THE STORM
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Thy crying about the city
In. the house where is no pity,
But in the desolate halls and lonely vales of
sand :
Not in the laughter loud,
Nor crying of the crowd,
But in the farthest sea, the yet untravelled
land.
Where thou hast trodden, I have trod ;
Thy folk have been my folk, and thine abode
Mine, and thy life my life, and thou, who
art thy God, my God.
VII.
Draw me with cords that are not; witch me
chanted
Spells never heard nor open to the ear,
Woven of silence, moulded in the haunted
Houses where dead men linger year by year.
I have no fear
To tread thy far irremeable way
Beyond the paths and palaces of day,
Beyond the night, beyond the skies,
Beyond eternity’s
Tremendous gate; beyond the immanent
miracle.4
O secret self of things !
I have nor feet nor wings
Except to follow far beyond Heaven and
Earth and Hell,
Until I mix my mood
And being in thee, as in my hermit’s hood
I grow the thing I contemplate—that selfless
solitude !
THE STORM.
Written on the North Atlantic Ocean.
In the sorrow of the silence of the sunset,
when the world’s heart sinks to sleep,
And the waking wind arises from the wedding
of the aether and the deep,
There are perfumes through the saltness of
the even ; there are hints of flowers afar;
And the God goes down lamented by the
lonely vesper star.
1 The universe.
The monsters rise around us as we move in
moving mist,
Slow whales that swim as musing, and lo!
or ever we wist,
Looms northward
in the grey, mysterious ice,
cathedral high,
Clad in transparent clouds of cold, as a ghost
in drapery.
The solemn dusk descending creeps around
us from the East ;
Clouded as with the ungainly head of a
mysterious beast.
Long wisps of darkness (even as fingers)
reach and hold
The sobbing West toward them, clasp the
barred Hesperian gold.
Still pale a rose reflection lingers, in pure
soft blue ;
Even above the tempest, where a lonely
avenue
Leads from the wan moon’s image, shadowy
in the air,
Waning, half hidden from the sun—and yet
her soul is there.
So stand I looking ever down to the rolling
sea,
Breast-heaves of a sleeping mother, spouse of
Eternity :
The dark deep ocean mother, that another?
hath reviled,
Calling her bitter and barren—and am I not
her child ?
O mother sea, O beautiful, more excellent
than earth,
How is thy travail understood, except thou
give me birth ?
O waves of death, O saltness, O sorrow
manifold !
I see beneath thy darkness azure; deeper
still, the heart of gold.
1 It is not known to whom Crowley refers.