Classic Poem

Down into hell I passed:
I stirred the fires, I saw that innocent and guilty there were duly punished:
I left no soul untouched, I turned ages into the cauldrons:
I saw that rules were enforced, penalties exacted: that no exceptions were allowed:
I saw the pallid sufferers: and to suffering I added severity:
And nothing was too hard for the inexorable humor of my revenge:
Then I turned away and wept: into my secret corner went and wept.

In the city I hastened with my whip and drove the crowd to sheepfold:
I sat at ease in my study and touched the quick of the thousand slaves who never saw me yet did my will.
I was master of races, chieftain of tribes, always on top, ever commanding,
Obedient to me the social planes rose and fell:
I was relentless, unbending: I pioneered and cleansed:
Yet great was my pity also: I withheld no charter of love.

Into the veins of men I passed: I became their rebel's blood, their passion's outrage:
Into their hearts I passed: I pressed life off the line of its loyalties:
I halted the flower in its bud and virtue in its impulse,
I performed unwelcome deeds and neglected the call of my kinsmen:
Then I turned round my corner again and crowded men with the benefaction of my regret.

Out of their courses I swept the protesting stars,
I took the planets away from their bereaved suns:
I touched the earths to deserts: I moled to the roots of vegetation and blasted harvests:
I built cities over marshes and played death loose into the haughty avenues of the rich,
The sophist, the pander, the outlaw, lodged securely in my heart:
Yet my hands were released — they reached behind veils and spread wide the crowning conditions of salvation.

But for me God could not have been, but for God I could not have been,
In God explained, God is explained in me,
I, the mixed accident and reason, I the straight course and round:
The chord of life not found in God, nor found in me,
But found in that presence, not God's or mine, strained from all being.
You have thought God had quarreled with me and we were at war:
But God's truce is mine: our blended pulses yield a single pledge.

Did Satan deceive you O my loved companions?
Did you suppose he was really something alone, to be reckoned with as an evil spirit?
Did you believe that Satan was an alien threatening the citadel of God?
Did you go to bed at night thinking Satan barred out of your house?
Did you think God had so much for you and Satan nothing at all?
Did you write Satan out of your scriptures and God there to fill every line?
Did you take the round globe seriously and think it was intended for gentle things and likely things alone?
Did you take up a spadeful of earth and compare it unfavorably with the colors in your western sky?
I do not parley with Satan or God but with the stuff of the ethers which provoke both.
I am no more afraid of Satan's bad than of God's good:
And but for me neither could have been and but for my good health the two would never merge:
And the good health of my body and of my soul is the good health of the spheres:
And Satan could not damn me alone: God would have something to say about that:
And God could not save me alone: Satan would have something to say about that:
And it is whispered me that I am to be neither saved nor damned anyway,
But that I am to save or damn myself to all eternity:
I, in whom God and Satan, for purposes not all seen, eternally melt beyond severance.