 | Poems descriptive, dramatic, legendary and contemplative |  |
SOUL-FLIGHT.
I.
What checks the eagle's wing—what dims his eye,Turn'd upward to the sky?
Doth the cloud cumber the ascending flight
Of that which is all light?
Fruitless, indeed, were such a frail defence
Against intelligence;
And all in vain the chains of earth would bind
The disembodied mind!
II.
Glorious and unrestrainéd on its way,It seeks the endless day;
It drinks more deeply of the intenser air,
That streams with being there;
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And sees, adores, and burns;
Claiming, with every breath from out the sky,
Its own divinity.
III.
From world to world, from gathering star to star,Its flight is fast and far;
As through an ordeal, it prepares in each
Some higher form to reach;
From the small orb that lights the outer gate
Of that all-nameless state,
To that which burns before the eternal throne,
Fearless it hurries on.
IV.
Dread mystery, that to the mortal sight,Seems all one shapeless night,—
Wild with unbidden clouds, that flickering haste
Still o'er a pathless waste,
Without one intellectual planet's ray
To yield a partial day;
Will death reveal the truth to sons of men?—
Shall we explore you then?
V.
I would not be the creature of the clay,Mouldering with time away,
Nor hold, for my soul's hope, the awful thought
That death is all, life naught!—
That all this soaring mind, this high desire
Still upward to aspire,
Is but the yearning of some painted thing
That would not lose its wing.
| Poems descriptive, dramatic, legendary and contemplative | |