THE BOOK OF AHANIA. CHAPTER V.

1. The lamenting voice of Ahania,
Weeping upon the void
And round the Tree of Fuzon:
Distant in solitary night
Her voice was heard , but no form
Had she; but her tears from clouds
Eternal fell round the Tree;

2  . And the voice cried: ‘Ah, Urizen! Love!
Flower of morning! I weep on the verge
Of Non-entity; how wide the Abyss
Between Ahania and thee!

3  . ‘I lie on the verge of the deep,
I see thy dark clouds ascend,
I see thy black forests and floods,
A horrible waste to my eyes!

4  . ‘Weeping I walk over rocks,
Over dens & thro’ valleys of death.
Why didst thou despise Ahania,
To cast me from thy bright presence
Into the World of Loneness?

5  . ‘I cannot touch his hand,
Nor weep on his knees, nor hear
his voice & bow, nor see his eyes
And joy, nor hear his footsteps and
My heart leap at the lovely sound!
I cannot kiss the place
Whereon his bright feet have trod,
But I wander on the rocks
With hard necessity.

6  . ‘Where is my golden palace?
Where my ivory bed?
Where the joy of my morning hour?
Where the sons of eternity singing

7  . ‘To awake bright Urizen, my king,
To arise to the mountain sport,
To the bliss of eternal valleys;

8  . ‘To awake my king in the morn
To embrace Ahania’s joy
On the bredth of his open bosom,
From my soft cloud of dew to fall
In showers of life on his harvests?

9  . ‘When he gave my happy soul
To the sons of eternal joy;
When he took the daughters of life
into my chambers of love;

10  . When I found babes of bless on my beds,
And bosoms of mild in my chambers
Fill’d with eternal seed,
O! eternal births sung round Ahania
In interchange sweet of their joys.

11  . “Swell’d with ripeness & fat with fatness,
Bursting on winds my odors,
My ripe figs and rich pomegranates
In infant joy at thy feet,
O Urizen, sported and sang.

12  . ‘Then thou with thy lap full of seed,
With thy hand full of generous fire,
Walked forth form the clouds of morning,
On the virgins of springing joy,
On the human soul to cast
The seed of eternal science.

13  . ‘The sweat poured down thy temples;
To Ahania return’d in evening
The moisture awoke to birth
My mother’s-joys, sleeping in bliss.

14  . ‘But now, alone, over rocks, mountains,
Cast out form thy lovely bosom.
Cruel jealousy, selfish fear,
self-destroying: how can delight
Renew in these chains of darkness,
Where bones of beasts are strown
On the bleak and snowy mountains,
Where bones form the birth are buried
Before they see the light?’