Satan monologue — Satan Absolved: A Victorian Mystery

Ah, glorious Lord God! Thou hadst Infinity From which to choose Thy plan. This plan, no less than those, Was noble in conception, when its vision rose Before Thee in Thy dreams. Thou deemedst to endow Time with a great new wonder, wonderful as Thou, Matter made sensitive, informed with Life, with Soul. It grieved Thee the Stars knew not. Thou couldst not cajole Their music into tears, their beauty to full praise. Thou askedst one made conscious of Thy works and ways, One dowered with sense and passion, which should feel and move And weep with Thee and laugh, one that alas, should love. Thus didst thou mould the Earth. We Spirits, wondering, eyed Thy new-born fleshly things, Thy Matter deified. We saw the sea take life, its myriad forms all fair. We saw the creeping things, the dragons of the air, The birds, the four-foot beasts, all beautiful, all strong, All brimming o'er with joyaunce, new green woods among, Twice glorious in their lives. And we, who were but spirit, Envied their lusty lot, their duplicated merit, Their feet, their eyes, their wings, their physical desires, The anger of their voices, the fierce sexual fires Which lit their sentient limbs and joined them heart to heart, Their power to act, to feel, all that corporeal part Which is the truth of love and giveth the breathing thing The wonder of its beauty incarnate in Spring. What was there, Lord, in Heaven comparable with this, The mother beast with her young? Not even Thy happiness, Lord of the Universe! What beautiful, what bold, What passionate as she? She doth not chide nor scold When at her dugs he mumbleth. Nay, the milk she giveth Is as a Sacrament, the power by which he liveth A double life with hers. And they two in a day Know more of perfect joy than we, poor Spirits, may In our eternity of sober loneliness. This was the thing we saw, and praised Thee and did bless.