Movement VIII: The Anvil of Atrophy
Sonnet XXXVI: The Trek Through the Tundra of TautologyHe marched across a plain of frozen breath,Where every footstep echoed its own sound,A landscape of a cold and circular death,Where meaning in a loop was ever bound."A rose is but a rose," the air was found,To whisper in a weary, grey refrain,Until the King, upon that hallowed ground,Felt the slow numbing of his royal brain.To say the same is but to court the vain,And stall the chariot of the sun’s ascent;He pushed through drifts of terminological rain,Until the power of the loop was spent.Before him rose the Anvil, black and vast,Where every weary word is forged at last.
Sonnet XXXVII: The Hammers of the Hueless Hours
Twelve titans stood around the iron block,Their faces featureless as desert glass,They struck the rhythm of the cosmic clock,And watched the glory of the æons pass.Their hammers were of dense, mercurial mass,That crushed the diamond back into the coal,And burned away the withered, wordy grass,To find the silent center of the soul."Behold!" the King cried, "I have brought the toll,The jagged thorn that pricked the Great Design,The 'I' that would the universe control,And turn the holy water into brine."The titans paused, their hammers poised on high,Beneath the lidless watching of the sky.
Sonnet XXXVIII: The Smelting of the Sovereign "I"
He laid the rune upon the freezing steel,That crooked symbol of the ego’s pride,And felt a shudder like a thunder-peal,Through every vein and every bone inside.For he and "I" were dangerously allied,The King was but the pronoun’s gilded mask;To kill the lie, the seeker too must bide,The fire of the reconstructive task."What is the truth?" the titans seemed to ask,With every blow that fell upon the spark;He stripped away the grand, linguistic flask,To stand a naked spirit in the dark.The metal glowed with a defiant red,Until the arrogance of "Self" was dead.
Sonnet XXXIX: The Ash of the Absolute
The rune dissolved into a silver ash,A fine and ghostly dust of "Is" and "Am,"That vanished in a sudden, blinding flash,Like sacrificial blood of some great lamb.The gates of thought, that held the cosmic dam,Were opened to a flood of wordless light,Removing every artifice and sham,That cluttered up the channels of the sight.The King was hollowed by the hammers’ might,A flute of bone for God’s own breath to play,No longer struggling in the ink-stained night,To find a name for the eternal day.The Anvil rang with one final, pure tone,That shook the foundations of the highest throne.
Sonnet XL: The Emergence from the Atrophy
He rose from out the furnace, changed and still,His eyes like basins of a quiet lake,With no more hunger for a private will,Nor any thirst for words for talking’s sake.The frost of the Tautology did break,Beneath a spring that had no need for name,And every sleeping syllable did wake,To find itself within a different frame.He was the fire, and he was the flame,The poet and the silence of the page,A king who had no kingdom left to claim,Beyond the wisdom of a wordless age.The Anvil faded like a morning mist,As things that Are replaced the things that List.The King has been purified.
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