V

Slowly the generations pass-- Like sand through Heaven’s blue hour-glass.

So let us find tomorrow now: Our towns are gone; Our books have passed; ten thousand years Have thundered on. The Sphinx looks far across the world In fury black: She sees all western nations spent Or on the rack. Eastward she sees one land she knew When from the stone Priests of the sunrise carved her out And left her lone. She sees the shore Confucius walked On his sorrowful day: Impudent foreigners rioting, In the ancient way; Officials, futile as of old, Have gowns more bright; Bookworms are fiercer than of old, Their skins more white; Dust is deeper than of old, More bats are flying; More songs are written than of old-- More songs are dying.

Where Galahad found forty towns Now fade and glare Ten thousand towns with book-tiled roof And garden-stair, Where beggars’ babies come like showers Of classic words: They rule the world--immortal brooks And magic birds.

The lion Sphinx roars at the sun: “I hate this nursing you have done! The meek inherit the earth too long-- When will the world belong to the strong?” She soars; she claws his patient face-- The girl-moon screams at the disgrace. The sun’s blood fills the western sky; He hurries not, and will not die.

The baffled Sphinx, on granite wings, Turns now to where young China sings. One thousand of ten thousand towns Go down before her silent wrath; Yet even lion-gods may faint And die upon their brilliant path. She sees the Chinese children romp In dust that she must breathe and eat. Her tongue is reddened by its lye; She craves its grit, its cold and heat. The Dust of Ages holds a glint Of fire from the foundation-stones, Of spangles from the sun’s bright face, Of sapphires from earth’s marrow-bones. Mad-drunk with it, she ends her day-- Slips when a high sea-wall gives way, Drowns in the cold Confucian sea Where the whirring fan-girl first flew free.

In the light of the maxims of Chesterfield, Mencius, Wilson, Roosevelt, Tolstoy, Trotsky, Franklin or Nietzsche, how great was Confucius?

“Laughing Asia” brown and wild, That lyric and immortal child, His fan’s gay daughter, crowned with sand, Between the water and the land Now cries on high in irony, With a voice of night-wind alchemy: “O cat, O sphinx, O stony-face, The joke is on Egyptian pride, The joke is on the human race: ‘The meek inherit the earth too long-- When will the world belong to the strong?’ I am born from off the holy fan Of the world’s most patient gentleman. So answer me, O courteous sea! O deathless sea!”

And thus will the answering Ocean call: “China will fall, The Empire of China will crumble down, When the Alps and the Andes crumble down; When the sun and the moon have crumbled down, The Empire of China will crumble down, Crumble down.”

In the following narrative, Lucifer is not Satan, King of Evil, who in the beginning led the rebels from Heaven, establishing the underworld.

Lucifer is here taken as a character appearing much later, the first singing creature weary of established ways in music, moved with the lust of wandering. He finds the open road between the stars too lonely. He wanders to the kingdom of Satan, there to sing a song that so moves demons and angels that he is, at its climax, momentary emperor of Hell and Heaven, and the flame kindled of the tears of the demons devastates the golden streets.

Therefore it is best for the established order of things that this wanderer shall be cursed with eternal silence and death. But since then there has been music in every temptation, in every demon voice.

Along with a set of verses called The Heroes of Time, and another The Tree of Laughing Bells, I exchanged The Last Song of Lucifer for a night’s lodging in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio, as narrated in A Handy Guide for Beggars.

The fourteenth chapter of Isaiah contains these words on Lucifer:

“Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee and the worms cover thee.

“How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning. How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations.

“For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into Heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God....

“All the kings of the nations, even all of them, lie in glory, every one in his own house.

“But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, and as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword, that go down to the stones of the pit; as a carcass trodden under feet.

“Thou shalt not be joined to them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land.”