The white sail and other poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

LATE PEACE.

As a pool beset with lilies
In the May-green copses hid,
Far from wayfarers and wrongers,
Clangors, rumors, disillusions,
Neighbored by the wild-grape only,
By the hemlock's dreamy host,
By the Rhodian nightingale,
O remote, remote, O lonely!—
So thy life is.

Whence and wherefore is it
Never peace may be co-dweller
With my lakelet
Too belovèd and too sheltered,
That, secure from broil of cities,
From a secret regnant spring
To its own wild depth awaking,
Makes but moaning and resistance,

Undiminishable protest;
Mimicking with pain and fury
Of humanity the struggle;
Fretting, foaming, pacing ever
Round and round its fragrant cloister,
All within itself perplexèd,
Every heart-vein bruised but eager;
And its clear soul, doubt-o'erladen,
'Neath the stirred and floating foulness,
Long abased, long dumb, ah! long?—
So thy life is.

Comes the respite, comes the guerdon;
The perfect truce arrives
In the honey-dropping twilight,
The southwestering pallid sunshine,
The magian clouds a-fire,
The mooring galleon-wind:
At whose spell,
Potent daily,
The lulled wafer is beguiled
Back to saneness, back to sweetness.
All its arrowy hissing atoms
Gather from the chase forsaken;
The sphered galaxy of bubbles,
Fragments, motes, the lees unrestful,

Disunite, as to heard music,
Like weird dancers, from their wreathings
Each to its cool grotto swaying;
Till there follows, on their fervor,
Depth, and crystal clarity.
So thy life is, so thy life!
Darkling to beatitude,
Shaken in the saving change.
And the spirit made wise, not weary
By the throes that youth endureth,
When old age falls, evening-placid,
On the mystery unriddled,
Yet in empire, yet in honor,
In submission not ignoble,
Glistens to a central quiet,
Leal to the most lovely moon.