264
EPILOGUE
Yet my heart looks to Madness as its mother,
Remembering Who once caught me by
the well;
And the strange loves of that misshapen Other,
The feast of blood, the cold enchanted dell,
Where fire was filtered up through earth to
smother
Sick scents of hell.
And that wild night when vine-leaves wooed
and clustered
Round my wild limbs, and like a woman
I went
Over the mountains—how the Northwind
blustered !—
And slew with them the beast, and was
content.
The madness :—Oh! the dreadful light that
lustred
The main event.
Ay! the wild whirlings in the woodland
reaches ;
The ghastly smile upon the Stone God’s ! lip;
The rigid tremors, anguish that beseeches
From eye to eye fresh fervours of the whip ;
The mounded moss below the swaying
beeches—
Kiss me and clip!
Why ! the old madness grows !—how feebly
lying
Smooth by this bay where waves are
tender flowers.
Winds, soft as the old kisses were, are sighing.
Clouds drift across the sun for silken
bowers.
The moon is up--an hastening nymph! I,
dying,
Await the Hours.
1 Priapus, like Jehovah, is the phallic god of
generation. It is to be remarked that Crowley
never uses Jehovah in this sense, but in the
later spiritualised sense of the Qabalists.
And thou, Persephone, I know thy story,
That I must taste the terror of thy wrong :
How Hades ride across the promontory,
Snatch my pale body in mid over-song ;
Drag me from sight of my Apollo’s glory
With horses strong.
Nay! as Apollo half the day is shrouded,
As Artemis twice seven nights is dark ;
Surely he shines in other lands unclouded,
Surely her shaft shall find another mark.
So dawns the day on Acheron ghost-crowded,
And on my bark.
I know not how yon world may prove, nor
whither
Hermes conduct me to what farther end.
Yet if these bays abide, this heart not
wither, 7
It cannot be I shall not find a friend.
Some pale immortal lover draw me thither !
To kiss me bend !
Moreover, as Apollo re-arisen
Flames, with a roaring of the morning
sea,
Up from the stricken gray, the iron-barred
prison,
Flashes his face again upon the lea,
And diamond dews the woodland ones
bedizen;
So—so for me!
Some forty years this earth knew song and
passion
Pour from my lips, saw gladness in mine
eyes !
Some forty shall I sing some other fashion,
Dance in strange measures, change the
key of sighs.
Then rise in Thessaly again, Thalassian !
Only, more wise,