Amenophis and Other Poems Sacred and Secular :: :: University of Virginia Library

So far! so very far!
And this life pressing in, for good and ill,
Sea-like at every pore; the tangible
Shrunk round the soul with adamantine bar,
—And that world further than the farthest star!

So long ago! so long!
The world devouring with impassion'd stride
Its history; Years that rather surge, than glide;
Peace with her garish triumphs, and the throng
Of wonders working equal weal and wrong;

Science so free of hand,
Yet vaunting more than she can give or know;
The dazzling Present with his glory-show;
—And that scarce-visible life in Syrian land,
Lost and time-buried by the Dead Sea strand!

—Strange warfare, which the seen,
The present, wage against the unseen, the past!
As that enchantress, whose sweet guile held fast
Within her palace-walls and forest green
The gray world-wanderer;—though the faithful Queen

Sate in his island-hall,
And the hearth blazed in winter, and the sun
Shone summer-high above the mountains dun,
As erst before the fatal Spartan call,
And the long siege, and holy Ilion's fall:—

But he remembers nought
Of what has been, and will be:—till the spell
Fade, and his eyes behold the invisible
Long hid:—the faithful wife, the fields he fought
The signs Athena for his safety wrought.

—We too, amid the glare
Of present life, misdeem the world we view,
Our small horizon, for the boundless blue,
Holding all things must be as now they are,
And our experience valid everywhere.

‘Let others tell their tale
‘Of wonders by the Hellenic questioning mind
‘Accepted:—We ne'er saw the shroud unbind
‘Its tenant; nor the cheek change rose for pale,
‘Raised up from earth: nor do our powers avail

‘To go round Death, and view
‘An incorporeal life in realms unseen!
‘So let what will be rest with what has been!
‘Let the bright Hours their daily dance renew,
‘While dreamers chase the Eternal and the True.

‘If scanty all we know,
‘At least, 'tis knowledge palpable and pure:
‘We see!—Thus far, our footsteps are secure:
‘No more we ask than sense and senses show,
‘And Hope and Faith, vain luxuries, forgo.

‘The envious Fates on high
‘Grudge our horizon, nor will let man stray
‘Unpunish'd past the bounds of sentient clay,
‘And puff to scorn the adventurers who try
‘On self-blown airballs to transcend the sky.

‘Man was not made to soar!
‘Ascidian-born, not Angel: on this earth
‘We clench our sight, nor claim a loftier birth;
‘Accept our fate and creep along the shore,
‘And with life's music drown the dead-sea roar.’

—To Circe's sleep-soft isle
Straight let us steer, and live by Circe's creed,
If this be all, if this be all, indeed!
—But should our science of things seen, meanwhile,
Have its own bounds and quicksands: Should the smile

Of sceptic doubt assail
The message of the senses; whether things
Be what we see and touch, or imagings
By self on self imposed, without avail
To make us grasp the Infinite, which our frail

Yet eager reason knows
Essential to the scheme of thought, and yet
Transcending thought, because 'tis infinite:-
If beyond Space and Time no wisdom goes,
—Man's limitations, yet to which man owes

The stage whereon he stands
And breathes and thinks and acts:—How then shall man
Cut fragments out from Nature's general plan,
Naming these known, while all beyond he hands
To nescience?—O fair palace, but on sands,

For all thy bravery, set!—
—To our own selves, O friends, let us be just!
Either not know, or else our knowledge trust:
For all our wisdom, howsoe'er we fret,
Or boast our narrow certainties, is yet

Enframed by hint and guess
And theory:—As when the nights are dark
In Autumn, and men trace a transient arc
That threads its burning way with lightning stress,
And then is swallow'd in blank nothingness,

Deducing from the seen
A credible unseen; some curve, to roll
Wider for aye, or circle, closed and whole:
—So on our knowledge, partial though, we lean,
And what will be forecast from what has been.

—O sceptics airily bold!
'Tis Reason bids you scorn the facile sneer
That bars the search for truth beyond the sphere!
It is the weak who doubt; the strong who hold
The resolute Faith where new is one with old.

Within a narrow vale
Rock-wall'd and closed, and skies with cloud o'erwrought,
The Powers have planted Man, for life and thought
Knowledge, and love: and, from beyond the pale,
Some bird of God at times above may sail,

Or gleams ascend and go,
As on some castle turret-steps by night
The lamp climbs square by square, and light o'er light;
And then the shameful things of sin and woe,
The poison-plants that in the valley grow,

The sights that in the heart
Tingle, and make us cry, O Lord! how long?
Hast Thou forgotten? Why concede such wrong?
Glare with less luridness, and the cloud in part
Thins, and behind we know Thee, that Thou art;—

Justice, and Love, and Law
Eternal.—Madness then, aside to thrust
The heart's unsyllabled voice, the instinctive trust,
The signal gleams that lighten and withdraw,
Because with mortal sense man never saw

Nor touch'd nor measured God!—
—As that lone sophist of earth's earlier days
Empedocles, who life's common, sunlit, ways
Scorn'd, and the lava layers of Aetna trod,
And dived for light in Typho's red abode:

Nor saw the Immortals rise
Star-eyed around the zenith, when the veil
Of marsh-white mist parts in the midnight gale;
Nor where the dawn above horizon lies,
And Phoebus fluting to the saffron skies.