Prayer of the Soul on entering Human Life
EN SOPH, uncomprehended in the thought | |
| Of man or angel, having all that is | |
| In one eternity of Being brought | |
| Into a moment: yet with purposes, | |
| Whence emanate those lower worlds of Time, | 5 |
| And Force, and Form, where man, with one wing caught | |
| In clogging earth, angels in freer clime, | |
| From partial blindness into partial sight, | |
| Strive, yearn, and, with an inward hope sublime, | |
| Rise ever; or, mastered by down-dragging might, | 10 |
| And groping weakly with an ill-trimmed light, | |
| Sink. quenched; | |
| En Soph was manifest, as dim | |
| And awful as upon Egyptian throne | |
| Osiris sits; but splendour covered Him; | 15 |
| And circles of the Sephiroth tenfold, | |
| Vast and mysterious, intervening rolled. | |
| |
| And lo! from all the outward turning zones, | |
| Before Him came the endless stream of souls | |
| Unborn, whose destiny is to descend | 20 |
| And enter by the lowest gate of being. | |
| And each one coming, saw, on written scrolls | |
| And semblances that he might comprehend, | |
| The things of Life and Death and Fate—which seeing, | |
| Each little soul, as quivering like a flame | 25 |
| It paled before that splendour, stood and prayed | |
| A piteous, fervent prayer against the shame | |
| And ill of living, and would so have stayed | |
| A flame-like emanation as before, | |
| Unsullied and untried. Then, as he ceased | 30 |
| The tremulous supplication, full of sore | |
| Foreboding agony to be released | |
| From going on the doubtful pilgrimage | |
| Of earthly hope and sorrow, for reply | |
| A mighty angel touched his sight, to close, | 35 |
| Or nearly close, his spiritual eye, | |
| So he should look on luminous things like those | |
| No more till he had learned to live and die. | |
| |
| And when the pure bright flame, my soul, at last | |
| Passed there in turn, it flickered like them all; | 40 |
| But oh! with some surpassing sad forecast | |
| Of more than common pains that should befall | |
| The man whose all too human heart has bled | |
| With so much love and anguish until now. | |
| And has not broken yet, and is not dead, | 45 |
| And shaken as a leaf in autumn late, | |
| Tormented by the wind, my soul somehow | |
| Found speech and prayed like this against my Fate: | |
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| The pure flame pent within the fragile form | |
| Will writhe with inward torments; blind desires, | 50 |
| Seizing, will whirl me in their frenzied storm, | |
| Clutching at shreds of heaven and phantom fires. | |
| A voice, in broken ecstasies of song, | |
| Awakening mortal ears with its high pain, | |
| Will leave an echoing agony along | 55 |
| The stony ways and o’er the sunless plain, | |
| While men stand listening in a silent throng. | |
| |
| And all the silences of life and death, | |
| Like doors closed on the thing my spirit seeks, | |
| Importuning each in turn, will freeze the breath | 60 |
| Upon my lips, appal the voice that speaks; | |
| Until the silence of a human heart | |
| At length, when I have wept there all my tears, | |
| Poured out my passion, given my stainless part | |
| Of heaven to hear what maybe no man hears, | 65 |
| Will work a woe that never can depart. | |
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| Oh, let me not be parted from the light, | |
| Oh, send me not to where the outer stars | |
| Tread their uncertain orbits, growing less bright, | |
| Cycle by cycle; where, through narrowing bars, | 70 |
| The soul looks up and scarcely sees the throne | |
| It fell from; where the stretched-out Hand that guides | |
| On to the end, in that dull slackening zone | |
| Reaches but feebly; and where man abides, | |
| And finds out heaven with his heart alone. | 75 |
| I fear to live the life that shall be mine | |
| Down in the half lights of that wandering world, | |
| Mid ruined angels’ souls that cease to shine, | |
| Where fragments of the broken stars are hurled, | |
| Quenched to the ultimate dark. Shall I believe, | 80 |
| Remembering, as of some exalted dream, | |
| The life of flame, the splendour that I leave? | |
| For, between life and death, shall it not seem | |
| The fond false hope my shuddering soul would weave?… | |
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| So prayed I, feeling even as I prayed | 85 |
| Torments and fever of a strange unrest | |
| Take hold upon my spirit, fain to have stayed | |
| In the eternal calm, and ne’er essayed | |
| The perilous strife, the all too bitter test | |
| Of earthly sorrows, fearing—and ah! too well— | 90 |
| To be quite ruined in some grief below, | |
| And ne’er regain the heaven from which I fell. | |
| But then the angel smote my sight—’twas so | |
| I woke into this world of love and woe. | |
