University of Virginia Library

“I pledged myself to seek diviner life,
Flinging the past behind; with stedfast face,
Look'd forth on truth; and one of all the world
Dared all the heights. Not so the mission came.
Heights fail'd: upstanding as on peaks of thought,
Meseem'd the mazes of the mind enwound
Still, and beyond them was unpeopled void—
God hidden in the spaces 'twixt the stars
And more in solar glory deeply veil'd.
But thought, the darkest curtain, hung between
Heart and essential being. Self likewise
Barr'd self from knowledge, open'd gulfs between
Man and that great unmanifest Divine
Deep-seal'd within him. Paralysed I fell
To night and nothing. In my darkness then—
Helpless and humbled—the dread mission came.
It gave me darkness for my place, and hope
My broken lamp—all purpose miss'd but one.
As Christ flung back Heaven's gates to all who came
Believing and embracing, so could I
Shut up the gates of hell by passing through
And there abiding, through a work of will,
Not slave's compulsion. Mine free choice of heart,
And choice alone could make the mission mine.
I testify as one who knelt and pray'd,
In blacker garden than Gethsemane,
For cup more bitter than was drunk of old
By Mount of Olives to be taken hence.
That cup still offer'd unto shrinking lips,
Nor was mine angel mission'd to console.
In fine I drank it to the dregs, all pain,
All wrath accepting in the inmost self,
That I might bring thee, World, from doom and woe.
Body and soul into the gulf I cast,
And fill it: now thou canst not fall therein.
Hell's House is shut against thee by these hands,
While from the dolorous place, all hope beyond,
I peer between the bars, and thee so fair,
Redeem'd unwittingly, my World, I see.
Account it thou the chiefest test of love
That though no Word Divine has come to mark
Such sacrifice as ratified above—
The mission only from the mind itself
Unfolded, self-conceived, self-built and last
Self-taken—I hold God's silence like a word
Of doom-encompassing consent; and that
Accorded, utter dereliction now
Descends and certifies the offering.
I cry not—woe is me—with God's strong Son
That ‘Why hast Thou forsaken me?’—which seal'd
His mission and reveal'd Divinity.
My passion and the long-drawn life thereof
Seems more than Golgotha or Calvary,
For consciousness of Godhead unobscured
Supported Him; but I am man alone:
Nor special strength has nerved, nor man has dream'd,
Nor Nature known.

“Here in this testament
The inspiration which inform'd me once
At length bereaves me. Now my voice has lost
Its early ring; the lightness from this pen
Has vanish'd: there is lead in every line.
Without conviction in the weight it drags,
By every word I wrong the cause I own,
And my poor life which, from this garrulous state
Apart, might take some touch of the sublime—
Because it was so secret and so still—
Counts itself out in folly at the end.

“Yet must I speak: so only man shall know
That one unaided, voluntary act
Has taken to my heart the whole world's shame,
Even the unrepented yoke thereof,
For evermore. Who deems I err herein?
Nay, God in fine is mercy and would send
Some envoy surely of his hierarch-host
To turn my path, if I deceived myself—
To scourge me, were I blinded with my pride.
The unassisted agony wherein
This soul must keep shall over quickly quench
All shining spectacles of sacrifice;
Yet should I madden past the second death—
World—could I save thee not. And Thou, O Lord,
Make this self-ruin grateful in Thy sight,
But do not let one wrathful shaft of flame,
From Thine eyes scorch, but for a moment's space,
One fibre of man's being.

“Man, forgive
This unskill'd harping on the creaking strings
Of my worn thought. Behold, I pass through life
Anonymous, unknown, who might have seal'd
Such mission with a gorgeous ministry,
Sending apostles and disciples forth
Through all the world, to conquer every heart,
To bid them cease from evil and so make
My stripes perchance the fewer. Through pleasant paths
Of rose-leaf creed, for all in truth but one,
Hereafter, haply I had led the earth
To temple me, so taking full delight
Of pomp and splendour from the peak of doom,
Self-poised o'er all in god-pre-eminence.
I might have met Diana the divine—
High love—upon a golden night of nights—
Yea, on some marriage-night of main and sky—
And in a silent, passion-haunted place,
On which the stars shed influence benign,
Where stars and moon concur, have known her grand
And holy secret. So for this, for all
Foregone, acquit me when my weakness calls
On distant pulse of love from those I love
To travel towards me through the sable voids.
Trust me, in fine, to hold thee freed. Spare all
Thou canst of all that hurts me. On my part
I do repent me not. With heart aflame,
Here I renew, a meek but stedfast man,
My godly sacrifice.

“Refulgent light
Bared in the stormy West—fire-fill'd abyss—
A conscious life assume and hear my pledge.”

So broke the testament, reaching a kind of close
In frenzy. Ave, Poet. He became
His own dread epic; lived it out in heart;
Took back, accepted; and again took back.
So crazing more and more, he spilt himself
Towards death or madness, then was sick to death,
But at the end, by mercy, fell in strange,
Far-haunted sleep. The mission-life of dream
Broke there upon him, an old tale maybe,
Long since rehearsed; but coming back with him
For the first time into his waking world,
That other dream which long distracted life
Led forth its darksome pageant and went down
Below the mind's horizon.

So it was
With QUÆSTOR DEI, bearing Cup of Dream,
When something flowing over life of earth
Brought on salvation.

I awoke in Thy sunlight,
I lived in Thy light:
Very good, very sweet has it been,
For all I have heard and seen
Has been songs and visions of Thee.
In the golden haze or the noon-white blaze
And the violet height of the brooding night
Were images—all of Thee.
I have found Thee, Master of life and Lord:
In all true voices Thy voice alone,
And written on star and stone
Thy sigils of act and word.

May I, who awaken'd to hear and see
The sounds so bless'd and the sights of Thee,
Pass off at length into states more deep,
The finding and keeping of perfect sleep,
And awaken after in Thee.