Alone in a wind-swept wood.

And my soul said, gazing at me,
"I will show you another land
Different from that you see,"
And took into hers my hand.--
We passed from the wood to a heath
As starved as the ribs of Death.

There, every leaf and the grass
Was a thorn or a thistle hoar,
The rocks rose mass on mass,
Black bones on an iron moor.
And my soul said, looking at me,
"The past of your life you see."

And a swineherd passed with his swine,
Deformed, with the face of an owl;
Two eyes of a wolfish shine
Burned under his eyebrows foul.
And my soul said, "This is the Lust,
That soils my beauty with dust."

Then a goose-wife hobbled by,
On a crutch, with the devil's geese,
A-mumbling that God is a lie,
And cursing the world without cease.
And my soul said, "This is Unfaith
Who maketh me that which she saith."

Then we came to a garden, close
To a hollow of graves and tombs;
A garden as red as a rose,
Hung over of obscene glooms;
The heart of each rose was a spark
That smouldered or glared in the dark.

And I was aware of a girl
With a wild-rose face, who came,
With a mouth like a shell's split pearl,
Rose-clad in a robe of flame;
And she plucked the roses and gave,
And I was her veriest slave.

She vanished. My lips would have kissed
The flowers she gave me with sighs,
But they writhed from my hands and hissed,
In their hearts were a serpent's eyes.
And my soul said, "Pleasure is she.
The joys of the flesh you see."

Then I bowed with a heart too weary,
That longed to rest, to sleep;
And it seemed in the darkness dreary
I heard my sad heart weep;
And my soul to the silence say,--
"O God! for the break of day!"