Huxley, Aldous: The Burning Wheel

Wearied of its own turning,

Distressed with its own busy restlessness,

Yearning to draw the circumferent pain—

The rim that is dizzy with speed—

To the motionless centre, there to rest,

The wheel must strain through agony

On agony contracting, returning

Into the core of steel.

And at last the wheel has rest, is still,

Shrunk to an adamant core:

Fulfilling its will in fixity.

But the yearning atoms, as they grind

Closer and closer, more and more

Fiercely together, beget

A flaming fire upward leaping,

Billowing out in a burning,

Passionate, fierce desire to find

The infinite calm of the mother’s breast.

And there the flame is a Christ-child sleeping,

Bright, tenderly radiant;

All bitterness lost in the infinite

Peace of the mother’s bosom.

But death comes creeping in a tide

Of slow oblivion, till the flame in fear

Wakes from the sleep of its quiet brightness

And burns with a darkening passion and pain,

Lest, all forgetting in quiet, it perish.

And as it burns and anguishes it quickens,

Begetting once again the wheel that yearns—

Sick with its speed—for the terrible stillness

Of the adamant core and the steel-hard chain.

And so once more

Shall the wheel revolve till its anguish cease

In the iron anguish of fixity;

Till once again

Flame billows out to infinity,

Sinking to a sleep of brightness

In that vast oblivious peace.