Part 15 (2/2)

Now know'st thou, that voice desolate, Mourning ruined joy's estate, Reached thee through a closing gate.

”Go'st thou to Plato?” Ah, girl, no!

It is to Pluto that I go.

ARAB LOVE SONG

The hunched camels of the night[E]

Trouble the bright And silver waters of the moon.

The Maiden of the Morn will soon Through Heaven stray and sing, Star gathering.

Now while the dark about our loves is strewn, Light of my dark, blood of my heart, O come!

And night will catch her breath up, and be dumb.

Leave thy father, leave thy mother And thy brother; Leave the black tents of thy tribe apart!

Am I not thy father and thy brother, And thy mother?

And thou--what needest with thy tribe's black tents Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?

[E] Cloud-shapes often observed by travellers in the East.

THE KINGDOM OF G.o.d

”IN NO STRANGE LAND”

O World Invisible, we view thee, O World intangible, we touch thee, O World unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean, The eagle plunge to find the air-- That we ask of the stars in motion If they have rumour of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving soars!-- The drift of pinions, would we hearken, Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places;-- Turn but a stone, and start a wing!

'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces, That miss the many-splendoured thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder) Cry;--and upon thy so sore loss Shall s.h.i.+ne the traffic of Jacob's ladder Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter, Cry,--clinging Heaven by the hems; And lo, Christ walking on the water, Not of Genesareth, but Thames![F]

[F] This Poem (found among his papers when he died) Francis Thompson might yet have worked upon to remove, here a defective rhyme, there an unexpected elision. But no altered mind would he have brought to its main purport; and the prevision of ”Heaven in Earth and G.o.d in Man,”

pervading his earlier published verse, we find here accented by poignantly local and personal allusions. For in these triumphing stanzas, he held in retrospect those days and nights of human dereliction he spent beside London's River, and in the shadow--but all radiance to him--of Charing Cross.

ENVOY

Go, songs, for ended is our brief, sweet play; Go, children of swift joy and tardy sorrow: And some are sung, and that was yesterday, And some unsung, and that may be to-morrow.

Go forth; and if it be o'er stony way, Old joy can lend what newer grief must borrow: And it was sweet, and that was yesterday, And sweet is sweet, though purchased with sorrow.

Go, songs, and come not back from your far way; And if men ask you why ye smile and sorrow, Tell them ye grieve, for your hearts know To-day, Tell them ye smile, for your eyes know To-morrow.

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