The Children of the Night

by Edwin Arlington Robinson

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Sonnet

OH for a poet -- for a beacon bright

To rift this changeless glimmer of dead gray;

To spirit back the Muses, long astray,

And flush Parnassus with a newer light;

To put these little sonnet-men to flight

Who fashion, in a shrewd, mechanic way,

Songs without souls, that flicker for a day,

To vanish in irrevocable night.

What does it mean, this barren age of ours?

Here are the men, the women, and the flowers,

The seasons, and the sunset, as before.

What does it mean? Shall not one bard arise

To wrench one banner from the western skies,

And mark it with his name forevermore?



George Crabbe

GIVE him the darkest inch your shelf allows,

Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will, --

But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still

With the sure strength that fearless truth endows.

In spite of all fine science disavows,

Of his plain excellence and stubborn skill

There yet remains what fashion cannot kill,

Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows.

Whether or not we read him, we can feel

From time to time the vigor of his name

Against us like a finger for the shame

And emptiness of what our souls reveal

In books that are as altars where we kneel

To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.



Credo

I CANNOT find my way: there is no star

In all the shrouded heavens anywhere;

And there is not a whisper in the air

Of any living voice but one so far

That I can hear it only as a bar

Of lost, imperial music, played when fair

And angel fingers wove, and unaware,

Dead leaves to garlands where no roses are.

No, there is not a glimmer, nor a call,

For one that welcomes, welcomes when he fears,

The black and awful chaos of the night;

For through it all, -- above, beyond it all, --

I know the far-sent message of the years,

I feel the coming glory of the Light!



On the Night of a Friend's Wedding

IF ever I am old, and all alone,

I shall have killed one grief, at any rate;

For then, thank God, I shall not have to wait

Much longer for the sheaves that I have sown.

The devil only knows what I have done,

But here I am, and here are six or eight

Good friends, who most ingenuously prate

About my songs to such and such a one.

But everything is all askew to-night, --

As if the time were come, or almost come,

For their untenanted mirage of me

To lose itself and crumble out of sight,

Like a tall ship that floats above the foam

A little while, and then breaks utterly.



Sonnet

THE master and the slave go hand in hand,

Though touch be lost. The poet is a slave,

And there be kings do sorrowfully crave

The joyance that a scullion may command.

But, ah, the sonnet-slave must understand

The mission of his bondage, or the grave

May clasp his bones, or ever he shall save

The perfect word that is the poet's wand!

The sonnet is a crown, whereof the rhymes

Are for Thought's purest gold the jewel-stones;

But shapes and echoes that are never done

Will haunt the workshop, as regret sometimes

Will bring with human yearning to sad thrones

The crash of battles that are never won.



Verlaine

WHY do you dig like long-clawed scavengers

To touch the covered corpse of him that fled

The uplands for the fens, and rioted

Like a sick satyr with doom's worshippers?

Come! let the grass grow there; and leave his verse

To tell the story of the life he led.

Let the man go: let the dead flesh be dead,

And let the worms be its biographers.

Song sloughs away the sin to find redress

In art's complete remembrance: nothing clings

For long but laurel to the stricken brow

That felt the Muse's finger; nothing less

Than hell's fulfilment of the end of things

Can blot the star that shines on Paris now.



Sonnet

WHEN we can all so excellently give

The measure of love's wisdom with a blow, --

Why can we not in turn receive it so,

And end this murmur for the life we live?

And when we do so frantically strive

To win strange faith, why do we shun to know

That in love's elemental over-glow

God's wholeness gleams with light superlative?

Oh, brother men, if you have eyes at all,

Look at a branch, a bird, a child, a rose, --

Or anything God ever made that grows, --

Nor let the smallest vision of it slip,

Till you can read, as on Belshazzar's wall,

The glory of eternal partnership!



Supremacy

THERE is a drear and lonely tract of hell

From all the common gloom removed afar:

A flat, sad land it is, where shadows are,

Whose lorn estate my verse may never tell.

I walked among them and I knew them well:

Men I had slandered on life's little star

For churls and sluggards; and I knew the scar

Upon their brows of woe ineffable.

But as I went majestic on my way,

Into the dark they vanished, one by one,

Till, with a shaft of God's eternal day,

The dream of all my glory was undone, --

And, with a fool's importunate dismay,

I heard the dead men singing in the sun.



The Night Before

LOOK you, Dominie; look you, and listen!

Look in my face, first; search every line there;

Mark every feature, -- chin, lip, and forehead!

Look in my eyes, and tell me the lesson

You read there; measure my nose, and tell me

Where I am wanting! A man's nose, Dominie,

Is often the cast of his inward spirit;

So mark mine well. But why do you smile so?

Pity, or what? Is it written all over,

This face of mine, with a brute's confession?

Nothing but sin there? nothing but hell-scars?

Or is it because there is something better --

A glimmer of good, maybe -- or a shadow

Of something that's followed me down from childhood --

Followed me all these years and kept me,

Spite of my slips and sins and follies,

Spite of my last red sin, my murder, --

Just out of hell? Yes? something of that kind?

And you smile for that? You're a good man, Dominie,

The one good man in the world who knows me, --

My one good friend in a world that mocks me,

Here in this hard stone cage. But I leave it

To-morrow. To-morrow! My God! am I crying?

Are these things tears? Tears! What! am I frightened?

I, who swore I should go to the scaffold

With big strong steps, and -- No more. I thank you,

But no -- I am all right now! No! -- listen!

I am here to be hanged; to be hanged to-morrow

At six o'clock, when the sun is rising.

And why am I here? Not a soul can tell you

But this poor shivering thing before you,

This fluttering wreck of the man God made him,

For God knows what wild reason. Hear me,

And learn from my lips the truth of my story.

There's nothing strange in what I shall tell you,

Nothing mysterious, nothing unearthly, --

But damnably human, -- and you shall hear it.

Not one of those little black lawyers had guessed it;

The judge, with his big bald head, never knew it;

And the jury (God rest their poor souls!) never dreamed it.

Once there were three in the world who could tell it;

Now there are two. There'll be two to-morrow, --

You, my friend, and -- But there's the story: --

When I was a boy the world was heaven.

I never knew then that the men and the women

Who petted and called me a brave big fellow

Were ever less happy than I; but wisdom --

Which comes with the years, you know -- soon showed me

The secret of all my glittering childhood,

The broken key to the fairies' castle

That held my life in the fresh, glad season

When I was the king of the earth. Then slowly --

And yet so swiftly! -- there came the knowledge

That the marvellous life I had lived was my life;

That the glorious world I had loved was my world;

And that every man, and every woman,

And every child was a different being,

Wrought with a different heat, and fired

With passions born of a single spirit;

That the pleasure I felt was not their pleasure,

Nor my sorrow -- a kind of nameless pity

For something, I knew not what -- their sorrow.

And thus was I taught my first hard lesson, --

The lesson we suffer the most in learning:

That a happy man is a man forgetful

Of all the torturing ills around him.

When or where I first met the woman

I cherished and made my wife, no matter.

Enough to say that I found her and kept her

Here in my heart with as pure a devotion

As ever Christ felt for his brothers. Forgive me

For naming His name in your patient presence;

But I feel my words, and the truth I utter

Is God's own truth. I loved that woman, --

Not for her face, but for something fairer,

Something diviner, I thought, than beauty:

I loved the spirit -- the human something

That seemed to chime with my own condition,

And make soul-music when we were together;

And we were never apart, from the moment

My eyes flashed into her eyes the message

That swept itself in a quivering answer

Back through my strange lost being. My pulses

Leapt with an aching speed; and the measure

Of this great world grew small and smaller,

Till it seemed the sky and the land and the ocean

Closed at last in a mist all golden

Around us two. And we stood for a season

Like gods outflung from chaos, dreaming

That we were the king and the queen of the fire

That reddened the clouds of love that held us

Blind to the new world soon to be ours --

Ours to seize and sway. The passion

Of that great love was a nameless passion,

Bright as the blaze of the sun at noonday,

Wild as the flames of hell; but, mark you,

Never a whit less pure for its fervor.

The baseness in me (for I was human)

Burned like a worm, and perished; and nothing

Was left me then but a soul that mingled

Itself with hers, and swayed and shuddered

In fearful triumph. When I consider

That helpless love and the cursed folly

That wrecked my life for the sake of a woman

Who broke with a laugh the chains of her marriage

(Whatever the word may mean), I wonder

If all the woe was her sin, or whether

The chains themselves were enough to lead her

In love's despite to break them. . . . Sinners

And saints -- I say -- are rocked in the cradle,

But never are known till the will within them

Speaks in its own good time. So I foster

Even to-night for the woman who wronged me,

Nothing of hate, nor of love, but a feeling

Of still regret; for the man -- But hear me,

And judge for yourself: --

                              For a time the seasons

Changed and passed in a sweet succession

That seemed to me like an endless music:

Life was a rolling psalm, and the choirs

Of God were glad for our love. I fancied

All this, and more than I dare to tell you

To-night, -- yes, more than I dare to remember;

And then -- well, the music stopped. There are moments

In all men's lives when it stops, I fancy, --

Or seems to stop, -- till it comes to cheer them

Again with a larger sound. The curtain

Of life just then is lifted a little

To give to their sight new joys -- new sorrows --

Or nothing at all, sometimes. I was watching

The slow, sweet scenes of a golden picture,

Flushed and alive with a long delusion

That made the murmur of home, when I shuddered

And felt like a knife that awful silence

That comes when the music goes -- forever.

The truth came over my life like a darkness

Over a forest where one man wanders,

Worse than alone. For a time I staggered

And stumbled on with a weak persistence

After the phantom of hope that darted

And dodged like a frightened thing before me,

To quit me at last, and vanish. Nothing

Was left me then but the curse of living

And bearing through all my days the fever

And thirst of a poisoned love. Were I stronger,

Or weaker, perhaps my scorn had saved me,

Given me strength to crush my sorrow

With hate for her and the world that praised her --

To have left her, then and there -- to have conquered

That old false life with a new and a wiser, --

Such things are easy in words. You listen,

And frown, I suppose, that I never mention

That beautiful word, FORGIVE! -- I forgave her

First of all; and I praised kind Heaven

That I was a brave, clean man to do it;

And then I tried to forget. Forgiveness!

What does it mean when the one forgiven

Shivers and weeps and clings and kisses

The credulous fool that holds her, and tells him

A thousand things of a good man's mercy,

And then slips off with a laugh and plunges

Back to the sin she has quit for a season,

To tell him that hell and the world are better

For her than a prophet's heaven? Believe me,

The love that dies ere its flames are wasted

In search of an alien soul is better,

Better by far than the lonely passion

That burns back into the heart that feeds it.

For I loved her still, and the more she mocked me, --

Fooled with her endless pleading promise

Of future faith, -- the more I believed her

The penitent thing she seemed; and the stronger

Her choking arms and her small hot kisses

Bound me and burned my brain to pity,

The more she grew to the heavenly creature

That brightened the life I had lost forever.

The truth was gone somehow for the moment;

The curtain fell for a time; and I fancied

We were again like gods together,

Loving again with the old glad rapture.

But scenes like these, too often repeated,

Failed at last, and her guile was wasted.

I made an end of her shrewd caresses

And told her a few straight words. She took them

Full at their worth -- and the farce was over.

    .    .    .    .    .

At first my dreams of the past upheld me,

But they were a short support: the present

Pushed them away, and I fell. The mission

Of life (whatever it was) was blasted;

My game was lost. And I met the winner

Of that foul deal as a sick slave gathers

His painful strength at the sight of his master;

And when he was past I cursed him, fearful

Of that strange chance which makes us mighty

Or mean, or both. I cursed him and hated

The stones he pressed with his heel; I followed

His easy march with a backward envy,

And cursed myself for the beast within me.

But pride is the master of love, and the vision

Of those old days grew faint and fainter:

The counterfeit wife my mercy sheltered

Was nothing now but a woman, -- a woman

Out of my way and out of my nature.

My battle with blinded love was over,

My battle with aching pride beginning.

If I was the loser at first, I wonder

If I am the winner now! . . . I doubt it.

My life is a losing game; and to-morrow --

To-morrow! -- Christ! did I say to-morrow? . . .

Is your brandy good for death? . . . There, -- listen: --

When love goes out, and a man is driven

To shun mankind for the scars that make him

A joke for all chattering tongues, he carries

A double burden. The woes I suffered

After that hard betrayal made me

Pity, at first, all breathing creatures

On this bewildered earth. I studied

Their faces and made for myself the story

Of all their scattered lives. Like brothers

And sisters they seemed to me then; and I nourished

A stranger friendship wrought in my fancy

Between those people and me. But somehow,

As time went on, there came queer glances

Out of their eyes, and the shame that stung me

Harassed my pride with a crazed impression

That every face in the surging city

Was turned to me; and I saw sly whispers,

Now and then, as I walked and wearied

My wasted life twice over in bearing

With all my sorrow the sorrows of others, --

Till I found myself their fool. Then I trembled, --

A poor scared thing, -- and their prying faces

Told me the ghastly truth: they were laughing

At me and my fate. My God, I could feel it --

That laughter! And then the children caught it;

And I, like a struck dog, crept and listened.

And then when I met the man who had weakened

A woman's love to his own desire,

It seemed to me that all hell were laughing

In fiendish concert! I was their victim --

And his, and hate's. And there was the struggle!

As long as the earth we tread holds something

A tortured heart can love, the meaning

Of life is not wholly blurred; but after

The last loved thing in the world has left us,

We know the triumph of hate. The glory

Of good goes out forever; the beacon

Of sin is the light that leads us downward --

Down to the fiery end. The road runs

Right through hell; and the souls that follow

The cursed ways where its windings lead them

Suffer enough, I say, to merit

All grace that a God can give. -- The fashion

Of our belief is to lift all beings

Born for a life that knows no struggle

In sin's tight snares to eternal glory --

All apart from the branded millions

Who carry through life their faces graven

With sure brute scars that tell the story

Of their foul, fated passions. Science

Has yet no salve to smooth or soften

The cradle-scars of a tyrant's visage;

No drug to purge from the vital essence

Of souls the sleeping venom. Virtue

May flower in hell, when its roots are twisted

And wound with the roots of vice; but the stronger

Never is known till there comes that battle

With sin to prove the victor. Perilous

Things are these demons we call our passions:

Slaves are we of their roving fancies,

Fools of their devilish glee. -- You think me,

I know, in this maundering way designing

To lighten the load of my guilt and cast it

Half on the shoulders of God. But hear me!

I'm partly a man, -- for all my weakness, --

If weakness it were to stand and murder

Before men's eyes the man who had murdered

Me, and driven my burning forehead

With horns for the world to laugh at. Trust me!

And try to believe my words but a portion

Of what God's purpose made me! The coward

Within me cries for this; and I beg you

Now, as I come to the end, to remember

That women and men are on earth to travel

All on a different road. Hereafter

The roads may meet. . . . I trust in something --

I know not what. . . .

                         Well, this was the way of it: --

Stung with the shame and the secret fury

That comes to the man who has thrown his pittance

Of self at a traitor's feet, I wandered

Weeks and weeks in a baffled frenzy,

Till at last the devil spoke. I heard him,

And laughed at the love that strove to touch me, --

The dead, lost love; and I gripped the demon

Close to my breast, and held him, praising

The fates and the furies that gave me the courage

To follow his wild command. Forgetful

Of all to come when the work was over, --

There came to me then no stony vision

Of these three hundred days, -- I cherished

An awful joy in my brain. I pondered

And weighed the thing in my mind, and gloried

In life to think that I was to conquer

Death at his own dark door, -- and chuckled

To think of it done so cleanly. One evenig

I knew that my time had come. I shuddered

A little, but rather for doubt than terror,

And followed him, -- led by the nameless devil

I worshipped and called my brother. The city

Shone like a dream that night; the windows

Flashed with a piercing flame, and the pavements

Pulsed and swayed with a warmth -- or something

That seemed so then to my feet -- and thrilled me

With a quick, dizzy joy; and the women

And men, like marvellous things of magic,

Floated and laughed and sang by my shoulder,

Sent with a wizard motion. Through it

And over and under it all there sounded

A murmur of life, like bees; and I listened

And laughed again to think of the flower

That grew, blood-red, for me! . . . This fellow

Was one of the popular sort who flourish

Unruffled where gods would fall. For a conscience

He carried a snug deceit that made him

The man of the time and the place, whatever

The time or the place might be. Were he sounding,

With a genial craft that cloaked its purpose,

Nigh to itself, the depth of a woman

Fooled with his brainless art, or sending

The midnight home with songs and bottles, --

The cad was there, and his ease forever

Shone with the smooth and slippery polish

That tells the snake. That night he drifted

Into an up-town haunt and ordered --

Whatever it was -- with a soft assurance

That made me mad as I stood behind him,

Gripping his death, and waited. Coward,

I think, is the name the world has given

To men like me; but I'll swear I never

Thought of my own disgrace when I shot him --

Yes, in the back, -- I know it, I know it

Now; but what if I do? . . . As I watched him

Lying there dead in the scattered sawdust,

Wet with a day's blown froth, I noted

That things were still; that the walnut tables,

Where men but a moment before were sitting,

Were gone; that a screen of something around me

Shut them out of my sight. But the gilded

Signs of a hundred beers and whiskeys

Flashed from the walls above, and the mirrors

And glasses behind the bar were lighted

In some strange way, and into my spirit

A thousand shafts of terrible fire

Burned like death, and I fell. The story

Of what came then, you know.

                               But tell me,

What does the whole thing mean? What are we, --

Slaves of an awful ignorance? puppets

Pulled by a fiend? or gods, without knowing it?

Do we shut from ourselves our own salvation, --

Or what do we do! I tell you, Dominie,

There are times in the lives of us poor devils

When heaven and hell get mixed. Though conscience

May come like a whisper of Christ to warn us

Away from our sins, it is lost or laughed at, --

And then we fall. And for all who have fallen --

Even for him -- I hold no malice,

Nor much compassion: a mightier mercy

Than mine must shrive him. -- And I -- I am going

Into the light? -- or into the darkness?

Why do I sit through these sickening hours,

And hope? Good God! are they hours? -- hours?

Yes! I am done with days. And to-morrow --

We two may meet! To-morrow! -- To-morrow! . . .



Walt Whitman

THE master-songs are ended, and the man

That sang them is a name. And so is God

A name; and so is love, and life, and death,

And everything. But we, who are too blind

To read what we have written, or what faith

Has written for us, do not understand:

We only blink, and wonder.

Last night it was the song that was the man,

But now it is the man that is the song.

We do not hear him very much to-day:

His piercing and eternal cadence rings

Too pure for us -- too powerfully pure,

Too lovingly triumphant, and too large;

But there are some that hear him, and they know

That he shall sing to-morrow for all men,

And that all time shall listen.

The master-songs are ended? Rather say

No songs are ended that are ever sung,

And that no names are dead names. When we write

Men's letters on proud marble or on sand,

We write them there forever.



The Chorus of Old Men in "Aegeus"

YE gods that have a home beyond the world,

Ye that have eyes for all man's agony,

Ye that have seen this woe that we have seen, --

Look with a just regard,

And with an even grace,

Here on the shattered corpse of a shattered king,

Here on a suffering world where men grow old

And wander like sad shadows till, at last,

Out of the flare of life,

Out of the whirl of years,

Into the mist they go,

Into the mist of death.

O shades of you that loved him long before

The cruel threads of that black sail were spun,

May loyal arms and ancient welcomings

Receive him once again

Who now no longer moves

Here in this flickering dance of changing days,

Where a battle is lost and won for a withered wreath,

And the black master Death is over all,

To chill with his approach,

To level with his touch,

The reigning strength of youth,

The fluttered heart of age.

Woe for the fateful day when Delphi's word was lost --

Woe for the loveless prince of Aethra's line!

Woe for a father's tears and the curse of a king's release --

Woe for the wings of pride and the shafts of doom! --

And thou, the saddest wind

That ever blew from Crete,

Sing the fell tidings back to that thrice unhappy ship! --

Sing to the western flame,

Sing to the dying foam,

A dirge for the sundered years and a dirge for the years to be!

Better his end had been as the end of a cloudless day,

Bright, by the word of Zeus, with a golden star,

Wrought of a golden fame, and flung to the central sky,

To gleam on a stormless tomb for evermore: --

Whether or not there fell

To the touch of an alien hand

The sheen of his purple robe and the shine of his diadem,

Better his end had been

To die as an old man dies, --

But the fates are ever the fates, and a crown is ever a crown.



The Wilderness

Come away! come away! there's a frost along the marshes,

And a frozen wind that skims the shoal where it shakes the dead black water;

There's a moan across the lowland and a wailing through the woodland

Of a dirge that sings to send us back to the arms of those that love us.

There is nothing left but ashes now where the crimson chills of autumn

Put off the summer's languor with a touch that made us glad

For the glory that is gone from us, with a flight we cannot follow,

To the slopes of other valleys and the sounds of other shores.

Come away! come away! you can hear them calling, calling,

Calling us to come to them, and roam no more.

Over there beyond the ridges and the land that lies between us,

There's an old song calling us to come!

Come away! come away! -- for the scenes we leave behind us

Are barren for the lights of home and a flame that's young forever;

And the lonely trees around us creak the warning of the night-wind,

That love and all the dreams of love are away beyond the mountains.

The songs that call for us to-night, they have called for men before us,

And the winds that blow the message, they have blown ten thousand years;

But this will end our wander-time, for we know the joy that waits us

In the strangeness of home-coming, and a faithful woman's eyes.

Come away! come away! there is nothing now to cheer us --

Nothing now to comfort us, but love's road home: --

Over there beyond the darkness there's a window gleams to greet us,

And a warm hearth waits for us within.

Come away! come away! -- or the roving-fiend will hold us,

And make us all to dwell with him to the end of human faring:

There are no men yet can leave him when his hands are clutched upon them,

There are none will own his enmity, there are none will call him brother.

So we'll be up and on the way, and the less we brag the better

For the freedom that God gave us and the dread we do not know: --

The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it,

And the doom we cannot fly from is the doom we do not see.

Come away! come away! there are dead men all around us --

Frozen men that mock us with a wild, hard laugh

That shrieks and sinks and whimpers in the shrill November rushes,

And the long fall wind on the lake.



Octaves

I

TO get at the eternal strength of things,

And fearlessly to make strong songs of it,

Is, to my mind, the mission of that man

The world would call a poet. He may sing

But roughly, and withal ungraciously;

But if he touch to life the one right chord

Wherein God's music slumbers, and awake

To truth one drowsed ambition, he sings well.

II

We thrill too strangely at the master's touch;

We shrink too sadly from the larger self

Which for its own completeness agitates

And undetermines us; we do not feel --

We dare not feel it yet -- the splendid shame

Of uncreated failure; we forget,

The while we groan, that God's accomplishment

Is always and unfailingly at hand.

III

To mortal ears the plainest word may ring

Fantastic and unheard-of, and as false

And out of tune as ever to our own

Did ring the prayers of man-made maniacs;

But if that word be the plain word of Truth,

It leaves an echo that begets itself,

Persistent in itself and of itself,

Regenerate, reiterate, replete.

IV

Tumultuously void of a clean scheme

Whereon to build, whereof to formulate,

The legion life that riots in mankind

Goes ever plunging upward, up and down,

Most like some crazy regiment at arms,

Undisciplined of aught but Ignorance,

And ever led resourcelessly along

To brainless carnage by drunk trumpeters.

V

To me the groaning of world-worshippers

Rings like a lonely music played in hell

By one with art enough to cleave the walls

Of heaven with his cadence, but without

The wisdom or the will to comprehend

The strangeness of his own perversity,

And all without the courage to deny

The profit and the pride of his defeat.

VI

While we are drilled in error, we are lost

Alike to truth and usefulness. We think

We are great warriors now, and we can brag

Like Titans; but the world is growing young,

And we, the fools of time, are growing with it: --

We do not fight to-day, we only die;

We are too proud of death, and too ashamed

Of God, to know enough to be alive.

VII

There is one battle-field whereon we fall

Triumphant and unconquered; but, alas!

We are too fleshly fearful of ourselves

To fight there till our days are whirled and blurred

By sorrow, and the ministering wheels

Of anguish take us eastward, where the clouds

Of human gloom are lost against the gleam

That shines on Thought's impenetrable mail.

VIII

When we shall hear no more the cradle-songs

Of ages -- when the timeless hymns of Love

Defeat them and outsound them -- we shall know

The rapture of that large release which all

Right science comprehends; and we shall read,

With unoppressed and unoffended eyes,

That record of All-Soul whereon God writes

In everlasting runes the truth of Him.

IX

The guerdon of new childhood is repose: --

Once he has read the primer of right thought,

A man may claim between two smithy strokes

Beatitude enough to realize

God's parallel completeness in the vague

And incommensurable excellence

That equitably uncreates itself

And makes a whirlwind of the Universe.

X

There is no loneliness: -- no matter where

We go, nor whence we come, nor what good friends

Forsake us in the seeming, we are all

At one with a complete companionship;

And though forlornly joyless be the ways

We travel, the compensate spirit-gleams

Of Wisdom shaft the darkness here and there,

Like scattered lamps in unfrequented streets.

XI

When one that you and I had all but sworn

To be the purest thing God ever made

Bewilders us until at last it seems

An angel has come back restigmatized, --

Faith wavers, and we wonder what there is

On earth to make us faithful any more,

But never are quite wise enough to know

The wisdom that is in that wonderment.

XII

Where does a dead man go? -- The dead man dies;

But the free life that would no longer feed

On fagots of outburned and shattered flesh

Wakes to a thrilled invisible advance,

Unchained (or fettered else) of memory;

And when the dead man goes it seems to me

'T were better for us all to do away

With weeping, and be glad that he is gone.

XIII

Still through the dusk of dead, blank-legended,

And unremunerative years we search

To get where life begins, and still we groan

Because we do not find the living spark

Where no spark ever was; and thus we die,

Still searching, like poor old astronomers

Who totter off to bed and go to sleep,

To dream of untriangulated stars.

XIV

With conscious eyes not yet sincere enough

To pierce the glimmered cloud that fluctuates

Between me and the glorifying light

That screens itself with knowledge, I discern

The searching rays of wisdom that reach through

The mist of shame's infirm credulity,

And infinitely wonder if hard words

Like mine have any message for the dead.

XV

I grant you friendship is a royal thing,

But none shall ever know that royalty

For what it is till he has realized

His best friend in himself. 'T is then, perforce,

That man's unfettered faith indemnifies

Of its own conscious freedom the old shame,

And love's revealed infinitude supplants

Of its own wealth and wisdom the old scorn.

XVI

Though the sick beast infect us, we are fraught

Forever with indissoluble Truth,

Wherein redress reveals itself divine,

Transitional, transcendent. Grief and loss,

Disease and desolation, are the dreams

Of wasted excellence; and every dream

Has in it something of an ageless fact

That flouts deformity and laughs at years.

XVII

We lack the courage to be where we are: --

We love too much to travel on old roads,

To triumph on old fields; we love too much

To consecrate the magic of dead things,

And yieldingly to linger by long walls

Of ruin, where the ruinous moonlight

That sheds a lying glory on old stones

Befriends us with a wizard's enmity.

XVIII

Something as one with eyes that look below

The battle-smoke to glimpse the foeman's charge,

We through the dust of downward years may scan

The onslaught that awaits this idiot world

Where blood pays blood for nothing, and where life

Pays life to madness, till at last the ports

Of gilded helplessness be battered through

By the still crash of salvatory steel.

XIX

To you that sit with Sorrow like chained slaves,

And wonder if the night will ever come,

I would say this: The night will never come,

And sorrow is not always. But my words

Are not enough; your eyes are not enough;

The soul itself must insulate the Real,

Or ever you do cherish in this life --

In this life or in any life -- repose.

XX

Like a white wall whereon forever breaks

Unsatisfied the tumult of green seas,

Man's unconjectured godliness rebukes

With its imperial silence the lost waves

Of insufficient grief. This mortal surge

That beats against us now is nothing else

Than plangent ignorance. Truth neither shakes

Nor wavers; but the world shakes, and we shriek.

XXI

Nor jewelled phrase nor mere mellifluous rhyme

Reverberates aright, or ever shall,

One cadence of that infinite plain-song

Which is itself all music. Stronger notes

Than any that have ever touched the world

Must ring to tell it -- ring like hammer-blows,

Right-echoed of a chime primordial,

On anvils, in the gleaming of God's forge.

XXII

The prophet of dead words defeats himself:

Whoever would acknowledge and include

The foregleam and the glory of the real,

Must work with something else than pen and ink

And painful preparation: he must work

With unseen implements that have no names,

And he must win withal, to do that work,

Good fortitude, clean wisdom, and strong skill.

XXIII

To curse the chilled insistence of the dawn

Because the free gleam lingers; to defraud

The constant opportunity that lives

Unchallenged in all sorrow; to forget

For this large prodigality of gold

That larger generosity of thought, --

These are the fleshly clogs of human greed,

The fundamental blunders of mankind.

XXIV

Forebodings are the fiends of Recreance;

The master of the moment, the clean seer

Of ages, too securely scans what is,

Ever to be appalled at what is not;

He sees beyond the groaning borough lines

Of Hell, God's highways gleaming, and he knows

That Love's complete communion is the end

Of anguish to the liberated man.

XXV

Here by the windy docks I stand alone,

But yet companioned. There the vessel goes,

And there my friend goes with it; but the wake

That melts and ebbs between that friend and me

Love's earnest is of Life's all-purposeful

And all-triumphant sailing, when the ships

Of Wisdom loose their fretful chains and swing

Forever from the crumbled wharves of Time.



Two Quatrains

I: Unity

AS eons of incalculable strife

Are in the vision of one moment caught,

So are the common, concrete things of life

Divinely shadowed on the walls of Thought.

II: Paraphrase

We shriek to live, but no man ever lives

Till he has rid the ghost of human breath;

We dream to die, but no man ever dies

Till he has quit the road that runs to death.



Romance

I: Boys

WE were all boys, and three of us were friends;

And we were more than friends, it seemed to me: --

Yes, we were more than brothers then, we three. . . .

Brothers? . . . But we were boys, and there it ends.

II: James Wetherell

We never half believed the stuff

They told about James Wetherell;

We always liked him well enough,

And always tried to use him well;

But now some things have come to light,

And James has vanished from our view, --

There is n't very much to write,

There is n't very much to do.



The Torrent

I FOUND a torrent falling in a glen

Where the sun's light shone silvered and leaf-split;

The boom, the foam, and the mad flash of it

All made a magic symphony; but when

I thought upon the coming of hard men

To cut those patriarchal trees away,

And turn to gold the silver of that spray,

I shuddered. Yet a gladness now and then

Did wake me to myself till I was glad

In earnest, and was welcoming the time

For screaming saws to sound above the chime

Of idle waters, and for me to know

The jealous visionings that I had had

Were steps to the great place where trees and torrents go.



L'Envoi

NOW in a thought, now in a shadowed word,

Now in a voice that thrills eternity,

Ever there comes an onward phrase to me

Of some transcendent music I have heard;

No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered,

No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory,

But a glad strain of some still symphony

That no proud mortal touch has ever stirred.

There is no music in the world like this,

No character wherewith to set it down,

No kind of instrument to make it sing.

No kind of instrument? Ah, yes, there is!

And after time and place are overthrown,

God's touch will keep its one chord quivering.

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