Did I bid thee Mock, and forget me for thy friend — I say not, King? Is thy heart so light and lean a thing, So loose in faith and faint in love? I b… - Algernon Charles Swinburne

"Before The Beginning Of Years"

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance, fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell;
Strength without hands to smite;
Love that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light,
And life, the shadow of death.

And the high gods took in hand
Fire, and the falling of tears,
And a measure of sliding sand
From under the feet of the years;
And froth and the drift of the sea;
And dust of the laboring earth;
And bodies of things to be
In the houses of death and of birth;
And wrought with weeping and laughter,
And fashioned with loathing and love,
With life before and after
And death beneath and above,
For a day and a night and a morrow,
That his strength might endure for a span
With travail and heavy sorrow,
The holy spirit of man.

From the winds of the north and the south,
They gathered as unto strife;
They breathed upon his mouth,
They filled his body with life;
Eyesight and speech they wrought
For the veils of the soul therein,
A time for labor and thought,
A time to serve and to sin;
They gave him light in his ways,
And love, and space for delight,
And beauty, and length of days,
And night, and sleep in the night.
His speech is a burning fire;
With his lips he travaileth;
In his heart is a blind desire,
In his eyes foreknowledge of death;
He weaves, and is clothed with derision;
Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.

By Heaven, had I the teeth of Caucasus
Red-hot from Promethean agonies,
And tusks more lucid than the lunar snows,
On those jagged lawns of Asia, cavernous
With many a dragon banquet-eyes like those
Minerva made of flint to shatter Jove — I'd hurl their hate upon thee, and myself
Die in a red parabola of Fate! — Ernest Wheldrake, The Monomaniac's Tragedy

And lo, between the sundawn and the sun
His day's work and his night's work are undone:
And lo, between the nightfall and the light,
He is not, and none knoweth of such an one.