Now are no Janus' temple‑doors thrown wide

To utter thougts of war upon the land.

Now doth no double facing God divide

Him from himself, that sight of him may brand

The symbol of opposed things upon

Our hearts that at our eyes on him are thrown.

Now do no pagan cults tremble at Mars' name

Because bad‑auguring birds like clouds have flown

O'er nations' frontiers, nor do oracles frame

Strange answers unto ears of armoured chiefs,

Replies that leave perplexed their perplexed eyes

That know not whether that heart‑pang they hear

Is the first grief heralding their peoples' griefs

Or the strange cold that the Gods' mysteries

Speak to his soul that is to conquest near.

No. All is dead that wreathed war round with Gods.

Nor omens mute, nor the foiled sacrifice,

No dim words spoken by spilt blood on sods.

Nay, nor the later sense that vice and sloth,

When in a people's heart they nestle both

Do on them call the wrath of heaven, us move.

Our souls are void, like a stage mummer's cries

And our hate and our love mock hate and love.

Something of coldness, like the coming winter,

Crosses our autumn like a profecy.

Round our leaves now no swallows circle and twitter.

No more, no more, shall we heart‑wholesome be.

There is a sadness that with us doth stay

Like a billetted guest, and far away

Our ultimate death awaits us like a sea.

Alas! that even the poesy of wars

Should, like a tired thing, have gone where things go.

Alas! alas! that we have come thus far

Knowing still the same nothing that we know,

To meet more than ourselves, nor no throe

That shall be herald of a newer man.

And ever as the old woes the cold new woe

Fills with its deathless measure our life's span.

No, even the Christian manner of love or hate

Is dead. No God that lives in us survives

The winter in us that snow‑kills God and Fate

And has iced o'er the rivers of our lives.

With cuirass and with pike we laid aside

All that made battle worth the death in it.

Our science‑made war‑gestures now deride

The great eternal things that war doth fit

With helm and armour.

With mortal pomp yet pomp. We are on death's side.

All is as if were not part of it.

All clashes, rings and turmoils as if far.

The foiled imagining within our wit

Ousts war's clear image with bare thought of war.

Our plans are cold, our courage cold, our eyes

When they look inwards dream but the far plain

And vague, picture‑seen faces and their pain

Touches no sense of ours, nor do dreamed cries

Rise in us. What cold thing has become of

Our very hatred? What way has strength gone?

We die as if the sky were not above

Our heads and beneath us sand, grass and stone.

The great eternal presence of all things

No longer doth with us collaborate

To lift our hearts up on invisible wings

And bid us tremble at the thrill of Fate.

The possible fall of empires doth no more

Touch us with that great and mysterious dread

That John on Pathmos saw rise o'er his head

Like a space‑filling sea without a shore.

Alas! our nobler fear has gone away

Where our weariness pointed. We are blind

And learned to blindness. Our wild gestures stray

From us like leaves that fall far off with the wind,

And we fight clearly, coldly, night and day.

These things I thought, knowing that far behind

My visible horizon war was slave

Of that Invisible Master who doth wave

His speechless hand o'er continents and seas

And men like reaped things fall, and the blind wind

With groping hands that in the night are blind

Touches the dead men's faces' mysteries.

This I thought when, lo! before me there was

A door of iron, or what iron seemed,

An unsized portal, and its live‑seeming lock

Seemed all the uses of a lock to mock.

To see that door was to know none could pass

Through it, nor could its other‑side be dreamed.

A ribbon of broad stairs led up to it

But had no meaning, like a laugh unseen,

I looked and the door seemed to sway as hit

By blows, but no blows fell on it. That screen

Was interposed between me and no scene,

Yet, like an eye staring from out the night,

It touched my heart cold with its iron mean.

And this was not in space nor in a light.

Somewhere in me where dreams do themselves show

And have an inner meaning God doth know,

The door was set, and it seemed to my soul

That there since some inner eternity

It ever had been and I something had seen,

Yet half forgot, that like a half‑shown scroll,

Concealed its sense in what it showed to me.

And lo! as my heart looked, the door grew clear

As a near‑lit thing seen in a black night,

And a great sense of a great coming fear

Was fear already in my heart's affright.

Then as I looked I saw - yet it did seem

That in my vision that had ever been -

From beneath the strange door down the steps flow

A string of silent blood, that step by step,

Fell with a motion desolate and slow.

The thin red stream seemed conscious of its course

Though its course seemed to be none, but to fall.

I looked and it fell ever, with a force

Of relinquishment to its fall, a knell

To some hope in me, and the blood

That ever was but a small line did flood

All my pained soul and made it red. The spell

Of its thin redness spreade o'er my thought's mood

And all my thoughts became a great red wall

Set up in front of what in me doth brood.

Then everything shifted, yet was the same.

I looked on as one who sees a child's game

And finds its eyes at interest in it

And knows not why. A sense of end did hit

My power of having feelings with a rain

That did with deep red all my dim soul stain

As it had stained that soul.

Then all the outer world was dashed to night

And, though no floor remained, no sides, no light

To that space‑missed new world, set far from being,

Yet by some clearer virtue of my seeing

All I saw was without nor left nor right

With a name to it, without a place

Even in itself, without an I to see.

The mere great door and the red blood's thin trace

And all the rest was void and mystery.

Then all again seemed changing unto some

New, unimaginable and fearful thing.

The door and that blood‑line seemed to come

A strange new‑featured Face looking out through

The Universe's whole frame, traversing

It like light an invisible glass - a wing

Belonging to no bird our thoughts construe.

Then the door seemed to recede - nay, to have

Receded, when I knew not, nor was there

A when, for Time seem'd as seems a far wave

On a wide sea, something gone past. The bare

Eternal door seemed to have gone to the end

Of a visible infinity, and all

That now remained on which my soul could spend

Its terror was the blood ever at its fall.

Then, though still the same small line of red,

The blood seeemed to grow glass and in it I saw

A mighty river full of strange things - dead

Men, children, wrecks of bridges, cities, thrones,

And still the line was a small red line, (...)

Of other meaning than that

That before God for the clear world atones.

But the (...) visions in that line contained

Seemed wide as space. The red line seemed a slit

In a thin door through which our eyes can see

Large fields, a city and the whole sky stained

With clouds, and all this in the line could be;

And from some unknown where I looked on it.

It seemed the edge of a cube opening

Sideways to sides of visions, more and more.

Now and then across its glass - like being a wing

Passed a tremor ran over everything

That had in it a clear and tragic being.

Then ceased. And from, past space, the door

Still held my unconscious consciousness of seeing.

It seemed sometimes a bright, red moving veil

And through it as through a stained window I guessed

A night and stars on a vague pale day pressed,

On a same horizon desolate and pale.

Then, as I stared, suddenly before me,

Like a fan suddenly opened, the blood‑line

Took space from side to side, leaving naught to me

Left or right of it. Its red (...) fact

Became a red Niagara, a cataract.

But there were no steps, nothing: it did fall

As if drawn in the air, over no edge, and all

Was this and this was its own mystery.

Then lo! over the edge, no longer now,

But empires rolled, and I saw Greece and Rome

Pass. And still over the eternal flow

Reddened from left to right my inner sight's home

Of seeing. And all like to God's blood did come

Like a great rain off a huge thorn‑crowned brow.

And I saw more and more strange empires roll

Down and some I knew not, nor seeing them, guessed.

Awhile their falling the fall's brink caressed

Then they sunk down somewhere within my soul,

And my soul was the soul of all the world,

And from my (...) eyes that saw all this

Suddenly I felt, as if a flag unfurled,

God in me look out at these mysteries.

My eyes seemed windows of another sight

Of someone set behind my soul in the night

Looking through my eyes and my sight, mine own

Was but a glass those unknown eyes looked through,

And still the vision was blood falling down

In cataracts into Mystery, red and slow.

I became one with world and Fate and God,

And the great River that came on and fell

Let me see through its veil of (...) blood

The stars shine and a vague moonlight, then fell

Something from me. The cataract came more near

To my sight; then it seemed into mine eyes

To creep to become with them and the fear

To pass behind them into some soul (...).

Then all that did remain was the stars light

And again in the dark infinity

My pity and my dread alone with me

And my dream's meaning like a paling night.