Volume Ii Part 38 (2/2)
The fleeting Present we crave, Barter our best to wed, In hope of a cus.h.i.+oned bower, What is it but Future and Past Like wind and tide at a wave!
Idea of the senses, bred For the senses to snap and devour: Thin as the sh.e.l.l of a sound In delivery, withered in light.
Cry we for permanence fast, Permanence hangs by the grave; Sits on the grave green-gra.s.sed, On the roll of the heaved grave-mound.
By Death, as by Life, are we fed: The two are one spring; our bond With the numbers; with whom to unite Here feathers wings for beyond: Only they can waft us in flight.
For they are Reality's flower.
Of them, and the contact with them, Issues Earth's dearest daughter, the firm In footing, the stately of stem; Unshaken though elements lour; A warrior heart unquelled; Mirror of Earth, and guide To the Holies from sense withheld: Reason, man's germinant fruit.
She wrestles with our old worm Self in the narrow and wide: Relentless quencher of lies, With laughter she pierces the brute; And hear we her laughter peal, 'Tis Light in us dancing to scour The loathed recess of his dens; Scatter his monstrous bed, And hound him to harrow and plough.
She is the world's one prize; Our champion, rightfully head; The vessel whose piloted prow, Though Folly froth round, hiss and hoot, Leaves legible print at the keel.
Nor least is the service she does, That service to her may cleanse The well of the Sorrows in us; For a common delight will drain The rank individual fens Of a wound refusing to heal While the old worm slavers its root.
I bowed as a leaf in rain; As a tree when the leaf is shed To winds in the season at wane: And when from my soul I said, May the worm be trampled: smite, Sacred Reality! power Filled me to front it aright.
I had come of my faith's ordeal.
It is not to stand on a tower And see the flat universe reel; Our mortal sublimities drop Like raiment by glisterlings worn, At a sweep of the scythe for the crop.
Wisdom is won of its fight, The combat incessant; and dries To mummywrap perching a height.
It chews the contemplative cud In peril of isolate scorn, Unfed of the onward flood.
Nor view we a different morn If we gaze with the deeper sight, With the deeper thought forewise: The world is the same, seen through; The features of men are the same.
But let their historian new In the language of nakedness write, Rejoice we to know not shame, Not a dread, not a doubt: to have done With the tortures of thought in the throes, Our animal tangle, and grasp Very sap of the vital in this: That from flesh unto spirit man grows Even here on the sod under sun: That she of the wanton's kiss, Broken through with the bite of an asp, Is Mother of simple truth, Relentless quencher of lies; Eternal in thought; discerned In thought mid-ferry between The Life and the Death, which are one, As our breath in and out, joy or teen.
She gives the rich vision to youth, If we will, of her prompting wise; Or men by the lash made lean, Who in harness the mind subserve, Their t.i.tle to read her have earned; Having mastered sensation--insane At a stroke of the terrified nerve; And out of the sensual hive Grown to the flower of brain; To know her a thing alive, Whose aspects mutably swerve, Whose laws immutably reign.
Our sentencer, clother in mist, Her morn bends breast to her noon, Noon to the hour dark-dyed, If we will, of her promptings wise: Her light is our own if we list.
The legends that sweep her aside, Crying loud for an opiate boon, To comfort the human want, From the bosom of magical skies, She smiles on, marking their source: They read her with infant eyes.
Good s.h.i.+ps of morality they, For our crude developing force; Granite the thought to stay, That she is a thing alive To the living, the falling and strewn.
But the Questions, the broods that haunt Sensation insurgent, may drive, The way of the channelling mole, Head in a ground-vault gaunt As your telescope's skeleton moon.
Barren comfort to these will she dole; Dead is her face to their cries.
Intelligence pus.h.i.+ng to taste A lesson from beasts might heed.
They scatter a voice in the waste, Where any dry swish of a reed By grey-gla.s.sy water replies.
'They see not above or below; Farthest are they from my soul,'
Earth whispers: 'they scarce have the thirst, Except to unriddle a rune; And I spin none; only show, Would humanity soar from its worst, Winged above darkness and dole, How flesh unto spirit must grow.
Spirit raves not for a goal.
Shapes in man's likeness hewn Desires not; neither desires The sleep or the glory: it trusts; Uses my gifts, yet aspires; Dreams of a higher than it.
The dream is an atmosphere; A scale still ascending to knit The clear to the loftier Clear.
'Tis Reason herself, tiptoe At the ultimate bound of her wit, On the verges of Night and Day.
But is it a dream of the l.u.s.ts, To my dustiest 'tis decreed; And them that so shuffle astray I touch with no key of gold For the wealth of the secret nook; Though I dote over ripeness at play, Rosiness fondle and feed, Guide it with shepherding crook To my sports and my pastures alway.
The key will shriek in the lock, The door will rustily hinge, Will open on features of mould, To vanish corrupt at a glimpse, And mock as the wild echoes mock, Soulless in mimic, doth Greed Or the pa.s.sion for fruitage tinge That dream, for your parricide imps To wing through the body of Time, Yourselves in slaying him slay.
Much are you shots of your prime, You men of the act and the dream: And please you to fatten a weed That perishes, pledged to decay, 'Tis dearth in your season of need, Down the slopes of the sh.o.r.eward way; - Nigh on the misty stream, Where Ferryman under his hood, With a call to be ready to pay The small coin, whitens red blood.
But the young ethereal seed Shall bring you the bread no buyer Can have for his craving supreme; To my quenchless quick shall speed The soul at her wrestle rude With devil, with angel more dire; With the flesh, with the Fates, enringed.
The dream of the blossom of Good Is your banner of battle unrolled In its waver and current and curve (Choir over choir white-winged, White-bosomed fold within fold): Hopeful of victory most When hard is the task to sustain a.s.saults of the fearful sense At a mind in desolate mood With the Whither, whose echo is Whence; And humanity's clamour, lost, lost; And its clasp of the staves that snap; And evil abroad, as a main Uproarious, bursting its d.y.k.e.
For back do you look, and lo, Forward the harvest of grain! - Numbers in council, awake To love more than things of my lap, Love me; and to let the types break, Men be gra.s.s, rocks rivers, all flow; All save the dream sink alike To the source of my vital in sap: Their battle, their loss, their ache, For my pledge of vitality know.
The dream is the thought in the ghost; The thought sent flying for food; Eyeless, but sprung of an aim Supernal of Reason, to find The great Over-Reason we name Beneficence: mind seeking Mind.
Dream of the blossom of Good, In its waver and current and curve, With the hopes of my offspring enscrolled!
Soon to be seen of a host The flag of the Master I serve!
And life in them doubled on Life, As flame upon flame, to behold, High over Time-tumbled sea, The bliss of his heads.h.i.+p of strife, Him through handmaiden me.'
CHANGE IN RECURRENCE
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