Book V, Canto III: Satan

"Now again in the dreary blear-eyed room,
Where the poor boy lay murdered on the floor,
I find me ; and that white heap lies there yet,
On naked boards, life-crimsoned ; a thin fog
Of London fouls the atmosphere ; the pane
Only reveals red tile roof, and soiled chimney,
Through shivered, grimed glass ; in the room is more
Now than one body ; cold upon her pallet
Lay the dead maiden whom they starved ;
and through
The door half-open I behold the child
Flit up and down, with those two heavy irons
Dragging at skeleton arms ; while yonder stark
In that dim corner stares a small drowned corse.
Loathly, unclean accoiiplements in air
Take hinted shape phantasmal, or withdraw.
Amid the muttering of wicked words.

" I feel death-chilled from some strange, ghostly air,
And vital power drawn from me ; then rushed
A supernatural Wind of ample pinion.
That swooped, and wailed, and fell ; the affrighted chamber
Shuddered : I was aware of a dread Presence.
It seemed a pale mist nourished on my life.
Deadly miasm exhaling from my body.
Trailing now convolutions serpentine
Upon the floor ; a monster parasite.
It thickened, coiled voluminous ; and then
Rose solid, palpable, huge dragon train,
Towering high till it assumed a crest.
Human, yet half inhuman ; now it wavered,
As though in act to threaten with a fang.
All the dull-white showed clots of Ijlood in it;
I deem them mine ; and yet the Thing appeared
Very embodied soul of the vile scene,
Of all the loathly outer circumstance :
Whose human visage, livid like grim death,
Whose vampire visage, monster life-in-death,
Fascinates with an evil-glittering eye.

"And still a grandeur outraged and defiled
Sat throned upon the ruin-countenance.
On the large god-front, broadly reared and high,
Like some pale crag, some temple wall, shagged over
With thickets of dull hair ; on loose lewd lips
Dwelt Cruelty, Pride, arrogant Disdain,
While hard Hate glared from cavernous green eyes,
Unchallenged owner, with immense Despair;
Save when some lurid Passion smouldered sullen,
Or flared infernal ; yet withal in them.
As on the haggard, marred, and wasted cheek.
There reigned so absolute a desolation,
That Pity rose upon the night of Fear
And Horror, like a timid trembling star.
Venturing even here with her faint ray —
Now It assumed the guise of a well-dressed.
And cynic-sneering modern gentleman.

" None could have told the age of the dread Thing —
It might have been or very old, or young —
Whose haunting set grey face
Is all one blight, and pregnant with decay. . . .
I can but grovel, cower underneath.
Spell-bound by this, more dire than the
Anaconda.
What is it?" Cain, the murderer, the rebel?
Or legendary wanderer. Ahasuerus?
Or that Medusa fury's Gorgon-head ?
Ahriman, Satan, Mephistopheles,
Arch-critic, nourished on belittlement —
Malign joy strength accords to impotence —
Or some projection of the worst in me,
Horribly thriven at a soul's expense ?

" I hear it breathe in tones sepulchral, low.
Some heart-o'erwhelming knolling of a knell,
Which maddeneth, like that torture of the drop
In mediaeval dungeons on the crown !
Now loud with heart -cleft anguish, and despair,
Syllables poignant with the wind's wild wail ;
Charged now with hollow mockery and gibe,
Thin, ringing false, blood-curdling, half a hiss.
Every malignant word deprived of strength.
Drew life forth, slow blood from the gladiator,
And fell like clods upon a coffin-lid.
I felt as though some fungus of the charnel
Were growing over my dim, withered heart.

" ' You shall not have your child for all your pother.
For he is well extinguished ; so are these —
The happy children a fair accident.
And these an uglier — thus you say they seem
To you — yet they're congenial enough
To other folk — proverbially tastes differ !
Your vice may relish what their virtue frowns at,
The while your bridling virtue scorns their vice.
There is no right, nor wrong, nor heart in
Nature !
She suffocates the miner in the mine ;
Earth yawns to swallow honest labour, tombed
Among the fallen stones of his poor home.
Slowly to starve there, inaccessible.
She shakes his roof down upon masquing
Mirth,
And gaily-tripping Innocence, but dumb
And stolid stands, accomplice of a crime.
Who hurls the panic-stricken freight of men,
So roused from slumber, trapped in their own trains.
From high- built viaducts, their own proud work,
Ablaze, one shrieking, dizzying chaos down
To iron-bound winter water, which denies
A drop to quench the fierce flame, that devours
At leisure victims, caged behind strong bars,
Themselves devised to guard from misadventure !
Convulsed with mirth at her grim irony,
Look how she glowers over them, and grins !

"'What more? the time would fail me, should I summon
All my great cloud of witnesses for evil !
She grinds together huge ships in mid-ocean.
Mere brittle shells in Her portentous grasp,
Holds puny, pale crews drenched in cold suspense
Over the maws of ravening wave-furies,
That pluck and hiss at them, and show white teeth,
Where lurks the foul shark, ere she drops them in — -
Maddens in open boats, until they pray —
Yes ! pray to God — then prey on one another ! —
Sun-smitten and delirious, after draughts
Of tantalising brine from the false water. . . .

" ' Huge ship dismasted, staggering to her doom,
While the loud surge sweeps over her drenched decks !
A man is lashed to the helm ; the rest are sealed.
And battened down beneath, shut in with
Horror,
To madden, rend one another, stifle, drown.
Rats in a hole ; whose screams and wails appeal
To ravening wind, and wildly hounded cloud !
One plunge ! one last loud shriek caught away by the blast.
Mangled, mocked, sucked into its mastering roar,
And consubstantiate with senseless Sound !
Dominant, blind black Vortex whirls, rolls, rages.
And brief-lived bubbles float in place of men ! —
Dive to the deeps ! there shapes of the well-loved
Drift heaped, stiff, festered, eaten of monstrous things ! . . .
She decimates with cancer, and long pangs
On your sick beds ashore : O Tamburlaine,
Caligula, Tiberius, De Sade,
Well may you droop your shamefast eyes, and kneel
Before your Queen, your Mistress crowned with crime,
Avowing how She dwarfs imagination
With hell-born ingenuities of wrong !
" ' Did God appoint the infant-murdering woman.
Who slowly starves, and rols with foul disease.
Through filth, stench, long neglect, cold cruelty,
Pale, pleading babes, she undertook to cherish.
Presiding genius of the baby-farm,
Vampire, that sucks the blood of innocence ?
Or did He make her heart, who does to death
Her own child, for some base insurance fee,
Which she will pour fire-molten down her throat ?—
Or doth this brittle, poor potter's clay defy
Him ?
Our confraternity applaud such deeds !
But God ! Even I dare not so frantically
Blaspheme as charge such petty crimes on
God!
If He commanded, then Myself am He,
And if permitted, He is Impotence.
Choose, man, your horn! or else, renounce your God !

" ' Or will you, in sooth, sophisticate your souls
By arguing Wrong mere roundabout, masked
Right ?
Well ! you are more mine for the specious lie! . . .
If there's a God, I never met with Him.
The emaciate, cruel-eyed inquisitor.
And soldiers fanatic drenched earth with blood,
Oppressed the unconscious air with human woe.
In that dread Name ! and who were glad but we?

" ' There is no right, no wrong, no heart in
Nature :
Your right and wrong are rules for your own order.
Rules variable, moreover, and unsure.
Nay, virtue is but idiosyncrasies.
Similar, close-knit, long-inherited,
Thrust upon others, under penalty.
Provide for your own order how ye may,
Great Nature careth but a little for it !
Nay, but She made your order ? Well, 'tis true.
Yet if you lean on her, you'll find a whore,
Fickle of humour, fancying one to-day,
And much preferring another by to-morrow.
Her rough -hewn plans jostle at cross-purposes,
Malformed brats, fighting as they leave the womb.
She shouldereth you unceremoniously
Aside in blundering on her big blind way,
And trampleth on the writhing hearts she whelped.
Hers the volcanoes, hers the foodful fields
They devastate ; who brings to birth fair children.
And loathly monsters, with the same set smile.
Vacuous, impartial ; now the Fury wields
Storm, Earthquake, Pestilence, now Humanthonged
Red scourges, Tyranny, or Revolution,
Lust, Murder; yet she neither bans nor blesses ;
For Mind informs not the Automaton ;
One huge, impassive Immobility,
A Block, to whom Delirium lends gesture.

" ' Hers two colossal faces, and dread names,
Anarchy-Order, Order- Anarchy :
She alternateth both ad libitum ;
(Her seesaw is a trifle wearisome !)

" 'Whom she engendereth, shall she not destroy ?
Sole Fountain she of Honour and Dishonour ;
Absolute Sovereign, she may apportion either.
Who are you that arraign her ? Pray, whine, whimper !
But, fool ! do you suppose that she can hear ?
Who wearieth more of babes and population
Than any murdering mother of you all.
Whom she inspireth in her irony
To emulate her royalty of wrong.
Deterioration. — I
" ' I commend to you the ethics of deterioration.
A genius, a temperament of fire,
Weighted with the dead weight of ancestral sin 1
Pegasus turning a mill-wheel,
While his white wings wave, longing for the ether !
Yet even Pegasus cannot feed on air.
The portals of sense were closely barred
Against the entrance of any lovely vision,
Barred against fair imagery from the world,
Though the man was gifted with all sensibility.
Prepared in the stately temple of his spirit
Were niches for carven gods innumerable,
Who would have made it beautiful as a dream.
These by the Architect in irony.
These was it forbidden to fill in :
Night formless suffused the ample spaces ;
For the Builder had left the windows blind.
Within were all appointments for ritual,
Yet neither wrought gold, embroidered fabric, nor pure white lily
Might ever be conveyed thither from without ;
And so the temple rites were maimed :
Although friendly voices from the darkness.
Kindly accents of comrades, were fain to cheer him ;
Yea, the voice of his well-beloved spake to him.
But one morning he addressed her.
Her blind lover addressed her.
With fond playfulness, as was his wont,
And there came no answer ;
So he leaned foreboding hands to feel for her,
To feel for her in her accustomed place.
Half hoping and believing she might be in play,
Because the alternative were too tremendous for endurance.
But her face was clay-cold when he touched it.
His consolation was clay-cold,
Who might have redeemed his soul !
A little later, the voices of companions,
One by one, were put to silence ;
As lamps may be extinguished after service ;
Until around the solitary inmate
Reigned one immensity of desolation.
"'Then awoke the House-Curse of the family,
From where it slept in the dim crypt,
Feigning a mortal slumber ;
It wailed only for opportunity.
Now the Fury sprang upon him,
Seized him in his mortal weakness,
In the lone hour of his despair,
Gript him in relentless talon ;
Till he, weary of unendurable
Life, yielded him to temptation,
Delivered himself over to fatal vice,
With unnatural lust wooing even Annihilation.
Then fell the fair temple, tottering to ruin.

' ' Have you ever watched a drowning thing in the water —
A little animal thrown into it by rough hands?
For a moment it struggles in mortal anguish ;
But stone upon stone, well-aimed,
Sinks it with reiterated blows,
Mangled and choking, under the flood. . . .
Who weighted with ancestral ruin the feeble soul ?
Who flung it in sunless gulfs to drown,
Stoning it with misfortune upon misfortune? . . .
But ' credo quia impossibile"
I may boast, has never been my motto !
" Hast thou observed my servant Job ? "
I think I may answer that I have observed him often.
And such was the conclusion at which he arrived.
So I leave you to conclude what was mine. . . .
Regard but the seething swarms of your huge cities !
Steeped in muddy environments from their birth up.
The stagnant sewer of whose blood is one corruption.
Dull reptiles nourished in congenial slime.
If there wa-e another life beyond the grave.
These would enter it under favourable auspices !
" ' Lo ! the blithe squirrel, with its nested young,
Who plays among lit laughter of young leaves,
His stored nuts of the forest lying near.
Suddenly troubled ! — he descends the boughs,
Feebly resisting : at the caverned trunk
Arrived, there glare fixed eyes of a stark snake,
Ringed, mailed, fierce lusting for its proper prey.
Waiting him in the hollow : look! he leaps,
Death-doomed and dazed, into red-gulfing jaws.
Inevitable— type of your free-will !
Example of the kindness of your gods !
And their beneficent contrivance ! fie !
What " good " can Horror do this animal ?
What "moral gain" to him in lingering torture.
Or long, excruciating agony ?
Glad life grows out of, feeds on, painful death . . .
Such the essential structure of the work
Omnipotent Benevolence devised !

" 'These slaughters, and that roasting of a mother
By her own children for a paltry hoard,
( )ver a slow fire ! yawnings of hell-fire,
Flame-flaps to show the furious furnace under —
A boy of eight, her grandson, told the tale —
What admirable nurture your good gods
Provide for their young charges, to be sure !
Old Priestcraft did this family much good !
Priestridden, Agnostic, ye are all one Death;
Your Calvinist was right at least in that.

" ' Some are born devil, and some saint, they say,
While some born devil seem to turn to saint.
All by material necessity !
A brain secretes the virtue, and the vice,
Which, decomposing, can secrete no more.
And blood-disease, or blows upon the head.
Convert the sage saint back to a mad sinner.
For all's laborious goodness, built with pain —
That's a ' conversion " ; only upside down !
Nay, I've known many a hale old man
" converted "
In such a wise, and cursing his pure youth ;
Joseph regrets that wife of Potiphar,
And rails on the prim boyhood, which refused her,
Because he'll never get another chance.
The drivelling babe returns in the old dotard,
Fool's babble of man relapsing to the silence,
Whence it emerged so very uselessly.
Cease, vain curvetting Virtue ! you who dance
As you are wound by the fool, Circumstance !

" 'The use of suffering ! use of fiddlesticks !
See yon blasphemer harden under it !
And when primeval Chaos comes again,
The old Abyss remains indifferent.
If it's a comfort, pray to the deaf Silence !
But understand, it can't so much as grin.
To mock your prayer. And for your " wise,"
"good" men,
Who, fumbling at old knots, entangle more,
Who, wrangling, only pour oil on hot hate,
These are but bigger animalcules ; all
Your little noise will cease at the last cold.
The Deep once dreamed a nightmare of abortions.
The Tragi-comedy of Human kind ;
And when It woke, misshapen shadows fled;
I pray God to avert another, like it !

" ' Why did you leave your old glad gods ?
For now
They lie dead; yea, and younger gods lie dead.
Why stayed ye not with Bacchus and his crew?
Remains for worship iron-bound blind Law.
Ye move now in a dim, dun, dismal world
Of listless Wealth, of lean, monotonous Toil,
One bone between her savage and starved sons,
Snarling and tearing madly for one bone,
Who make the earth that groans beneath red shamt)les.

"'There is no life for you beyond the grave.
No, nor redress, nor hope for these dead children.
Why crush your heart against the Inevitable?
Nay, rather, sip your pleasure — gulp your bliss —
Get all you can ! enjoy it while you may !
Or if you say you may not relish joy.
Because it tastes of alien suffering,
As though some tears had dropped into the cup.
Then die ! die now ! Repose is with the dead.
They have a monopoly of that !
And thank your stars, poor men, that ye are mortal !
What direr curse than immortality?
Than immortality without a God ?
Alas ! alas ! . . .
Ha ! what am I, then, who now talk with you? . . .
Why, a phantasm of your disordered brain! . . .
Mad ! are you ? . . . wish you may indeed go mad !
In such a world 'tis better to be mad.
Lie down with this cold clay you say you love —
What if some like their cuddles cold, some hot?

" ' Old age, the shadowy vestibule of Death,
Long, chill, pale cloister, over-roofed with yew,
Looms lone and dreary ; Death awaits you all,
To still your tired hearts for you ; then die!
Cut short the long unfriended road ; die now !
Ye dawned at early morning from the Abyss ;
Now it is evening ; fade, and cease therein !
And learn, man ! one dread name of mine.
Despair,
Most formidable name of all the names
Men call nie by ! — more life but means more pain.
Then why live?
That inner burden which you deem your sin
Weighs heavier, ever more intolerable,
Weighs you to earth, yea, drags you down to hell.
" ' Vou cannot carry it with jaunty step,
Or light heart, nor yet leave behind — how cure
The monstrous cancer of your own bad blood,
Anger, and lust, and vanity, and pride ?
Repentance ? Had I any laughter left
I'd keep it all for that ! Repent! To-morrow
You'll sin anew, and more yet ! Will remorse.
Were it sincere, undo the harm you did
To those weak souls, whom you dared feign to /ove? . . .

" ' Ye are but attitudinising apes,
With all your airs of penitence, reform ! . . .
Why scold your fellows ? hypocrite, look nearer !
You, the potential murderer of these !
You, their corrupter I . . . die, for very shame,
Before you inflict worse injury ! Begone !
Why seek not now the cold breast of your mother? . . .
I mean the Abyss, your mother, fool ! to rest
There from more conflict, effort, vain endeavour.
Even as they ? ... So very still they lie . . .
Behold their slumber ! — that is sleep indeed. . . .
Your child, your mother, summon you away. . . .
What ! don't you recognise the sainted tones? . . .
Nothing is certain, save confusion . . .
go! . . .
Fall down, and worship ... in me behold your god ! '
I, cowering underneath the awful eyes.
Regarding, fascinated, the dread Face,
Whose stony cold invades my own chill heart,
Beheld therein, with more supreme dismay.
The same dire Visage, which confronted mine
Erst in my lonely thought, when insolent
I dared adjure great Isis to unveil.
And, for reward, beheld the countenance.
The rigid countenance of Death, that wore
Malign, set scowl of supernatural Hate. . . .
Methought this loomed more luge, till it usurped
All space, and claimed to be tht Universe —
Our flimsy decent coverings withdrawn.
Withdrawn at last. . . . ' Now, ;im I fair ? '
it breathed
In hoarse, low mocking tones . . and lo !
this seemed
Mine own face, dead. . . . Tlirust down, I reeled, and fell . . .
Yet clutched at somewhat in the jaws of hell . . .
Yea, nerved my spirit with one last wild cry
For one last wrestle with the enemy. . . .
A Voice spake in me ; yea, mine own heart spoke.
Ah ! but it sounded like his, who forsook
Our darkling path in that far-off drear night
Of winter! and yet /cried out for light ! . . .