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master of herself, now toy and slave.

      A huge inconsequence was her action’s law,

      As if all possibility must be drained,

      And anguish and bliss were pastimes of the heart.

      In a gallop of thunder-hooved vicissitudes

      She swept through the race-fields of Circumstance,

      Or, swaying, she tossed between her heights and deeps,

      Uplifted or broken on Time’s inconstant wheel.

      Amid a tedious crawl of drab desires

      She writhed, a worm mid worms in Nature’s mud,

      Then, Titan-statured, took all earth for food,

      Ambitioned the seas for robe, for crown the stars

      And shouting strode from peak to giant peak,

      Clamouring for worlds to conquer and to rule.

      Then, wantonly enamoured of Sorrow’s face,

      She plunged into the anguish of the depths

      And, wallowing, clung to her own misery.

      In dolorous converse with her squandered self

      She wrote the account of all that she had lost,

      Or sat with grief as with an ancient friend.

      A romp of violent raptures soon was spent,

      Or she lingered tied to an inadequate joy

      Missing the turns of fate, missing life’s goal.

      A scene was planned for all her numberless moods

      Where each could be the law and way of life,

      But none could offer a pure felicity;

      Only a flickering zest they left behind

      Or the fierce lust that brings a dead fatigue.

      Amid her swift untold variety

      Something remained dissatisfied, ever the same

      And in the new saw only a face of the old,

      For every hour repeated all the rest

      And every change prolonged the same unease.

      A spirit of her self and aim unsure,

      Tired soon of too much joy and happiness,

      She needs the spur of pleasure and of pain

      And the native taste of suffering and unrest:

      She strains for an end that never can she win.

      A perverse savour haunts her thirsting lips:

      For the grief she weeps which came from her own choice,

      For the pleasure yearns that racked with wounds her breast;

      Aspiring to heaven she turns her steps towards hell.

      Chance she has chosen and danger for playfellows;

      Fate’s dreadful swing she has taken for cradle and seat.

      Yet pure and bright from the Timeless was her birth,

      A lost world-rapture lingers in her eyes,

      Her moods are faces of the Infinite:

      Beauty and happiness are her native right,

      And endless Bliss is her eternal home.

      This now revealed its antique face of joy,

      A sudden disclosure to the heart of grief

      Tempting it to endure and long and hope.

      Even in changing worlds bereft of peace,

      In an air racked with sorrow and with fear

      And while his feet trod on a soil unsafe,

      He saw the image of a happier state.

      In an architecture of hieratic Space

      Circling and mounting towards creation’s tops,

      At a blue height which never was too high

      For warm communion between body and soul,

      As far as heaven, as near as thought and hope,

      Glimmered the kingdom of a griefless life.

      Above him in a new celestial vault

      Other than the heavens beheld by mortal eyes,

      As on a fretted ceiling of the gods,

      An archipelago of laughter and fire,

      Swam stars apart in a rippled sea of sky.

      Towered spirals, magic rings of vivid hue

      And gleaming spheres of strange felicity

      Floated through distance like a symbol world.

      On the trouble and the toil they could not share,

      On the unhappiness they could not aid,

      Impervious to life’s suffering, struggle, grief,

      Untarnished by its anger, gloom and hate,

      Unmoved, untouched, looked down great visioned planes

      Blissful for ever in their timeless right.

      Absorbed in their own beauty and content,

      Of their immortal gladness they live sure.

      Apart in their self-glory plunged, remote

      Burning they swam in a vague lucent haze,

      An everlasting refuge of dream-light,

      A nebula of the splendours of the gods

      Made from the musings of eternity.

      Almost unbelievable by human faith,

      Hardly they seemed the stuff of things that are.

      As through a magic television’s glass

      Outlined to some magnifying inner eye

      They shone like images thrown from a far scene

      Too high and glad for mortal lids to seize.

      But near and real to the longing heart

      And to the body’s passionate thought and sense

      Are the hidden kingdoms of beatitude.

      In some close unattained realm which yet we feel,

      Immune from the harsh clutch of Death and Time,

      Escaping the search of sorrow and desire,

      In bright enchanted safe peripheries

      For ever wallowing in bliss they lie.

      In dream and trance and muse before our eyes,

      Across a subtle vision’s inner field,

      Wide rapturous landscapes fleeting from the sight,

      The figures of the perfect kingdom pass

      And behind them leave a shining memory’s trail.

      Imagined scenes or great eternal worlds,

      Dream-caught or sensed, they touch our hearts with their depths;

      Unreal-seeming, yet more real than life,

      Happier than happiness, truer than things true,

      If dreams these were or captured images,

      Dream’s truth made false earth’s vain realities.

      In a swift eternal moment fixed there live

      Or ever recalled come

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