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 winged 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. 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; 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 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. 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 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, 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 whereunto; 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. 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, 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. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...DIRGE IN WOODS by GEORGE MEREDITH THE GOAT PATHS by JAMES STEPHENS STANZAS ON FINDING THE KEY OF AN OLD PIANO by E. JUSTINE BAYARD DRINKING SONG by NICOLAS BOILEAU-DESPREAUX TRAFFIC WARNING by RICHARD WARNER BORST PROLOGUE FOR THE SILVERDALE VILLAGE PLAYERS: EASTER 1924 by GORDON BOTTOMLEY AN ASSURANCE by NICHOLAS BRETON |