Classic Poem

Appraise me! — you, Christian of any stock:
Suave Catholic, whose haunting art avails,
Though fires are damped and sophistry undone;
Evangelist, with starved and barren brain,
Preying on evil consciences; or you,
Courageous Anglican, the well-beloved,
Enfeoffed with freehold in the City of God,
And happy here upon commuted tithes —
Your vested interests snug and ancient lights;
Or you, Agnostic, fearing yes and no,
Poltroon upon conviction; you, nor you,
Vendor of poem or philosopheme,
Patriot, gossip, warrior, chapman, all
In profits dabbling and affairs of men —
Not one of you with impulse or intent
To think my thought, how can you judge my life?

Who knows the savour of forbidden fruit,
The zest of inquisition when the world
Delivers whole, unchallenged and exempt;
Who never begs that truth should benefit,
Or be at least innoxious, but frequents
The labyrinthine fires of solitude
Wherein the thinker, parched and charred, outlives
Millenniums in a moment; who reveres
Himself, and with superb despite
Maltreats the loving-kindnesses of men,
Divine ideas and abstractions fond —
He, he alone may measure and endure
My headstrong passion and austerity.
" To love and understand?" The prattlement
Of amorists, begetters, family folk
Inevitably mean, and gall-less hacks
Of wealth who ape imagined Providence!
Chief end of man, the ultimate design
Of intellect, is knowledge undefiled
With use or usufruct. Matter, unknown,
Unknowing, crawled and groped through grade on grade
Of faculty, till Thought came forth at last
With power to sift the elements. Chief end
Of Matter — of the Earth aware in us,
As of that Greater Matter orbed and lit
Throughout Eternal Night — is evermore
Self-Knowledge.

Thought achieved, the unconscious will,
Which Matter is, empowered it and enslaved
With endless lust of life triumphantly,
That knowledge might endure; and tarred it on —
This Thought, or lustful thinker, man — to know
Under a penalty without reprieve,
Of character and title manifold,
Discomfort, pain, affliction, agony.

Inclement skies, antagonism in love,
Engrossing hunger, from the willing earth
Won easy knowledge apt for instant use.
Luxury, fashion, tribal vanity,
Desire of power, disease, the fear of death
Extorted many a secret, quaintly masked,
Embarrassed and provocative, or pent
Inscrutably in substance signetless;
But chiefly Death inspired the slavish Thought
With terror-stricken zeal to penetrate
The only mystery, Matter, mutable,
Eternal, infinite in being, power,
And semblance.

Matter's drudge, the restless Thought
Knit up with flesh of men, that builds and weaves,
Bakes, brews, and fights, and heals; that would express
The very seed of gold, and tamely sought
Elixir — (paragon of vanities,
And Matter's masterpiece in high chicane:
That, not content with offspring, men must scheme
To propagate their own peculiar woe!) —
This helpless Thought, solacing unbeknown
The passion for self-knowledge, crown and flower
Of that unconscious will which Matter is —
(Always the stolid will, Matter supreme!) —
I say, this anguished Thought, this mind of man,
Organ of Matter's consciousness, rebelled,
And with a wanton populace of gods,
A drift of elves, and rout of forms obscene,
Slandered Material truth; more traitorous still,
Perverted and obscured the clear Unknown
With the Immaterial, imagined God
Alone, spirit, and a hereafter — pitched
Sublimely in the empyrean Heaven,
In the abyss profoundly hollowed Hell.
Salvation or Damnation," Thought aspired,
So I escape from Matter's galling yoke!"
Thus the tormented common-mind of man,
A mode of Matter warring with itself.

But at all times a more reliant Thought,
A strength of brain, a remnant less than man
And greater — in the jargon of the herd,
Hateful to God and to God's enemies' —
Fulfilled the bent of Matter willingly,
And sought out Knowledge for its very sake:
It might be shrewdly as a livelihood,
Or to delight or help mankind, or make
A name, at first; but in the end to know —
Merely to know was the consuming fire
Of these strong minds, delivered and elect.

In the high sphere of knowledge which I haunt,
When I began to hew the living flesh,
I seemed to seek — I seemed; for who can tell
The drift of aims utility distorts? —
The mitigation of disease. Not long
A bias of humanity deflects
Advancement in the true Materialist!
My Thought that share the contumacy men
Display, effeminate in things Material,
Began to turn to Matter lustfully
With masculine intent . . . You start and stare!
How shall I cut and thrust conviction through
And through you? . . . Now, I know. This impress asks
A sheet unsoiled. Oh, for a sudden end
Of palimpsests! Expunge the o'erscored script
That blurs the mind with poetry and prose
Of every age; and yield it gladly up
For me to carve with knowledge, and to seal
With Matter's signet. Listen now, and think.

Daily I passed a common, chapped and seamed
By weeks of headlong heat. A rotten hack,
Compunctious hideful of rheumatic joints
Larded with dung and clay, gaunt spectacle
Of ringbone, spavin, canker, shambled about,
And grazed the faded, sparse, disrelished tufts
That the sun's tongue of flame had left half-licked:
Family physician, coster, cat's-meat-man —
These, the indifferent fates who ruled his life.
The last had turned him loose to dissipate
A day or two of grace. But when he came —
The raw-faced knacker with his knuckly fists —
I ransomed Dobbin, pitying his case,
He seemed so cheerful maugre destiny.

Enfranchised in my meadow, all his hours
Were golden, till the end with autumn came,
Even while my impulse sundered hisk and shell
Of habit and utility. Two days
He lay a-dying, and could not die. Endowed
With strength, affection, blood, nerve, hearing, sight;
Laden with lust of life for the behoof
Of Matter; gelded, bitted, scourged, starved, dying —
Where could the meaning of the riddle lie?

Submissively, like a somnambulist
Who solves his problem in a dream, I found
The atonement of it, and became its lord —
Lord of the riddle of the Universe,
Aware at full of Matter's stolid will
In me accomplishing its useless aim.
The whip's-man felt no keener ecstasy
When a fair harlot at the cart's-tail shrieked,
And rags of flesh with blood-soaked tawdry lace
Girdled her shuddering loins. No hallowed awe
That ever rapt a pale inquisitor,
Beholding pangs of stubborn heresy
A-sweat upon the rack, surpassed the fierce
Exalted anguish of my thought. I fixed
The creature, impotent and moribund,
With gag and fetter; sheared his filthy mane;
Cut a foot's length, tissue and tendon, 'twixt
His poll and festering withers, and hammered out
Three arches of his spine. In ropy bulk,
Stripped to my forceps, marrow, Matter's pith
Itself! A twitch, a needle's faint appeal
Recalled the gelding's life, supplied each stop
And register of sense with vibrant power,
And made this faithful, dying, loathsome drudge,
One diapason of intensest pain,
Sublime and terrible in martyrdom.

I study pain, measure it and invent —
I and my compeers; for I hold again
That every passionate Materialist,
Who rends the living subject, soon is purged
Of vulgar tenderness in diligent
Delighted tormentry of bird and beast;
And, conscious or unconscious of his aim,
Fulfils the will of Matter, cutting out
A path to knowledge, undefiled with use
Or usufruct, by Matter's own resource,
Pain, alkahest of all intelligence.
I study pain — pain only: I broach and tap
The agony of Matter, and work its will,
Detecting useless items — I and those
Who tortured fourscore solipeds to carve
A scale of feeling on the spinal cord;
Quilted with nails, and mangled flights of fowl,
Litters and nests of vermin happily
Throughout a year, discerning in the end
That anguished breath and breath of healthy ease
Differ in function by a jot, perhaps;
Or Pisan doctors whom the Florentine
Furnished with criminals from a gentler doom
Withdrawn to undergo anatomy,
And masters who, before the world grew tame,
Enjoyed the handling in their horoured troughs
Of countless men and women alive and well.

" Have I no pain?" — I live alone: my wife
Forsook me, and my daughters. In the night,
From silted fountains sprung, insurgent tears
Arouse me, a marauder in the past
Against my will — one of the nightly gang
Impressed by sleep to serve Insomnia,
The queen of waking dreams. Caught in her snare,
The man-trap Memory, towards the recreant hour
When life is at the ebb, I rise and think
To end it now; but always stay my hand,
Because we cannot put an end to that
In which we live and move and have our being,
Nor anywhere escape it: air is Matter;
The interstellar spaces, Matter cold
And thin, the darksome vehicle of light.
To the Materialist there is no Unknown;
All, all is Matter. Pain? I am one ache —
But never when I work; there Matter wins!
And I believe that they who delve the soil,
Who reap the grain, who dig and smelt the ore,
The girl who plucks a rose, the sweetest voice
That thrills the air with sound, give Matter pain:
Think you the sun is happy in his flames,
Or that the cooling earth no anguish feels,
Nor quails from her contraction? Rather say,
The systems, constellations, galaxies
That strew the ethereal waste are whirling there
In agony unutterable. Pain?
It may be Matter in itself is pain,
Sweetened in sexual love that so mankind,
The medium of Matter's consciousness,
May never cease to know — the stolid bent
Of Matter, the infinite vanity
Of the Universe, being evermore
Self-knowledge.