’Over my shoulder for eighty years
I have looked for the gleam of the sphere of spheres.’ 
‘In all your turning, what have you found?’
‘At least, I know why the world goes round.’

THE END OF FEAR

Though the whole heaven be one-eyed with the moon,
  Though the dead landscape seem a thing possessed,
  Yet I go singing through that land oppressed
As one that singeth through the flowers of June.

No more, with forest-fingers crawling free
  O’er dark flint wall that seems a wall of eyes,
  Shall evil break my soul with mysteries
Of some world-poison maddening bush and tree.

No more shall leering ghosts of pimp and king
  With bloody secrets veiled before me stand. 
  Last night I held all evil in my hand
Closed:  and behold it was a little thing.

I broke the infernal gates and looked on him
  Who fronts the strong creation with a curse;
  Even the god of a lost universe,
Smiling above his hideous cherubim.

And pierced far down in his soul’s crypt unriven
  The last black crooked sympathy and shame,
  And hailed him with that ringing rainbow name
Erased upon the oldest book in heaven.

Like emptied idiot masks, sin’s loves and wars
  Stare at me now:  for in the night I broke
  The bubble of a great world’s jest, and woke
Laughing with laughter such as shakes the stars.

THE HOLY OF HOLIES

’Elder father, though thine eyes
Shine with hoary mysteries,
Canst thou tell what in the heart
Of a cowslip blossom lies?

’Smaller than all lives that be,
Secret as the deepest sea,
Stands a little house of seeds,
Like an elfin’s granary,

’Speller of the stones and weeds,
Skilled in Nature’s crafts and creeds,
Tell me what is in the heart
Of the smallest of the seeds.’

’God Almighty, and with Him
Cherubim and Seraphim,
Filling all eternity—­
Adonai Elohim.’

THE MIRROR OF MADMEN

I dreamed a dream of heaven, white as frost,
The splendid stillness of a living host;
Vast choirs of upturned faces, line o’er line. 
Then my blood froze; for every face was mine.

Spirits with sunset plumage throng and pass,
Glassed darkly in the sea of gold and glass. 
But still on every side, in every spot,
I saw a million selves, who saw me not.

I fled to quiet wastes, where on a stone,
Perchance, I found a saint, who sat alone;
I came behind:  he turned with slow, sweet grace,
And faced me with my happy, hateful face.

I cowered like one that in a tower doth bide,
Shut in by mirrors upon every side;
Then I saw, islanded in skies alone
And silent, one that sat upon a throne.