those walls. 

 

XXIII.

 Even as upon a low and cloud-domed day, When clouds are one cloud till the horizon, Our thinking senses deem the sun away And say «’tis sunless» and «there is no sun»; And yet the very day they wrong truth by Is of the unseen sun’s effluent essence, The very words do give themselves the lie, The very thought of absence comes from presence: Even so deem we through Good of what is evil. He speaks of light that speaks of absent light, And absent god, becoming present devil, Is still the absent god by essence’ right. The withdrawn cause by being withdrawn doth get (Being thereby cause still) the denied effect. 

 

XXIV.

 Something in me was born before the stars And saw the sun begin from far away. Our yellow, local day on its wont jars, For it hath communed with an absolute day. Through my Thought’s night, as a worn robe’s heard trail That I have never seen, I drag this past That saw the Possible like a dawn grow pale On the lost night before it, mute and vast. It dates remoter than God’s birth can reach, That had no birth but the world’s coming after. So the world’s to me as, after whispered speech, The cause-ignored sudden echoing of laughter. That ’t has a meaning my conjecture knows, But that ’t has meaning’s all its meaning shows. 

 

XXV.

 We are in Fate and Fate’s and do but lack Outness from soul to know ourselves its dwelling, And do but compel Fate aside or back By Fate’s own immanence in the compelling. We are too far in us from outward truth To know how much we are not what we are, And live but in the heat of error’s youth, Yet young enough its acting youth to ignore. The doubleness of mind fails us, to glance At our exterior presence amid things, Sizing from otherness our countenance And seeing our puppet will’s act-acting strings. An unknown language speaks in us, which we Are at the words of, fronted from reality. 

 

XXVI.

 The world is woven all of dream and error And but one sureness in our truth may lie— That when we hold to aught our thinking’s mirror We know it not by knowing it thereby. For but one side of things the mirror knows, And knows it colded from its solidness. A double lie its truth is; what it shows By true show’s false and nowhere by true 

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