University of Virginia Library

Low, still, unutterably weak,
In human helplessness more helpless than
The smallest of God's other creatures can
Be left, I lie and do not speak.
Walls rise and close
Around. No warning shows
To me, who am but blind, which wall
Will shelter, and which one will fall
And crush me in the dust,
Not that I sinned, but that it must.
Each hour, within my heart, some sweet hope dies.
Each night the dead form lies
Of some fair purpose which I could not save,
Ready for day to carry out and hide
In a dishonored grave.
My strongest will
Finds stronger fate stand side by side
With it, its utmost efforts conquering still
With such swift might, the dust in which I lie
Scarce quivers with my struggle and my pain,
Scarce echoes with my cry.
Grief comes and passes by,
And Joy comes hand in hand
With Grief, each bearing crowns with buds of snow,
Both laying crowns upon my head.
Soon as the buds are open, it were vain
To try to separate or understand—
No sense of mine can feel or know—
Which flowers the hand of Joy has shed,
And which the hand of Pain.
Therefore I do not choose;
Fearing, desiring equally from each,
I wait. I do not dare refuse.
Only one sound can reach
Me where I lie, can stir my veins,
Or make me lift my eyes.
That sound drops from the skies,
A still small voice,—round it great silence lies:
“Not one of all these things remains.
Thou shalt arise!”

Somewhere on earth,
Marked, sealed, mine from its hour of birth,
A stairway lies, down which I shall descend,
And pass through a dark gate, which at my name,
And at no other, will swing back and close.
Where lies this stairway no man knows,
No man has even wondered. Only I
Remember it continually.
Spring never came,
Her grasses setting, that I did not bend
Low in the fields, saying: “Lend
But part trust, O Summer! Many graves,
Before this sweet grass waves
Half grown, must open. Ah! will reapers reap
Harvest from my low resting-place
This year? Or will the withered sods and I
Lifeless together lie,
With silent, upturned face,
Before the autumn winds sweep by?”
And when the winter snows lie deep,
I think: “How hard to find,
Just now, those hidden stairs that wind
For me.” The time must near the end.
Perhaps for those I leave behind,
More sad to see the snow. But its pure white,
I think, would shed a little light,
And stretch like alabaster skies
Above the stairway dark I must descend,
That I may rise.

Somewhere on earth,
Marked, sealed, mine from its hour of birth,
There lies a shining stone,
My own.
Perhaps it still is in the quarry's hold.
Oh! Pine Tree, wave in winter's cold
Swifter above it; in the summer's heat
Drop spices on it, thick and sweet;
Quicken its patient crystals' growth.
Oh! be not loth,
Quarry and Pine,
And stir of birds in the still North,
And suns that shine,—
Give up my smooth white stone! Hasten it forth.
My soul in bondage lies.
I must arise.
Perhaps upon the shining stone,
My own,
Even to-day the hammers ring.
The workman does not sing.
He is a lover and he has a child;
To him a gravestone is a fearful thing.
He has not smiled
Since under his strong hands the white stone came,
Though he is slow and dull,
And could not give a name
To thoughts which fill his heart too full
Of prophecy and pain.
O Workman, sing! See how the white dust flies
And glistens in the sunny air.
No grain but counts;
Some fair spot grows more fair
By it, each moment. In the skies,
My moment must be near.
Workman, there is on earth no loss, no waste.
Sing loud, and make all haste;
I must arise.

Perhaps even now the shining stone,
My own,
Stands ready,—arch and base,
And chiselled lines, and space
For name all done: and yesterday
Some sorrowing ones stood round it silently
And looked at it through tears,
But passed it by,
Saying, with trembling lips: “No, no!
For stone more beautiful than this we seek.
Sculptor, dost thou not know
What lines will make the marble show
A deeper grief?” Ah! mourners, speak
In lower voice. Ye do not see
What presence guards
The stone. More than ye dream retards
Your will. The stone waits there for me.
My soul in bondage lies
I must arise.

Then, when I have descended, and the stone
Above the stairway has been set,
The tears of those who reckoned me their own
A little space will wet
The grass; but soon all saddened days
Count up to comforted and busy years:
All living men must go their ways
And leave their dead behind. The tideless light
Of sun and moon and stars,—silence of night
And noise of day, and whirling of the great
Round world itself,—yea,
All things which are and are not work to lay
The dead away.
The crumbling of the stone, more late,
The sinking of the little mound
To unmarked level, where with noisy sound
Roam idle and unwitting feet,
Least tokens are and smallest part
Of the oblivion complete
Which wraps a human grave;
And unto me, the hour when the last heart
Has ceased to save
My memory, the year
That sees my white stone lying low,
The century that sees the grave mound grow,
Free of my dust, to solid earth again,
Made ready for new dead,—all these will be
Alike to me,
Alike uncounted will remain.
Their sound I shall not hear
As I arise.
They mark no moments in the skies
Through which I mount. As constant as
God's law,
Bearing all joy and grief my first years saw,
Even my babyhood,—
Bearing all evil and all good
Of ripest age,—nowise
Escaping and nowise forgetting one
Of all the actions done,—
And bearing all that lies
In utmost law for me,—all God's great will,
All God's great mercy,—still
I shall arise.

The fool asks, “With what flesh? in joy or pain?
Helped or unhelped? and lonely, or again
Surrounded by our earthly friends?”
I know not; and I glory that I do
Not know: that for Eternity's great ends
God counted me as worthy of such trust,
That I need not be told.
I hold
That if it be
Less than enough to any soul to know
Itself immortal, immortality
In all its boundless spaces will not find
A place designed
So small, so low,
That to a fitting home such soul can go.
Out to the earthward brink
Of that great tideless sea
Light from Christ's garments streams.
Cowards who fear to tread such beams
The angels can but pity when they sink.
Believing thus, I joy although I lie in dust.
I joy, not that I ask or choose,
But simply that I must.
I love and fear not; and I cannot lose,
One instant, this great certainty of peace.
Long as God ceases not, I cannot cease;
I must arise.