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Robert Laurence Binyon - The Idols
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An Ode
Luce intellettual, piena d` amore


Prelude
 Lo, the spirit of a pulsing star within a stone
 Born of earth, sprung from night!
 Prisoned with the profound fires of the light
 That lives like all the tongues of eloquence
 Locked in a speech unknown!
 The crystal, cold and hard as innocence,
 Immures the flame; and yet as if it knew
 Raptures or pangs it could not but betray,
 As if the light could feel changes of blood and breath
 And all--but--human quiverings of the sense,
 Throbs of a sudden rose, a frosty blue,
 Shoot thrilling in its ray,
 Like the far longings of the intellect
 Restless in clouding clay.

 Who has confined the Light? Who has held it a slave,
 Sold and bought, bought and sold?
 Who has made of it a mystery to be doled,
 Or trophy, to awe with legendary fire,
 Where regal banners wave?
 And still into the dark it sends Desire.
 In the heart`s darkness it sows cruelties.
 The bright jewel becomes a beacon to the vile,
 A lodestar to corruption, envy`s own:
 Soiled with blood, fought for, clutched at; this world`s prize,
 Captive Authority. Oh, the star is stone
 To all that outward sight,
 Yet still, like truth that none has ever used,
 Lives lost in its own light.

 Troubled I fly. O let me wander again at will
 (Far from cries, far from these
 Hard blindnesses and frozen certainties!)
 Where life proceeds in vastness unaware
 And stirs profound and still:
 Where leafing thoughts at shy touch of the air
 Tremble, and gleams come seeking to be mine,
 Or dart, like suddenly remembered youth,
 Like the ache of love, a light, lost, found, and lost again.
 Surely in the dusk some messenger was there!
 But, haunted in the heart, I thirst, I pine.--
 Oh, how can truth be truth
 Except I taste it close and sweet and sharp
 As an apple to the tooth?


I.1
 On a starr`d, a still mid--night
 Lost I halted, lost I gazed about.
 Great shapes of trees branched black into the sky:
 There was no way but wandered into doubt;
 There was no light
 In the uncertain desert of dim air
 But such as told me of all that was not I,--
 Of powers absorbed, intent, and active without sound,
 That rooted in their unimagined might,
 Over me there ignoring towered and spread.
 Homeless in my humanity, and drowned
 In a dark world, I listened, all aware;
 And that world drew me.
 The shadowy crossing of the boughs above my head
 Enmeshed me as with undecipherable spells:
 The silence laid invisible hands upon my heart,
 And the Night knew me.

 She put not forth her full power, well I knew:
 She only toyed
 With reason, used to sunshine flatteries,
 The praise of happy senses, trusted true,
 And smile of stable Earth`s affirming ease.
 Yet even in this her ante--room I felt,
 Near me, that void
 Without foundation, roof, or bound, or end,
 Where the eyes fast from their food, the heavenly light,
 The untallied senses falter, being denied,
 The mind into itself is pressed, is penned,
 Even memoried glories of experience melt
 Into one mapless, eyeless, elemental Night.
 It was so near
 That like a swimmer toiled in a full--streaming tide
 Drawing him unawares down the unsounded seas,
 My soul sank into fear.

 O for one far beam of the absenting sun!
 O for a voice to assure me, and to release
 Out of this clutching silence! There is none:
 Shadow on shadow, and stillness on stillness
 Enclose me, and fasten round.
 Is this a world which Day never has known?
 A world made only of doubt and dream and dread?
 Is this the interior Night of the dark human soul,
 And the immaterial blackness branching from the ground
 A fearful forest that itself has sown
 Against the stars to tower,--
 Stars that dispense their faint uncertain dole
 Of light, that darkness may the more abound?
 Whither am I come? Where have my wandered feet
 Brought me on circling steps, led by what furtive power?
 Alas! in this dumb gloom wherein my spirit gropes
 Only myself I meet.

 Only myself; but in what strange image
 Encountered and phantasmally surprised!
 This thing of stealth that rises from the shrouds of sleep,
 I know it, I with shuddering guess presage
 An enemy,--the native of the night
 That in me was disguised.
 Hollow--echoing caverns where blind rivers creep
 With soundless motion; ice--cold, sudden breath
 Of climbing cloud, at whose abstracting touch
 The upholding rock seems baseless as the mist;
 Black silence in the eagle`s captive stare
 Empty of all but the baulked lust of death,
 Could not oppress so much.
 Even that which in the dark brain says ``I am,``
 Desperate in its faltering to persist,
 Flickers like an expiring lamp`s last leap of flame
 To leave me I know not where.

 Let not the beautiful world perish and cease!
 My heart cries, freezing in its secret cells.
 Let me not be extinguished in the abyss,
 Losing the blessèd touch and taste of things,
 Earth`s heaven of hues and smells!
 I am so far from worlds where any fountain springs,
 Sunken into this placeless dungeon--dream,
 That holds me without wall, or roof, or door.
 The light is only legend: I begin
 To give away my being like a stream
 Wandering among unshapen shapes, that spin
 A world of unintelligible dread;
 And this world seeks me for its own!
 All is dissolved, nothing has meaning more.
 Each moment heaps an age of time above my head.
 It is the very Mind of Darkness I am in,
 Lost, and alone, alone!


I.2
 The Forests of the Night awaken blind in heat
 Of black stupor; and stirring in its deep retreat,
 I hear the heart of Darkness slowly beat and beat.

 As if Earth, shrouded dense in gloom,
 Shuddered in her guilty womb;
 As if a power from under earth
 Would bring some monstrous spirit to birth;
 As if a spirit ran pursued
 And sobbing through the shadowy wood;
 Ghostly throbs of sound begin
 To circle from the distance in,
 A phantom beating, dulled, remote,
 With madness in its fever--note.

 I know not what about me or what above me oppresses
 The suffocating air; but fear within me guesses
 A peopling of the caverned glooms, miasma--cold recesses.

 Leaves depending still, still,
 Bronzed to blackness, spill
 Dead light from a sinking moon,
 Wholly to be sunken soon,
 Wandering down a desert coast
 At the horizon`s end, a lost
 Eternal exile from the Day,
 Whence she stole a perished ray
 That falls from off those fingered fronds,
 Black as vipers, cold as bronze.

 O is it from my heart or from the darkness round,
 The far reverberation, the dull throb of sound,
 A pulse, a fearful pulse, in air or underground?

 Closer, quicker, through the heat
 Drones, insists, the incessant beat.
 Round in shuddering circle comes
 Beat on frenzied beat of drums,
 Nearer in from every side
 Thudding, madly multiplied,
 To seize the heart and blind the brain
 With a monotone insane.
 Terrible, terrible in continuance,
 It holds me fastened in a trance.

 O for a spirit that is not mine, to bear
 This weight of the unfathomable night!
 O for a spirit of more than mortal might
 To take upon him this my load
 Of infinitely wide world--quivering fear!
 O for a Demon or a God
 In saving presence to appear!

 What is it that my eyes amid the gloom divine
 There in the furtive filterings of the ghast moonshine?
 What bodies sway and cry and to the ground incline?

 The fear that held me falls apart,
 But leaves a horror in my heart.
 Stony, stony, of blank stone,
 Fixt on that secret altar--throne,
 Inhuman human Shape, with hands on knees,
 With remote stare that nothing, nothing sees,
 Yet is a magnet to a thousand eyes,
 A thousand forms that crouch, scenting the scent of blood,
 Beat breasts and writhe before you with ejected cries,--
 Unbrothered beast, abominable God!
 Who made you, and shaped you into more than breath
 Can give a will to? What power drove the hand
 With terror strong as lust, to shape you there
 Immovable as Death,
 And carve the rock of darkness in the mind
 To horrible resemblance of my kind?
 Lost Light, sunken Light!
 From what I am, save me!
 The fever--beat of sound is in my veins.
 I breathe the black, blood--smelling air.
 The ecstasy of fear, the blind throb in the breast,
 I share it, I must share.
 It is not I, I cry;
 Yet it is I.
 These are the powers that crave me;
 This is the full dominion of the Night.

 The victims, ah, the victims shriek and die:
 And on them the eternal Idol stares.
 But they have made him incense of their prayers,
 Voluptuously have knelt before their own
 Black terror, bodied into stone.
 Not the expiring cry
 So lacerates my mind, while without end
 Through ages up the altar--fumes ascend,
 And fading into shadow, from their bodies rent,
 Stream spirits without number to conceive,--
 But this, O victims, this, that you consent,
 That you believe!

 They were all human. My heart falters: how
 That infinite bond refuse?
 Like last reverberations of a bell
 That in their ebb and last expiry tell
 Of stupefying clamour, when it heaved
 And shook its tower to the foundation,--now
 Whispers out of the dark accuse, accuse:
 I have consented, I have believed.


I.3
 There is singing of brooks in the shadow, and high in a stainless
 Solitude of the East
 Ineffable colour ascends like a spirit awaking:
 Slowly Earth is released.
 It is dawn, it is dawn, the light is budding and breaking.

 Earth is released, flowing out from the void of the darkness
 Into body and bloom;
 Flowing out from the nameless immensity, night, where she waited
 Myriad forms to resume,
 Gloriously moulded, as if in her freshness created.

 The lineaments of the hills, serene in their order,
 Arise, and the trees
 With their motionless fountains of foliage, perfect in slumber;
 And by lovely degrees
 The blades of the grass re--appear, minute without number.

 The rounded rock glistens and warms, where the water slips by it,
 Familiar of old.
 The tree stretches up to the air its intimate branches
 Bathing in gold;
 And the dew--dazzle colours in fire the lichen it blanches.

 Each is seen in its beauty of difference, deeply companioned,
 Leaf, root, and the stone,
 And drawn by the light from their dream in earth`s prison, emerging
 Distinct in their own
 Form, from the formless a million natures are urging.

 I see them, I know them, I name them, I share in their being;
 I am not betrayed:
 I feel in my fibre the touch of a spirit that knows me;
 For this was I made;
 In a world of delight and of wonder my senses enclose me.

 Whence come they, the water--brooks? Out of the mountainous darkness,
 Where no life is seen,
 From caverns of night are they come, but because of their springing
 Meadows laugh to be green;
 And hearing the voice of their carol, the children go singing.

 The children go singing, they read in the books of the Light
 Things hidden from the sage.
 Unschooled are their bodies, that run like a ripple and fear not
 Coming of grief and age:
 The sighs of the night, the doubt in the shadow, they hear not.

 Lo, single mid grasses a flower upspringing before me
 In delicate poise
 Takes the light like a kiss from an innocent mouth, as it quivers
 Confiding its joys
 To the air, and my heart from its prison of self it delivers.

 I stand in the dew and the radiance, my shadow behind me,
 Lost out of thought.
 The bright beams ascend, and ascending, from earth they uncover
 The secret they sought.
 Enter me; make me afresh, O Light, my lover!


I.4
 Why are these beams so twined with sweetness and with pain,
 Injury and anger, fear, and all desire,
 Whose purity should stream through pulse and brain
 Not thickened in dull fume or frayed with fire
 But absolute and whole
 Into the central soul
 Disclouded from those lures and all their train,
 Knowing what is and is not; white and bare
 As the bathed body quit of day`s disguise?
 But the only truth is coloured with the secret stain
 Of our mortality, that unaware
 Infects the farthest vision of the eyes
 And region of invisible thought: Vain, vain
 That throbbing search! The Light
 Is more profound, more secret than the Night.

 Who has built an airy mansion for the unresting mind
 To inhabit and rejoicing contemplate,--
 A many--pillared universe, designed
 In order clear, complete and intricate,
 Intelligible wonder, not
 Too vast to hold man`s lot,--
 But he has waked on some malignant morn to find
 The certainty, too certain to be true,
 Distasted, and that palace only a maze
 Wherein he wanders and is still confined,
 The pillars of it fallen, and no clue,
 But through the ruin penetrates a blaze
 Of glory beyond glory and of light behind
 The light: and the strength fails in him; he knows
 Himself lost in a world that overflows.

 Yet no power stills the ache or stops the springing need.
 The dark creative spiritual Desire
 Seizes upon his heart which holds that seed
 And straightway, till the last of breath expire,
 Like tool upon the wheel
 Sharpened the more to feel,
 He counts all else waste,--honour, wealth, a weed:
 The burden of the beauty is too great,
 The eternal mystery in the heart a wound,
 Until his vision in the end be freed,
 Until he has spent his all to incarnate
 An airy spirit upon earthly ground,--
 Forms for a God to dwell in and exceed
 This fading flesh. Alas! from godlike shapes
 Some yet diviner essence still escapes.

 O that the form which once kindled to ecstasy
 The rapt gazer, and freed him, should become
 A cold thing to appraise with leisure`s eye,
 A beauty disinherited and dumb!
 Whither is the spirit flown
 From the forsaken stone
 That seemed our sunken selves to deify?
 O that the thought, the word, which into the heart leapt
 Pregnant with light and troubling even to tears,
 Should fade and wither, should grow old and dry,
 By repetition dulled upon the ears
 Like cheapened courtesies the lips accept,
 And falsehood, custom cares not to deny;
 A scumm`d and stirless pool, a frozen rut,
 A path deserted, a door shut.

 But that the life should be less living than the dead,
 This is the worst; that perfect form and word
 Should perish of perfection, yet be fed
 With incense still, and duteously adored;
 A name prostrate the throng
 The presence moved among
 Unrecognized; neglected and forsaken bled!
 Time`s treachery sleeks and glozes to our use
 The bright eternal bareness: dearer grows
 To mortals what is mortal, comforted
 Mid alteration rather to keep truce
 With the ancestral darkness than oppose
 Too arduous scrutiny: by dreams we are led
 Content: to pleasure us, our truth decays.
 The God departs, the Idol stays.

II.1
 I have heard voices under the early stars
 Where, among hills, the cold roads glimmer white,--
 Voices of shadows passing, each to the other,
 Clear in the airy stillness
 Call their familiar greeting and Good--night.

 Were they not come as guests to a remembered room,
 Those words, surrounded by the befriending silence?
 But words, ah, words--who can tell what they are made of,
 Or how inscrutably shaped to colour and bloom?
 Sharp odours they breathe, and bitter and sweet and strong,
 Born from exultation, endurance, and desire;
 Flying from mind to mind, to bud a thought again,
 Spring, and in endless birth their wizard power prolong.

 There was a voice on a sun--shafted stair
 That sang; I heard it singing:
 The very trees seemed listening to their roots
 Out in the sunshine, and like drops in light
 The words rained on the grasses greenly springing.

 Ah, lovely living words, what have we done to you?
 Each infant thought a soul exulting to be born
 Into a body, a breath breathed from the lips, a word
 Dancing, tingling, pulsing, a body fresh as dew!
 Once in the bonds of use manacled and confined
 How have we made you labour, thinned from beauty and strength,
 Dulled with our dullness, starved to the apathy of a serf,
 Outcast in streets, abandoned foundlings of the mind!

 Yet once, in stillness of night`s stillest hour,
 Words from the page I read
 Rose like a spirit to embrace my spirit.
 Their radiant secret shook me: earth was new;
 And I throbbed, like one wakened from the dead.

 O swift words, words like flames, proud as a victor`s eye,
 Words armed and terrible, storming the heart, sending
 Waves of love, and fear, and accusation over
 Peoples,--kindling, changing! Alas, but can you die,
 Hardened to wither round the thought wherein you grew?
 Become as the blind leading with slow shuffle the blind,
 Heavy like senseless stones the savage kneels before?
 O shamed, O victim words, what have we done to you?


II.2
 The Presses are awake. Under the midnight cloud,
 Mid labyrinthine silence of the spectral streets,
 Sound upon darkness beats,
 A pulse, quivering aloud
 Insanely, as if a fever throbbed in stone,
 As if a demon plied in palpitating gloom
 The hurry of his loom
 To weave that tissue, white for an instant, then
 Populated with words, shadows of thought and act,
 Death, birth, fear, madness, joy, disaster, packed
 Headlong into a medley, a monotone
 Indifferently echoing alike
 Laughter and the moan of men!

 In the avaricious gloom a secret Ear
 Sucks with a whirlpool greed out of the skies
 Words, voiceless words, drawn in from far and near,
 Bubble--blown rumour, whisperings like spies,
 The knife--stab in the night, the fall of thrones,
 Alarm of nations like a beating bell,
 Jubilant feat, and misery grey,
 Caught from all corners of the air pell--mell
 In a voice that no man owns,
 That a multitude of brazen masks shall shout
 To the multitudes of Day.

 The few stars, solitary in heights of night
 Thieved by the cloud, shine and are dimmed again,
 Though none puts out their light.
 So solitary in the heart is pain,
 Solitary the Dream,
 Solitary the Vow, solitary the Deed!
 There is no room for these
 In that invisible cloud, woven of things that seem,
 Sure of accepting softness and the greed
 That it shall cling to and make cheaply wise,--
 An all--uniting web of lies and of half--lies
 And lying silences.

 Into my ear, remote, remote, is blown
 Out of the darkness and across the seas
 Sound of a forest falling, young bodies of trees
 One by one falling prone,
 To be tamed to a helpless tissue, and to feed
 The insatiate Presses` need.
 Oh, did they spring to scent the blue silence of air
 And sway slow to the wind, launching the light--winged birds?
 Ghosts only are there,
 The ghosts of trees that shoot no fresh leaf any more
 But, drones of darkness, in the midnight bear
 Black myriads of words.

 Invisibly the night thickens with words that glide
 Driven thronging on blind errands, soon to fall
 Into a million minds, and glorified
 To be their momentary oracle,
 Glitter, and then--they are like the innumerable snow
 Chance--timed, indifferent, random, swift and slow
 That falls to a stillness out of whirling flurry;
 And workers heavy--eyed
 That under the chill cloud of morning hurry,
 Muffled against the shiver in the blood,
 Soil it at every stride,
 Till each articulate crystal whiteness is confused,
 And where the moment`s wonder shone is mud,
 Trodden, stale, and used.


II.3
 Hewn and heavy, of granite hewn
 Heavy and hard, the walls ascend
 Bare, without measure to the eye:
 Indifferent to night or noon,
 Over pavement they impend.
 Locked, impassive, huge, the Door
 Stands caverned in the midst: on high,
 Ruled and squared, the lintel stone
 Bears the carven Janitor,
 Justice, blind upon her throne.
 Her no praying hands implore:
 To her bound eyes no eyes plead.
 Reason`s idol, calm she sits,
 Weighing only the gross deed,
 Scrupulous with mind unsoiled
 Not to know the thoughts that bleed
 In the dumb soul, fluttering, beating
 Hither, thither in its cage
 Of ancestral ignorance foiled,
 Rushing blinded into rage
 And its own desire defeating.
 Behind the door, within the wall
 Locked, they sit, the numbered ones,
 Secret from each other, all
 Lost to name, like spectres passed
 From the region of the sun`s
 Changeful glory on young limbs
 Free to dance and free to leap.
 From the acted thought they fast:
 Them a roof of silence dims.
 The midnight stars move over them;
 They move not; but ruled times they keep
 With the shadows on the floor.
 They are mortised in a scheme,
 Where the walls and fastened door,
 Built of words that are become
 Stones, are like their spirits dumb.

 In ripened rustle of the corn
 The wind becomes a flowing flame;
 As swift it curves and slow relents
 The body of a wave is born.
 It passes--whither? No one knows;
 But in the vision that consents
 It is the beauty it became.
 The wind blows and the spirit blows,
 No moment ever yet the same,
 And fresher than a sparkling spring
 The unrepeated beauty flows;
 And in the child that claps his hands
 To see the daisy on the green,
 And in the young man where he stands
 Poised for the naked plunge; and in
 The invisible bursting of the bud,
 The leafing of the bough, that sends
 Lightness like laughter through the blood
 Of dancing girls, its wave is seen;
 It flows and sings and never ends!
 And flowers, trembling heavenly hues
 In a lonely mountain place,
 And chiming water`s liquid curve,
 The torrent`s white, rock--ruffled race
 Freed for splendour of its swerve,
 And clouds that steal the solemn blues
 Of noon, unregioned in their trace,
 Or, ghostly travellers, invade
 The mountains they dissolve in dream;
 And mazes of the stars that fade
 At dawn, still moving, lost in light;--
 All, all the threads of music bind
 Together in the visioned mind:
 Eternity has imaged them.

 O lovely is their secret Law
 Timing all their motions true.
 They know it not, yet they obey
 Without thought and without awe,
 Of that fountain unaware
 Which they spring from and renew,
 Finding out their missioned way,
 Everywhere, oh, everywhere!
 It is wild as a wild rose
 And fearful as the weltering wave.
 It is courage to the brave,
 Wisdom to the eye that knows.
 But we have bound it as with cords,
 We have built it into stone,
 All its motions frozen stark
 Round a hidden human moan.
 We have made it old and dark
 Out of maiming thought and fears,
 And the things our fears forbid,
 Out of self--hurt and of rue.
 We have built it into words,
 And the words are stones! We did
 What we could not help but do,--
 We, the eternal Prisoners.

 Break the word and free the thought!
 Break the thought and free the thing!
 But who in any net has caught
 The wind, or in a sieve the spring?
 As soon shall he dissever these,
 Through which the life--blood single streams
 From germ unknown to fruit unguessed,
 Nourished with wonder and with dreams,
 In its deep essence unpossessed
 And smiling out of mysteries.
 The flower is in the bud, the bud
 Within the seed, beneath the ground.
 But all is flowing of one flood
 That is not seen, that is not bound.

 This palace--prison of the mind
 How in the youthful morn it glows!
 Its windows flame with angel--light,
 Auroral flushes of the rose,
 And all the airs of heaven invite
 With miracle of breathing blue
 And shifting glory of sun and showers
 To ecstasy and song,--and who
 Remembers how therein confined
 In sunken cells are captive powers,
 Powers that a jailer fetters close
 With chains of the invisible hours,
 To one another hardly known
 In furtive glimpse, and each alone?
 O marvel of the world, O bright
 And luminous palace, built to hold
 The light of heaven within its walls
 Precious with glory as of gold,
 Why comes the night, why comes the night,
 When, as about it the sky falls
 Filled with the dark, it seems to stand
 A dark tower in a lonely land!


II.4
 In the wonder of dreams on a wave of the sky buoyed
 My body was the body of a wish, the word of a thought
 Uttered whole from a throb of the heart in a cry`s delight.
 Never bird out of Africa beating a golden void,
 Shifting the coloured regions that Spring has caught,
 Pursued the desire of its being in flight
 Happier: Time an idle ruin gleamed
 Where vision flamed or flowered or streamed.

 Slow, slow the mind gropes back to curb and term
 Of this strange world; to Time that`s used, and all
 The enclosing, age--descended ritual,
 The invisible garment, cobweb--fine and firm,
 Wherein the limbs move to the ancestral call,
 And hands repeat what dead hands did before,
 And the mind lingers as behind a door.
 The hinted glory of liberty is fled,
 And in its stead
 Is only the shadow of Man`s ancient nurse,
 Dear Custom, at whose knees he learnt the ways
 Of his uncounted tribe, schooled to rehearse
 Cruelty and folly, and, ere he comprehend,
 Make these his virtue, so to earn her praise.

 Massive as mountain to his childish gaze
 Is that unmoved authority of power,
 His fibre trembles to offend.
 And slow as the Earth is in her seasons, she
 Befriends and punishes like sun and shower;
 Well--used to tears and the heart--broken hour,
 Smoulder of mutiny and anger, tamed in the end,
 Indulgent of a laughter brief as those,
 For all come back at night--fall to her knee,
 When the old shadows descend.
 With mutter upon her lips, with eyes half blind,
 Buried mysteries she knows.
 With dark fountains of ignorance in her mind,
 How wise she seems, amassed in ancient certitudes!
 Her silences, how comfortably kind!
 The human slowly grows
 Inhuman, where she broods.
 And if a solitary spirit would wrest
 His wrongs away from what so closely cleaves,
 And break into the world that he believes,
 Betrayers from within, crying Traitor! seek
 To pull him back, securely weak,
 In passiveness: he sucked it from her breast.

 O away and away and afar from this alien home,
 Where spirits are woven together in words of fear,
 Released into innocence let me have being and breath!
 But is it alone by mercy of dreams that I roam,
 Liberated to joy`s essential sphere,
 In an antechamber of birth or beyond death?
 All flushes around me and then dissolves away.
 The heavenly dawning closes gray.


II.5
 Once, only once, never again, never,
 The idle curve my hand traces in air,
 The first flush on the cloud, lost in the morning`s height,
 Meeting of the eyes and tremble of delight,
 Before the heart is aware
 Gone! to return, never again, never!

 Futurity flows toward me, all things come
 Smooth--flowing, and ere this pulse beat they are bound
 In fixity that no repenting power can free;
 They are with Egypt and with Nineveh,
 Cold as a grave in the ground;
 And still, undated, all things toward me come.

 Why is all strange? Why do I not grow used?
 The ripple upon the stream that nothing stays,
 The bough above, in glory of warm light waving slow,
 Trouble me, enchant me, as with the stream I flow
 Lost into the endless days.
 Why is all strange? Why do I not grow used?

 Eternity! Where heard I that still word?
 Like one that, moving through a foreign street,
 Has felt upon him bent from far some earnest look,
 Yet sees not whence, and feigns that he mistook,
 I marvel at my own heart--beat.
 Eternity! how learnt I that far word?


III.1

 Not for pity and pardon, for Judgment now I cry!
 To be seen, that I may see; known, that I may know,
 For this I cry.
 Dwelling among dear images dream--created,
 Flattered or daunted by a deluding mirror
 That is not I,--
 O to taste the light as my body tastes the air,
 Let fall defence, cast off the obstinately excusing
 Pleas, and myself be my only vindication!
 Nothing but this in the end can satisfy.

 Why does this desire pursue me and so possess me?
 Is not breath sweet, and the young smile of the morning?
 Yet inly to know
 That I am bound in a net of minutes and of hours,
 Inheriting bondages of habit, and fear,
 And ancient woe;
 To be rooted so deep in lost ages of time,
 With tendrils of hope and want and frail repining,
 The ignorant accomplice of purposes abhorred:
 This thought is my companion and my foe.

 Sometimes to fly to some remoteness of the air
 To perceive with different senses, a new body,
 I pine and ache;
 As on this bed of self, whereon I am bound, I toss
 Day and night, filled with ineffectual longing
 That bond to break.
 O yet, enslaved, I know not to what I am enslaved:
 Only this husk and shard of what I am, this fond
 Dreamer of dreams, eater and drinker of untruth,
 This only I know, and this cannot forsake.

 Wondrous glories crowd into the eye`s treasure--chamber,
 Wondrous harmonies linger in the ear`s recesses,
 Stored for delight.
 But beyond the ear`s compass what modulations fine
 Tremble, and what marvels unapprehended sparkle
 Beyond the sight!
 Oh, and beyond the mind`s capacity of conceiving,
 Much less of measuring, amplitudes of wisdom,
 Fit to sustain eternal serenity and courage,
 While we go clouded, faltering, finite!

 Were I stationed in the sun, to behold the worlds
 Not nightly in declension but in dance triumphant
 And timeless rolled;
 Had I the vision, closed to the eye`s horizon,
 Labyrinths of an unimagined minuteness
 In the mind to hold;
 Could I attain the greatest and assume the least,
 Shrink to be a blade of the innumerable grass,
 Soar eagle--winged amid the altitudes of noontide,
 Then might I measure, and what I am behold.

 But rained over with riches of hours and moments,
 Meshing me as a lily, thick with honeyed light,
 The drunken bee;
 Intoxicated with wild sweetnesses of sense,
 Fullness of the opened heart, glory of earth, and beauty
 Enamouring me,--
 Roofed in a den I am, a poor captive rather
 Who sits in fetters eyeing the barred, the precious blue,
 Where high in the envied air a cloud lingers in light
 And wings fly whither they desire to be.

 Lying in the night I hear from graves unnumbered,
 Under stars that have seen all history passing,
 The indignant cry:
 Must we only in effigy and phantom be remembered,
 Malignly obscured or mocked with gilded pretences,
 Wherefrom we fly?
 Will none unwind these cerements? none lift up from us
 This load of false praise and false fortune`s betrayal?
 Let us be known in nakedness of our nature!
 Deliver us from dominion of the lie!

 As if they wandered in deserts and groped in caves,
 I hear the exclaiming of disenchanted spirits
 In bitter lament
 Beholding the barren things for which they wasted
 The world, the pitiable causes whereon their breath
 And blood were spent!
 Was this the Light, this little candle at noon? This loathed
 Cruelty, the righteousness for which they thirsted,
 Sacrificing to invisible idols of the mind?
 They see. But who hears? This world is content.

 Perfect Experience! Is not the mind worthy
 This, when for glimpses only and shining fragments
 The martyrs bled?
 Majesty and splendour of overcoming vision,
 Vision all--judging, certain and universal,
 Not this I dread,
 But to remain banished into a parcelled being,
 Eternized in all these faculties of error!
 Better a perfect oblivion in Earth`s vastness,
 By that eternal ignorance comforted.

 Yet does my heart not cease from its supplication,
 Yet I remember and cannot be satisfied,
 By Time oppressed.
 And, as if summoned and drawn whither I know not,
 Clinging into earth with strong fibres of nature,
 In dark unrest
 I burn like a seed that in burial forgotten
 Pushes its hope up, growing in blind affiance
 Toward the light shining over an unconceived world,
 There to be lost, illumined and released.


III.2
 In my dream there was a Door.
 Dark on my musing path it stood
 Before me, and straightway I knew
 (The certainty ran through my blood)
 That, did I open and pass through,
 I should know all for evermore.
 Those slow hinges, and that weight
 Relenting on them, would unroll
 The hidden map of all my fate
 And all the world and the world`s soul.

 Who has trembled not at doors?
 Motionless, they shake the heart.
 Hope and menace on them hang:
 They are the closed lips` counterpart
 Wherein the sentence is concealed
 For leaping joy or lancing pang.
 Ah, what answer will they yield?
 Will it be barren as the shores
 That endless waves beat, like a knell
 Slowly repeated to Time`s end?
 Or will it be the ineffable
 Still radiance that shall all amend,
 Melting out Time`s ancient stain?
 Will they open on sunrise
 Everlasting, or will they
 Close upon the light again,
 Like eyelids closing over eyes
 That see for the last time the day?
 Is it not by such ancient dread
 Inspired,--the warning doubt of what
 Our prospering spirits has full--fed
 With certainties by hope begot--
 That on his progress proud we raise
 For the returning conqueror
 The arch, the immaterial door,
 So he may pass, amid the blaze
 And loud acclaim at glory`s height,
 Beneath a shadow of the night,
 Where the hinted powers take toll
 Of what is mortal in the soul?

 O Door, like sealed fatal decree,
 Image of death, image of birth,
 Ever uncertain certainty!
 O silence as of silent earth,
 O silence into substance built,
 O night projected into day,
 O still unspoken Yea or Nay,
 O brimming vessel still unspilt,
 O end that meets us on the way!
 What lies behind your blank accost?
 Is it the treasure we have lost
 And laboured wearily to recover?
 Or something that we never knew,--
 Another mind with other measures
 Laughing to scorn our pangs and pleasures?
 Is it at last the only true,
 The unknown Love, the unknown Lover?

 With all my soul at earnest gaze
 Fixed upon that silent Door,
 I stretched my hand the latch to raise,
 I lifted up my hand, and then
 Some power forbade me, and I forbore.

 In the changes of my dream
 I was borne to a far place
 Empty and wide, and all a--gleam
 With sunlit quivering of the grass.
 There rose before me, vast and blind,
 A towered prison, walled and old;
 It seemed a prison--house so great
 It could have held all human--kind.
 In the midst there was a gate.
 And as I dreamed my dream, behold
 I saw the prisoners released.
 The gates rolled back; and forth they came
 Stumbling in the light that smote
 Full on them from the dazzling East.
 Like knives it stabbed them; like a flame
 It seared them; with their hands they hid
 Their faces, or as if by rote
 Stretched out vain arms, to touch and feel
 Familiar walls closing around;
 Then, lacking fetters, halted lame
 Waiting to do what they were bid.
 Their helpless motions made as though
 They would run back, or fall, or kneel
 Or hide themselves beneath the ground.
 This way and that they looked to go.
 O never may I see again
 Such looks of blank and empty pain!
 They were looks of men betrayed
 And of their naked souls afraid.
 But some there were, a few, that stood
 And stretched their arms up to the sun,
 As if the light streamed through their blood,
 As if their breath was now begun;
 As if their spirits till then had slept,
 As if they never yet had known
 The world of life that was their own.
 These it was, not those, who wept.
 Was it for pity of all that sad
 Throng, or the extreme joy they had?
 O that on earth I could have sight
 Of those faces, and that light!


III.3
 I am laid within a place of summer leaves.
 Solid boles mount through foliage out of sight.
 No shadow lacks some intimacy of light,
 No penetrating radiance but receives
 Shadowy immersion. Dream
 Is on me, is on the hushed, the thronged and drowsing glow.
 Even the thoughts emerging from the mind,
 Like voices in a sleeping city, seem
 Reproved. This is old Earth, so old and kind,
 That she is lenient in her overflow
 To all things human. Why, why tease the sense
 For a hope to a fear unmated?
 Why rend the rich seam of experience?
 Why toss upon thoughts frustrated?

 Each way appears a closing avenue,
 Leading, among warm scents, I know not where.
 But Whither is to the idle mind no care,
 For always there is fragrance of some clue
 Neglected, that might guide
 As in a trance the veiled soul to its unknown peace:
 Peace such as comes like lips laid upon lips,
 A brimmed oblivion of all else beside;
 Like anchorage to tempest--blinded ships
 When the thwart waves resign, and the winds cease.
 Earth with warm arms embrace me, and let me feel,
 Feel only, a wonder working,
 Until the tender and still sense reveal
 The secrets round me lurking.

 Now might you come back, old divinities,
 Earth--born, from cradling green and lost recess,
 Serene in your unclouded nakedness,
 To enrich the mirror of my musing eyes.
 As fruit on the rough bough
 Globes itself, the last golden glory of the tree,
 Smooth from wild earth the human image rose;
 And what diviner shape should hear the vow
 Of mortals, or what else their secret knows,
Source
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