Rhymes And Rhythms - VI

Space and dread and the dark,     Over a livid stretch of sky     Cloud-monsters crawling like a funeral train     Of huge primeval presences     Stooping beneath the weight     Of some enormous, rudimentary grief;     While in the haunting loneliness     The far sea waits and wanders, with a sound     As of the trailing skirts of Destiny     Passing unseen     To some immitigable end     With her grey henchman, Death.     What larve, what spectre is this     Thrilling the wilderness to life     As with the bodily shape of Fear?     What but a desperate sense,     A strong foreboding of those dim,     Interminable continents, forlorn     And many-silenced in a dusk     Inviolable utterly, and dead     As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes     In hugger-mugger through eternity?     Life, life, let there be life!     Better a thousand times the roaring hours     When wave and wind,     Like the Arch-Murderer in flight     From the Avenger at his heel,     Storm through the desolate fastnesses     And wild waste places of the world!     Life, give me life until the end,     That at the very top of being,     The battle-spirit shouting in my blood,     Out of the reddest hell of the fight     I may be snatched and flung     Into the everlasting lull,     The immortal, incommunicable dream.