NeverEnder – Book II, Chapter VI

Original Poem

I.
Relative universe flows through the Mind,
ripples in waves, music to some,
dreadful noise to others. Creatures unseen,
mysteries in song-tormented green oceans,
deep beneath the mantle of hungry planets,
ditzy stars, half-forgotten light.

II.
Do not let the Archive burn,
for ash cannot remember its name.

III.
Desert storm crosses the horizon,
a figure half-formed,
blurred by shifting sand.
No one remembers his name,
but his shadow falls long.

IV.
Volterra rises in memory,
its stones bathed in dusk.
A bell tolls where the cliffs
meet silence,
an echo of poets in exile.

V.
In the Archive’s dust,
a page resists the flame.
A name survives —
half-erased, half-pronounced,
spoken only in sleep.

VI.
The Gulf of Poets swallows
the last horizon,
a bay of mirrors,
its waters restless with
the ghosts of unwritten lines.

VII.
Storm returns.
The desert reshapes itself.
A man searches for his name
in broken reeds,
in the scarred palms of the dead.

VIII.
Green oceans turn black.
The mantle of planets shifts.
Ditzy stars fade
into the deep silence
of things unspoken.

IX.
Hypnos lays down his wings.
Thanatos closes the book.
Dream and Death
walk side by side,
brothers in shadow.

X.
Apollo’s bow sings.
The Python falls.
Clarity returns
like a forgotten dawn.
A grain of sand in the hand,
a seed of tenderness.

Parallel Gloss

UK	Italy	China	Japan
I. The mind is an ocean where signals turn to song or static. Blake heard it in fiery imagination, between divine harmony and industrial noise.	In Liguria, the sea is green and song-burdened. Dante’s selva oscura seeps into the Mediterranean; Volterra’s twilight echoes in the stars.	Ripples resemble the guqin string trembling. Daoist thought: noise and music are perceptions — emptiness births both.	A Zen koan: a bell strikes — some hear silence. ‘Ditzy stars’ are fleeting fireflies, as in Heian scrolls already half-lost.
II. The burning Archive recalls Alexandria, Bodleian fears of empire — knowledge as tinder.	Dante’s celestial library, Florence’s archives reborn after flame. Fire and renewal cycle endlessly.	Qin Shi Huang’s book burning still echoes — fragments survive. Ash is severed lineage.	Hiroshima’s stone shadows are archives of absence. Silence testifies beyond words.
III. A nameless figure in storm: England’s myths of Arthur lost in mist, an identity half-erased.	Dante’s pilgrim: blurred, wandering desert paths. Volterra’s wind strips names to shadows.	In Shiji, nameless wanderers lose records but cast long shadows — silence records them.	Zen warriors seek the name behind the mask — shadow as teaching, storm as impermanence.
IV. Bells across ruined abbeys toll memory. Exile is English monastic silence.	Volterra’s stones hold exile — Shelley drowned nearby, poets’ ghosts linger.	Suzhou’s stone bridges echo with absent poets, dusk on canals like bells.	Kyoto’s bells toll dusk; exile becomes mono no aware, the sorrow of passing.
V. A half-erased page: palimpsests in Oxford libraries, erased yet surviving.	Dante’s lost verses, Petrarch’s fragments — names survive in half-pronunciation.	Han fragments recovered from ashes, whispered in dreams.	Calligraphy half-washed, ink faint: read in dreams, surviving in silence.
VI. Bay of mirrors: Cornwall’s mythic coasts, restless tides of unwritten poems.	Gulf of Poets — Lerici, Byron, Shelley — exile into sea, drowned in verse.	South China Sea reflects poets’ ghosts — Li Bai drowned in moon’s reflection.	Inland seas mirror absence — Matsuo Bashō’s restless haiku drift like foam.
VII. Storm reshapes desert: post-empire Britain searching for lost name.	Dante’s desert of souls. Volterra cliffs cut by storm, seekers of identity.	Bamboo reeds split: broken records of dynasties. Dead palms scar the past.	Samurai scars record identity lost in storm. Reed fragments drift like haiku.
VIII. Black oceans: industrial smoke over Albion, stars fade in unspoken silence.	Dante’s Inferno seas. Ligurian coast darkened, stars vanish into gulf.	Yin overtakes yang; black oceans as silence, planets’ shifting as cosmic qi.	“The stars vanish” — a Zen void. Mono no aware: silence heavier than light.
IX. Hypnos and Thanatos: English Romantic dream of sleep-death twinship.	Virgil, Dante — twin guides of sleep and death.	Daoist brothers: dream and death as one passage, yin twins.	In Noh plays, dream and death walk side by side — brothers in shadow.
X. Apollo’s light dispels Python: Albion clarity, long-awaited dawn.	Apollo over Python echoes Delphi; Italian Renaissance clarity reborn.	Dawn clarity echoes Confucian renewal, a grain of sand as Daoist seed.	Zen dawn: a single grain, seed of compassion. Tenderness is enlightenment.