CHLOROFORM
(Written in collaboration with Arthur Davison Ficke.)
A sickening odour, treacherously sweet,
Steals through my sense heavily.
Above me leans an ominous shape,
Fearful, white-robed, hooded and masked in white.
The pits of his eyes
Peer like the portholes of an armoured ship,
Merciless, keen, inhuman, dark.
The hands alone are of my kindred;
Their slender strength, that soon shall press the knife
Silver and red, now lingers slowly above me,
The last links with my human world ...
... The living daylight
Clouds and thickens.
Flashes of sudden clearness stream before me,—and then
A menacing wave of darkness
Swallows the glow with floods of vast and indeterminate grey.
But in the flashes
I see the white form towering,
Dim, ominous,
Like some apostate monk whose will unholy
Has renounced God; and now
In this most awful secret laboratory
Would wring from matter
Its stark and appalling answer.
At the gates of a bitter hell he stands, to wrest with eager fierceness
More of that dark forbidden knowledge
Wherefrom his soul draws fervor to deny.
The clouds have grown thicker; they sway around me
Dizzying, terrible, gigantic; pressing in upon me
Like a thousand monsters of the deep with formless arms.
I cannot push them back, I cannot!
From far, far off, a voice I knew long ago
Sounds faintly thin and clear.
Suddenly in a desperate rebellion I strive to answer,—
I strive to call aloud,—
But darkness chokes and overcomes me:
None may hear my soundless cry.
A depth abysmal opens,
Receives, enfolds, engulfs me,—
Wherein to sink at last seems blissful
Even though to deeper pain....
O respite and peace of deliverance!
The silence
Lies over me like a benediction.
As in the earth’s first pale creation-morn
Among winds and waters holy
I am borne as I longed to be borne.
I am adrift in the depths of an ocean grey
Like seaweed, desiring solely
To drift with the winds and waters; I sway
Into their vast slow movements; all the shores
Of being are laved by my tides.
I am drawn out toward spaces wonderful and holy
Where peace abides,
And into golden æons far away.
But over me
Where I swing slowly,
Bodiless in the bodiless sea,
Very far,
Oh very far away,
Glimmeringly
Hangs a ghostly star
Toward whose pure beam I must flow resistlessly.
Well do I know its ray!
It is the light beyond the worlds of space,
By groping, sorrowing man yet never known—
The goal where all men’s blind and yearning desire
Has vainly longed to go
And has not gone:—
Where Eternity has its blue-walled dwelling-place,
And the crystal ether opens endlessly
To all the recessed corners of the world,
Like liquid fire
Pouring a flood through the dimness revealingly;
Where my soul shall behold, and in lightness of wonder rise higher
Out of the shadow that long ago
Around me with mortality was furled.
I rise where have winds
Of the night never flown;
Shaken with rapture
Is the vault of desire.
The weakness that binds
Like a shadow is gone.
The bonds of my capture
Are sundered with fire!
This is the hour
When the wonders open!
The lightning-winged spaces
Through which I fly
Accept me, a power
Whose prisons are broken—
... But the wonder wavers—
The light goes out.
I am in the void no more; changes are imminent.
Time with a million beating wings
Deafens the air in migratory flight
Like the roar of seas—and is gone ...
And a silence
Lasts deafeningly.
In darkness and perfect silence
I wander groping in my agony,
Far from the light lost in the upper ether—
Unknown, unknowable, so nearly mine.
And the ages pass by me,
Thousands each instant, yet I feel them all
To the last second of their dragging time.
Thus have I striven always
Since the world began.
And when it dies I still must struggle ...
The voice I knew so long ago, like a muffled echo under the sea
Is coming nearer.
Strong hands
Grip mine.
And words whose tones are warm with some forgotten consolation,
Some unintelligible hope,
Drag me upward in horrible mercy;
And the cold once-familiar daylight glares into my eyes.
He stands there,
The white apostate monk,
Speaking low lying words to soothe me.
And I lift my voice out of its vales of agony
And laugh in his face,
Mocking him with astonishment of wonder.
For he has denied;
And I have come so near, so near to knowing....
Then as his hand touches me gently, I am drawn up from the lonely abysses,
And suffer him to lead me back into the green valleys of the living.