Like "The Morning Song of Lord Zero", "Evil Is the Palindrome" is an excellent text for starting the study of Conrad Aiken's poetry. A simple, a straight forward poetic explanation of his ideas, "Evil" does not involve the intricate and, at times, convoluted dialogues that characterize so many of Aiken's major works  such as "Preludes For Memnon" , "Landscape West of Eden" and "Time in the Rock". Nonetheless, rather typically for Aiken,  "Evil", involves two people, the "sweetheart" (CP. 869) mentioned in the first line of the poem and the narrator, who is presumably a mask for Aiken himself. What simplifies the poem is the fact that the "sweetheart" listen quietly to what boils down to a poetic lecture.

 Not unexpectedly for a rather didactic poem, 'Evil" begins with a simple, unsupported assertion of the poem's major premise, "Perception is the beginning" (CP, 869), meaning, thereby, that human awareness or consciousness and the nature of this awareness determines how we see the world and, consequently, how we act. There is nothing terribly earth-shaking in this but the reader soon senses that this commonplace is not going in the ordinary 'nothing-is-so-but-thinking-makes-it-so' direction.

  ...perception
  opens the window from which we view
  terror fluttering toward us down an empty road
  delight screaming on dark wings over the hill.
         (CP, 869)

 Why would the first experience of opening ourselves to the world be terror? The answer is that the first act of perception requires us to distinguish self from not-self, from which it follows that each self lives utterly surrounded by not-self.  The self thus feels overwhelmed by the alien world in which it lives. This terror is not necessarily permanent, for, as the next line mentions "delight screaming on dark wings over the hill"(CP869). Opening the windows of perception also brings pleasure but such pleasure will always be mixed with the original experience of terror.

 Another way of expressing this is to say that the self first experiences evil when its awareness begins, when it experiences the dark mysterious, overwhelming and potentially threatening not-self around it. Because this experience is unavoidable, to live means first of all, to experience evil. Hence, living, which, as

shall be shown, means living consciously, that is, with 'open windows' and evil are two sides of a single activity. Either both are accepted, or neither.

 This state of affairs challenges us to find a proper way of conducting our lives. "Shall we run? Shall we stand still?" (CP, 869). The narrator does not immediately answer these questions but bursts into the lyrical refrain that marks the end of each stanza:

  O if we cannot live or love, let us forgive:
  evil is the palindrome of live.
      (CP, 869)

The meaning of these lines is not fully clear at this point in the poem. What,  precisely, is meant by "live"? The meaning of the phrase "let us forgive", however, seems obvious: if we can't consciously understand why evil is inevitable we can at least accept the fact that it is so, expressed in the line, "evil is the palindrome of live." (CP, 869).

 The second stanza, beginning with what is, in effect, a restatement of the opening lines of the poem,"[t]e first act is to open our eyes to the light" (CP, 869), expands the theme of perception: "the last act is to close them to inward night"(CP, 869). This is one of Aiken's typical - and deliciously - ambiguous lines. On one hand it refers to death, when we close our eyes for the last time  not only against the outward light of the surrounding world, but also to the "inward night" (CP869) of our own fears, secrets and misdeeds. On the other hand, this closing of the eyes also means the end of living consciously in the world, the end of perception; it is a flight from consciousness, from the terrors and delights of the self/not-self division that characterizes all human be-ing. Is such flight cowardly? In the first instance no, in the second yes. Physical death is unavoidable but the flight from consciousness is a decision  to flee from life itself.  Consequently, if we cannot really live, that is, cannot bear reality as it is, if we must "close our eyes to terror, close them to weep" (CP, 869), or, if we cannot love the reality  despite its often frightening ambiguities, then we should at least forgive, the world, others and, of course, ourselves for being what we are.

 Having noted that the least that  humans can do, "forgive" without full understanding, the narrator then spells out the ideal attitude for which we should strive.
 

  Praise, praise the dreadful fountain of all blaze,
  the immense, cruel, dazzling, spouting source
  of ethereal violent living and death-dealing powers:
        (CP, 869)

Ideally, we not only  accept  but also take joy in the world as we find it: frightening; cruel;  rich and fecund ("fountain" and "spouting"); violent "death-dealing") and beautiful ( in the lovely image of "the fountain of all blaze").
This is simply the nature of the world into which we are born and in which we either open our eyes in the struggle for consciousness or close them in fear.
This stanza, too, ends, with the narrator's fall-back, minimal position:
"If we cannot live or love, let us forgive:/evil is the palindrome of live."(CP, 870)

 In the last stanza of this poem, the narrator clarifies what he means by "live":

  Live for the frontier of the daily unknown, of terror,
  ...
  live for the borderland, the daybreak, whence, we start
  to live and love, and if we cannot live to forgive:
  evil is the palindrome of live.
       (CP, 870)

Living, in its fullest sense, means that we willfully and joyously participate in the activity that, according to Aiken,  is the essence of humankind: the evolution of consciousness. We live "for the frontier" (CP, 870,) or the "borderland"  (CP, 870) to know and experience more and more of the world and ourselves in all their beauty and terror. In so doing, we evolve our consciousness and, thereby, consciously become what we really are, beings whose destiny is to take conscious command of their own evolution. In an image that brings readers back to the beginning of the poem,  the narrator intimates it is human nature to live for the "daybreak" of consciousness, which, like the horizon, recedes before us in humanity's endless evolution both as a species and as individuals. The poem concludes with what has already been described as the "fall-back' position,  namely, that if we cannot live, that is evolve consciously, or love the world as it is, we must, at least, forgive for one simple reason: the evil inherent this world is unavoidable for the simple reason that the self/not-self distinction is unavoidable.
 

 "Evil Is the Palindrome" is a typical example of how much Aiken can pack into even his shortest and simplest poems. Like the other great masters of English poetry, he is able to load even the simplest images with an enormous amount of content, as for example, in the images of opening and closing our eyes or looking out a window, an often re-recurring image in his work. This small poem illustrates once again how richly Aiken's poetry repays the effort to study it carefully.