Confessions of Aleister Crowley

37 reputation. It was only when I got among the crags themselves that I was happy. I demanded to be at grips with death in one way or another. The bourgeois ambition to get through life without unpleasantness seemed to me the lowest vileness and entirely in keeping with the moral attitude of the heavenly people in Paradise Lost. I was allowed to read Tennyson and Longfellow, but it is impossible to class them as poets. The emasculation of all the characters disgusted me beyond measure. Their very sins are suburban. {81} 1. The alleged antithesis between these two texts (I cannot perceive it) was actually the basis of the schism. My mother thought that one of them (I forget which) "dishonoured the Lord's person"! 8 So when it came to my writing poetry myself, my work fell naturally into three divisions. Firstly, short lyrics modelled on the hymns to which I was accustomed; secondly, parodies, principally of Scottish and English songs; and thirdly, epics based on Sir Walter Scott. I must have written over a hundred thousand lines. They have all been destroyed; and I am rather sorry for it. While they possessed no merit, their contents would afford a valuable key to my thoughts at the time. The few fragments which escaped destruction were reprinted in my Oracles. I remember something of their general moral tendency, which was to celebrate the triumph of the revolt of youth and passion against age and propriety. I tried to get effect by using extremes of expression. I remember two lines from an epic. "Lady Ethelreda": Baron Ethelred waxed wroth, Frothed he with a frothy froth. But as I grew a little older I became able to manage my material with more discretion. My mother designed me, of course, to follow in my father's footsteps as am evangelist, but as I had to take a profession she decided she would like me to be a doctor, of the ground that "doctors have so many opportunities". (Scil. for bringing souls to Jesus. She did not see anything funny in this remark!) So I began to learn a little about medicine and produced the following effusion: A PEEP BEHIND THE SCENES In the hospital bed she lay ..........Rotting away! Cursing by night and cursing by day, ..........Rotting away! The lupus is over her face and head, Filthy and foul and horrid and dread, And her shrieks they would almost wake the dead; ..........Rotting away! In her horrible grave she lay, ..........Rotting away! In the place of her face is a gory hole, {82}