The Kadisah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi | Page 3

table spread
With the fair-seeming
Sodom-fruit,
with stones that bear the shape of bread:
How Life was nought but ray of sun
that clove the darkness thick and blind,
The ravings of the reckless
storm,
the shrieking of the rav’ening wind;
How lovely visions ’guiled his sleep,
aye fading with the break of morn,
Till every sweet became a sour,
till every rose became a thorn;
Till dust and ashes met his eyes
wherever turned their saddened gaze;
The wrecks of joys and hopes
and loves,
the rubbish of his wasted days;
How every high heroic Thought
that longed to breathe empyrean air,
Failed of its feathers, fell to

earth,
and perisht of a sheer despair;
How, dower’d with heritage of brain,
whose might has split the solar ray,
His rest is grossest coarsest earth,
a crown of gold on brow of clay;
This House whose frame be flesh and bone,
mortar’d with blood and faced with skin,
The home of sickness,
dolours, age;
unclean without, impure within:
Sans ray to cheer its inner gloom,
the chambers haunted by the Ghost,
Darkness his name, a cold dumb
Shade
stronger than all the heav’nly host.
This tube, an enigmatic pipe,
whose end was laid before begun,
That lengthens, broadens, shrinks
and breaks;
—puzzle, machine, automaton;
The first of Pots the Potter made
by Chrysorrhoas’ blue-green wave;*
Methinks I see him smile to see
what guerdon to the world he gave!
0. The Abana, River of Damascus.
How Life is dim, unreal, vain,

like scenes that round the drunkard reel;
How “Being” meaneth not to
be;
to see and hear, smell, taste and feel.
A drop in Ocean’s boundless tide,
unfathom’d waste of agony;
Where millions live their horrid lives
by making other millions die.
How with a heart that would through love
to Universal Love aspire,
Man woos infernal chance to smite,
as Min’arets draw the Thunder-fire.
How Earth on Earth builds tow’er and wall,
to crumble at a touch of Time;
How Earth on Earth from Shînar-plain
the heights of Heaven fain would climb.
How short this Life, how long withal;
how false its weal, how true its woes,
This fever-fit with paroxysms
to mark its opening and its close.
Ah! gay the day with shine of sun,
and bright the breeze, and blithe the throng
Met on the River-bank to
play,
when I was young, when I was young:
Such general joy could never fade;
and yet the chilling whisper came
One face had paled, one form had

failed;
had fled the bank, had swum the stream;
Still revellers danced, and sang, and trod
the hither bank of Time’s deep tide,
Still one by one they left and
fared
to the far misty thither side;
And now the last hath slipt away
yon drear Death-desert to explore,
And now one Pilgrim worn and
lorn
still lingers on the lonely shore.
Yes, Life in youth-tide standeth still;
in manhood streameth soft and slow;
See, as it nears the ’abysmal
goal
how fleet the waters flash and flow!
And Deaths are twain; the Deaths we see
drop like the leaves in windy Fall;
But ours, our own, are ruined
worlds,
a globe collapst, last end of all.
We live our lives with rogues and fools,
dead and alive, alive and dead,
We die ’twixt one who feels the pulse
and one who frets and clouds the head:
And,—oh, the Pity!—hardly conned

the lesson comes its fatal term;
Fate bids us bundle up our books,
and bear them bod’ily to the worm:
Hardly we learn to wield the blade
before the wrist grows stiff and old;
Hardly we learn to ply the pen
ere Thought and Fancy faint with cold.
Hardly we find the path of love,
to sink the self, forget the “I,”
When sad suspicion grips the heart,
when Man, the Man begins to die:
Hardly we scale the wisdom-heights,
and sight the Pisgah-scene around,
And breathe the breath of
heav’enly air,
and hear the Spheres’ harmonious sound;
When swift the Camel-rider spans
the howling waste, by Kismet sped,
And of his Magic Wand a wave
hurries the quick to join the dead.*
0. Death in Arabia rides a Camel, not a pale horse.
How sore the burden, strange the strife;
how full of splendour, wonder, fear;
Life, atom of that Infinite Space
that stretcheth ’twixt the Here and There.
How Thought is imp’otent to divine
the secret which the gods defend,
The Why of birth and life and

death,
that Isis-veil no hand may rend.
Eternal Morrows make our Day;
our Is_ is aye _to be till when
Night closes in; ’tis all a dream,
and yet we die,—and then and THEN?
And still the Weaver plies his loom,
whose warp and woof is wretched Man
Weaving th’ unpattern’d dark
design,
so dark we doubt it owns a plan.
Dost not, O Maker, blush to hear,
amid the storm of tears and blood,
Man say Thy mercy made what is,
and saw the made and said