Collected Poems: With Autobiographical and Critical Fragments ::

Or questi che dall' infima lacuna
Dell' universo insin qui ha vedute
Le vite spiritali ad una ad una,
Supplica a te per grazia di virtute
Tanto che possa con gli occhi levarsi
Più alto verso l' ultima salute.
Dante, Par. xxxiii. 22-28.

Friend, and it little matters if with thee
In shadowed vales and night's solemnity
Heart has met heart, and soul with soul has known
A deathless kinship and one hope alone;—
Or if thy dear voice by mine ears unheard
Has never spoken me one wingèd word,
Nor mine eyes seen thee, nor my spirit guessed
The answering spirit hidden in thy breast;—
Known or unknown, seen once and loved for long,
Or only reached by this faint breath of song,
In thine imagined ears I pour again
A faltering message from the man in men,—
Thoughts that are born with summer, but abide
Past summer into sad Allhallowtide.

184

The world without, men say, the needs within,
Which clash and make what we call sorrow and sin,
Tend to adjustment evermore, until
The individual and the cosmic will
Shall coincide, and man content and free
Assume at last his endless empery,
Seeking his Eden and his Heaven no more
By fabled streams behind him or before,
But feeling Pison with Euphrates roll
Round the great garden of his kingly soul.

I answer that, so far, the type that springs
Seems like a race of strangers, not of kings
Less fit for earth, not more so; rather say
Grown like the dog who when musicians play
Feels each false note and howls, while yet the true
With doubtful pleasure tremulous thrill him through,
Since man's strange thoughts confuse him, and destroy
With half-guessed raptures his ancestral joy.

Meantime dim wonder on the untravelled way
Holds our best hearts, and palsies all our day;
One looks on God, and then with eyes struck blind
Brings a confusing rumour to mankind;

185

And others listen, and no work can do
Till they have got that God defined anew;
And in the darkness some have fallen, as fell
To baser gods the folk of Israel,
When with Jehovah's thunders heard too nigh
They wantoned in the shade of Sinai.

Take any of the sons our Age has nursed,
Fed with her food and taught her best and worst;
Suppose no great disaster; look not nigh
On hidden hours of his extremity;
But watch him like the flickering magnet stirred
By each imponderable look and word,
And think how firm a courage every day
He needs to bear him on life's common way,
Since even at the best his spirit moves
Thro' such a tourney of conflicting loves,—
Unwisely sought, untruly called untrue,
Beloved, and hated, and beloved anew;
Till in the changing whirl of praise and blame
He feels himself the same and not the same,
And often, overworn and overwon,
Knows all a dream and wishes all were done.

I know it, such an one these eyes have seen
About the world with his unworldly mien,
And often idly hopeless, often bent
On some tumultuous deed and vehement,
Because his spirit he can nowise fit

186

To the world's ways and settled rule of it,
But thro' contented thousands travels on
Like a sad heir in disinherison,
And rarely by great thought or brave emprise
Comes out about his life's perplexities,
Looks thro' the rifted cloudland, and sees clear
Fate at his feet and the high God anear.

Ah let him tarry on those heights, nor dream
Of other founts than that Aonian stream!
Since short and fierce, then hated, drowned, and dim
Shall most men's chosen pleasures come to him,—
Not made for such things, nor for long content
With the poor toys of this imprisonment.
Ay, should he sit one afternoon beguiled
By some such joy as makes the wise a child,
Yet if at twilight to his ears shall come
A distant music thro' the city's hum,
So slight a thing as this will wake again
The incommunicable homeless pain,
Until his soul so yearns to reunite
With her Prime Source, her Master and Delight,
As if some loadstone drew her, and brain and limb
Ached with her struggle to get through to Him.

187

And is this then delusion? can it be
That like the rest high heaven is phantasy?
Can God's implicit promise be but one
Among so many visions all undone?

Nay, if on earth two souls thro' sundering fate
Can save their sisterhood inviolate,
If dimness and deferment, time and pain,
Have no more lasting power upon those twain
Than stormy thunderclouds which, spent and done,
Leave grateful earth still gazing on the sun,—
If their divine hope gladly can forgo
Such nearness as this wretched flesh can know,
While, spite of all that even themselves may do,
Each by her own truth feels the other true:—
Faithful no less is God, who having won
Our spirits to His endless unison
Betrays not our dependence, nor can break
The oath unuttered which His silence spake.

Oh dreadful thought, if all our sires and we
Are but foundations of a race to be,—
Stones which one thrusts in earth, and builds thereon
A white delight, a Parian Parthenon,
And thither long thereafter, youth and maid

188

Seek with glad brows the alabaster shade,
And in processions' pomp together bent
Still interchange their sweet words innocent,—
Not caring that those mighty columns rest
Each on the ruin of a human breast,—
That to the shrine the victor's chariot rolls
Across the anguish of ten thousand souls!

“Well was it that our fathers suffered thus,”
I hear them say, “that all might end in us;
Well was it here and there a bard should feel
Pains premature and hurt that none could heal;
These were their preludes, thus the race began;
So hard a matter was the birth of Man.”

And yet these too shall pass and fade and flee,
And in their death shall be as vile as we,
Nor much shall profit with their perfect powers
To have lived a so much sweeter life than ours,
When at the last, with all their bliss gone by,
Like us those glorious creatures come to die,
With far worse woe, far more rebellious strife
Those mighty spirits drink the dregs of life.

Nay, by no cumulative changeful years,
For all our bitter harvesting of tears,

189

Shalt thou tame man, nor in his breast destroy
The longing for his home which deadens joy;
He cannot mate here, and his cage controls
Safe bodies, separate and sterile souls;
And wouldst thou bless the captives, thou must show
The wild green woods which they again shall know.

Therefore have we, while night serenely fell,
Imparadised in sunset's œnomel,
Beheld the empyrean, star on star
Perfecting solemn change and secular,
Each with slow roll and pauseless period
Writing the solitary thoughts of God.
Not blindly in such moments, not in vain,
The open secret flashes on the brain,
As if one almost guessed it, almost knew
Whence we have sailed and voyage where-unto;
Not vainly, for albeit that hour goes by,
And the strange letters perish from the sky,
Yet learn we that a life to us is given
One with the cosmic spectacles of heaven,—
Feel the still soul, for all her questionings,
Parcel and part of sempiternal things;
For us, for all, one overarching dome,
One law the order, and one God the home.

190

Ah, but who knows in what thin form and strange,
Through what appalled perplexities of change,
Wakes the sad soul, which having once forgone
This earth familiar and her friends thereon
In interstellar void becomes a chill
Outlying fragment of the Master Will;
So severed, so forgetting, shall not she
Lament, immortal, immortality?

If thou wouldst have high God thy soul assure
That she herself shall as herself endure,
Shall in no alien semblance, thine and wise,
Fulfil her and be young in Paradise,
One way I know; forget, forswear, disdain
Thine own best hopes, thine utmost loss and gain,
Till when at last thou scarce rememberest now
If on the earth be such a man as thou,
Nor hast one thought of self-surrender,—no,
For self is none remaining to forgo,—
If ever, then shall strong persuasion fall
That in thy giving thou hast gained thine all,
Given the poor present, gained the boundless scope,
And kept thee virgin for the further hope.

This is the hero's temper, and to some
With battle-trumpetings that hour has come,

191

With guns that thunder and with winds that fall,
With closing fleets and voices augural;—
For some, methinks, in no less noble wise
Divine prevision kindles in the eyes,
When all base thoughts like frighted harpies flown
In her own beauty leave the soul alone;
When Love,—not rosy-flushed as he began,
But Love, still Love, the prisoned God in man,—
Shows his face glorious, shakes his banner free,
Cries like a captain for Eternity:—
O halcyon air across the storms of youth,
O trust him, he is true, he is one with Truth!
Nay, is he Christ? I know not; no man knows
The right name of the heavenly Anterôs,—
But here is God, whatever God may be,
And whomsoe'er we worship, this is He.

Ah, friend, I have not said it: who shall tell
In wavering words the hope unspeakable?
Which he who once has known will labour long
To set forth sweetly in persuasive song,
Yea, many hours with hopeless art will try
To save the fair thing that it shall not die,
Then after all despairs, and leaves to-day
A hidden meaning in a nameless lay.

University of Virginia Library

THE IMPLICIT PROMISE OF IMMORTALITY