What shape had I before the Fall?
What hills and rivers did I seek?
What were my thoughts then? And of what
Forgotten histories did I speak
To my companions? Did our eyes
From their foredestined watching-place
See Heaven and Earth one land, and range
Therein through all of Time and Space?
Did I see Chaos and the Word,
The suppliant Dust, the moving Hand,
Myself, the Many and the One,
The dead, the living Land?
That height cannot be scaled again.
My fall was like the fall that burst
Old Lear’s heart on the summer sward.
Where I lie now I stood at first.
The ancient pain returns anew.
Where was I ere I came to man?
What shape among the shapes that once
Agelong through endless Eden ran?
Did I see there the dragon brood
By streams their emerald scales unfold,
While from their amber eyeballs fell
Soft-rayed the rustling gold?
It must be that one time I walked
By rivers where the dragon drinks;
But this side Eden’s wall I meet
On every twisting road the Sphinx
Whose head is like a wooden prow
That forward leaning dizzily
Over the seas of whitened worlds
Has passed and nothing found to see,
Whose breast, a flashing ploughshare, once
Cut the rich furrows wrinkled in
Venusberg’s sultry underworld
And busy trampled fields of sin,
Whose salt-white brow like crusted fire
Smiles ever, whose cheeks are red as blood,
Whose dolphin back is flowered yet
With wrack that swam upon the Flood.
Since then in antique attitudes
I swing the bright two-handed sword
And strike and strike the marble brow,
Wide-eyed and watchful as a bird,
Smite hard between the basilisk eyes,
And carve the snaky dolphin side,
Until the coils are cloven in two
And free the glittering pinions glide.
Like quicksilver the scales slip down,
Upon the air the spirit flies,
And so I build me Heaven and Hell
To buy my bartered Paradise.
While from a legendary height
I see a shadowy figure fall,
And not far off another beats
With his bare hands on Eden’s wall.