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Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Human Life’s Mystery
Work rating: Medium

We sow the glebe, we reap the corn,  
  We build the house where we may rest,  
And then, at moments, suddenly,  
We look up to the great wide sky,  
Inquiring wherefore we were born…          
  For earnest or for jest?  
  
The senses folding thick and dark  
  About the stifled soul within,  
We guess diviner things beyond,  
And yearn to them with yearning fond;         
We strike out blindly to a mark  
  Believed in, but not seen.  
  
We vibrate to the pant and thrill  
  Wherewith Eternity has curled  
In serpent-twine about God’s seat;         
While, freshening upward to His feet,  
In gradual growth His full-leaved will  
  Expands from world to world.  
  
And, in the tumult and excess  
  Of act and passion under sun,         
We sometimes hear—oh, soft and far,  
As silver star did touch with star,  
The kiss of Peace and Righteousness  
  Through all things that are done.  
  
God keeps His holy mysteries         
  Just on the outside of man’s dream;  
In diapason slow, we think  
To hear their pinions rise and sink,  
While they float pure beneath His eyes,  
  Like swans adown a stream.         
  
Abstractions, are they, from the forms  
  Of His great beauty?—exaltations  
From His great glory?—strong previsions  
Of what we shall be?—intuitions  
Of what we are—in calms and storms,         
  Beyond our peace and passions?  
  
Things nameless! which, in passing so,  
  Do stroke us with a subtle grace.  
We say, ‘Who passes?’—they are dumb.  
We cannot see them go or come:         
Their touches fall soft, cold, as snow  
  Upon a blind man’s face.  
  
Yet, touching so, they draw above  
  Our common thoughts to Heaven’s unknown,  
Our daily joy and pain advance         
To a divine significance,  
Our human love—O mortal love,  
  That light is not its own!  
  
And sometimes horror chills our blood  
  To be so near such mystic Things,         
And we wrap round us for defence  
Our purple manners, moods of sense—  
As angels from the face of God  
  Stand hidden in their wings.  
  
And sometimes through life’s heavy swound         
  We grope for them!—with strangled breath  
We stretch our hands abroad and try  
To reach them in our agony,—  
And widen, so, the broad life-wound  
  Which soon is large enough for death.
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