The Adventure of the Apocalypse

The terror and the tyranny

A demon's grip is the wide universe—

Unending space and termless time, yet each

Distance and day hold ever the same heart-break!

Sunlight falls like a fire-whip on the flesh:

From pulse-throb to small quivering pulse-throb

Our life keeps running neath that titan stroke.

And every star opens a wound of dream

In the unescapable gloom that is our soul.

Even beauty is a rainbow hung on tears. . . .

But through the terror and the tyranny

And yet the blind defiance by our blood

A wondrous word steals out in lonely calms

When on itself man's mind looks with long gaze

And broods on the secret of mortality.

Too vast the doom of boundless space and time

Seems for so tiny a creature and too keen

For a pygmy such denial of defeat!

Are then the monster hours a wizard's wand

Smiting to wake up some veiled heaven within—

Challenge to charm out lost omnipotence?

O freedom to gold freedom calls across

The iron infinite of a world of woe!

Pain eats up joy that we may crave God's deep,

Fate drives us to a quest of God's immense,

We bleed that God in us may break through clay.

And the whole tyranny and terror we face

Are a perilous pressure of God on His own self

To smile from blankest sleep. But once we wake

The superhuman light behind our eyes

All that we dread laughs suddenly divine!

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