[BNP/E3, 78B – 46-48]

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Agony

Soul-Symbols.

My soul — what is my soul? But symbols mute

Its horror and confusion can |give|[1] out:

A desert |out of| space where absolute

Reigns expectation full of horrid doubt.

It gives the sense that giveth, strange and dark,

Some unknown river weird, hauntingly lone,

In some[2] old picture storiless, sole work

Of some great painter horribly unknown.

It is an island out of human track,

Mysterious, old within the sea and full

Of caves and grottoes unexplored and black,

Pregnant with many horrors possible.

It is an olden inn with corridors

Woven in a labyrinth and scarce of light,

Where through the night the sound of shutting doors,

Vague in its cause and place, fills us with fright.

It is a mountain region wild and free,

Precipiced, hid and silent, never seen,

Where we dare not think of what might have been

[47^r]

Soul-Symbols – 2.

Nor wish idea of what things may be.

If ever mystery, romance and fear

Have shown their heart on canvas and on scroll,

It must assuredly to men appear

As to mine inner sense appears my soul.

It is a vision-desert full of rocks

Where all than reason is both more and less,

’Tis a lone coast where the sea's endless shocks

Fill with an empty sound its lifelessness.

|Something of lost, forgotten, vague and dead,

Yet waking, as a slumberer mystical

Seems to perceive, for who looks knows with dread

That something he doth see to make appal.|

All this my soul is in its weak despair,

Full of sense unto pain, of thought to tears[3],

Having for meed of reason a mute care,

For company to feeling — woes and fears.

So to my glance, as if with opium wide,

My very self is grown a mystery;

In inextatic fear Life doth abide

[48^r]

Soul-Symbols – 3.

And madness like my breath[4] is within me.

Alexander Search

February 1906.

[1] |give| ^/speak\

[2] some ^/an\

[3] to ^/past\ tears

[4] my breath ^{/lip\/a heart\}