Musa Verticordia :: :: University of Virginia Library

A Vision of Life: the Law Divine
Broods overhead, imposing still
The tangled, mutable twist and twine
Of ill in good and good in ill,
Of woe from joy and joy from woe,
On the ebbing and flowing world below.

There stands the triumphing Hour, amid
The splendours of the universe;
Yet, in her very triumph hid,
Stirs the inevitable curse,

The Law that nothing may remain
And all except the Law is vain.

Triumph of Love: yet Love contains,
E'en in the moment of his bliss,
His own exterminating pains,
The skull that grins beneath the kiss;
For souls that each to other fly
In pangs of coalescence die.

Triumph of Hate: but yet the deed
Of vengeance or fanatic rage
Is pregnant with the wide-blown seed
Of an ameliorating age;
Death crowns him, when a good man dies,
And Death his deeds will canonise.

Murder and motherhood—the strange,
Sad meetings of the high and low—
Hope and despair—in changeless change
Of woe from joy and joy from woe,
Like bubbles rise, to orb and burst
In cursings blest and blessings curst.

Lapsing, unlapsing, like a stream,
The old for aye rings in the new;
Man is a dream and life a dream;
Yet the unattainable is true;
And the one triumph not quite vain,
The soul's stern striving to attain.