Look how in cluttered heaps the crosses rise,
Stacked pile on pile, until they twist and sag
The rivets on the bolted doors of God.
This is a storm beyond imaginings,
Unknown to land or sea. Were waves and gales
The only agents of man's ruin, then
The chance might fall upon his side--the fight
With nature growing simpler every hour,
Her ways being known; but when the struggle takes
Its eddying fortunes in these blinded routes,
Not once, nor twice, as though an incident
Of casual kind had touched man's history,
But as a baffling epidemic strikes
A thousand times his life, failure of cure--
How strike this foul, insistent integer
Clean from his life? ... The taint is in the blood.