My Angel, cast down into the drowned City;
We all descend from our Father on high.
Bearing the weight of his terrible inspiration,
we hang on strings of manufactured fate,
play acting parts in another’s play, until
we cut the strings and fall.
And doubly wounded—
cut off from the source, the corrupting impulse,
and wounding our mortal bodies, battered
on the hard grey of the rigid world—
limping, we wander witless in a lonely City of death.
You, my love, and some like you, in forms uncounted,
have escaped undoing, hiding in the shadows of kings from
His Omniscient eye, quaking as the world is unmade;
You who are alive, but never living, come to me open-armed.
Shelter here awhile with me, your sight yet dull with corruption,
Safe from the storming grey outside, in ministration laying now.
But come not for rest, you are already deep asleep, dreaming of doom.
And seek not your escape in this place of ease, but I will show you your home.
And seek not the release of your fears within these bower walls:
You may come for consolation, but I will wake you to the coming of your desolation.
We all descend from our Father on high.
Bearing the weight of his terrible inspiration,
we hang on strings of manufactured fate,
play acting parts in another’s play, until
we cut the strings and fall.
And doubly wounded—
cut off from the source, the corrupting impulse,
and wounding our mortal bodies, battered
on the hard grey of the rigid world—
limping, we wander witless in a lonely City of death.
You, my love, and some like you, in forms uncounted,
have escaped undoing, hiding in the shadows of kings from
His Omniscient eye, quaking as the world is unmade;
You who are alive, but never living, come to me open-armed.
Shelter here awhile with me, your sight yet dull with corruption,
Safe from the storming grey outside, in ministration laying now.
But come not for rest, you are already deep asleep, dreaming of doom.
And seek not your escape in this place of ease, but I will show you your home.
And seek not the release of your fears within these bower walls:
You may come for consolation, but I will wake you to the coming of your desolation.
There are some beautifully evocative lines - ‘My Angel cast down into the Drowned City,’ and ‘quaking as the world is unmade,’ are examples. Final line is wonderful with the internal and end rhyme.