The Conservative (Lovecraft)/July 1923/To Satan
To Satan
By Samuel Loveman
“Tu tires ton pardon de l’eternal martyre
Inflige sans relache aux coeurs ambitieux.”
......Baudelaire
To H. P. L.
When, mid the hyacinth deep that girds the sky,
You saw, O Brother, ere your eyes grew dim,
In wrath and loneliness the sight of Him,
Amid His bow’d and litten hierarchy:
Heard songs that fell from lips half-strange with years,
Outcast and ruin’d, beautiful in flame,
You——with the lost among the damned few,
The fallen rebel crew——
Hearing the flattery that fawned His name,
Turn’d back to hell a face that shone with tears.
Did you not at the sunken portals wait,
And where the golden estuaries fell,
Gazing at heav’n before the low of hell,
Stretch forth your hand to where the tyrant sate?
With the first cry that shook th’ enslaved world,
Swift, silver, clarion, Lo! I make you free,
Free as the winds and as the waters are,
Sons of the morning-star!
O souls of mine, I give you liberty——
No withering, hate into the darkness hurl’d!
Not from those spaces charm’d to dusk and rose,
Nor in the scarves with light and music pent,
Came the soft wail of disillusionment,
But lower than the lowliest in their woes,
The trodden and the dispossess’d of fate;
These, brooding in a quiet flash of tears,
By stars that to the massive night are graven,
Recall’d their austere haven
The sorrow and the bitterness of years,
Conceiv’d in ruin and embalm’d in hate!
And now shall men no longer fear and dread!
For heav’n is shatter’d, faded is the host,
That without pity judg’d the tortur’d lost,
And radiantly parcell’d forth the dead.
See! where your molten throne uprears in night
The legions gleam, the drowsy vultures wing;
That which first met your plaintive, human eyes,
Ev’n that, is paradise......
At last, my Brother, the awakening!..
Ere dawn appears, a perfect chrysolite.