What of the Immanent Will and Its designs? SPIRIT OF THE YEARS It works unconsciously, as heretofore, Eternal artistries in Circumstance, Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote, Seem in themselves Its single listless aim, And not their consequence. CHORUS OF THE PITIES [aerial music] Still thus? Still thus? Ever unconscious! An automatic sense Unweeting why or whence? Be, then, the inevitable, as of old, Although that SO it be we dare not hold! SPIRIT OF THE YEARS Hold what ye list, fond believing Sprites, You cannot swerve the pulsion of the Byss, Which thinking on, yet weighing not Its thought, Unchecks Its clock-like laws. SPIRIT SINISTER [aside] Good, as before. My little engines, then, will still have play. SPIRIT OF THE PITIES Why doth It so and so, and ever so, This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel? SPIRIT OF THE YEARS As one sad story runs, It lends Its heed To other worlds, being wearied out with this; Wherefore Its mindlessness of earthly woes. Some, too, have told at whiles that rightfully Its warefulness, Its care, this planet lost When in her early growth and crudity By bad mad acts of severance men contrived, Working such nescience by their own device.-- Yea, so it stands in certain chronicles, Though not in mine. SPIRIT OF THE PITIES Meet is it, none the less, To bear in thought that though Its consciousness May be estranged, engrossed afar, or sealed, Sublunar shocks may wake Its watch anon? SPIRIT OF THE YEARS Nay. In the Foretime, even to the germ of Being, Nothing appears of shape to indicate That cognizance has marshalled things terrene, Or will [such is my thinking] in my span. Rather they show that, like a knitter drowsed, Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness, The Will has woven with an absent heed Since life first was; and ever will so weave. SPIRIT SINISTER Hence we've rare dramas going--more so since It wove Its web in the Ajaccian womb! SPIRIT OF THE YEARS Well, no more this on what no mind can mete. Our scope is but to register and watch By means of this great gift accorded us-- The free trajection of our entities. SPIRIT OF THE PITIES