Myself unto myself will give
This name, Katharsis-Purgative.
I, who dishevelled ways forsook
To hold the poets’ grammar-book,
Bringing to tavern and to brothel
The mind of witty Aristotle,
Lest bards in the attempt should err
Must here be my interpreter:
Wherefore receive now from my lip
Peripatetic scholarship.
To enter heaven, travel hell,
Be piteous or terrible
One positively needs the ease
Of plenary indulgences.
For every true-born mysticist
A Dante is, unprejudiced[3],
Who safe at ingle-nook, by proxy,
Hazards extremes of heterodoxy,
Like him who finds a joy at table
Pondering the uncomfortable.
Ruling one’s life by common sense
How can one fail to be intense?
But I must not accounted be
One of that mumming company —[4]
With him[5] who hies him to appease
His giddy dames’[6] frivolities
While they console him when he whinges
With gold-embroidered Celtic fringes[7] —
Or him[8] who sober all the day
Mixes a naggin in his play —
Or him[9] whose conduct ‘seems to own’
His preference for a man of ‘tone’ —
Or him[10] who plays the ragged patch
To millionaires in Hazelpatch
But weeping after holy fast
Confesses all his pagan past —
Or him[11] who will his hat unfix
Neither to malt nor crucifix[12]
But show to all that poor-dressed be
His high Castilian courtesy —
Or him[13] who loves his Master dear —
Or him[14] who drinks his pint in fear —
Or him[15] who once when snug abed
Saw Jesus Christ without his head
And tried so hard to win for us
The long-lost works of Æschylus.
But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique.
That they may dream their dreamy dreams
I carry off their filthy streams
For I can do those things for them
Through which I lost my diadem,
Those things for which Grandmother Church
Left me severely in the lurch.
Thus I relieve their timid arses,
Perform my office of Katharsis.
My scarlet leaves them white as wool[16]:
Through me they purge a bellyful.
To sister mummers one and all
I act as vicar-general[17]
And for each maiden, shy and nervous,
I do a similar kind service.
For I detect without surprise
That shadowy beauty in her eyes,
The ‘dare not’ of sweet maidenhood
That answers my corruptive ‘would’[18].
Whenever publicly we meet
She never seems to think of it;
At night when close in bed she lies
And feels my hand between her thighs
My little love in light attire
Knows the soft flame that is desire.
But Mammon[19] places under ban
The uses of Leviathan[20]
And that high spirit ever wars
On Mammon’s countless servitors
Nor can they ever be exempt
From his taxation of contempt.
So distantly I turn to view
The shamblings of that motley crew,
Those souls that hate the strength that mine has
Steeled in the school of old Aquinas[21].
Where they have crouched and crawled and prayed
I stand, the self-doomed, unafraid,
Unfellowed, friendless and alone,
Indifferent as the herring-bone,
Firm as the mountain-ridges where
I flash my antlers on the air.
Let them continue as is meet
To adequate the balance-sheet.
Though they may labour to the grave
My spirit shall they never have
Nor make my soul with theirs as one
Till the Mahamanvantara[22] be done:
And though they spur me from their door
My soul shall spurn them evemore.