Explore "Incarnate Devil" by Dylan Thomas on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Incarnate devil in a talking snake, / The central plains of Asia in his garden, / In shaping-time the circle stung awake, / In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple,
And God walked there who was a fiddling warden / And played down pardon from the heavens' hill.
When we were strangers to the guided seas, / A handmade moon half holy in a cloud, / The wisemen tell me that the garden gods
Twined good and evil on an eastern tree; / And when the moon rose windily it was / Black as the beast and paler than the cross.
We in our Eden knew the secret guardian / In sacred waters that no frost could harden,
And in the mighty mornings of the earth; / Hell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth, / All heaven in a midnight of the sun, / A serpent fiddled in the shaping-time.