Ii. Penumbra

Hearken to the hammers, endlessly hammering, The din of wheels, the drone of wheels, the furnaces Panting, where Man as in a demon-palace toils To forge the giant creatures of his brain. He has banished the spring and the innocence of leaves From the blackened waste he has made; the infected sky Glooms with a sun aghast, and the murk of the night Is peopled with tall flames like spirits insane.

He strips himself to the heat, not of the jovial sun, But of the scorch of furnaces; with naked breast Sweating beneath the iron and blear glass, amid The hammers’ hammering and the wheels’ roar. Not with grapes of October trodden underfoot Spurting juices of ripeness in runnels, his vats Brim, but with gushes flickered-over and blinding, Unshapen spilth and blaze of molten ore.

With a finger he lifts the weight of mountain-sides Poised; the metal mass he shears red-hot in a trice; He has given to the animate iron thews of force, A Titan’s pulse, and breath of fiery draught. Monsters mightier far than himself he creates To swim storming seas, and to mount in miles of air, To deride Space and the old opposition of Time: Their speed is like strong drink that he has quaffed.

He has the tamed lightning to do his bidding, draws Energies out of the veins of earth; he is armed From all elements, woven as in a magic web; He has stolen seeds of Death, wherewith to fight. He holds fabled terrors of the ancient gods in his hand— In a handful of dust, earthquake and pestilence; He exults to destroy, to obliterate, to be Lord of the powers of the engulfing night.

Deafened with the hammers, inebriate with the sound Of the powers he has raised out of their jealous lair, He has fever within him, he becomes dizzy, And craves, and knows not whither he is bound. Shall he attain god-like felicity of ease, Supreme articulate voice of nature’s striving, Or builds he a vast prison for himself, a slave With iron of his own strong forging crowned?

Insatiable of ransacked worlds, and exulting Furiously in feet-supplanting speed, the proud-eyed Victor, he who has come so far, so far, looks forth To achieve the eluded glory of his goal. What solitude is this that suddenly he enters? Voices of earth no more with anchoring kindness call. The fevered hammers throb; but deep within he knows The desert he has made in his own soul.

O where is now the dew-dropt radiance of morning, That sistered with him leafing tree and rippling stream, When simple of heart in the sun with a free body He accepted all the boundaries of his mind? Full of fears he was then, shadowed with helpless need To propitiate Powers that threatened each footstep. Has he escaped from those old terrors, to be prey Of fears more terrible because less blind?