and drawing its mantel closer. Love thwarted and becoming acid. Hatred mounting too high and thinning into pity. Hunger for life unappeased and becoming a stream under-ground Where only blind things swim. God year by year removing himself to remoter thrones Of inexorable law. God coming closer even while disease And total blindness came between him and God And defeated the mercy of God. And a love and a trust growing deeper in him As she in great thirst, hanging on the cross, Mocked his crucifixion, And talked philosophy between the spasms of pain, Till at last she is all satirist, And he is all saint. And all the children were raised After the strictest fashion in New England, And made to join the church, And attend its services. And these were the children:       Janet was a religious fanatic and a virago, She debated religion with her husband for ten years, Then he refused to talk, and for twenty years Scarcely spoke to her. She died a convert to Catholicism. They had two children:      The boy became a forgerer Of notorious skill. The daughter married, but was barren. Miranda married a rich man And spent his money so fast that he failed. She lashed him with a scorpion tongue And made him believe at last With her incessant reasonings That he was a fool, and so had failed. In middle life he started over again, But became tangled in a law-suit. Because of these things he killed himself. Louise was a nymphomaniac. She was married twice. Both husbands fled from her insatiable embraces. At thirty-two she became a woman on a telephone list, Subject to be called, And for two years ran through a daily orgy of sex, When blindness came on her, as it came on her father before her, And she became a Christian Scientist, And led an exemplary life. Deborah was a Puritan of Puritans, Her list of unmentionable things Tabooed all the secrets of creation, Leaving politics, religion, and human faults, And the mistakes most people make, And the natural depravity of man, And his freedom to redeem himself if he chooses, As the only subjects of conversation. As a twister of words and meanings, And a skilled welder of fallacies, And a swift emerger from ineluctable traps of logic, And a wit with an adder's tongue, And a laugher, And an unafraid facer of enemies, Oppositions, hatreds, She never knew her equal. She was at once very cruel, and very tender, Very selfish and very generous Very little and very magnanimous. Scrupulous as to the truth, 

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