Poem 10

with death, and lengthened out To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet Mortality, my sentence, and be earth Insensible! how glad would lay me down As in my mother’s lap! There I should rest And sleep secure; his dreadful voice no more Would thunder in my ears; no fear of worse To me and to my offspring would torment me With cruel expectation. Yet one doubt Pursues me still, lest all I cannot die; Lest that pure breath of life, the spirit of Man Which God inspired, cannot together perish With this corporeal clod; then, in the grave, Or in some other dismal place, who knows But I shall die a living death? O thought Horrid, if true! Yet why? It was but breath Of life that sinned: what dies but what had life And sin? the body properly hath neither. All of me then shall die: let this appease The doubt, since human reach no further knows. For though the Lord of all be infinite, Is his wrath also? Be it, Man is not so, But mortal doomed. How can he exercise Wrath without end on Man, whom death must end? Can he make deathless death? That were to make Strange contradiction; which to God himself Impossible is held, as argument Of weakness, not of power. Will he draw out, For anger’s sake, finite to infinite In punished Man, to satisfy his rigour Satisfied never? That were to extend His sentence beyond dust and Nature’s law; By which all causes else according still To the reception of their matter act, Not to the extent of their own sphere. But say That death be not one stroke, as I supposed, Bereaving sense, but endless misery From this day onward, which I feel begun Both in me and without me, and so last To perpetuity⁠—Ay me! that fear Comes thundering back with dreadful revolution On my defenceless head! Both Death and I Am found eternal, and incorporate both: Nor I on my part single; in me all Posterity stands cursed. Fair patrimony That I must leave ye, sons! Oh, were I able To waste it all myself, and leave ye none! So disinherited, how would ye bless Me, now your curse! Ah, why should all mankind, For one man’s fault, thus guiltless be condemned, If guiltless? But from me what can proceed But all corrupt, both mind and will depraved Not to do only, but to will the same With me? How can they