Judas Iscariot drearily
Wheeling round the deadly tree:
Adders sleep
Awake and keep
Their watch, encircling scale to scale
The tree of bale.
From whose cleft fastnesses glare out
Basilisks furnace-eyed,
Within whose shade like matted hair,
About, about,
Pronged hornets cruise and glide,
Sting, sting the glassy air.
And all around the labouring ground is torn;
Hoof and horn
Thrice-deep their hieroglyphs have lined,
Lead in and in his mind,
And wind him in a maze forlorn.
Judas, awake and pass
Dryfoot the charmed morass,
Break the bright fence of glass,
Lift up your eyes!
Asleep in light great-limbed Judaea lies;
Dark wood and sunny hill
Will let you where you will,
And by some road perhaps young Judas waits,
Not found yet by his twelve doom-bearing mates.
O that all time had stopped then, had rolled back
A little way, let Judas out again!
I saw Him stand in the Garden, by the snare
The dove-eyed Decoy. Had I taken my life
Just then it would have been in time. O that
I had stumbled and fallen then, died suddenly!
I stumbled and did not fall; the vast earth turned,
Then stopped awry, half-way, all mad and strange,
The ponderous heavens heeled over, stars, rocks, soldiers,
The very roots run wrong, locked wrong forever!
Now Time beats on, all changed, and yet the same.
Judas Iscariot wearily,
Wheeling round the darkening tree:
Now winds the sting
Deeper,
Now the faint fairy death-bells ring,
Now the mind’s surly keeper
Makes the thirty death-coins spin,
Winding Judas in:
With such thin-edged unearthly sound
As ours the stones cry from the ground:
The little stones that cut the feet
Of travellers going up the hill,
Of sad and merry, lame and fleet,
And cannot show
Compassion though
Their little arrows striking make
With such mean war some heart to break
That thought to die undaunted on the hill.
Now all the air is still.
He chose, and I was chosen. No one knew Him.
Judas Iscariot by the tree.