University of Virginia Library

“Beyond those peaks of purple,” some one said,
“That seem to prop the palace of the heavens
And meet and mix with them in loveliness
Of hyacinthine light, the Vision dwells
Through pillared porches opening into Life,
Where truth and beauty mingle and are one
In happiness and peace.” And I believed
And journeyed on in uncompanioned haste
A solitary soul, but still possest
With purpose like a fire, and ecstasy
Of hope that stept on roses as it trod
In triumph, heedless of the toil and soil
And buffetings of chance and change. I went
Straight as an arrow from the bow and winged
With passion, forward to the one fixed goal.
No terror turned me, no dread circumstance
Of danger stayed my feet that made the stones
And thorns subservient to their pilgrimage;
Though shadows as of death encompassed me
And threatening shapes that melted ere I passed,
While horror of deep night at times rushed down
Superincumbent. Ever on I moved,
Who only sought the beautiful and best.
But as I drew yet nearer, lo, the tops
That looked like summits of high virgin thought,
White roses bathed in blue and heaven, sank down
And dwindled into insignificance
Of common colours and most humble mien,
Which nought but distance and my purblind gaze
Had fashioned forms magnificent. I took
Them almost in my stride, and scarce
Discerned as different from the valley or plain.
No solemn Vision greeted me, no Voice
Brake like a living fountain from their cup
Of quietness; I heard the weary wind
That wailed as it had wailed ten thousand years
Among the rocks in their gray grim repose,
The rugged sphinxes of the solitude;
I saw no sight to gladden me, with peace
Of riddles answered and old secrets solved;
I caught no word of comfortableness,
That spake of lofty hopes and dreams fulfilled
In vast fruition of rich act and fact;
And still that ancient singer babbled on,
Just to itself. I wept and wondered now,
Where lay the Truth, the Unattainable,
Which yet I sought and wrought to overcome
If at the supreme sacrifice of all
That makes life worthy, health and wealth and life.

Then as I wept and grovelled in the dust,
Appeared a holy man with looks of love
And light that wove a wonder round his head
Hoary from time and measured pieties,
With murmuring lips of praise and breast of rest,
Who lifted up my fallen frame and mind,
And said, “Believe in God and dwell with me
Apart from men, and multiply sweet prayers
And charities for suffering pilgrims here,
Rejected by the world, and pour thy heart
Out in a daily stream of constant toil
And worship.” So I hearkened to his speech
That dropt like dew upon a wilderness
Upon my soul, and sojourned in his house,
And mortified my flesh with fasts and nails
Of crucifying penance, seeking what
I thirsted for with many tears and fears.
Whole nights I wrestled sore with monstrous foes,
Obscene and sudden, which against me flocked,
And brought with them all the artillery
Of evil, if they might but everthrow
The sanctity of my pure purpose. Lone
I faced them on my knees with agonies
Of supplication, meeting sword of pride
With shield of purpose, and though wounded oft
And bitterly I struggled toward some end,
Faint, yet determined still. I scattered gold
About me as I held my steadfast course
Of ministering mercies, and I lay
Myself in sackcloth on the dank hard stone,
Which struck me with inevitable arms
And bruised with frequent blows. But never came
The rending veil, the clear theophany.
I seemed as one who twisted ropes of sand,
And builded castles in the clouds of air
Or fancy; all my prayers and praises ran
To foolishness as beads upon a string,
Told in the twilight to the flickering shades
By ghostly figures; while the cares and snares
Of banished life peeped mockingly within
My haunted cell and yet more haunted heart
Still. Vainly did the chants devotional,
The sacred rites and solemn mysteries,
The service and the pageantry of cults
And venerable creeds that bowed the form
But not the spirit, hedge me round with bound
Of holy bars and bolts innumerable,
And talk to me in measures calm and soft
Antiphonies and ardent undertones.
That came not, which I sought by divers ways
Of genuflection in the very soul,
Which bent and bent not to observances
And forced oblations not my own; I stood
Outside it all, a mere spectator, touched
But yet not taken by the almighty tide
Of worship, that with whirl and swirl profound
Caught other souls and flooded them with flame
And secret music, till they overflowed
In bright and burning love and walked with God
And lived in utter disembodiment.
I heard not, saw not, felt not aught except
One awful Silence dark unknowable.

I wandered forth once more, a haunted thing,
A sole and separate waif, and lacked not guides
Or councillors. They crawled on every hand,
Loud, confident and multitudinous,
Cheap as the dirt and common as the weeds
Beneath my feet; they swarmed as vermin swarm
In rubbish and the horrors of decay,
Corrupt themselves, and so corrupting all
With the dire taint of their infectiousness,
Whate'er they handled. Each with remedies
To heal the heart or the distempered brain
And any ill, with much religiousness
Or wondrous new moralities not taught
By right or reason or the maddest church;
Each rostrum had its nostrum for my case.
Again I plunged into the moil of men
And things, and drank the battle's fevered breath,
Esteeming strife as life, and held my own
Against tremendous odds, and rose and fell
And rose once more Antœus from the earth,
To smite the foeman down in dust and shame
And gather splendid spots, in armoured ease
Of resolution as on anvils wrought
Red-hot to iron perfectedness of might;
And from the pious palimpsests of use
With all its organised hypocrisies
And glittering masks of meretriciousness,
I tore the veil and showed the naked springs
And devilries at work, the engine-room,
The reeking hell that was the human breast.
One bade me live, another bade me die,
And both with equal certitude of speech
Assured. One told me work was everything,
Rejuvenescence and the fount of joy;
While yet another sware, that rest alone
From toil and soil could bring me happiness
And peace of soul. One knew the bliss required,
The longed-for Vision and the Victory
Lay all within the heart of man himself
For introspection and the purged desire;
Another knew the wells were all without
In Nature communed-with and made a friend,
And conquering paths of broad humanities
In fellowship of love and labour. One
Proclaimed the sole sufficiency of trust,
Another preached pure excellence in deeds,
And both alike with boundlessness of pride
Boasted the secret of Omniscience.

But in the teaching and the preaching, thrust
Upon me by a thousand ready guides
Or leaders who to nothing led but night,
And could not lead themselves one little stage
Along the road of life, I found no rest;
But only counsels darkened, and despair
Or shame of mind. Confusion spread around,
It crept from bosom unto bosom thwart
And threatening, and it coiled about the heart
Circumvolutions serpentine and sad
And chill. The rulers and authorities
But feigned and reigned not over any realm,
Excepting drear logomachies of dust.
For all had different ways, and yet agreed
In insolence and infertility
Of thought that was mock thunder without bolt
Or the red sword of lightning; optimists
Sang hope and peace and fair enfranchisements
At last somehow for every creature; some
Rejoiced and revelled in the frank blank crash
Of universal ruin, and a doom
In final unimaginable woe
Fixed; some, with besoms of gay theories,
Surmised that they could sweep an ocean back
Or on with strophe and antistrophe,
Of laboured line and elegant conceit,
And make the play and spectacle their own
With splitting hairs and measurements of straws;
Some in the present, some in the deep womb
Of ages dim and distant, marked the rose
That was redeeming dawn, new chastities
And chivalries, the modes and codes of life's
Last efflorescence, when the rude crude days
Had passed; some sallied forth on wild crusades
And raked the gutters, moral scavengers,
Who drew from ugly sores unspeakable
The decent veil, and gloated over heaps
Of hateful refuse and the leprosies
That bred in brothels; some ran over still
With babblement of many words and cures,
And went and came in empty rivalries
Backward and forward up and down the streets
And market-places, hawking petty trash
Of medicines that were mockery and grief.
And from the pulpit rose no certain sound
But mumblings low and mouthings of false lips,
The postures and impostures of the boards,
The harlotries of art and masquerade
That halted through its helpless mummery.

So I perceived at length there was no bound,
No Vision and no Voice of comforting
Save in the passion of pursuit; the end
Was nothing, and the way was everything;
And in no idle refuge ultimate
Lay Victory, but in the constant strife
And agony and clash of hand with hand
Or soul with soul. And thus I marked evolved
The plenitudes of progress and the grace
Of poesies, through gray catastrophes
That sowed the seed of fresh vitality
Betwixt the ribs of death. I saw the end
Must be for ever unapproachable,
And if an end existed all would stop
When it was reached in equilibrium
Of pale paralysis and dumb deep night
And dark stark frost. No anchorage that held,
Save for a moment when our battered ships
Were moored against some new philosophy
And gathered food to voyage farther on
Into the awful Infinite, abode
On this side of the mystery called life,
Nor was desired. For but in ceaseless flux
Of creeds and deeds and bright activities
And energies, and impulses and shifts
Of aims and claims with fresh horizons yet
Expanding, could the faculties of man
And blossomings of sweet moralities
Be brought to birth and grow to grander heights,
As purple mountains leap range beyond range
To purple skies and marry heaven and earth.
I proved the moment ethical sufficed,
And that was all; to seize the effluence
Of prayer or passion, the voluptuousness
In woven arms when mouth kist mouth and breast
Met breast, and all the body pulsed with fire,
The white abandonment of ecstasy
Immersed in depths devotional. No waste
Of thought and feeling, or the aptitudes
And jealousies of educated wit,
That flashed among our delicate delights
And fell in sadness or rose up in song,
But always played about the paradise
Of men, for ever lost, for ever found,
If only in the humble flowers of earth.

Thus have I learned—by the similitudes
Of present nature and the apparent war
Betwixt all creatures and all things that live,
Which hardly hides the brotherhood below
And fellowship of aim and unity
Through sacrifice—thus have I dimly learned,
There is no true theophany but this:
The lesson by the way, the walk, the talk,
The rapture of resistance overcome,
The fight of might, the plenitudes of hope,
The revelation of the heart to heart
By loss and cross and torn tumultuousness
Of appetites that surge and urge us on,
To break like foam on iron and dreadful rocks
Of righteousness and rule immutable
By a Divinity, I know not what,
Above, around, within and everywhere
Desired, and yet most undesirable
By imperfections shrivelling at its touch.
I simply feel that, whether wrong or right
My plan and purposing, I shall go on
As now somewhither and somehow to some
Uncertain issue not finality,
Taught and untaught by trifles and the vast
Outgoings of the ages; till I gain,
If I do gain, a seeming strength at length
To be myself and not another, nerved
For either fortune, to endure, enjoy
Whatever comes or seems to come to me
From inner founts or the environment
Of shining shapes that fluctuate and are
But shadows. And content in uncontent
Of resignation is my will and skill
Whereby to steer my storm-tost impotence
Unto the haven not of happiness,
But knowledge tempered to the passing hour,
And re-adjusted, as I step through gloom
Or glimmer of a ghostly photosphere
All undefined and undefinable.
But still I seek and seek—because I must,
And choose, as being the slave of circumstance
No less than lord—the Vision that eludes
My utmost efforts and for ever flies
Before me in new latitudes of thought
And unconjecturable fantasies
Where night is day, and no beginning is
And never bounding wall, and day is night,
The end no end, the Unattainable.