Ah, what a sweat of anguish in that strife
     To hold them fast conjoined within him still;
     Submissive to his will
     Along the road of life! 
     And marvel not he wavered if at whiles
     The forward step met frowns, the backward smiles. 
     For Pleasure witched him her sweet cup to drain;
     Repentance offered ecstasy in pain. 
     Delicious licence called it Nature’s cry;
     Ascetic rigours crushed the fleshly sigh;
     A tread on shingle timed his lame advance
     Flung as the die of Bacchanalian Chance,
     He of the troubled marching army leaned
     On godhead visible, on godhead screened;
     The radiant roseate, the curtained white;
     Yet sharp his battle strained through day, through night.

     He drank of fictions, till celestial aid
     Might seem accorded when he fawned and prayed;
     Sagely the generous Giver circumspect,
     To choose for grants the egregious, his elect;
     And ever that imagined succour slew
     The soul of brotherhood whence Reverence drew.

     In fellowship religion has its founts: 
     The solitary his own God reveres: 
     Ascend no sacred Mounts
     Our hungers or our fears. 
     As only for the numbers Nature’s care
     Is shown, and she the personal nothing heeds,
     So to Divinity the spring of prayer
     From brotherhood the one way upward leads. 
     Like the sustaining air
     Are both for flowers and weeds. 
     But he who claims in spirit to be flower,
     Will find them both an air that doth devour.

     Whereby he smelt his treason, who implored
     External gifts bestowed but on the sword;
     Beheld himself, with less and less disguise,
     Through those blood-cataracts which dimmed his eyes,
     His army’s foe, condemned to strive and fail;
     See a black adversary’s ghost prevail;
     Never, though triumphs hailed him, hope to win
     While still the conflict tore his breast within.

     Out of that agony, misread for those
     Imprisoned Powers warring unappeased,
     The ghost of his black adversary rose,
     To smother light, shut heaven, show earth diseased. 
     And long with him was wrestling ere emerged
     A mind to read in him the reflex shade
     Of its fierce torment; this way, that way urged;
     By craven compromises hourly swayed.

     Crouched as a nestling, still its wings untried,
     The man’s mind opened under weight of cloud. 
     To penetrate the dark was it endowed;
     Stood day before a vision shooting wide. 
     Whereat the spectral enemy lost form;
     The traversed wilderness exposed its track. 
     He felt the far advance in looking back;
     Thence trust in his foot forward through the storm.