Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE TWO DOMES, by CHARLES WILLIAMS


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE TWO DOMES, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: What are those domes? You asked in clerkenwell
Last Line: This is the deep unhappiness of our race.
Subject(s): Guilt; Judgments; Prisons & Prisoners; Sin


WHAT are those domes? you asked in Clerkenwell;
And I: One is the Old Bailey and one Saint Paul's,
Sitting up there like the broken halves of the shell
Of the egg of life, whose overspilt yolk we are.

Justice is perched on one, with her sword and scales,
And over her shoulder the ancient commentary,
The cross, in huge silence that neither hopes nor rails,
Peeps,—all judgement's ironical overthrow.

All wisdom, all might, watchfulness, meditation,
Fixed Law—the changeless, throned, perpetual judges,
Unfixed Opinion—the juries in congregation
Out of the mass, into the mass dissolving;

All is overwatched by that vast and still
Quiet of the Cross, into its silence
Drawing the silence of corridors that fill
Morn by morn with speechless men in our prisons:

Speechless there by man's rule as once without speech
In the dock, because no word, however they sought
In agony and haste, because no thought could reach
To their central secret, the innermost unknown motive:

The unknown motive, the common truth of all lives,
Lost somewhere between those domes, the fearful cross,
The fearful justice! O impotent law that strives
To pierce the guilty heart, and never finds it!

If judges some day having uttered their judgement arose
And themselves in the doomed man's stead were drawn to the bitter
Torment of prison or death—would that cure the woes
We suffer, and quench the unquenchable fiery pang?

Not for love's sake—leave that to a god!
Not for love but only to bring the irrational in!
Madness might wander where sanity never trod
And find the secret, and strike the irony dumb;

Strike out the cruel cross that calls us to heed
How the guilty suffer for us the guilty,—how we
Do righteously, judging rightly, but in the deed
Lose something we do not know, and lose it for ever.

Two equal bits of a dry hard brittle shell
With the yolk all spilt, the yolk that was life therein;
These are the domes you saw from Clerkenwell,
This is the deep unhappiness of our race.





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