XII
So in this agony of enforcèd silence
The sober song breaks to a phrenzied scream;
The shattering brain admits the mad god's violence,
And wild things course as in an evil dream:
Devils and dancers, druid rites and dread,
Horrible symbols scarred across the sky,
Invisible terrors of the quick and dead,
Impossible phantoms in mad revelry
Conjoined in spinthriae of bestial form,
Human-faced toads, and serpent-headed women,
All lashed and slashed by the all-wandering storm
Caricature of all things holy and human—
—Such are the discords that absolve the strain
As this wild threnody dissolves the brain.
The sober song breaks to a phrenzied scream;
The shattering brain admits the mad god's violence,
And wild things course as in an evil dream:
Devils and dancers, druid rites and dread,
Horrible symbols scarred across the sky,
Invisible terrors of the quick and dead,
Impossible phantoms in mad revelry
Conjoined in spinthriae of bestial form,
Human-faced toads, and serpent-headed women,
All lashed and slashed by the all-wandering storm
Caricature of all things holy and human—
—Such are the discords that absolve the strain
As this wild threnody dissolves the brain.
— 78 —
