University of Virginia Library

IV.

“Thou immature
And mindless god! whose smiling sinecure
Is but a blindfold childhood never grown!
Comest thou to mock at what thou hast not known
—Man's full-grown misery at the end of all
The strivings of a life, spent past recall,
Used out, in urging, on its destin'd way
To dissolution, force that went astray
By struggling upwards? Such a vapour streams
From altars vainly lit; which, tho' it seems
To go up to the gods, goes nowhere—is
Made nothing, merged in that wide nothingness
Men take for Heaven! Thou purblind lord of all
Purblindest instincts! thee, not Love I call,
But Lust. For man's loss, Love must needs be sad:
Lust, with no eyes to see man's loss, is glad,
As thou art. Yet, since men misname thee Love,
Loose, if thou canst, what, pent in me, doth move
Importunate, as some dumb creature curst
With such a secret as at length must burst
Its heart, endeavouring to be understood.
O Love, if thou be Love, pluck off that hood
That hides thine eyes from human grief. Revere
Love's last result on earth—a wretch's tear!
Break silence, Love! Thee only, of the gods,
I ask . . . What is it heaves earth's sullen clods
When Spring winds, wet with tears from trembling boughs,
Breathe, and behold! in place of snows (those snows
Themselves earth's seasonable comforters)
The abounding violet! Or what Spirit stirs
In tones and scents that bathe man's wearied heart
With fresh belief, and bid the strong tears start
For solemn joy? What mystic inmate gives
Some sense of loveliness to all that lives:
Some worth, tho' hinder'd, to the humblest worm
That crawls; some purpose to the poorest germ
That buds unwitness'd from the meanest seed:
Some beauty to the barest rock's worst weed?
Which, thro' all pores of Being, everywhere
Passing, at last, into Man's Life; and there
Changing what was (till such a change it knew)
Merely, perchance, some droplet of wild dew,
Clasping a thorn, to Pity; some tost sea,
To Aspiration passionate; some tree,
That struggles with the savage gust forlorn
All night, wherein a wild bird sings at morn
Exulting, to the Fortitude of Faith;
In Man grows audible; speaks out, and saith
To Heaven “Await me!” with a human voice:
Man here, God everywhere! Which doth rejoice,
And droop, live, strive, and grieve, and grow, with man:
And so, completing from all points, the plan
Of a god's vast experience in God's Bliss,
—Too perfect, too immeasurable, to miss
The manifold significance of tears,
Strength strain'd from weakness, struggle that endears
Triumph, and failure forced into success,—
Looks down thro' all inferior grades to bless
Life's hopes with Love's assurance of the end
Whereto all Life, by Love inspired, doth tend!
Such a god dare not be indifferent
To man's success or failure: He, the Event,
Which man, His Means, he fashions to fulfil:
A god's means, therefore worth a god's care still!
Oh, such a god, my spirit whispers me,
Tho' nameless yet, and yet unknown, must be.
I seek His Face among your faces all,
Olympians; and, not finding it, I call
Earth's woe to witness that you do not well,
Being gods, to leave man godless . . . You! that tell,
Smiling the while, as you depart serene,
Me that have loved you, me whose life hath been
Yours, tho' in vain, yours past recovery, here
At that life's cheated end, to now revere
What love of you hath bid me loathe . . . .
“If He—
If He, indeed, were—what ye are not, ye!—
That God—that Love, which . . . Ah, but know I not,
Too well, with cause to curse them all for what
They are—and do—His worshippers? the late
Last form of man's forlornness . . . men that hate
Even each other!
“Fair, false Forms depart!
Happy in ignorance of the human heart
You have deceived! Apollo, load some star
With liquid music far from earth! Far, far
From eyes worn out with weeping wasted love,
O Venus, guide whatever golden dove
Delights to draw thy lucid wheels!
“But we?
The men that loved you, and are left?
“Ah me,
What goal to us remains, whose course some Fate
Impels unwilling where no prize can wait
The weary runner?
“He, that late is come
To rule from your abandon'd thrones the scum
And sewage of that rough-hewn rabble world
Wrought from the ruins of Rome's pride down-hurl'd,
Why comes He now, who comes so late? He too,
Hath He not all too long connived with you
At man's disaster? If He love to be
Beloved of men, why so long linger'd He?
Letting men grow familiar, age by age,
With gods not destined to endure; engage,
Unwarn'd, to you the homage, He now claims,
And you resign; while men that got your names
By heart, have now no heart left to unlearn
The faith which, sued for ages, given, you spurn!
Is nothing sure? Must man's existence be
Barter'd and bandied thus eternally
From god to god? By each new master made
Pull down in haste what each last master bade
The o'ertask'd drudge build up with toil intense?
Oh, for some voice Love's sanction to dispense
To Life's endeavour! oh for one, but one,
Of all you gods, whose forms I gaze upon
With grief left godless, to assure at last
This else-wrong'd spirit, that, in despite the Past,
Which fail'd in power, the Present, by despair
Darken'd, the Future, desolate and bare,
It did not ill to trust an instinct, wrong'd
Not seldom, oft rebuked, but yet prolong'd
Thro' strangling hinderance and confounding chance;
Which, fronting Heaven with constant countenance,
Would whisper, ‘I am love, and love is there,
And love to love is kindred everywhere!’
But which of all the gods can do this?”