The three stern sisters of the mystery Enduring and miraculously wrought In granite and in porphyry, Then, holding concourse in the desert, spake With the great sound of billows on the sea That rumble as they break: “Thou, Eros, art the eternal riddle, we Are but in stone the semblance of thy thought.” Limbed like the panther, featured like a man, The wisest of the Sphinxes thus began, That still had waited where the river steams And winds the caravan: “In my brain’s cavern seven cubits span Dwell visions splendorous Of the great lords of song and thought and might, Who in the large eyes of Antinous Behold the Deeper Light, Upon my lashes gleams Still Shakespeare’s rhythmic tear; Here Plato musing dreamed his dreams Of spirit-passion; David here In the long night-watch sang of Jonathan.” Then rose the wingèd Theban, figure dual Of maid and lion strangely wed; “I am the blood that tingles, and the jewel Of all the world’s desire adorns my head-- The lithe-limbed youths that fell for Helen’s sake Have died for me, The lads that wake To ripeness curse me as they ache Beneath my tyranny. My mandates sweet and cruel Nor prayer nor penance shall revoke: I am the flame, men’s bodies are the fuel, Men’s souls the smoke.” The pinioned Sphinx of Babylon, Human in naught, Lord Eros thus addressed: “Wherever men have spat thy face upon Or sought strange pleasure in unholy quest, My breath had made them mad. I am the dream that Nero’s mother had Ere burned his natal star. I am the ghastly vision of de Sade: Astarte and Priapus wage War for my beauty monstrous, barren, bare; The Cretan knew me and from far My image fell upon the crimson page Of Swinburne and of Baudelaire.” The silence shivered as in tearless woe When they had done, the Foam-begotten broke Across his knee the sceptre and the bow: “The empyrean is beyond your reach, Your substance earth of earth, And even she that called on Plato’s name Bears soilure of a mortal birth. The triple mirror are you of my shame Half-beast are two, one wholly beast, in each Is something bestial, and your wings’ winds choke Within my heart the unadulterate flame.” But the three Sphinxes mighty murmuring Thus answer made: “O Love, Turn thou thy wrath above, Where round God’s throne the cosmic sunsets fling The light that shall not fade. Beneath his feet the countless æons roll, His slow relentless purpose knows the goal Of things, and joining flesh and spirit made A beast the mansion of the soul.” And lo, the spring’s breath faded from Love’s charm, The sunshine from his hair, And in his arm The arrows turned to rods. He heeded not the silent years that crawl Like uncouth spiders. Weary, cynical, Self-conscious, disenchanted stood he there, The oldest and the saddest of the gods. THE CYNIC’S CREDO