Pain and Despair

That was a time when only the dead could smile.

No foreign sky protected me, no stranger’s wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place.

Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove.

Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree. The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars And reconciles forgotten wars.

They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer. They know and do not know, that acting is suffering.

Terminate torment Of love unsatisfied The greater torment Of love satisfied.

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates.

Still falls the Rain— Dark as the world of man, black as our loss— Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails Upon the Cross.

as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth

I hear a sudden cry of pain! There is a rabbit in a snare.

The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

Now no joy but lacks salt That is not dashed with pain And weariness and fault; I crave the stain Of tears, the aftermark Of almost too much love, The sweet of bitter bark And burning clove.

With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all.

In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.” 1

But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.

What shall I do with this absurdity— O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog’s tail?

Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?

We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way, Baa! Baa! Baa! We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray, Baa—aa—aa! Gentlemen rankers out on the spree, Damned from here to Eternity, God ha’ mercy on such as we, Baa! Yah! Baa!

To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned.

Something was dead in each of us, And what was dead was Hope.