The seen, the unrevealed.
Implacable they shine
To us who would of Life obtain
An answer for the life we strain
To
nourish with one sign.
Nor can
imagination throw
The penetrative shaft: we pass
The
breath of thought, who would divine
If haply they may grow
As Earth; have our desire to know;
If life comes there to grain from grass,
And flowers like ours of toil and pain;
Has
passion to beat bar,
Win space from cleaving brain;
The
mystic link attain,
Whereby star holds on star.
Those
visible im
mortals beam
Allurement to the dream:
Ireful at human hungers brook
No question in the look.
For ever
virgin to our sense,
Remote they wane to gaze intense:
Prolong it, and in ruthlessness they smite
The
beating heart behind the ball of sight:
Till we
conceive their heavens hoar,
Those lights they raise but sparkles frore,
And Earth, our blood-warm Earth, a shuddering prey
To that frigidity of brainless ray.
Yet space is given for
breath of thought
Beyond our bounds when musing: more
When to that musing love is brought,
And love is asked of love's wherefore.
'Tis Earth's, her gift; else have we nought:
Her gift, her secret, here our tie.
And not with her and yonder sky?
Bethink you: were it Earth alone
Breeds love, would not her region be
The sole delight and throne
Of
generous Deity?
To deeper than this ball of sight
Appeal the lustrous people of the night.
Fronting yon shoreless, sown with fiery sails,
It is our ravenous that quails,
Flesh by its craven thirsts and fears distraught.
The spirit leaps alight,
Doubts not in them is he,
The binder of his sheaves, the sane, the right:
Of
magnitude to
magnitude is
wrought,
To feel it large of the great life they hold:
In them to come, or vaster intervolved,
The issues known in us, our unsolved solved:
That there with toil Life climbs the self-same Tree,
Whose roots enrichment have from ripeness dropped.
So may we read and little find them cold:
Let it but be the lord of Mind to guide
Our eyes; no branch of Reason's growing lopped;
Nor dreaming on a dream; but fortified
By day to
penetrate black
midnight; see,
Hear, feel, outside the senses; even that we,
The specks of dust upon a mound of mould,
We who
reflect those rays, though low our place,
To them are lastingly allied.
So may we read, and little find them cold:
Not
frosty lamps illumining dead space,
Not distant aliens, not
senseless Powers.
The fire is in them
whereof we are born;
The music of their
motion may be ours.
Spirit shall deem them beckoning Earth and voiced
Sisterly to her, in her beams rejoiced.
Of love, the grand impulsion, we behold
The love that lends her grace
Among the
starry fold.
Then at new flood of
customary morn,
Look at her through her showers,
Her mists, her streaming gold,
A wonder edges the familiar face:
She wears no more that robe of printed hours;
Half strange seems Earth, and sweeter than her flowers.
WOODMAN AND ECHO
Close Echo hears the
woodman's axe,
To double on it, as in glee,
With clap of hands, and little lacks
Of meaning in her repartee.
For all shall fall,
As one has done,
The tree of me,
Of thee the tree;
And unto all
The fate we wait
Reveals the wheels
Whereon we run:
We tower to flower,
We spread the shade,
We drop for crop,
At length are laid;
Are rolled in mould,
From chop and lop:
And are we thick in
woodland tracks,
Or
tempting of our
stature we,
The end is one, we do but wax
For service over land and sea.
So, strike! the like
Shall thus of us,
My brawny
woodman, claim the tax.
Nor foe thy blow,
Though wood be good,
And shriekingly the
timber cracks:
The ground we crowned
Shall speed the seed
Of younger into swelling sacks.
For use he hews,
To make awake
The spirit of what stuff we be:
Our earth of mirth
And tears he clears
For braver, let our minds agree;
And then will men
Within them win
An Echo clapping
harmony.
THE WISDOM OF ELD
We spend our lives in
learning pilotage,
And grow good steersmen when the
vessel's crank!
Gap-toothed he spake, and with a tottering shank
Sidled to gain the sunny bench of Age.
It is the
sentence which completes that stage;
A
testament of
wisdomreading blank.
The seniors of the race, on their last plank,
Pass mumbling it as nature's final page.
These, bent by such experience, are the band
Who captain young enthusiasts to maintain
What things we view, and Earth's
decree withstand,
Lest dreaded Change, long dammed by dull decay,
Should bring the world a
vessel steered by brain,
And ancients
musical at close of day.
EARTH'S PREFERENCE
Earth loves her young: a
preference manifest:
She prompts them to her fruits and flower-beds;
Their beauty with her choicest interthreads,
And makes her revel of their merry zest;
As in our East much were it in our West,
If men had risen to do the work of heads.
Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads
The ways they walk; by what they speak oppressed.
How
wrought they in their
zenith? 'Tis not writ;
Not all; yet she by one sure sign can read:
Have they but held her laws and nature dear,
They mouth no
sentence of inverted wit.
More prizes she her beasts than this high breed
Wry in the shape she wastes her milk to rear.
SOCIETY
Historic be the
survey of our kind,
And how their brave Society took shape.
Lion, wolf, vulture, fox, jackal and ape,
The strong of limb, the keen of nose, we find,
Who, with some jars in
harmony, combined,
Their primal instincts taming, to escape
The brawl indecent, and hot
passions drape.
Convenience pricked
conscience, that the mind.
Thus entered they the field of milder beasts,
Which in some sort of civil order graze,
And do half-homage to the God of Laws.
But are they still for their old ravenous feasts,
Earth gives the
edifice they build no base:
They spring another flood of fangs and claws.
WINTER HEAVENS
Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive
Leap off the rim of earth across the dome.
It is a night to make the heavens our home
More than the nest whereto apace we strive.
Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive,
In swarms outrushing from the golden comb.
They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam:
The living throb in me, the dead revive.
Yon
mantle clothes us: there, past
mortalbreath,
Life glistens on the river of the death.
It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt,
Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs
Of
radiance, the
radiance enrings:
And this is the soul's haven to have felt.
End