Classic Poem

Stupid on the sand, like a stoned bird,
With his limp wings languishing, lay Asmodeus;
The vast dazzling grey of desert ground
Like a speck took the size of the sprawling spirit.
A brindled locust, when its brittle membranes
Flames of the bonfires the brass-beating farmers
Kindle, have caught and crippled with shrivelling:
Such a lame locust the demon lay.
And such a scorching, that sent him tumbling,
Ecbatan to Egypt, in ungovernable flight,
Such a withering and blasting, till his blunders ended
In a stunning fall furrowing the sand,
Such bitter passion as a burnt thing passes through —
The smell of the smoke of smouldering fish:
Suffocating frenzy to the sensitive fiend,
Ransacking agony and ruin like flame.
But long time lying in the sunlight of Egypt
And odourless air of the empty place,
From the wreck of his members and his reeking memory
The drench of the poison was purified, and past.
Shuddering out of senselessness the swoon'd life crept;
But lamentable life now, for all it was cleansed:
His grief still a story astonishing his mind.
" I saw them coming, I saw the young men
Rejoicing in their journey, and jolly with their dog,
I sitting on the roof above Sara's room.
I knew not their minds, they were nothing to me:
Handsome young men, in the honey-yellow light,
With Median evening mingled in their hair,
Making pelt for pebbles the pretty shock dog.
I lookt at their beauty and boasted lazily:
Seven such fine fellows have these fingers strangled,
Seven bride-grooms lie buried in graves,
Seven such glitterers are secrets in the garden;
No housing for you here, you handsome young men!
" But were they wizards, that my wantoning mood,
Chattering within me, could challenge like a voice?
Did a magical hearing quiver in their minds,
As through to them my thought thrill'd along the light?
For they came marching in. They made a marriage.
And I knew nothing, I knew not their mastery;
Nothing I reckoned but the rage in me again
To deal like a demon with the flesh that dared
Come lusting for the slenderness of my delight, my Sara.
So I laught and I waited: I lookt through the window,
And in the dark garden lo! the digging of a grave:
Raguel making ready where to roll the morning corpse,
Like a sensible father, seven times instructed.
Ay, old sir, said I, more strangling to be done,
More mould to be stampt down before the market stirs!
But I knew nothing: not when the new bridegroom,
My frightened Sara faltering before him,
Brought in his nastiness, nothing I knew;
Not even when he pickt from out his fulsome pocket
His filthy handful of offal of a fish,
And the brown morsel in the brazier's midmost,
With a little prim smile, prest well upon the coals,
I knew not his mastery, I rankling for his murder.
" Ah! then, then I knew — nay, then I knew nothing
But anguish and anguish through me like lightning,
And a leap aloft like letting fly a catapult,
And the stink after me up to the stars;
Then the long crazy glide of me, crumpled and corroded,
In swerves and somersaults spinning to the ground.
" O my Master! O manifold Energy
Hallowed in Hell! Holy one, Beelzebub,
Prince the most popular of power on earth!
Innumerable nature, the nation of the flies,
But one demonic majesty, one multiplying fiend!
Curse me my vanity, come with a vengeance
Of destruction swarming on the strength of my folly!
Commander and unmaker of all made things,
Lord of the flesh, loosening it into flight
Of vanishing vapour, invisible pestilence:
Putrefy my folly like liquescent flesh,
And let it go wandering in ghost about the world!
Make ministers of rottenness to feed in my mind:
Be a season of flies there, and my sore folly
A festering beast in it! Be great in me, Beelzebub!
Eat up my pleasure in my one precious sense,
Consume my yearning for a lust beyond it,
Rid me of the dreams that enchanted the darkness
Solomon sealed me in, with the sea's weight over:
Devour the vile dreams that could infect a fiend
With fanatic zeal of desire impossible —
Sensuous pleasure craving more sense to please,
A demon's mind living in that ignominy of men,
Imagination! But Master, my Beelzebub,
Make thy Asmodeus once more pure breath
Of intellectual being, the boundless simplicity
Of spirit serene above sense and feeling,
Incuriously perfect in pleasureless knowledge.
" For with good words God gave me dismissal;
Yet crookedly, I doubt, and craftily kind:
" Ay, have thou for holiday awhile my earth;
Scandalize to thy liking there, be scurrile all thou canst,
Naught thou wilt devise but like virtue will serve me:
Nothing on my earth may move in other scope.
But earth must be in thee, lest thou strain my exquisite
Articulate contrivance, intruding all unearthly.
Thou must learn to go grossly in negotiating sense,
And mix the strange appetite of mortal perceiving
With spirit's speculation. But a single sense
Shall be thy passport of pleasure and pain:
Take thy choice, and I will touch thee with it!"
" I studied; and the sense of purest pleasure,
The least intelligent, to life of a spirit
Faculty most foreign and remotest amusement,
I chose, I assumed — man's absolute sense:
And for sojourn on earth became a spirit that could smell.
" Master, I was marvellous! I loved myself!
And the piercing surprisals of pleasure in my sense
I worshipt — a wild thing, wandering continually
In solitary ravishment, smelling the earth:
Herbage on the hills, in the hedges lilies,
Warm winds at sea, spices in the desert,
Peaks icily sheathed, shadowing pines at noon:
No counting the delights of my lonely flying
Through the fragrance of the earth — the fibres of a spirit
In delicious stress of the sense of a man,
Tremulous with subtly traversing pulses.
" Ah, but the terror, the tearing amazement,
The dividing of life, the lurch and whirl
Of giddy disgust, the goading for leagues —
Ah, the filthy anguish of stinking places!
" But nothing of that. One notable joy
I found and kept: from cruising daylong
In sunshine odours, and under the stars
Enquiring for scents cool hours entice,
Always at morning I made towards Lebanon,
To drink where a dark cleft drips, confiding
Its secret water (a well as black
And still as the mind of a stunn'd man)
To a noiseless intent conspiracy of cedars.
But the chasm to me, coming with dawn
Smouldering after me, crystalline smell
Of living rock-water would welcoming send —
Message sweeter to meet than sweetness,
Freshening even the mountain morning —
And wash me keen for the morrow's worship.
" But once strange savour seized me returning,
And far off the fright of it stung like fire:
A luxury of fragrance fuming and glowing
Into my mind, tormenting sweetness,
Corrupting the limpid Lebanon twilight.
My spirit, expecting purity of water,
Cringed in the air; and there crept through the scent
My loathing, the musty handling of men.
I fled, and my thirst refrained three dawns.
But each day reluctantly longer and nearer
To hover, the dizzying odour drew me:
Till I drank the well — I drained the wine
Crafty King Solomon for a bait to catch me,
Stealing my treasure of water, had stored in it.
Drunk and manacled, down to Solomon
The ruffians carted me for him to question.
But I held my tongue. Like a hound he had me
Still at his heels, standing or following,
His humble animal — Hell's Asmodeus! —
But answering nothing: though I knew well
To loose the riddle his wisdom writhed in,
And give him his temple of great wrought stone
No metal had toucht, mallet or chisel.
I knew, from my nice exploring for novelty
Fragrantly growing in highland ground,
The workman he wanted — the small fierce worm,
Shamir , that rasps rock for his food,
With engraving tongue licking it glassy,
Granite and basalt burnishing and grooving.
But when Solomon perceived I would not speak,
He thrust me in a jar and throttled the mouth of it
With a mystical emerald he moulded like wax,
And wrote his name and anger across it,
And put the sea for a sentry over me.
" Yet crafty King Solomon, cunning fiend-trapper,
Guesst not my punishment in the pit of the sea.
He found me a fiend with that folly trifling
Men call pleasure — playing with a sense,
And making much of its amusing ecstasy:
I once the dignity of a demon's intelligence,
Undelighted, undiscursive, instantaneously expatiating.
Did I grieve for my spirit so long degraded
In the small rapture of a sense's greed:
Ay, now through its greed degraded to the grave
Of all event but ineffectual shame?
Or think you I longed for my darling loss,
Remembering noon meadows, morning on Lebanon,
Salt sea-beaches — all the sweet breathing earth:
Now an abject sealed for centuries of nonentity,
In the bottom of existence buried by a man? —
Nay, for a fiend infected he buried me,
Infected by the spectacle of Solomon's pleasure:
Dreams were shut in with me; when he drowned my sepulchre
I was closeted with phantoms. A cloud full of thunder
Superbly persuades the mass of a mountain
To imitate the passion electric above it,
Disturbing the sleep of its inmost stone
To thrill like vapour with vehemence unuttered:
So Solomon's happiness with hidden dark fire
Had charged my being; and it broke forth imagining
Continual lightning of dazzling lust,
Soon as I was fast in my senseless solitude.
My black abysm became a den of dreams;
I was no cramp in the sea's depth sunk,
But a world of voluble fury of fantasy,
Wheeling apparition of impossible pleasure,
Passage so swift of spectres adorable
In dancing procession, alluring courtesy,
I could take no features of their flying faces.
A globe of incapable glorying desire
My spirit invented in the senseless sea;
And I its creator like a crazy god
Doating on the inscrutable thing he has done.
" Then the spell broke and the seal burst open,
Solomon's malignity at the last perishing.
The black water quaked, the blind brute places
Roared with my freedom, and my rage triumphantly
Thundering up to be again a demon.
As if the ground of the sea broke, spouting with fire,
And the boiling of the gulf in one grand bubble
Exclaimed its smoke and steam to the air:
So swirling I arose, ravenous to please
My visionary appetite and vastly enjoy
Solomon's delight, a lover of women
Roaming the nations in innumerable marriages.
My scrutinizing quest quarter'd the earth
For my first feasting of my dream's desire;
And passing over Ecbatan the power possesst me
That Solomon lavisht his life to worship.
A Median girl on a marketing errand
Fixt in me her loveliness, and fetcht me circling
Down from the height of my spying to adore her:
As if a meteor should fall from its fiery curve,
Suddenly sloping the splendour of its mission
To fly as a pigeon round loiterers' shoulders.
Invisibly obsequious I followed my Sara
Moving a spectre of music in front of me:
Music divined before hearing can feel it,
Promising the beauty my dream proposed,
And now to be loved and known and enjoyed!
" And still no delight! Still deluded agonizing,
Worse than my dreams now, would not let me go!
I knew of beauty and a bliss calling me
To spend my life on it, spirit and sense:
It was there, the wonder, it was waiting for me there;
But beyond me, beyond me! Detestably useless
My one wretched sense — all that idiot ranging
In pleasures sweet earth bestowed so easily,
That simple alacrity, my life of fragrance!
There was Sara to be loved: and I could not love her!
No beauty for me, where I knew beauty was:
No meaning for me where marvellous meaning
I knew awaited worshipping sense.
In ravishing torture that took me voluptuously,
My speculating spirit burnt about her
In fiction of the bliss I could not find;
But always recoiled in baffled concupiscence,
Mere imbecile lust, longing for sense
That could understand that symbol of love,
My inconceivably lovely Sara.
Ay, much that my misery of sense would suffer
Faithfully the odour of female flesh —
Nay, like it at last! But at least this
I would not bear — bridegrooms libidinous
With senses impudently able before me,
The delighted loving of lusty young men!
But Sara was not loved: my strangling was their marriage.
" All ended now! And my worthless sense
Flung with disgusting injury grovelling
Back to stale things at the bidding of a stench.
Those conjurers came; they caught me unaware
With their filthy mischief; and nothing fortunate
Remains on earth, now they have made me
Abandon my anguish, my beauty's phantom,
My love of unimaginable love, my Sara.
" But take me out of earth! Take from my nature
Sense and the mankind curse of pleasure,
The craving of sense; and my crippled speculation
Restore to a fiend's unfeeling sanity
Of lucidly spacious spiritual knowledge
That knows no desire, for beyond it nothing is.
Beelzebub, my lord! Let me live no more
In that glamour of men, that gleaming superstition,
Beauty, so shiftily brightening and shaping
The clouds of sense that enclose and bemuse
Man's wistful mind — and my mind, Beelzebub!
The mind of thy demon! O make me be done with it!
Out of this earth of appetite desiring,
Beauty pretending, fantasy forging,
Take me, and give me reality again:
Once more the endless unmoved moment
Of pure reality, a spirit's experience
Perfectly circular, icily secure:
The infinite of all things for ever present
In one calm personal point of knowledge,
Itself to all things infinitely known.
So prayed the fiend to his pestilent master:
Who knows how answered? — But if, of an evening,
In a thicketted place where thrushes and primroses
Celebrate spring, or in summer morning
When burnet-roses sweeten sea-breezes,
And the space of the dunes blows honey and spice,
You feel a spirit has fled before you:
It may be Asmodeus was modestly there
Smelling his solace; but swift to shy
Continents away, if a man comes near.