Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

When we two were dear friends I sway'd between
God and the World. It, with its ceaseless round
Of precept and example, pull'd me on,
And daily grew in force. The Spirit Soul
That lies unseen and trodden in the dust,

Came only when the World would throw me off—
In solitude and sorrow came and whisper'd—
“The World hath thrown thee off, but thou hast fallen
On that which doth the giddy World bear up.
The surge hath cast thee down, but thou hast found
The deep sea's rest. The surge itself but frets
To find a rest like thine: it looks above,
In envy of yon heaven's quiet blue,
And scrambles to get up:—ah, witless surge!
That ceaseless climbing lengthens thy unrest;
Thou must at last return into the deep
Still bosom of thy being; peace is there—
The unfathom'd peace that can alone be thine.
Yon blue serenity does not exist,
Save in the eye's delusion: when the hand
Draws near to take the bliss, it is not there.”
Thus would the Spirit voice, but again the din
Of rolling day would deafen me, and my heart
Would follow in the pageantry of day;
Deeming the voice that spake had been my own,
Hanging sour grapes in the World, heaping down
On the hard relentless ground to break my fall,
And turning failure to commodity—
The last shift of weak hearts. And so the World
Would have me all again: its pageantry
Became the only real—all else dream:
What eyes and hands can grasp take thou and live:
Nothing there is behind this show but death.

Once-friend, it's well we are no longer friends,
But hate each other—O how much we hate!

As much as e'er we loved in olden time,
When all the ground-work of our natures lay
In keeping, like the bases of two cones
Together laid, and meeting in all points.
The figures are reversed; the broad affections
That friendship builds upon, lie in us both
All on the offturned sides that cannot touch;
And we that in our fitness were as one,
Now meet but in one point—and that is hate.

Yet say I it is well; else thy gilt course,
With the authority of added years,
Had drawn my wavering, undecided step,
And given me smooth progression in thy wake.
I had been still sway'd in my old unrest,
Or all bought over to a faithless peace.
But came the sudden, unprepared-for throe
That heaved us from each other. Had the chain
That bound us in our love withstood that wrench,
Then more than ever had we been one heart.
I will not say with whom the weakness was—
Although I have my thought—but snapt a link
That never can be welded. Our next love
Must forge itself a chain to bind us with.

It was the whole upheaving of our natures;
And gather'd years were scatter'd to the blast.
We rock'd in peace upon one tide; a wave
That raked the ocean deeps rose up between,
And in two currents broke. One took in-shore
Into the crisping bay where streamers flaunt

From idly cabled ships, and summer friends
Come wooing the mild air; and with it thou
Went proudly on, hail'd by the summer friends.
The other took me like a prey, and drove
In triumph out to sea. A lesser force
Could not have cross'd the bar, had left me there
To wreck amongst the breakers; but this met
And bore them down. In the meeting crash methought
The face of heaven was blurr'd, and I engulf'd
As in a horrid dream: but soon I woke,
Not from but as it seem'd within my dream—
Not to old life, but into a new birth.
It was the passing into that deep sea
Which is the under-being of all things—
The deep calm it, and they the curling waves
That ever and anon are lost in it.
The things I held to as stabilities,
Now thaw'd away; and that faint ghost-like thing
That came of old and comforted my woes,
Was a still inlet of the unfathom'd deep
That now lay more reveal'd; it was no ghost
Of a night-shrouded brain, which morning's sun
Would scorch into its grave, but the up-reach
Of that deep Life, whereof the universe
Itself is but the ghost.

There is no heart
That is not penetrated with that Life:
Our Heaven is as the fulness of our share;
And he of scrimpèd measure cannot see

The bliss of him whose full cup overflows.
That which he has he takes and never doubts,
But calls him mystic who has more than that,
Him purblind who has less. There comes to all
A deep sense of the true—itself its proof:
Doubt has no wedge-room when the inflow comes:
It carries its own warrant like plain sight,
And he that sees believes. Therefore I rest
In this blue deep, nor cast one wistful look
Back to the shallows of a doubtful shore.—
Day after day waves up the beach of time,
With ceaseless chafe and melancholy note
To him that is time's slave: but to the ear
That lays its hearing in the eternal sea,
Comes not the fretted murmur of the days.

We may not search our nearest brother's heart,
Nor sound the secret fathoms of his soul;
And thou, dear enemy, art not reveal'd
In all thy depth to me. But certain winds
Have blown thy heart's throbs hither, and I know
Thou art not yet at peace: the World still spurs
Thy bleeding sides; thou may'st not shake it off;
For if it probes thy flank, it pats thy neck—
A coaxing cruel rider that will take
His hire out of the poor hack's blood and bones.

We are reversed in everything but hate;
But thy hate comes from the right side for me,
And if I curse thee, it is with deep thanks.

That bar of hatred that between us lies,
I've beaten on the anvil of my heart
Till now methinks it turns to love—red hot.
We'll grow to love each other for the heart
We put into our hate. Friendship suspects:
In open enmity what chance of guile?
We know each other true in our dislike,
And have no dread of falseness. When we meet—
As meet we shall upon another stage,
Where each shall bear to view the alphabet
Of his most inward life—and when we read
How step by step throughout this little war
Was taken and mistaken—tracing back
The thing to its first germ—ah then, the first
Of all our quarrel will be as the seed
From which the fruit-tree sprang—that seend not found.
And when we note how true we both have been
To our own sense of right, what then but love
And admiration for that thoroughness?—
In this faith let us live—love even now:
How else than thus can enemies be loved?