MORPHIA

Published in the English Review

London, England

July 1914

(pages 433 - 438)

Thirst!

Not the thirst of the throat,

Though that he the wildest and worst

Of physical pangs—that smote

Alone to the heart of Christ,

Wringing the one wild cry

“I thirst!” from His agony,

While the soldiers drank and diced:

Not the thirst benign

That calls the worker to wine;

Not the bodily thirst

(Though that be frenzy accurst)

When the mouth is full of sand,

And the eyes are gummed up, and the ears

Trick the soul till it hears

Water, water at hand,

When a man will dig his nails

In his breast, and drink the blood

Already that clots and stales

Ere his tongue can tip its flood,

When the sun is a living devil

Vomiting vats of evil,

And the moon and the night but mock

The wretch on his barren rock,

And the dome of heaven high-arched

Like his mouth is arid and parched—

And the caves of his heart high-spanned

Are choked with alkali sand!

Not this! but a thirst uncharted

Body and soul alike

Traitors turned black-hearted,

Seeking a space to strike

In a victim already attuned

To one vast chord of wound;

Every separate bone

Cold, an incarnate groan

Distilled from the icy sperm

Of Hell’s implacable worm;

Every drop of the river

Of blood aflame and a-quiver

With poison secret and sour—

With a sudden twitch at the last

Like certain jagged daggers.

(With blood-shot eyes dull-glassed

The screaming Malay staggers

Through his village aghast).

So blood wrenches its pain

Sardonic through heart and brain.

Every separate nerve

Awake and alert, on a curve

Whose asymptote’s name is “never”

In a hyperbolic “for ever”

A bitten and burning snake

Striking its venom within it,

As if it might serve to slake

The pain for the tithe of a minute.

Awake, for ever awake!

Awake as one never is

While sleep is a possible end,

Awake in the void, the abyss

Whose thirst is an echo of this

That martyrs, world without end,

(World without end, amen!)

The man that falters and yields

For the proverb’s “month and an hour”

To the lure of the snow-starred fields

Where the opium poppy’s aflower.

Only the prick of a needle

Charged from a wizard well

Is this sufficient to wheedle

A soul from heaven to hell?

Was man’s spirit weaned

From fear of its ghosts and gods

To fawn at the feet of a fiend?

Is it such terrible odds—

The heir of ages of wonder,

The crown of earth for an hour,

The master of tide and thunder

Against the juice of a flower?

Ay! in the roar and the rattle

Of all the armies of sin,

This is the only battle

He never was known to win.

Slave to the thirst—not thirst

As here it is weakly written,

Not thirst in the brain black-bitten,

In the soul more sorely smitten!

One dare not think of the worst!

Beyond the raging and raving

Hell of the physical craving

Lies, in the brain benumbed.

At the end of time and space,

An abyss, unmeasured, unplumbed—

The haunt of a face

She it is, she, that found me

In the morphia honeymoon;

With silk and steel she bound me,

In her poisonous milk she drowned me,

Even now her arms surround me,

Stifling me into the swoon

That still—but oh, how rarely!—

Comes at the thrust of the needle,

Steadily stares and squarely,

Nor needs to fondle and wheedle

Her slave agasp for a kiss,

Her’s whose horror is his

That knows that viper womb,

Speckled and barred with black

On its rusty amber scales,

Is his tomb—

The straining, groaning, rack

On which he wails—he wails!

Her cranial dome is vaulted.

Her mad Mongolian eyes

Aslant with the ecstasies

Of things immune, exalted

Far beyond stars and skies,

Slits of amber and jet—

Her snout for the quarry set

Fleshy and heavy and gross,

Bestial, broken across,

And below it her mouth that drips

Blood from the lips

That hide the fangs of a snake,

Drips on venomous udders

Mountainous flanks that fret,

And the spirit sickens and shudders

At the hint of a worse thing yet.

Olya! the golden bait

Barbed with infinite pain,

Fatal, fanatical mate

Of a poisoned body and brain!

Olya, the name that leers

Its lecherous longing and knavery,

Whispers in crazing ears

The secret spell of her slavery.

Behind me, behind and above,

She stands, that mirror of love.

Her fingers are supple-jointed;

Her nails are polished and pointed,

And tipped with spurs of gold:

With them she rowels the brain.

Her lust is critical, cold;

And her Chinese cheeks are pale,

As she daintily picks, profane

With her octopus lips, and the teeth

Jagged and black beneath,

Pulp and blood from a nail.

One swift prick was enough

In days gone by to invoke her:

She was incarnate love

In the hours when I first awoke her.

Little by little I found

The truth of her, stripped of clothing,

Bitter beyond all bound,

Leprous beyond all loathing.

Black, the plague of the pit,

Her pustules visibly fester,

Cancerous kisses that bit

As the asp caressed her.

Dragon of lure and dread,

Tiger of fury and lust,

The quick in chains to the dead,

The slime alive in the dust,

Brazen shame like a flame,

An orgy of pregnant pollution

With hate beyond aim or name—

Orgasm, death, dissolution!

Know you now why her eyes

So fearfully glaze, beholding

Terrors and infamies

Like filthy flowers unfolding?

Laughter widowed of ease,

Agony barred from sadness,

Death defeated of peace,

Is she not madness?

She waits for me, lazily leering,

As moon goes murdering moon;

The moon of her triumph is nearing:

She will have me wholly soon.

                              •   •   •   •   •

And you, you puritan others,

Who have missed the morphia craving,

Cry scorn if I call you brothers,

Curl lip at my maniac raving,

Fools, seven times beguiled,

You have not known her? Well!

There was never a need she smiled

To harry you into hell!

Morphia is but one

Spark of its secular fire,

She is the single sun—

Type of all desire

All that you would, you are—

And that is the crown of a craving.

You are slaves of the wormwood star.

Analysed, reason is raving.

Feeling, examined, is pain.

What heaven were to hope for a doubt of it

Life is anguish, insane;

And death is—not a way-out of it!