Marlowe
Peabody Josephine Preston
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- MARLOWE: Hands off, I say!
- Stay then, and every devil may come to hear,
- And heaven may have it's laugh! I ever speak
- As if there were a Something there to listen:
- The shadow of the little mind, grotesque,
- Confident, helpless, thrown upon the clouds
- To serve him for a god. And I have sworn
- There is no God. --Ah, but there should be one!
- There should be one. And there's the bitterness
- Of this unending torture-place for men;
- For the proud soul who craves a Perfectness
- That might out-wear the rotting of all things
- Rooted in earth, that bloom so piercing fair
- A little while, a little while,--O God,
- The little while!...
- No, something, something perfect, man or beast!
- What is it all, without?--And what's a man?
- To go a blind way seeking here and there,
- Spending and spending for the Beautiful,
- On shams and shows, and clay that worms devour;
- Banquet and famine, till all's gone, all's gone;
- And he is fain to fill that tortured craving
- With husks the swine do eat. --Almighty Void!
- And there is nothing there for me to curse,
- In this despair. I tell thee, I have come
- Unto a horror no man dreams upon.
- Nothing is left and nothing is, to curse.
- For you may hear the crying of the wind,
- Crying despair and darkness round the earth,
- Without a hope of rest. But who has caught
- That torturer by the gray, ancient locks,
- Or who can stab the wind? Hast ever thought
- Of the thirst of hatred with no thing to hate?
- Here, here behold me with my enemy! --
- The Void!
