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Robert Laurence Binyon - The Idols
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 Though past the ache of our mortality?
 Shall I not sacrifice unrest and fume
 On an altar here secluded?
 Let the vext mind re--open like a bloom
 Upon which the light has brooded?

 Delay me from the sight that only sees!--
 Frost of a dawn disclosing the world bare,
 And, stript of splendour, all things as they are,
 When stiffened grasses and stark branches freeze
 And the mind shrinks apart
 With all the living colours famished out of it.
 O kindly mediation, interpose
 Images of those forms that hold the heart,
 Warm, wondrous forms whereinto the world flows
 To bloom and to perfect them: O admit
 Certitude to obscurity awhile,
 As cloud in the light suspended.
 Gracious is Earth; not far her secret smile:
 And here is the soul befriended.

 Only such sorrow as lingered in the gaze
 Of Proserpine, returning from the dark,
 Such tears as filled her, listening to the lark
 And looking on the flower that springs and sways,--
 All humanized for her
 As even the shadows were, when she was throned in night;
 No more than these, to enhance the glowing day
 Shall enter where the green leaves are astir!
 Shall I not be sufficed, and charm away
 Perplexities to soft and shadowy flight?
 Shall I not now--O whence is this breath come
 Of Time in a stealing chillness?
 Why cries my heart out? Why are all things dumb,
 And strange, strange the stillness?


III.4
 Whisper to me, whisper! I have listened and have not heard.
 Whisper to me, you leaves; have you not more to say?
 Now at the ebb of the low evening ray
 Whisper some word left over from the day,
 The one word, the lost word!--
 So I cried; and then was stilled.
 For suddenly, unsought, unwilled,
 I knew not how, I knew not whence,
 There came a lightening of the sense;
 I found an answer from within,
 That made me to the stars akin;
 My pulse obeyed the lovely Law;
 With ears I heard, with eyes I saw;
 And one leaf, veined with green, indwelling light
 Seemed the world`s secret and absorbed me quite.
 Eternity through a moment
 Sparkled; I could not turn away my sight.

 What thing, long contemplated, alters not
 Its seeming substance, as the deepening mind
 By contemplation passes out of thought,
 Immenser worlds to find?
 The Mother as she clasps her infant boy,
 Bent over him with the deep looks of joy,
 Becomes her own hope; oh, she stays
 Not with the idol of her gaze,
 But she is gone beyond her farthest prayer
 And Time`s last injury, to meet him there.
 All that distracts him from her bosom now,--
 White butterflies, a waving bough--
 Presages the usurping world: she grows
 To something more than fear and hope forebode,
 Wide as the sky. He goes
 Out of her heart`s possession;
 Yet in her arms he lies, that stranger and that God.

 Free on its wings the mind can hover, worlds away,
 To where the vast Atlantic stream
 Dwindles to a watery gleam,
 And like a star in bright noonday
 The body`s home is lost.
 The mind can tell me that these mossed
 Gray boulders in green shadow deep,
 Appearing sunk and socketed in sleep,
 Beneath their image of repose
 Are all a dizzy motion whirled,
 A streaming dust our sight so gross
 Confuses to a solid world.
 Never mortal eye has seen
 Those minim motes, no thought can lodge between,
 So restless in their secret fever
 They dance invisibly for ever.
 Alone the soul has knowledge of release;
 Only in the soul is stillness,
 Poised to receive a universe in peace.

 Only in the soul is stillness! I remember an hour,--
 It was the May--month and wild throats were singing
 From bough to bough that breathed in bud and flower,
 And the full grass was springing
 Beneath an old gray tower--
 I remember those blue, scented airs,
 And how I came at unawares
 Beside the daisied border of a mead
 Upon a pool so magically clear,
 It made each coloured pebble and furry weed
 And star--grained sand within its depth appear
 Like things of Paradise, unearthly bright;--
 No surface seemed to intervene
 Fairy floor and eye between,
 Save for a traceless quivering of the light,
 Gentle as breathing sleep, where stole
 Up from its pregnant darkness
 The living spring, as private as the soul.

 Love from its inward well, a secret wonder, arising
 Clear as the trembling water--spring,
 A spirit that knows not anything,
 Simple in the world and nought despising,
 Changes all it meets,--the stone
 Becomes a gem, the weed a rose;
 But oh, within itself it grows
 By all it touches, all it makes its own,
 Vast and multitudinous, a Power
 To act, to kindle and to dower
 In pain`s and fear`s despite
 With glory of unending light.
 O fountain in my heart, I feel you now
 Full and resistless, so I nothing scorn.
 How could I lose you, how
 Ever for an hour forget you?
 This is the world whereinto I was born.

 Why did I tread long roads, seeking, seeking in vain?
 Why did I make lament of the dark night?
 Why crouch with images of old affright?
 Eternal Moment, hold me again, again,
 Bathe me in wells of light!
 It is now and it is here
 The something beyond all things dear,
 The miracle that has no name!
 When I am not, then I am:
 Having nothing, I have all.
 It was my hands that built my prison--wall,
 It was my thought that did my thought confine,
 It was my heart refrained my heart from love.
 Now I am stilled as in a gaze divine,
 Now I flow upward from my secret well,
 Now I behold what spirit I am of.
 The Body is the Word; nothing divides
 This blood and breath from thought ineffable.
 Hold me, Eternal Moment!
 The Idols fade: the God abides.
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