The Modern Manichee
He sayeth there is no sin, and all his sin
Swells round him into a world made merciless;
The midnight of his universe of shame
Is the vast shadow of his shamelessness.
He blames all that begat him, gods or brutes,
And sires not sons he chides as with a rod.
The sins of the children visited on the fathers
Through all generations, back to a jealous God.
The fields that heal the humble, the happy forests
That sing to men confessed and men consoled,
To him are jungles only, greedy and groping,
Heartlessly new, unvenerably old.
Beyond the pride of his own cold compassion
Is only cruelty and imputed pain:
Matched with that mood, a boy's sport in the forest
Makes comrades of the slayer and the slain.
The innocent lust of the unfallen creatures
Moves him to hidden horror but no mirth;
Misplaced morality rots in the roots unconscious,
His stifled conscience stinks through the green earth.
The green things thrust like horrible huge snails,
Horns green and gross, each lifting a leering eye
He scarce can call a flower; it lolls obscene,
Its organs gaping to the sneering sky.
Dark with that dusk the old red god of gardens
Still pagan but not merry any more,
Stirs up the dull adulteries of the dust,
Blind, frustrate, hopeless, hollow at the core;
The plants are brutes tied with green rope and roaring
Their terrible dark loves from tree to tree:
He shrinks as from a shaft, if by him singing,
A gilded pimp and pandar, goes the bee.
He sayeth, 'I have no sin; I cast the stone',
And throws his little pebble at the shrine,
Casts sin and stone away against the house
Whose health has turned earth's waters into wine.
The venom of that repudiated guilt
Poisons the sea and every natural flood
As once a wavering tyrant washed his hands,
And touching, turned the water black with blood.
Jealousy
'The Roman Catholic Church has never forgiven us for converting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from his Agnosticism; and when Men like Mr. Dennis Bradley can no longer be Content with the old Faith, a Spirit of Jealousy is naturally roused.'
-A Spiritualist Paper
She sat upon her Seven Hills
She rent the scarlet robes about her,
Nor yet in her two thousand years
Had ever grieved that men should doubt her;
But what new horror shakes the mind
Making her moan and mutter madly;
Lo! Rome's high heart is broken at last
Her foes have borrowed Dennis Bradley.
If she must lean on lesser props
Of earthly fame or ancient art,
Make shift with Raphael and Racine
Put up with Dante and Descartes,
Not wholly can she mask her grief
But touch the wound and murmur sadly,
'These lesser things are theirs to love
Who lose the love of Mr. Bradley.'
She saw great Origen depart
And Photius rend the world asunder,
Her cry to all the East rolled back
In Islam its ironic thunder,
She lost Jerusalem and the North
Accepting these arrangements gladly
Until it came to be a case
Of Conan Doyle v. Dennis Bradley.
O fond and foolish hopes that still
In broken hearts unbroken burn,
What if, grown weary of new ways,
The precious wanderer should return
The Trumpet whose uncertain sound
Has just been cracking rather badly
May yet within her courts remain
His Trumpet-blown by Dennis Bradley.
His and her Trumpet blown before
The battle where the good cause wins
Louder than all the Irish harps
Or the Italian violins;
When armed and mounted like St. Joan
She meets the mad world riding madly
Under the Oriflamme of old
Crying, 'Mont-joie St. Dennis Bradley!'
But in this hour she sorrows still,
Though all anew the generations
Rise up and call her blessed, claim
Her name upon the new born Nations
But still she mourns the only thing
She ever really wanted badly;
The sympathy of Conan Doyle
The patronage of Dennis Bradley.
