Master of masters, O maker of heroes, Thunder the brave, Irresistible message:— ‘Life is worth Living Through every grain of it, From the foundations To the last edge Of the cornerstone, death.’ XV YOU played and sang a snatch of song, A song that all-too well we knew; But whither had flown the ancient wrong; And was it really I and you? O, since the end of life’s to live And pay in pence the common debt, What should it cost us to forgive Whose daily task is to forget? You babbled in the well-known voice— Not new, not new the words you said. You touched me off that famous poise, That old effect, of neck and head. Dear, was it really you and I? In truth the riddle’s ill to read, So many are the deaths we die Before we can be dead indeed. XVI SPACE and dread and the dark— Over a livid stretch of sky Cloud-monsters crawling, like a funeral train Of huge, primeval presences Stooping beneath the weight Of some enormous, rudimentary grief; While in the haunting loneliness The far sea waits and wanders with a sound As of the trailing skirts of Destiny, Passing unseen To some immitigable end With her grey henchman, Death. What larve, what spectre is this Thrilling the wilderness to life As with the bodily shape of Fear? What but a desperate sense, A strong foreboding of those dim Interminable continents, forlorn And many-silenced, in a dusk Inviolable utterly, and dead As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes In hugger-mugger through eternity? Life—life—let there be life! Better a thousand times the roaring hours When wave and wind, Like the Arch-Murderer in flight From the Avenger at his heel, Storm through the desolate fastnesses And wild waste places of the world! Life—give me life until the end, That at the very top of being, The battle-spirit shouting in my blood, Out of the reddest hell of the fight I may be snatched and flung Into the everlasting lull, The immortal, incommunicable dream. XVII CARMEN PATIBULARE _To_ H. S. TREE, Old Tree of the Triple Crook And the rope of the Black Election, ’Tis the faith of the Fool that a race you rule Can never achieve perfection: So ‘It’s O, for the time of the new Sublime And the better than human way, When the Rat (poor beast) shall come to his own And the Wolf shall have his day!’ For Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Beam And the power of provocation, You have cockered the Brute with your dreadful fruit Till your fruit is mere stupration: And ‘It’s how should we rise to be pure and wise, And how can we choose but fall, So long as the Hangman makes us dread, And the Noose floats free for all?’