Classic Poem

So they would leave him there to die alone.
Why trouble more? All they could do was done;
Nothing but senseless breathing now remained
Of what the man had been. If death disdained
To notice his surrender, why should they,
Who never noticed yet the humble way
He had of living, dawdle to attend
Upon his humble dying to its end?
The unregarded serviceable man
Was finisht; any common coal that can
No longer heat the furnace was like him:
A cinder haunted by a twittering, dim,
Forsaking mutter of small, plucking flame.
And how long might it be, before there came
Negligent death contemptuously to bless
This lingering stir of mortal wretchedness
With one resolving touch, and on him cast
Mercy of cold and quietude at last?
The unregarded man had served his turn;
Some flickering round the cinder still might burn,
But 'twas a life dismisst: surely alone
He could be left to die.
When they were gone
Death came; but not in manner as they thought.
Suddenly he was awake and staring, wrought
Out of his lethargy to expect amazing
Presences there, by summons of a blazing
White and unspeakable astonishment,
That with a shatter like the lightning rent
The drowsy darkness of his dying mind.
His kindled spirit gazed abroad, to find
His cell a miracle: the magnificence
Of tawny fire crimson'd round him, whence
Gleam of delicious green played among blue,
Like heavenly flashes globed in sunlit dew;
And the air chimed, and changing fragrances
Were coolly fanned about him, as a breeze
Made by a pulse of great invisible wings
Drove spirits of flowers in sweet squanderings,
Then those he expected came: and first the Queen
Of Heaven, in all the joyful light of green
Moving that ever glowed in grass or glanced
From falling water, and every blue entranced
In summer bliss of deep seas, and the height
Of air from April noon to June midnight.
So in her paradise she came, and shed
The colour of its climate round his bed.
But fire, and mighty fire, attended her,
Three tranquil majesties of fire; and where
Their golden pacing trod, there was no ground,
But gulf; for downward without end or bound
Vacancy open'd underneath their station,
And darkness of the world's annihilation
There burned more blinding than their white-hot wings.
Thus on the empty vanishing of things
The angels stood, Mary, obediences,
In fiery rank behind her loveliness;
Composed and patient their immortal zeal:
Their faces splendour as of molten steel;
Brightness in folds that thrill'd like scarlet heat
In silver, falling to their golden feet;
And in the steadfast flaming of their wings
A mounting ripple of fierce quiverings
Sparkling terribly—the infinite ascending
Of Fire unbeginning and unending,
Whereof their persons were the shapely flames.

In passion the man cried, as one who claims
Rescue with agony of all his strength,
‘Mother of God, may I not die at length?’
Whether it music were he could not tell
That answered him, or an insensible
Piercing of ravishment into his brain;
But thus the meaning spoke: ‘Now for thy pain
Have thy reward! I bring electuaries,
Made of such honey and such herbs that thrice,
Tasting of these, into delight extreme
Thou shalt be changed as ever heart could dream:
And they shall make it well with thee after all.’
Askance, for fear the mere glimpse should appal
His seeing to a blank, beyond the bound
Of gleam delectable that sphered him round,
He eyed those glittering statures where they stood
Quietly ardent; and with a blench he could
See there were caskets in their dazzling hands.
But instantly they knew their Queen's commands;
And the first splendour for her ministry,
Bearing his casket of electuary,
Strode forth, making his way the yawn'd abyss
Beneath him; and as he near'd the bliss
The man lay in, the paradise of hues
That Mary loved him with, the sheltering blues
Mingled with sweet surprise of green, began
To glare a burning amber, and there ran
Through the translucency of azure shade
Reddening curls of lustre, and a blade
Of whitening vehemence: till the man sealed his sight
Against the full severe angelic light.

His service done, and Mary with his first
Of sacred food that poor heart having nurst,
Back to his place the stately angel went
To shine beside his brothers there; content,
As when his Queen her miracle began,
To wait upon her dealing with this man.

‘Take now thy first delight!’
The signs of it
Were these: but the joy was an infinite
Exceeding its occasions, even these.
For stript from his life were labour and disease
Like unclean wrapping, and the shame to be
Indecent servitude to malady.
As if his flesh were all new exquisite sense
Assuming a divine experience,
Health was the thing he knew, health quick and beating.
Fine as a mind strange radiant beauty greeting
His subtle body knew his health, and made
Bodily joy of it: joy his sinews said,
Muscles and skin and the hairs upon his skin,
Bones and the secret pith of the bones within,
Were intellectual speech of joy, and each
Marvelling distinctly in joyous speech
Of mere delighted faculty, aware
Of health and the beauty of health. And long time there,
Receiving each elate particular glee
Of his brave body in serene harmony,
And passionately still, he lay intense,
Not to disturb the lucid affluence
Of health along the nerves of his delight:
Collected so in this, that even of sight
His will was jealous, and kept closed his eyes.
But slowly out to ampler boundaries
Rejoicing knowledge well'd its way; and soon
He knew where he was lying: and high noon
Above, and under him the crisp and spring
Of sheep-bit turf, and round him whispering
Short mountain grass to gentle mountain airs
He knew. Untouchable by men's affairs,
The great slope of the mountain held him high
And lonely, offered to sunlight and the sky.
There in his wholesome flesh he took his rest,
His eyes still shut: not seizure now of zest
That fastened every motion, but because
All his desires closed in this heavenly pause
Of rest perfected in the loftiest
Of light and air—his joy now all in rest,
And rest sensibly loving him from the profound
Of his hale body, and out of the vast surround
He felt unseeing of the mountain's day.
In mere simplicity of joy he lay.
No sight: no matter if the wind should teaze
Fleeces of cloud to thin white delicacies
Brusht clean across the blue in curve and stroke
(Loveliest thing to see), he would not look.
No sound: but a continual passing by
Of living silences; save, far or nigh,
Some sound belonging to the silences
Would drop like diamond; and chiefly these:
Down falls of moss small water into wells
Ringing in glassy little syllables;
And quivering glides of cadence shrill and rare
Of curlews whistling down the shining air.

There was the touch of power on his head,
The hand of the goddess; and it was into dread
She roused him, dread of any greater bliss:
‘No more, no more! I want no more than this!
This was enough!’—the anguish of a child.
But Mary's love inexorably smiled;
The second angel came, and at his side
Gloried, and went back blazing to abide
In those devoted wings of throbbing fire,
A white-gold instinct one with her desire;
And with the second of the electuaries,
Fulfilling to the end her promises,
She bid the man: ‘Now take thy next delight!’
Not to be named, but as to think starlight
Enlarging measurelessly circular
In utterance round the bright point of a star,
The tale of joys the man's life now must be.
Nay, such a speed and such perplexity
Of pleasured sense and mind's beatitude,
Not to be named at all, not understood,
No spectre of it fantastically kenn'd,
The joy his spirit came to in the end.
It began sweetly. Fragrance to him stole,
With calling of blithe thrush and oriole,
From cherry orchards that a sauntering breeze
Has visited, when each garth of crowded trees
Is one broad mound of happy blossoming,
White as a cloud from the new heaven of spring
Fallen to lie on green. But sharper scent
Flowed in, dividing this mild air, and went
Spicing the inmost chambers of his brain:
Gorse steept in sunshine, sweetbriar in warm rain,
Kindling of rosemary; and many more
Unknown: to odours that for tenderest core
Of feeling pry'd with searching nicety
Like spirit's smouldering fingers, now must he
Submit his being. Gust in his mouth, that pass
Apples and honey, was power to hold fast
His saturated mind. Sense into sense
Confused; and medley of sweet excellence
Poured into him vibrating, like a tide
Taking a narrow harbour and magnified
In surging of its waters to be there:
Such thronging in, such narrowed turbulence were
The floods of delicate tumult in his mind,
The race in undistinguishable kind
Of the world's rapture into him: the quire
Of colours, and in flights of glistering fire
The music there—amethyst, chrysolite,
And topaz, reeds and strings and horns; and white,
Whiter than moonlight on a sword, a noise
Crystalline bright, like the singing of boys.
Then out of sense he broke; no more by sense
He was aware, but his intelligence
Was now to Be, not know: life, conscious still
In thought and in a body incredible,
Became the beauty sense could only know:
Himself a sound of music—naked so
To all the pulses of rejoicing things,
Fibres of mind alike and bodily strings
Took trembling thence the passion of a sound;
And light he was, out of him glorying round
Issue of living light—the joy adoring
The gift of light become itself outpouring
Of answering light: his thought pure power of light,
And torrents of flashing particles icily bright
His blood, in limbs of flesh like fiery glass.
Not beyond this could vivid substance pass:
As if this speck of being, this body and mind,
In one essential energy combined
The shining din of the whole creature of light
And music of the burning world's delight.
Then something new and nameless: a caress
Blandishing dark and silent all the stress
Of joys intelligible, and through him sending
Blissful dissolution and an ending.
And he was free, thoughtless and bodiless,
Having no form, acknowledging no place:
A speed, a phantom speed for ever fleeing,
Speed the uttermost purity of being,
Speed the imperishable thing in things,
The changeless ghost about which changeably clings
The growth and dying of the world: in speed
Out of the momentary man is freed
Unquenchable phantom purity of being,
The speed beyond the world for ever fleeing.

Once more where Mary and her angels stood,
The panting body and the pelting blood
And the confounded mind came back to be
Of common men the common misery;
But he by mighty memory pursued—
Longing to have it, and fearful lest it should
Descend on him. But more he durst not know:
‘O let me be! Thou wilt not give me, no,
Thou must not give me more! For I have been
Where no more can be borne: O dost thou mean
To kill me with delight?’—The Queen of Heaven
Impassibly smiled: ‘More shall yet be given.
There is a third delight.’—And by him stands
Now the third angel: in the blinding hands
The third electuary.
And heaven was gone;
And in his last delight he lay alone.
The morning found his blessed face, and there
The joy that is too great for life to bear.