Classic Poem

Yes; I am grown incapable, 'tis true,
To comprehend our fathers what they were;
But so are all men now, and so are you.
This fallen age can neither see nor hear
The heroic strength of thought which laid
Itself to work, and conquest made
From the wide Infinite displayed
To its wide eyes, and in that trade
Of region conquest carried men by tribes
To people its new colonies: upbraid,
Banter not me, my Stoic, for thy gibes
Be double-edged; I mean that thought
Of Homer or of Plato brought
A tract unknown, perhaps unsought,
To man's domains; and men upcaught,
As in a bark, by such thoughts' mightiness,
Were rapt together to the new-found port,
And there got apanage, with no dangerous press
Of numbers, and no famine, for
Such thought was as the harvest store
Of diverse grains for usance, or
Such that each man could bite its core—
Each of a million; yes, that was the age
Of Argonauts; but we who now explore,
We who are writing up the present page
In earth's accounts, can only just
Sharpen a thought which may or must
Touch one soul only to its lust:
No region conquest here, no trust
In each of millions that we speak for him;
Can more than one find room upon the thrust
Point of a pin? We make a splinter trim.
Yes, and we subdivide at best
The realms of old at large possessed;
This truth stings you like all the rest:
We are not great, it is confessed
But there's another danger, solemner;
The thoughts that work within our children's breast,
Shall we miss these? Our children make demur
To thy sad creed, e'en while we see
The old age rotting utterly,
And we in ruin well agree
Yes, there is hope of things to be;
Here, while our legionaries from this hill
Look lazily along the languid sea,
Where the white sails wear windward, waving still
With flagging arms to one another:
What bring the galleys as they row there,—
Ind spice, or Cretan grit; or smother
Isle slaves in the monoxylo there?
Yields earth no more to earth's monopolizer
Than such cheap tribute? Nothing rarer, loather,
Than these mean gains? Sad earth! dost thou despise her,
Ostian-mouthed Rome, so much as this?
Dost thou demand no more? Dost miss
No gifts of earth, but tithe anise,
Still murmuring, Let be what is?
I say, a thought brain-warm and new may grow
In any skull to light up the abyss
Of any nature, till it overflow
(I'll tell you something by and by)
On all the nations, and off-wry
Our business-like supremacy.
For instance, our belief is high;
We are the few for whom the many work:
Suppose it should be bruited in reply,
That nature moves the world in equal cirque;
How wildly should we retrograde
Confounded from the web we've made
O'er all the world with spear and spade!
Again, our creed is now our trade,
That the brute multitude may crouch and pray
At popular altars, little reverence paid
By us, who supervise the popular way,
Aristocrats, philosophers:
Suppose an intimation stirs
That God holds by His worshippers,
The swine are right and wisdom errs:
Then, all are right but thou and I and I,
And there is hooting where a fool occurs;
Brother, behold a possibility!
Changes may come; see how the air
Stirs curls that leave the forehead bare
Of your Domitian, so aware,
While you by hint and dint prepare
His soul with Stoic maxims for the world,
And with Greek dramas and such other fare
For growing upwards rightly trimmed and curled.
You Stoic poet, is it well
To blow the wrong end of the shell,
Concluding with a Stoic spell
All life as in a citadel,
Half active, and half theoretic; so,
Just as the father of your porch did tell?
At least you rightly keep your creed, to go
Retracing with poetic skill
The springs Castalian rill by rill!
Those stories anciently did thrill
The blind man of Olympus hill.
Your Hercules I've read, as good almost
As if in Trachis written; still, yet still
An age whose greatest poet is a post
Of that old porch, is a strange age,
I am no Stoic, yet a sage,
Living in Greece here, where yet rage
Some flutterers 'gainst your iron cage:
We are Platonists in Greece here, we maintain
A various expectation, which bids gauge
The world as not set in this state and strain
For ever; hold in spite of sin
A chastity of mind wherein
Some glimpse of that reserve we win,
Which Essence holds amidst the din
Of outward life and death: since man is base,
Is nature base, doth God fail? Not so thin
Of faith am I; nay, though I grant this phase,
This present, which we all abhor,
May be the last save one that o'er
The world shall pass, yet I ignore
Thy sentence, “There remains no more.”
Nay, there's an infinite nothing; we shall come
Thither at least, and have not reached that shore;
We have at least then so much floating room.
Now with your leave let me rehearse
In brief what prompts me, the reverse
Of your conclusion; why I nurse
This hope of better out of worse.
Five days ago held I a curule hall:
A heap of Jews rushed, mad as if the thyrse
Drave them: they haled along a certain Paul
As prisoner, whom they did accuse
Of those strange questions of the Jews
Of which I gave you lately news:
Their laws, they said, he did refuse
To worship by; among their heretics
Numbered him; but what chiefly served to bruise
Their Jew galls was that he had dared to mix
Them with the gentiles; he had said
That all men have one common Head,
One common law, one common bread,
Life, death, flesh, spirit, hope, and dread.
These wretched Jews are quite as proud as we;
Moreover, Paul affirmed one, sometime dead
By Roman law, a seer of galilee,
To be alive: I think I wrote
Something of this report remote
To illustrate this very thought
That the dead die not;—time will show 't.
This seer then Paul affirmed to be the Christ,
Or prophet, for whose advent the Jews doat
All this so angered me, I seized one priest
And scourged him, drove the rest away,
Dismissed their prisoner—hold here—stay—
Their prisoner—what may I say?
Describe those features? He did sway
An arm and side towards his slanderers,
And fixed an eye upon me like the ray
Of humid star; a certain reverence errs
From further portrait, but he seemed,
A fire-calm soul; a something dreamed
Between us, as his eyeballs gleamed
With inner vision, which outbeamed
And sunned him, as I had beheld a man
Had gone through all the forms of thought esteemed
Amongst us, by the which we think we can
Gain the truth's truth; I think that he
Had taken from them all the fee,
Nor failed to find not one to be
The knowledge, but had found the key
Some other way, he looked beyond them all,
Yet far from sadness, confident and free,
As if he held them still, let nothing fall
Of all that ever he had learned,
But all by inner force had turned
To one harmonic; I discerned
A pathos which not flamed but burned—
A pathos which consisted in the truth,
As I should call it, not from passion churned,
Not tearful pathos suddenly uncouth,
But rising from the very might,
With which he held the Infinite;
As if some moment past his night
Had changed to glory in a blight
Which withered all desire except to tell
How God did once through all his senses smite
I am too old to think old things: 'tis well;
Such men would die, for what they hold;
He has seen that which doth enfold
His eyesight always, yea, upmould
His nature, which nor heat nor cold
Can suffer in the welding glow of faith
I questioned Barrhus why he lowered the gold
Spiral upon my lituus, which he hath,
Until Paul's exit, doing force
To Rome's majesty; this of course
Insufferable by the laws
Divine and human;—whence the source
Of such a strange neglect I had observed?
Barrhus, my oldest of apparitors,
Fixed his grim head towards me, never swerved,
Weeping stone tears from Scythian eyes,
And clipped me such a mint of lies—
Or truths—heart-told in any wise,
About Paul's preaching;—novelties
I almost thought, until I thought again
You say that nothing new can ever rise;
He said that Paul was one of many men,
Who words and works and wonders show,
In name of Him their nation slew,
Whom they aver to live anew,
Whom they allege to Greek and Jew,
In whose name they do bid all men repent,
With many other doctrines which ensue
From this; even Barrhus spoke as he were sent
To sound this one word to me then
Straight out from heaven, not as if men
Had taught it him, and he again
Taught me a secondhand refrain.
The sum of all was hope in things to come,
And faith that gives hope substance in our pain,
And love that perfects faith; yes, love the sum
Of sums: the sweetness in the thing
Seemed here, that love was named the ring
Which linketh man to God, the wing
Which strikes the eternal shadowing
With one firm shadow; the great category
(Rest here, rest here) from which the truth doth sing,
Through every other form with brightest glory.
Winds weary with the old sea tune
Slide inland with some cloud, and soon
From woods that whisper summer noon,
Weigh their wight wings with odour boon;
So I, long salted in our ocean drear
Of disbelief that Essence can be won
By any form of thought invented here,
Felt such a gush of joy about
My heart-roots, as if in and out
'twas life-blood billowed; and as stout
As once we sent the battle-shout,
Pitching clear notes against barbaric din,—
Oh, brother, my soul's voice against the rout
Of unbeliefs a man doth nurse within,
Arising and protesting wild,
Spake, speaking out untruth defiled;
Spake, speaking in the truth exiled;
Spake, Little head and weary child,
Come home, God loves, God loves through sin and shame;
Come home, God loves his world: and thy so-styled
Instincts, which whispered this even in the name
Of doubts and of carnalities,
Were true conclusions, nature-wise;
In thy old scorned formalities
And creeds, God looks thee in thine eyes!
Wherefore believe again thine ancient lore,
For whatsoever Reason doth devise,
Her fiery wings and fire-cloud cars to soar,
They truly gain the living height,
Because as their most proper freight
They carry love, the infinite
Of man, up to the rapturous site
Of love, the infinite in nature spread.
Shall forms in nature always play at sleight
With forms in man, that nature's chief and head?
Nay, God is an authority,
We deem, in nature; let Him be
Authority in us, that we
Hold this for certainty, that He
Yields up Himself to all our grasps of thought—
Our little nets cast in the shoreless sea,
Our dartles launched in skilled or skilless sort,
Our reason in its many modes,
Its paths lead to the star abodes,
Spherical music lights those roads
To love's true ending, which is God's.
O Love, thou art the secret of our God;
Thou art, O Love, the centre of heaven's codes;
The due thou art by all to all things owed!
This love within me grew alive
So late in this my life, I strive
To give it language; do thou give
Me audience; we so late arrive
Where we have been so many years agone;
Yet think of this, with whom should God connive
At such a madman as would gather stone
For his own grave? Rather be built
Houses for dwelling with the silt
Of every creed and knowledge, spilt
From the deep waters, which do lilt
With prescient music unto mortal ears,—
plena Sunt Omnia dei: in our guilt,
Failure and pain this very love inheres
I wrote all this to thee last night
Beneath my lonely chamber light,
Impelled through the long hours to write
Up to this point, at which the blight
Of the stealthy morning withered my pale lamp,
And in my vases all the fir-cones lite
Drew their brown mouths a little wider, ramp
Sweet briars with all their berries red,
A palsy took the arbute dead
Asleep till now; he shook and said,
It is high morning overhead,
Where are my birds that sported in my boughs?
The nearer cones no answer breathed, afraid
To lose an instant of their dear carouse
Of the new morning's life divine;
Then first I slept amid the shine
Of all my loving flowers quirine;
And then Paul's face, which did decline
All through the broken waters of my sleep,
Changed wonderfully in a magic sign,
Became in part another's, part did peep
A visage at me terrible,—
'twas my own look, I knew half well,
My very self; dead mutterings tell
This truth to me; and then the spell
Wrought so that through one ghostly countenance
Two souls did strive to speak, to think, to quell
Each other; then I woke and tell my chance
Paul spake of One: what man is He,
We ask; what other could He be
Save whom I saw, whom all may see
Of us—another and the Me?
Thou wouldst inquire concerning Him, of whom
Spake Paul—the Christ? My dream I tell to thee,
I saw another striving to become
Myself in self; this was the Christ
I think, be sure I have not missed
Paul's meaning, that God's Word uprist
Doth grant the truth to all who list.
Oh, just, and pious, and pitiful heart of God!
There is one Word of Truth who makes acquist
Of human words pronounced in our exode,
From other unto other faith—
Most holy word, as Philo saith
(Another Jew) doth knit the rath
Unto the late with equal breath.
God grant He may have whispered unto me,
For some fulfilment this poor soul to graith;
God grant He may have walked in Galilee,
For there belike my love may dwell;
From this full morning breathes the smell
Of olden years; from hidden dell
A wind breathes over deserts fell
With whitened bones. Farewell, farewell.