# Divinations and Creation

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-18 — 1 clipping.*

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Horace Holley, Divinations and Creation, bahai-library.com.
> ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
> 
> DIVINATIONS
> AND
> CREATION
> 
> BY
> HORACE HOLLEY
> 
> MITCHELL KENNERLEY
> NEW YORK : MCMXVI
> 
> iii
> COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
> MITCHELL KENNERLEY
> 
> PRINTED IN AMERICA
> 
> iv
> Certain of these poems having already appeared in
> Poetry, Forum, Smart Set, New Republic, Others,
> Poetry Journal, Evening Sun, Poetry Review, Manchester
> (England) Playgoer, Masses, International, and the New
> Freewoman, acknowledgments and thanks are rendered
> their respective editors for permission to use the poems in
> this collection.
> 
> v
> CONTENTS
> PAGE
> FOREWORD                         1
> DIVINATIONS
> RENAISSANCE                      3
> THE SOLDIERS                     4
> HERTHA                           5
> FLIGHT                           6
> LIFE                             7
> EGO                              8
> PAYSAGE D’AME                    9
> DURING A MUSIC                 10
> NEW YORK                        11
> TOTEM                          12
> HOME                           13
> EPIGRAMS                       14
> A PETAL                        16
> CREATIVE                       17
> THE ORCHARD                    18
> THE SEER                       19
> THE PRINCE                     20
> PAGANS                         21
> CROSS PATCH                    22
> CONFESSION                     31
> 
> vii
> PAGE
> THE MEETING                        32
> MASTERS OF ALL                     41
> ELEKTRA                            42
> IN A BOOK OF POEMS                 43
> POSTSCRIPT TO THE NEW TESTAMENT    44
> SHE                                46
> DIALOGUE                           47
> TO CERTAIN AMERICANS               48
> FEAR                               49
> INVOCATION                         5o
> DIVINATIONS                        51
> MYSTIC                             54
> RAIN                               55
> VISION                             56
> HIGHWAY                            57
> G. B. S. & CO.                     58
> THE IDIOT                          59
> THESE WERE                         6z
> IMAGES D’AMOUR                     62
> LOVERS                             72
> TO A DANCER                        90
> VICTORY                            91
> ILLUMINATION                       92
> CREATION
> DEDICATION                         97
> THE VISION                         99
> THE WELL BELOVED                  101
> 
> viii
> PAGE
> IN A FACTORY           104
> IN A CAFÉ. I           105
> IN A CAFÉ. II          106
> A GAUGUIN              107
> A PASTEL               108
> LES MORTS              109
> MYTH                    110
> VALE                    112
> ENGLAND                 113
> THE PLAIN WOMAN         114
> EVERYMAN                115
> THE LONELY CUP          116
> SKYSCRAPERS             117
> HOMEWARD                118
> THE DANCE               119
> THE CROWD               121
> THE EGOIST             123
> THEY                   124
> HERTHA                 126
> THE GIRL                127
> THE ENCOUNTER          128
> THE BLUE GIRL          129
> EVE’S LAMENT           130
> EVE                    133
> GHOSTS                 134
> EVE’S DAUGHTER          135
> LOVE                   136
> 
> ix
> PAGE
> SOULS                         137
> THE DREAMER                  138
> O BRUTES AND DREAMERS!       139
> REVEILLE                      141
> BEFORE A GAUGUIN             142
> THE HILL                     143
> AN OLD PRAYER RESAID         145
> IN THE MIRROR                146
> PILGRIM                       147
> PARADOX                       151
> FRAGMENT                     152
> JANUS                        154
> CREATOR                      156
> CREATION                     158
> ECSTASY                      16o
> GOAL                          161
> 
> x
> FOREWORD
> 
> “O THAT I be
> As oak to the carver’s knife, or tougher stone,
> A moveless monolith
> Scored deep with secret hieroglyphs
> Whence men will slowly, letter by letter, spell
> Enduring exultation for their lives!
> For I am witness to a miracle
> That opens a new mad mouth
> Quick with astonishment of ardent words
> Not mine but prophets to this wonder
> That must be testified all new and strange
> And ere it stale be kneaded in our clay,
> Since memory would betray what must remain
> Ever before us like tomorrow.
> Of myself
> I should not otherwise heap words
> Upon the garbage of our daily gossip.
> But let you pass unhailed
> Myself preferring to slip within a dream
> Like a stretched lily in its quiet pool.”
> 
> RENAISSANCE
> 
> ONCE more, in the mouths of glad poets,
> Words have become
> Terrible.
> An energy has seized and ravished them
> Like a young lover,
> And they are pregnant.
> Their sound is the roaring of March tempests;
> Their meaning stabs the heart
> Like the dagger thrust flashing from a dancer’s sleeve.
> Terrible and stark are words
> Once more,
> Risen from the deeps of eternal silence.
> New gods and fruitfuller races
> Chant
> Jubilant behind them!
> 
> THE SOLDIERS
> 
> (An Impression of Battle)
> 
> WHOM I long since had known,
> Long since forgotten;
> Who cast their names behind them like a dream,
> Like stagnant water spitting
> Their tasteless souls away;
> These are the soldiers,
> The nameless, the changelings,
> Monstrous with slow tormenting Number,
> Pestilent with unremitting Machine.
> 
> Soldiers …
> These are they whom I suspected, guilty and glorious,
> Crouching in my own thought’s background,
> Released by the whirlwind of fate
> To move as winds that scream about the Pole,
> As darkness of sea-depths,
> As meeting of ice and flame.
> Priests of the mystic sensual death,
> When shall they return?
> When shall they return, broken, from Hell?
> 
> The fuse of a thousand years has burned:
> Lord, quicken the groping hands of tomorrow!
> 
> HERTHA
> 
> SHE will grow
> Beautiful.
> Beauty will come to her
> Given, like sun and rain;
> Will go from her
> Freely, like laughter.
> She will be
> Centre, circumference to a great joy
> Swiftly passing, repassing
> Like water in and from a limpid well.
> She is of the new generation, new;
> Torch for the flame of passion,
> Flame for the torch of love.
> 
> She will grow
> Beautiful.
> No, beauty itself will grow
> Like her.
> 
> FLIGHT
> 
> AS sky to the hawk’s wing be
> O Life, for me!
> Space yielding space and height compelling height,
> To poise and free
> The ardor of my flight!
> Give me the sky
> Of the hawk’s wing, Life!
> And does a Voice reply:
> “To the hawk’s wing … to the hawk’s wing,
> Sky”?
> 
> LIFE
> 
> TO thrust back the hard, sleek water
> With toil of body,
> Spitting the bitter salt from the mouth;
> Eyes just raised over
> The heaving surface;
> To sleep, captive of creeping tide and strangling billow;
> Unable ever to stand upright in the stature of God—
> The toil, the mystery, the danger!
> At last sucked in by the hard, sleek, creeping water.
> 
> EGO
> 
> A SOUL of long-enduring silences,
> In me
> The ancient demons
> Carved from Egyptian terror
> Brood again,
> High-throned above ten thousand pillars
> Where the years
> Break, like billows of sand;
> Who sleep
> Watchful behind lidless eyes
> That men may call them sleepless;
> Who speak
> Seldom,
> As words scored in tough, incredulous stone.
> 
> PAYSAGE D’AME
> 
> BUT there’s a desert moment in the soul
> All dry, all level, all monotony;
> As if it were the bed of some lost stream
> Or shore to salt, forgotten inland lakes
> That stormed a way with waves, then died to sand,
> Salt, glittering sand, interminable and mad.
> In this spot or in that where one lies down
> At last too reconciled,
> The stretched, black tongue is just as far from speech;
> And nowhere can the finger, trembling out,
> Stab the escaped horizon.
> Never, never and never who loves the world away
> Loves one day back.
> 
> DURING A MUSIC
> 
> SHARP barbs of many arrows
> Sped suddenly from the ambush of old sorrow
> Transfix us;
> Now the company, hypocritic,
> Bleedsin its anguish of passion—
> St. Stephen!
> Redeemed by the arrows!
> 
> NEW YORK
> 
> (By an “artist refugee”)
> 
> “SNICKER between convulsive screams of war,
> Fate, that snickered of old
> Gloating to watch Æneas and his race
> Orphaned from golden Troy;
> Ulysses too,
> No luckier, tossed upon the trackless ocean—
> Snicker once more
> And goad the gods against our wished return,
> We, homeless as they,
> Thrust forth from that same rage renewed
> From Troys re-wasted
> And cast upon this half-spawned isle where seized us
> A worse-than-Cyclops!
> Snicker that we are prisoned in such cave,
> (Few, few will be the stern survivors
> Winning the dream beyond or the dream forsaken!),
> Yet, as you bend to gloat, see! written
> In smoke and blood our hearty scorn of Cyclops,
> Homeric epigram damning the isle forever:
> Sting of beehive, strife of antheap, stupor of graveyard.”
> 
> TOTEM
> 
> THE lake in utter liquid silence
> Mirrored the sky;
> In utter granite silence rose about
> Mountain on mountain, colored like a flame
> And flaunting all seasons to the single view;
> Mountain and lake, and wood and cloudy snow
> Barred thrice against my spirit—
> They conversed
> With whomsoever knew their native tongue,
> A mystic murmur eloquent, to me
> Silence oppressive; and I stood
> A stranger, subtly hated, in the land.
> It seemed the world turned inside out,
> I outside, banished, banned, feeling
> Beyond the wall were secrets spelling life.
> Strange image! Brutal wood! Tremendous form!
> Totem! Guardian god of long-forgotten souls!
> In you is locked the lost, the ancient tongue,
> The language intimate, wooed from lake and mountain—
> In you, strange silent thing,
> America!
> 
> HOME
> 
> NOW as from a long arduous journey
> Have I returned
> Homeward within myself
> And loose from aching shoulder the pressing straps,
> And lay my burden down, my wisdom,
> Content with home.
> In this small garden I see
> Meeting and mingling, fused to familiar things,
> The strange glamor that beckoned across star-lit desert,
> The passionate freedom that heaved within the ocean,
> The glory of marble cities and marching men.
> May I be local as a tree or hill,
> Which no man moves in his imagination.
> 
> EPIGRAMS
> 
> CAN I outwatch a fixed, unwinking star?
> Can I outwait the calm Millennium?
> Speak from that starry silence which you are;
> Yield me your heart’s lone heaven—come, O come!
> 
> Unfold for men, O God, love’s true, creative day
> To flower our barren lives by mellow rain and noon:
> The glory of old thought is still, and cold, and gray,
> Like gardens unrenewed beneath the sterile moon.
> 
> Whate’er our love vouchsafe, men’s praise and blame
> fall hollow,
> A voice upon the winds that drown it as they blow:
> So fair a vision led our thought was all to follow;
> So strong a passion urged our will was all to go.
> 
> Love cometh to the proud as a strong wind upon little
> ships.
> Confounding them;
> Unto the meek it cometh as April to the wayside,
> Scattering joy.
> 
> Ill health—the heart’s unseen Gethsemane;
> Ill health—the mind’s unknown insanity;
> Ill health—a prison round the spirit built
> Darker than Judas’ sin, than Kaiser’s guilt!
> 
> A dead leaf has fallen in the forest,
> And that is my past suffering;
> A drop of rain is lost within the sea,
> And that is my old desire.
> 
> With slow, deliberate hands
> I carve my secret
> On cliff, on shattered stone, on ancient wall,
> Letter by letter,
> Arduous, firm.
> 
> A PETAL
> 
> THE garden is drenched with dew,
> Each drop has captured the dawn;
> Suns purple and gold gleam through
> From myriad blades on the lawn.
> The trees, long rooted in gloom
> Where slumberous Winter has been,
> Skyward toss branches abloom
> Like dancers glad to begin.
> 
> CREATIVE
> 
> RENEW the vision of delight
> By vigil, praise and prayer
> Till every sinew leaps in might
> And every sense is fair:
> Beyond the soul’s most stagnant dread
> A full tide drives its foam
> Where life, with golden sails outspread,
> Is one glad voyage home.
> 
> THE ORCHARD
> 
> I STOOD within an orchard during rain
> Uncovering to the drops my aching brow—
> O wondrous fancy, to imagine now
> I slip, with trees and clouds, the social chain,
> At one with nature, naught to lose or gain
> Nor even to become; no, just to be
> My being’s self and essence wholly free
> From needs that mold the heart to forms of pain.
> Arise, I cried, and celebrate the hour!
> Acclaim serener gladness; if it fail
> New courage, nobler vision will survive
> That I have known my kinship to the flower,
> My brotherhood with rain; and in this vale
> Have been a moment’s friend to all alive.
> 
> THE SEER
> 
> WHO must fare alone tonight
> Underneath the stormy skies,
> Who must wait the morning light
> Patient, alone, with fearless eyes?
> The Seer, the Singer,
> The Heaven-bringer,
> Patient, alone, with fearless eyes.
> 
> Who must leave his kin, and roam
> Past the bourn of farthest wind;
> Who must make the world his home,
> Glad of the crust the beggars find?
> The Seer, the Singer,
> The Heaven-bringer,
> Glad of the crust the beggars find.
> 
> “Who was it came, who was it went?—
> Ere we could speak he passed along.
> He filled our hearts with wonderment:
> We know him not, but hear his song.”
> The Seer, the Singer,
> The Heaven-bringer,
> We know him not, hut hear his song!
> 
> THE PRINCE
> 
> “THE world’s proud head has shaken down
> As from a burden free
> The splendor of his ancient crown,
> His golden royalty,
> And with his broken sceptre, flings
> The glory and the faith of kings.
> 
> “The throne that Time prepared for him
> Within a solemn court
> Settles in ruin mild and dim;
> And there no more resort
> Power, justice, mercy, whom his face
> Once touched with stern, superior grace.
> 
> “The sacred majesty of law
> Goes dressed in common weed;
> Authority, once hedged with awe,
> Men hire to serve their need;
> All attributes of royal worth
> In exile scatter through the earth.
> 
> “O lest the world, with kings, o’erthrow
> Its own superior line,
> Before this vacant throne I vow
> One aim, one passion mine:
> To raise the King on high again
> And throne him in the hearts of men!”
> 
> PAGANS
> 
> CRAFTY, they come again,
> Pagans of heart and brain
> To seize with carefuller art
> Our life in mind and heart;
> Who wasted the love we sold
> For image of brass and gold
> But now with words betray
> Our eager love today.
> Up, faith, and forward, vision!
> Ride wrath and drive derision
> Among their tongues, to break
> Riddle and rhyme they make
> Lest we be taken in shames,
> Netted in numbers and names!
> Riddle and rhyme and spell—
> Crafty, who sing so well.
> 
> CROSS PATCH
> 
> HER ardent spirit fled beyond her years
> As light before a flame.
> At fifteen, the tennis medal; at sixteen, the golf cup;
> Then, the coveted! bluest of blue ribbons
> For faultless horsemanship.
> No man in all that country,
> Whatever his sport,
> But had to own the girl the better man.
> At that she merely smiled—saying that triumph
> Is all a matter of thrill: who tingles most,
> He wins inevitably.
> Half bewilderment, half jest,
> They called her Sprite, those ordinary folk
> Who thought such urge, such instinct of life to joy
> Was somehow mythical.
> And having named her, they no longer thought of her
> (To their relief) as young or old, one sex or other—
> Just herself, apart, a goddess of outofdoors.
> Certainly school boys never dreamed of her tenderly
> As one to send a perfumed valentine;
> But when she strode among the horses in the field
> They pawed the ground.
> No leash could hold a dog when she passed by.
> Then, despite her ardent race with time—
> Ardent as though each moment were a dare
> To some adventure of freed muscle and thrilled nerve—
> A fleeter runner overtook her flight
> 
> And bound her tightly in a golden net,
> Hands, feet and bosom; lips and hair and eyes:
> Beauty, beauty of women.
> Or was it she, unconscious what she raced,
> Ran suddenly, breathless, glad and yet dismayed,
> Into the arms of her own womanhood?
> Which, no one knew, herself the least of all.
> But no more did she fly beyond herself
> As anxious to leave the very flesh behind,
> But lingered with it in deep and rapturous content;
> Her ardor turned
> Henceforth within upon a secret goal.
> Spirit and beauty seemed to flow together,
> Each rapt in each
> Like a hushed lily in a hidden pool.
> Only at dances did the sprite peep out,
> Ardent and yet controlled,
> Alive to every turn and slope of the rhythm
> As if the music spread a path for her
> To what she truly sought.
> ’Twas at a dance she found it—found the man—
> And no one had to question what she found:
> Her eyes, her very fingertips proclaimed
> The marvel it was to be a part of her,
> A part of love.
> The man—he had no medals and ribbons of triumph;
> If she had fled on horse or even on foot
> 
> He never could have caught her.
> It must have been his mind’s humility
> That made her stay,
> So thoughtless of itself, so thoughtful of
> Forgotten wisdoms, old greatness, world glories,
> A patient, slow, but never-yielding search
> (Passionate too, with wings’ flight of its own)
> For what—compared with other minds she knew—
> Might well have seemed the blessed Western isles.
> They lived beyond the village on a hill
> Beneath a row of pines; a house without pretence
> Yet fully conscious of uncommon worth—
> A house all books inside.
> Their only neighbor was a garrulous man
> Who smoked a never-finished pipe
> Beside a never-finished woodpile
> Strategically placed against the road
> So none could pass without his toll of gossip.
> He started it.
> One day, pointing his thumb across the pines, he said
> “Something’s wrong up yonder;
> Their honeymoon has set behind a storm.
> I heard ‘em fight last night …
> Well, what’d he expect? They’re all alike—women.”
> Of course it got about,
> And while no one quite believed,
> Still, to make sure some friendly women called.
> 
> They said that he was studying, quite as usual,
> Not changed at all, just quiet and indrawn—
> The last man in the world to make a quarrel—
> And she, well, of course, she wasn’t so easy to read,
> Always strange and different from a child,
> But even in her the sharpest eye saw nothing
> That seemed the loose end of the littlest trouble.
> No couple could have acted more at ease;
> And anyhow, a woman like that, they said,
> Would never have stayed so quiet behind the pines
> With real unhappiness, but tossed it broadcast
> Like brands against the burning of the world.
> She said the house was damp—and that was all.
> At last even the old garrulous woodpile
> Knocked out those ashes and refilled his pipe.
> Then, a few months later, a frightened servant girl
> Ran out at early morning from the pines
> Crying the judge in town.
> She said her mistress suddenly, without cause,
> Standing beside her in the kitchen, turned on her
> Blackly a moment, with words no decent girl deserved,
> Then struck her full in the face, spat on her, pulled her
> hair.
> She wanted damages, the servant did,
> Yes, and a clean character before the world—
> That is, if the woman wasn’t mad.
> Mad! Oh ho! the shock of it
> 
> Rolled seething over the place like a tidal wave,
> And in the wake of the wave, like weed and wreckage,
> Many a hint and sense of something wrong at the pines
> Sprawled in the daylight.
> A stable boy remembered
> How not a week before she’d called for a horse,
> The spiritedest saddle they had,
> And when she brought him back ‘twas late at night,
> The horse and woman both done up,
> Slashed, splashed and dripping;
> But all she said was send the bill;
> The beast’s no good; Til never ride again.
> So this and other stories quite as strange
> Stretched everybody’s nerves for the trial to come,
> And made them angry when it didn’t come.
> He settled with the girl outside of court.
> The judge’s wife knew all there was to know:
> Not jealousy at all, just nerves—
> Every woman, you know, at a certain time …
> Of course, agreed the village, so that’s it? still
> (Not to be cheated outright) still,
> Even so, she’d best take care that temper—
> A husband’s one thing, an unborn child’s another—
> She’d always been a stormy, uncontrollable soul.
> Some blamed the husband he had never reined her in,
> Most pitied him a task impossible.
> All awaited the event on tiptoe—
> 
> It wasn’t like other women, somehow, for her to have a
> child.
> No child was born.
> Then other women sneered:
> “She wanted one, and couldn’t—served her right.”
> This lapse from the common law of women
> Was all the fissure the sea required
> To force the dike with; little by little,
> The pressure of year on year,
> The pines and the two lives they hid
> Grew dubious, then disagreeable, at last sinister.
> At this point the new generation took up
> Its inheritance, the habit of myth,
> And quite as matter of course it found her hateful,
> Ugly, a symbol of sudden fear by darkened paths,—
> Cross Patch!
> And one by one the people who were young
> Beside her youth, moved off or died or changed,
> Forgetting her youth as they forgot their own,
> Until if ever she herself
> Had felt a sudden overwhelming pang
> To stop some old acquaintance on the road
> And stammer out “You know, don’t you? the girl I
> was—
> I was not always this, was I?” she might have met
> A dozen at most to know the Sprite her youth,
> But none to clear the overtangled path
> 
> That led from Sprite to Cross Patch—not one, not one
> But looking back would damn
> The very urge of joy in Sprite, and all its ardor,
> For having mothered Cross Patch—not one, not one
> To see the baffled womanhood she was;
> Orphan of hopes too bright, not mother of wrong.
> And thus besieged on all sides by the present
> Against all sides she fought, as if by fury
> To force one way to yield.
> For both it was a nightmare, not a life, and neither
> Could well have told how it had ever begun,
> But once begun it seemed inevitable,
> A storm that settled darkly round their souls,
> Unwilled as winter
> With moan of wind through sere and barren boughs
> And skies forever masked.
> The first blow of the quarrel had been hers,
> A blow unguessed of cither, for she struck
> Like nature, not to hurt but to survive;
> But wrath accrued
> So soon thereafter that the blow seemed angry,
> And she struck out again with eyes and tongue,
> Pursuing him, the angrier at his grief,
> Until in sheer defence he struck
> Not at herself but at her blows, to ward them.
> Keeping the while
> His thought above the dark upon a star or so
> 
> Fixed in the past; but she defended her wrath
> As dignified and right—they stormed
> Up, up the hill and down,
> Increasing darkness to the end of life.
> Friends said of him
> He seemed like a lonely sentinel
> Posted against the very edge of doom,
> Whom no watch came relieving.
> “She’ll kill him yet; the fool!” the woodpile’s verdict
> Before the pipe went out for the last time
> Leaving the pines unneighbored.
> But he was wrong, the urn outlasted the flame.
> One night, hands at her throat, she came
> And knelt before him, timidly looking up
> And trying to speak, to speak—struggling as if words
> Were something still to learn.
> At last speech broke from her, so agonized
> He hardly knew if it were supreme wrath or supreme
> supplication:
> “You did not love me. …”
> And as he bent to her he felt
> Her girlhood cry, a murdered thing returned.
> He hoped that it was wrath, as easier to endure,
> Feeling it burn from mind to heart, from heart to soul,
> Gathering more terror, more awe, at each advance.
> Like a priest with sacrifice it passed
> The colonnades of his thought, entering without pause
> 
> An unknown altar of his being
> Behind a curtain never moved before.
> “You did not love me. …”
> Both gazed upon the sacrifice held up
> As though it w^ere the bleeding heart of God.
> And then the priest returned, slowly, pace by pace
> Out of the hush of feeling into the hush of thought.
> It was the priest and not himself, the man believed,
> Who like an echo, not less agonized,
> Whispered across the waste of many lives,
> Whispered “No. …”
> Whose heart, the man’s or woman’s, lowest stooped
> To raise the other, prostrate heart aloft
> With supplication and consolement, urging it
> To live, O live!—dying itself the while,
> God knew before the beginning of the world.
> We only know that stooping so, dust turned to dust,
> All hearts meet at last.
> 
> CONFESSION
> 
> “THE first hour with her, even the first,
> I felt
> A leaf in some lone forest crisp and fall.
> A wiser man were warned.
> I stayed;
> And straightway, like a strange eclipse,
> All things lost luster in her presence,
> Lost luster, darkening—days, events, and I.
> And still I was not warned.
> Yet, in my new remorse
> (What else but I the knife that tortured her?)
> I asked—why had I changed?
> What hardened, what edged my heart,
> What drove it home?
> No will of mine.
> Then, as the darkness thickened and grew mad,
> Walling us two in one close coffin
> (A cenotaph, I said!),
> The brooding whisper I meant became a scream
> And suddenly from that terror lightning broke
> Our sunless worlds apart; and she was gone.
> And she was gone.
> Now, as I turn from the world’s reproach
> Seared like the fields against the new seeds’ sowing,
> One thing I say of that mad winter—
> One thing, the last:
> “Poor child …
> She was the tragedy … before it came.”
> 
> THE MEETING
> 
> INDEED, it was no ordinary night
> But gloomed by rain and riven by the light
> Of reckless, crashing clouds that seemed to meet
> As ships along the rivers of the street—
> A night when hearts like lonely ships would fly
> The burden of their ocean and their sky,
> And as from storm-beridden voyage end
> At last within the harbor of a friend.
> Yet I was ordinary, unelate;
> I felt no rendezvous that night with fate;
> And had I not made promise, rain or fine,
> To meet with friends at a new place to dine,
> Had much preferred to idle home instead
> And take my romance, second hand, in bed.
> Arrived, by this time awed and silent too,
> I gladly lost myself among the few
> Already met, whose speech roofed out the storm,
> Whose laughter lit the room and made it warm.
> Well I remember yet the corner where
> I tilted in a small, uneasy chair,
> But cannot now recall a single word
> Of all I might have said or might have heard,
> For through my thoughts as through a broken pane
> Somehow the darkness drifted and the rain. …
> A later guest moved in beside me soon.
> 
> I laughed; “There is between us but one spoon.”
> 
> “O that’s a custom here; each takes his turn.”
> 
> I looked at her. … I saw the candles burn
> Brighter along the pleating of her hair
> And round it glory such as legends wear;
> Her eyes, a moment shown, were suns gone down
> To twilight of a meditative brown;
> Her age … it seemed like some rare trophy hung
> Between two victories. And then my tongue
> Like an old harp of long-forgotten tone
> Awoke to sudden music, not its own—
> Music in which her speech and silence blent
> The throb of a responsive instrument. …
> 
> “And yet how strange it is,” I said at last;
> “How strange … a something through my heart has
> passed
> These very moments, something that would speak
> Within my words, my thoughts, willing but weak.
> It seems to come from some dim long ago.”
> 
> “So soon?” she murmured. “Give it voice and know.”’
> 
> “Well, as I may. … It’s like a telephone
> That brings incredible leagues of whispered tone,
> Or like a drama, shadowy but real,
> 
> Of some one’s life replayed for me to feel—
> A life that reaches hither from the dead.”
> 
> “Draw closer, closer whom it is” she said.
> 
> “There! now it’s clear, no farther than a pace:
> I seem to stand with some one face to face—
> A woman, yes, a woman that I knew …
> But she’s Egyptian!”—
> 
> “What was she to you?”
> 
> “What could she be? And yet … and yet, close by,
> I see a sleeping child—the child is I!
> I know him as I know the yesteryear
> My memory keeps in sight or odour here
> More intimate than things I touch and see;
> I know him as a very part of me,
> A path retrodden and a gate unbarred.
> By him I know the woman. … It is hard
> To keep these selves apart, so close we seem!”
> 
> “O do not try. But is there more you dream?”
> 
> “Yes, yes, that life unwinds itself again
> With all its scenes of different times and men,
> 
> And round each act, each passion, every mood,
> One essence clings, that woman’s motherhood …
> A motherhood so urgent yet so mild
> It made my spirit lonely as a child,
> As one forever homesick, to return
> Somewhere, sometime, to her”—
> 
> “And still you yearn?”
> 
> “Perhaps. … Great beauty makes me lonely still
> As though her passion worked upon my will.
> In her as in a garden I was sown;
> Her heart was like a far horizon thrown
> About the goings and comings of my heart,
> From whom my blindest path could not depart.
> I was the empty cup, and she the wine—
> How have I thought my being wholly mine?
> I’d thank her now, but she alas is dead.”
> 
> “Are you so sure? What of yourself?” she said.
> 
> “O you are right! I am no longer sure
> Of what things perish and what things endure …
> And yet one thing tonight I’m certain of:
> A woman without her I could not love!”
> 
> “But there were other women—can you see?”
> 
> “Yes, many others whom confidingly
> I gave the candle of my life to light;
> Dimly I feel them, not like her, tonight.
> Not dimly, no, with very pang renewed
> I live again one hour, become one mood:
> It was the evening of the day she died—
> Too late the message brought me to her side—
> And seeing her unresponsive, in decay,
> Thin, sere, the orphan of her opulent day,
> I prayed beside her, stricken to the bone,
> In anguish wrestling with all grief alone …
> When underneath my sight a new sight burned
> Than saw, unspoiled, the tender one returned,
> Yes! somehow lovelier, somehow purer gold
> While unbelievably shrunk, incredibly old.”
> 
> “The grief of love is beauty’s faithful glass.”
> 
> “The one I love, her glory would not pass …
> How strange, to walk this night among the dead!”
> 
> “The dead are walking this night in us!” she said.
> 
> “Surely! and many, many are the feet
> I hear return; many the hearts that beat
> Against my heart to enter and to tell
> Forgotten secrets.”
> 
> “Listen, listen well!”
> 
> “A comet that through time’s prodigious black
> Moved to the ends of heaven then journeyed back,
> From death to birth I sped, quickened by will
> That gave me motion: death and time stand still …
> Once more I lived, with altered race and name,
> With altered thoughts but in my soul the same—
> The soul, that music whose innumerable strings
> I hear tonight, echoes of echoings
> All gathered in one sound as if I stood
> Within the ear of God.”
> 
> “Tonight you would!”
> 
> “The life whose orbit now dips nearest me,
> It seems, but how to tell? it seems to be
> Open to love as it was open before,
> But on love’s other side. …”
> 
> “You loved HER more?”
> 
> “Her? … Yes, I feel a woman’s presence near—
> How could you guess? and thoughts more strangely dear,
> More intimate, than I had ever known
> Even in former lives … as if I’d grown
> Ready for this new love in all my lives.”
> 
> “You loved this woman, then, as men their wives?”
> 
> “Ah no! It was a daughter I adored!
> Her groping hands and heart in me unstored
> An unsuspected world of brooding awe;
> Of miracle, a law behind our law;
> Of passion’s best desire resolved in clay.
> On her I labored as an artist may
> To manifest, before his dreams depart,
> The tense, creative longing of his heart.
> So then I felt … but now as I return
> Within that delicate fellowship, I learn
> How much I changed by her I thought to change.
> Her rapt young beauty—what on earth more strange
> Than this awakening in fatherhood
> Of something so maternal, yes, so good!—
> It strained the waters of my old desire
> And turned to light love’s self-consuming fire.”
> 
> “You did not feel that older self of you?”
> 
> “Not as by thoughts but as by dreams I grew
> Conscious of deeper soul and wider scheme. …”
> 
> “But never of that mother did you dream?”
> 
> “Never to be aware—yet once almost
> 
> She lived again, a momentary ghost
> Invisible against the luminous day—
> A presence and a sign that slipped away
> While, guessing at myself, I guessed at her.
> She stood about the daughter like a blur—”
> 
> “About the daughter?”
> 
> “Yes. It was the hour
> Of my leavetaking. Silent with the power
> Of words I could not speak, of words turned tears—”
> 
> “The pang that strangles yet across the years!”
> 
> “As well as I she knew the words unsaid—”
> 
> “How should a daughter not, the day she wed?”
> 
> “Then round about her drew that other one
> In whom I felt the mother, me the son …
> I thought it was a new bride’s hope confessed
> Of motherhood to be. But who had guessed?
> She spoke no word of whom or what returned;
> For both alike unutterably I yearned …”
> 
> “O self that to itself becomes a ghost!”
> 
> “Tonight, so near them both … I dare almost
> Believe that one and other were the same—
> Adorably one womanhood that came
> With beauty guarded thus, with love untold,
> A flame within my life to free its gold. …”
> 
> “With love half told, invoking more delight. …”
> 
> “With love half heard, half known—until tonight!”
> 
> Over her yielded hands I bowed my head:
> 
> “That I am you … that you are I!” we said.
> 
> MASTERS OF ALL
> 
> ROLLING alone, a soul that could not know
> The why of itself, the what and why of the sky,
> I labored with the slow blind moments
> To pile about the white flame-core of my life
> Dream upon dream, unconscious what they were;
> Which now as by intense geology
> Lie stratum on stratum, each an inadequate self
> Living its aeon of old frustrate desire
> But cumbrously, marvelously wrought
> Compact at last from core to disk, a shape
> Joining the harmonic motion of all worlds
> Until, æons and æons more of mute perfection,
> I found my sun, my season in the sky.
> Then lo! the disk thrust out a garden
> As on pavilions of old dream.
> Habitable and conscious—life:
> A little strip of being poised in the vast inane
> Wherein as Adam I walk in my own dawn
> And find you there as Eve, we two
> Masters of all.
> 
> ELEKTRA
> 
> GLORY that you are
> I do not want you to be a glory;
> Are there not stars enough, and music,
> And words which at the turning of thought’s long vistas
> Amaze the soul?
> But I would have you near,
> Near as the beating of my heart,
> Near and familiar.
> Here upon my table your wrinkled glove,
> Your coat upon my chair,
> And ever your footsteps, ever your speech, ah near!
> For I would relearn this world looking through your
> eyes.
> And build the day anew upon your kisses,
> Its miracle the perfume of your presence.
> Your wrinkled glove and coat
> Sprawling beside me—they
> Would banish the mystic stars, and bring their glory
> Passionately down to wood and earth and stone
> All-glorious now for me, instinct with power
> To build a home about us—Paradise!
> 
> IN A BOOK OF POEMS
> 
> FAITH cried of old that life fulfills in death,
> That heaven, not earth, was made the meetingplace
> For dream and deed, for power and wisdom, grace
> Perfected as a new-born child with breath,
> As tongues with speech, eyes vision, hearts with blood.
> So faith foreknew and told, even in this dark
> Where every arrow seems to miss its mark,
> Each sacrifice its right of gratitude.
> But life’s the mock of faith if life must die,
> And faith’s the scourge of life if life must fear.
> Who spells the riddle? How shall love fulfill?
> But heaven and earth grow closer, here, O here
> For whoso die to self, as you and I,
> And, born to spirit, learn the spirit’s will.
> 
> POSTSCRIPT TO THE NEW TESTAMENT
> 
> (For the year 1916)
> 
> “GRANT them, in peace, their blustering argument;
> Calm-souled, obey their mad and soulless will;
> Though it confirm their triumph and your ill,
> Follow their ways and live them through, content.
> 
> “In all the world keep back no smallest plot
> Beyond their lust, even for an altar place—
> Nay, give them, with a lover’s eager grace
> All things you have and are till you are not.
> 
> “Build to the top each vaunting Babel tower
> Their pride appoints to overtake the sun,
> And, witnessing its doom or ere begun,
> Condemn your labor’s limit, not their power.
> 
> “Press first in every battle they deploy;
> Their murder multiply, their suicide;
> If they so bid, against yourselves divide:
> Loose as they will, and as they will, destroy.
> 
> “Who questions them in aught, he questions Me.
> I am unquestionable. Me not oppose.
> By good and evil and by friends and foes
> I join the ends of My eternity.
> 
> “They seize the means: the end I hold above
> The frenzied schemes of their unwitting mind,
> Close, yet concealed, as sunlight from the blind.
> Be you the end: the end of all is love.
> 
> “Be patient to the end, and do not grieve.
> Their to-and-fro is circled by My Power.
> I sowed the seeds their effort brings to flower—
> A paradise they know not, nor receive.”
> 
> SHE
> 
> SHE is the ewe lamb I tend by the hills of devotion.
> She is the tigress I flee through the desert of shame.
> She is the tempest that shatters my rock in the ocean.
> She is the vision I follow, the path that I came.
> 
> DIALOGUE
> 
> “LIKE the god of a fountain, I knelt
> Caressing the flow of your beauty
> Till, limpid as you, I entered
> The dominant whirlpool.”
> 
> “From the shadowy garden I gave you
> Fruits that were softer than flowers,
> Fruits of myself.
> These, O lover, are renewed.”
> 
> TO CERTAIN AMERICANS
> 
> “I LOOKED, and saw the doom, and turned to salt,
> Lot’s wife, become a legendary woe
> Not well forgot by them who yet will show
> Extremity of fate for extreme fault.
> But you, worse disobedience, what shall halt
> Your more than backward gaze, your backward hope
> Relapsing from the decent task, to grope
> For gold, unearned, within a charnel vault?
> Know well, as souls have ampler light and wings
> God moves His people upward to the sky
> And dooms the bestial city of the plain;
> Know well, whoever bestial would remain,
> They join the darkness of forbidden things:
> Which since you do, I pity, even I!”
> 
> FEAR
> 
> WITHIN my eyes the landscape sags
> Like sodden garments from a nail;
> Voices and music shatter in my cars
> Like teacups in a trembling hand;
> And faith, that was an eagle in the sun,
> Hangs like a bat, in darkness, upside down.
> 
> INVOCATION
> 
> O GOD, who shattered every heart at last
> And every mind and body, unaghast
> Molding from spended hearts a purer heart,
> From weary minds a hopefuller mind, to start
> Renewed desire upon the way of love;
> O God, take all as Thou hast taken of
> My all so often; yet before I turn
> Silent as earth and water, grant I burn
> One beacon in this cloudy world of strife!
> With all my life I reach to more than life—
> Yea, ere I mingle with anonymous earth
> Give me to spell this passion’s passionate worth
> Upon some visible, lasting monument!
> Let not my rapture with my blood be spent,
> But seizing light and movement, ever stay
> A star against the dawn of perfect day.
> 
> DIVINATIONS
> 
> BLIND footprints treading the snow
> In crazy hieroglyphs:
> History …
> (For My beloved the snow lies white again!)
> 
> My beloved call one to another
> “There is no yesterday!
> “Memory, the fortune teller of souls,
> “Slinks from her broken tent
> “Fearing the storm.”
> 
> My beloved cry
> “We move in a joyous Dream
> “Parted from all that is!
> “O God, Destroyer of paths that returned!”
> 
> Know you not, beloved,
> I give you My sight
> That you may behold all ends as beginnings;
> My heart,
> That you may adore things living;
> And My memory,
> To know yourselves?
> 
> Vainly in passionate arms you hold,
> Or snare in whisper’s echo
> The strangers
> That move in a World a world apart,
> By paths that join you never.
> 
> The shadow of hate turned stone,
> The image of scorn turned clay;
> In the Seven Valleys of My will, beloved,
> The strangers perish!
> 
> Over the gate of Death I carved in flame
> “Not adoring My beauty again
> “With these eyes;
> “With this heart falling in love
> “No more.”
> 
> None are the hieroglyphs within My court
> You shall not read, beloved,
> Save that yourselves have writ,
> Yourselves adoring!
> 
> Not in your eyes that look to hill and cloud,
> Nor in your hand plucking the yellow blossom
> Does Spring return,
> But in My radiant will
> That burns upon the winter of your heart!
> In this Season,
> Wherever the seeds of your endeavor strike,
> There is renewal.
> 
> My beloved,
> I stand about you like a bright Horizon
> Burning with many suns;
> As flowers firmly rooted in the warm earth of Spring,
> You live in the midst of Me.
> 
> MYSTIC
> 
> HANDS grope for the strung bow,
> Feet for the open summit path,
> Eyes for the strange altar carving.
> Hands and feet tensely held, eyes closed,
> Daylong I stand under the rain
> Feeling a great power pouring, brimming my soul.
> Break bow, close path, hide carving:
> Here’s all.
> 
> RAIN
> 
> ON housetops lofty as thought
> The rain drips pelting down, the winter rain,
> Pelting and spattering,
> Driven from the austere windy north
> As if the skies would cleave
> To spew once more the forty days and nights
> Prodigious with pelting rain,
> And over these housetops lofty as thought,
> Over this city,
> Roll waves of desolation!
> O my people, unconscious! do you not listen?
> Do you not hear these messengers approach?
> Where is that open door, your soul,
> To give them entrance?
> Thrilling, invocative, with speech of God they speak,
> Conductors of truth, ripeners of seed, bringers of power,
> Which you avoid as chill tormenting rain!
> Nay, yourselves are chill tormenting rain
> Rolling like myriad drops
> Down gutters of nothingness,
> Sinking to hidden pools, forgotten and stagnant.
> Rolling, rolling forever
> A deluge
> Drowning the golden City, vision of God!
> 
> VISION
> 
> IS there a crowd that rolls upon itself,
> A frantic, stuprous mob
> Headless and heartless?
> It is an arrow streaming to distant mark
> Fixed in the will of God.
> And are there darkened cities,
> Peoples sword-locked and closely crucified;
> Explosive passions, self-tormenting hates,
> Blindness of path and peak?
> They drive, all men, divided mobs and towns,
> Fort-girdled states, imperious continents—
> All men soever—moving to a goal
> Urged as these separate waters by one moon.
> They struggle, sleep; they murmur, grieve or pray,
> Thoughtful and reckless, seeing, unseeing; entwined in
> bitter grasp
> Beyond partition into good and evil;
> Yet all, and not one conscious stream—
> All, all, the sere, the singing—
> Obey one urge, and each alike arrives.
> O fool that turns his back!
> Traitor that leagues the world to weak despair!
> He gropes against the rising of the sun,
> And dawn shall strike him speechless.
> 
> HIGHWAY
> 
> PATHWAY of currents charged from rapid worlds;
> Between immovable poles I stand
> Vibrant with forces joyous, conquering,
> That fly through every atom quick with birth.
> I am the highway of God,
> Trodden by radiant messengers. His will;
> I am the tent where angels love to sleep,
> Dreaming of Love reborn.
> 
> G. B. S. & CO.
> 
> TOO late, masters of knowledge, you approach
> With open tomes, encyclopaedic acres
> Sown with the old world’s wisdom!
> I have drunk
> The wine of love … I dance
> And will not batten on this corn.
> Too late …
> Yet, O my masters, ye were the undertakers of great
> things,
> Yea, the pall bearers of a corpulent world
> Dead, dead forever.
> 
> THE IDIOT
> 
> … Yes!
> But as for me,
> I pass without debate of life and death,
> Stumbling or dancing as the tune is pitched,
> Not choosing, not remembering,
> Dragging no chains and aiming for no star.
> I know who frowns and grudges:
> “Concentrate essence of inconstant moments,
> The flower’s soul, the fool’s way his!”
> And that may be.
> But ever I peer about
> Observing these anxious folk, these moderns,
> Tired Atlases who bear
> A world of borrowed marble and stolen fame—
> I peer about, and ever as I pass
> Touch softly each gleaming pillar, each smoking shrine
> And unperceived, drop tears upon them.
> Tears …
> For men are sleepers in a world of dream,
> An unreal, staggering world
> That any moment, as I know,
> Will break asunder, crashing, heaved apart
> By bursting seeds of God’s compelling spring,
> Temple on temple, arch on arch,
> All staggering down and whelmed
> In waters of eager thought, in flames of love.
> Against which day I neither lock nor loose
> 
> Nor own nor will be owned within this doom
> That with a few others, unattached and free,
> My soul may cry:
> “Lo God, within this quickened earth
> Plow under the yearning heart which I have borne
> So many seasons, unfertile till You had sown!”
> … Aye,
> The fool’s way mine.
> Where is that Prophet crying within my heart?
> 
> THESE WERE
> 
> THERE was a childhood once,
> And groping hands and feet that labored,
> Room after room, an old, evocative house;
> A youth whose urgent pinions beat
> The neighboring hills, to pass forever
> Their all-encircling borderland of sky;
> And there were people, travels, foreign lands,
> Adventure and love.
> These were …
> Blind potters of memory.
> Now, like an empty cup, I hold it forth
> To catch the vision …
> Drop by drop,
> Sparkle of living wine.
> I drain it … thought, deed and passion
> Met in this glory.
> Immortal.
> 
> IMAGES D’AMOUR
> 
> WHETHER I was making salad in the blue bowl
> Or whether, beside the open window, I sat
> Leaning against the twilight—
> Bruskly, a storm amid my dreams, one entered,
> My brother.
> Speechless he stood and stared about him there
> As one whose thoughts are like a leaderless mob,
> Each tripping the next.
> His hands and eyes, the eyes and hands of a ghost,
> Twitched vainly at the veil of my repose;
> And when at last he spoke
> I heard not his voice as words but moods,
> Moods pitching from angry fear to awed regret
> Like the stressed arpeggio of a violin:
> “Letters three I as a brother wrote,
> “And telegrams, unanswered one and all …
> “None knew where you had gone.
> “Why did you go? And why, O why come here
> “To this poor barren attic?
> “A monk’s, a prisoner’s or a madman’s cell!
> “What folly, what misfortune brought you here?”
> Wonderingly I gazed at him so wistful, so far away,
> Beating desperately against the gate of my will.
> “Always, from a child, you leaned your ladder against
> a cloud,
> “And when the cloud drifted, you fell amidst the dirt.
> 
> “Speak!”
> “It was the earth drifted, not the cloud,” I said.
> “But having promised the dead mother of us both
> “I came, and come again,
> “To bear you home, and wind the tired springs of your
> “hope.”
> “This is my home, the house of my soul,” I said.
> Trembling, he seized my hand.
> “Come! I beg of you, come home!”
> Quietly I let a perfect silence flow about us, then
> “Look no more at the image of other minds;
> “Look once at me.”
> Eye into eye, life into life deeply he gazed
> As one who sees his own bride in another’s arms
> And feels his anger drown in fathomless regret.
> Despite himself, he stood beside me on the hill of my
> possession.
> “But you will let no harm befall you?
> “To me, first of all, you will come for aid?
> “Please!”
> Insistently, not to be forded by speech, the silence
> Flowed sparkling between us.
> Weeping, he turned away.
> Once, when I too beat as a ghost against the gates,
> I too had wept and been as water in the cup of his desire,
> Who am no more a ghost
> Neither a coin jingled in the blind pocket, life.
> 
> Stiffly astare,
> The drowned corpse of that visit rises
> After nine days to float upon my thought:
> “A monk’s, a prisoner s or a madman s cell!
> “What folly, what misfortune brought you here?”
> My attic, my little room
> Captured from the world’s monotony;
> My solitude, ransom of myriad souls!
> What blindness hangs before the friendliest eye!
> A room, an attic? …
> ’Twas rooms I fled from, prisons of visioning hearts.
> Now as in the freedom of all dream
> I camp upon the crossroads of the worlds;
> The ages come and go;
> Continents arise, dissolve; seas labor;
> Images, wrapt in glory, pause and speak;
> Or, if I will, there’s nothing here at all
> Except the end of my thumb.
> Will the creator, and Desire the god
> Attend my moments;
> But my will is to be free of every will;
> My desire to conquer all desire.
> 
> Last night, following my impatient feet,
> I quit the vastness of the attic
> 
> And entered in the city as a cave.
> With tunnels cut through human hopes denied
> It prisoned me in streets,
> And breasting the casual crowd
> I felt each man and woman thrusting forth
> His aura, stealing room from one another,
> None giving amplitude (where are those heroes
> Whose lives are amplitude about us?)
> Until I felt the river and the sky.
> A little star gleamed from the murky water:
> How like her life in mine, I said,
> Her life, bright perfect point remote,
> Yea worlds remote, yet faithfully contained
> In my own darkness!
> But does the star itself contain the river?
> Inscrutable shining star!
> Then,
> She leaned beside me on the brink,
> Both joining hands and lips. …
> Late, when the city slept, past darkened homes
> That were as lovers kept by grief apart,
> I crept to the attic, the river in my ears,
> Remembering.
> 
> The clattering footsteps of my neighbor
> Up and down the stairs, impatient always for the street,
> 
> Reluctant for the attic—the silence—
> They teach me
> I too, and more than sailor or soldier,
> Adventure!
> Here is my frontier, where salt and bread and water
> Change into the marvelous movements of hand and eye,
> Where movement becomes a thought, and thought a
> vision;
> Here I adventure!
> Often, gazing at the bare wood of the table
> Showing its delicate veins, I stand abashed …
> The body of God.
> The body of God, given with open, tremulous hands and
> shining eyes
> In fire and earth and water which to me
> Murmur of glory streets and crowds betray:
> Of martyrs chanting sensuous, passionate joy
> Into the flame and smoke of bridal death;
> Of sages brooding prayer in ancient forests;
> Of children who gaze openly at the Word made flesh …
> A crucible, my attic; melting life
> Into the quivering elements, love and dream.
> Whence joyously I hang crucified between the two
> thieves
> Poverty and Sorrow.
> 
> Sometimes I do not know if she or I be dead;
> Which is the ghost, which is the living.
> I saw her thrice …
> The first time I grew conscious of the world,
> As if I’d drunken wine, the wine of dreams.
> As a flower I burst from the dead seed of myself
> Into the glory of life!
> And then, the second time …
> She was the glory.
> Once more (I felt the great arranger, fate, behind us)
> We met … and as it were by two wicks
> The candle of life took flame.
> Thrice, thrice …
> Yet as with closed eyes I see again
> Her eyes shining in mine, and with fingertips
> Trembling like conscious thoughts I know her warmth,
> There is a vibrance, a community
> Like speech of speechless children:
> She is near!
> Only, I too must die (or must she die?)
> To join her, where she fled.
> Meanwhile, I play at living in a world
> Whose toys blind hands have broken.
> 
> Like atoms whirling in a drop,
> Atoms I mingled with, the crowd
> Stirred silently across the city square.
> Movements and moods passed above our heads,
> We striving to seize and fix our thoughts
> Blown from us, coals from a shallow pan.
> Then to me, witless as the rest, the eyes of a woman …
> And I knew nothing else beside their glow.
> It lit the world.
> Sunlight was darkness to it, shining with rapt calm
> Upon the souls of men.
> For the first time—souls!
> Men I beheld as thoughts and not as features;
> As fates, not bodies;
> As wills and not as forms.
> A whole city I perceived as a desert
> With never a drop of water nor a shady tree
> To nourish the leaf of life;
> A nation, prodigious with leagues and millions,
> Then I recalled as seven men and women
> Standing like carven giants on a hill,
> Or like actors silent upon a darkened stage,
> Their heads bowed, hands relaxed,
> Waiting the curtain.
> But she! her I absorbed as civilization
> 
> Glowing with customs and arts,
> Laws, knowledges, cities, rivers, landscapes, monuments,
> Reverence for death and joy in living.
> I have forgotten the numbers and size of things in this
> world.
> Never shall I recall them!
> The crowd scattered; the great mood like an ocean
> Drew to its ebb, but still the light shines …
> Men are the gardens to each others’ seed;
> Men are the spring for each others’ gardens-
> Men are the dawn of each others’ daytime!
> The dawn has broke; forgotten thoughts and loves
> Walk like the blessed gods from soul to soul,
> Bearers of recognition.
> We return
> Even to the birth and the beginning of time,
> Children again made perfect in the womb.
> 
> The perfume of her lingers about me,
> A garden under the level setting sun of Greece
> When, at the path’s end, the gleaming marble
> Almost becomes the goddess.
> 
> Goddess! what is this twilight which, creating you,
> Creates the darkness of your recession?
> 
> As the mild slipping of a child’s steps I heard her
> Approach me; as the presence of a mother
> So she came; speaking, it was the voice of my beloved.
> Kneeling beside my couch thus spoke my beloved:
> “Now at last is the returning of our love
> “From exile;
> “Arise, for the thought of me is not dead.
> “Surely I have come of my own will,
> “Willing.
> “Between the worlds of being and appearance
> “Let our love dwell in peace.
> “There is an island rimmed by seas denied
> “Set like a pearl in the bright path of the sun.
> “There, which is the world’s distance, be our future.
> “Arise, O my beloved.”
> To whom, waking to her in the darkness of this world’s
> midnight,
> Softly, speaking into the dawn, I answered:
> “Has not our future been, long ago, consummate?
> “The golden words of love, O my beloved,
> “These are but echoes.
> “Death does not intervene so much as living.”
> But she, weeping, already withdrawing:
> “With all this I have not to do,
> “With brass and marble;
> “The empire of my heart shall it decay by time?”
> 
> When, strangely ecstatic, I caressing the hands withdrawing:
> “Even by brass and marble shall I, toiling,
> “At last arrive!”
> As from a closing door I heard “Farewell!”
> As to a door closed until the dawn I said:
> “Farewell!”
> 
> About me lingers the perfume of her,
> A garden under the moon-disk, memory,
> Where, at the path’s end, the gleaming marble
> Becomes the goddess. …
> 
> LOVERS
> PETER, an old peasant
> MARA, his wife
> ANSON, their son
> LORNA, a young woman
> 
> FIRST SCENE
> 
> The interior of PETER’S cottage. A fire of sod glows
> on the hearth. A table is set with cups and bowls and a
> loaf on a wooden plate. Three chairs are drawn up
> though only two places have been set. The outside door
> shakes uneasily in the violence of a storm, and the window
> rattles. ANSON, his arm bandaged in a sling, sits on the
> floor beside the hearth, staring into the fire and oblivious
> of what takes place in the room. Opposite him across
> the chimney-piece PETER is seated awaiting supper, troubled and wistful, a spent pipe in his hand. MARA moves
> between the fire, the cupboard and the table, preparing
> the meal. LORNA, her hair shining with wet, has drawn
> a stool against the outside door. She seems to be listening
> to the rain, but occasionally watches MARA intently, as if
> she had never before seen a domestic woman at work.
> 
> MARA
> 
> [Startled by the wind]
> 
> Oh dear! Oh dear!
> It be the coming of the end of all things;
> 
> I have the sure feeling now.
> Aye, hear the hateful wind and the rain!
> They are but voices, like, and say what I always knew.
> 
> PETER
> 
> Don’t be afeared for storms, Mara.
> You and me have passed many a worse.
> 
> MARA
> 
> Oh yes—have been enough of them;
> But I always knew in my heart this thing would fall so.
> 
> PETER
> 
> Lies a path out somewhere, Mara.
> 
> MARA
> 
> [Indignant]
> 
> Do you say so?
> What with Umber gone too, and none to help you!
> But that’s the way of it:
> Men look ever to their own betterment
> And leave others in want behind them.
> 
> PETER
> 
> Umber stayed through the sowing, Mara,
> And who can blame him for wanting to be a householder?
> 
> MARA
> 
> Oh, you never could, at all!
> You never could blame anybody, you’re that easy.
> But I might have told you beforehand.
> I knew in my heart my life would fall so;
> I knew from the day my mother died and I had the
> family,
> Six small ones, always hungry and wild,
> My life would be a grief and a torment.
> 
> PETER
> 
> You were the good daughter to your father;
> The good wife you are to me, Mara.
> But I think we have been happier than most—
> Won’t you just say so with me?
> 
> MARA
> 
> Say so, indeed!
> Harken now to me, Peter, what I will say to you;
> Any time these thirty years I could have said the same,
> What I hold up to you now,
> This misfortune sent upon us,
> This bad luck in our old age!
> 
> PETER
> 
> How could you have said so, Mara?
> 
> MARA
> 
> ’Twas in my heart like a sorrow.
> I always expected the worst thing would come,
> As come it has.
> What can you say to that now, Peter?
> 
> PETER
> 
> [Sobered]
> 
> You are right, Mara;
> ’Tis like a prophecy come true,
> But I have been happy, aye, and looked for no trouble
> Beyond my power to right it or endure it.
> 
> MARA
> 
> That’s your blindness, man.
> Men are blind—’tis women who see things.
> There now! I suppose you will eat your supper?
> 
> PETER
> 
> Why, if it be ready …
> 
> MARA
> 
> You would eat the same were I cold in the barrow!
> 
> PETER
> 
> [Taking his place at table]
> 
> I think I would not take food that day, Mara.
> 
> [He breaks the loaf, hesitates, looks at Lorna doubtfully, then at Mara]
> 
> Well now …
> 
> MARA
> 
> [Angrily, watching him]
> 
> Eat, man! Is the supper not good enough, I expect?
> 
> PETER
> 
> It is so, but I was thinking …
> 
> LORNA
> 
> Sit you, Mara.
> I will fetch the porridge from the fire.
> 
> MARA
> 
> Am I the woman will let another wait on my man?
> ’Tis the supper she is wanting for herself.
> 
> PETER
> 
> There is enough for her, Mara.
> 
> MARA
> 
> Aye, if she eat what be Anson’s!
> 
> [Full of this neu grievance, she takes a bowl from
> the cupboard, wipes it conscientiously and lays it
> 
> on the table. Lorna, undisturbed, brings a steaming pot from the fire and fills the bowl.]
> 
> PETER
> 
> [Perplexed]
> 
> You be changed, Lorna.
> 
> [They eat in silence. A spark snaps from the fire
> and burns on Anson s coat. Lorna extinguishes
> it carefully]
> 
> MARA
> 
> What are you doing to him?
> Seven days and nights I have cared for him,
> And never at all has he looked at me or smiled at me.
> He seems no longer my own son, at all.
> 
> PETER
> 
> Poor Anson.
> He has not wits for speaking and hearing
> And no will for eating.
> His mind is never with us now;
> I pray it not be wandering in darkness.
> 
> LORNA
> 
> Let him be. ’Tis the long fast of new things.
> 
> MARA
> 
> What witch’s thing is that now?
> 
> PETER
> 
> What was that word you put on him Lorna,—
> The new things?
> 
> LORNA
> 
> Aye, the true word; I learnt it from the beasts.
> 
> MARA
> 
> And once he pushed me away!
> Me, his old mother, he did not want by him.
> What times and what ways are these,
> When mothers are struck by their children?
> Is he not mine altogether,
> My flesh and my blood?
> He never did so before, never before!
> 
> [She rocks back and forth, crying feebly]
> 
> No, he never crossed us before.
> Our will was his, as needs be in this world.
> 
> LORNA
> 
> What did you ever will for him
> Except to make him another like yourselves?
> But he is not like you, and must no more try to be.
> 
> MARA
> 
> What does she say, the strange woman?
> 
> Do not look at him so with those eyes!
> What do you will for him?
> 
> LORNA
> 
> Nothing. Nothing and everything.
> His own will I will for him.
> I watch it creeping nearer and nearer
> Like a dream in the darkness.
> I watch, and can do nothing at all,
> Only wait, who never waited before.
> 
> PETER
> 
> [Touched by her sadness]
> 
> But you aren’t such a bad woman, Lorna.
> 
> LORNA
> 
> How should I be a bad woman, Peter?
> 
> PETER
> 
> But you were never as the others, Lorna.
> 
> LORNA
> 
> We be as God makes us;
> And there is one only wrong, to change or be changed.
> 
> PETER
> 
> You say so, Lorna,
> 
> But for me a man is bad who destroys others,
> And a woman is bad who lives with too many or all alone.
> 
> LORNA
> 
> Oh, I have not lived alone!
> I have heard many voices speak
> Gentle and wise
> Out of the bright sky.
> Out of the deep wood, the grass.
> I have heard them since my mother went away,
> Whom I just remember, dimlike.
> I wandered out alone, looking for her,
> And she never came to me again
> But some one like her lives in the wood
> Who whispers many a word I understand.
> Oh, I never have been lonely!
> 
> PETER
> 
> Aren’t you lonely now, Lorna?
> Did you not come here because you were lonely?
> 
> MARA
> 
> ’Tis our Anson she wants, Peter!
> 
> LORNA
> 
> No, never your Anson!
> 
> MARA
> 
> ’Tis so! Let her not befool you, Peter!
> Oh dear, oh dear,
> I have no power over him since that day.
> Belike she has power over him.
> 
> PETER
> 
> She says ’tis not our Anson she wants, Mara.
> Perhaps you had some thoughts for a warm supper?
> 
> MARA
> 
> ’Tis Anson, I tell you!
> 
> LORNA
> 
> ’Tis the future and the new life, Peter.
> 
> MARA
> 
> There now! What is that but every girl’s want?
> 
> PETER
> 
> Can you help him, Lorna?
> Give him wit for hearing and speaking,
> Make of him what he was before?
> 
> LORNA
> 
> Any woman can do that
> Who waits for his weakness.
> 
> MARA
> 
> He pushed me away when I brought the porridge!
> 
> PETER
> 
> Well now, Mara, if Lorna can do for him
> What we cannot do for him
> We’d best be thankful, eh?
> 
> MARA
> 
> Let her not touch him!
> What does she want but to make him follow her
> Into the woods and live with voices and things,
> Idle and selfish as she is?
> 
> LORNA
> 
> Let nobody touch him.
> Let us wait for him to come
> To you or to me, Mara.
> That is wisdom;
> For surely if Anson be urged against his will,
> Even if he believe he comes by his own will,
> He comes only partly,
> And from her one day he will surely depart in anger.
> 
> Mara
> 
> Beguile men with that now, never a woman!
> Are you not both young together,
> 
> And will he not likelier come to you than to me?
> So need you but sit still with that yellow hair
> Before him when he awakes,
> But I must work for him and take him!
> 
> [Her voice rises shrill. Anson starts uneasily, mutters, and stands up. Mara draws near him, pleading without daring to touch him.]
> 
> Anson, see yonder the warm supper.
> You will eat with us, Anson? Oh yes,
> You will sit down here, in your own place
> Between your father and mother.
> ’Tis as if you had been far away,
> But now all things will be homelike, as they were.
> 
> [Peter cries nervously, feeling a situation he cannot
> understand. Mara stirs the porridge and offers
> it to Anson. Lorna unbolts the door and flings
> it open. The storm has passed, the wind sighs
> away in the darkness; slow drops of water drip
> from the eaves. Anson leans forward searching
> his mother s eyes. She closes them, unable to meet
> his glance, but throws out her arms in deep humility. Anson turns away and passes into the
> night without looking at Lorna or Peter. The
> three stand a moment with bated breath, then
> Lorna closes the door and leans against it, facing
> Mara.]
> 
> LORNA
> 
> Have no fear and no anger, Mara,
> Though he has crossed the old threshold forever.
> I think it was not for myself I did this,
> No, nor even for Anson,
> But for … the voices and the wisdom.
> 
> [Mara chokes, unable to reply.]
> 
> PETER
> 
> [Sadly]
> 
> I do not know him at all;
> It is to you we must look for Anson now, Lorna.
> 
> LORNA
> 
> It may be so. I do not know the end yet, at all.
> 
> MARA
> 
> Oh yes, you bad woman and witch,
> You have stolen him for your own pleasure!
> A spell you put upon him,
> Hussy, foreigner!
> 
> LORNA
> 
> I have put no spell on him, Peter,
> Do not think it.
> Did I want him to come that day?
> Ah no, but something new has fallen over us both!
> 
> PETER
> 
> You will not take him away,
> You will not change him, Lorna?
> 
> LORNA
> 
> Believe me, Peter,
> Anson will be nearer though far away;
> He will be more Anson, though another.
> This I will do for him
> Lest his agony depart without bringing renewal.
> 
> [She follows Anson. Mara sinks into a chair, crying hopelessly. Peter, blindly hopeful and sympathetic, takes her in his arms and kisses her tenderly.]
> 
> SECOND SCENE
> 
> The forest at dawn. The austere twilight reveals a
> circular glade. A spring, half hidden beneath a rock
> and the sprawling roots of a tree, overflows with rainswollen murmur. Here and there a vista of ghostly distances opens through the trees. LORNA and ANSON ENTER
> THE GLADE.
> 
> LORNA
> 
> I stand at the door of the sun,
> I open the morning;
> 
> I hold apart the gate for one who climbed
> Seven days the lonely path,
> Leaving behind the things he hated
> To become the things he adored.
> 
> Powers behind tree and tempest,
> Behind all that lives in freedom,
> Untamed, instinctive,
> You gather in me too intense for one to contain!
> 
> Pass out, pass over whither I will you.
> Pass with my love
> Into the soul that is near.
> Glad! Glad! Glad!
> Pass with your moods and thoughts,
> Violently changing, making old ways new.
> 
> [To Anson]
> 
> Take freely the powers that come,
> Your own, the self that you find
> Waiting under the dawn.
> 
> Be strong and glad in the faith
> That you had forgotten,—
> Faith of things whole and changeless, compelling!
> 
> Be glad in tumult and riot;
> Be glad in darkness and silence,
> Glad in yourself and the world.
> 
> [She offers him water from the spring]
> 
> Drink, lest you turn back
> Dragged by a bitter memory.
> Drink, that things past become like things reborn.
> 
> ANSON
> 
> I stand within a cave that opens
> To the bright reaches of the sky,
> And see the heavens for the first time.
> God! How beautiful we are!
> 
> Where do these paths lead that dance beneath me?
> What is this will that is not will but desire,
> Not desire but fulfillment?
> Thanks, thanks that I am born into this morning of time!
> Lorna, is it you? You have changed.
> The tiger has lain her to sleep.
> The fawn has awakened.
> O light that made my cave so dark I must destroy it!
> 
> We two stand in a garden,
> Our garden, Lorna;
> Our garden that we will sow with many a delight,
> 
> Hush! A bird sings at the horizon of hearing.
> Hush! An echo—or is it the mate who replies?
> Who taught them our song?
> I listen, but the song is part of you and me.
> Come, pillow my head that I may sleep a little.
> I am a child too full of the day,
> Too full of wonder and growth,
> Ready for the sleep at last.
> What things we have to do, Lorna!
> Think of them, how wonderful they are:
> None, since the beginnings of time have known how sweet!
> To make for ourselves a home
> Full of sweet thoughts and right wishes;
> To lay out a meadow and field and a garden
> Where nobody ever turned a sod;
> To dig for a sweet spring … the house all new,
> Yet not too far away …
> The poor, dear people, we’ll teach them.
> 
> [He sinks down drowsily]
> 
> LORNA
> 
> ’Tis right now, to speak of a home
> Though I hated the women who grow old in homes,
> And the men who keep them in homes
> Prisoned from springtime,
> And said, never shall I forget and grow bitter!
> 
> But these too were claimed in joy—
> With happy thoughts they passed over the threshold.
> This is the gift of the world,—
> I too am born to-day,
> I too am grateful.
> 
> TO A DANCER
> 
> SCULPTOR of that most gracious theme,
> Yourself,
> You carve the galleries of remembrance
> Like Egypt, with a deathless attitude.
> Inscrutable figures, passing ever by
> In rhythmic file, yet ever, ever stayed …
> Behold, how hand outstretched to hand, they poise,
> The goddess and the victim and the bride,
> Your myriad moments … traced
> In bas-relief upon a poet’s soul.
> 
> VICTORY
> 
> THE sense of triumph slumbers deep
> And victory goes without a tongue
> For all the visible fanes we keep,
> For all our audible pæans sung.
> 
> Unseen of eye, by ear unheard,
> It thrills to its own theme apart,
> The mind’s unutterable Word
> And nameless Lover of the heart.
> 
> From outward glory fugitive,
> Aloof from public fact and creed,
> Its hope is all the life we live,
> Its memory more than life indeed.
> 
> ILLUMINATION
> 
> THE pride that darkens after victory
> Like mist upon the waters of the mind
> Parted, as though a sudden eagle passed
> Dipping a moment from the sun; a light
> Shook down upon the waters audibly:
> ‘Who to himself and all the world appears
> Oracular, with speech of heaven and earth,
> But never from his couch before the map
> Has stirred a single pace, preferring ease!’
> (O scorn of eagles, which have dared the sun!)
> 
> Then silence; but the waters of my thought,
> Bared to the brilliance, for a moment shone
> Like silver mirrors, facing from all sides,
> Inside and out. I gazed and saw myself
> Reflected in a thousand various forms:
> A beast, a tree, a stone, a cloud, a child,
> With thousand various images behind
> Of thought and deed and memory and mood.
> All moved, as they were troubled by a wind,
> But at the last were nothing. Then I fell
> Upon the knees that are no more my knees
> And with the voice that is no more my voice
> I cried a cry, the single thing I am,
> 
> As one will cry whose house has fallen down
> For help to raise the ruin and go free.
> And like the cry I fled outside myself
> And died like echo on the farthest hill.
> 
> Like echo I had died, but now arise
> Like echo re-awakened by the song
> Of one who dwells upon the farthest hill.
> 
> CREATION
> 
> Post-Impressionist Poems
> 
> (Paris, January-October, 1913)
> 
> DEDICATION
> 
> O GOD, Thou knowest I
> With what few things and slight,
> Form, music, colour and my power of words,
> Created heaven in this deathly place.
> Aye, as I struggled for the air I breathe
> And seized my bread and water from the earth
> By toil and pain,
> Thou knowest, God, I built a little heaven,
> An atmosphere, a dream
> More fixed than hills beside the ocean,
> Where I have lived content.
> God, if Thou hast not to struggle,
> If Thou art free in fact as I in dream,
> In will as I in hope,
> What larger heaven Thou hast built thyself!
> Sometimes within this cloudy mirror
> I glimpse it steadfast, and my passion hurts
> Like wounded birds in storm.
> O there shall I enter,—no, not enter,—
> But I shall make its equal, stone on stone,
> Thy watching architect, and dwell therein
> Godlike, in our good time.
> 
> THE VISION
> 
> I CLIMB.
> The old spirit of the race, like hidden music,
> Tugs at my toiling feet and hands,
> Beats on my thought. I pause;
> The whole world dances to a strange sad measured tune.
> Baffled to reach sheer heights of silence
> I close my ears. The world shall dance,
> But dance from my own spirit’s rhythm!
> Deafened, I climb.
> The old spirit of the race, dawn-mist,
> Taking a thousand lights and gleams,
> A sheen perceptible on peak and plain,
> Tangles the flow of river, the stillness of tree,
> The action of men in labour.
> Beauty! The spirit of the race proclaims. But I
> No longer perplexed, seeking the sun’s pure blaze—
> Life’s colour shall be the hues of my own dream!—
> I close my sight, and blinded, climb.
> Suddenly, gaining the utmost peak,
> Opening my eyes, I see beneath the sun
> United in an unguessed radiant glory
> The whole world changed,—created, re-created
> Mine, mine to love and know! And,
> Giving my ears and senses their desire,
> Silence at first, then slowly arising,
> The flux of musical rhythm swift and deep
> Binding all things in one tremendous march,
> 
> The glad progression of my conscious spirit!
> Now, kneeling in speechless wondering gratitude,
> Pierced through by free, creative wills and moods,
> I give myself to this, the common earth
> Redeemed, dissolved in my long-prayed-for vision!
> Men, rivers, trees: to you I turn again,
> Too strong for hate, too humble for doubt and fear,
> Descending from this peak of ecstasy
> To change your drugging music for this pæan,
> To drive away your pestilent dangerous beauty
> For this renewing, soul-seen living sun!
> 
> THE WELL BELOVED
> 
> O THE well beloved,
> Fortunate, fortunate men and women!
> They show the only authentic virtue
> Desirable in every race and clime:
> To be at home in one’s own soul
> And comfortably fit, like a student’s gown,
> The folds and wrinkles of one’s nature.
> I love to fall upon one of them suddenly
> Just out the window, or round the corner,
> When I am vacant or grieving or hateful;
> I know them by a secret sympathy,
> And I go straightway healed, as by a spell,
> Strutting a little, hearty, bold, superb,—
> Spilling over, in short, as a man’s life often should.
> I remember each of them I’ve seen:
> Such days are mirrors hung against my hope.
> There’s one, now, leaned beside a mossy well,
> Dipping his fingers, lingering.
> Within his eyes I saw
> Continual amazement, the revelation
> Of sheer meanings in things blinked at, passed over,
> since,—
> Well,—Wordsworth, we’ll say;
> And one that followed a rebel mob all night
> To feel the human pulse at point of bursting.
> (And when he came again among us
> So strangely catholic, titan he, we stared in awe.)
> 
> And one that stood before an antique desk
> Pondering old difficult words in a parchment book,
> Seldom turning a page, so deep he peered
> Into the lost childhood and mystery of time
> Glimmering through the philosophic Greek;
> And then another (he too, an old, old man)
> Whose sweeping beard fell down and almost hid
> The tawny violin he pressed
> Rapturously to him, like a new mother; and I waited
> Impatient for a fierce music to stab me ecstatic,
> (But he deeply, deeply listening
> To some old master or some grave inward tune
> Forgot me, though I coughed.)
> O, O the well beloved!
> Who taught them the true secret of being
> Over our heads who wait but hear it not?
> They never hurry, never disintegrate their souls,
> Fill the moment and the life-time richly up;
> Grow to the time and place they find themselves
> Inevitably, like the weather,
> And seem to a casual passer-by
> The very spirit of the brook or forest,
> Its human symbol, its reality;
> Become the lordly genius of all knowledge
> That holds the piecemeal generations
> Fixed to a conscious, unifying will.
> They are not many,
> 
> But where you meet but one or two
> There’s the rare odour in the world’s garden,
> The poignant taste in the soul’s wine,—
> The essence that memory feeds upon,
> Sick of the common waste of life,
> To write a noble record or a joyous dream.
> 
> IN A FACTORY
> 
> SMOKY, monotonous rows
> Of half-unconscious men
> Serving, with lustreless glance and dreamless mind,
> The masterful machines;
> These are the sons of herdsmen, hunters,
> Lords of the sunlit meadow,
> The lonely peak,
> The stirring shadow-haunted wood,—
> Of mariners who swung from sea to sea
> In carven ships
> And named the unknown world:
> Hunters, herdsmen, sailors, all
> By trade or chase or harvest
> Winning their substance
> Rudely, passionately like a worthy game
> With a boy’s great zest of playing.
> O labour,
> Whoso makes thee an adventure
> Thrilling to the nervous core of life,
> He is the true Messiah,
> The world’s Saviour, long-waited, long-wept-for.
> 
> IN A CAFÉ
> 
> HOW the grape leaps upward to life,
> Thirsty for the sun!
> Only a crushed handful, yet
> Laughing for its freedom from the dark
> It bubbles and spills itself,
> A little sparkling universe new-born.
> Well, higher within my blood and ecstasy
> You’ll sunward rise, O grape,
> Than ever on the slow, laborious vine.
> 
> IN A CAFÉ
> 
> I DRAIN it, then,
> Wine o’ the sun, sun-bright,
> And give it fuller life within my blood,
> A conscious life of richer thought and joy.
> And yet,—
> That too will perish soon like withered leaves
> Athirst for an ultimate sun
> Upon the soul’s horizon.
> Come down, O God, even to me,
> And drain my being as I drank the grape,
> That I, this moment’s perfect thing,
> Live so for ever.
> 
> A GAUGUIN
> 
> TO see, know, passionately take to heart
> The terrible beauty, in feature and in soul,
> Of one I heartily, heartily hate;
> Then, possessed by her magnificence,
> Wholly become it, lover-like for the time,
> Create her perfect likeness, line and form,
> Conspicuous for the world’s astartled wonder:
> This is the last mystery of art,—
> Moulding, with a strong, slow, hate-masterful hand,
> The delicate mask of some tormenting beauty.
> 
> A PASTEL
> 
> YONDER the towered city, yonder the world …
> A heart-beat more, and surely from the East
> Another land will show
> Its delicate promise native to our joy
> Over the mauve and silver twilight:
> The soul of some remote, unguessed Japan.
> 
> LES MORTS
> 
> STRANGELY between the darkness and my heart
> The lost eyes shine,
> And hands, fonder than all desire,
> Pass slowly on my hair and face.
> Whispers, arising from old depths of dream,
> Hover within my thought, awaking tears.
> How soft,
> How soft and tenderly clinging
> Pass the hands of the dead
> Over our hair in darkness.
> These arc they that living we could not hold,
> That slipped like lustral water
> Out of our hands, away;
> And all our passion, all our desperate prayer
> Held them, O held them not.
> 
> MYTH
> 
> GOD bless me! how that rascal time
> Keeps on his poet’s tricks!
> I’ the full daylight stare of trained historians and doctors,
> Under the very hands of modem bridge-builders, aeroplane-inventors and what-not,
> He’s imperceptibly filled my heart with a new romantic
> myth
> Rich-flavoured as any tale Greek schoolboys heard
> On Attic slopes of a shepherd’s holiday!
> Those boys grown up and changed,—those boys grown
> men?
> Freckles a City Mayor, three children, frock-coat and
> public title?
> (He swam our swimming pond three times across);
> Champion a judge, his car outside the court,
> Whom surely God designed a prime first baseman?
> And Hornet a clothes-importer,—prominent, etc.?
> No, no!
> They are not men, like all these common lives,—
> ril not believe it, though across the ocean
> Newspapers and letters mark their late success.
> No.
> If they are not still young, eternal boys.
> Their age has steeped itself in richer essence
> And turned them into joyous demigods.
> Their true life takes my memory like a myth
> Witnessed each day by the bright holiday sun,
> 
> The glad, splashing river, the haunting odour of cherry
> blossoms,
> And my own faithful heart, that yearns—
> That yearns for demigods, not men.
> 
> VALE
> 
> HER eyes turn mutely, patiently
> Like a hurt fawn’s away, moist with a sense
> Of some great passionate faith or promise
> Broken, denied to the living-out of life.
> And in the muter stillness where they stand
> He sees as through an opened window
> The last petal from a well-loved bough
> Tremble and flutter down;
> Hears, as from a neighbour orchard,
> A friendly throstle flute his parting tune,
> And suddenly, suddenly knows from her, from him,
> That spring itself, fleeing a stricken land,
> Has passed for ever.
> 
> ENGLAND
> 
> I GAZE upon the golden steaming hills,
> England! and yield a grateful heart to thee.
> What! this cottage thatched against the sun,
> This April morning steeped in fallow glebe,
> And not an English heart broken in rapture
> To keep thee—England?
> The Vandal poets wait against the coast
> To conquer thee and give the land a soul.
> 
> THE PLAIN WOMAN
> 
> WHAT is the beauty of women?
> Listen!—a song that makes the whole world sob
> Its aching heart away.
> But I?
> I am the silence closed about the song
> That keeps it beautiful.
> 
> EVERYMAN
> 
> I CURSED,—she wept;
> And from her tears and broken heart
> Eden arose about me, and I stood
> Perfect within her beauty.
> God! how has that spirit hid unseen
> Behind the clods and hates of daily life?
> 
> THE LONELY CUP
> WITHIN the dusky room
> Betweenwhiles of the fire’s insistent flap
> My silver spoon taps out
> Like startled sentinel’s musket,
> The steaming tea
> Hisses against the cup like far-off rapids,
> Whirlpools of dim alarm …
> Impelled, I deeply gaze within the amethyst liquid
> Somehow become a globed, translucent fate.
> Shapes, colours, figures, dreams and deeds
> Create, conjoin, dissolve;
> Ideas, evolutions, histories, moods and souls
> Steam richly up and fill the empty room.
> No broken heart, no desolation,
> But life’s vast wonder, changing, quick, intense,—
> A whole fellowship of things imminent and real,
> Portentous times to come,—sweetens for me
> The lonely cup.
> 
> SKYSCRAPERS
> 
> A FOREST of strange palms
> That stir not, nor sway in the wind,
> Nor nod sleepy at evening, nor reach to nestling birds
> A warm and comfortable mossy bough;
> Strange giant palms
> Rigid and sternly fixed in the purple sunset.
> One day the loud vexed ocean
> Will drive a furious tempest from the East
> To lash your stony trunks,
> To tear your earth-devouring roots
> And shake upon a shore deserted
> This terrible fruit of flame long petrified.
> 
> HOMEWARD
> 
> THERE is no other bosom for a grown man
> To sob his whole heart-bursting grief upon
> Than the sweet motherhood of his own native race;
> No voice to call him back from loneliness
> Than his own language, uttered from the first comfortings of love
> By the hushed lips of poets and faithful women
> Speaking into the great darkness
> That he, in his dark time, may turn homeward again
> and find
> The world’s heart warmly near.
> 
> THE DANCE
> 
> SLOW moonlight steeps the jungle-glade,
> And all the movement, all the pulse of night,
> Gathers within the hollow-sounding ocean.
> Long, melancholy waves
> Beat nature’s avid life within my blood;
> An essence slips from the still trees
> Freeing my thought from dream.
> I rise,
> Feeling the air like womanhood about me,
> Arise and grope through silence to the moon,
> Then turn, sway, bow and pause again,
> Waiting the rhythm.
> Find me, sea-loud night!
> Find me, for you are spent and old.
> I bring fresh heart and joyous consciousness
> Will give you speech, soul, freedom, thought,—
> Will tell the old, heroic lie of life
> So gaily none will doubt for another age.
> The rhythm falls like women’s passion
> Upon my lips, my hands;
> The world is sudden music and I dance,
> I dance, the soul of the lonely, moon-steeped glade,
> The thought, the freedom of the laboured sea,
> Swayed by a grace not mine
> In worship to a long-forgotten god.
> The womanhood of things closely and warm
> Presses my thrilling senses,
> 
> Creating at my fingers and my eyes
> A vision,—Eve, all palpable and warm,—
> That beats upon my sobs
> And mates my life with passion.
> Eve!
> I come … O Eve!
> Then, like a setting moon, a storm subdued,
> The rhythm closes round about itself,
> Passing to secret consummation
> Beyond nature, farther out than thought,
> Lost even to heart-beats.
> And I, tossed by, forgotten, wingless to follow,
> Sink back into the apathetic darkness
> With earth’s ten million years,
> Into the prison-house of tree and ocean.
> Eve. …
> 
> THE CROWD
> 
> FED from the gloom of night-strewn barren streets
> And gorged from the gloomier night of barren homes,
> The heavy, corpulent crowd
> Enormously sprawls the house of carnival,
> Mute as a foeless, mateless sea-deep monster
> Heaving through livid, phosphorescent caves
> Its bulk of terrible hunger seeking prey.
> As one great staring Thing the brutal crowd,
> Passion-distended,
> Rolls ponderously out its whole slow length,
> The avid, pitiless will of huddled men
> Absorbing into one vapid, bottomless soul
> Its long-craved prey of pleasure.
> The dancers flutter, dazzling Its vacant eye;
> These girls with shining trays of heaped fruit
> And wines from the world’s mad reckless south
> Steep drowsily Its wandering senses;
> Deafened by changing music. It grows partly glad.
> How did I come a part of this huge Thing,
> Myself so harmless?
> Yet I too fled from my own hateful gloom,
> From many a biting sorrow,
> Gladly forgetting myself and others
> To surge with these the warm sleek blazing house,
> The house of carnival.
> So the monster dies. Its bloated power
> Dissolves in tears. I look and deeply know
> 
> The secret parts, like me, of the corpulent Thing,
> The avid men and women of the crowd.
> And O these dancing girls, this glittering fruit
> The Thing glutted Its empty heart upon,
> ’Twas all the broken pieces of old joy,
> The fragments of our man and woman dream
> Which, blindly coming together,
> We sought amid these changing lights and sounds
> To take, to gather up, fragment by fragment,
> And shape into one conscious soul again.
> I, when the rear gate of my life opens,
> From all such tragic hypocritic days
> Shall turn to the far mountain of my secret will,
> That stark, still place, to build a small cottage there
> Beside a whispering brook,
> To sit alone and think of many things.
> 
> THE EGOIST
> 
> “SHE has no soul.
> “Her almond eyes diminish to a spark
> And change the sun to amber.
> When she looks at me
> I draw without myself and pass, unwilled,
> The strange lids of her eyes, and enter
> A garden that knows no law,
> Sowed with imaginations like a god’s.
> I enter and become
> Another self, drunken
> By new thoughts and hot-pulsed danger.
> I long to sing, to prove my madness,
> Dancing away from habit,
> Responsibility and the grave laws of soul.
> A woman has no right to perilous thoughts.
> She has no soul, and O,
> I lose my own, and all my satisfied past,
> Desiring her.”
> 
> THEY
> 
> SHE, with smile of wrinkled stone,
> Watched Lola dance.
> 
> Like naked flames
> Blown dazzling by a masterful wind
> Frantic with conflagration, leaping on
> To seize intolerable smokeless heights;
> Like branches, laurel and bay,
> Gently, soberly borne by virgin girls
> In white procession
> To lay upon some holy monument;
> Like stars that light through storm
> Astonishing the soul—
> Two stars above the rushing tempest poised …
> Her hair, her limbs, her eyes:
> O God! how Lola danced!
> 
> He
> Wearied a little, gray before his time,
> Polite, attentive … apathetic …
> Quickened, knew within his blood
> Suddenly the old adventure;
> Within his thought
> The tense, creative pull and tingle of life—
> The vision—
> Knew himself in Lola, and leaned
> 
> With eyes and heart and will
> To seize this marvel
> And make its essence eternally his own.
> 
> She, with smile of wrinkled stone,
> Watched Lola dance.
> 
> HERTHA
> 
> EXQUISITE to her slow silk’s rustle
> Nay its echo
> Who save one hate-tortured might say how perfect
> This woman’s silken and perfumed exquisite
> Feminine beauty?
> 
> THE GIRL
> 
> SHE plagues me with the rapture of my sex;
> I bring her flowers and kisses,
> I breathe her hair
> And dream against her breasts;
> I splash her limbs with water from a pool.
> Then, inspired to something of my manhood,
> I sing to her, and to myself, a song,
> The song of Eve:
> But frightened she laughs aloud
> And runs and hides within the sleepy wood.
> I follow, sobbing.
> 
> THE ENCOUNTER
> 
> POOR shivering girl,
> All eyes
> That swim in timid wonder,
> Hungry, forlorn, street-corner girl,
> How the stupid world has starved her!
> Stay, I will give her riches,—
> Not bread and wine and pearls,
> (Those eyes were never starved for bread alone!)—
> But love, soft kisses, ardent words
> And fellow-admiration; these
> Will lid her lidless eyes, restore her soul
> To vacant lip and bosom.
> She
> Will lie as summer dawn within my heart,
> And moonlight on my imagination.
> 
> THE BLUE GIRL
> 
> SHE does not walk, like me;
> She swims, an undulation, a perfumed water,
> Changing, changing.
> When she is gone I try to think of her,
> But dream and all desire turn inward, empty,—
> Her passing burns no steadfast line upon my vision
> To recreate her beauty from,
> Beauty, like life itself, lost in its own rhythm.
> Perfume and water.
> Others I could dream of, and loved my dream far
> more than woman.
> She alone I must have, the beautiful,
> Like perfumed water, flowing, flowing.
> 
> EVE’S LAMENT
> 
> WHEN I first stopped, dismayed, and wept,
> Caught in the tangled vines, at the world’s
> wildness,
> You swiftly came, O Adam,
> Heartily bade me wait, and singing gaily
> Hewed through the crowded jungle growth a way.
> Lonely I waited by the cave, afraid
> You never should return; but you returned,
> And standing upright in the dim home-twilight,
> Kissed me, and loved me safe.
> 
> Then, when I wept once more
> For rivers to be crossed and hills laid low
> And the great ocean to be governed,
> You heartily bade me wait, and while I waited,
> Lonely and desolate at home,
> You, Adam, pushed your might against the hills
> And laid them low;
> Pondered a moment by the swollen streams
> And bridged them;
> Flung ships across the white, rebellious seas,
> And governed to your will the tide and storm.
> But, each adventure done, you hastened
> Searching for Eve, and ever as you came
> Brought the glad bold heart that stirred my heart,
> Strong manhood to my womanhood so warm,—
> Adventure to my adventure,—
> 
> That, united in our twilit chamber,
> We laughed for contentment, lapped in vision.
> Never the task too hard,
> Never the way too long,
> But you returned, O Adam,
> Joyous to me.
> 
> Now, in a moody night
> I looked upon the stars, wept forlorn,
> Lost within their infinite mocking spaces,
> Their soulless tangle,—wept, and cried aloud
> To save my spirit slipping, slipping away.
> The boy-heart swelled within you.
> You bade me wait a little, then sped
> Out to the solitary hills,
> Down in the dripping pits
> Pondering, and groping and dreaming,
> To measure them, to master them, for me.
> 
> So long, so long I waited,
> Grown cold with barren terror;
> Yet, turned thus upon myself
> My womanhood awoke more fiercely,
> Steeped richer passion in my heart,
> Made me more lovely than a dream,
> Desirable and warm.
> And I danced, dreaming of your return,
> 
> Adventure to match adventure,
> Vision to match your vision;
> 
> Then
> You homeward crept, O Adam,
> Dragged by unconscious habit, like a worm,
> And stumbled upon the threshold empty-eyed.
> Dumbly you sit apart
> Amazed by the cold frame of things
> As one stricken by a mortal inward fear;
> And all my passion spilled upon your lips,
> And all my trembling silence
> Has not restored your boyish mirth,
> Has not reflamed your eyes, melted your heart,
> Given your cosmic space a human feature
> Nor saved me from this modem widowhood.
> 
> EVE
> 
> WHY have you hid yourself, O Eve,
> Among these laughing girls,
> And why are you divided, Womanhood,
> Among these anxious women?
> There is no world for me,
> But only silent hills and empty woods,
> And restless seas and rivers,
> And lights of sun and star
> That bear their barren torches up and down,
> And only seasons, storms and holidays;
> No soul, but only thoughts and moods
> And self-tormenting dreams,
> Until we mate, O Eve,
> And gather all these fragment-worlds and lives
> Into our large and procreant passion.
> 
> GHOSTS
> 
> IF you have never lain
> Against the passion of a poet’s heart
> In his great hour,
> Created by his triumph to a queen
> And known the world beneath you;
> Girl,
> Go straightway to a far, deserted hill
> And cry, with arms outflung,
> That you are dead, not living,—
> Aye, mock the sun
> And call the world a dream;
> Pray fiercely for birth
> With words and gestures such as ghosts employ
> Beneath the grave
> (For you are one with them!),—
> Do so
> And I, whose hour passed on
> Without the mating heart, the comrade arms,
> The poet loneliest in his vision,—I
> Will follow you, O girl,
> And mingle with your bitterest sob
> Silence less sweet.
> 
> EVE’S DAUGHTER
> 
> YOU have tamed me, O
> Eve’s daughter!
> The promise of veiled eyes,
> The passion of newly opened arms,
> Breasts’ opulence at twilight,—
> All the vision I sought to mould of life
> (The man-dream, womanhood),—
> You tenderly seize, you change. Eve’s daughter.
> All womanhood is you. Eve’s daughter,
> And touched by you with something still and far,
> An awe, remote as stars.
> Eyes shine with new promise,
> Arms’ passion creates a new desire, a longing
> To enter life’s unravishable heart
> You, only you can still.
> O, you have tamed me, child,
> Eve’s daughter … and mine.
> 
> LOVE
> 
> THIS is the way, O girl, of love divine
> That men and women, rooted in earth’s soil
> With trees and dogs, ignore:
> My conscious and abundant passion
> For life in God,
> Directed by your unawakened beauty,
> Pours out in ardent words and warm embraces,
> And stirs the soul within you:
> Aye, I give you soul, new life and being
> From my abundance,—
> Wake you in stainless, masterful ecstasy
> From your long earthly sleep;
> And you arise, conscious, grateful, devoted
> (In love as blind hearts say).
> Then, the steep wave spent,
> My head upon your lap, my hands relaxed,
> A great emptiness where I had hailed my soul,
> You, O conscious girl,
> Will know to render me a soul again
> With ardent hands and voice, with joyous will,
> And I shall rise
> Your mate, restored against your need.
> Ah, amid the ruin of all worlds and lives,
> Our being shall not fail.
> Nay,
> We two shall live for ever.
> 
> SOULS
> 
> WOMEN
> Brightness of many limbs and wondering eyes
> A calm still garden: dawn: leaves that slowly
> Yield to sleepy breezes: glimmering fountains
> Painting barbaric colours black and gold
> On peering faces—
> Odours that steep the essence of magic
> Dream of infinite passion to be—
> Women
> Women unwearily keeping their beauty perfect
> Sheltered in shady gardens
> Limbs and breasts and eyes—
> Suddenly
> Crashing forgotten gates in thunderous war-song
> Men, thrust by desire: hands outstretching: enter
> Naked as they.
> 
> THE DREAMER
> 
> GOD the Father in His easy chair pondering the
> great book of Vision
> Lets fall a casual hand the while He broods tremendously the word;
> And on his little stool beside the human child, restless
> for play,
> Takes the slack fingers in his busy grasp,
> Fondles them, tracing the great grave philosophic lines
> and wrinkles
> And rubs his cheek against the palm, kissing it all over
> with a sudden fondness;
> But fallen from his little stool, and crying aloud,
> Pulls at the casual Hand and whimpers for a word, a
> glance,
> All in vain, now and for ever;
> For God the Father is quite lost in the terrible endless
> Vision,
> And from the height whereon He broods sunk in His
> easy chair,
> Only the casual Hand falls down, the slack, forgetful
> fingers,
> Tear-wet or kissed, gently relax, nor close the Book, nor
> lift the child.
> 
> O BRUTES AND DREAMERS!
> 
> COULD it not be
> That God, turning His essence outward
> Upon our world to search the things we know and live
> among
> For some creation corresponding to His being,
> Might see, when ranging these stars and worlds,
> These ponderous, slow, impenetrable shapes,
> Nothing,—nothing?
> In all these forms that stop and prison us
> Only a void wherethrough His glances pass
> Without resulting image?
> Could it not be
> That all our universe to Him is unsubstantial,
> Unreal, inane?
> And, passing from thence (which is nowhere) to us,
> These active, self-impressing souls, their moods and
> states.
> Their terrible energy of good and evil,
> These also make no image on His thought,—
> Not even echo, shadow, memory?
> But, wherever a vision-caught spirit of man
> In self-oblivious loyalty labours on
> This outer world, endows it with his vision,
> Changes its substance, pierces it with moods
> Humanized, aspiring,—there
> God pauses, closelier turns and knows
> (Not in the shaping soul or shapen world
> 
> But in their perfect union),
> An actual thing at last, a correspondence,
> Essence materialized. Himself attained,
> The one reality in space and time?—
> Could that not be, O brutes and dreamers,
> Say!
> 
> REVEILLE
> 
> WHETHER the conscious world,
> Girt round by hate and wrong and terror,
> Desperately defend itself
> As a few brave guards and watchful captains
> Maintain about some lone remote fortress
> A small circle of troubled peace;
> Or whether, ourselves a blind anarchy,
> We vainly pit our selfishness and fear
> Against a whole outer universe of law,
> Admitting across the frontier from time to time
> Enough of God’s terrible order and justice
> To burn a small torch amid our inward gloom—
> Ah, when shall we raise our battle-blinded eyes
> Above this endless conflict we wage
> Life by life, for a mere breathing-space and foothold,—
> Heart-knit, soul-united once both East and West
> Thrilled by the energy of a mutual dream,
> Take heed and know if brute or Prophet hold
> True mirror of the attributes of man.
> 
> BEFORE A GAUGUIN
> 
> I ESCAPE from all them that hold me;
> The prisons and the strong stockades of love,
> The deep pits of hatred, let me go.
> I pass on perforce from name to name,
> Assume new qualities and titles
> Sewed and patched on for the day’s need
> From old definitions proudly fitting once
> But soiled, rent and tawdry long since
> Like the heaped regalia of long unfashionable kings.
> I pass on, escape even from myself.
> The swiftest mood and widest embracing thought
> Reel from my eager tortuous progression.
> Nay, the whole world grins
> Knowingly from its mask of good and evil;
> Murderers, in utmost pity, droop before their judge,
> And for the sake of the world’s masquerade
> Dive willingly into the black mud of stigma.
> Otherwise …
> But we are all anarchists
> Stumbling brave and blind through a strange lost region
> Bordering the stupendous ecstasy of life.
> 
> THE HILL
> 
> BE not too certain, life!
> (Or is that power of death, that tedious power
> Which with insistent sneer
> Shatters continually and steeps in slime
> The difficult house I raise,
> The house of consciousness?)—
> Be not too certain of me;
> Deem me not wholly tamed,
> Content with labour ineffectual
> Upon this ruined house of thought;
> Or, turning to things outside,
> Content to hurry a life-time through these streets
> Darkened with vaster ineffectiveness
> Even this sea-flung, sea-swift fog
> Makes so pathetic romance of!
> Count not too long upon my slavehood!
> For as I have often dreamed,
> There is a hill
> Sloping against the dizzy, mystic sky
> Whither, in a moment, I can go.
> There is a hill
> And, pausing for courageous breath
> Pace after pace I’ll climb
> Fleeing from thee, O insufficient life,
> A weak yet conscious Christ
> Bearing his cross of aspiration.
> O, bleeding and gasping on that hill
> 
> To me the vision of things
> Already perfect, consummated, present
> Sudden will rise, and I shall thrill
> With powers you know not of,
> Old tedious world of streets,
> Inevitable failure, self-deception,
> Death-in-life;
> For, writhing as I might be
> In supreme pain, and broken
> Upon the wheel of dissolution,
> Never was so great aspiration void;
> And I shall wholly triumph
> Convinced at last of my own perfect soul,
> And God, the soul’s desire.
> 
> AN OLD PRAYER RESAID
> 
> IS it too much to seek
> Among the living, one friend, one man or woman
> To stand ever between me and the blinding glory of God,
> Mirroring the pure flame to my weak eyes
> And visibly to every humble sense
> Showing the glory?
> Too much to seek?
> Is there not one among the breathing
> Who like the demigods of old
> Mythed to a people’s heart the manner and the way,
> Will draw my thought and passion from itself,
> Make me forget the dangerous mystery, Soul,
> Wholly admiring, wholly intent upon a great nature
> Heroic, tender and calm?
> I drive my prayer along the crowded street
> But meet only a passionate, willful race
> Or here and there a wistful fellow pilgrim;
> And all the while the immanent, pitiless glory of God
> Burdens and breaks my heart.
> 
> IN THE MIRROR
> 
> I HAVE not dared to be alone
> These many months, but passed with all the world,
> A driven ghost, through the black magic
> That we call life; till now
> My mirror suddenly bids me halt.
> Before its dimly lighted depths I pause
> Seeking the image I have known, serene, heroic,
> Dwelling for me within the mysterious glass,
> The I …
> Lost, lost these fearful, hurried, wasted days.
> Now islanded about by silence,
> Poised safe upon the twilight
> Alone, intent, thrice-conscious,
> I dare again, I will … and
> Convinced, convincingly
> Out of the glooms of my disparted self
> It starts, it gathers,
> Shines from the mirror, throbs within my heart;
> And gladder than any warrior-ravished bride
> My song of triumph flows …
> Loving the world and by all things adored.
> 
> PILGRIM
> 
> HOW often, paused before some brilliant name
> Shining by thought or will;
> Or glimpsing a modern chief
> Serenely intent
> Upon his purpose undefinable,—
> How often the shadow of ourselves
> Projects far forward
> Even to touch the titan we admire,
> When, heart-leaping, soul-conscious,
> Thither, we say, the distance to traverse,
> Thither the summit we must still attain.
> Our consciousness is never to itself
> Sufficient and content,
> But ever seems
> A pilgrim thrust upon an endless way,
> Toiling to reach
> Some ultimate shrine of self contained in self.
> The road of life winds upward, upward.
> Gathering all types and natures
> Into one fate,
> Linking the brute to God.
> Never a day
> Opens our eyes and minds to a new sun
> But, thrilled by fear or joy
> Excessively intense
> And startled from ourselves,
> We recognize a way that winds in our own soul,
> 
> Bidding us follow.
> And, looking beyond,
> We find nor end, nor pause, nor quiet,
> Only the road that winds
> Upward and upward,
> And the great compulsion of time and change
> Goads us along the dizzy, myriad days.
> Even death, we feel, but plants new pilgrim feet
> Upon the ancient upward pilgrim way.
> O, disheartened we lean
> Upon our staff of the soul’s self-recognition,
> Pondering the interminable road
> And our own worldly burden.
> The road of life winds upward, upward,
> Strewn with disheartened pilgrims
> Even as you and I.
> 
> Yet, when we will to yield,
> Dismayed by the cold, bleak summits of time,
> And toil no more,
> Leaving perfection to a tougher soul,—
> Content to pause midway
> With broken staff, closed eyes, and folded hands,
> (A little slumber, O narcotic sleep!),—
> Then, opening eyes.
> After the moment’s frantic oblivion,
> Then has the landscape changed
> 
> Unwilled, untoiled-for:
> By no labour, no conscious pilgrimage of self
> Our soul has gained ascent.
> New vistas arise
> With pleasurable moods
> And, for a little, time has lost its dread.
> Then first do we confess a power
> Beyond our conscious purpose
> Filling the universe of men and things;
> Changing, replacing, creating,
> At once here, before us and behind,
> Planning itself a pilgrimage so vast
> That our supreme success would make it fail.
> There is a power
> Not to be sought, but seeking;
> Holding, not to be held;
> Using, not to be employed;
> Ignoring, not mocking personality,
> Shaping the fragments of men and things
> Into an order and perfection not our own.
> Life is the climber-up!
> Life is the pilgrim!
> We but a part of the road he treads upon
> Mounting the cloud-piled hill!
> 
> So, being not the climber but the climbed,
> Not the eternal pilgrim but the way,
> 
> I come to find myself
> Circled by a great confidence and peace.
> No more shall I attempt,
> Blindly afraid, to seize
> His garment or sandal, and stay
> Life, the creative, unstaying;
> No more shall I perplex and madden
> My sensitive thought
> With torment of a sheer, heart-breaking hill;
> Nay, but thankfully aware
> At last, and not too late,
> How rightly fits my nature to the world,
> Learn to live fully, gratefully within
> The perfect here and now
> Which life, from full-brimmed pilgrim’s wallet,
> Tosses each soul in passing
> Upward and upward
> On his mysterious way.
> Pass freely along, O life,
> God’s pilgrim.
> Godspeed! I speed, I release thee!
> 
> PARADOX
> 
> IF I praise death, I feel it by the genius of life:
> If I praise life, I speak it within the ears of death.
> 
> FRAGMENT
> 
> THEIR eyes shine, the rapt boy-gleam that never before
> Poured out the hearts of strong, world-toughened men,—
> Shine, and eagerly turn
> The one way, Wesward,
> So many arrows cleaving a single mark;
> And like the wheat in windy acres tossing
> Their limbs reach forth
> The one way. Westward, all their ardent hands.
> Their ardent hands and feet, one rapid, impetuous rhythm
> Tosses them, swaying, advancing.
> 
> The tapestries of kings superb in battle
> Bore never so rich design,
> Nor rugs that ancient faith made intricate
> Visioning the fervent soul,
> As here
> These dancing feet, the citizenship of earth,
> Responsive, passionate, trace
> Unconsciously along the echoing street.
> 
> I follow.
> I join them.
> Closer, closer I press me,
> Body and spirit
> Urged to the central core
> Of this new passion warming, transforming men.
> 
> Like a strong man bearing proudly aloft his burden
> Our slow, deep-rolling voices
> Carry to heaven a grave and mighty hymn.
> We reach to the world’s edges
> Gathering all men and women,
> Uniting them, creating to one titanic, puissant nature
> The myriad moods and passions of the race.
> Not one avoids or declines us, impetuously receiving
> In deepest heart the mutual rapture
> Bursting at last the swart frontiers
> Of nations, races, hatreds of class and clan.
> No master to lead us.
> No slave to follow;
> We go.
> 
> JANUS
> 
> “THERE!
> Look where the blazing star reels down
> To sudden death in some mean stagnant water—
> That, O friend, is signal to the doom
> Rushing upon a world, a fair, dear world
> That dies almost unmourned. But I
> Die with it in my heart.”
> My silence questioned him.
> “A world,—how shall I tell it?
> So calm, so gracious? Well,
> It lay in little villages apart
> Like secrets in a lover’s memory;
> In villages where family names and deeds
> Survived, creating magnanimity;
> And there were albums, birthdays, festivals;
> And old men grave, old women queenly;
> And night enframed each leisurely day in gold;
> Poets were read and known;
> Slow organs breathed along the shadowy street;
> And manners were thought the better part of men;
> October twilight,—God! it seemed as though
> History itself, and all the human race.
> Had come each autumn to its perfect fruitage.
> Friend, believe me, a fair, dear world lies dead.”
> Moved by his measured sadness
> I rose to score the dead world’s epitaph
> On starkest rock by distant hills unknown
> 
> Where some strayed reveller of future times
> Might chance upon it, and had he a soul,
> Lament the passing of a kingly race.
> But even as I rose I felt about me
> The new world shaping in the ancient wreck;
> That modern vision of life,—city-haste
> But with it city-plenitude; and souls
> Created by the tenser rhythm of crowds;
> No long-maturing names, but freer men;
> And roads hewn out like equatorial belts
> From race to race;
> And cloud-lost aeroplanes; colossal ships;
> Long inter-racial tasks, to unify
> A million labourers in .a single dream;
> New words, terms, thoughts,—the conscious mind
> Reached out atiptoe, startled by its wealth;
> New dreams, of art and peace,
> Advanced by stouter hearts than Caesar’s;
> I felt this world in labour, and I knew
> Not death, but birth, had agonized my soul.
> 
> CREATOR
> 
> GOD looked at me … a woman’s eyes
> Piercing through and beyond
> As there were nothing here,—
> Nothing, where this heart beats, where this mind labours!
> Now the whole daylong I stand
> Lost in this strange nothingness,
> Seeking …
> As a shadow might seek the hand that cast it,
> As an echo might seek its sound,
> … A soul.
> I have been with them who run hither and thither
> Before the antique silence of a church,
> Who kneel at carved dark altars
> And sniff wantonly the heady incense;
> They are like those who guard a forgotten fortress,
> Defending a frontier no hostile army ever will attack,
> Long ago a vigorous Life passed by
> Making terrible battle of being against non-being.
> His memory lingers, and these
> Proud of their strategy and their courage
> Take arms and stand before his fading footprints in due
> array.
> The sun glitters on their new swords and buttons,
> And death, their only foe,
> Steals up and crushes them beneath the burden of their
> unused armour!
> May I cast this lie utterly away,
> 
> Creep out from this entanglement of memory,
> Stamp underfoot the secondhand experience men term soul.
> This is the lie that fetters the world.
> All men save thieves and artists mix its poison w^ith their
> daily bread.
> Soul never existed before,
> Will never exist until I give it being in and by myself.
> There is no type, no model;
> No path worn sleek by generations of dragging knees
> Can lead me to its place.
> It is a chaotic nothingness round about my life,
> Flesh with my hand and eye, thought with my thought;
> It whirls past my finger-tips,
> Hides beyond my swiftest imagination.
> Here in its midst I stand
> Lonely as no mortal ever was before,
> Confronting it, stern, anguished, half-daunted,
> Waiting for the great mood gathering power within me.
> Soon shall I leap forward for the last time,
> Seize the chaos with all my being, godlike,
> Creatively shape it into a perfect spirit, self,
> Or fall back prostrate, knowing myself no better than
> dogs and trees.
> The blatant legions of triumphant hell
> Swing past with reckless booty.
> What faith, what sureness of the daily life!
> God looked at me … .
> 
> CREATION
> 
> NATURE’S truant and scapegoat.
> When I was made the earth held back her flame,
> Mixed no prodigious sulphur with my blood;
> Said: Here’s one must beg or steal his life
> Day by day; I’ll give him nothing mine.
> How long I crouched apart;
> How long I hated the ample-winged birds,
> Envied the sturdy oxen, the swift hound, the painless tree.
> When a man passed I wept, bewildered.
> How long I begged of water its ease,
> Of wind its lightness, of fire its passion.
> I crouched apart from laughter and tears;
> Love I knew not, only I knew that hearts with sulphurous
> blood
> Beat grief and rapture through all lives but mine.
> All else is perfect; nothing am I, I said.
> Then, like a tiny puff of wind on the great sea
> Thickened by obdurate calm,
> A prayer, a feeble spirit-breath sighed within me.
> My hand tightened as for a titan task.
> I gazed at it, bewildered,
> Said: Nay, another suffering begins;
> Now while the burden of storm and season
> And men and things harries the gable of life,
> A cunninger spite steals in beside the hearth
> To pester the feeble flame.
> But, stirring again my thick obdurate calm,
> 
> The prayer increased.
> My breath drew deep, as for the dance of passion.
> What is this? I cried.
> Stronger, stronger it heaved and whirled and swirled.
> I could not crouch, I rose, I stood erect,
> Clenched hand, drew breath.
> Impelled by some new sense not mine, yet mine,
> I leaned swiftly to myself, as to heaped inarticulate clay,
> Moulded the mass to likeness of a dream,
> Fondled the outline to a wondrous curve,
> Gave eyes, ears, breath.
> Hasten, said God: not so in a thousand years
> Shall man create himself.
> Swifter I laboured, singing.
> Then when the shape fairly answered my desire,
> Answered, contained the vision of things perfect,
> I in my feeble days painfully descried,
> I entered in, assumed it as my own.
> Nature’s scapegoat!
> While men and beasts drag the burden of nature,
> Her being, loved for her sake, not their own,
> Her need their passion, her desire their power,
> I stand apart with God
> And brood upon the world behind this dream.
> 
> ECSTASY
> O LAST, unassailable perfect triumph of life,
> The very signal of attained being to avidest men:
> When the bound, slow-groping panting soul
> Abruptly risen to freedom, joyously perceptive
> In presence of some unexpected beautiful thing,
> Cries out to perish.
> To die all through straightway, and nevermore be,—
> Unless, unless, it be the universe itself,
> Container of all space and time,
> Container of that very moment of sweet anguish,
> That very death-life cry and the mad, rent spirit;
> Container of itself—as the opulent spring contains
> One clear, articulate bird—as the unpartisan year
> One season of spring whose pomp, whose passing alike
> Inspires no pride, no awe—returning again.
> How the life-filled spirit of man,
> In its great moment, knows and envies God.
> 
> GOAL
> 
> OVER my head bowed in the passing of the souls first
> rapture
> The day burns calmly and slow pressed in its brazen bowl
> Like incense peacefully consumed by shrines where few
> men worship;
> Odours arising drift and catch at my weary senses,
> Wakening an inner power my will, my courage never
> inspired.
> Without ash the day burns out, without pollution; calmly
> and slow
> The day in its brazen bowl consumes the perfumed ash of
> yesterday.
> Mingled in one strange maddening odour the incense of
> the passing moment
> Restores the old, forgotten years. All time returns, a
> strange perfume.
> To-morrow so shall burn, and its to-morrow. No moment
> wastes and none
> Sinks to ashes in the bowl that calmly burns all life away.
> My will, my name, my love, my soul consume; O God,
> at last I am.
> 
> THE END
>
> — *Divinations and Creation (Used by permission of the curator)*