The Poetical Works of George Barlow :: :: University of Virginia Library

Far through the stars the human heart can reach
And mark the waves on some celestial beach
Breaking, along the night.
Our human deeds affect the furthest stars—
Change to blood-red the leaves in iron Mars,
Or change the colours of the rings and bars
That Saturn bears, storm-bright.

Our actions bound before us into space:
Not one far heavenly spectral dwelling-place
Lambent amid the gloom
But burns with deeper or with fiercer hue
For the misdeeds and sins of me or you;
The comet-birds who haunt the enormous blue
Heaven-sea, our crimes displume.

341

The whole is one.—A single act of will
(God cannot stay it) mounts the purple hill,
Climbs the stupendous night,
And, having struggled up the heavenly stair
And passed right through the star-impeded air,
Impinging on the farthest star-cliff there
Fringes its base with white.

Such air-waves are our deeds. God cannot stay
The airy course they take. From day to day
We mould all things anew.
One woman ruined in an English town
Alters the fashion of the dainty crown
Some far star-blossom bears, and sends a moan
For leagues across the blue.

The solitude is peopled with our deeds.—
Not words and thoughts, and hopes and fears, and creeds,
Not these make history grow.
Our actions build the stars, and make all space
Fit either for the high God's dwelling-place
Or a vast dungeon where our own disgrace
Fiendlike tramps to and fro.

342

The slightest noble deed is felt to-day,
Though it took place in far-off ages grey.
The woman who first clung
To the wild dream of woman's purity
Passed to the dark unhonoured; and yet she,
None other, saith to her sisters “Ye are free”
To-day, and speaks our tongue.

The singer hidden in the years unknown
Who first had eyes to see and soul to groan
For woman unredeemed
Passed,—yet his soul is seen in woman's eyes
To-day, when through them gleams the light of skies
Pure, sweet, unstained, unsullied. In like wise
They dream, as once he dreamed.

One royal act, one regal stroke of will,
Can quite remake the universe,—can thrill
The farthest bounds of space.
The seas are only blue as we design;
Ours is the sketch, though God's is the outline;
We grant their fruitage to the corn and vine;
We mould and shape the race.

343

And our immortal life is in our hand
Likewise. Fate hath no force that can withstand
The human force of will.
God gives the power to wrench the bolts aside
And force an entrance large, an entrance wide,
Into the deathless house death will provide:
Death has no power to kill.

God reaches us, and rules us. And we reach
The Lord of all the stars. Our broken speech
Can move the King of kings.
Not only we are governed; we affect
God by our will, and force him to reject
This or that plan. We force him to select
New modes and motive-springs.

We act upon the stately will of God;
Force it sometimes to choose another road.
We, gnats who dance in space,
Can none the less affect the central Power:
We, creatures whose life lasts one short sweet hour,
We, more ephemeral far than the June-flower,
Can stir God's dwelling-place.

344

We can so rule our daily devious way
That in the end the Lord cannot but say,
“This soul must pass the gloom:
New labour waits beneath another sun
This pale ephemeral, whose one life is done.”
This life is ended, when the right is won
To disregard the tomb.