Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

The ways are closed upon me. When I try
To get admittance to the busy mart,
No one hears what I say, and straight a wall
Runs up about me; buyers and sellers pass,
But no one asks me—Will I buy or sell?
And when the day grows dusk, and cheery groups
Wear off, well pleased, a good day's business done,
None asks me—Will I go? I have no key
To fit the lock of any of their hearts.
Duck-like they breast the world's tide and float on,

Sleek and unruffled. If I tempt the stream,
I fall into some eddy and am drawn
By hidden currents back against the feathers.
Our meetings, too, at nights, disgorge me up
The same unalter'd thing. That gastric juice,
That mellows all their natures into chyme,
Slimes me but works no chemical effect.

The meanest thing should have a way on earth.
Have I not mine? Ah! when that mid-day sun
Shall, like an after-dinner alderman,
Full-faced and flush'd with wine, wink in yon west,
And eve's one star come through the gauzy light
To tend like loving wife her winey lord—
Who like ripe fruit drops heavily to bed—
And kneeling on the earth she gives her soul
To Heaven in a flood of glowing prayer,
And quietly beside her lord lies down,—
O then my hour is come!—I move as light
That has its time and orbit. With the stars
My way is through the night. Our light is pale
And dim and distant to the earth; but earth
Knows not the glow we have amongst ourselves:
The fogs that hide us are not ours but hers.

God lights both stars and souls; their glory is
Their measure of His being. Who would shine
In His full light must tarry like the stars
And bide God's time—not in hibernal coil,
But with a watchful soul laid bare to Heaven,

And in a ceaseless prayer, drinking in
The light that moves him onward to his rise.

No one, however dim, is wholly dark;
For life and darkness cannot be in one.
But whoso, charmèd with another's blaze,
Would also be of that peculiar hue,
Draws in a borrow'd light that dwarfs his own.
He is the garner of another's wealth,
To be repaid with interest, beggaring him.

Thou see'st that heaven of stars! Not man, the race—
The multitudinous, crowded, scatter'd race—
Seems more confused, more purposeless than that.
Yet each particular orb has its own course,
And threads the ambiguities of space
Unerringly, because moved by the Law
That shaped its course and it, and is to it
Necessity of movement. Fretful soul—
Fretful because of freedom—thou shalt know
That under thy free gift lies that same Law:
It is thy root of being, grows in thee,
And will press out that freedom, which is but
Thy present mode of growth and source of ill.
The time will be when we shall pace the heavens
In glorious constellations like the stars;
Blissful as they, but conscious of our bliss;
Moved only by necessity of Right,
Which is the highest reach of a free soul.
The time will be hereafter—might be now,

Did we obey the tide of that deep Will
Beneath the turbid currents of our own,
And take with joy the motion that it gives.

My disobedience drives me to the night:
My way should not be with the stars alone:
The same deep spirit that bears up the dark
Brings in the living day, and bides all day
Amidst the ways of men. If I have not
Found what I sought in them, have been like one
Breathing an element that gives no life,
It was for want of truer seeking: Thou,
The life of all the elements, wast there—
The life that in defeat gives victory,
And gain in loss.—I will not shun the field
Of this world's battle: if I may not ride
Proudly with shining helm and nodding plume,
On the topmost surge of deeds, I will, unmark'd,
Pass through it like a spirit, as Thou dost;
Be with the stout hearts in the cloud of war,
And help them to Thy bosom when they fall.