From a Chapter on Literature

After the sunlight and the fiery vision
Leading us to a place of running water,
We came into a place by water altered.
Dew ribboned from those trees, the grasses wept
And drowned in their own weeping; vacant mist
Crawled like a snail across the land, and left
A snail’s moist trace; and everything there thriving
Stared through an aqueous half-light, without mirth
And bred by languid cycles, without ardor.

There passion mildewed and corrupted slowly,
Till, feeding hourly on its own corruption,
It had forgotten fire and aspiration,
Becoming sodden with appetite alone.
There in the green-grey thickness of the air
Lived and begat cold spores of intellect,
Till giant mosses of a rimelike aspect
Hung heavily from the boughs to testify
Against all simple sensualities,
Turning them by a touch gross and discolored,
Swelling the warm taut flesh to bloated symbol
By unrelenting watery permeations.

So from promethean hopes we came this far,
This far from lands of sun and racing blood.
Behind us lay the blazing apple tree,
Behind us too the vulture and the rock—
The tragic labor and the heroic doom—
For without passion the rock also crumbles
And the wet twilight scares the bird away.