Jean Wahl

## Ecstasies

### I

Meadow and pool, sea and fire,
Along the meadow I walk, I ponder over the pool,
Into the sea straight I dive and I leap into the fire,
And all ceases but my bliss.

### II

It's something more profound than pleasure,
And deeper also than knowledge.
In vain I seek a name for it.
It is a fusion instinct with science.
It is an unmovable indifference streaked with superficial light.

### III

It's surging of wave, the upheaving of a mountain, the crescence of a lake,
And a fire and a tear.

### IV

Knife of heaven, thou stabbesst me.
It opens a secret life in me, red and fainting.

### V

Blue and somber architecture of waves,
Each on the other superincumbent more somber and more blue,
Till the stars themselves engulfed in this great surge,
Swept and besprinkling this deep melody,
Become trembling notes in this cosmic orchestra,
Huge blocks of feelings melted and carried away;
And ever and ever the movement keeps the movement grows,
With from time to time a deep ecstacy of a curling wave,
And the mountainous sea begins anew,
Singulting sea, moving altar, chorus of supplicating hands.

Jean Wahl

Fragment of a Pseudo-Prophetic Book

Enitharmon arose from her flowery beds,
And sang of Beulah and of her strong delight.

This is the delusion of love, and the revelation of wisdom,
This is the gliding pleasure along which we glide,
The slope aslant the abyss, the unfathomable deep.

The multitudinous glowing stars, sobbing as waves in the well.
Here is the vast expanse where our spirit lifts its wings,
And glides, immeasurably, in perpetual transition,

From one pole to another, from the midst of the night to the midst of
the day,
From one cliff to one abyss, from the cavern to the peaks,
From the enclosure into oneself to the expansion into the all,
To the breaking of oneself on the hardest cliffs of the world.
Nothing is so firm that there is not something firmer,
Nothing is so smooth that there is not something smoother,
And the spirit is he that comprises the smooth and the firm,
And who is shut out by them.

Deliver me from Beulah, the place of delight,
And throw me amidst the red tempests of Ulro.
There is my paradise, my terrible paradise.

So sang, so shrieked Enitharmon. And her wailings were echoed in the
caves of Golgonooza.