The Garden of Janus poem – Aleister Crowley poems | Poetry Monster

A poem by Alistar Crowley (1875-1947)

The cloud my bed is tinged with blood and foam.

The vault yet blazes with the sun

Writhing above the West, brave hippodrome

Whose gladiators shock and shun

As the blue night devours them, crested comb

Of sleep’s dead sea

That eats the shores of life, rings round eternity!

So, he is gone whose giant sword shed flame

Into my bowels; my blood’s bewitched;

My brain’s afloat with ecstasy of shame.

That tearing pain is gone, enriched

By his life-spasm; but he being gone, the same

Myself is gone

Sucked by the dragon down below death’s horizon.

III

I woke from this. I lay upon the lawn;

They had thrown roses on the moss

With all their thorns; we came there at the dawn,

My lord and I; God sailed across

The sky in’s galleon of amber, drawn

By singing winds

While we wove garlands of the flowers of our minds.

All day my lover deigned to murder me,

Linking his kisses in a chain

About my neck; demon-embroidery!

Bruises like far-ff mountains stain

The valley of my body of ivory!

Then last came sleep.

I wake, and he is gone; what should I do but weep?

Nay, for I wept enough — more sacred tears! —

When first he pinned me, gripped

My flesh, and as a stallion that rears,

Sprang, hero-thewed and satyr-lipped;

Crushed, as a grape between his teeth, my fears;

Sucked out my life

And stamped me with the shame, the monstrous word of

wife.

I will not weep; nay, I will follow him

Perchance he is not far,

Bathing his limbs in some delicious dim

Depth, where the evening star

May kiss his mouth, or by the black sky’s rim

He makes his prayer

To the great serpent that is coiled in rapture there.

VII

I rose to seek him. First my footsteps faint

Pressed the starred moss; but soon

I wandered, like some sweet sequestered saint,

Into the wood, my mind. The moon

Was staggered by the trees; with fierce constraint

Hardly one ray

Pierced to the ragged earth about their roots that lay.

VIII

I wandered, crying on my Lord. I wandered

Eagerly seeking everywhere.

The stories of life that on my lips he squandered

Grew into shrill cries of despair,

Until the dryads frightened and dumfoundered

Fled into space —

Like to a demon-king’s was grown my maiden face!

At last I came unto the well, my soul

In that still glass, I saw no sign

Of him, and yet — what visions there uproll

To cloud that mirror-soul of mine?

Above my head there screams a flying scroll

Whose word burnt through

My being as when stars drop in black disastrous dew.

For in that scroll was written how the globe

Of space became; of how the light

Broke in that space and wrapped it in a robe

Of glory; of how One most white

Withdrew that Whole, and hid it in the lobe

Of his right Ear,

So that the Universe one dewdrop did appear.

Yea! and the end revealed a word, a spell,

An incantation, a device

Whereby the Eye of the Most Terrible

Wakes from its wilderness of ice

To flame, whereby the very core of hell

Bursts from its rind,

Sweeping the world away into the blank of mind.

XII

So then I saw my fault; I plunged within

The well, and brake the images

That I had made, as I must make; Men spin

The webs that snare them; while the knee

Bend to the tyrant God; or unto Sin

The lecher sunder!

Ah! came that undulant light from over or from under?

XIII

It matters not. Come, change! come, Woe! Come, mask!

Drive Light, Life, Love into the deep!

In vain we labour at the loathsome task

Not knowing if we wake or sleep;

But in the end we lift the plumed casque

Of the dead warrior;

Find no chaste corpse therein, but a soft-smiling whore.

XIV

Then I returned into myself, and took

All in my arms, God’s universe:

Crushed its black juice out, while His anger shook

His dumbness pregnant with a curse.

I made me ink, and in a little book

I wrote one word

That God himself, the adder of Thought, had never heard.

It detonated. Nature, God, mankind

Like sulphur, nitre, charcoal, once

Blended, in one annihilation blind

Were rent into a myriad of suns.

Yea! all the mighty fabric of a Mind

Stood in the abyss,

Belching a Law for “That” more awful than for “This.”

XVI

Vain was the toil. So then I left the wood

And came unto the still black sea,

That oily monster of beatitude!

(‘Hath “Thee” for “Me,” and “Me” for “Thee!”)

There as I stood, a mask of solitude

Hiding a face

Wried as a satyr’s, rolled that ocean into space.

XVII

Then did I build an altar on the shore

Of oyster-shells, and ringed it round

With star-fish. Thither a green flame I bore

Of phosphor foam, and strewed the ground

With dew-drops, children of my wand, whose core

Was trembling steel

Electric that made spin the universal Wheel.

XVIII

With that a goat came running from the cave

That lurked below the tall white cliff.

Thy name! cried I. The answer that gave

Was but one tempest-whisper; “If!”

Ah, then! his tongue to his black palate clave;

For on soul’s curtain

Is written this one certainty that naught is certain!

XIX

So then I caught that goat up in a kiss.

And cried Io Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan!

Then all this body’s wealth of ambergris,

(Narcissus-scented flesh of man!)

I burnt before him in the sacrifice;

For he was sure –

Being the Doubt of Things, the one thing to endure!

Wherefore, when madness took him at the end,

He, doubt-goat, slew the goat of doubt;

And that which inward did for ever tend

Came at the last to have come out;

And I who had the World and God to friend

Found all three foes!

Drowned in that sea of changes, vacancies, and woes!

XXI

Yet all that Sea was swallowed up therein;

So they were not, and it was not.

As who should sweat his soul out through the skin

And find (sad fool!) he had begot

All that without him that he had left in,

And in himself

All he had taken out thereof, a mocking elf!

XXII

But now that all was gone, great Pan appeared.

Him then I strove to woo, to win,

Kissing his curled lips, playing with his beard,

Setting his brain a-shake, a-spin,

By that strong wand, and muttering of the weird

That only I

Knew of all souls alive or dead beneath the sky.

XXIII

So still I conquered, and the vision passed.

Yet still was beaten, for I knew

Myself was He, Himself, the first and last;

And as an unicorn drinks dew

From under oak-leaves, so my strength was cast

Into the mire;

For all I did was dream, and all I dreamt desire.

XXIV

More; in this journey I had clean forgotten

The quest, my lover. But the tomb

Of all these thoughts, the rancid and the rotten,

Proved in the end to be my womb

Wherein my Lord and lover had begotten

A little child

To drive me, laughing lion, into the wanton wild!

XXV

This child hath not one hair upon his head,

But he hath wings instead of ears.

No eyes hath he, but all his light is shed

Within him on the ordered sphere

Of nature that he hideth; and in stead

Of mouth he hath

One minute point of jet; silence, the lightning path!

XXVI

Also his nostrils are shut up; for he

Hath not the need of any breath;

Nor can the curtain of eternity

Cover that head with life or death.

So all his body, a slim almond-tree,

Knoweth no bough

Nor branch nor twig nor bud, from never until now.

XXVII

This thought I bred within my bowels, I am.

I am in him, as he in me;

And like a satyr ravishing a lamb

So either seems, or as the sea

Swallows the whale that swallows it, the ram

Beats its own head

Upon the city walls, that fall as it falls dead.

XXVIII

Come, let me back unto the lilied lawn!

Pile me the roses and the thorns,

Upon this bed from which he hath withdrawn!

He may return. A million morns

May follow that first dire daemonic dawn

When he did split

My spirit with his lightnings and enveloped it!

XXIX

So I am stretched out naked to the knife,

My whole soul twitching with the stress

Of the expected yet surprising strife,

A martyrdom of blessedness.

Though Death came, I could kiss him into life;

Though Life came, I

Could kiss him into death, and yet nor live nor die!

XXX

Yet I that am the babe, the sire, the dam,

Am also none of these at all;

For now that cosmic chaos of I AM

Bursts like a bubble. Mystical

The night comes down, a soaring wedge of flame

Woven therein

To be a sign to them who yet have never been.

XXXI

The universe I measured with my rod.

The blacks were balanced with the whites;

Satan dropped down even as up soared God;

Whores prayed and danced with anchorites.

So in my book the even matched the odd:

No word I wrote

Therein, but sealed it with the signet of the goat.

XXXII

This also I seal up. Read thou herein

Whose eyes are blind! Thou may’st behold

Within the wheel (that alway seems to spin

All ways) a point of static gold.

Then may’st thou out therewith, and fit it in

That extreme spher

Whose boundless farness makes it infinitely near.