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I I LIE upon my bed and hear and see. | |
| The moon is rising through the glistening trees; | |
| And momently a great and sombre breeze, | |
| With a vast voice returning fitfully, | |
| Comes like a deep-toned grief, and stirs in me, | 5 |
| Somehow, by some inexplicable art, | |
| A sense of my soul’s strangeness, and its part | |
| In the dark march of human destiny. | |
| What am I then, and what are they that pass | |
| Yonder, and love and laugh, and mourn and weep? | 10 |
| What shall they know of me, or I, alas! | |
| Of them? Little. At times, as if from sleep, | |
| We waken to this yearning passionate mood, | |
| And tremble at our spiritual solitude. | |
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II Nay, never once to feel we are alone, | 15 |
| While the great human heart around us lies: | |
| To make the smile on other lips our own, | |
| To live upon the light in other eyes: | |
| To breathe without a doubt the limpid air | |
| Of that most perfect love that knows no pain: | 20 |
| To say ‘I love you’ only, and not care | |
| Whether the love come back to us again, | |
| Divinest self-forgetfulness, at first | |
| A task, and then a tonic, then a need; | |
| To greet with open hands the best and worst, | 25 |
| And only for another’s wounds to bleed: | |
| This is to see the beauty that God meant, | |
| Wrapped round with life, ineffably content. | |
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III There is a beauty at the goal of life, | |
| A beauty growing since the world began, | 30 |
| Through every age and race, through lapse and strife | |
| Till the great human soul complete her span. | |
| Beneath the waves of storm that lash and burn, | |
| The currents of blind passion that appal, | |
| To listen and keep watch till we discern | 35 |
| The tide of sovereign truth that guides it all; | |
| So to address our spirits to the height, | |
| And so attune them to the valiant whole, | |
| That the great light be clearer for our light, | |
| And the great soul the stronger for our soul: | 40 |
| To have done this is to have lived, though fame | |
| Remember us with no familiar name. | |
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