Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, MANES, THE HERETIC, by EDMUND WILLIAM GOSSE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

MANES, THE HERETIC, by             Poem Explanation         Poet's Biography
First Line: Dark, dark at last! And this warm tide of scent
Last Line: Of thy supine and cold omnipotence.
Subject(s): India; Manes (216-176); Mani; Manichaeus


DARK, dark at last! and this warm tide of scent, --
A west wind in a cedarn element, --
These cold leaves of the lily out of sight,
And the long single ray of sacred light!

'Tis night, then; I have slept, and o'er my sleep
The soul of love has hovered close and deep.

A bat moves in the porphyry capitals,
And cuts the clear-drawn radiance as it falls;
So man, intruding in his bestial way,
Shears from the lamp of God the heavenly ray.

Ah! to my keen and tempered senses rise
The temple-perfumes like a people's cries, --
The cinnamon, a prayer beneath the stars,
Adoring love pulsed from the nenuphars,
Sharp aloes, like a soul that strives with sin,
And myrrh, the song of one all chaste within;
In each I join, on each my spirit flies
To float, a thread of mist, along the skies.

By every way I soar to God's abode,
But rising perfumes pave the smoothest road.

Hail! Soul of all things, parted, yet not lost,
One sea of myriad breakers torn and tost,
One river eastward, westward, northward bent
And branching through a monstrous continent,
Yet drawn at last by every winding road
Down to that noiseless marish which is God!

Thou art the wind that like a player's hand
Strikes out harp-music where these columns stand,
Thou art the small hushed cry of crisp dry life
The terebinth gives beneath the carver's knife,
And the soft alabaster sighs for Thee
When the pale sculptor shreds it on his knee.

I pluck these fig-leaves, broad, and smooth as silk,
And godhead weeps from them in tears of milk;
I catch those fish of glimmering head and tail,
And godhead sparkles from each fading scale.
I draw the Indian curtain from my bed,
And Thou the lustrous arch above my head;
It falls in folds, and this one beam I see,
O tender heavenly Light, is trebly Thee!

Ah! Thou, invoked by many a mystic sign,
Bend hither from Thy secret crystalline;
O'er Thy twin angels' arms be seen to move;
Let Light and Perfume teach me Thou art Love.
In this dusk world of scentless, hueless man
My soul once heard Thee, and to light it ran,
Shot leaf and bud from out its watery bed,
And in adoring fragrance Thee-wards spread.
Then Thy soft ray, ineffable, divine,
Flushed my cold petals with ecstatic wine,
The pistils trembled, and the stamens flew
Straight to the centre, where their god they knew,
Clung quivering there, enkindled and aglow,
Sank, big with blessing, on the leaves below;
I bowed, -- and deep within my soul I found
A fount of balm for dying worlds around.

And now, within the temple they have built,
I live to expiate a nation's guilt;
To me they blindly pray, I handing on
To Thee the essence of each orison.
I bask within one narrow'd beam all day,
And sleep all night within this single ray;
While, like the sound of many an instrument,
Floats round me ever this rich tide of scent.
So may I live till all my dreams are o'er,
Then on a shaft of radiance upward soar,
Fade as a thread of dew the sun draws up,
And, kindled high in heaven's inverted cup,
Like some aroma melt into the sense
Of Thy supine and cold omnipotence.





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