Hyperion to Bellarmin
Still there were times when mind and spirit stirred in me. But all to only ravaging effect!
‘What is man?’ I could begin; ‘how can it be that such a thing is in the world that ferments like a chaos or moulders like a rotting tree, and never grows to ripeness. How can nature suffer this sour grape amid her sweet clusters?
‘To the plants he says, “I too was once like you!” and to the pure stars, “I will become like you, in another world!” Meanwhile he breaks asunder and keeps practising his arts upon himself, as if he could, once it’s come apart, put a living thing together again like a wall of bricks; but it doesn’t even trouble him when nothing is improved by all his efforts; what he works will always stay mere artifice.
‘Oh, you poor wights who feel this, you who too are loath to talk of man’s vocation, who too are gripped so through and through by the Nothing that sways over us, so clearly see that we are born for Nothing, what we love is Nothing, what we believe in is Nothing, that we grind ourselves down for Nothing, only to slowly pass over into Nothing — can I help it that your knees give way when you take it all in? For more than once I too have been brought low in such thoughts and have cried out, “why do you lay the axe to my root, cruel spirit?”, and still I’m here.
‘Oh once, you dismal brethren! it was different. Then everything above us was so beautiful, so beautiful and blithe was all before us; these hearts too welled over before the distant blissful phantoms, and in bold exuberance our spirits too forged upwards and broke through the bounds, and when they looked around, oh woe, all was endless void.
‘Oh! I can fling myself on my knees and wring my hands and beseech I don’t know whom? for other thoughts. But I can’t overcome it, the screaming truth. Have I not convinced myself twice over? When I look into life, what’s at the end of it all? Nothing. When I soar in the spirit, what’s at the summit of all? Nothing.
‘But be still, my heart! It’s your last strength you're wasting! your last strength? and you, you would storm heaven? where then are your hundred arms, Titan, where your Pelion and Ossa, your stairway to the fortress of the father of the gods, so that you may climb up and cast down the god and his table and all the immortal peaks of Olympus, and preach to mortal men: “Stay below, children of the moment! don’t strive to scale these heights, for there’s nothing up here.”
‘And you yourself can leave off trying to see what sways the lives of others. For you your new lesson applies. Above you and before you all is waste and void, and that’s because within you all is waste and void.
‘And indeed if you others are richer than I, you could at least help just a little.
‘If your garden’s so full of flowers, why does their breath not rejoice me too? — If you're so full of divinity, give me to drink of it. For no one starves at a feast, not even the poorest of men. But there’s only one who holds his feasts amongst you; and that is death.
‘Need and fear and night are your masters. They sunder you, they drive you together with blows. Hunger you call love, and where you can see nothing more, there dwell your gods. Gods and love?
‘Oh, the poets are right, there’s nought so small and trifling that it can’t be made the stuff of inspiration.’
That’s what I thought. How it came to be in me I still can’t comprehend.