hawking over the lake.

  And I, a naked man, calling

  calling to thee for my mana,

  my kingdom, my power, and my glory.

  MANA OF THE SEA

  Do you see the sea, breaking itself to bits against the islands

  yet remaining unbroken, the level great sea?

  Have I caught from it

  the tide in my arms

  that runs down to the shallows of my wrists, and breaks

  abroad in my hands, like waves among the rocks of substance?

  Do the rollers of the sea

  roll down my thighs

  and over the submerged islets of my knees

  with power, sea-power sea-power

  to break against the ground

  in the flat, recurrent breakers of my two feet?

  And is my body ocean, ocean

  whose power runs to the shores along my arms

  and breaks in the foamy hands, whose power rolls out

  to the white-treading waves of two salt feet?

  I am the sea, I am the sea!

  SALT

  SALT is scorched water that the sun has scorched

  into substance and flaky whiteness

  in the eternal opposition

  between the two great ones, Fire, and the Wet.

  THE FOUR

  To our senses, the elements are four

  and have ever been, and will ever be

  for they are the elements of life, of poetry, and of perception

  the four Great Ones, the Four Roots, the First Four

  of Fire and the Wet, Earth and the wide Air of the world.

  To find the other many elements, you must go to the laboratory

  and hunt them down.

  But the four we have always with us, they are our world.

  Or rather, they have us with them.

  THE BOUNDARY STONE

  So, salt is the boundary mark between Fire that burns, and

  the Wet.

  It is the white stone of limits, the term, the landmark between

  the two great and moving Ones, Fire and the yielding Wet.

  It is set up as a boundary, and blood and sweat

  are marked out with the boundary of salt, between Fire and

  the Wet.

  SPILLING THE SALT

  DON’T spill the salt, for it is the landmark,

  and cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark.

  And the watchers, the dividers, those swift ones with dark

  sharp wings

  and keen eyes, they will hover, they will come between you,

  between you and your purpose like a knife’s edge shadow

  cutting you off from your joy.

  For the unseen witnesses are the angels of creation

  but also the sunderers, the angels with black, sharp wing-tips.

  WALK WARILY

  WALK warily, walk warily, be careful what you say:

  because now the Sunderers are hovering round,

  the Dividers are close upon us, dogging our every breath

  and watching our every step.

  and beating their great wings in our panting faces.

  The angels are standing back, the angels of the Kiss.

  they wait, they give way now

  to the Sunderers, to the swift ones

  the ones with the sharp black wings

  and the shudder of electric anger

  and the drumming of pinions of thunder

  and hands like salt

  and the sudden dripping down of the knife-edge cleavage of the lightning

  cleaving, cleaving.

  Lo, we are in the midst of the sunderers

  the cleavers, that cleave us forever apart from one another,

  and separate heart from heart, and cut away all caresses

  with the white triumphance of lightning and electric delight,

  the Dividers, the Thunderers, the Swift Ones, blind with speed

  who put salt in our mouths

  and currents of excitement in our limbs

  and hotness, and then more crusted brine in our hearts.

  It is the day of the Sunderers

  and the angels are standing back.

  MYSTIC

  THEY call all experience of the senses mystic, when the

  experience is considered.

  So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it

  the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth

  and the insistence of the sun.

  All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.

  Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour

  and some of too much sun, brackish sweet

  like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.

  If I say I taste these things in an apple, I am called mystic,

  which means a liar.

  The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig

  and taste nothing

  that is real.

  But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.

  Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.

  ANAXAGORAS

  WHEN Anaxagoras says: Even the snow is black!

  he is taken by the scientists very seriously

  because he is enunciating a “ principle,” a “ law “

  that all things are mixed, and therefore the purest white snow

  has in it an element of blackness.

  That they call science, and reality.

  I call it mental conceit and mystification

  and nonsense, for pure snow is white to us

  white and white and only white

  with a lovely bloom of whiteness upon white

  in which the soul delights and the senses

  have an experience of bliss.

  And life is for delight, and for bliss

  and dread, and the dark, rolling ominousness of doom

  then the bright dawning of delight again

  from off the sheer white snow, or the poised moon.

  And in the shadow of the sun the snow is blue, so blue-aloof

  with a hint of the frozen bells of the scylla flower

  but never the ghost of a glimpse of Anaxagoras’ funeral black.

  KISSING AND HORRID STRIFE

  I HAVE been defeated and dragged down by pain

  and worsted by the evil world-soul of to-day.

  But still I know that life is for delight

  and for bliss

  as now when the tiny wavelets of the sea

  tip the morning light on edge, and spill it with delight

  to show how inexhaustible it is.

  And life is for delight, and bliss

  like now where the white sun kisses the sea

  and plays with the wavelets like a panther playing with its

  cuffing them with soft paws,

  and blows that are caresses,

  kisses of the soft-balled paws, where the talons are.

  And life is for dread,

  for doom that darkens, and the Sunderers

  that sunder us from each other

  that strip us and destroy us and break us down

  as the tall fox-gloves and the mulleins and mallows

  are torn down by dismembering autumn

  till not a vestige is left, and bleak winter has no trace

  of any such flowers;

  and yet the roots below the blackness are intact:

  the Thunderers and the Sunderers have their term

  their limit, their thus far and no further.

  Life is for kissing and for horrid strife.

  Life is for the angels and the Sunderers

  Life is for the daimons and the demons

  those that put honey on our Hps, and those that put salt.

  But life is not

  for the dead vanity of knowing better, nor the blank

  cold superiority, nor silly

  conceit of being immune,

  nor puerility of contradictions

  like saying snow is black, or desire is evil.

  Life is for kissing and for horrid strife,

  the angels and the Sunderers.

  And perhaps in unknown Death we perhaps shall know

  Oneness and poised immunity.

  But why then should we die while we can live?

  And while we live

  the kissing and communing cannot cease

  nor yet the striving and the horrid strife.

  WHEN SATAN FELL

  WHEN Satan fell, he only fell

  because the Lord Almighty rose a bit too high,

  a bit beyond himself.

  So Satan only fell to keep a balance.

  “ Are you so lofty, O my God?

  Are you so pure and lofty, up aloft?

  Then I will fall, and plant the paths to hell

  with vines and poppies and fig-trees

  so that lost souls may eat grapes

  and the moist fig

  and put scarlet buds in their hair on the way to hell,

  on the way to dark perdition.”

  And hell and heaven are the scales of the balance of life

  which swing against each other.

  DOORS

  BUT evil is a third thing.

  No, not the ithyphallic demons

  not even the double Phallus of the devil himself

  with his key to the two dark doors

  is evil.

  Life has its palace of blue day aloft

  and its halls of the great dark below,

  and there are the bright doors where souls go gaily in:

  and there are the dark doors where souls pass silently

  holding their breath, naked and darkly alone

  entering into the other communion.

  There is a double sacredness of doors.

  Some you may sing through, and all men hear,

  but others, the dark doors, oh hush! hush!

  let nobody be about! slip in! go all unseen.

  But evil, evil is another thing! in another place!

  EVIL IS HOMELESS

  EVIL has no home,

  only evil has no home,

  not even the home of demoniacal hell.

  Hell is the home of souls lost in darkness,

  even as heaven is the home of souls lost in light.

  And like Persephone, or Attis

  there are souls that are at home in both homes.

  Not like grey Dante, colour-blind

  to the scarlet and purple flowers at the doors of hell.

  But evil

  evil has no dwelling-place

  the grey vulture, the grey hyaena, corpse-eaters

  they dwell in the outskirt fringes of nowhere

  where the grey twilight of evil sets in.

  And men that sit in machines

  among spinning wheels, in an apotheosis of wheels

  sit in the grey mist of movement which moves not

  and going which goes not

  and doing which does not

  and being which is not:

  that is, they sit and are evil, in evil,

  grey evil, which has no path, and shows neither light nor dark

  and has no home, no home anywhere.

  WHAT THEN IS EVIL?

  OH, in the world of the flesh of man

  iron gives the deadly wound

  and the wheel starts the principle of all evil.

  Oh, in the world of things

  the wheel is the first principle of evil.

  But in the world of the soul of man

  there, and there alone lies the pivot of pure evil

  only in the soul of man, when it pivots upon the ego.

  When the mind makes a wheel which turns on the hub of the ego

  and the will, the living dynamo, gives the motion and the speed

  and the wheel of the conscious self spins on in absolution, absolute

  absolute, absolved from the sun and the earth and the moon,

  absolute consciousness, absolved from strife and kisses

  absolute self-awareness, absolved from the meddling of creation

  absolute freedom, absolved from the great necessities of being

  then we see evil, pure evil

  and we see it only in man

  and in his machines.

  THE EVIL WORLD-SOUL

  OH, there is evil, there is an evil world-soul.

  But it is the soul of man only, and his machines

  which has brought to pass the fearful thing called evil,

  hyaenas only hint at it.

  Do not think that a machine is without a soul.

  Every wheel on its hub has a soul, evil,

  it is part of the evil world-soul, spinning.

  And every man who has become a detached and self-activated ego

  is evil, evil, part of the evil world-soul

  which wishes to blaspheme the world into greyness,

  into evil neutrality, into mechanism.

  The Robot is the unit of evil.

  And the symbol of the Robot is the wheel revolving.

  THE WANDERING COSMOS

  OH, do not tell me the heavens as well are a wheel.

  For every revolution of the earth around the sun

  is a footstep onwards, onwards, we know not whither

  and we do not care,

  but a step onwards in untraveiled space,

  for the earth, like the sun, is a wanderer.

  Their going round each time is a step

  onwards, we know not whither,

  but onwards, onwards, for the heavens are wandering

  the moon and the earth, the sun, Saturn and Betelgeuse, Vega

  and Sirius and Altair

  they wander their strange and different ways in heaven

  past Venus and Uranus and the signs.

  For life is a wandering, we know not whither, but going.

  Only the wheel goes round, but it never wanders.

  It stays on its hub.

  DEATH IS NOT EVIL, EVIL IS MECHANICAL

  ONLY the human being, absolved from kissing and strife

  goes on and on and on, without wandering

  fixed upon the hub of the ego

  going, yet never wandering, fixed, yet in motion,

  the kind of hell that is real, grey and awful

  sinless and stainless going round and round

  the kind of hell grey Dante never saw

  but of which he had a bit inside him.

  Know thyself, and that thou art mortal.

  But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal:

  a thing of kisses and strife

  a lit-up shaft of rain

  a calling column of blood

  a rose tree bronzey with thorns

  a mixture of yea and nay

  a rainbow of love and hate

  a wind that blows back and forth

  a creature of conflict, like a cataract:

  know thyself, in denial of all these things.

  And thou shalt begin to spin round on the hub of the obscene ego

  a grey void thing that goes without wandering

  a machine that in itself is nothing

  a centre of the evil world.

  STRIFE

  WHEN strife is a thing of two

  each knows the other in struggle

  and the conflict is a communion

  a twoness.

  But when strife is a thing of one

  a single ego striving for its own ends

  and beating down resistances

  then strife is evil, because it is not strife.

  THE LATE WAR

  THE War was not strife

  it was murder

  each side trying to murder the other side evilly.

  MURDER

  KILLING is not evil.

  A man may be my enemy to the death,

  and that is passion and communion.

  But murder is always evil

  being an act of one

  perpetrated upon the other

  without cognisance or communion.

  MURDEROUS WEAPONS

  So guns and strong explosives

  are evil, evil

  they let death upon unseen men

  in sheer murder.

  And most murderous of all devices

  are poison gases and air-bombs

  refinements of evil.

  DEPARTURE

  Now some men must get up and depart

  from evil, or all is lost.

  The evil will in many evil men

  makes an evil world-soul, which purposes

  to reduce the world to grey ash.

  Wheels are evil

  and machines are evil

  and the will to make money is evil.

  All forms of abstraction are evil:

  finance is a great evil abstraction

  science has now become an evil abstraction

  education is an evil abstraction.

  Jazz and film and wireless

  are all evil abstractions from life.

  And politics, now, are an evil abstraction from life.

  Evil is upon us and has got hold of us.

  Men must depart from it, or all is lost.

  We must make an isle impregnable

  against evil.

  THE SHIP OF DEATH

  I

  Now it is autumn and the falling fruit

  and the long journey towards oblivion.

  The apples falling like great drops of dew —

  to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

  And it is time to go, to bid farewell

  to one’s own self, and find an exit

  from the fallen self.

  II

  Have you built your ship of death, O have you?