SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       Hold what ye list, fond believing Sprites,
       You cannot swerve the pulsion of the Byss,
       Which thinking on, yet weighing not Its thought,
       Unchecks Its clock-like laws.

  SPIRIT SINISTER [aside]

                 Good, as before.
       My little engines, then, will still have play.

  SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

       Why doth It so and so, and ever so,
       This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel?

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       As one sad story runs, It lends Its heed
       To other worlds, being wearied out with this;
       Wherefore Its mindlessness of earthly woes.
       Some, too, have told at whiles that rightfully
       Its warefulness, Its care, this planet lost
       When in her early growth and crudity
       By bad mad acts of severance men contrived,
       Working such nescience by their own device.—
       Yea, so it stands in certain chronicles,
       Though not in mine.

  SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

                 Meet is it, none the less,
       To bear in thought that though Its consciousness
       May be estranged, engrossed afar, or sealed,
       Sublunar shocks may wake Its watch anon?

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       Nay.  In the Foretime, even to the germ of Being,
       Nothing appears of shape to indicate
       That cognizance has marshalled things terrene,
       Or will [such is my thinking] in my span.
       Rather they show that, like a knitter drowsed,
       Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness,
       The Will has woven with an absent heed
       Since life first was; and ever will so weave.

  SPIRIT SINISTER

       Hence we've rare dramas going—more so since
       It wove Its web in the Ajaccian womb!

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

       Well, no more this on what no mind can mete.
       Our scope is but to register and watch
       By means of this great gift accorded us—
       The free trajection of our entities.

  SPIRIT OF THE PITIES

       On things terrene, then, I would say that though
       The human news wherewith the Rumours stirred us
       May please thy temper, Years, 'twere better far
       Such deeds were nulled, and this strange man's career
       Wound up, as making inharmonious jars
       In her creation whose meek wraith we know.
       The more that he, turned man of mere traditions,
       Now profits naught.  For the large potencies
       Instilled into his idiosyncrasy—
       To throne fair Liberty in Privilege' room—
       Are taking taint, and sink to common plots
       For his own gain.