Esthétique du Mal

I

He was at Naples writing letters home

And, between his letters, reading paragraphs

On the sublime. Vesuvius had groaned

For a month. It was pleasant to be sitting there,

While the sultriest fulgurations, flickering,

Cast corners in the glass. He could describe

The terror of the sound because the sound

Was ancient. He tried to remember the phrases: pain

Audible at noon, pain torturing itself,

Pain killing pain on the very point of pain.

The volcano trembled in another ether,

As the body trembles at the end of life.

It was almost time for lunch. Pain is human.

There were roses in the cool café. His book

Made sure of the most correct catastrophe.

Except for us, Vesuvius might consume

In solid fire the utmost earth and know

No pain (ignoring the cocks that crow us up

To die). This is a part of the sublime

From which we shrink. And yet, except for us,

The total past felt nothing when destroyed.

II

At a town in which acacias grew, he lay

On his balcony at night. Warblings became

Too dark, too far, too much the accents of

Afflicted sleep, too much the syllables

That would form themselves, in time, and communicate

The intelligence of his despair, express

What meditation never quite achieved.

The moon rose up as if it had escaped

His meditation. It evaded his mind.

It was part of a supremacy always

Above him. The moon was always free from him,

As night was free from him. The shadow touched

Or merely seemed to touch him as he spoke

A kind of elegy he found in space:

It is pain that is indifferent to the sky

In spite of the yellow of the acacias, the scent

Of them in the air still hanging heavily

In the hoary-hanging night. It does not regard

This freedom, this supremacy, and in

Its own hallucination never sees

How that which rejects it saves it in the end.

III

His firm stanzas hang like hives in hell

Or what hell was, since now both heaven and hell

Are one, and here, O terra infidel.

The fault lies with an over-human god,

Who by sympathy has made himself a man

And is not to be distinguished, when we cry

Because we suffer, our oldest parent, peer

Of the populace of the heart, the reddest lord,

Who has gone before us in experience.

If only he would not pity us so much,

Weaken our fate, relieve us of woe both great

And small, a constant fellow of destiny,

A too, too human god, self-pity’s kin

And uncourageous genesis … It seems

As if the health of the world might be enough.

It seems as if the honey of common summer

Might be enough, as if the golden combs

Were part of a sustenance itself enough,

As if hell, so modified, had disappeared,

As if pain, no longer satanic mimicry,

Could be borne, as if we were sure to find our way.