BOOKS 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Holiday and Other Poems. 3s. 6d. net. 
 
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 and Stage. 5s. net. 
 
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 ' ' His strength, and obvious sincerity, the amaz- 
 ing beauty of his blank verse . . . assure him a 
 hearing among all luho value good literature, 
 and all ivho like poetry 7-eally to mean great 
 things. It is in the stress laid on imagination, 
 both for poetry and life, that the distinction and 
 value of Mr. Davidson's writing lie. It is 
 poetry . . . and all thai we now hear on many 
 sides of the twentieth cetttury and tJie glories it 
 shall bring with it, will 'find itself in this 
 poetry. . . . His prose is not less striking than 
 his verse ; he stands alone, and claims t/ie right 
 to make no concessions to popular views or dis- 
 guises." — Athenaeum, August 22, 1908. 
 
 " There is something so powerful and indi- 
 vidual in Mr. Davidsons writing, in addition to 
 his mastery of that tnost wonderful, but difficult, 
 instrument, blank verse, that one not only reads 
 but re -reads his books." 
 
 The Guardian, September 16, 190S.
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF 
 JOHN DAVIDSON
 
 THE TESTAMENT 
 
 OF 
 
 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 ^ 
 
 LONDON 
 
 GRANT RICHARDS 
 1908
 
 4 < - BUfERSITY OF CALIFORNU 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 DEDICATION— 
 
 TO THE PEERS TEMPORAL OF THE 
 UNITED KINGDOMS OF GREAT BRITAIN 
 AND IRELAND ir 
 
 PROLOGUE- 
 HONEYMOON 3f^ 
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON . . 43 
 
 EPILOGUE— 
 
 THE LAST JOURNEY 145
 
 DEDICATION
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 To the 
 
 Peers Temporal 
 
 Of the United Kingdoms of Great Britain 
 and Ireland. 
 
 My lords^ 
 
 I address you because havings each of 
 you, inherited or accepted a title which you share ^ 
 Duke or Marquis, Earl or Viscount, with the 
 Creator of the Universe, the common title of \ovd, 
 you are not to be supposed incapable of greatness ; 
 and I invite you to 7'ead this book, the prologue 
 to a literature that is to be, a literature which I 
 have already begun in my Testam,enis and Trage- 
 dies, believing that you at least will recognise 
 integrity of thought and integrity of imagination, 
 however unexpected the form and substance of these 
 may be. 
 
 I have to tell you, also, that it is still Christendom
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 in England, the old, effete, economic world of 
 Christendom: for centuHes a dull evolution by 
 degeneration, arrived nozv at the barracks of the 
 Salvation A rmy, and a no-government by agita- 
 tion : Christendom,, ascendant to the heyday of 
 the Papacy^ decadent ever since. This decadence 
 of Christendom, tnirrored in its own fancy as a 
 virtuousness of Democracy, of Progress, of Im- 
 provement of the Species, should be best known to 
 you, fjiy lords, in the atrophy of your function in 
 the state, and the loss of individual prestige. 
 Many generations have come and gone since you 
 were the great Baronage of England, extorting 
 rights, granting or refusing subsidies, inaking 
 and unmaking kings. Yet you remain, after the 
 Monarch, and as in the case of the Monarch, by 
 reason of permanence, a most effective estate of the 
 realm, your ten-acknowledged veto being our main 
 bulwark against the anarchy of the franchise. 
 It must be a source of intolerable chagrin, and 
 of intolerable mortification, to your lordships, to 
 behold the destinies of England and of the Empire 
 at the mercy of the feeblest minds in these islands, 
 at the mercy of the few thousand feather-brained
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 tax-payers^ the vibration of whose vote determines 
 the result of every general election. I trust that 
 your chagrin and mortification are, indeed^ 
 intolerable, chagrin and mortificatioti being in all 
 ages a root and fount of greatness i?i life, in 
 polity, in art, in war ; and I trust that your 
 resolution to transmute these em-otions into action 
 will appear in the development of some power of 
 initiative, centered in your House, and etitirely 
 uninfluenced by the veering flaw of popular 
 opinion which has hitherto been of the very essence 
 of that phantasm, the British Constitution. My 
 lords, we want great men to govern the kingdoms 
 and the Empire. We want government; we have 
 it not. If we were governed, there would be no 
 Irish Question, no Labour Question, no Franchise 
 Question. The demands of Women, the demands 
 of the Irish, the demands of Labour! To m,e all 
 that is heinous iii the last degree. I demand a 
 House of Peers able to say to Wom,en, to the 
 Irish, to Labour : ' ' We are not here to consider 
 your demands. What we have to do is to enforce 
 our requirements, which are the requirements of 
 the kingdoms and of the Empire. With you, our 
 
 13
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 good folk of Ireland^ we have the utmost sympathy. 
 An unconquerable race^ you had the terrible mis- 
 fortune to be brought under the government of 
 a people who destroyed your power of armed 
 resistance , but never vanquished you : a terrible 
 misfortune ; yet not an irremediable one ; rather 
 a misfortune pregnant with hope: — You are 
 unconquered; you are still the Irish Nation ; and 
 we desire you to be m,ore and more the Irish 
 Nation. By our own initiatory power, and with- 
 out reference to the House of CoTnmons, whose 
 slow machinery and emasculating compromise 
 spoil all its legislature^ we intend to grant a degree 
 of autonomy to the various parts of the kingdoms: 
 to the Welsh, to the E7iglish; to the Highlands 
 of Scotland, and to the Lowlands ; and, in the 
 case of Ireland, to the four historical divisions of 
 the country, to Ulster, Leinster, Connaught and 
 Munster. Independently? Certainly; each 
 division to be independent of the other in the 
 measure of Home Rule accorded. That is not 
 what you want? Unfair to Ireland? The 
 prosperous Ulster? Ah, the important part of 
 Ulster is not Nationalist : you would have your 
 
 14
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 Ulster Question, as we have our Irish Question, 
 were your Nationalist majority to attempt the 
 control of the loyal minority. But you particu- 
 larly desire the control of Ulster? Frankly, 
 you will be satisfied with nothing short of an 
 independent Parliament. You are a witty race 
 
 governed by a dull one, and We lose 
 
 patience now. England wishes you to be 
 National, as the Welsh are National, as the 
 Scots are National ; hut in your relations to the 
 other British Kingdoms, to the Empire, and to 
 the world, England requires you to he English, as 
 the Welsh are English, as the Scots are English. 
 The Welsh and the Scots, having accepted 
 England and the meaning of England, remain 
 m,agnaniinous. The Irish, having refused Eng- 
 land and the great m,eaning of England, are less 
 fortunate; to live with England, and yet to 
 decline the destiny of England, is to be unfortu- 
 nate indeed. A nd as regards the supposed racial 
 incompatibility, we assure you, we do not think 
 you a witty people at all : the English have the 
 wit: you are an amusing people, a comical people 
 — which is a very different thing. We like you, 
 
 15
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 and intend nothing but your best interests. We 
 recommend you heartily to cease thinking of 
 dema^ids on England^ and of "what England 
 should do for Ireland. Set yourselves^ rather^ to 
 study and understand what Englatid requires of 
 you, and what you should do for England. 
 Remember in the meantime that the Irish 
 Question is unfortunately solving itself: your 
 population has decreased in recent years at a 
 rate that will, if it continues, put a speedy and 
 final stop to the Irish Question for lack of Irish 
 Questio7iers. And hark, sirs! A last word: 
 Get rid of your priests; be done with Other 
 World. 
 
 '■*■ For you, our Working-men, we have a pro- 
 found regard; but we are somewhat tired of your 
 Labour Question. Already one of your demands 
 is being attended to : your Old Age Pension is 
 assured. But, men, we beg you to note that 
 your Old Age Pensioji is your heaviest handicap 
 in the competition for power and wealth. In tJie 
 failures and defeats of life, which none escape, 
 even the gallantest among you will be tempted to 
 give in : will, sometimes, give in^ now that dens 
 
 i6
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 of starvation or the horror of the poorhouse no 
 lojiger await poverty at the journeys end. We 
 question very much if it would not be more 
 humane^ as it would certainly he greater, to inflict 
 a dire penalty on failure instead of awarding it a 
 pension. But you want to have done with com- 
 petition? You want everything socialised? 
 We decline to listen to a word of that. The 
 members of this House are proprietors of much of 
 the soily much of the means of production ^ much 
 of the capital of these kingdoms. They are not 
 going to sit with folded hands and see their lands 
 and factories voted away. Civil War lies across 
 the path of that attem.pt. But what are you to 
 do ? If there is no scope for your energies at 
 home, do as your fathers did in all ages, Hive 
 off: acquire lands and factories of your ow7t. We 
 have made room for you, ample room. But you 
 want to be great : you have heard of the Over- 
 man, and you would transcend humanity? Do 
 not be misled by any speciousjiess of that kind. 
 Let us understand this of the Overman. Ueber- 
 mensch, a word of Goethe's, of the young Goethe's, 
 having a pre-Darwinian half-mea^iing, was inter- 
 
 B 17
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 preted in an evolutionary sense hy Nietzsche^ and 
 received its European vogue from him. When 
 the misapprehension of Ibsen in England gave 
 place to a misapprehe?tsion of Nietzsche : — Celtic 
 panicsy both of these ; not English at all; the 
 English care nothing for either Ibsen or 
 Nietzsche :— your absurd neologism^ Overman^ 
 was accepted by the panic-stricken as an index 
 of evolution in humanity; but not by the English. 
 You must remember that Nietzsche, the fugleman 
 iji this business, was a Pole. The Poles being the 
 Celts of Eastern Europe, an inferior race, unable 
 to conquer and unable to be conquered, the idea of 
 a higher type of man than they is natural to them. 
 But such an idea could never occur to an English' 
 man. The Englishman is the Overman; and 
 the history of England is the history of his 
 evolution. You think we are unjust to Nietzsche, 
 the most powerful mind of recent times? We 
 admit the power : a shattering mhid that never 
 spared itself. But an extraordinary individual 
 may spring from any source. Napoleon was a 
 Corsican : the smallness, the much meanness of 
 Napoleon was racial : the blood of the pigmies 
 
 i8
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 ran in the veins of the giant; and thus it is that 
 Napoleon appears monstrous rather than great. 
 Nietzsche' s notion of Beyond-man was not of the 
 individual; it came of the inferiority of the stock. 
 But why should the English Working-man trouble 
 himself about Nietzsche ? Have you never heard 
 of Burns? Goto! Sharpen your tools ; square 
 your shoulders to the work; eat and drink lustily ; 
 love your wives and children; and read The Jolly 
 Beggars. 
 
 *^And as for you, the Women of England who 
 desire political equality with men, what is to be 
 said? Do you know wJiat has happened in the 
 world in the matter of Women ? It is this 
 Woman Question that betrays most definitely the 
 decadence, the disintegration of Christendom, 
 Do you know that hitherto Woman, either as the 
 legitimate or illegitimate minion of man, has 
 ruled the world? Part and parcel of his goods 
 and chattels, you developed the finest intellectual 
 capacity — ruse, stratagem, chicanery; the simplest 
 and therefore the subtlest aHifice in your whole 
 armoury being the expert touch on the helmsman's 
 hand, which while it seemed only to stroke and 
 
 19
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 caress, was all the time steering the world. You 
 are tired of hearing that? You want direct 
 representation ? We shallcome to the franchise ; 
 but we must ask you to consider very importantly 
 the stupendous change long elaborated in silence, 
 the quiet crumbling and decomposition of society, 
 of which your militant campaign is the sudden 
 sound and sign. The history of the past is the 
 history of the ' regiment of women. ' Man, having 
 made women and offspring his private property , 
 became, as their provider, the virtual slave of his 
 wife and children; and on that account and 
 during the many centuries of the intellectual 
 development of woman, man continued to grow in 
 instinct and in all hu77ia7i qualities ; tJiat is to 
 say, in intelligence and experience. What do 
 we mean by such sophistry ? // is not sophistical. 
 There is a vast distinction and a difference between 
 intellect and intelligence : it is hitherto the dif- 
 feretice between men and women : intellect is of 
 the nerve and of the brain ; but intelligence is 
 more of the blood— passion, histinct, genius. It 
 was the hitelligence of m,an that developed his 
 ideas of justice, of right and wrong, of truth and
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 falsehood^ and created a moral order of the 
 universe to be a nest for his wife and family ; 
 that transmuted the base metal of desire into a 
 golden 7niracle^ invented the divine mystery of 
 maternal love (a most masculine invention)^ and 
 imposed upon himself under the unperceived 
 tyranny of woman, the semi-celibate life of the 
 m.onogamist. You cannot make us out? Do 
 we mean that women are superior to men in- 
 tellectually? We do; but even so there have 
 been instances of men able to hold their own in- 
 tellectually with women; and indeed mail's rudi- 
 mentary i?itellect is only a few marks lower 
 in capacity than that of woraan^ trained and 
 strengthened^ edged and pointed by millenniums 
 of constant exercise in the art of changing in 
 every circumstance her nominal and apparent sub- 
 ordination into an actual and rational dominion. 
 We state it paradoxically ; but there is some 
 truth in it ? We are glad you admit that. From 
 beginning to end the automatic subtlety in the 
 matter was so exquisite that man conceived him- 
 self the lord of creation^ and woman felt that she 
 was only a m,inor consideration in the universal
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 order, little better than an evil thing necessary 
 for the continuance of the race. But you're going 
 to change all that? It has been very much 
 chariged already. We came to an end of that, 
 indeed, when the French Revolution plunged the 
 world and its ideas into the crucible; the begin- 
 ning of the end that is ; for almost all those ideas, 
 which seemed at the time annihilated, reappeared 
 from the furnace changed but not transformed. 
 In the relations of men and women there was no 
 destructive distillation of marriage into some new 
 compound, but only a distillation as of sea water 
 into fresh water : marriage remained, but it had 
 lost the rich salt and savour of sanctity ; no longer 
 necessarily a sacrament surrounded with glories 
 and terrors, it became and becomes more and 
 more, a m,erely economical arrangement, termin- 
 able under various disguises, on economical 
 grounds. Back from the crucible came also the 
 idea of property, the only philosopher's stone that 
 ever did change anything into gold. Much 
 cracked and buckled by the fire, this talisman 
 still retained its identity, and some of its magic 
 virtue ; but its most potent witchcraft had de-
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 parted: Man was no longer to have any property 
 in man ; not even in his wife and family. What 
 about votes for women ? We shall co7ne to that ; 
 but we are determined first of all to let you know 
 what has happened to you. The increasing im- 
 potence of these tivo charms^ the amulet of mar- 
 riage and the talisman of property^ bega?i the 
 change which is now rapidly determining the 
 new orientation of man and woman; and if 
 this philosopher's stone of property is pulverised 
 and scattered oti the wi?id never again to be re- 
 integrated, then will the last phylactery of mar- 
 riage be burned away to everlasting tinder ; when 
 men have no lands and money to bequeath, a son 
 of their own blood will be of no consequence. You 
 see hoiv far the decadence has gone, how deep the 
 corruption of Christendom is, how entire the dis- 
 solution of our complex society. You are on the 
 verge of a reversion to a community of goods and 
 women, a community of goods and m,en ; some 
 condition of things in which the old tribal systems 
 of polyandry and polygyny, never entirely super- 
 seded, will coalesce and become universal. What 
 are we going to do about votes for women? 
 
 23
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Something rigorous. In the meantime we heg you 
 to notice that by this loosening of the bonds of 
 property, woman is already free to do as she 
 chooses, and obtain what she can. Having ab- 
 dicated, unwittingly :—you had, and have, no con- 
 ceptioti ofwJiatyou are doing : — having abdicated 
 the uncrowned sovereignty of the world, you efiter 
 the arena with man, and find yourself with your 
 wonderfully evolved intellect, at least his equal. 
 With great liberty and rejoicing you turn into 
 the broadway of intelligence and expei'ience, and 
 with the sweetest arrogance imaginable you say 
 to the clerk, the merchant, the physician, the 
 lawyer, the politician, */ wish to work side by 
 side with you ; we shall march together to Ely- 
 sium ' / not knowing that the true expression of 
 your action is ' Ote-toi de la que je m'y 
 mette ' ; atid that tJiat particular way to the 
 Elysium no one ever reaches is a descending 
 road through every kind of hell to absolute per- 
 dition. You deny that ; and all your leaders, 
 and social reformers everywhere, insist that it is 
 not a case of ' Ote-toi de la ' ? You will find it 
 is if the disruption of society continues. So far 
 
 24
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 as it has gone, you bat, bowl and field your best, 
 while we, with our undeveloped intellects, stand 
 about awkwardly and play the game with a 
 broomstick and the left hand. But if the game 
 were to become serious, if it ceased to be a game 
 played in exatnination halls, and in pantomime 
 scuffles with the constable; were it to change into 
 the actual battle of life along the whole line, what 
 would happen ? (Votes for Women !) This 
 would happen : Man, with an intellect in its un^ 
 developed state only a little lower than the per^ 
 fected instrument of woman, would set about the 
 evolution of a masculine subtlety, a keenness of 
 ruse, a fathomlessness of chicanery, an undetect- 
 able statagem beyond the imagination of the 
 craftiest maitresse femme ; and long before 
 woman had begun to realise that the battle was 
 lost in the nature of things, she would find her- 
 self at her opponent' s mercy, disarmed and power- 
 less. When woman ruled the world, man, in 
 most things her slave, worshipped her; sedulously 
 built up his moral order of the Universe for the 
 safety of her and her children ; reared a heaven for 
 her and her friends ; dug the pit of hell for her 
 
 25
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 foes and blasphemers. 7/> upon her abdication^ 
 challenge and defeat^ ivoman becomes the slave 
 of m.an and a re-orientation of the sexes is per- 
 fected: then we shall have indeed a new order 
 of things ; and in the place of home we shall see 
 what shelter woman will provide; what substitute 
 for viands heroic spiritualisation of passion ; what 
 of worth a?id worship for the divinity of mother- 
 hood. All that goes in at one ear and out at 
 the other? Give you votes, and you can take 
 care of yourselves ? Yoit are under the strong- 
 est of all delusions, the idea of representative 
 government, of government by vote. England, 
 the true England, has long suspected representa- 
 tive government to be the sheerest phantasm ; we, 
 the Peers of England, have always recognised 
 its shadowy, tentative nature ; and we purpose, 
 wielding our nezv initiative, to stem the forces of 
 social evolution by degeneration, which England, 
 intending something very di^erent, was the first 
 to set free. Hitherto the franchise has had a 
 merely economic foundation, and the more temper- 
 ate among you ask for no 7nore than inen have, 
 a property qualification. That we will not give 
 
 26
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 youy because "me intend to introduce an entirely 
 new principle J to place the franchise upon a moral 
 as well as upon an economic basis. We propose 
 to limit the male vote to married men who are 
 householders, and to extend the franchise to 
 married women who are the mothers of at least 
 three children. You tnay exclaim, but we know 
 what we are about. Class and mass in this 
 generation have eaten greedily of the modern tree 
 of the knowledge of good and evil; and — there 
 will be no children's teeth to set on edge unless 
 some stringent measure is taken. What ! You 
 want to be mothers or not as you choose ? Men 
 will never allow that. Do not dream of it. Mas- 
 culine control of offspring is of the very form and 
 substance of life. (Votes for women !) We in- 
 vite you to reconsider the whole matter. (Votes 
 for women ! Votes for women !) There is 
 remedy for the terrible lot of some of your sisters 
 in sweated industries, and for such artificial dis- 
 abilities as may impede your true advancement, 
 without your becoming active politicians. You 
 
 (Votes for Women ! Votes for Women ! 
 
 Votes for Women !) " 
 
 27
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 My lordSy in the above intei'vie'vo "which I Jiave 
 imagined for you, I Jiave shown you the litter and 
 broken bits of a shattered society, the debris and 
 wreckage of Christendom, clamouring to be put 
 together again — after a pattern of its own ! Is 
 there any political seccotine, stickfast, or fish- 
 glue equal to it ? I think not. When the dilapi- 
 dators have begun upon a liouse it is best to let 
 them, go through with it; and build again from a 
 7iew foundation. For my own part I liave come 
 out of it all, and have found another abode for 
 my mind and imagination, not in any symbol of 
 the Universe, which Christendom was, but in the 
 Universe itself. . . . How shall I say it ? How 
 shall I get this thing said to you, briefly and in 
 prose ? I am persuaded that the thing I have to 
 tell is for you of all classes. You are raised above 
 the rank and file, accustomed to greatness, and 
 able at once to grasp a great idea. Briefly then, 
 and witJwut more preamble : — A/y lords, there is 
 no Other World; there never was anything that 
 man has meant by Other World; neither spirit, 
 nor mystical behind-the-veil; nothing not-ourselves 
 that makes for righteousness, no metaphysical ab- 
 
 28
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 straction. Time is a juggler's trick of the sun 
 and the moon. There is only m^atter^ "which is the 
 infinite^ which is space ^ which is eternity ; which 
 we are. In the beginning matter had only one 
 forfny that of the oblivious ^ omnisolventy imponder- 
 able ether. The principal constituents of matter ^ 
 that is to sayy of eternity ^ of the iiifinite, are carbon, 
 hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen; but these, with 
 the other elements, consist of lightning, the first 
 emergence of the ponderable from the imponder- 
 able. Lightning, with its poles or sexes, essence 
 at once and seed and yeast, secreted in drops, or 
 cells, or electrons the first limitation of matter, and 
 began the fermentation in the eternal ether which 
 was not to cease until the appearance of the visible 
 Universe. No sooner had the drops, or cells, or elec- 
 trons sprung from the tension of the dark, oblivious, 
 omfiipotent ether in eddying vortices than they 
 sought an equilibrium, and combined themselves 
 into groups, each group consisting of an array 
 of negative and positive electrons, neutralising 
 each other, and revolving about a common centre 
 like a miniature solar system; and this is the 
 evolution of the atom. In each invisible atom 
 
 29
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 tens of tfiousands^ or hundreds of thousands, or 
 fnillions of cubic miles of the primal substance^ 
 which in its tenuous, imponderable form fills 
 space, are constringed into the ponderable, gar- 
 nered up and packed away ; every atom is thus 
 a repository of the ^naterial of eternity, and the 
 fountain of all force — physical, mental, imagina- 
 tive. These microscopic systems of electrons 
 whirled into vast swarms forming nebulcB, and 
 07ie of the smallest of many million, million 
 nebulce, resolved itself into our solar system. 
 Within the 7iebulce, or after, when the planets 
 had been flung off to circle round tJie sun^ 
 from the primal atoju, by process of chemical 
 selection, all other atoms were evolved; and these 
 assemblies of electrons, themselves combined in 
 m,olecules, gave form and stability to the various 
 elem-ents — gaseous, metalloid, or metallic. By 
 an advanced process of chemical selection, car- 
 bon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen were chosen 
 out to be the basis of all life, and life through 
 geologic periods of natural selection arrived at 
 men and women, in whom are enshrined the two 
 poles or sexes of the lightning, the earliest nisus 
 
 30
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 of matter towards self-consciousness : matter now 
 capable in us of the highest ecstasy and of all 
 knowledge. Thus I break the world out of the 
 imaginary chrysalis or cocoon of Other World in 
 which it has slumbered so long; and man beholds 
 himself.) not now as that fabulous monster, half- 
 god y half -devil J of the Christian era, but as Man^ 
 the very form and substance of the universe, the 
 m,aterial of eternity, eternity itself, become con- 
 scious and self-conscious. This is the greatest 
 thing told since the world began. It means an 
 end of the strangling past ; an end of our con- 
 ceptions of humanity and divinity, of our ideas 
 of good and evil, of our religion, our literature^ 
 our art, our polity ; it means that which all men 
 have desired in all ages, it fueans a new begin- 
 ning; it means that the material forces of mind 
 and imagination can now re-establish the world 
 as if nothing had ever been thought or imagined 
 before; it means that there is nothing greater 
 than man anywhere; it means infinite terror, 
 infinite greatness. And that is the 7neaning 
 of me, and of my Testaments and Tragedies, 
 and of ^ this Testament, which I have placed 
 
 3»
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 between a poem of the dawn of life and a poem of 
 its close, and which I commend to your lordships* 
 notice, as my most original presentation of the 
 thing I have to tell. 
 
 I am, 
 
 My Lords, 
 Most faithfully yours, 
 
 JOHN DAVIDSON. 
 
 32
 
 PROLOGUE
 
 HONEYMOON 
 
 I WAKEN at dawn and your head 
 On the pillow beside me lies ; 
 And I wonder although we were wed 
 Such an infinite fortnight ago, 
 ** Have the planets stood still in the skies 
 Since my sweetheart and I were wed, 
 
 Since first I awoke, and lo, 
 On the pillow beside me her head ! " 
 
 Through our window the wind forspent — 
 
 Marauder in garth and wild ! — 
 His opulent burden of scent 
 
 Unloads lest he faint by the way ; 
 For the flowers, they were subtly beguiled, 
 And their dewdrops and manifold scent 
 
 Perfume now the crimsoning day 
 On the wings of the wind forspent. 
 
 35
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 I look, and I look at your face 
 
 Till my thought of you pierces your sleep, 
 Till your silken lashes unlace, 
 
 And your blossomlike lids upheave, 
 Till your eyes emerge from the deep 
 As your writhen lashes unlace, 
 
 And morn and awakening weave 
 The wonder and joy in your face. 
 
 Then your memory quickens and bids 
 
 A blush and a happy sigh 
 At the lift of your azure lids, 
 
 A concord of colour and sound ; 
 And there dawns in your violet eye. 
 When you open your flowerlike lids, 
 
 A thought from the depths profound 
 As an exqusite memory bids. 
 
 And this is your twentieth year, 
 
 And your bridegroom is twenty-one ; 
 And our thoughts are as fragrant and clear 
 As the lucent splendour of noon. 
 My love is as rich as the sun. 
 And your love is as tender and clear 
 
 As the lily-light of the moon 
 In the sweetest month of the year. 
 
 36
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 At once when we waken we rise, 
 
 For the earth is as fresh as our thought, 
 And the heaven-high dome of the skies 
 A miracle constantly new : 
 A marvel diurnally wrought. 
 The earth with its seas and its skies, 
 Its flowers and its matinal dew, 
 Awaits us as soon as we rise. 
 
 Through the woodland and over the lea 
 
 That dips to a golden strand, 
 Like fugitives seeking the sea 
 
 We haste in our morning mood ; 
 Together and hand in hand. 
 We hurry to reach the sea 
 
 Through the purple shade of the wood, 
 And over the spangled lea. 
 
 In our boat on the swell of the tide 
 
 We steer for the heart of morn, 
 And I say to you, '* Sweet and my bride, 
 Should hope be for ever undone. 
 Should destiny leave us forlorn. 
 Thus, thus shall we journey, my bride. 
 
 Right into the heart of the sun 
 On the morning or evening tide." 
 
 37
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Could we harbour with sorrow and care, 
 
 And friendless, in penury lost, 
 Remain at the beck of despair 
 
 Like prisoners or impotent folk? 
 Could we chaffer and reckon the cost, 
 And measure out love till despair 
 Subdued us, bereft, to a yoke 
 In harness with sorrow and care? 
 
 O, not while the morning is crowned. 
 
 And the evening, with roses and gold ; 
 Because like adventurers bound 
 
 For a kingdom their faith could create 
 In a future of beauty untold — 
 Like hazardous mariners bound 
 
 For the haven and wharf of Fate 
 On a voyage with happiness crowned. 
 
 In our boat when the day is done, 
 
 On the lift of the evening tide 
 I should steer for the heart of the sun. 
 And sigh with my ebbing breath, 
 '* Be resolute, sweet and my bride ; 
 We shall sink with the setting sun, 
 
 And shelter our love in death 
 Since our beautiful day is done." 
 
 38
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 But now while our hearts beat high 
 
 With youth and unfolding delight, 
 And the honeymoon in the sky 
 At her zenith usurps the reign 
 Of the day as well as the night — 
 With the honeymoon in the sky 
 
 We steer for the shore again 
 While our bosoms with hope beat high. 
 
 Through the tasselled oats and the wheat 
 
 We march to the skylark's song, 
 Where the roses, pallid and sweet. 
 In delicate pomp parade 
 The precincts the wild bees throng — 
 Where the winding byways, sweet 
 
 With scent of the roses wade 
 Through the flowing tide of the wheat. 
 
 O hark from the meadows ! O hear 
 
 The burden the mower sings ! 
 The past, how it hovers near 
 
 This uttermost isle of the sea ! 
 Where the stone on the sickle rings 
 The shadowy past draws near, 
 
 And the spirit of eld set free 
 Revives in the song we hear. 
 
 39
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 The dawn and the dusk are crowned 
 With chaplets of roses and gold ; 
 We two are invincibly bound 
 
 For a kingdom our faith can create 
 In a present of beauty untold : 
 O love, we are certainly bound 
 
 For the ultimate haven of Fate 
 On a voyage with happiness crowned ! 
 
 40
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF 
 JOHN DAVIDSON
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF 
 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 WHEN suddenly the world was closed to me, 
 And every road against my passage barred, 
 I found a door that opened into space ; 
 I built a lodge celestial for myself, 
 An outcast's palace in the Milky Way; 
 I banqueted my body and my soul 
 On light and sound, the substance of the stars, 
 Ethereal tissue of eternity ; 
 And took my ease in heaven, the first of men 
 To be and comprehend the Universe : — 
 To know how all things are the infinite 
 Imponderable ether that possessed 
 Illimitable space with tension (pure 
 Spontaneous energy, the pristine state 
 Of matter and its last consummate doom) 
 Before the galaxies with silver seamed 
 
 43
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 The swart oblivion of the Universe, 
 
 Or pearly nebula began to glow 
 
 Upon the sable bosom of the night, 
 
 Or any living nerve electric leapt 
 
 To elemental ecstasy; and, most 
 
 Atoning recompense, to feel myself 
 
 Ethereal fabric, exquisitely spun. 
 
 Entranced andwreathedof light and sound, the warp 
 
 And woof of matter ; flesh and blood, a lyre 
 
 Of tuneful colours ; every nerve, a strain 
 
 Of spheral music ; body, mind and soul, 
 
 Material intensity evolved 
 
 From unseen atoms, each a reservoir 
 
 And ponderable treasury of power ; 
 
 Infinitude condensed and garnered up 
 
 In ions, to be sifted, blent, sublimed, 
 
 Transmuted into life of every grade — 
 
 Lightning, the sexes of eternity, 
 
 Become a group of chosen elements 
 
 In flower and beast, and capable in man 
 
 Of knowledge, understanding, rapture, truth. 
 
 Therefore it shook me when my senses lost 
 The full material power of crystal vision 
 
 44
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 And audience infinite, that could outstare 
 A million suns, and happily engulf. 
 As in a sea of sound, harmonic curves 
 Reverberant through the ether ; fathom depths 
 Profound, and subtle darknesses unplumbed 
 By asterism remote or shimmering waif. 
 Comet or meteorite or shooting star ; 
 Resolve the discords of imagined spheres ; 
 Enharmonize divergent galaxies ; 
 In puissant planes arrest and deftly cleave 
 Irradiance everywhere, from candent fire 
 Inwove, of blanched intolerant stars that burn 
 Pellucid flame, unbraiding prismal hues 
 To stud and gem enamelled firmaments, 
 And stain the welkin and the steep of space 
 With shadowy tinctures ; grip the tumult high 
 That echoes through the vast unvaulted courts 
 Interminable, where the nebulae. 
 Evolving constellations, their spindles whirl. 
 And break it into rhythmic chords, as light 
 Asunder bursts in blazoned intervals 
 Against refractive adamant, or drops 
 In jewelled tears before the cloudless sun : 
 So being unwearied of the universe, 
 
 45
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 As of myself and my supernal place, 
 
 But faint with glory by my soul conceived, 
 
 And by my soul begotten, in the rapt 
 
 Cohabitation with eternity, 
 
 I left my palace in the Milky Way, 
 
 My outlook in the skies, and sought the earth ; 
 
 For men must still descend to earth to die. 
 
 *' None should outlive his power," I said. '* Who 
 
 kills 
 Himself subdues the conqueror of kings : 
 Exempt from death is he who takes his life : 
 My time has come. The native energy 
 Whereby I exorcised fantastical 
 Immutability, and in my own 
 Resemblance reproduced the plastic world, 
 Beginning to relent, abates the thrust 
 And tension of my thought, discharges love. 
 Unwinds the poignant charm of living, frees 
 Imagination — known eternity. 
 Confined in lightning, light, or radiant soul, 
 That breaks atomic chrysalids unseen, 
 Unthinkable, but certain and innate — 
 To melt into the ether, and to be 
 
 46
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Transmuted to injfinity again. 
 
 We are the plunging fire, the molten seed 
 
 That gladdened, swelled and rent the generous 
 
 wombs 
 We harboured in — most wilful, fateful births, 
 Predestined by ourselves before the world 
 Or time began, and wholly answerable ; 
 For had we not, beyond all yea or nay. 
 Escaped alive among the myriad germs 
 Devoutly squandered from abundant reins 
 To dower a woman's body with delight. 
 We had not been. By my own will alone 
 The ethereal substance, which I am, attained, 
 And now by my own sovereign will, forgoes, 
 Self-consciousness ; and thus are men supreme : 
 No other living thing can choose to die. 
 This franchise and this high prerogative 
 I show the world : — Men are the Universe 
 Aware at last, and must not live in fear. 
 Slaves of the seasons, padded, bolstered up, 
 Clystered and drenched and dieted and drugged ; 
 Or hateful victims of senility, 
 Toothless and like an infant checked and schooled ; 
 Or in the dungeon of a sick room drained 
 
 47
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 By some tabescent horror in their prime ; 
 But when the tide of life begins to turn, 
 Before the treason of the ebbing wave 
 Divulges refuse and the barren shore, 
 Upon the very period of the flood, 
 Stand out to sea and bend our weathered sails 
 Against the sunset, valiantly resolved 
 To win the haven of eternal night." 
 
 Ten lustres of authentic life compact, 
 And many a visit to the heaven of heavens. 
 Had thus determined me ; so forth I sped 
 Upon a mountain-top to die alone. 
 
 At sunset on the mountain of my choice 
 I stood above the catafalque of day. 
 And watched the quilted vapour harness heaven 
 In chrysolite and ruby of countless hues. 
 Unnamed, unknown, unthought-of, only guessed 
 Upon the moment of vicissitude 
 And pulsing cadence ; while the lofty wind's 
 Unseen battalions swung their shining glaives 
 Against me, and across the hills behind. 
 With bridle-bells a-peal and vibrant tread, 
 
 48
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Went down into the gloaming and the night. 
 Suddenly fear, against me stumbling, struck 
 With heavy foot my heart, that missed a pulse, 
 Then beat upon my ribs as if to break 
 The prison of humanity ; my blood. 
 Like snow-dredged water laboured in my veins ; 
 My nerves as pithless as peeled rushes now, 
 And now as taut as harp-strings, flagged inert 
 Or hummed with agony ; my sight went out ; 
 I strained on tiptoe to escape myself 
 Like one hung up that barely touches ground ; 
 My arms flung forth, my stiffened fingers spread, 
 Repulsing death, I fell and clutched the earth. 
 Without a weapon or a potent drug, 
 My very will to die had seemed enough 
 To end the consciousness of matter shrined 
 In me a while ; and so, indeed, it was ; 
 But in the travail of it, fierce revolt 
 Broke out with this intolerable thought 
 Thrust through me by the sunset and the wind, 
 (Deadlier than dying pangs or fabled throes 
 In hell, or anguish actual in dungeons broached 
 By vengeance, lust of souls, or lust of gain) — 
 That being dead we neither see nor hear, 
 D 49
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 And beauty ceases to renew our blood 
 With form and colour, light and harmony. 
 
 Out of my swoon I wrestled, further roused 
 To live again by high remembrances. 
 Being the first to understand himself, 
 I felt my life the universal will, 
 My death more terrible than death — in me 
 More terrible than in all the world beside ; 
 For when I die the Universe shall cease 
 To know itself. Athwart the tenebrous 
 Oblivion of the starless infinite 
 The lightning eddied into nebulae, 
 Systems and suns, the earth and life and sex, 
 That I might see the beauty, hear the music, 
 The loveliness which is the infinite ; 
 That I might be and know and feel myself 
 Eternity incarnate in the powers 
 Material that eat and drink and love. 
 Beget, imagine, labour, think, invent, 
 The multitudinous atonement knit 
 In brain and blood, in marrow, seed and soul 
 Of all the substance of the Universe. 
 Wherefore I drove my vision through the world 
 
 50
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 As in the turf my fingers dug ; I drew 
 The wind's sonorous tune into my ears 
 As whirlpools suck the sea down ; drank the air 
 In pregnant sighs and lusty bosomfuls ; 
 And felt the mountain underneath me throb. 
 
 Uplifted by this freshened will I stood 
 Erect again upon the mountain-top, 
 And looked about me, rebeholding earth 
 As though I ne'er had seen it. In the west 
 A range irregular of summits, clear 
 As polished ebony, with giant notch 
 Dinted the crimson shadow of the sun 
 That faded into purple. Utmost heights. 
 Immortal in romance, with forests fledged 
 And battlefields beneath, keen-crested hung 
 In air ; then loomed uncharactered as dusk 
 To darkness turned ; and sank into the ground 
 When in the wakeful bosom of the night 
 The slumbering land lay hushed. Themonthlystar, 
 Whose silver sorcery fills the tidal wave, 
 Ascendant with the sun, in hidden courts 
 Her interlunar festival observed ; 
 And through the swarthy battlements no glance 
 
 SI
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Sidereal from any loophole fell. 
 
 I breathed the darkness, fragrant as a wine 
 
 Delivered from the lees : it laced my blood 
 
 With night's material elixir, old 
 
 And mightier than magic ; subtly slaked 
 
 The Phcenix-ashes of my thoughts, affined 
 
 Their diverse elements, and interknit 
 
 The myriad fibrilled intellects that store 
 
 The engine and the battery of the brain 
 
 With power and powers, eternity installed 
 
 In ganglioned tissue. Long I stood entranced 
 
 Until a rumour in my quickened ears, 
 
 A resonance and noise of breathing woke. 
 
 Of heavy pinions and a griping step 
 
 Unearthly : faint, afar, and sheathed within 
 
 The louder wind, but heard, with wonder heard 
 
 And terror. On the instant I divined 
 
 Divinity. 
 
 " My hands — my soul is red 
 With blood of gods in battle slain ; and now," 
 I thought, '^some deity, in adamant 
 Accoutred, wheels against me, dragon-drawn 
 From glowing Muspelheim, or charioted 
 
 52
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 By Cyclopean craftmanship, and armed 
 
 With thunders for celestial vengeance forged." 
 
 In my great day and vigour of. my prime 
 
 No god could stand against me ; but the mood, 
 
 That drew me from my palace in the skies 
 
 To die alone, unmanned me — was, in truth, 
 
 The lowering of the flame of life that means 
 
 Surcease of strength ; so that I trembled, I 
 
 Who hitherto had sought divinity 
 
 As champions seek co-rivals, faintly hoped — 
 
 Abjectly hoped, insidious night would screen 
 
 My presence ! Notwithstanding, when the sounds 
 
 Heraldic of divine approach increased 
 
 In menace, through my tremor flashed again 
 
 My old disdain of spirit and Other World. 
 
 *' The cowardice of immaterial things ! " 
 
 I muttered. *' When our days are nearly done ; 
 
 Imagination withered ; passion, stale 
 
 As spilth of blood in shambles ; thought, a net 
 
 Entangling action ; and our sense corrupt 
 
 With soul, the pious title of decay, 
 
 Then come the treacherous powers to dauntus: gods. 
 
 That in the flood and torrent of our lives, 
 
 53
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 We left bewildered in their ruined fanes, 
 Or tossed ashore in isles forlorn, or fought 
 And overthrew, if any durst on sea 
 Or land abide our onset, face us then 
 With smooth effrontery, empanoplied 
 In all their specious terrors, sure 
 That scorn can hurt us in our impotence, 
 A supercilious look with anguish pierce 
 Our naked hearts, and lofty silence wring 
 Our flayed and bleeding vanity." 
 
 By this 
 The noise uncouth of supernatural flight, 
 Archaic jangle of celestial gear. 
 Rapacious step and breathing arrogant 
 Outstripped the wind's sonorous pilgrimage, 
 Till with the very neighbourhood of dread. 
 The sheer immediacy of some divine 
 Appellant's onslaught, power enough to brim 
 A year's adventurous life (from energies 
 Material within me disengaged) 
 In ruddier stains dyed deep my labouring heart, 
 Restrung my bones, and reattuned my nerves 
 To quarrel and to cope with the unseen 
 In visionary essences beheld. 
 
 54
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Forth as a wrestler steps I strode, my hands 
 Advanced palm uppermost, and raked the night 
 With glances keen from bended brows discharged, 
 Hearkening, undaunted now, the braided sounds 
 Phantasmal violently throb and ring 
 In swift crescendo, as the visitant 
 Unknown wheeled up the mountain. Savage eyes 
 Like burning emeralds glared through vapour, 
 
 streaked 
 With yellow flame from ruddy nostrils flung ; 
 And on the instant while I held my breath, 
 Still as the statue of a combatant 
 About to grapple his antagonist, 
 Dragon and chariot and charioteer 
 Swept past me, clearly seen by dulcet light 
 A molten crescent threw, crowning the brows 
 Superb of her who trod the chariot floor 
 With sandalled feet. Umber and gold her locks 
 In loose adornment clustered, crescent-held ; 
 Or streamed behind unchapleted. One hand 
 With easy manage curbed the dragon's flight ; 
 The other grasped a glittering spear. Her arms. 
 Uncovered, fair and firm as woman's flesh 
 In rounded beauty shone. Her loose simarre, 
 
 SS
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 A fabric of the freshest mountain green, 
 Rustled above her bosom, and the wind 
 Wedged it between her thighs and furled it close 
 About her comely leg. She flung a look 
 Upon me as she passed ; her lips apart ; 
 Her pearly nostrils quivering with her speed ; 
 And on her ardent countenance divine 
 Virginity mantling to see me there. 
 While yet her vivid eyes in secret smiled. 
 
 **She thinks herself unseen!" I guessed. At 
 
 once. 
 Belling my hands, after her down the wind 
 I shouted, '• Holla, Hecate ! " I saw 
 Her swerve and pant like one thrust through that 
 
 scarce 
 For pain can breathe. '' Holla ! " again I cried ; 
 *' Diana, Artemis, Selene ! Ghost 
 Or goddess ! Deity beheld, halt, halt ! " 
 
 She dropped the bridle-rein; she dropped her 
 
 spear ; 
 She wheeled about and gripped in either hand 
 The chariot's sides, devouring me with eyes 
 
 56
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 That cracked their sockets. Eyebrows arched 
 
 beneath 
 Alarm engraved upon her forehead ; wide 
 Her mouth to drink in wonder at a draught ; 
 And every fibre of her godhead tense 
 With uttermost amazement : thus she stood 
 A breathing space, until her eddying hair 
 Blinded her vision. Swiftly then she turned 
 And snatched the bridle, whispering the urgentword 
 That rendered up the dragon to his speed. 
 I, following hard behind, shouldered the wind 
 That like an unseen sighing multitude 
 Oppressed and swarmed upon me. Turf and stone 
 With every step the dragon's talons showered ; 
 His furnace breath in rhythmic blasts respired 
 A ruddy gloom that lit his brindled mane ; 
 His leathern pinions wide as latin sails 
 On curving yards of Berber pirates bent, 
 With steady motion winged the chariot on. 
 Fluent upon its whirring wheels that droned 
 Like mammoth bees, and from the mountain 
 
 skimmed 
 A rotatory purchase merely. Far 
 Outpaced I laboured after, hoping still 
 
 57
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 An audience of the goddess of the night ; 
 For straight across the dragon's course a stream, 
 Entangled in the mountains, deeply clave 
 A tortuous glen, with precipices ribbed, 
 With rocky caldrons, pools and waterfalls 
 Intestined, fleeced with shaggy woods, and dark 
 With necromantic memories, haunt and hold 
 In faithful ages of unchristened things. 
 
 '' Now, if the goddess deems that there her flight 
 
 May find an end in arboured secrecy, 
 
 I, knowing every cavern, nook and vault. 
 
 Can take her unawares ; or if intense 
 
 Emotion of divinity beheld 
 
 After millenniums of enfranchisement. 
 
 Wherewith invisibility endowed 
 
 Celestial being : if, perturbed, she leaves 
 
 The way to chance, the briar and the thorn 
 
 Will soon ensnare her wheels." 
 
 But when I changed, 
 On these presumptions, to a measured stride, 
 Suddenly chariot and charioteer. 
 Cresting a knoll that broke the steep descent 
 
 58
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 With upward impulse, climbed against the wind, 
 
 And, voyaging aloft, from mountain crossed 
 
 To mountain, lightly borne on mighty vans 
 
 Revibrant indiscernibly, that wreathed 
 
 The outstretched dragon in elastic coils 
 
 Of humming speed. I watched as one who sees 
 
 A miracle within a miracle. 
 
 At length the crescent, like a wandering moon 
 
 In mundane paths astray, twinkled at rest 
 
 Against a wooded swartness opposite 
 
 My stance of wonder. Thither thinking naught 
 
 Of hazard, toil, impediment or woe 
 
 Allotted all who fling themselves on chance, 
 
 I sped across the devious ravine ; 
 
 And fording thrice the sluggish brook that seemed 
 
 With whispered threat to haunt my way unlit 
 
 And perilous, down heedlessly and up 
 
 By crumbling verges, where the earth exhaled 
 
 A spicy redolence of nature's vat. 
 
 By scaurs of torrent stone, by ivied cliffs. 
 
 Thickets and mossy brinks and brakes of fern, 
 
 I reached the virgin deity's retreat, 
 
 A vaulted hollow in the mountain-side. 
 
 Within it grew the hawthorn and the ash 
 
 59
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 By briar-roses linked — whose blossoms gleamed 
 
 Like shards of pearly lustre mirroring 
 
 The dulcet light that shone there ; foxgloves piled 
 
 Their leaning campaniles about the groined 
 
 Embayment in the mountain ; somewhere near 
 
 The lowly eglantine enriched the night 
 
 With incense. Overhung by dewy boughs 
 
 The crystal chariot stood, its shafts of gold 
 
 Inclined, its jewelled wheels at rest, among 
 
 The bracken. On a crag the goddess sat, 
 
 Her molten crescent welling silver fire. 
 
 While at her feet the unharnessed dragon crouched. 
 
 " Goddess ! " I cried, ascending, " goddess, hail !" 
 But at my shout her guardian leapt upright. 
 The russet plates and crimson — purple, bronze, 
 Emerald, and topaz-hued — that overlaid 
 His sinuous body like a latticed bark. 
 Glowed in the fury of his onslaught ; eyes 
 Illumined with the sombrest blaze of wrath. 
 His mane erect, his sheathless talons curved. 
 His folded wings clanking against his houghs, 
 He hurled himself upon me snorting flame. 
 My very heart grew pale ; my marrow froze ; 
 
 60
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 I rolled my helpless eyes this way and that, 
 
 Expecting death ; but in the chariot, lo 
 
 The spear celestial ! Shrill the dragon neighed, 
 
 About to overwhelm me ; but I stooped, 
 
 And underthwart his overhanging bulk 
 
 Escaped and seized the weapon, crying out 
 
 In triumph inarticulate. 
 
 '' Put down 
 My spear," the goddess said, divinity 
 Affronted deepening her voluptuous tones 
 To such a menace, I had almost cast 
 My life away with that, her proper arm ; 
 But while her absolute command still rang 
 In my enchanted ear, the dragon, balked 
 And desperate now, a fresh defiance breathed. 
 Surging against me with his scalloped vans 
 Outspread and thundrous, whirlwind-like he 
 
 whipped 
 Me up, enshrouding me, and o'er my head 
 Gnashing his teeth, tossed high his wrinkled snout 
 In act to grind my skull betwixt his jaws. 
 No room had I, so closely held, to strike ; 
 But upward through his furrowed brisket, rough 
 
 6i
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 With stumps of wiry hair, I dug and wrought, 
 Begetting death devoutly as a groom 
 Begets a son, until his wings relaxed, 
 Affording ample liberty to drive 
 The weapon home — and through and out 
 Among his upper ribs, an ell beyond the chine ! 
 He straddled blindly, shrieking like a horse 
 Whose stable burns ; flounced hither, thither ; tore 
 His dripping breast and broke the shaft across. 
 Wheeled round and, whining hideously, fell 
 
 dead. 
 The gorgeous colours of his plated hide 
 Burned out and left his carcase dull and grey 
 As some forgotten lichen-covered log. 
 His dragon's blood with bitter fragrance laced 
 The mountain air, and like a smouldering fire 
 Crept, scorching turf and fern. The battle won, 
 I leaned against the chariot and addressed 
 The goddess, faint, but resolute to dare 
 Another hazard : — " Wanderer of the night, 
 I am the foe of all the gods. I slew 
 Apollo, Thor, Aidoneus. Behold 
 Your dragon dead ! Wherewith shall you and I 
 Contend ? " 
 
 62
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 I spoke thus, high and hard, aware 
 That deities are daunted, even as men, 
 By arrogance unlocked for and abrupt. 
 And truly for a space the goddess, still 
 Enthroned upon the moss-grown crag, like 
 
 one 
 Whose purpose and whose speech are both fore- 
 stalled. 
 Lowered at me with a baffled look of hate. 
 Anon, turning her gaze upon her dead 
 Attendant fixedly, she left her seat. 
 Beside the body knelt, and stroked awhile 
 The heavy mane, inert and withered now. 
 She sighed, she looked to heaven, she looked to 
 
 earth. 
 She searched the horny leaden reptile eyes. 
 She listened close for any sounds of life, 
 With such sad gesture, such abandonment 
 Of deity forlorn, and so divine 
 A tenderness that I forbore to look. 
 
 At last she cast my way a wounded frown. 
 And whispered in a hueless voice of woe, 
 ♦'Why did you kill him?" 
 
 63
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 '' Had it been in doubt," 
 I answered, drawing near, '' I should have known 
 You now a goddess. " 
 
 "Wherefore now?" she asked, 
 And stood, confronting me. 
 
 I said, " Because 
 Idea of calamity to them 
 Or theirs the gods conceive not." 
 
 Loftily 
 She asked, ** What can you know of gods? " 
 
 "All men, 
 I answered, " Know the God who made the world ; 
 Then killed His Son in ecstasy of grief 
 (A wanton slaughter that destroyed Himself) 
 When He beheld the pleasure of His hands, 
 That seemed so lovely in the making, turn 
 To rapine, murder, madness, death and hell." 
 
 Swiftly she said, and wistfully and wan, 
 " You did not like that god ? " and on me showered 
 
 64
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 The chastened lustre of her mournful eyes, 
 That with her crescent, languid from dismay, 
 A dusky local twilight interwove. 
 
 ** Nor any god," I said. 
 
 Then softly she, 
 And with the naivete of divinity, 
 "Nor goddess?" 
 
 And I answered, feigning scorn, 
 **Nor goddess." 
 
 But she heeded not, and knelt 
 Again beside her dead protector. '* Why," 
 With duller anguish than before she wailed, 
 "Why did you kill him?" 
 
 ** In my own defence," 
 I answered. *' Like a child you prate, as gods 
 Are wont to do. On me unarmed you loosed 
 Your champion : I encountered him, and won. 
 Would you have had me die without a blow ? " 
 
 E 65
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 * * You should be dead ! " she said, and rose in wrath, 
 The steel-blue lightning blazing in her eyes, 
 While ruddy fire her crescent overbrimmed. 
 " You had beheld me : all who see me die ; 
 And you shall die ! " 
 
 ''If looks could kill," I said, 
 " I should be now a cinder at your feet ; 
 But I am stronger than the strongest gods." 
 
 ** You ! Stronger than the gods ! What are you, 
 
 then?" 
 She asked, her mouth so near me that her voice 
 Embalmed the breath I spoke with. 
 
 " I am he 
 That was to come," I said. 
 
 " But are you god ? " 
 She cried, her eyes clashing on mine like flints. 
 
 " Not god," I told her ; '' man ; but such a man 
 As was not in the world before my time. 
 And cannot be again." 
 
 66
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 "One man is like 
 Another," she replied. '* The world is full 
 Of men ! This was the only dragon left : 
 Not all your nation could atone for him ! " 
 
 I said, " Bethink you : there are men and men. 
 How many men have had the power to see 
 Your virgin deity?" 
 
 " But four," she said : 
 ''Endymion, Acteon, Orion, you. 
 Know you the fate of those whose second-sight 
 Divined me in the forest or on the hill? " 
 
 *' I know it well," I said. 
 
 ** Do you, indeed ! 
 Then let us hear what mortals say of that," 
 She cried with withering malice. ** Orion, now : 
 What is the tale of him ? " 
 
 " He, having heard 
 How the sweet goddess of the liberal womb 
 Had honoured and delighted chosen men. 
 Determined on a hardier enterprise, 
 
 67
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Seduction of a willing deity 
 
 Being for him not perilous enough. 
 
 Wherefore he swore a Stygian oath to see, 
 
 To capture and to ravish you, the chaste 
 
 Divinity whom not a god dared touch. 
 
 His savage lust it was that couched his eyes, 
 
 And showed you naked in your secret bower 
 
 About to don your hunting-habit. Fierce 
 
 As that ensanguined boar of Calydon 
 
 (By you unslipped in wild -^tolia) 
 
 Upon your hallowed privacy he crashed 
 
 The thicket thorough, seeing, to be seen, 
 
 And at the sight of you at once to die ; 
 
 For in the bosom of his wicked hope 
 
 Your glittering instantaneous arrow sang 
 
 Infallible as light. So ended he. 
 
 The mighty hunter whose renown adorns 
 
 In stellar script the figured vault of heaven." 
 
 She scowled upon my version ; but she said, 
 "And of Acteon, then, what tale is told?" 
 
 "A wanton boy, he hunted you with dogs. 
 And tracked you to your bath. Your silver bow 
 
 68
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Beyond your reach, the magic of your glance 
 Undid his nature ; and his mongrels tore 
 Him down and killed him for a rascal stag. 
 Endymion's fate " 
 
 *' You must not speak of him ! " 
 
 But I replied, '* Endymion and I 
 Pursued you not ; but by your own design, 
 Or by an incommunicable power, 
 Descried you." 
 
 '' Hush ! " she said, as though 
 I had profaned her person, such rebuke 
 Was in her voice, such distance in her eyes, 
 Such reverence in her motion, such an awe 
 Upon her face. 
 
 I understood, and said. 
 With equal inspiration, ''You may know 
 How great I am by this, — that I shall tell 
 Endymion's story swiftly, truly, yet 
 Religiously, and with such warrant high, 
 That you will think your recollection speaks. 
 
 69
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 You loved him, goddess, with a woman's love, 
 Him only, in your monthly glory, him 
 In all your shining centuries, in all 
 Your sweet millenniums of virginity. 
 One night on Latmos, as he watched his sheep, 
 He sang a wistful ditty to the moon 
 Fragrant with budded passion and the rich 
 Account of opening manhood. In your heart 
 That cherished silverly, as maidens should, 
 A delicate, discarnate thought of him. 
 The golden message of his sonnet flowered 
 In roses red as blood ; and, ere you knew. 
 Your deity, enraptured, had put on 
 The beauty visible that maddens men. 
 A moment in his sight your loveliness 
 Appeared, a woman's naked godhood, stained 
 With blushes of desire, and faded not. 
 But in his fancy grew. Olympus saw 
 You instantly ; and Jove before your haste 
 Had comment of your voice, knowing your plea. 
 Accorded it. He shall not die^ Jove said. 
 Had he beheld you by an impious wtll^ 
 Reprieve had been impossible. That once 
 Unwonted ecstasy should overpower 
 
 70
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 My virgin daughter pleases fate and me. 
 
 Therefore the gift bestowed on him unsought, 
 
 A vision of im,passioned deity ^ 
 
 Shall be Eiidymion's abiding joy : 
 
 He in eternal shimber shall retain 
 
 Eternal youthy and in his countenance 
 
 Eternally the rapture of his dream. 
 
 You laid him in a cave, and every night, 
 
 Untouched, unkissed, with maiden vehemence 
 
 Adored him even to lunacy, your whole 
 
 Divine existence, spirit, sex entranced 
 
 In his entrancement ; and your daily thoughts 
 
 As through the Carian woods you still outstripped 
 
 The swiftest nymph that followed in the chase, 
 
 Were with Endymion always, poignantly 
 
 Transported by the sweet subtlety of Jove's 
 
 Decree, that made you the beatified 
 
 Beholder nightly, and rememberer 
 
 By day, of happiness your image gave 
 
 The dreamer — you, the virgin heroine 
 
 Of that eternal miracle of love." 
 
 "Alas ! " she said, and sank upon the ground, 
 "The miracle was not eternal. Him, 
 
 71
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Endymion — O, my caverned treasure ! — him 
 I have not seen ; of him I have not dared 
 To think with intimate remembrances 
 For many and many an empty century." 
 
 Faint as a glowworm now, her crescent showed 
 A wan and fitful lustre ; sighs profound 
 So shook and rent her bosom that she seemed 
 About to fade and crumble in my sight. 
 Although the ruthless foe of all the gods, 
 The instinct of the flesh, an ominous thought, 
 Eluding thought, constrained me, and I vowed 
 She should not perish thus. 
 
 Two crystal ewers, 
 A golden platter and an agate cup 
 Adjusted in a frame (by Vulcan's craft 
 Of old equipped, the chariot no device 
 For ease of travel lacked) had stirred a vague 
 Conjecture when I saw them ; now I knew 
 The goddess's Olympian larder, choice 
 And frugal. In the golden dish from one 
 Pellucid pitcher filleted with gems, 
 Turquoise and ruby, jasper, opal, pearl, 
 
 72
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 I shook a portion of ambrosia sliced 
 
 In manchets of a mouthful daintily ; 
 
 And from the other, that bore about its neck 
 
 A wreath of emerald, ruddy tourmaline, 
 
 Topaz and amethyst, I brimmed the cup 
 
 With nectar : and the pitchers both appeared 
 
 After the service replenished as at first. 
 
 I pondered on the marvel ; but a sigh, 
 
 As of the wind among ^olian strings 
 
 Deep shuddering through the night, upon my knees 
 
 Beside the goddess brought me speedily. 
 
 She ate and drank, and with the sacrament 
 
 Of food, the universal pledge of life 
 
 And health, her virgin deity regained 
 
 The power, the passion, the celestial looks 
 
 That filled the picture of Endymion's dream ; 
 
 And in the mountain-vault her crescent made 
 
 A golden day the darkness thronged upon. 
 
 Then, *'Taste," she said, "the nurture of the gods," 
 And handed me the platter and the cup. 
 Having appeased her appetite, repaired 
 Her vigour, and assuaged her grief with less 
 Than half my offering, so restorative 
 
 73
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 To every faculty of sense and soul 
 Was that ethereal fare. 
 
 No words can tell 
 The relish of ambrosia, represent 
 Aroma, unimagined out of heaven 
 Until I drank the nectar lips divine 
 Had tasted. Such a supper never man 
 Before me palated, and none again 
 Shall eat in time or in eternity. 
 
 My high material nature hitherto 
 Had vanquished all divinity that dared 
 Encounter it ; but now, to this innate 
 Supremacy no spirit could withstand, 
 The food and wine of Other World conjoined 
 Whatever in their supernatural breed 
 Advantaged gods against me. By the hand 
 I took my chance companion of the night. 
 And from that battle-place with dragon's blood 
 Perfumed and smouldering sward, we passed 
 
 beneath 
 A lowly architrave of banded boughs. 
 Thence, winding by a path where briars caught 
 
 74
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Her green simarre, we gained a bosked abode 
 
 Of solitude sequestered from the wind, 
 
 That hummed a tune without, and rounded off 
 
 The tingling silence there from all the world : 
 
 An arbour to possess a goddess in, 
 
 With roses hung, and sweet with eglantine. 
 
 That sweetens all that mountain's tawny flank. 
 
 The deep intolerant sexual rancour stored 
 In men (who innocently undertake 
 The death of women in the name of love, 
 And ruin beauty that beauty may endure 
 From age to age) augmented, whetted, fired 
 By paradisean refreshment (life 
 Itself in melting mouthfuls, and its gold 
 In potable elixir of the gods) 
 Incensed me with malignant joy to think 
 That I should here deflower the undeflowered 
 Immortal blossom of virginity, 
 Chasten the chastity of heaven with love, 
 Invade the roseal bower of deity. 
 The very maidenhead of maidenhead. 
 But she, foreboding doom, withdrew her hand 
 And set a space between. 
 
 75
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 "What den is this?" 
 She asked, dismay and doubt in voice and eye — 
 ** I thought you led me to a temple near, 
 Some sanctuary, some porch, some ruined fane. 
 This hidden lodge and magic nook, of old 
 Inhabited by nameless gods, uncouth 
 Progenitors of deities whose rites 
 Infect it still with horror, daunts my soul. 
 Celestial though it be. Conduct me hence, 
 Unhappy mortal, ere primeval fate 
 Betray us utterly, and ancient woe 
 Entangle both in undivine despair." 
 
 "The latest tenants of this secret shade — 
 
 They fill it now!" — I said, "are dreams of 
 
 mine. 
 My place of inspiration in my youth, 
 My refuge, study, haunt and hermitage. 
 The ground is hallowed, goddess : here can come 
 No horror ; only beauty and delight 
 Inhabit mansions youth has sanctified." 
 
 " Anathema ! " she cried. "The enemy ! 
 This was foretold me : I remember now." 
 
 76
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 "What was foretold? The prophet? Who was 
 he!" 
 
 " Proteus announced it centuries ago — 
 So many empty centuries ago ! " 
 
 She panted, paused and paled, her godhead all 
 Aghast, as in her sapphire eyes arose 
 Terrific memories from the depth of time. 
 
 " O, in the idle sweetness of the years," 
 
 She caught her breath and cried, ''the endless 
 
 years — 
 A myriad summers, for I followed still 
 The scent of roses — fate, predicted, passed 
 Me by it seemed : I never gave it thought ; 
 Or if it lingered with the pageantry 
 Roaming the background of my tranquil mind, 
 'Twas merged in legend and Olympian lore 
 My mother (most belov'd delight of him 
 Whose lust immortalised mortality) 
 Leto, sweet breeder of the sun and moon, 
 Hushed me to sleep with when the world was young 
 In golden Delos by the Ionian sea." 
 
 77
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 ** What dead prediction, buried in your heart, 
 Revives with such an import ominous? " 
 
 "Not you!" she cried; "not you!" in violent 
 
 wrath : 
 " You are not he the prophet warned me of ! 
 Some lycanthrope in borrowed manhood, some 
 Detestable fanatic or nympholept, 
 Or parasite of fame like him that burnt 
 My temple beautiful in Ephesus ; 
 For I remember your insensate brag 
 That fell at first unheeded on my ears. 
 Repeat it now : — you killed them ! Come : you 
 
 killed 
 Apollo, Thor, Aidoneus ! Swear it ! — You, 
 That dared not face a dragon without my spear, 
 Contend with gods ! " And like the bridle 
 
 bells. 
 Imagined of an elfin cavalcade, 
 Her laughter filled the night with ringing scorn. 
 
 '* I overthrew those three — Apollo, Thor, 
 Aidoneus." Temperately I spoke, inured 
 To all misprision, both of gods and men.
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 Her sudden anger passed, for in her heart 
 The teeth of fear had met. '* How can one do 
 A thing insuperable? " she asked. " No man 
 Could overcome Apollo at any time ; 
 And know you not my brother vanished, long 
 Before renown went west or north of Rome?" 
 
 " I overcame him ; but Aidoneus first ; 
 Then Thor," I said. 
 
 ** Aidoneus? Never ! He," 
 She told me, ''ended when Apollo did. 
 But had that sullen monarch's rule endured. 
 Even you with all your boasted second-sight 
 Could not have seen, still less encountered, him. 
 The wearer of the helm invisible." 
 
 I said, speaking like fate, '' There is no term, 
 No brink, no confine to my vision. He 
 Who can espy electrons in their dance 
 Atomic, and delight his burnished gaze 
 In depths of ether, fathomless till now 
 By sight of god or man, was never yet 
 Deceived by artifice archaic. Casque 
 
 79
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Of darkness, deity impure, obscene 
 And skulking usage neither hid nor helped 
 Your sombre God of Hell when once I tracked 
 Him out. His hateful presence on the earth 
 Was known to me from boyhood by the high 
 Poetic gift I have. Unerringly, 
 When manly years to genius added power, 
 I sought and found him by the Lucrine shore 
 Haunting the entrance to the underworld : 
 Whence far he might not stray for fear of death 
 (That was his minion once) in countless shapes. 
 Unknown when he with Jove and Neptune ruled 
 Their trivial Universe. He saw me come. 
 And laughed his hellish laugh, for centuries 
 A rarity, and that my coming caused 
 The last to wring his fallen countenance. 
 He grasped his helm, upon a willow hung. 
 Whose shade obscured the gloomy port of Hell, 
 And shambled towards me, doubting not to see 
 Terror and headlong flight. But my strong 
 
 tread, 
 Advancing on him, echoed loud as doom 
 Upon the hollow roof of Tartarus, 
 And daunted him whose office it had been 
 
 80
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 And automatic function, to appal 
 
 Mankind throughout the ages of his power." 
 
 ** Insanity ! " the goddess cried : " a wild, 
 A sacrilegious lie ! " 
 
 ** I saw him quail," 
 I said ; and when she moved to speak again. 
 Continued my recital hardily. 
 *' He stood a moment swithering, then he donned 
 His headpiece, and came at me with dispatch. 
 Had I remembered Vulcan's magic gift, 
 Such power has fantasy, I might have failed 
 To see Aidoneus helmeted ; but lust 
 Of battle so obsessed my mind that Hell's 
 Belated champion changed nor shape nor bulk 
 Until my wrath destroyed him utterly ; 
 For when he noted in my fervid gaze 
 That I beheld him still, and feared him not 
 Despite the Cyclopean sorcery 
 Of unseen omnipresence subtly forged 
 (That once with Neptune's triple spear and Jove's 
 Compelling thunderbolt ordained the world) 
 Irrational terror inhibited his power, 
 F 8i
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 Darkened his vision, and delivered him 
 To my remorseless hands. I gripped his throat 
 And strangled him ; I knelt upon his breast 
 And crushed his ribs ; I battered helm and head 
 To powder on the stones, and trod and stamped 
 Him down into the dust, and put an end 
 For ever to the nether deity. 
 Forthwith I plucked the brazen gates of Hell 
 From off their adamantine hinges, tossed 
 Them far into the middle sea, and took 
 The facile way, by my heroic deed 
 Become, at last, I thought, a thoroughfare — 
 Mistaking the consummate consequence. 
 For men both break and make beyond their aim. 
 Yet trembling I went down the Avernine slope. 
 So dreadful was the gloom, the roar and whine 
 So shrill and shattering, penetrant and harsh, 
 The fume of charred humanity so foul. 
 So noisome, and so sulphurous the antique 
 Corruption of the air, time out of mind 
 Unwinnowed, unrenewed ; while such a sense 
 Intolerable of age-long agonies 
 Invaded every nerve, that the command, 
 All hope abandon ye who enter here 
 
 82
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 (Sunk in the ocean with the gates of Hell) 
 
 Inscribed itself upon the stagnant smoke 
 
 In glittering fire, the image of my doubt. 
 
 But soon the tide of power within me rose 
 
 To flood again ; and when my sight, attuned 
 
 To darkness dimly diapered and gilt 
 
 By withered beams and lustre in decay 
 
 (The relics and despair of ruined light) 
 
 Began to search the tract of Hell, it seemed 
 
 At first as though the place were empty ; voice 
 
 Of woe and carnal smell of burning, all 
 
 Hypnotic fancy ; and the realm itself, 
 
 So spacious once, a cavern in the earth 
 
 For antiquaries only ; and even they 
 
 Should have discovered there no vast machines 
 
 And horrible inventions of a god's 
 
 Revenge ; but spoke-sprung wheels with giz- 
 
 zened hubs, 
 Fruit in a ropy puddle petrified, 
 Dead vultures, splintered stones, and tattered 
 
 sieves, 
 Lumber of specimens unlisted left 
 To moulder in a cellar underground ! 
 I scarce had time to note a bluish scurf, 
 
 83
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Or phosphorescent mildew here and there, 
 
 The dregs, the palsied lechery of flame. 
 
 Licking with fitful tongue the roasted loins 
 
 Of ancient sinfulness that still could writhe 
 
 After millenniums of incessant Hell ; 
 
 Scarce to behold beneath the rocky frown 
 
 And sullen drip of precipices, bleached 
 
 And bitten, through the marbled ice. 
 
 Abominable spongy faces peer, 
 
 When silence came with utter darkness down — 
 
 Silence more penetrative, darkness more 
 
 Essential, vehement, and absolute 
 
 Than ear or eye the craftiest could gauge. 
 
 I stood intensely strung expecting death. 
 
 But sudden miracle befell instead ; 
 
 For, sweet and fresh, the fragrance of the dew, 
 
 The voice of larks, the wind among the trees. 
 
 Flowers in the meadow and on the mountains 
 
 morn, 
 Filling the region with music and delight 
 Established day upon the wreck of Hell. 
 Thus did I kill Aidoneus, thus did I 
 Annihilate perdition that began 
 To fade the moment of its monarch's death, 
 
 84
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 And ceased upon my advent as a dream 
 Disperses with the sound that gave it shape. 
 Hardly was Hell abolished, hardly dawn 
 Had lit his crimson camp-fires in the green 
 Translucent orient, when the forest leaves 
 Inquired in silent terror, every blade 
 Immobile on its rigid stalk — Which way 
 Against us will destruction come, 
 Storm ^ thunder, deluge, and the swords of fire ? 
 And swift and steep it fell ! Like mountains 
 
 hurled 
 From Utgard, cloud on cloud descended, black, 
 Convolved and dense, with rain aslant. 
 And white as burning steel in driven showers. 
 With funeral darkness for the crest of morn, 
 And hollow on the resonant floor above 
 The rumble of the chariot-wheels of death. 
 Long, golden thongs of lightning leapt and 
 
 stung ; 
 Fork'd brands, and brands like blue-green icicles 
 Hissed hot, and spat and crackled through the air 
 Continual fire in beryl cascades poured ; 
 Irregular, convulsive, peal on peal, 
 The thunder rent and shook the firmament ; 
 
 85
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 The whole world trembled like a beaten bell. 
 Forth from the storm, gigantic, ruddy, fierce 
 As rage itself, the oldest son of earth 
 Appeared before me, challenge in his eyes, 
 Thor, with his conquering hammer, Miolnir 
 armed." 
 
 " My northern cousin," said the goddess, 
 
 "ceased : 
 When our tradition ended Thrudheim fell." 
 
 I made no answer, but continued. *'Thor, 
 
 Aware of my inexorable hate. 
 
 My dire hostility, for gods discern 
 
 Their enemies without appeal or war 
 
 Declared, upheaved his hammer, Miolnir, high 
 
 Above his head and brought it down on mine 
 
 With all the ancient power of Other World. 
 
 Before his merest gesture giant hosts 
 
 Had fled without a stroke from many a field ; 
 
 But never had he met a man in fight. 
 
 His dreaded hammer, Miolnir, forged of storm 
 
 In Elfheim in the furnace of the dwarfs, 
 
 Did me no harm at all. When he beheld 
 
 86
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 Me Standing there unhurt, after a blow 
 So mighty and direct, he clutched his beard 
 And glared, astounded by material strength 
 Invulnerable in men ; then heaved once more 
 His magic mace in both hands like a sledge. 
 And thundered blow on blow. I moved aside 
 After a shower of strokes, that struck of old 
 In Jotunheim might easily have cracked 
 The skulls of all the Thurses there, and down 
 The weapon crashed into the earth, to dig 
 Itself so deep a sepulchre the god 
 Could not withdraw it ere my arms embraced 
 Him like a vice, and pinioned his 
 Against his cloud-girt flanks. All day he strove 
 And panted in my grasp, the while his bulk 
 Enormous, and his sinew, bone and nerve. 
 Of spiritual substance and fibre knit, 
 Dwindled and shrank, and withered to a wraith 
 Illusory, that sighed itself away 
 In tenuous vapour on the evening wind. 
 That was the end of Thor, the mankind god ; 
 The mighty worker for the sake of work — 
 Whose work was never seen and still to do ; 
 The bluff, old hero of a hundred fights — 
 
 87
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 By includible enchantment won, 
 
 Like every conquest of the Other World. 
 
 Crushed to a film in my material clasp 
 
 The god of use-and-wont, of daily toil, 
 
 The home, the cupboard, tedium, common things, 
 
 Still flickered in the sky, a wisp of cloud. 
 
 When from the sunset in Olympian state, 
 
 Terribly beautiful, Apollo came ; 
 
 For this was my great day." 
 
 Divinest scorn 
 Bathing her crescent in a ruddier blush 
 Than that which damascenes with sanguine fire 
 The glowing sickle of the harvest-moon, 
 The goddess silently confronted me. 
 And looked me in the face ; but my great night 
 Had dawned. 
 
 "Your brother, goddess — he, even he," 
 I said, ** offered me insult : 'tis a way 
 They have in heaven, and all the heavens : he called 
 Me, Mafiy with infinite contempt — a name 
 I mean to make the greatest of all time. 
 Of all eternity ; and challenged me
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 To sing against him. Who shall judge ? I thought, 
 Expecting no rejoinder. I shall judge, 
 Apollo answered. Whereupon I laughed, 
 So godlike was the word. I asked him then, 
 What guerdon shall the victor have ? He said 
 The victory — which was great, and manlike even. 
 The penalty, I said, shall be defeat. 
 Ay, said the god, defeat; and after, death 
 In agony : I flay the vanquished : Hell 
 Eternally to follow : — a reply- 
 Worthy the hatefullest of all the gods. 
 But if you lose ? I asked. / cannot lose, 
 Apollo answered. Think you so! I said. 
 And spoke with high disdain : whichever way 
 The judgment goes His I shall whi this bout. 
 Who first shall sing? He struck his lyre and sang. 
 Great was the song, melodious and divine. 
 Preluding darkly in the vast abyss 
 With heavy sounds and words that summoned up 
 Benighted chaos or ever gods and men 
 Or heaven and hell were known, till gathering 
 
 might. 
 As in the Olympian mystery of things. 
 Reunion and disjunction, heaven and hell
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 With earth between, gods, titans, heroes sprang 
 
 Impassioned from the all-conceiving gulf 
 
 Big by relentless fate ; then sweet as fire 
 
 That murmurs in a golden censer lit 
 
 To blandish adoration. Love began 
 
 A honeyed ecstasy and soon evolved 
 
 In gorgeous strains and dazzling cadences, 
 
 With rich division fledged and winged aloft, 
 
 A soaring descant like a savoury smoke 
 
 Of sacrifice that god might offer god. 
 
 With crashing resonance of brazen strings, 
 
 As lightning to the thunder of his voice, 
 
 Apollo uttered next titanic war 
 
 And Jove's achievement and supremacy. 
 
 A muted passage followed, dissonant 
 
 And emphasized with level looks of scorn, 
 
 Showing the origin of men, from earth 
 
 Impasted by Prometheus, and the breed. 
 
 After Deucalion's flood, by miracle 
 
 Preserved when stones were dowered with life : a 
 
 race 
 Eternally subservient to the gods, 
 Whom they must worship with profoundest awe — 
 And chiefly him Apollo, god of light, 
 
 90
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Of knowledge, justice, purity and truth. 
 
 He finished in Apolline rapture, playing 
 
 The spheral music Troy was builded with. 
 
 Intolerably sweet, and jubilant 
 
 As trumpets of the dawn, to honour now 
 
 And magnify the essence of the gods, 
 
 Consummate jealousy, wherein himself 
 
 Had no superior ; and, that I might lose 
 
 Courage and hope and fall an easy prey, 
 
 In this, the swan-song of Musagetes, 
 
 (Although the prophet knew it not) he poured 
 
 A fountain of memorial melody 
 
 To grace the lofty p^ean that extolled 
 
 His treacherous vengeance on the satyr. Last " — 
 
 ** Blasphemous mortal ! " cried the goddess. "Death 
 Assail and choke you now! Hell gnaw your 
 
 bones ! 
 Apollo treacherous? Noblest god of all. 
 My brother, most divine and most adored 
 Theophany of justice, light and truth 
 Revealed to men ! Marsyas? A Silen, foul, 
 Abominable, bestial, fit for death 
 A thousand times in monstrous agonies ! " 
 
 91
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 " His song surpassed Apollo's." 
 
 ** It never did ! 
 No voice of heaven or earth could equal his ; 
 No flute, no pipe be favourably heard, 
 Whene'er Apollo deigned to touch his lyre." 
 
 ** The prepossession of Olympus ! Know 
 The truth at last," I said. ** Both flute and pipe 
 Surpassed Apollo's lyre. Pan overcame 
 (With powerful music of the woods and wilds, 
 Dancing and mirth and wine and harvest-home. 
 The mountains and the pastures and the chase) 
 Apollo's moral ode and heavenly hymn ; 
 And Marsyas also with harmonious flute 
 Excelled his minstrelsy. The god performed 
 (A new thing seeming needless in a war 
 Already won !) a famous masterpiece. 
 The most uplifting music wrung from strings, 
 His Trojan overture, when Midas judged 
 Between Apollo and the venturous faun. 
 But Marsyas blew a melody so rich 
 In morn and eve, in midnight and in noon ; 
 So stained with spring that blushes in the snow, 
 
 92
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 With summer's diverse bloom and autumn's gold, 
 
 So passionate and so instinct with love, 
 
 In single notes like water in a well 
 
 That drops an orb of music lingeringly, 
 
 In warbled showers of jewels and streams of 
 
 sound 
 Like vintage flowing free, more searching-sweet 
 Than twilight when the stars at intervals 
 In shadowy magnificence appear 
 Till darkness like a bridegroom lifts the veil, 
 That Midas, though he laughed aloud to see 
 The eager satyr's crimson cheeks distent 
 To bursting, crowned him victor ; and the joy 
 Of every hearer, save the deity 
 Defeated, echoed to the skies. Now, mark 
 The nature of divinity — of yours, 
 As of Apollo's, for you slew, with him, 
 The lovely children fruitful Niobe 
 Amphion bore : a wife whose generous boast 
 Of rich maternity and loyal claim, 
 That he, her spouse, had built a city too, 
 Boeotian Thebes, with music of his lute. 
 Deserved a smile well-pleased from gods and men. 
 Instead of such bereavement as you dealt — 
 
 93
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 The stolid vengeance of celestial art, 
 The ruthless spite of noisome chastity ! " 
 
 ** I was a patroness of motherhood ! " 
 She cried in anguish. 
 
 ''All the gods," I said, 
 " Were arrogant in virtues, self-assumed 
 To palliate their malice. Let me end 
 This history of divine malevolence. — 
 Between Apollo and his challenger 
 The strife was fair, and true award pronounced 
 Upon the instant issue, the delight 
 The skill and music of the players gave ; 
 But your theophany of hallowed truth 
 Adorned the arbiter with ass's ears. 
 And flayed the genial champion alive ! — 
 Behaviour wanton as Jehovah's trick, 
 Who set his creatures in a garden fair 
 Beside a beautiful, a tempting fruit, 
 And bade them eat it not on pain of death. 
 Knowing that they would eat it. — Now, no more 
 Till I have finished, goddess of the night. — 
 You interrupted when Apollo sang 
 
 94
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 His treacherous triumph over Marsyas. Last, 
 
 Rending a shriek from every lyric string, 
 
 Mournful and heinous as the doom portrayed 
 
 (The satyr's agony beneath the knife) 
 
 He smiled with glittering narrowed eyes of hate, 
 
 And ample expectation of revenge, 
 
 Immediate, bloody and sufficing even 
 
 The anger of a god. Silent I gazed 
 
 On that superb divinity a while. 
 
 My senses in melodious surges drowned, 
 
 Such as on Helicon Mnemosyne 
 
 Had joyed in with her daughters ; heard by me 
 
 Once more, and never to be heard again 
 
 By any ear throughout eternity. 
 
 The god's conceit of triumph, unexpressed 
 
 Delight of mine and still demeanour fed 
 
 Until it flamed : You yield without a song, 
 
 He cried, malignant even to happy tears. 
 
 Whose dew annealed the fury of his glance. 
 
 Roused from my reverie not a word I spoke, 
 
 But clasped my hands behind me, having no 
 
 lyre. 
 And mightily against Apollo's song 
 That pleased Olympus and established Troy, 
 
 95
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 I waged the Universe itself, in being 
 
 Before Apollo or any god debauched 
 
 Imagination. Of the ether first 
 
 I sang, one subtile tension of entire 
 
 Immaculate energy, omnipotent, 
 
 Eternal, stretching taut in bourneless space. 
 
 This infinite elastic ether — pure 
 
 Dynamic form (no chaos ever was. 
 
 But order always, mutable and free 
 
 For every change) — possessed no sun, no 
 
 star. 
 No meteorite, no atom, or element. 
 Being a sheer oblivious ecstasy. 
 Until the lightning wakened and began 
 A limitation of eternal space 
 (Which is the ether) in eddying vortices, 
 (The offspring of the ether energised 
 Under continual omnipresent strain) 
 That sought stabilit)^ in golden drops. 
 Bisexual electrons, pith and seed 
 At once of ponderable matter, each 
 Invisible corpuscle being condensed 
 From myriads of measures of imponderable 
 Elastic stuff, and therefore each a packed 
 
 96
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Compendium of the Universe, an orb, 
 A reservoir and continent of power 
 Incalculable, manifest-occult 
 Repository of eternity 
 And hidden treasure of the infinite. 
 When these electric gems, confederate all 
 In balanced companies, began to spin 
 Like planets in a system, every group 
 Became a candent atom of hydrogen, 
 First condensation of the infinite. 
 And these again, these atoms, clustered stars 
 Of bezeled lightning, instantly conglobed 
 As passionate molecules, atomic pairs 
 In most material wedlock interfused 
 Insatiably, to throng in countless swarms. 
 Hive upon hive of radiancy insphered 
 And whirling through immensities of space, 
 Till into sumptuous nebulas they swelled, 
 The seen, the heard, the ponderable at last 
 From the imponderable, omnipotent, 
 Eternal ether gloriously evolved. — 
 Come to the gods ! Apollo cried : the gods ! 
 I take them in their tiim^ I said ; and kept 
 The tenour of my song. — The least of all 
 
 G 97
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 The nebulse, contracting as it cooled, 
 
 Flung off the planets, they their moons, to swing 
 
 In ample berths miraculously moored 
 
 By gravitation in a spatial gulf 
 
 Five thousand millions of our mundane miles 
 
 Diametrally measured, circumscribed 
 
 By Neptune's orbit, centred by the sun, 
 
 Haunted by errant comets that wander out 
 
 (Obliquely curving through the desolate night 
 
 That lies between us and the nearest star) 
 
 And driven directly on towards Hercules 
 
 In Lyra, planets, comets, and the sun. 
 
 Though moored, advancing with the speed of 
 
 thought, 
 And representing in colossal form 
 The balanced clusters of electrons, grouped 
 To constitute infinitesimal 
 Atomic parcels of an element. 
 As solar systems are evolved to be 
 The mighty members of the universe. 
 Secreted by the primal atom, all 
 The other atoms, as the planets cooled, 
 Became ; and all the elements, how much 
 So ever differing in appearance, weight,
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Amount, condition, function, volume (gold 
 From iodine, argon from iron) wrought 
 Of the purest ether, in electrons sprang 
 As lightning from the tension filling space. 
 Forms of the ether, primal hydrogen. 
 Azote and oxygen, unstable shapes. 
 With carbon, most perdurable of all 
 The elements, forthwith were sifted out 
 To be the diverse warp and woof of life, 
 The lowest and the highest, louse and man. — 
 How came the gods to be? Apollo cried. 
 Smiting his lyre in wrath. Their day arrived^ 
 I said ; but man^ whose fault they are^ came first. 
 Then sang I other miracles of time : 
 Telluric history, brought to light by power 
 Material in men of resolute 
 Attention, from the dust of ages, shells, 
 And scattered limbs and footprints, petrified 
 In rocky strata, or in fossil mud 
 Matrixed like scripture for the founder's craft ; 
 Organic stone, wherein whole species, plant 
 And animal, of their own substance built 
 Their tomb and monument ; shale, lava, marl, 
 Obsidian, porphyry, syenite, travertine, 
 
 99
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Mica and talc, blown sand and drifted sand 
 
 In deserts and in oceans, fruitful soil 
 
 With forests, pastures, orchards, harvests 
 
 fledged — 
 Millennial almanac and open scroll 
 Of deluge, fire, volcano, glacial drift, 
 Compacture fierce and winnowing tides of air, 
 That forged and tempered and engraved the earth, 
 Enamelled it with sapphire seas and hung 
 An emerald veil about its nakedness. 
 Then did I sing the greatest miracle, 
 The origin of species, devoutly traced 
 Throughout the scale of being in the deep brain 
 We honour most to-day ; and showed the god 
 Assuredly — as one who can reveal 
 By power poetic what the groper fears 
 To institute — sex, from the ether strained 
 As lightning, male and female, first and last 
 Delimitation of eternity : 
 Immaculate, discarnate, twifold sex. 
 Electrons, jewel-substance of evolved 
 Ethereal, uncreated Universe, 
 In protoplasm embodied, sarcode stuff 
 Or vegetable, inwoven of the same
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Quaternion of elements (vapours three, 
 Azote and hydrogen, with oxygen, 
 The great protagonist, and carbon, crowd 
 And chorus, common tissue of the whole) 
 Wherein the ether lightened into life 
 Organical — amoebce, monera. 
 Bacteria, diatoms, single cells 
 That sped through differentiation, changed 
 Environment and series manifold, 
 By natural selection and sexual. 
 Into the rose, the oak-tree and the vine, 
 And into men and women. And swift again 
 I sang what no one sang before, or said. 
 Or thought : — Eternity, which was, and is 
 None other than the ether, infinite 
 Unconscious rapture tensely strung in space, 
 By travail inenarrable and urge 
 Adventurous of evolution shrined 
 Dividual in men and women, to know 
 Itself, to understand the whole and keep 
 The primal, everlasting ecstasy 
 Self-conscious in the passionate kiss of love. — 
 The godsy the godsj the gods ! Apollo cried ; 
 But shrilly now and fearfully. To them
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 / come, I said ; and sang the body of man : — 
 Mucus, the blood unlit ; on fire as blood ; 
 In flesh, compact and baked like earthenware ; 
 In nerve, as pith ; as mineral in bone ; 
 Fibrous in muscle ; and in the viscera, 
 Vegetal ; repeating, in the microcosm, 
 Electron, atom, system, universe. 
 With cells and organs, members, moonsand suns.- 
 The gods, the gods, the gods! — I sang the brain, 
 A double sponge soaked in the ether, fruit 
 Hesperian in the garth of space, the goal 
 Unconscious lightning aimed at when it led 
 The onset of eternity towards man : 
 Receiver and recorder, carder, sieve, 
 Alembic, loom and lyre, and every arm. 
 Machine and implement for art, war, use. 
 To put in act the thoughts the body thinks. 
 I sang the multitudinous cells that bud 
 And blossom in the trellised protoplasm 
 Filling the skull, and make the chambers there 
 Arbours of colour, beauty, fragrance, joy, 
 By sulphur's gold and purple blooms uplit. 
 And garlanded with phosphorescent wreaths, 
 Crimson and ivory and violet.
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 And then I sang the gods : — Infinity 
 Confined in atoms, that developed power 
 In many modes, and changed and counterchanged 
 Through force and forces to become in us 
 Terror and hatred, anger, worship, love ; 
 And be projected on itself again — 
 Fantastic, immaterial eclipse 
 Of the actual material universe, 
 The undeciphered fancy, thought, complete 
 Self-consciousness of man flung blindly forth 
 To master mystery and to know the unknown. 
 Vitality? — the ether in densest stones 
 Asleep, whose thronged electrons, still at ease. 
 In harbours and empyreal roadsteads ride ; 
 Awake in protoplasm, a formless stir 
 Or diastase of life, that lends the clot 
 Of carbon-curdled vapours poetic power 
 To gather to itself, and to transmute 
 Diversity of matter into man, 
 The crown of evolution : this it was 
 That men supposed to be another thing 
 Than they, not knowing that the whole 
 Is one material substance. Gods and God 
 Are man's mistake : no brain exists 
 
 103
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Behind the galaxies, above them or beneath ; 
 No thought inhabiteth eternity, 
 No reason, no intelligence at all 
 Till conscious life begins. The ouphs and elves, 
 The satyrs, centaurs, goblins, gnomes and trolls, 
 The ancient lands of faery and romance, 
 Infernal and supernal domiciles. 
 The dreadful dwellers there, and wonderful 
 Cosmogony of Other World (perverse 
 Reflexions of his unenlightened mind 
 Upon the mirror of eternity. 
 And on the mirrors of the sun and moon. 
 The stars, the flowers, the sea, the woods, the wilds) 
 With immaterial nothings deceived mankind, 
 Even as his shadow on a darksome way 
 Looms like a ghost and daunts the pilgrim still. — 
 / am no ghost! Apollo cried : a gody 
 And son of god! But now his voice, a thin 
 And batlike shriek, dismayed himself; his light 
 Had waned, his figure shrunk, before the truth 
 The greatness and the terror of my song, 
 The deep malevolence of Other World 
 Alone remaining. Fierce from his lyre he struck 
 Sundering dissonance that might have ended time; 
 
 104
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 For lo, the gallant-curving horns were warped, 
 The strings awry and beaded thick with rust ! 
 Again he smote, so savage was his rage. 
 As with a bestial claw, the tuneless lyre. 
 And straight the instrument of power, that worked 
 By poignant melody enchantment strong 
 As bastioned cities, crumbled into dust. 
 Swift like a famished werwolf at my throat 
 He leapt, or vampire fresh from sepulture — 
 In semblance only, for the fire was out, 
 His sinew tinder, and his blood a fume. 
 His empty quiver, every arrow spent — 
 How long ago ! — flapped on his shrivelled haunch 
 Like a cast slough: not even the knife he skinned 
 The satyr with was left him. As he sprang 
 His clenched teeth mouldered in his jaws, his eyes, 
 Like gathered leaves that in a kiln curl up, 
 Shrank in their gloomy sockets, and on my flesh 
 His withered fingers hung like gossamer 
 The evening breezes trail ; for all you gods 
 Without your weapons or your magic arts. 
 Your heavens and hells and cyclopean bolts, 
 Envenomed arrows, casques invisible, 
 Girdles and shoes of swiftness and gorgon-heads, 
 
 105
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Are impotent as palsied eld. I struck 
 Him down ; dismembered him as one might tear 
 A mannikin in pieces ; by breech and neck 
 I seized and kneaded him, and bent and plied 
 And wrung him like a rag until he ceased 
 To be, as in a conjurer's nimble hands 
 A kerchief vanishes. Thus did I meet, 
 Thus did I conquer and annihilate 
 Apollo, Thor, Aidoneus, gods that were." 
 
 ' ' That never were ! " the goddess said, and smiled — 
 
 Divinity commiserating man's 
 
 Simplicity. Her grief and horror past. 
 
 Complacent now and beautiful as heaven's 
 
 Devoted maiden in the flower of youth 
 
 And freshness of her nights, fair as herself. 
 
 She bade me know the truth. ''These were not 
 
 gods," 
 And loftily she spoke. " At first I feared 
 I knew not what. So wide and so profound 
 A gulf divides my solitary time 
 From those olympiads sweet when every brake 
 Blossomed with deity undisciplined. 
 When dryads, hamadryads, oreads, nymphs 
 
 io6
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 Haunted the wilderness and watched my sport, 
 That things immemorable had fallen away, 
 Leaving my lonely mind and tranquil thought 
 A thoroughfare of beauty. Chief of all 
 Unblessed remembrance are the loathsome Wanes, 
 Forgotten till you told how in the voice 
 That named itself Apollo shrillness struck 
 And fear with dwindled volume: then I knew 
 A Wane had mocked you. Only voices now, 
 They once had deity — archaic sprites 
 Adored by uncouth beings, hardly men, 
 That ceased or ever Ouranos began 
 The dynasties of heaven. Unworshipped gods 
 May haughtily retain divine estate, 
 While any scion of the race endures 
 Whose gods they were ; but when the blood, 
 That warmed and fostered them with worship, 
 
 burns 
 Entirely out, they wither into sound. 
 Involving baneful power to personate 
 The very gods themselves — if time and place 
 Accord, with second-sight like yours at hand 
 To see the phantom. I supposed, indeed, 
 The abhorrences had perished from the world ; 
 
 107
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 But those apparent gods you thought you killed 
 Were certainly none other than the Wanes 
 Still at their execrable masquerade." 
 
 "Are you of them?" I asked. 
 
 Her crescent flushed 
 A saffron hue, and from her sparkling eyes 
 Keen lightnings pierced me. Not aword she spoke. 
 
 ** If the three deities I slew were Wanes, 
 Can I believe that no iniquitous 
 Embodiment of empty sound like them 
 Encounters me to-night?" I asked, assured 
 The slain divinities were what they seemed. 
 
 " I am the only deity," she said, 
 '* Remaining on the earth." 
 
 ** Since you remain 
 Might not a remnant of divinity 
 Frequent the day as you frequent the night ? " 
 
 *' No," pensively she answered. ** All the gods 
 Except my single self departed hence, 
 
 io8
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Whither I know not, centuries ago. 
 
 Let me recall the past, and let me tell — 
 
 What I have never told, since there was none 
 
 To hear. Can I remember? Can I bear 
 
 To think it? . . . Silent noon in Arcady : 
 
 I, in my dragon-car driving at speed, 
 
 Compelled to wonderment and awe by fate 
 
 Unknown invading heaven and earth — unknown, 
 
 But felt : then darkness inexpressible. 
 
 The gods could see by day and night, but I, 
 
 Renowned for vision, saw not — heard not : out 
 
 The darkness blotted every sense save one : 
 
 Day blazed by contrast when I shut my eyes. 
 
 Then I remembered Proteus. Once I sought 
 
 The crafty shepherd of the sea, and bade 
 
 Him tell my fortune. Gods must come and go; 
 
 But virgin deity outlasts them all,, 
 
 He said. I thanked him for his prophecy 
 
 And left his cave well-pleased. He followed, 
 
 loath, 
 But powerless not, to tell the whole of doom. 
 Until a man shall conquer you ,^ he said, 
 You cannot pass away : which might have been 
 A cryptic promise of eternal life ; 
 
 log
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 But in the strangling darkness No ! So long 
 
 The horror brooded I believed an end 
 
 Of all had come : it had, for all but me. 
 
 The faithful beast you slew, my dragon, stood 
 
 As motionless as I : I neither heard 
 
 His labouring heart nor mine, though every throb, 
 
 Uncounted in that dread obsession, seemed 
 
 A night of fear. At last a sound arose 
 
 Far off, a rumbling deep and low that shook 
 
 The earth as thunder shakes it ; travelling on. 
 
 It filled the air as tempests do ; and yet 
 
 No louder than a murmur, than a sigh, 
 
 The word went round the world, Great Pan is 
 
 dead! 
 Soon as the whisper traversed Arcady, 
 The all-devouring darkness rendered up 
 The day again ; but not the day that was : 
 Gone were the golden sunbeams ; iron skies 
 O'ercanopied the world. Through the dull air 
 I hastened to my hidden place of joy. 
 If I have still Endymion, I thought. 
 An empty heaven^ an empty worlds for me 
 Are terrorless. His image in my mind — 
 Eternal youthy and in his countenance
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Eternal rapture^ words of yours or Jove's — 
 
 I reached my Latmian bower and found ... I 
 
 found 
 No priceless treasure there : a wind that sighed, 
 A charnel smell, dead leaves where spiders span 
 Their dusty webs ; a bat, a toad usurped 
 The mountain-cave Endymion and his dream 
 (Myself in naked deity beheld) 
 Had made the very jewel of the earth. 
 I swore by Styx vengeance more horrible 
 Than any punishment in Tartarus, 
 And lit the air in meteoric flight 
 To high Olympus and the ear of Jove. 
 Alas, no mortal mind can comprehend. 
 No words can tell, no thought can think the 
 
 change ! 
 Where the twelve palaces had soared aloft 
 In massive splendour, beauty and balanced 
 
 strength, 
 The wonder of the gods themselves, there spread 
 A leprous snow winnowed by icy blasts. 
 I sought no further. What had chanced I knew : 
 The intolerant Jewish God, the terrible 
 Jehovah, subtlest of supernal powers.
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 By magic more inscrutable than his, 
 Had conquered Jove and wiped Olympus out. 
 You know that awful God better than I. 
 The rumour of His might 
 
 " I know of Him," 
 I said, eager to speak. *' The sorcery 
 Whereby he seemed to quell the other gods 
 Was twofold. First and foremost, reiterant 
 Assertion of supreme dominion, / 
 Am I ; there is no God hut Me^ assailed 
 The Jewish mind for ages, and destroyed 
 The sense of hearing for the voice of gods 
 Less arrogant. To make Himself renowned 
 Beyond all rivalry, in mythic times 
 Jehovah had proclaimed Himself the world's 
 Creator, never imagining that men 
 Would wrest its secret from the Universe. 
 Howbeit, long before we understood 
 That all things of themselves evolved, His boast — 
 He had pronounced the whole creation good ! — 
 Exposed Him to derision : — great, indeed, 
 The world was and will always be, but good 
 It never can become : — and worst of worsts,
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 His chosen race, the Jews, the only folk 
 
 In all the world that worshipped Him, had passed 
 
 From slavery into slavery, and were then 
 
 Writhing beneath the heel of Rome, Jove's might 
 
 Incarnate. Some unparagoned device 
 
 Alone could raise a God, discredited 
 
 So utterly, to eminence again ! 
 
 Nor was that wanting in the operant part 
 
 Of plausible enchantment — reinforced 
 
 With iterance unending of the spell 
 
 Primeval, / am I ; there is no God 
 
 Beside. When Jove, divinely errant, chose 
 
 To mingle blood with mortals, heroes or gods 
 
 Were still the offspring as became a sire 
 
 Eternal ; but this desperate Deity 
 
 Begat a common man, and in His Son, 
 
 Not as a natural parent reappears. 
 
 But really incarnate, lived on earth 
 
 To change the mood of men and make them His. 
 
 Now, mark how relative omnipotence 
 
 And all divine ascriptions are : — Without 
 
 Disquietude, and when it pleased him best, 
 
 Triumphant Jove destroyed Jehovah : left 
 
 To Rome, Jove's delegate, and by that power 
 
 H 113
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Abandoned to the mercy of the mob, 
 
 (Whose God he was !) His claim was laughed to 
 
 scorn, 
 And He on Calvary hammered to a cross. 
 That was your time of darkness ! What happened 
 
 then 
 On Calvary when Christ was crucified ? 
 The end of Godhead happened once for all : 
 So interwoven an affinity 
 Entangled all the gods ; so spiritual 
 A fabric, so essentially allied. 
 Were all your states and towers of Other World, 
 A single death of deity involved 
 The entire extinction of the race divine — 
 Celestial and infernal ; and the ruin 
 Irremediable of every heaven and hell." 
 
 ** That was an accident on Calvary, then ! " 
 
 The goddess cried enlightened. " Had Jove 
 
 known 
 Jehovah would become a man in all 
 Mortality, he never would have risked 
 Destruction in permitting men to work 
 Their will upon his rival. Could he dream 
 
 114
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 That deity would so forget itself ! 
 Put on without reprieve the flesh of men ? 
 The madness of a god ! " 
 
 ** The irony 
 Exorbitant of chance," I said : '* pursued 
 Throughout the centuries with keenest zest ; 
 For only then when all the gods were dead 
 Or moribund, did men begin to pray 
 In earnest, and to worship truly — both 
 Jehovah and his conqueror : the one 
 As Christ, the Man of Sorrows ; the other, Jove, 
 As God of kings and armies, pride and pomp — 
 In Rome, besides, his ancient seat of power !" 
 
 " If deity went out upon the cross 
 How comes it I am here? " The goddess asked, 
 Not now disdainful, but in thoughtful guise, 
 As having met the master of her fate. 
 
 I said, " The point of time on Calvary 
 
 When Christ gave up the ghost ; the three dark 
 
 hours 
 You passed in Arcady, the centuries 
 
 'J5
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Of Christendom in which Jehovah, dead, 
 Appeared to triumph, are in eternity 
 One single moment and the same with this 
 In which we meet." 
 
 The goddess understood ; 
 But asked me of the gods whom I had killed — 
 '* Were they not Wanes, then ? " 
 
 *' No ; not Wanes," I said. 
 ** Unless they were the fittest, how they survived 
 No one can tell. I know I killed the three." 
 
 "And I?" she said. 
 
 By the great power I have 
 To join the ends of time, and to compress 
 Eternity into a glowing point. 
 One teeming moment of imagination 
 (The active sum of all material force). 
 Nothing in this or in the Other World 
 (Extinguished now), no cause, no accident, 
 No import, no result, no fate (so-called) 
 That ever did betide is hid from me. 
 
 ii6
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Giving this faculty the rein, I said, 
 
 " Goddess and hallowed lamp of stainless youth. 
 
 Shining supreme in lilied sovereignty 
 
 Because of maidenhood, you are to-night 
 
 As beautiful, as fragrant, fresh, and rich 
 
 In deity and in divine desire. 
 
 As on the evening when you came of age. 
 
 And Jove, with such a daughter overjoyed. 
 
 Enthroned and crowned you, while the dusky stars 
 
 In envy swooned, or hung about you, too 
 
 Enchanted with your excellence to dream 
 
 Of emulation." 
 
 Wistfully she said, 
 ** But wherefore then do I survive alone? 
 Athene was a virgin." 
 
 ** A sexless one ; 
 Not from Jove's loins, but from his head she 
 
 sprang : 
 When the end came she was the first to fade." 
 
 **To fade?" she murmured, while her crescent, 
 
 filled 
 Anew with pulsing fire, lit up the night. 
 
 117
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 "They ceased somehow, they vanished, every god, 
 Myself excepted, and the three you slew — 
 I will believe you slew them : but was that 
 The end of all the kingdoms of the air — 
 That death on Calvary when Jehovah's treason 
 Undid Himself and us? May there not be 
 Celestial homes beyond the stars, a lodge 
 Above Olympus, a higher heaven than heaven. 
 Where Jove confederate with Jehovah dwells. 
 And Juno visits Aphrodite's bower 
 In sweetest amity? I think there may." 
 
 " A goddess's romance ! In bourneless space, 
 
 Fulfilled with matter multiform, no room 
 
 For any immaterial mite remains." 
 
 "No room," she cried, "for immaterial things? 
 
 But I am immaterial, if you mean. 
 
 By immaterial, immortal and divine." 
 
 I was about to say, " Sheer fantasy ! 
 You are not ; never were ! " but in my veins 
 The aphrodisian force of Other World 
 Began a revel as of molten ore, 
 Tumultuous in the entrails of the earth, 
 
 Ii8
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 That shatters mountains and upheaves the sea. 
 Ambrosial food and nectar of the gods, 
 Whereof I had partaken with careless zest, 
 Being savoury morsels of essential life, 
 (I mean the unreal essence of the spirit) 
 And aureate passion, potable, and pure 
 As the first lightnings (though impossible, 
 As the uncharactered inane itself) 
 No filter and no witchcraft ever tuned 
 To such a pitch of poignant ecstasy 
 The senses of her lord, beloved in vain 
 By some unhappy bride, as that which now 
 Inspired me. 
 
 ''Goddess," I said, ** above the stars 
 I see the dazzling fronts of palaces 
 That overlook eternity. On one 
 A crescent burns and beckons: your demesne, 
 Untenanted and waiting " 
 
 *' Forbear deceit !" 
 She cried : " you said romance ; and now you say, 
 In the same wanton breath, the highest heaven 
 Exists, with room for me ! " 
 
 119
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Against her will 
 To cull the flower of her virginity 
 Had been my purpose : with the loss 
 Of maidenhood her deity I knew 
 Must end at once ; and I should then have purged 
 The Universe of the last exile, last 
 Inheritress of Other World. But now 
 Material things or immaterial seemed 
 The selfsame substance, or it mattered not 
 Whether they were — betrayal of the truth, 
 And of my own material being, for which 
 I suffered torment dire ! — while one design 
 Engulfed as in a vortex all my thoughts : — 
 In some vertiginous moment of the blood 
 To win the virgin goddess of the night, 
 And to possess her with her sweetest will. 
 
 " When I derided you, divinity 
 
 Adorable above all adoration. 
 
 My thoughts," I said, "were wandering far 
 
 astray 
 In labyrinths where human doubt devours 
 The first-born of the mind. Now I return 
 To earth, to heaven and hell : nor Jove, nor God
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Did ever speak more truly than I in this 
 
 I tell you : — Not a gnome or filmy elf, 
 
 Demon or angel, hero, deity 
 
 Can ever cease to be : they and their realms 
 
 Romantic, fairylands, elysiums, bliss 
 
 And bale, the peopled universe of man's 
 
 Fantastical creation, as the scope 
 
 Of vision, trebly harnessed for the strife 
 
 Against encroaching distances, against 
 
 Minuteness still dividing, and the war 
 
 That spectral colours wage upon the stars 
 
 In conquest of their nature, substance, growth : 
 
 I say as vision widened, deepened, struck 
 
 Aloft, extending everywhere, domains 
 
 Imaginative, and unsearchable 
 
 By keenest lens or prism resolvent, pass 
 
 Beyond material ken, advancing swift 
 
 As thought, or as the constellations speed 
 
 For ever in a goalless infinite. 
 
 Above the highest heaven your palace shines 
 
 With tenderest light. Thither you will ascend 
 
 When you with me fulfil your destiny ; 
 
 And win high welcome, for the gods await 
 
 Your certain advent in their new abode."
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 ** I doubt you ; I distrust you ; all you spoke 
 
 " I thought aloud, affirming crudely things 
 Debatable to clear my turbid mind, 
 Awork with your astounding presence here. 
 The gathered dross, the slag and scoria scummed, 
 I drain a noble metal unalloyed, 
 And cast it in the very mold of fate. 
 Alone and helpless you have none but me : 
 You must believe, and I must speak, the truth." 
 
 ** How shall I know the truth ? " 
 
 "Yourself," I said, 
 " Being divine, are test enough. Reject 
 The thing you doubt without a second thought." 
 
 "Then what must I believe?" 
 
 " Do you believe 
 The gods exist?" I asked. 
 
 " I neither doubt 
 In my divinest moments that the gods 
 
 122
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 Exist, nor doubt I shall at last attain 
 The lofty home of my celestial folk." 
 
 *' What would you do to bring that time about?" 
 
 "What can I do?" she asked. 
 
 *' What have you left 
 Undone? The meaning of your maidenhood, 
 Abandoned here without a token sent 
 From any heaven " 
 
 **The meaning?" 
 
 ''Even this, — 
 That deity, neglected on the earth, 
 Contemned, denied or utterly misknown 
 Since Golgotha and the debacle there 
 Begun, is yet again to be the world's 
 Unquestioned glory in a golden age, 
 Wherewith the times Saturnian shall compare 
 As winter's pallid gleam and drizzling sky 
 With the steep sun of summer and its rose." 
 
 '* My long terrestrial exile means a new 
 Beginning of divinity on earth? 
 
 123
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Tell me of that ! " the goddess cried, her eyes, 
 Her crescent luminous with hope : " tell — tell 
 The wonder, the delight, the truth of that ! " 
 
 " It could not be," I said ; *' nor is it high 
 
 And holy that the everlasting youth, 
 
 Florescent in the ichor of the gods, 
 
 Should bloom infertile through millennial years. 
 
 Unhappy women — or, it well may be, 
 
 The happiest ! — can continue maidenhood 
 
 Till death at last deflowers the scentless weed ; 
 
 For women wither and their summertime 
 
 Is not so long a war of continence 
 
 That all must yield. But with the unfading gods 
 
 Who live in the eternal moment, time 
 
 Has nought to do ; their beauty and their 
 
 strength 
 Renew themselves : with every ardent pulse 
 Desire augments throughout eternity." 
 
 ** What are you going to say ! " 
 
 "That all the change 
 In both Worlds was, from Calvary till now, 
 
 124
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 The elaborate accomplishment of fate's 
 Mature device, our casual meeting here." 
 
 ** Is this a horror or a glorious thing?" 
 The goddess asked the night. 
 
 '' A glorious thing ! 
 I from my mansion in the Milky Way 
 Come down to earth to die ; you on your beat 
 Nocturnal round the summer world patrol 
 The frontier of the north ; and lo, we meet ! 
 And we shall mingle " 
 
 *' Not even with higher God 
 Than God would I unite my deity ! " 
 
 " No ; but with man — with me, you shall unite ! 
 The gods have paired with women and begot 
 Beloved sons and daughters : dynasties 
 Divine ; but unenduring, and beyond 
 Restoral banished. Let a greater race 
 Than any hitherto adored in Heaven, 
 
 In Asgard or Olympus " 
 
 125
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 " My guardian dead ! 
 No spear ! No arrow ! God — O, any god 
 In any heaven or hell, limbo or land 
 Forgotten, hear and aid me ! It is I, 
 Virginity, your flame-clad maidenhood, 
 So highly sphered, so holily beseen. 
 The innocent goddess whom the gods themselves 
 Adored ! And, O sweet stars, my bowermaids 
 
 long 
 Agone, why are you hid to-night ? Unveil " 
 
 '* The very eyes of heaven are closed," I said, 
 " That none may see us ! " 
 
 "/shall see you — I, 
 A goddess ! " 
 
 " But by you I would be seen ! 
 My eyes in your unfathomed orbs deep sunk 
 As in a tide of glory " 
 
 *' Never ! " she cried. 
 ** Shall the proud legend of my life, the high 
 Achievement of millennial purity, 
 
 126
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Immortal flower of maidenhood, be turned 
 To laughter, tarnished and undone, and rent 
 And rifled by a man ? — or by a beast ? 
 Or by a devil ? — vampire, ghost, or ghoul ? 
 No fiercest, strongest, subtlest male alive 
 Dare touch me ! Go ! I bid you go ! " 
 
 " Your wrath 
 Betrays your ill-assurance. In your heart, 
 Installed by Jove when he begot you, love, 
 A dreaming world long time enchanted, wakes 
 In uttermost amazement : passion stirs ; 
 The curtains of your mind are drawn, and light — 
 Not of the moon that borrows daily fire 
 And nightly freezes it — but sevenfold light 
 Eternal floods your thought. Clear as the sun, 
 The secret of celestial ruin dawns 
 Upon your wonder ; for the sin of heaven 
 That sapped Olympian power, unguessed till now, 
 Was lodged in you, the cult of maidenhood. 
 Virginity is never, will never be, 
 Divine. The worship of an incomplete 
 Existence? — of one half of a being? — Sin 
 Unpardonable, and inconceivable 
 
 127
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 As soon as known ! But by this very sin, 
 The unhallowed worship of virginity 
 (Achievement of the automatic fates !) 
 You were preserved a maid ; and in your sex 
 Myriads of virgin years have so matured 
 Essential deity, so burdened every lode 
 With golden ore of love, and so fulfilled 
 Your beauty with the sorcery of heaven. 
 That he who sees you needs you with a need 
 No mortal can endure. You goddess, you, 
 In unreserved divinity, or death ! " 
 
 She gazed into the darkness ; she wrung her hands ; 
 Her bosom heaved, her bosom thronged, with 
 
 sighs. 
 But now her soul had yielded, and I knew 
 That, being a goddess, she would give herself 
 Without another thought than to be mine. 
 
 *' Look, goddess, look ! " I said, aware how love 
 Had rolled the years up like a debt discharged. 
 Erased the cross-hatched shadows of old time. 
 And lit my face with youth : truly to love 
 
 128
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 A woman will transfigure any man ; 
 But I, desiring deity, became 
 The avatar of deity's desire. 
 
 She looked, and on the instant stood entranced. 
 Then slowly from her lips her meaning poured 
 Like organ music : — ** Greater than the gods, 
 
 man, immortal in mortality, 
 
 For your delight, for your supreme delight 
 
 1 kept my maidenhead. Without a doubt — 
 I know it in my sex and in my soul ! — 
 
 My womb will teem with daughters fairer far 
 Than their most happy mother, with many sons 
 As great as he whose love, so deified. 
 Will found a mightier dynasty of gods 
 Than any in the records of all the heavens : 
 Justice and guerdon due my chastity 
 Preserved throughout millenniums at a cost — 
 Now I may say it, now that sudden fate 
 Unties my virgin knot ! — O, at a cost 
 Incalculable of sleepless centuries 
 And midnight madness that the muffled skies 
 Concealed from gods and men ! That pallid 
 
 dream — 
 
 I 129
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 Endymion in the Latmian cave? — O, that ! — 
 Tender, and sweet, and beautiful ; a thing 
 To tell about — for slander must be fed 
 In heaven and earth ! — masking forbidden lust 
 That might have horrified the world with births 
 More heinous than Chimasra or Minotaur, 
 Had not occasion, still inopportune, 
 Undone the evil thought : — at such a cost 
 The maiden treasure of my deity 
 Was kept for you to plunder ! Every pulse 
 Exults and every nerve ; my bosom swells 
 Already at the thought of sucklings there — 
 My babes upon my breast ! But this comes first, 
 The sum and harmony of every joy, — 
 That I shall suffer and that you shall wreak 
 Sweet vengeance for millennial chastity. 
 That my long lonely passion will be shared 
 With one who loves me and is by me belov'd." 
 
 The bracken was our couch ; our bridal sheets, 
 Her green simarre, by her divinely spread. 
 The while she wished to hide and would not hide 
 Her tender shuddering sighs, her flowerlike smiles 
 That bloomed in swift succession with crystal tears 
 
 130 ;
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 For dewdrops, and the dazzling blood that welled 
 In momentaneous surges and overcame 
 Her face, her neck, her bosom with a tide, 
 Wherein, as in the mirror of the wave. 
 An unseen dawn its rosy shadow threw. 
 
 She was the virgin goddess of the night ; 
 
 And she lay down with me ; and in my arms 
 
 She sacrificed the chastity of heaven ; 
 
 And swoonedSwith happiness, and whispered close, 
 
 '' I see my palace on the highest height — 
 
 The one you told-^'me of. Thither will we, 
 
 So stealthily, when our first boy is born, 
 
 And take with sudden wonder all my kin." 
 
 That was the burden of her nuptial song 
 Until the tumult of her own delight 
 Invaded all her being. Then — O then. 
 Her molten crescent dripped with honeyed fire — 
 A light to love by had we needed light ; 
 With fragrant kisses, like a magic cup 
 For ever brimming with the wine of life, 
 Her mouth was at my lips ; her golden voice 
 In murmurs and unworded rapture told 
 
 131
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Voluptuous secrets of our rich embrace ; 
 And over us the moonless, starless night 
 A velvet coverlet of darkness spread. 
 
 But when her soul was satiated with love 
 A little while before the morning broke 
 Wanton she grew and would not be appeased. 
 Although her crescent waned, and in its gloom 
 Her eyes and eyelids withered, and her face 
 Grew haggard with the ashen stain of death. 
 Yet would she cling to me, one hungry sense 
 Alone alive, and " Take me, take me, love, 
 Or else I die ! " she sobbed, her arms and limbs 
 About me writhen like a serpent's coils. 
 
 Once when a momentary lull reprieved 
 The travail of her body, she shrieked aloud, 
 " Anathema ! A man has conquered me ! 
 The end has come ! Insufferable hell 
 Begin again and disembowel earth 
 With hotter fire than any stolen from heaven, 
 To be a living sepulchre of pain 
 For that pernicious prophet whose presage sly — 
 Gods! — vanished gods! dead gods! — I heeded 
 not . . . 
 
 132
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Because it was to be ! " Then at my ear, 
 
 And through her grinding teeth, "Save me from 
 
 death," 
 She said — ' ' by love ! Save me from death by love ! " 
 
 Such being the tragic loom of it, and she 
 And I the warp and woof, I still renewed 
 The anguish that was ecstasy at first ; 
 But as I drained my life in one resolved 
 Embrace, her fire went out, her deity 
 Deca3''ed ; and by the sullen clouded dawn 
 That dredged the sky with dim, diffusive dust. 
 There vanished from my sight a carrion shape, 
 With shrivelled dugs, wry mouth and posture foul 
 As of a naked hag on lewdness bent. 
 
 With shrunk veins, empty mind, suspended will, 
 Scarce had I noted veils and shreds of mist 
 Hanging upon the mountains and the woods. 
 And through my marrow felt the morning air 
 Like curdling venom steal, when death came down. 
 And brought about tremendous punishment 
 For my seduction of the goddess, lust 
 Indulged to frenzy, self-deceit and dark 
 
 ^33
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Betrayal of the ethereal universe. 
 Without a pang I died ; but, shrieking, waked 
 In the last Hell remaining. Hell unknown 
 To men before my visit, appalling Hell, 
 The Hell of Deity where Other World 
 Intolerable agony endured. 
 
 Although the instantaneousness of Hell 
 
 Extorted sudden outcry, yet the thought 
 
 That immaterial falsehood of the spirit 
 
 Had not escaped ; but that the gods themselves 
 
 A fierier flame, a fiercer torture knew 
 
 Than any penalty infernal dealt 
 
 The human victims of their wrath divine, 
 
 Inventors, patrons, connoisseurs of Hell, 
 
 Was as a drop of water on my tongue, 
 
 A chord of music, and a breath of wind 
 
 Amid the dismal noise, the withering heat. 
 
 The awful restlessness, the live despair. 
 
 Beside me on the threshold the goddess stood, 
 As young, as full of zest, and as divine 
 As when she passed me on the mountain-top. 
 I also in the splendour of my youth 
 
 134
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 Entered the dread inferno of the gods ; 
 For, that the anguish there might still surpass 
 The utmost pain in every other hell, 
 The spirit and strength of all the denizens, 
 Restored at once, were to the height maintained 
 By the pure flame they breathed, the atmosphere 
 Being also nurture and stimulant, and one 
 Exhaustive torment of that shrine of woe : 
 That all the essences of Other World 
 Should breathe, should feed on Hell like plants on 
 
 air. 
 And should become in every artery, nerve. 
 Secretion, organ, bone and muscle. Hell, 
 Insufferable Hell, was the supreme 
 Distinction, the redundancy superb 
 In hellishness that made the Hell of the Gods 
 Pre-eminent Hell. But over and above 
 The general torture native in the air — 
 So stringent and imbuing that the might 
 Combined, the majesty and pride of gods, 
 The highest, Jove, Poseidon, Mulciber, 
 Ormuzd and Ahriman, Woden, Surtur, Mars, 
 Could not have borne in silence a moment's throe — 
 Each individual, from the daintiest elf, 
 
 135
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 That fed on perfume once and bathed in dew, 
 
 To Cyclopean figures vast, of yore 
 
 The armourers and farriers of the gods. 
 
 Endured the unendurable, impaled 
 
 Against a towering cliff of adamant, 
 
 Sheer as a waterfall and smooth as glass, 
 
 Broad as the bastion of an island realm. 
 
 And topaz-hued by reflex of the flame 
 
 That filled the wide and lofty vault of Hell, 
 
 Its atmosphere : impalement manifold. 
 
 The pegs and bolts, the hooks, the skewers and 
 
 beams 
 Being of the soul of metal, an element 
 Unknown on earth, that where it pierces lives 
 An aching life metallic, in pain itself. 
 And to the wounded spirit imparting power 
 Transcendent to experience agonies 
 That, felt less keenly, with a single pang 
 Had ended every god. Supine or prone 
 The fairies, kobolds, dwarfs, by pins and nails 
 Transfixed like butterflies and beetles, screamed 
 With stretched mouths, wings a-buzz and wrig- 
 gling limbs ; 
 And though they wrenched and wrung their bodies, 
 —they, 
 
 136
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 And every sufferer there, incessantly — 
 
 The puncture of the impalement sucked||the stake 
 
 Like a fierce mouth, such was the energy 
 
 Constrictive in the magic metal lodged. 
 
 Titans and Thurses huge, dropped from the 
 
 height, 
 Onganches pined — such groupsof barbsand spikes 
 As on the walls of orient cities clutched 
 The mangled malefactor, dying long 
 In hideous misery : through the bowels thrust. 
 Hooked by a leg and in both shoulders griped, 
 The storm-leviathan, enormous Thrym, 
 Terrific anguish from his cavernous maw 
 Uttered continually ; beside him hung 
 Uncouthly by the head, his eyehole pierced 
 By other malice than the wandering Greek's, 
 His bulk contorted and immanely trussed 
 On giant prongs that dug through either thigh. 
 And, curving, gashed his midriff, ocean's son, 
 The cloud-high Polyphemus, writhed and roared. 
 Upon a skewer, that through their navels stuck, 
 Vulcan and Mars, with Venus wedged between, 
 Bellowed discordant frenzy as they bit 
 And clawed each other. Juno stitched to Jove 
 2 I 137
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 By latticed scythes — austerely, back to back — 
 Bayed like a she-wolf maddening at the moon, 
 While her great consort's lion throat unstopped 
 Pealed out the diapason of all woe : 
 Chronos with Rhea, Baal with Ashtaroth, 
 Woden with Freya, such espousal had, 
 In couples ganched, and howling deep and shrill 
 Hell's hymenean. There Apollo, racked 
 Among a grove of scimitars that grew 
 Like sedges through his deity, suppressed 
 His tuneless note a moment when he saw 
 His conqueror come so soon to share his fate ; 
 Thor, clamorous on an antlered couch, pronounced 
 Infernal welcome ; and Aidoneus stabbed 
 In every limb and organ, lifted up 
 A piercing voice that for a breath outsoared 
 The thundrous quire of Hell. This heard and seen 
 Within the instant of my entrance, more 
 I could not mark for the appalling pain 
 That the first breath of Hell instilled, but flung 
 My unheard cry into the whelming noise, 
 Absorbed in monstrous torment. Yet I knew, 
 By the inherent faculty of Hell, 
 That my divine companion of the night 
 
 138
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 Impaled throughout her sumptuous deity — 
 Beside Athene strung upon a stake ! — 
 Wriggled and yelled abominably hurt. 
 
 Also I knew (in the one instant still, 
 
 Like all the happening in the Hell of the Gods) 
 
 That on the adamantine bastion hung 
 
 A figure crucified, which was myself ; 
 
 And that beside myself there hanging, I, 
 
 A second time, being he who entered, nailed 
 
 Through either palm at arm's length drawn, and 
 
 through 
 My feet together pressed, beheld myself 
 Still standing at the entry, mouth agape 
 And pouring horror to behold a third 
 Appearance of myself against the wall 
 By hands and feet affixed ! Then I, the man 
 I am, the very man, beside the three 
 Phantasmas of myself was also nailed : 
 For I, as man, was guilty of the gods. 
 Guilty of God ; and in myself partook 
 Uniquely of the nature of the gods, 
 Having supped upon their food, and having loved 
 A deity, and been by her belov'd. 
 
 »39
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 *' Four persons in the Godhead — the Sire, the Son, 
 
 The Holy Spirit, and the Evil One," 
 
 The faculty of Hell within me cried ; 
 
 And in the instant, though that instant seemed 
 
 Eternity quadrupled, so intense 
 
 My fourfold agony became, the last 
 
 Of all the Hells, and the most terrible 
 
 Desisted wholly ; and I stood once more 
 
 Alone upon the mountain of my choice. 
 
 And saw the northern dawn awake the world. 
 
 The mechanism of automatic fate 
 Brought it about that when I thought to die 
 Eternally, I died to live again. 
 Thus in my night adventure and my death 
 I purged the world of the last remnant left 
 Of Other World, the hideous Hell of the Gods, 
 Of virgin worship, and, in myself, of God — 
 Pernicious slander of material truth 
 So terribly avenged in the last Hell. 
 And thus I made the world a fit abode 
 For greatness and the men who yet may be ; 
 And can myself with joy become again 
 The mountains and the ocean, the winds, the 
 flowers, 
 
 140
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 And life and death, and fear and love and hope, 
 And tender sorrow and heavy grief, and all 
 Humanity, and all that thinks and is : 
 Remaining still the conscious mystery throned 
 Among the stars, with systems round beset. 
 By throngs of constellations haunted, discs 
 Gigantic looming white on every hand, 
 And married globes whose orbits intertwine. 
 Whose burnished lights instinct with diverse 
 
 stains 
 Revolve about each other deep in space, 
 Saffron with sapphire, emerald with ruby-red. 
 And purple stars with topaz doubles sphered. 
 Or wonderful as instruments attuned 
 To some new ravishment of keen accord, 
 In virgin gold and lilac burning bright, 
 A stellar passion of harmonious fire. 
 I dare not, must not die : I am the sight 
 And hearing of the infinite ; in me 
 Matter fulfils itself; before me none 
 Beheld or heard, imagined, thought or felt ; 
 And though I make the mystery known to men. 
 It may be none hereafter shall achieve 
 The perfect purpose of eternity ; 
 
 141
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 It may be that the Universe attains 
 Self-knowledge only once ; and when I cease 
 To see and hear, imagine, think and feel, 
 The end may come, and matter, satisfied, 
 Devolve once more through wanton change, and 
 
 tides 
 Of slow relapse, suns, systems, galaxies, 
 Back to ethereal oblivion, pure 
 Accomplished darkness, might immaculate 
 Augmenting everlastingly in space. 
 Me, therefore, it beseems while life endures. 
 To haunt my palace in the Milky Way, 
 And into music change the tumult high 
 That echoes through the vast, unvaulted courts 
 Interminable, where the nebulae 
 Evolving constellations, their spindles whirl ; 
 Me it beseems to take my joy in heaven. 
 Revealing glory by my soul conceived, 
 And by my soul begotten, in the rapt 
 Cohabitation with eternity. 
 
 142
 
 EPILOGUE
 
 THE LAST JOURNEY 
 
 I FELT the world a-spinning on its nave, 
 I felt it sheering blindly round the sun ; 
 I felt the time had come to find a grave : 
 
 I knew it in my heart my days were done. 
 I took my stafif in hand ; I took the road, 
 And wandered out to seek my last abode. 
 
 Hearts of gold and hearts of lead 
 
 Sing it yet in sun and rain, 
 *' Heel and toe from dawn to dusk, 
 Round tn»i world and home again." 
 
 O long before the here was steeped for malt, 
 And long before the grape was crushed for wine, 
 
 The glor)' of the mcirch without a halt, 
 
 The triumph of a strJde like yours and mine 
 
 Was Kiiown to folk i.k.e us, who walked about. 
 
 To be the sprigbiiie^jt cordial oat and out ! 
 
 «45
 
 THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Folk like us, with hearts that beat, 
 Sang it too in sun and rain — 
 , 4$a?> :** Heel and toe from dawn to dusk, 
 ^- Round the world and home again." 
 
 My feet are heavy now, but on I go. 
 
 My head erect beneath the tragic years. 
 The way is steep, but I would have it so ; 
 
 And dusty, but I lay the dust with tears, 
 Though none can see me weep : alone I climb 
 The rugged path that leads me out of time — 
 Out of time and out of all, 
 
 Singing yet in sun and rain, 
 " Heel and toe from dawn to dusk, 
 Round the world and home again." 
 
 Farewell the hope that mocked, farewell despair 
 That went before me still and made the pace. 
 
 The earth is full of graves, and mine was there 
 Before my life began, my resting-p4ace ; 
 
 And I shall find it out and with the dead 
 
 Lie down for ever, all my sayings said — 
 
 146
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 Deeds all done and songs all sung, 
 While others chant in sun and rain, 
 
 '* Heel and toe from dawn to dusk, 
 Round the world and home again."
 
 piiliii 
 
 t