Classic Poem

IN A NSWER TO A L ETTER

" Regrets and memories these short December days. "
How the words cut and scar themselves
Across my heart!
Dear lady of the great compassion,
All tenderness enmeshed in withes of truth,
Experience harboured for its seeking flame,
Clean burning flame of knowledge beyond thought,
Sword-blade of sheerest beauty,
As the sun sinks wanly,
Branch by branch,
Through the shaking, leafless trees,
How cruelly the twilight comes —
I watch it here,
At this long distance from you,
And rage at impotence
Which can give you no brighter present
Than the flicker of a small red candle
Lit by you long ago.
You wrong yourself dwelling upon the past;
I have it from your lips:
" The past is dead. The future alone has life. "
The past is dead, save in the continuity
Of your most inaccessible loveliness.
Where touch is healing should be no regret
At that which makes it so.
You walked, and walk, incarnate soul
Of human needs and meetings.
This sight of you is the clarity of courage;
Your movements, insistent, compelling, muted trumpets in a still air;
Your voice, ah, dear, that voice, as April rain
Dropping at evening on beds of unsprung tulips.
Where has there ever been a flesh
So rightly framing such a spirit? Tell me.
You cannot.
Words are pebbles,
A gravel-path for you to tread and spurn.
Music is liker to encase your essence,
Yet you escape, for what you really are
Hangs to no swiftest flash of evocation,
But floats in rondure of its perfectness
Out of our sight as possible, impossible,
Peak of a human capability,
Infinite spirit with the lightest shadowing
Of merciful and finite flesh.
Has any one ever so held the cords of life,
Of all our lives, as you?
You dare not say there has and gaze truth in the eye.
Look back, then, if you must,
But see plain fact,
Yourself the soul's wine of a generation,
The whispered bourne of blessings to a world.