VII

     And ever that old task
     Of reading what he is and whence he came,
     Whither to go, finds wilder letters flame
     Across her mask.

     VIII

     She hears his wailful prayer,
     When now to the Invisible he raves
     To rend him from her, now of his mother craves
     Her calm, her care.

     IX

     The thing that shudders most
     Within him is the burden of his cry. 
     Seen of his dread, she is to his blank eye
     The eyeless Ghost.

     X

     Or sometimes she will seem
     Heavenly, but her blush, soon wearing white,
     Veils like a gorsebush in a web of blight,
     With gold-buds dim.

     XI

     Once worshipped Prime of Powers,
     She still was the Implacable:  as a beast,
     She struck him down and dragged him from the feast
     She crowned with flowers.

     XII

     Her pomp of glorious hues,
     Her revelries of ripeness, her kind smile,
     Her songs, her peeping faces, lure awhile
     With symbol-clues.

     XIII

     The mystery she holds
     For him, inveterately he strains to see,
     And sight of his obtuseness is the key
     Among those folds.

     XIV

     He may entreat, aspire,
     He may despair, and she has never heed. 
     She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need,
     Not his desire.

     XV

     She prompts him to rejoice,
     Yet scares him on the threshold with the shroud. 
     He deems her cherishing of her best-endowed
     A wanton’s choice.

     XVI

     Albeit thereof he has found
     Firm roadway between lustfulness and pain;
     Has half transferred the battle to his brain,
     From bloody ground;

     XVII

     He will not read her good,
     Or wise, but with the passion Self obscures;
     Through that old devil of the thousand lures,
     Through that dense hood: 

     XVIII

     Through terror, through distrust;
     The greed to touch, to view, to have, to live: 
     Through all that makes of him a sensitive
     Abhorring dust.

     XIX

     Behold his wormy home! 
     And he the wind-whipped, anywhither wave
     Crazily tumbled on a shingle-grave
     To waste in foam.

     XX

     Therefore the wretch inclined
     Afresh to the Invisible, who, he saith,
     Can raise him high:  with vows of living faith
     For little signs.

     XXI

     Some signs he must demand,
     Some proofs of slaughtered nature; some prized few,
     To satisfy the senses it is true,
     And in his hand,

     XXII

     This miracle which saves
     Himself, himself doth from extinction clutch,
     By virtue of his worth, contrasting much
     With brutes and knaves.