THE CITY OF GOD

Published in the English Review

London, England

January 1914

Day after day we crawled

Beneath the leaden, flat,

Featureless heaven, across dull emerald

Field after field, whereon no aureate

Sunrise awakened earth’s Magnificat,

Save at the marge where, rimmed with duller pines,

Dun earth mixed with black heaven, there unsealed

A red eye glowing through that furtive field,

As if the bloodhound of Eternity

Tracked the thief Time. Remorseless rain

Beat down, pale piteous monotony,

Upon the inexplorable plain.

A gnome that staggers under the grim load

Set on his back by God,

Might pity our weak jolting as we moved

Hopelessly, yet inevitably, on,

Under who knows what senseless goad,

Unlovable as unloved,

Towards the evasive horizon

That mocked us without laughter, wrapped

In its own cynic sleep,

Careless of the vitalities it trapped,

Not sanguine from the blood it lapped,

Not living from the life it sapped,

But in eternal gloom,

Its own soul’s tomb.

This was the sombre way we went—

Not eloquent of death, since death is change,

But of some tideless ocean sad and strange

Beneath a mute, immobile firmament,

The sun himself struck silent at the nod

Of some more awful God.

We were so far from the one city we sought

That we had never hoped; and so despair

Never built bastions against the thought

That we might—in some ultimate—be there.

Sunset and dawn were but the same red eye,

The first behind us and the last before,

Nor was the night more leaden than the day,

Since—to see less no worse than to see more,

Sight’s limit being that monotony

Of grievous green and grey!

Wonder could no more touch the soul. The dawn

Broke as it peers had broken—when we found

Ourselves in an enchanted ground

Where all the plain was suddenly withdrawn,

And we were in the midst of alien races

And monstrous market places

Where no man marked us. An armed man stood out

From the bright-coloured rabble: he was black

From head to foot, save for the peacock’s plumes

That were his crest—then was this wonderland

Storied Baghdad or silken Samarcand?

Kashgar the envied? Yarkand the yak’s mart?

Himis of holy men beyond utmost wrack

Of Himalaya? Pride of Jhelum’s strand,

Srinagar, happiest hope of every heart?

Oh! but the warrior signed for us to loose

Our shoes, for that the ground whereon we trod

Was holy already from profaner use,

Being the outskirts of the City of God.

II.

Close-ranked, the legions of the spear-bright rain

Roared as they charged; we came incontinent

Within a space: a threshold of twin spires,

Topaz and jade, confront the firmament,

And ’twixt them nestled the babe fane,

Formed with blue canopy, the golden fires

Of stars about it; there we stayed and there

Put up petitions well and thorough to fare,

Whirls of faint smoke that soared in the thin air.

Lo! suddenly we felt our feet unshod

Bleed with the sharp bliss of the City of God.

III.

Towered above the abyss, the red wall ran

Mightily forth, its crenellated crest

A square-toothed saw, God’s luminous azure

Poured through each palpitant embrasure,

Save where, crown over crown, fan over fan,

Dome upon dome, cupola beyond cupola,

Great gland, sun, moon, cross, crescent, breast

And mightiest breast and gland and vesica

Heaving with natural and unnatural longing,

Crowding, coalescing, thronging,

Mixing their magic, clouding over all

With pale, pure gold, the spring sun’s thrall

Thrilling with ecstasy to burst the blue —

Oh! all our hashish dreams came true

When we beheld the jewel of the city,

Its nine glands coloured like all manner of fruit

And flowers with stripe and trellis, whorl and spire,

Even like all manner of beast and bird that be,

And every gland stood bare, disdaining pity,

Each shaft a column of fire,

And its vibration was a lyre,

And the echo of it a lute,

So that a mighty melody

Shone out thereof, a maze of moon in the gloom

All inexpressibly dowered with perfume.

And this was molten, this was living stone,

This was the very flesh and blood of God,

Incarnate Christ, the Saviour, hailed alone

Artifex, martyr, the reviving god

That on itself begat the one true vine

And from its own breast drew the only wine.

And all was rainbow and aurora blended

In fluent colours interchanged and splendid

Pure water whirled into pure fire and flecked

With miracles of form,

Wheels upon wheels expiring and erect,

Colour and sound in storm,

The heart of God within a frame of blue:—

Our hashish dream come true!

IV.

And all this hung above a mighty river.

Curve after curve, an amphisbaena, wound

About the base of those pale precipices

That cut the clouds, whose curtained eyelids quiver

In their absorb’d gaze into that profound,

The abyss of height confronting the abysses

Of East and North.—Oh! but the fiery fan

Of burning water that made molten love

To the fiery face of the fair fane above,

Whose pure and whose palingenetic plan

Was older than all worlds, than that hot hour

When Christ Ischyros capped the topmost tower

About whose root the royal river ran.

V.

Gold upon gold, dome above dome, faint arrow

Kindling sharp crescent, as the sunrays swept,

Save for one midnight moment when one narrow

Fierce ray, exhaling from no eye that slept

Of God, our God, the sun—gold upon gold,

Frond upon frond, fold upon fold

Of walls like leaves and cupolas like flowers,

And spires and domes that were as fabled fruit

Of the low lands beyond the pillared seas

O Hercules!

Silver, sharp showers

Swept on the city, and made mighty suit

To the great god whose amorous hours

Were housed in those eternities

Within, where, by the frescoes and the gold,

Musical, manifold,

Carven like lace, by malachite

And pophyry and chrysolite,

Where in their copper cold sarcophagi

Hundreds of emperors lie,

And in their reliquaries bediamonded

Thousands of saints still watch their jewelled bones;

And beneath canopies of precious stones

Invoked archangels, each an armed host,

Hold ready to defend with glaive and spear

The frontiers of the city, there appear

The emblazoned ensigns of the Holy Ghost

That all invisible pervades the whole,

Being its secret soul.

There, in that sanctuary of silences,

There is a Word,

The Word that built the city, never heard

By any of those archangel phalanxes,

Unuttered even in the holy heart

Of God, or breathed by its own lightning breath,

Since from all being it stands ever apart,

Its name being Life, and that name’s echo Death.

VI.

Then when I was caught up into rapture—yea!

From heaven to heaven was I swept away.

And all that shadow city past,

And I was in the City of God at last.

This city was alive, athrob, astir,

Shaped as the sacred, secret place of Her

That hath no name on earth, whose whisper we

Catch only in the silence of the sea.

And through it poured a river of sunset blood,

Pulsing its choral and colossal flood

Throughout the city, and lifting it aloft,

Too subtle-strenuous and too siren-soft,

So that the very being of it did swim

Into Herself, bliss to the buoyant brim,

And rose and fell as only rise and fall

The bosoms of those maids ecstatical

Whom Gods caress with giant spasms—

Red orgiastic dawns of the orgasms

Wherein the soul, beneath its own feet trod,

Spends itself in the sanctuary of God!

VII.

And in that heart of hearts was no more I,

No more the heart; but sobbing through the sky,

Came trembling the more awful beat, the blast

Of a million trumpets blazoning the past,

Heralding the to-be, and on their wings

Whirred incommunicable things.

And in their wake, tremendous and austere,

A form of fear,

Awe in the shape of the Most Holy One,

A globe, an eye, a hawk, a lion, a lord,

A bowl of brilliance, a winged globe, a sword—

All these in one, and one beyond all these,

Mute, ithyphallic, caryatides

Like gods about his car, came crested on

The one true God, the Sun!

Instant, the city swirling to its brim

With Life unthinkable, dissolved in Him.

Instant, explosion shook the bounding night,

Smote it but once, and left but one thing, Light.

Oh, but the scarlet swallows up the blue—

Our hashish dreams come true!