Canticle on the Octarchy
XXXVIII
I have two daughters who as yet have not known man:
I will bring them out to you.
Grandeur has limits on earth, and the words of the rabbi’s description
Soared to a height unexpressed in the visual tale on arrival:
Babylon Great in appearance produced but a needable friction
Next to the favor’ble language it brought in recalling-revival:
Though it was vast in its miles, I found it somewhat depleted;
Many were bustling, cooking and crying but naught was romantic,
Where were the fiery eyes of the fugitive gods uncompleted?
Even the stories of towers and temples and idols gigantic,
Once in the light of my eyes were but fables and proved nonexistent,
Hardly impressing me that, for a man to betray in his varied,
Ludicrous methods his God, but a pittance is this in the distance!
Circling ’round it with fervor, the city for which we have tarried,
Building it mortar-and brick to be smitten and struck and be broken,
This is the thing we have sold each soul for, and thus I am burning,
Thinking it much as I wasted my life at the first for a token,
Scraps of the whinges of lust, we are equally damned in our earning
Lest we are saved by our God, and the remnants of lust and its merit
Bring on the scorched condemnation, and casting their vision with glass eyes,
Angels beheld such things with a longing to covet and bear it;
What can be said for a man but his wish to be secret, amass lies,
Build in himself great cities of brick to distract and defocus
Rather than span in himself wide fields for the pleasure of labor?
What is a man but a miser’ble pile of furious locusts
Raging with filthy desires, material drives and behavior,
Always depending on sense, thus chance, as it gives him impression;
Wonder indeed we are capable even to make of it merry,
Carry on wherefore in darkness of conscience and hopeless oppression
Suffered as creatures, as creatures, as finite and burdened to carry,
Thinking the walls of the cities are made to protect from the dreadful,
Though it is more apt saying a wall is to cease locomotion
Out-from and not into cities, for man can but leave with his head full
Seeing the terrors and startling measures of civilized notion,
Gorged on the fat of the land, and he sees it with lustful intention,
Thinking it better belongs as his own, for the city is shared all,
Shared to the masses, but even to strangers, beyond their retention,
Whereas our fathers were rich but itinerant, called by a rare call,
Tarrying here for the honors of trade, but I see in an instant
Thanks to the rabbi the fact great Abraham saw in the dual-cave,
That to sojourn and to journey is life in an image insistent,
Cities are graves: he only was stopped to acquire a new grave,
Then he continued traversing the land of eventual promise,
Wherefore the people to come from his seed were so also required,
During the feast of Sukkoth, to return to conditions as modest,
Whereby remembering this fact; thus I am neither inspired,
Wondrous nor piously stupor’d by Babylon’s walls or its blue gates,
Finding it flattering none, shame even residing beside it,
Cities themselves are the idol of idols, excuse to accrue weights,
Cheat on the wages of others, demand on the rights to decide it,
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