University of Virginia Library

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65

[O God, I have striven to grasp a straw]

I.

O God, I have striven to grasp a straw
Whirled from Thy central mystery,—
Some merest fragment of Thy law,
To bring me somehow nearer Thee:

To give me foothold but to span
A moment of Thy wealth of years,
Who drinkest up the life of man,—
Whose heart-throbs keep alive the spheres.

Star after star floats up the sky;
They sing in rapture as they go.
I hear; they know no more than I;
They are contented not to know.

The secrets of the world I probe;
Nature and all her laws are dumb.
Saith the great heart-voice of the globe,—
“From thine own soul must knowledge come.”

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66

I search my soul, but find no key
To unlock the door shut fast on Him.
The whole world murmurs, “Where is He?”
Is the voice His, when storms grow grim?

I were content with any mite
Of knowledge, for the sky is black
With hungry wolf-hounds, born of night,
And Death is hard upon the track;

And I am as a little child
That feebly gropes along the wall,
A moment walks, then totters wild,
And thrusts blind hands to meet its fall,

And cannot rise, and night is nigh,
And spectres gibber in the grey,
And the destroyer, passing by,
Will find me fall'n across the way.

II.

Year after year fulfils the word
God spake of it when speech was new,
'Mid storms and thunder-throbs that stirred
The roots of order through and through.

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67

His finger thrills along the nerves
Of space that weave the worlds in one.
His changeless will nor shrinks nor swerves
To wreck a star, to spare a sun.

How then shall man, with half a day
To build his flimsy walls of thought,
Hem in a God with hands of clay,
Whose footfall shivers worlds to nought,—

Unveil the heart o' the universe,
And dwarf it to his human mind?
Before the prime there came the curse
Of Time on us, and made us blind

To all beyond the grasp of sense.
We drift upon creation's round,
Nor know what wave of consequence,
God-driven, hath caught us, whither bound.

Yet once, may be, the soul may burst
Her bonds in some ecstatic hour,
When years of tireless toil have nursed
Closed buds of knowledge into flower:—

Gaze blenchless through the mist and mark
Faint gleams of swiftly flying feet,—
Far lightnings flooding all the dark
Inwards toward God's world-circled seat!

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68

Back shrinks the soul! the gleam is gone;
Through rifts of cloud night oozes gloom.
Down her dim path the earth spins on,
And, darkling, we fulfil our doom.

III.

Slow swings the earth round her own core,
Swift swings the earth about the sun,
Nor rests from either evermore
Till God hath thundered, “It is done!”

But lo, this human heart of mine,
That whirls with every gust of sin;
That fain would follow Love divine
In cycling flight till Life begin;

Yet fain would taste of earthly love,
And win the goal of earthly fame;
And hath its idols, and would prove
Each one a god till turned to shame;

And follows every wandering fire
That seems a beacon in the mist;
And deems some unknown faith were higher
Than that whose God's lips Judas kissed;

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69

And throbs to every faith men hold,
And knows not what itself believes;
Gleans from all creeds chance shreds of gold,
And thence its motley garment weaves.

Yet this it hath, O God, and this
Is vain;—a will to find out Thee
And die, Thy raiment's hem to kiss,
Scorched with the blasts of Deity!

But Thou art hidden, and my heart,
Blinded with searching, calls in vain,
“Wilt Thou not show me where Thou art?”
Storms shout my anguish back again.

Until the silences of space
Break up and, shrivelling, leave Thee bare,
My soul must sorrow in its place,
Whirled on its pivot of despair.