Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TARTARUS, by CHARLES WILLIAMS


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TARTARUS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Under my mind, so near I stand to the edge
Last Line: Lower and lower and lower beelzebub falls.
Subject(s): Devil; Hell; Satan; Mephistopheles; Lucifer; Beelzebub


UNDER my mind, so near I stand to the edge,
It crumbles, and I, from ruin barely saved,
Fling myself back, as at once, without shelf or ledge,
All life into nothing suddenly drops away.

Where was I walking, where? ...
The firm world stretches without me, of things and men;
Common delights that sudden gap repair;
Nothing in everything once more is vanishèd.

Higgledy-piggledy, through my brain, my thoughts,
In many alien lands born, of many minds,
Under far ascetic poles, upon sensuous ghauts,
In temperate meadows, but all here naturalized,

Hurry; unending that dim crowd stretches away.
My body is linked to the earth and cannot cease;
In death, but not destruction, shall end its day.
In body and mind all's sure, all's help at need.

Yet deep within me, wherever I stand or go,
I feel now the suction, the drag, the desire of the void
To swallow for ever the spirits of men, the flow,
Towards chaos ever-thinning, of souls disjoined.

Sick, sick from that shudder's last throes, I am shaken; pale
Must I walk and troubled hereafter, ever at point
To see in a room, in a stream, in a friend's face, and quail,
The farther gate of hell that gives on the void:—

The gulf, whence all the kingdom, the glory and power,
Suffices, yet hardly, to save us, lest we should sink;
Nothing, that presses against us each hour, each hour
Held back by the full-stress'd might of heavenly things;

The choice and sole dwelling of those who, dropping self-tossed
From the City whose streets in salvation their fellows walk,
Drift, dying for ever and ever, where, first of the lost,
Lower and lower and lower Beelzebub falls.





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