Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Bewilder'd in a maze of crowding themes,
O'erwhelm'd with multiplicity of books—
Each calling out “Lo, here! I am the way”—
And seeing more to do than can be done,
I idly stand, not knowing what to do:
And with a dim perception of a journey,
I loiter here in doubt which way to take.
Thou fool, do anything—take any way
That is not labell'd to thy conscience wrong;
For all are from one source, and to one end.

Know thou, the smallest atom is a door
Into God's temple, and if we but had
The secret of its opening, one step,
At anytime, would lead us into paradise.
And never doubt but that we are surrounded
With pleaders, great and small, that bid us come.
The heaving ocean everlastingly
With its big errand pants, and twice a day
Entreats a special hearing. Canst receive
That universal language? Listen well;
For all things speak it, and it is the tongue
That Spirits use:—
Yon silvery slipper'd brook,
That, with a ceaseless prattle from the hills,
Comes nimbly tripping o'er the mossy stones,
Cannot contain its joy: “Come thou with me—
Into my being let thy spirit slip,
Gliding as in a dream, and I will take
Thee to the green banks of thy spirit home”:—
The monarch sun that draws the adoring gaze
Of worlds, has still a special word for man:
“Though outward light should blind thy outward eye,
Turn not thy gaze from me; thy inner orb
Will open to new seeing and new light;
And know thou this: the outward mortal is
A symbol of the inward everlasting”:—
The stars in their long watches of the night,
Are ever shedding incense on our hearts,
Loving a lone heart more than gilded altar:
“O not with searching telescope canst thou

Our glory reach, not in round numbers tell
The mystery of our nature: If thou wouldst
Receive the God-sent message of the stars,
Then hang upon us with a poet's eye
That loves us for our beauty, and seeks not
Too curiously our secrets, yet drinks in
The unseen essence that enriches him,
And makes him the most wise astronomer”:—
And who on autumn night ne'er felt the moon
Creep through him like a maiden's soul that is
With love's fine fire a-glow? Old Night's fair child,
That in chaste maidenhood must aye remain—
Rich in a dower of renewing youth:
Wherefore her office is to woo young hearts
And lead them gently to a higher love.
O I have seen—about the harvest time—
When most young hearts into their moon-age pass—
I have, myself, seen then, upon the air,
Rushing between our own earth and the moon,
Thousands of bright and starry threads of fire;—
They were not star-lights shooting to the earth,
But emanated from love-kindled souls
Upon the earth, and centred in the moon.
I've seen a Poet on the dreamy shore—
The ocean in deep slumber at his feet,
With scarce the motion of a sleeper's breast,
The full moon lapping all in milky light,
He, like a statue, staring into her—.
Become, methought, so lustrous in himself,
That, even in that shiny night, he glow'd

Like palest marble on a ground of black:
And thus he stood, drawing down light from heaven,
Until the moon went out and earth was dark;
Yet he was not; and then it was I saw
The light he drew was not the moon's alone,
But that which flows inside of hers—unseen
Till garner'd in the cumulating soul.
But not the waters and the stars alone!
All things, in sea and air and on the earth,
Are half invisible to outward sight,
Walling the Eden of our destiny.
But yet they tell, in mutterings and shadows,
The mysteries beyond; and he that once
Has caught the unknown tongues, been startled with
The shadows, like a wing swept o'er his soul,
Is ever after glorified, has found
The opening and the everlasting way.

We may not enter wholly but by death,
Which is our passport. For the present 'tis
Enough for us to listen from without,
And read the words and signs that on us break—
Deep in the forest fanes, 'mid Druid oaks,
Where silence is so silent that it may
Be strangely heard in many whisper'd voices
That speak together from behind the trees:—

Away among the glens, where, like a god,
The eagle sits upon its thronèd peak,
Gleaming like gold far up amid blue air,

And drawing out the earth-stains of our hearts,
To the dispersion of his airy cliffs:—

On mountain ridges where the young winds come
Out of the vales to play. We listening hear
Them rustling up the heath, but mark them not
Until they burst in kisses on our cheeks:
Then rush they on in laughter like wild maids,
While all the mountain gullies laugh in turn,
And spread their arms like lovers to receive
The dimpled beauties falling out of breath:—

By mountain tarn whereto the weary sun
Has clomb the hills to drink, and where the stars
Come stealthily at night to bathe, like nymphs
That shame to strip until the sun has gone:—

By ruin'd castles, where the warrior's eye
Gleams down dark centuries upon our souls
And wakes them to the clang of wilder'd days;
Or where the gray walls start into old mirth
At thought of all the ancient revelrie
That brimm'd them o'er. Lay thou a deep ear there,
And thou wilt hear the music as of yore,
Bursting the hall-doors open, like a tide
That breaks in waves upon the night's black shore.
And if thou'lt wait until the morning star
Bedew the east with luscious dropping light,
And lay thine ear close to the castle wall,
Thou'lt hear strange things! At that hour maids of old,
Troubled with love's unrest, rose from their dreams,
And to that lattice-gazing star sighed out
The burden of their hearts: from donjon cell

The lips that scorn'd to mourn, unconsciously
Told out their sorrows in deep stifled moans,
As that heart-seeking star crept on their gloom:
And from that wilder'd time those sighs and moans
Have hung about the crumbling walls:—maybe
The souls that bore them come at fitting times
To live old woes transform'd to eternal joys;
For heavenly spirits love to haunt those places
That in their earth-life drank deep of their thought.
The noted places of the earth are hung
With cobwebs of the gone, in spirit weaved.
Linger about them in humility,
And leave thyself to the upturning mood,
And thou'lt be swathed in the eternities
Whose outward shreds have pass'd:—

In temples, when
The organ rolls its breath in volumes round
The pillar'd galleries, and woman's voice
Out of the tumult like a rocket shoots,
And into the big music comes again
In bells of falling melody. Their creeds?
The under current of them all is thine,
And earnest hearts can hear the stream's deep tone
Beneath the surface clamour of the foam:—

In crowded streets, where we may best throw off
Our self-oppression and be most alone,
Catching the varied mind that passes by—
Now moved to inward laughter, now to tears:—

In summer, when the sultry day lies down
At noon to rest, lull'd by the hymn of bees,

And all things tarry for a drowsy hour
Till she arise to go along with them.
In that noon hour, when all things are at stand,
Thou mayest pass beyond them and behold
Glimpses of that they tell us of, but hide:—

In winter, when the snow coats hill and plain,
And all green things have crept in from the cold,
And farm-stead noises beat across the fields,
And the cracking ice chinks in the stony delf,
And the hard blue air is full of tinkling sounds,
And under all the faint and far-off hum
Of coming Spring, moving within the earth;
When in blank trees the spirit is not dead
But works an unseen change—look in and know:—

In children's eyes, ere yet the I, the Me,
Has swum within them, and whilst yet we may,
Unwearied, gaze into their azure wells
And see no mote of earth, but all the soft
Infinitude of heaven that engulfs
The gazer's soul in depths of skiey light:—

In books that so bewilder and perplex
The brain with multiplicity. Shut out
Their number for the time: one master-book
Disposes to the influx of All Thought,
Doing the thing that numbers can but do.
The thought lives not on pages but in space;
The printed characters mysteriously
Open the mind's pores and the thought flows in.
And may not books—our idolizèd books—
Be but the anvil sparks of beaten soul—

The left materials of wondrous work,
That please a child more than the work itself?
The maker of a book has the great good,
The reader only gleans a gather'd field.
All work yields up its wealth to him that works;
It will not be transferr'd, and therefore books
Are but our stepping-stones into the mines.

I see no heaven beaming in that eye!
O if thou still art lost and blindly grope,
Thy vision dark amidst excess of light,
Go to the desert where God's awful rest
Is on the fetter'd air, and nothing but
Blank rocks can bide the unutterable pause;
Go with a mind as naked as the rocks,
All memories stript off, all shreds of creeds—
A very child, unswaddled as from God,
But with thy garner'd consciousness of Thought,—
And that which thou hast ever fail'd to find,
Will, as the light finds out the dark, find thee,
And gather as a dawn into a day,
And be thy Light—be thee, as light is day.