Temperance: A Tract for the Times

HYMN TO ASTARTE. For DEIRDRE Serene are the stars, and serene my soul, ablaze in the Night. Then how shall I worship Astarte sea-born, how invoke her aright? I am free from the fire and the foam, I have conquered the dragons and doves; I have gotten me Love as the gold from the furnace that melted my loves. Love is not bound to the body, not sparse and adrift with the mind Not secret with soul, though the soul seem one and alone of its kind. The body is naught but a corpse, its growth but a name of decay, A delirious dream of sick gods—where the Shadow hath sway. Concocted of offal and mire, putrescent with cancer of breath, A knot that unravels to naught, a riddle whose answer is Death? The mind is the reek of the fume of the body’s corruption, the mime Of its magotty moods as it rots from its worm-eaten egg to its slime. The mind hath not even a mist to excuse philosophic pretence Of a substance; at most it distorts some few of the phantoms of sense. Its reason is ever astray, its ignorance straitens its span; It ends in the mystery-night whence its clumsy creation began. It observes, it reflects, it decides as the slave of unconscious desires, Knows neither the world nor itself, nor stands for an hour but it tires. It struts in its pageant of pride, yet at heart is aware it is vain, And its summit of proof is to prove nothing proven, and itself but insane. The soul, ah the flame! Ah, the star! The God in us shining above! The soul, beyond being and form! Then is not the name of it Love? Nay, darker and deeper the curse, more dread the abyss never plumbed, The horror ineffably huge, the agony not to be summed; For the soul in itself is division, is separate, worse that its wings Were fledged of the essence of truth at the evil beginning of things, When the All broke its peace with the thought of itself, and the schism began That ended in chaos of crime, in the crazy catastrophe, man. The soul is no ghost to conjure with the spell of: “Illusion, begone!” It is true, and hath might to endure, unassailable, travelling on, None hinders, commands or deflects; none alters its course by a jot; Space cannot constrain it, and time the waster erodeth it not. How should I love such a soul, my like, and like me the accurst From the hour when the Second was struck a spark from the forge of the First? How should I love such a soul, though fierce and afar I may range