THE GATES OF LIFE
Held in the bosom of night, large to the limits of wonder,
Close where the refluent seas wrinkle the wandering sands,
Where, with a tenderness torn from the secrets of sorrow, and under
The pale pure spaces of night felt like ineffable hands,
The weak strange pressure of winds moved with the moving of waters,
Vast with their solitude, sad with their silences, strange with their sound,
Comes like a sigh from the sleep of the realmless Olympian daughters,
Widowed of worship by time, at the feet of their father uncrowned.
Held in the bosom of night, with the wind in my face, and the ocean
Stirred thro' its tremulous deeps with the unfulfilled dawning of moon,
As involved in the power of life and ashake with the pulse of emotion
It waited, when slow thro' the void came the primitive promise of noon.
Filled with the open avowals of nature, the choral that falters
Only to swell thro' the channels of song like an affluent stream,
Pure with old faiths of the heart that have died in the horns of their altars,
Leaving their beauty to live like the memories kept of a dream.
Like the fragments of immanent silence, like the dew of immense resurrection
Falls the night on mine eyes, in the curve of my lips the fresh tears of the sea,
And like rifts in the texture of life, like the soul in empiric reflection,
Come the tacit and lingering lapses where the phantoms of Heaven are free.
There is peace in the winds, the invisible pinions of dark, there is patience enduring
In the native and motionless outlines of headland and forest and stone,
There is love in the perfumes essential of earth, the old impulse maturing
To fruitage, and calm in the star-scattered chasms where night is alone.
I am drenched with the night, I am drunk with the wine she prepares for the spirit,
I am bathed in her solitudes, filled with her proper immensities, mad
With the perilous visions of realms that my soul, is it strong, may inherit,
With the simple and adequate bounty of natural things:—I am sad
With the solemn completeness of joy that abides in the centres of sorrow,
The sadness of life understood in its prophecy, loved in its pain,
I am alien to yesterday, held on the heart-beat of time, tho' to-morrow
Return and its temperance fall on my zenith like colourless rain.
I am urged with the germinal ichor whose functional vigour increases,
Subsides and suspires and fashions the world to its purpose again—
For the sands shall be fluent with sea when life's tremulous episode ceases,
And winds from the regions of sunset blow warm with the perfume of rain.
The darkness shall furnish its delicate silence, the destitute spaces
August with disseminate suns shall be heritage still for the soul,
And old memories warm from the heart shall inhabit earth's intimate places,
When the cool, kind fingers of death loose our bonds and we leap to the goal.
Tho' life shall return to me, sadden me cinctured with sin and besotten
With heartless immoderate voices, and state with perversion of truth,
I have tasted the lips of the night, the caress of its wind, and forgotten,
Alone on the bosom of nature, the days that shall wither my youth;
I have felt with the manifold ocean, with the blind, blank, lustreless shining
Of starlight, and tasted intensely the crude cold smells of the earth,
I have put my weak hands in the large hands of nature that caught me declining
Thro' colourless ashes of thought in the fear of perpetual birth.
She found me and nourished me, nourished mine eyes that were thirsty for shadow,
My heart that desired her blindly, my senses diseased in the strife,
Blurred phases of mortal desire, my soul that replied to her sad, slow
Power, her promise of ultimate peace thro' the strength of her life;
Her life that is lost in its bigness and big with the primitive glories,
Can it save from the life that is cramped in the dust-stifled highways of men,
Can it open the gates of the soul where the vital commencement and core is,
And the soul leave the centres of life and be merged into nothing again?
Can life save from itself? Oh, Beloved! thine eyes overcome me, and longer
Than flesh can endure is the kiss on the dew of thy lips and the flame,
And the old safe landmarks of life are lost in its volume, while stronger
It widens till sorrow and happiness, virtue and sin, are the same!
For love is coeval with life and what were divided are one now,
As we leap in the night, as we plunge in the well-spring of nature, and then
The world grows coherent with music—Oh, haste! shall our Heaven be won now,
And the manna of earth changed to food for the ultimate soul-wants of men?
Shall life turn to death in the living? Shall we pass from the heart-shaken centres
Of nature, the pinnacled crisis and powerful matrix of life,
That project thro' the cosmical fabric, where the sea-meadows pulse, where the scent stirs
In flowers that feed the faint breezes, the eternal progenital strife?
Can we pass to the perfect cessation where life is a dream unrecurring?—
Earth's divisionless ecstasy fills me, till my body is rent with the strain,—
Oh, Heart!—could the flesh but endure the full splendour of life and enduring
Dissolve in the quiet perfection of death, without hope, without pain!
