In nescientness, in nescientness, Mother, we put these fleshly lendings on Thou yield'st to thy poor children; took thy gift Of life, which must, in all the after days
Be craved again with tears,— With fresh and still petitionary tears. Being once bound thine almsmen for that gift, We are bound to beggary; nor our own can call
The journal dole of customary life, But after suit obsequious for‘ t to thee. Indeed this flesh, O Mother, A beggar's gown, a client's badging,
We find, which from thy hands we simply took, Naught dreaming of the after penury, In nescientness. In a little thought, in a little thought,
We stand and eye thee in a grave dismay, With sad and doubtful questioning, when first Thou speak'st to us as men: like sons who hear Newly their mother's history, unthought
Before, and say — “She is not as we dreamed: Ah me! we are beguiled!” What art thou, then, That art not our conceiving? Art thou not Too old for thy young children? Or perchance,
Keep'st thou a youth perpetual-burnishable Beyond thy sons decrepit? It is long Since Time was first a fledgling; Yet thou may'st be but as a pendant bulla
Against his stripling bosom swung. Alack! For that we seem indeed To have slipped the world's great leaping-time, and come Upon thy pinched and dozing days: these weeds,
These corporal leavings, thou not cast'st us new, Fresh from thy craftship, like the lilies’ coats, But foist'st us off With hasty tarnished piecings negligent,
Snippets and waste From old ancestral wearings, That have seen sorrier usage; remainder-flesh After our father's surfeits; nay with chinks,
Some of us, that if speech may have free leave Our souls go out at elbows. We are sad With more than our sires’ heaviness, and with More than their weakness weak; we shall not be
Mighty with all their mightiness, nor shall not Rejoice with all their joy. Ay, Mother! Mother! What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed, Thou lustingly engender'st,
To sweat, and make his brag, and rot, Crowned with all honour and all shamefulness? From nightly towers He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens,
Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust, And yet is he successive unto nothing But patrimony of a little mould, And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth
Avid of all dominion and all mightiness, All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs, All beauty, and all starry majesties, And dim transtellar things;— even that it may,
Filled in the ending with a puff of dust, Confess — “It is enough.” The world left empty What that poor mouthful crams. His heart is builded For pride, for potency, infinity,
All heights, all deeps, and all immensities, Arrased with purple like the house of kings, To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries!
Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues, Who bringest forth no saying yet so dark As we ourselves, thy darkest! We the young, In a little thought, in a little thought,
At last confront thee, and ourselves in thee, And wake disgarmented of glory: as one On a mount standing, and against him stands, On the mount adverse, crowned with westering rays,
The golden sun, and they two brotherly Gaze each on each; He faring down To the dull vale, his Godhead peels from him
Till he can scarcely spurn the pebble — For nothingness of new-found mortality — That mutinies against his galled foot. Littly he sets him to the daily way,
With all around the valleys growing grave, And known things changed and strange; but he holds on, Though all the land of light be widowed, In a little thought.
In a little dust, in a little dust, Earth, thou reclaim'st us, who do all our lives Find of thee but Egyptian villeinage. Thou dost this body, this enhavocked realm,
Subject to ancient and ancestral shadows; Descended passions sway it; it is distraught With ghostly usurpation, dinned and fretted With the still-tyrannous dead; a haunted tenement,
Peopled from barrows and outworn ossuaries. Thou giv'st us life not half so willingly As thou undost thy giving; thou that teem'st The stealthy terror of the sinuous pard,
The lion maned with curled puissance, The serpent, and all fair strong beasts of ravin, Thyself most fair and potent beast of ravin; And thy great eaters thou, the greatest, eat'st.
Thou hast devoured mammoth and mastodon, And many a floating bank of fangs, The scaly scourges of thy primal brine, And the tower-crested plesiosaure.
Thou fill'st thy mouth with nations, gorgest slow On purple aeons of kings; man's hulking towers Are carcase for thee, and to modern sun Disglutt'st their splintered bones.
Rabble of Pharaohs and Arsacidae Keep their cold house within thee; thou hast sucked down How many Ninevehs and Hecatompyloi And perished cities whose great phantasmata
O'erbrow the silent citizens of Dis:— Hast not thy fill? Tarry awhile, lean Earth, for thou shalt drink Even till thy dull throat sicken,
The draught thou grow'st most fat on; hear'st thou not The world's knives bickering in their sheaths? O patience! Much offal of a foul world comes thy way, And man's superfluous cloud shall soon be laid
In a little blood. In a little peace, in a little peace, Thou dost rebate thy rigid purposes Of imposed being, and relenting, mend'st
Too much, with nought. The westering Phoebus’ horse Paws i’ the lucent dust as when he shocked The East with rising; O how may I trace In this decline that morning when we did
Sport‘ twixt the claws of newly-whelped existence, Which had not yet learned rending? we did then Divinely stand, not knowing yet against us Sentence had passed of life, nor commutation
Petitioning into death. What's he that of The Free State argues? Tellus! bid him stoop, Even where the low hic jacet answers him; Thus low, O Man! there's freedom's seignory,
Tellus’ most reverend sole free commonweal, And model deeply-policied: there none Stands on precedence, nor ambitiously Woos the impartial worm, whose favours kiss
With liberal largesse all; there each is free To be e'en what he must, which here did strive So much to be he could not; there all do Their uses just, with no flown questioning.
To be took by the hand of equal earth They doff her livery, slip to the worm, Which lacqueys them, their suits of maintenance, And that soiled workaday apparel cast,
Put on condition: Death's ungentle buffet Alone makes ceremonial manumission; So are the heavenly statutes set, and those Uranian tables of the primal Law.
In a little peace, in a little peace, Like fierce beasts that a common thirst makes brothers, We draw together to one hid dark lake; In a little peace, in a little peace,
We drain with all our burthens of dishonour Into the cleansing sands o’ the thirsty grave. The fiery pomps, brave exhalations, And all the glistering shows o’ the seeming world,
Which the sight aches at, we unwinking see Through the smoked glass of Death; Death, wherewith's fined The muddy wine of life; that earth doth purge Of her plethora of man; Death, that doth flush
The cumbered gutters of humanity; Nothing, of nothing king, with front uncrowned, Whose hand holds crownets; playmate swart o’ the strong; Tenebrous moon that flux and refluence draws
Of the high-tided man; skull-housed asp That stings the heel of kings; true Fount of Youth, Where he that dips is deathless; being's drone-pipe; Whose nostril turns to blight the shrivelled stars,
And thicks the lusty breathing of the sun; Pontifical Death, that doth the crevasse bridge To the steep and trifid God; one mortal birth That broker is of immortality.
Under this dreadful brother uterine, This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come, Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-motherlike, To turn thy weanlings’ mouth averse, embitter'st
Thine over-childed breast. Now, mortal-sonlike, I thou hast suckled, Mother, I at last Shall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel, Here I pluck loose the body's cerementing,
And break the tomb of life; here I shake off The bur o’ the world, man's congregation shun, And to the antique order of the dead I take the tongueless vows: my cell is set
Here in thy bosom; my little trouble is ended In a little peace.
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