Originally published at The Catholic Thing
There is a place that some men know,
I cannot see the whole of it,
Nor how men come there. Long ago
Flame burst out of a secret pit
Crushing the world with such a light
The day sky fell to moonless black,
The kingly sun to hateful night
For those, once seeing, turning back:
For love so hates mortality,
Which is the providence of life,
She will not let it blessed be
But curses it with mortal strife.
Until beside the blinding rood
Within that world-destroying pit
–Like young wolves that have tasted blood
Of death, men taste no more of it:
So blind in so severe a place
(All life before in the black grave)
The last alternatives they face
Of life, without the life to save,
Being from all salvation weaned–
A stag charged both at heel and head:
Who would come back is turned a fiend
Instructed by the fiery dead.
