Poems and dramas of George Cabot Lodge

Magnificent presence of the living Truth—
We know not when thy swift, serene, strong flame
Shall violate our sanctuaries of sleep!
We know not when, from carnal lethargies
And trivial pastimes and derisive dreams
Of ineffectual felicities,
Irresolutions and timidities
And temperate ambitions, we shall wake
To find our safe exclusions overborne,
The pale of our defence invaded, all
Our precincts of secure retreat destroyed;
To feel the dark enchantments yield; to hear
Thy trumpets blowing in our citadels,
The shouting of thy liege-men on the hillsides,
And in our ears thy far and forward call;
To lift at last unconquerable eyes
Suddenly to the challenge of the sunrise,
And feel thereafter always by thy light
Delivered from the mean distrust of death,
The tyranny of time, the brief content
Of all achievement and prosperity
Less than perfection, and at last resolved

To illustrate in thought and word and deed,
In life and death, the utmost that we are!—
We know not when or where or in what wise
Thou shalt appear, imperishable Truth,
Spirit of Liberty!—but well we know
That life and death are only thine adventure.
And well we know the time of revelation
Is always now—eternity is now!
The place of miracles is always here—
Infinity is here! Then here and now,
And in thy name, O latent Truth within us,
In thought and word and deed, in life and death,
Let us report and celebrate the soul!

2

Let us report and celebrate the soul,
In thought and word and deed, in life and death!
Then may we feel, perchance, the God within us,
Whose worship waits and who has slept so long,
Revive at last, athletic and superb,
Stand forth from custom, creed and circumstance,
Reclaim his high, inherent liberties,
And stem the rush of the resistless hours,—
Till, for a spacious interval, we see
The veils of darkness and deception fall
And leave us, eager of our enterprise,
Transparent to our own reality,
Against the thrilled, tremendous heart of time! ...

Then shall it come to pass—as we report
The soul and celebrate the soul in life
And death—that hardly and mysteriously
The stubborn prison-walls of ignorance
Shall yield beneath our blind, insistent hands,
And, bruised with misadventures in the dark,
We shall achieve the soul's advance, and stand
Bathed in the light remedial, and behold
The broad, released, bright waters of the soul,
Sun-dazzled and resistless, rush away
Forever and forever to the sea! ...

3

O to report, to celebrate the soul!
O to proclaim ourselves and all we are,
In thought and word and deed, in life and death!
O to depart, avid of explorations,
Winged and resolved, curious, in time and space—
There to retrieve the soul's inheritance,
There to report and celebrate the soul!
O to confess at last who is the Lord!—
To find at last, beyond to-day, in all
The innumerable yesterdays of time,
The onward, latent, long millenniums,
A rumour of us and a recollection!—
To learn at last that always for the soul,
In the dark earth and the deep sea, throughout
Chill ethers and the pale star multitudes,

The path leads homeward and the place is home!—
To know at last that never and nowhere
The soul is stranger, never and nowhere
Without recognizance and habitation!—
To learn, to know, to realize utterly
That time and space are phases of the soul! ...
O let us perfectly report the soul
And celebrate the soul, until at last
No time, no space, no state is vacant of us!—
Until at last the sense revives within us
Of indissoluble identity
With sun and earth and beast, with man and God!—
Until at last, from granite, schist and shard,
From senseless jellies and brute envelopes,
We mark our stages of deliverance,
The age-long, upward levels of our flight,—
And feel the restless, resolute, firm soul,
Conscious and lord of life after so long,
Still by the insatiable impulse driven,
Transgress the forms and infidelities,
The calculations and economies,
That prove our insufficiency!—until
At last we share the ancient and divine
Companionship of peril and perfection
With all who once bore witness to the truth,
And were compounded of the celestial fire!—
Then shall we stand, central and self-assured,
To labour in the austere fraternity

Of Gods and Saviours, till our lives record,
As theirs,—our deaths, as theirs, declare the soul!
Then may we learn at last that here and now
The very light is parcelled in our vision,
Wherewith Father Prometheus disclosed
The kindled soul's transcendent regency;
That here and now, in free communion,
We break the bread of life and speak the word
Of life, as when the veiled respondents sang
Clear, at Eleusis, in the sacred gloom;
That here and now, no less for each of us,
That inward voice, cogent as revelation,
That trance of truth's sublime discovery,
Which in the soul of Socrates wrought out
Gold from the gross ore of humanity,
Still speak, still hold, still work their alchemy;
That here and now, and in the soul's advance,
And by the soul's perfection, we may feel
The thought of Buddha in our mortal brain,
The human heart of Jesus in our breast,
And in our will the strength of Herakles! ...

4

O to report, to celebrate the soul,
Equal at last and forward with the Captains,
On the long frontiers where the twilight dies!—
There with uplifted voices that shall sound,
Sound and resound amid the loud and long

Vociferations of the embattled souls,
There to report the soul—in the broad dusk
Of hesitation, in the immeasurable
Unknown—O there to celebrate the soul!
There to resume the retrospect, to find,
Up the bright courses of the stairs of thought,
The traces of our perilous ambition!
There to endure the prospect, and, at last,
In the proud might of the soul's will, to bear
The peril as of intense emergencies,
The storm and strength as of gigantic wings,
The glare as of deep-driven lightnings,—all
The multitudinous menace of the night!
Importunate and undissuadable,
There, for the sole sake of the endless voyage,
There to stand out over the utmost verge,
Where the mist drives and the night overwhelms! ...
There in our skies the stars of revelation;
There in our hearts the burning lamp of love;
There in our sense the rhythm and amplitude
And startled splendour of the seas of song;—
And there at last—our own infinity,
Our own eternity still unappeased!—
There, for ourselves, for freedom, truth, perfection,
There to report and celebrate the soul! ...

II

Strangely, inviolably aloof, alone,
Once shall it hardly come to pass that we,
As with his Cross, as up his Calvary,
Burdened and blind, ascend and share his throne
And perfectly, as with our lives, atone
For the heart's triumph, for the soul's victory!—
Yet may we seem thereafter, dead as he,
To lie within life's sepulchre of stone ...
But he is risen, the Lord is risen!—and thus,
Thus may he rise, the Lord may rise in us,
Who sleeps, who is not dead, who lives alway!
And all who come love-kindled to the tomb,
Shall find, as Mary found, an empty room,
And meet the Lord, alive and on his way! ...

III

“I am the Way, the Life, the Truth!” he said.—
Deep in the soul of every man alway
There is a voice that says, “I am the Way;
I am the Life, the Truth, the Living Bread!”
And whoso hearkens he is comforted:
Well he discerns the Paraclete is there,
The Soul of Truth, the Christ, the Comforter,
Who, tho' the mortal dies, is never dead.
He is within us all, whom we have sought:
The Way, the Life, the Truth, the Paraclete,
The soul, who ranges with resplendent feet,
Silent and swift, from peak to peak of thought;
He is the Lord for whom the task is wrought;
He is the Lover whom we haste to meet! ...

IV

“Ask what you will, it shall not be denied;
Knock, and the secret door shall stand ajar;
Seek, and however much the way is far,
Yet shall the Bridegroom find, who seeks the Bride!”—
He knows how much the truth is justified,
Who is not unambitious as we are;
He finds, beyond the star we seek, a star,
Beyond our dreams, a soul unsatisfied.
He knows, and That within us more than we
Shall learn, how much we leave the best undone;
How little there is end or rest or peace;
And how the Asker and the Alms are one;
How whoso knocks brings welcome and release;
And how the search is the discovery! ...

University of Virginia Library

THE SOUL'S INHERITANCE

Poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Cambridge, 1906

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