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SOUL UNTO SOUL GLOOMS DARKLING
DISGUISE upon disguise, and then disguise, | |
| Equivocations at the rose’s heart, | |
| Life’s surest pay a poet’s forgeries, | |
| The gossamer gold coinage of our art. | |
| Why hope for truth? Thy very being slips, | 5 |
| Lost from thee, in thy crowd of masking moods. | |
| Why hope for love? Between quick-kissing lips | |
| Is room and stage for all hate’s interludes. | |
| One with thy love thou art!—her eyes, her hair | |
| Known to thy soul, a pure estate of bliss; | 10 |
| But some least motion, look, or changëd air, | |
| And nadir unto zenith nearer is: | |
| Thou mayst control her limbs, but not begin | |
| To know what planet rules the tides within. | |
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DISENCHANTMENT
THE MIGHTY soul that is ambition’s mate, | 15 |
| Tied to the shiftings of a certain star, | |
| Forgets the circle of its mortal state | |
| And what its planetary aspects are, | |
| Till, in conjunctive course and wandering, | |
| Out of its trance and treasure-dream of hope | 20 |
| It wakens, poor illusionary thing, | |
| Wingless, without desire, or deed, or scope. | |
| So have I with imaginations played | |
| Till I have lost life’s sure and single good, | |
| Forgotten friendships, broken vows, and made | 25 |
| My heart a highway for ingratitude, | |
| And, driven to the desert of the sky, | |
| Fear now no thing but immortality. | |
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OR EVER THE EARTH WAS
THAT which shall last for aye can have no birth. | |
| Thou art immortal! therefore thou hast been | 30 |
| A voyage to which the journey of the earth | |
| Is but the shifting of some tawdry scene. | |
| Thou wert not absent when the camp began | |
| Of the great captains of the middle air,— | |
| Sirius and Vega and Aldebaran,— | 35 |
| Myriads, and but the marshals numbered there; | |
| Ay, earlier yet in the God-purposed void, | |
| The dream and desert of oblivion, | |
| Thou livedst,—a thought of one to be employed | |
| Ere yet Time’s garments thou didst take and don: | 40 |
| Guest that no footprint on my threshold leaves,— | |
| Speak, O dim traveller, speak: thy host believes! | |
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THOU LIVEST, O SOUL!
THOU livest, O soul! be sure, though earth be flames, | |
| Though lost be all the paths the planets trod, | |
| Thou hast not aught to do with signs and names, | 45 |
| With Life’s false art or Time’s brief period. | |
| Thy being wast ere yet the heavens were not, | |
| Gently thy breath the waves of ether stirred, | |
| And often hast thou feared and oft forgot, | |
| Yet knew thyself when rang the parent Word. | 50 |
| Long hast thou played at change through chain on chain | |
| Of beings, drooping now in strange descent, | |
| Now adding bloom to bloom and beauty’s gain, | |
| Through subtle growths of glory evident. | |
| O earnest play, thyself apart oft smilest, | 55 |
| One still at heart, that so thyself beguilest. | |
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THEN SHALL WE SEE
THEN shall we see and know the group divine, | |
| The sure immortals of the world’s vague throng, | |
| Ceaseless continuers of the purple line, | |
| The equal-sceptred kings of Deed and Song: | 60 |
| From sire to sire to Orpheus and beyond, | |
| Thrilled with the blood of Hector do they come, | |
| Blazoned on eyes believing, eyes too fond | |
| To fail to follow them unto their home. | |
| Hark! their thin tread outechoes the vast hosts | 65 |
| That shake the valleys of the globe beneath; | |
| Their smile is fire; their eyes (O, subtle ghosts!) | |
| Have waked in me the passion of the Wreath | |
| Without whose round not heaven itself is bliss, | |
| Nor immortality immortal is. | 70 |
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