Songs of A Worker :: :: University of Virginia Library

En Soph, uncomprehended in the thought
Of man or angel, having all that is
In one eternity of Being brought
Into a moment: yet with purposes,
Whence emanate those lower worlds of Time,
And Force, and Form, where man, with one wing caught
In clogging earth, angels in freer clime,
From partial blindness into partial sight,
Strive, yearn, and, with an inward hope sublime,
Rise ever; or, mastered by down-dragging might,
And groping weakly with an ill-trimmed light,
Sink, quenched;

En Soph was manifest, as dim
And awful as upon Egyptian throne
Osiris sits; but splendour covered Him;
And circles of the Sephiroth tenfold,
Vast and mysterious, intervening rolled.

And lo! from all the outward turning zones,
Before Him came the endless stream of souls
Unborn, whose destiny is to descend
And enter by the lowest gate of being.
And each one coming, saw, on written scrolls
And semblances that he might comprehend,
The things of Life and Death and Fate—which seeing,
Each little soul, as quivering like a flame
It paled before that splendour, stood and prayed
A piteous, fervent prayer against the shame
And ill of living, and would so have stayed
A flame-like emanation as before,
Unsullied and untried. Then, as he ceased

The tremulous supplication, full of sore
Foreboding agony to be released
From going on the doubtful pilgrimage
Of earthly hope and sorrow, for reply
A mighty angel touched his sight, to close,
Or nearly close, his spiritual eye,
So he should look on luminous things like those
No more till he had learned to live and die.

And when the pure bright flame, my soul, at last
Passed there in turn, it flickered like them all;
But oh! with some surpassing sad forecast
Of more than common pains that should befall
The man whose all too human heart has bled
With so much love and anguish until now,
And has not broken yet, and is not dead,
And shaken as a leaf in autumn late,
Tormented by the wind, my soul somehow
Found speech and prayed like this against my Fate:

The pure flame pent within the fragile form
Will writhe with inward torments; blind desires,
Seizing, will whirl me in their frenzied storm,
Clutching at shreds of heaven and phantom fires.
A voice, in broken ecstasies of song,
Awakening mortal ears with its high pain,
Will leave an echoing agony along
The stony ways and o'er the sunless plain,
While men stand listening in a silent throng.

And all the silences of life and death,
Like doors closed on the thing my spirit seeks,
Importuning each in turn, will freeze the breath
Upon my lips, appal the voice that speaks;
Until the silence of a human heart
At length, when I have wept there all my tears,
Poured out my passion, given my stainless part
Of heaven to hear what maybe no man hears,
Will work a woe that never can depart.

Oh, let me not be parted from the light!
Oh, send me not to where the outer stars
Tread their uncertain orbits, growing less bright,
Cycle by cycle; where, through narrowing bars,
The soul looks up and scarcely sees the throne
It fell from; where the stretched-out Hand that guides
On to the end, in that dull slackening zone
Reaches but feebly; and where man abides,
And finds out heaven with his heart alone.

I fear to live the life that shall be mine
Down in the half lights of that wandering world,
Mid ruined angels' souls that cease to shine,
Where fragments of the broken stars are hurled,
Quenched to the ultimate dark. Shall I believe,
Remembering, as of some exalted dream,
The life of flame, the splendour that I leave?
For, between life and death, shall it not seem
The fond false hope my shuddering soul would weave?

I dread the pain that I shall know on earth.
Give me another heart, but not that one
That cannot cease to suffer from its birth
With love, with grief, with hope; that will not shun
One human sorrow; that will pursue, indeed,
With tears more piteous than the woes they weep,
Hearts which, soon comforted, will leave to bleed
My heart on all the thorns of life. Oh, keep
That life from me—let me some other lead!

I fear to love as I shall love down there;
It is not like the changeless heavenly love.
I see a woman as an angel fair,
And know that I shall set her face above
All other hope or memory. Day by day,—
Ah, through what agonies and what despair!—
My soul's eternity will melt away
In following her. O God! I cannot bear
The passionate griefs I see along my way!

I shall not keep her; and I fear the grave
Where she will lie at last; for though my soul
Would yearn to wreck itself, yea, even to save
Her earthly perishable beauty whole,
I shall but pray to lie down at her side
And mingle with her dust, dreaming no dream,
Unless we wander hand in hand or hide,
Hopeless, together by some phantom stream—
Lost souls in human lives too sorely tried.

So prayed I, feeling even as I prayed
Torments and fever of a strange unrest
Take hold upon my spirit, fain to have stayed
In the eternal calm, and ne'er essayed
The perilous strife, the all too bitter test
Of earthly sorrows, fearing—and ah! too well—
To be quite ruined in some grief below,
And ne'er regain the heaven from which I fell.
But then the angel smote my sight—'twas so
I woke into this world of love and woe.

II. PART II. Last Prayer of the Soul.

After a few short years of feverish being
On earth, years all so swiftly flown, I seemed
To have filled them with a madness, as one seeing
No goal, but rushing on for something dreamed
Or lost, torn past endurance of an earthly frame
By griefs and angers and some brief-snatched bliss
More cruel, and with no stay for praise or blame,
Or thought of whether righteous or amiss
I did, only the roaring loud within
Of two great contrary voices loud in strife
The momentary prevalence to win;
Some last turn on the heated path of life

Brought me most suddenly before a door,
Dark and a mystery in the narrow way,
With look of nothing known to me before.
Only a moment had I then to stay,
Appalled: the latest frenzies of the blood
And o'erwrought heart abating rapidly,
Ere with me, overmastering me, there stood
One greater than in its weak humanity
My soul could comprehend, He touched the gloom
Of that closed door gigantic, the latest bar
Of iron earthliness, the body's tomb.
It opened noiseless: and for sight too far
I seemed to gaze, while feeling all his will
That I should enter or go out thereby,
And that above my head a moment still
As 'twere his other hand was raised on high.
But through quick inward change that brought to mind
Neglected knowledge, sudden flashing bright

Of flames burnt down or darkened, as one blind
A dream's space I began to see, with sight
Not of the failing eye, but such as thought
And memory use, the ample image unfailing
And look within. I saw my life as nought
In the eternity of spirit prevailing
Before and after; a moment's dream delayed
In the dense meshes of a slackening zone,
Where lights are scarce and wandering, or they fade
In some remote cessation. Clear my own
I saw an ever-brightening upward way,
Through finer-growing ocean and atmosphere,
The widening spirits' habitation lay
Open before me, and the mystery near;
Breaking a new-found revelation to my soul
Of that which, all beyond an angel's scope,
Tried me; and, farther than a star may roll
Unsundered from its sun, sent me to grope
Among the griefs and stumble o'er the graves
Of man's wrecked realm, yet drew me like a breath

Through all-dark walls and intervening waves,
And clogging heaviness of life and death,
Back to His bosom of ineffable calm,
And splendour of the soul's eternal source.

Yet, while that moment lasted, the disease
Of life was on me; its arrested course
My blood resumed and to my heart returned,
The latest fit of agony suspended,
At sudden shock. The unwrought purpose burned
Once more in all my being, with the blended
Fires and energies of love and grief,
Intense desire, and bitterness of hate.