Temperance: A Tract for the Times

HAPPY DUST. For MARGOTE Snow that fallest from heaven, bear me aloft on thy wings To the domes of the star-girdled Seven, the abode of ineffable things, Quintessence of joy and of strength, that, abolishing future and past, Mak’st the Present an infinite length, my soul all-One with the Vast, The Lone, the Unnamable God, that is ice of His measureless cold, Without being or form or abode, without motion or matter, the fold Where the shepherded Universe sleeps, with nor sense nor delusion nor dream, No spirit that wantons or weeps, no thought in its silence supreme. I sit, and am utterly still; in mine eyes is my fathomless lust Ablaze to annihilate Will, to crumble my being to dust, To calcine the dust to an ash, to burn up the ash to an air, To abolish the air with the flash of the final, the fulminant flare. All this I have done, and dissolved the primordial germ of my thought; I have rolled myself up, and revolved the wheel of my being to Naught. Is there even the memory left? That I was, that I am? It is lost. As I utter the Word, I am cleft by the last swift spear of the frost. Snow! I am nothing at last; I sit and am utterly still; They are perished, the phantoms, and past; they were born of my weariness-will When I craved, craved being and form, when the consciousness-cloud was a mist Precurser of stupor and storm, when I and my shadow had kissed, And brought into life all the shapes that confused the clear space with their marks, Vain spectres whose vapour escapes, a whirlwind of ruinous sparks, No substance have any of these; I have dreamed them in sickness of lust, Delirium born of disease—ah, whence was the master, the “must” Imposed on the All?—is it true, is it true, then, that something in me Is subject to fate? Are there two, are there two, after all, that can be? I have brought all that is to an end; for myself am sufficient and sole. Do I trick myself now? Shall I rend once again this homologous Whole? I have stripped every garment from space; I have strangled the secret of Time, All being is fled from my face, with Motion’s inhibited rime. Stiller and stiller I sit, till even Infinity fades; ’Tis an idol—’tis weakness of wit that breeds, in inanity, shades! Yet the fullness of Naught I become, the deepest and steadiest Naught,