No More Learning

_The Poet_.
The glory of the king of all the kings. --
You with the golden power on your brows,
You kings, I think you know not what you are.
First you shall learn yourselves: for neither light
Understandeth itself, nor darkness light.
You see your glory; but you cannot see
That which your glory conquers; and the peoples
Know nought but that the glooming of their night
Maketh a shining scope for crowns, as he,
Even as he, your king, Ahasuerus,
Maketh your splendour a darkness for his light.
But I, neither belonging to the kings
Nor to the people, only I may know
The golden fortune of light anointing kings.
Come with me now, and take my vision awhile.
The people of this world are misery.
What doth Man here? How thinketh God on him?
Surely he was sent here as if thereby
God might forget him. Like infamous desire
A wise heart puts aside, which yet remains
A secret hated memory, man was
In God, and is vainly discarded here.
I see him coming here; I see man's life
Falling into this base and desert ground,
This world that seems an evil riddance thrown
Down by the winds of God's swift purposes;
Some shame of grossness, that would cling upon
The errand of their holy speed, and here
Heapt up and strewn into the place wherein
The mind and being of man wander darkly.
Behold him coming here! --Against my sight,
Warning aback the gleam of sacred heaven,
Is vast forbiddance raised; creatures like hills,
Or darkness surging at the coasts of light,
Stand, a great barricade behind our lives,
Rankt as Eternity had put on stature.
The sharp sides of the peaks are finger'd white
With flame, lit by the fires of God beyond;
The rest is night; the whole people of dark hills
A front of high impenetrable doom.
But lo!
Black in the blackness, is a yawn in the doom,
And out of it flows the kind of man. Behold,
It is a river, through the permission sent
As through a snarling breakage in a cliff;
Turned like a hated thing away from God;
Spat out, the water of man's life, to spill
Down bleak gullies, and thrid the gangways dark
Through the reluctant hills, pouring as if
It knew God were ashamed of it. And thence,
Rejected down the abhorring steeps, man's life
Is wasted in this country, set to run
A blind, ignorant, unremembered course,
Treading with hopeless feet of griev'd waters
Unending unblest spaces, the shameful road
Of dirt thickening into slime its flow,
An insane weather driving. For at the issue,
Hovering mightily fledge to beat it on,
A climate of demon's wings o'erarches man,
The hatred God has sent pursuing him.
Fierce hawking spirits wrong him, hungry Cold,
Crazes of Fear and sickening Want, and huge
Injurious Darkness, lord of the bad wings
That pester all the places beyond God,--
These at the door, with lust to embody themselves,
Wait for the naked journey of man's life
To seize it into ache, ravenously.
They never leave, down all its patient way,
To meddle with its waters, till they be sour
As venom, salt as weeping, foully ailing
With foreign evil,--all the sort of desires
Whoring the shuddering life unto their lust.
Behold man's river now; it has travelled far
From that divine loathing, and it is made
One with the two main fiends, the Dark and Cold,
The faithful lovers of mankind. Behold,
Broad it is now become, a plenteous water,
A roomy tide. And lo, what oars are these?
To sweet sung measure rows what happy fleet,
With at the lifted prows banners of flame,
Bravely scaring the darkness to betray
The black embarasst flood sheared by the stems?
Behold, at last God for man's misery
Hath found excuse! Behold his wretchedness
Gilded at last with beauty pleasant to God!
No longer a useless grief is man's life now;
For floating on it, for enjoying it,
A state of barges goes, the state of kings.
They bring a day with them of many lamps,
And as they move, on the black slabbed waters
Red wounds, and green, and golden, do they shoot
About them, beautiful cruelty of light;
And they throw music over the sounding river.