Last Days Of Alice

Alice grown lazy, mammoth but not fat,

Declines upon her lost and twilight age;

Above in the dozing leaves the grinning cat

Quivers forever with his abstract rage:

Whatever light swayed on the perilous gate

Forever sways, nor will the arching grass,

Caught when the world clattered, undulate

In the deep suspension of the looking-glass.

Bright Alice! always pondering to gloze

The spoiled cruelty she had meant to say

Gazes learnedly down her airy nose

At nothing, nothing thinking all the day.

Turned absent-minded by infinity

She cannot move unless her double move,

The All-Alice of the world's entity

Smashed in the anger of her hopeless love,

Love for herself who, as an earthly twain,

Pouted to join her two in a sweet one;

No more the second lips to kiss in vain

The first she broke, plunged through the glass alone—

Alone to the weight of impassivity,

Incest of spirit, theorem of desire,

Without will as chalky cliffs by the sea

Empty as the bodiless flesh of fire:

All space, that heaven is a dayless night,

A nightless day driven by perfect lust

For vacancy, in which her bored eyesight

Stares at the drowsy cubes of human dust.

—We too back to the world shall never pass

Through the shattered door, a dumb shade-harried crowd

Being all infinite, function depth and mass

Without figure, a mathematical shroud

Hurled at the air—blessed without sin!

O God of our flesh, return us to Your wrath,

Let us be evil could we enter in

Your grace, and falter on the stony path!