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Poems
The Agent of Eternity
You stand at the point of a sacrilege,
Then step across, and let the dark thought come:
These storms of love that drove him mad, with joy,
With torment, and raised the mist that bound him,
To a timeless world, a fine dissolving,
Were the motive force not of his verse
But of his prose. The poems were personal,
And at their truest, impenetrable
To all but the two in that magic fire;
What the broad world needed was the dry craft
Of his other calling: the exhumation
Of the dead, restoring breath and blood
To Time's forgotten. And so the gods,
Or the Goddess, or history, or fate,
Or evolution's critical mass,
Or what other name we give the great fact
Of Eternity, sent him these hectics,
As fuel, diversion and reward, to draw
The daily poisons from his veins, and save him For the labour of resurrection.