The Dead Prophet

Dead!

And the Muses cried with a stormy cry,

"Send them no more for evermore:

Let the people die."

Dead!

"Is it he then, brought so low?"

And the careless people flocked from the field

With a purse to pay for the show.

Dead, who had served his time,

Was one of the peoples' kings;

Had laboured in lifting them out of the slime

And showing them souls have wings.

Dumb on the winter heath he lay,

His friends had stripped him bare,

And rolled his nakedness everywhere

That all the crowd might stare.

A storm-worn signpost need not be read,

And a tree with a mouldered nest

On its barkless bones stood stark by the dead;

And behind him, low in the West,

With shifting ladders of shadow and light,

And blurred in colour and form -

The sun hung over the Gates of Night

And glared at a coming storm…

Then glided a vulturous Bedlam forth

That dumb Death had thriven;

They called Her Reverence here upon Earth,

And The Curse of the Prophet in Heaven.

She knelt - "We worship him!" - all but wept,

"So noble and great was he!"

She cleared her sight, She arose,

She swept the dust of Earth from her knee:

"Great! for he spoke and the people heard,

And his eloquence caught like a flame

From zone to zone of the world till his Word

Had won him a noble name.

Noble! he sung, and the sweet sound ran

Through palace and cottage door,

For he touched on the whole sad planet of man,

The kings, and the rich and the poor;

"And he sung alone not of an old sunset,

But a sun coming up in his youth!

Great and noble, O yes, but yet,

For Man is a lover of Truth,

"And bound to follow, wherever She go,

Stark naked, and up or down,

Through her high hill-passes of stainless snow,

Or the foulest sewer of the town -

"Noble and great, O aye, but then

(Though a Prophet should have his due),

Was he nobler-fashioned than other men?

Shall we see to it - I and you?

"For since he would sit upon a Prophet's seat,

As lord of the Human soul,

We needs must scan him from head to feet,

Were it but for a wart or a mole."

His wife and child stood by him in tears,

But She, She pushed them aside,

"Though a name may last for a thousand years,

Yet a truth is a truth," She cried,

And She that haunted his pathway still,

Had often truckled and cowered;

When he rose in his wrath and yielded Her will

To the master, as overpowered…

She tumbled his helpless corpse about:

"A small blemish upon the skin!

But I think we know what is fair without

Is often as foul within!"

She crouched, She tore him part from part,

And out of the body She drew

The red Blood-eagle of liver and heart;

She held them up to the view.

She gabbled, as She groped in the dead,

And all the people were pleased;

"See what a little heart," she said,

"And the liver is half-diseased!"

She tore the prophet after death,

And the people paid Her well.

Lightnings flickered along the heath;

One shrieked, "The Fires of Hell!"…