BACK to the womb I creep, back to the womb!
Let snows and stagnant seas my province blight,
Deep down in matrix grots shall I consume
My mother's flesh, my spirit and the night.
I shall beat about her heart a few brief years,--
I, who once rolled fiery gold through all her veins,
And soared from mountain-throats o'er hemispheres,
And throbbed in huts and palaces and fanes.
What power in me abode! what loveliness!
The three vast elements proclaimed me king,
Straight from the Sun I sank with gifts to bless
The world with living tongue and burning wing.
I came, and Man sat caverned with the brute;
I nursed him and he rose into a god;
I leave him and he withers with the fruit
Of ages on the ground his splendour trod.
Farewell, you airs and skies from whence I fell,
Fond Earth, farewell, and all thy beauty past--
And thou, old pulseless Ocean foe, farewell!--
All dead! I too shall die, though I be last.
Utter silence and utter lifelessness engulf the Globe; the frozen
and adamantine bars of oblivion fall.
As the soft sibilant tones of the Fire-daemon flutter away, slowly
the spheres recede and vanish in the clasp of Night.
Once more is heard, sweet and clear, the voice of the Spirit
of Chaos.
Her music of mercy sinks softly down like star-dust, or as of old
dew on terrestrial flowers.
Through the infinite Universe, through Eternity, she sings her
everlasting song.
She lulls her endless flocks of worlds asleep; she seals them up
in the dark cycles of mutation--or makes them to bloom in the Night.
For they awaken once more when rings aloud the impulsive alternating
song of the Spirit of Life, her joyful sister, clad with inevitable
day.
Now the solar orbs are overcast with swift eclipse as with a mantle.
They are swept into illimitable abysses.
Above, below and all about gleam vast cohorts and constellations
of living stars, pouring crystalline melody from thrones of Light.
Ghosts of worlds drift by, and suns wrapped in extinction.
They too are floating tombs, in them too, Life, Love and Thought
lie sepultured like seeds.
Sepultured, until from the mighty marriage of orb with orb in
planetary impact shall the great rose of Existence re-unfold its
leaves in the light and warmth of suns new-born.
So follow and follow the unending successions of the Seasons of
Eternity.