THE INSOMNIAD: an essay on original sin

Some times, because I weary of the sheep Which over mental turnpikes seem to leap, I have tried sleeping with the Pentateuch Beside my bed, or some such weighty bookIllustrious Buffon, the incomparable Newton, The Decline and Fall of Edward Gibbon,

(That treatise on the mind of David Hume) And in the still small hours have pierced the gloom With Ovid, Lucretius, Plato's Apology, Professor Joseph Needham's Embryology, Hermes Trismegistus, or some such gollywollogy; Refusing to admit in my insomnia

The maxim: Post coitum tristis omnia .. Life, like the Hare's and Hatter's cyclic tea, Seems to repeat (See Eliot's poetry) The ancient menu in the dish prehensile, Eternal error in a new utensil,

Seeming the dormeuse soul to much perplex By joining opposites as mad as sex

In rolling spheres, like Aristophanes

(Note: Similars were joined in some of these) With strains of Vico, Hegel, Heraclitus,

Spengler, Jung and Joyce, and we, like Finnegan

Must sleep and wake but to begin again...

Jonah, like the human mind,

Is older than the hills,

Left only yesterday behind His pre-mammalian gills. Not in utter nakedness Comes Jonah to the shore, But trailing his half-bakedness And obsolescent lore.

Unconscious of vestigial frills And atavistic tail,

Against his deep nostalgic ills How can his will prevail?

He bears the burden of the past

In every living cell,

How can he love his God at last

Who never made His hell?

Who, bearing marks of Cain and Ham Will dare to say, with God, I AM? . . .

Now I'm a pygmy, neutered Newton, Wandering around on Arnold's beach, Flicking flat pebbles into the ocean

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Of faith resurgent whose terrible screech Proclaims it powerful and far from dead Would Matthew I wonder, recommend a try If he had got this singular reply?

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