If you can find the butterflies¹ still, when most
Cannot face the sun; if you know when you have been sifted -
Your faith, should you lose it, will be to you still a signpost.
Will love no more be courted, if some cannot love?
Will all hope corrode, if north wind is counted fair?
Will all faith be vain, if a dauntless breast can starve?
Will all beauty be baseless, if some of our judgments won’t wear?
Will morality be cancelled, if unmade by the null and void?
Will all truths be errors, if some errors are certainly true?
Will humanity be discounted, if a few are seemingly devoid?
Like a testy nurse who jettisons the baby with the bath water,
Or a butler who steals your silver and stifles his conscience,
Nietzsche ‘lived dangerously’. When waves ran high, the supporter
Of greedy sea-farers complained for want of accidents,
Sported with the monsters of the deep, where he finally drowned.²
Nihilism’s like the sea, bitter and boundless, reconciled
To no shore, breaks and is not broken, wipes out all ground.
Who has not felt on this broad, engulfing sea
His humanity shrink, felt landfall to be a vain hope,
Despaired as truth is revealed to be fantasy, and decency
A dead duck to a Captain Bligh? How will you cope
In a storm up in the crow’s-nest? Denounce this Caliban
And who should ‘scape whipping? Yet use him after your own dignity,
The less merit is there in his Bounty. Suck up to Superman,
Lower yourself in your own eyes to the common denominator
Of weakling de-humanity that praises selfishness as glorious
And you’ll still not escape his existentialist super-devastator -
² Nietzsche died, tragically, in an insane asylum. So the deep symbolizes the subconscious, where the reasons for nihilism lie hidden. The view that rejects all values, rules and beliefs (including belief in an innate humanity), as meaningless or unfounded, is like being at sea without ever sighting land.