University of Virginia Library

Alas, on this lone height my pinions fail,
And half my dreaming world unvisited!
As a sick woman, who, when morning glooms
Must leave for aye the house where she was wed,
Yearns to behold the thrice-familiar rooms,
And rises trembling, and with watch-lamp goes
From chamber unto chamber, stopping now
To muse upon her dead child's pictured brow,
And now to dream of little merriments
Enacted, and of trivial dear events,
Until her weakness grows
Upon her, and she sinks and cannot rise,—
So, since upon the sad and prescient skies
The darkness of this ultimate night was shed,
My feet from haunted place to haunted place
Of my familiar earth have kept their pace:
Alas, that ere the half be mused upon,
And while the coming up of dreadful day
Is still an hour away
My wing is broken, and my strength is gone!

Star after star goes out above the peak,
And only from the morning star is shed
Keen influence. Great star! He is not weak,
His pinions fail not; for he never quaffed
This frail and fiery air that mortals drink:
He has not heard when little children laughed;
He has not watched old pensioners break their bread;
To woman's lips he never held the draught
Of anguish, that a man-child might be born;
The May woods never saw him hiding there
His wings and flaming hair
To watch the young men pluck the budded thorn;
Nor has his mouth put off its seraph scorn
To hang with startled cry
Of grievous inquiry
Above the stoic forehead of the dead.

O heart of man, how I have loved thee!
Hidden in sunlight what sweet hours were mine
Of lover-like espial upon thine;
Thrilled with thy shadowy fears, half guessing
The hope that lit thy veins like wine,
Musing why this was bane and that thy blessing,
My angel-ichor moved by all that moved thee;
Though oft the meanings of thy joy and woe
Were hid, were hard to know;
For deep beneath the clear crystalline waters
That feed the hearts of Heaven's sons and daughters,
The roots of thy life go.
O dreamer! O desirer! Goer down
Unto untraveled seas in untried ships!
O crusher of the unimagined grape
On unconceivèd lips!
O player upon a lordly instrument
No man or god hath had in mind to invent;
O cunning how to shape
Effulgent Heaven and scoop out bitter Hell
From the little shine and saltness of a tear;
Sieger and harrier,
Beyond the moon, of thine own builded town,
Each morning won, each eve impregnable,
Each noon evanished sheer!
Thou fiery essence in a vase of fire!
What quarry gathered and packed down the clay
To make this delicate vessel of desire?
Who digged it? In what mortar did he bray?
Whose wistful hand did lead
All round the lyric brede?
Who tinted it, and burned the dross away?
“He, He,” (doth some one say?)
“Whose mallet-arm is lift and knitted hard
To break it into shard!”
Were that the Maker's way?
Who brings to being aught,
Love is his skill untaught,
Love is his ore, his furnace, and his tool;
Who makes, destroyeth not,
But much is dashed in pieces by the fool.

O struggler in the mesh
Of spirit and of flesh
Some subtle hand hath tied to make thee Man,
That now is unto thee a wide domain
To laugh and love and dare in for a span,
And straightway is a prison-house of pain,
A den of loathing, and a violent place,
A hold for unclean wing and cruel face
That mock the searèd heart and darkened brain,—
My bosom yearns above thee at the end,
Thinking of all thy gladness, all thy woe;
Whoever is thy foe,
I am thy friend, thy friend!
As thou hast striven, I strove to comprehend
The piteous sundering set betwixt the zenith
And nadir of thy fates,
Whose life doth serious message send
To moon and stars, anon itself demeaneth
Below the brute estates.
Wild heart, that through the steepening arcs art whirled
To a bright master-world,
And in a trice must blindly backward hark
To the subtèrrene dark,
Deem not that mighty gamut-frame was set
For wanton finger-fret!
No empty-hearted gymnast of the strings
Gave the wild treble wings,
Or flung the shuddering bass from Hell's last parapet.
Though now the Master sad
With vehemence shall break thee,
Not lightly did He make thee,
That morning when his heart was music-mad:
Lovely importings then his looks and gestures had.

Whatever cometh with to-morrow's light,
Oh, deem not that in idlesse or in spite
The strong knot of thy fate
Was woven so implicate,
Or that a jester put thee in that plight.
Darkly, but oh, for good, for good,
The spirit infinite
Was throned upon the perishable blood;
To moan and to be abject at the neap,
To ride portentous on the shrieking scud
Of the arousèd flood,
And halcyon hours to preen and prate in the boon
Tropical afternoon.

Not in vain, not in vain,
The spirit hath its sanguine stain,
And from its senses five doth peer
As a fawn from the green windows of a wood;
Slave of the panic woodland fear,
Boon-fellow in the game of blood and lust
That fills with tragic mirth the woodland year,
Searched with starry agonies
Through the breast and through the reins,
Maddened and led by lone moon-wandering cries.
Dust unto dust complains,
Dust laugheth out to dust,
Sod unto sod moves fellowship,
And the soul utters, as she must,
Her meanings with a loose and carnal lip;
But deep in her ambiguous eyes
Forever shine and slip
Quenchless expectancies,
And in a far-off day she seems to put her trust.
[OMITTED]
O Morning Star! that dost arise
Haughtily now from off thy flaming throne,
And standest in thy wings' outspreaded zone,
With hand uplift and intense vision glad,
More kindling while thy brother planets fade,—
Wilt thou, the seldom-speaker, speak and say
If this, if this be then the far-off day
When God shall give the substance for the shade?
When Man shall wake, and be no more adrad
To lose the precious dream he dreamed he had,
And the long groping of his heart be stayed?
[OMITTED]
He answers not; the globèd light he wears
Largens and largens like a wondrous flower,
And in the midst his wavering radiance fades.
Behold, upon the waters, them that be
Above the heavens, how the lily light
Blooms mystical and vast! till all the stars
And all the gathered clouds that wait the day
Are blotted by its rondure. Dimly grows
From height to depth of that magnificence
A splendor sad that taketh feature on. ...
Lo! where God's body hangs upon the cross,
Drooping from out yon skyey Golgotha
Above the wills and passions of the world!
O doomed, rejected world, awake! awake!
See where He droopeth white and pitiful!
Behold, his drooping brow is pitiful!
Cry unto Him for pity. Climb, oh, haste,
Climb swiftly up yon skyey Golgotha
To where his feet are wounded! Even now
He must have pity on his childish ones;
He knoweth, He remembereth they are dust!
[OMITTED]
Earth slumbers; and the freshening winds begin
To blow from out the unuprisen east;
Yet still abides that awful Eidolon
Large on the face of Heaven, and its light
Is as the patience of a thousand moons
Upon the peaks and gorges of the vale.
Now on that giant forehead slowly dawns
Again the star, the bright, the morning star;
Amid the changeful lampings of his orb
The Angel stands, with keen out-spreaded wings,
And lifted hand and intense vision glad,
As when he led his brother orbs in song.
But yet no word nor any breath of song
Begins upon the region silences:
All's hushed as ere the first-created throat
Was vocal.
Now remoter wonders wake,
Impatient glories gather and transpeer
That sky-suspended Image. Three by three
The beryl gates, the gates of chrysoprase,
And those that are a very perfect pearl
Open, and all the citadel of God
Even to the bright acropolis thereof,
The temple of the ark of the covenant,
Lies open, steeped in wroth light from the Throne;
And all the heavenly folk are busy there.