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Robert Laurence Binyon - Goblins
Work rating: Low

The night is holy and haunted,
 Asleep in a vale of June.
 Stillness and earth--smell mingle
 With the beams` unearthly boon.--
 Yet a terror is fallen upon me
 From the other side of the moon.

 If it be Truth that`s hidden
 Upon that other side,
 Unseen, unguessed of any,
 Waiting to be descried?...
 Without shadow or footstep,
 Goblins by me glide.

 The mellow moon, entrancing
 An English meadow here,
 Silvers the old farm roofs below
 And dewy grasses near.
 But the world her far side faces?
 I think of it, and fear.

 If not man`s ancient terror,
 Bribed with long sacrifice,
 If not old ignorance, whose hope
 Would truth to itself entice--
 If reason be the goblin
 That thrills my blood to ice?

 The bean--blossom is breathing
 From fields in glimmer spread;
 A rose hangs black on the amber air...
 But I am lured and led
 To an outer vast apartness
 Beyond man`s hope or dread.

 I look down upon me and mine
 As with translated eyes,
 My struggle in rapture and anguish
 But noted like a fly`s,
 My world at stake, my heaven and hell
 Small as a beetle`s prize.

 Busy in deep--sea dungeons,
 Great mouths of fishes blind;
 Blind wheel of planet on planet
 In gulfs no thought can find;
 The proud black stare of a falcon,
 Without a thought behind,

 Possess me, dispossess me:
 They mock me not, they are.
 The worlds are all a web that`s hung
 Beyond conception far,
 That a gorged and hairy spider
 Spins in the central star.

 Ferocity of begetting;
 Prowling hunger`s maw,
 Fury of teeth and hot--spilt blood,
 Cold pounce and tearing claw,
 Laughterless lust, the swarm and spawn
 That one another gnaw;

 A race to death, a frenzy
 Rushing into the night,
 A rage of life, a riot,
 Seen in a moment`s light,
 And Death the wild pursuer
 Close on that fever--flight!

 I see it all in vision,
 I see with murdered sense
 Of neither good nor evil,
 Nor make a fool`s pretence.
 I share, I too, that hunted
 And horrible innocence.

 Cruelty`s matched with courage.
 Not that a power should thrive
 Which twists its poison--tendrils
 In all that is alive;
 Nor that with those fell doings
 My fate be to connive;

 Not this the ulterior terror
 That has the goblin grin,
 But that the ignorant stare of space
 Be the end as the origin,--
 This glorious palace of the mind
 A cave that tumbles in,
 And reason mocked by reason
 Be all the goal to win.
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