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      Hard to the strong, implacable to the weak,

      It stared at the harsh unpitying world it made

      With the stony eyelids of its fixed idea.

      Its heart was drunk with a dire hunger’s wine,

      In others’ suffering felt a thrilled delight

      And of death and ruin the grandiose music heard.

      To have power, to be master, was sole virtue and good:

      It claimed the whole world for Evil’s living room,

      Its party’s grim totalitarian reign

      The cruel destiny of breathing things.

      All on one plan was shaped and standardised

      Under a dark dictatorship’s breathless weight.

      In street and house, in councils and in courts

      Beings he met who looked like living men

      And climbed in speech upon high wings of thought

      But harboured all that is subhuman, vile

      And lower than the lowest reptile’s crawl.

      The reason meant for nearness to the gods

      And uplift to heavenly scale by the touch of mind

      Only enhanced by its enlightening ray

      Their inborn nature’s wry monstrosity.

      Often, a familiar visage studying

      Joyfully encountered at some dangerous turn,

      Hoping to recognise a look of light,

      His vision warned by the spirit’s inward eye

      Discovered suddenly Hell’s trademark there,

      Or saw with the inner sense that cannot err,

      In the semblance of a fair or virile form

      The demon and the goblin and the ghoul.

      An insolence reigned of cold stone-hearted strength

      Mighty, obeyed, approved by the Titan’s law,

      The huge laughter of a giant cruelty

      And fierce glad deeds of ogre violence.

      In that wide cynic den of thinking beasts

      One looked in vain for a trace of pity or love;

      There was no touch of sweetness anywhere,

      But only Force and its acolytes, greed and hate:

      There was no help for suffering, none to save,

      None dared resist or speak a noble word.

      Armed with the aegis of tyrannic Power,

      Signing the edicts of her dreadful rule

      And using blood and torture as a seal,

      Darkness proclaimed her slogans to the world.

      A servile blinkered silence hushed the mind

      Or only it repeated lessons taught,

      While mitred, holding the good shepherd’s staff,

      Falsehood enthroned on awed and prostrate hearts

      The cults and creeds that organise living death

      And slay the soul on the altar of a lie.

      All were deceived or served their own deceit;

      Truth in that stifling atmosphere could not live.

      There wretchedness believed in its own joy

      And fear and weakness hugged their abject depths;

      All that is low and sordid-thoughted, base,

      All that is drab and poor and miserable,

      Breathed in a lax content its natural air

      And felt no yearning of divine release:

      Arrogant, gibing at more luminous states

      The people of the gulfs despised the sun.

      A barriered autarchy excluded light;

      Fixed in its will to be its own grey self,

      It vaunted its norm unique and splendid type:

      It soothed its hunger with a plunderer’s dream;

      Flaunting its cross of servitude like a crown,

      It clung to its dismal harsh autonomy.

      A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;

      Its hard and shameless clamour filling Space

      And threatening all who dared to listen to truth

      Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;

      A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,

      And braggart dogmas shouted in the night

      Kept for the fallen soul once deemed a god

      The pride of its abysmal absolute.

      A lone discoverer in these menacing realms

      Guarded like termite cities from the sun,

      Oppressed mid crowd and tramp and noise and flare,

      Passing from dusk to deeper dangerous dusk,

      He wrestled with powers that snatched from mind its light

      And smote from him their clinging influences.

      Soon he emerged in a dim wall-less space.

      For now the peopled tracts were left behind;

      He walked between wide banks of failing eve.

      Around him grew a gaunt spiritual blank,

      A threatening waste, a sinister loneliness

      That left mind bare to an unseen assault,

      An empty page on which all that willed could write

      Stark monstrous messages without control.

      A travelling dot on downward roads of Dusk

      Mid barren fields and barns and straggling huts

      And a few crooked and phantasmal trees,

      He faced a sense of death and conscious void.

      But still a hostile Life unseen was there

      Whose deathlike poise resisting light and truth

      Made living a bleak gap in nullity.

      He heard the grisly voices that deny;

      Assailed by thoughts that swarmed like spectral hordes,

      A prey to the staring phantoms of the gloom

      And terror approaching with its lethal mouth,

      Driven by a strange will down ever down,

      The sky above a communiqué of Doom,

      He strove to shield his spirit from despair,

      But felt the horror of the growing Night

      And the Abyss rising to claim his soul.

      Then ceased the abodes of creatures and their forms

      And solitude wrapped him in its voiceless folds.

      All vanished suddenly like a thought expunged;

      His spirit became an empty listening gulf

      Void of the dead illusion of a world:

      Nothing was left, not even an evil face.

      He

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