Christmas 1940

The journals give the quantities of wrong,
Where the impatient massacre took place,
How many and what sort it caused to die,
But, O, what finite integers express
The realm of malice where these facts belong?
How can the mind make sense, bombarded by
A stream of incompatible mishaps,
The bloom and buzz of a confessed collapse?

What properties define our person since
This massive vagueness moved in on our lives,
What laws require our substance to exist?
Our strands of private order are dissolved
And lost our routes to self-inheritance,
Position and Relation are dismissed,
An epoch’s Providence is quite worn out,
The lion of Nothing chases us about.

“Beware! Beware! The Great Boyg has you down,”
Some deeper instinct in revulsion cries,
“The Void desires to have you for its creature,
A doll through whom It may ventriloquise
Its vast resentment as your very own,
Because Negation has nor form nor feature,
And all Its lust to power is impotent
Unless the actual It hates consent.

The universe of pure extension where
Nothing except the universe was lonely,
For Promise was occluded in its womb
Where the immortal families had only
To fall to pieces and accept repair,
Their nursery, their commonplace, their tomb,
All acts accessory to their position,
Died when the first plant made its apparition.

Through a long adolescence, then, the One
Slept in the sadness of its disconnected
Aggressive creatures-as a latent wish
The local genius of the rose protected,
Or an unconscious irony within
The independent structure of the fish;
But Flesh grew weaker, stronger grew the Word,
Until on earth the Great Exchange occurred.

Now to maturity must crawl that child
In whom the old equations are reversed
For that is cause which was effect before,
Now he must learn for what he has been nursed
That through his self-annulment the real world
Of self-enduring instants may endure
Its final metamorphosis and pass
Into invisibility at last.”

The sacred auras fade from well and wood,
The great geometries enclose our lives
In fields of normal enmity no more,
The definitions and the narratives
Are insufficient for our solitude,
Venus cannot predict our passion, nor
The Dioscuri plant their olive trees
To guide us through the ambiguities.

And winds of terror force us to confess
The settled world of past events has not
A faiblesse any longer for the dull
To swim in like an aqueous habitat;
We are reduced to our true nakedness:
Either we serve the Unconditional,
Or some Hitlerian monster will supply
An iron convention to do evil by.

O beggar, bigwig, mugwump, none but have
Some vision of that holy centre where
All time’s occasions are refreshed; the lost
Are met by all the other places there,
The rival errors recognise their love,
Fall weeping on each other’s neck at last;
The rich need not confound the Persons, nor
The Substance be divided by the poor.

It is the vision that objectifies:
Only its Roman rigour can bestow
On earth and sea “la douceur angevine,”
Only its prayer can make the children grow,
Only its trembling can externalise
The bland Horatian life of friends and wine;
It is the tension of its inner dread
That moulds the beautiful patrician head.

Our way remains, our world, our day, our sin;
We may, as always, by our own consent
Be cast away: but neither depth nor height
Nor any other creature can prevent
Our reasonable and lively motions in
This modern void where only Love has weight,
And Fate by Faith is freely understood,
And he who works shall find our Fatherhood.