AH! who but the lover at last should know what Death is? To give one's body to the earth; To rise through the roots of the trees and to feel once more the sunshine—floating as a leaf in air; To star out months together with mosses and bog-plants on the lonely mountain-sides, to lurk under the speckled fungi in the woods, looking up at the traveller as he passes; To be sucked in, in the mad rush of the sap through the veins of the chestnut in spring, and to burst in its great shining buds; To catch at, dimly as in dreams, the wonderful thoughts that sweep through—the great rushing prophetic dreams of the life-laden earth; To feel the call of existence in new and strange fashion— To arise and ascend; To mix with the animals roaming over the Earth; To be and to include them—to put on purposely the mask which they put innocently on; To be one of two swallows clinging to the southern wall, twittering, discussing sites for a nest; to be a snake basking coiled on a rock in the sun; To rejoice in my swiftness and strength, my inevitable action and instinct; To pass into the bodies of men and women, to be arrayed in their hair, and to look forth out of their eyes; To be the long lines of habit in them, the food that is sweet in their mouths, the poison that is bitter; To be the thoughts that they think, and the dreams that they dream; to circle very close; To circle closer than all thought; to touch and startle—like the sound of distant music heard through the rushing of a storm; To be the presentation of new unsuspected ideals— To be buried in the ground; To be buried deep in the ground of all existence; To lie in the soil whence all human life springs, and whither it returns again; Listening as in a dream of joy to the sound of innumerable voices, And to the sound of innumerable footsteps coming nearer through all the ages; To see and to be unseen; to hear and to be that which no ear hath heard; To turn an open impartial eye without blame on every creature; to hold up a mirror, So tallying nature that to it all men and things run to look upon themselves and learn their parts; To give products and receive materials; To have the adit, to be the hidden link, the life which does not appear; To love without sorrow; and to send love forth to bathe the world, healing it from its wounds— Ah! who at last but the lover should know what Death is? |