Classic Poem

The glories of her lucent eyes,
That seem of truth and wisdom full,
Are merely starry summer skies
Mirrored upon a mountain pool,
Whose level limpid water lies
Placid, and passionless, and cool.

The truth and beauty that they dole
Are borrowed and reflected light.
No glimmer is there of a soul
In the blue depths that seem so bright;
And where the mirrored planets roll
Is cold as space, and dark as night.

And though a dancing summer wind
Make the blue water ripple and gleam
As if a spirit there — behind —
Were laughing in a lovely dream.
Yet to all dreams the eyes are blind;
As blind, in sooth, as bright they seem.

There is no beauty born in her,
No native loveliness to know,
And if a gust should rudely stir
The beauty imaged there below,
'Twould writhe into a shapeless blur,
And her ownself would fade and go.

And sorrow, like a rainy storm,
Would change her stars to briny tears;
Tempestuous anger would transform
Her laughter into crooked spears,
And turn the waters blue and warm
To misty, marshy, moonless meres.

Even as the passive viol strings
Are charmed to music by her art,
So in her throat the throstle sings,
So burns the sunset in her heart.
She is all lovely songful things,
Yet nothing is from them apart.

That is the whole of her bright soul —
Reflected light and echoed speech.
The things of sense her life control,
All sensuous beauty she can teach,
Yet lightning-flash and thunder-roll
Her eyes and lips can never reach.

And if her ears she simply close,
And shut her star-illumined eyes,
Her spirit withers with the rose,
Its radiance darkens with the skies;
Its radiance darkens with the skies;
Its music into silence goes,
And all its various beauty dies.

And we who shut our eyes to see,
And we who close our ears to mark,
What song and radiance there may be
Beyond the rose, above the lark —
What beauty and what mystery
Deep in the silence and the dark, —

We whose research discovereth
Joyance in pain and tears in mirth, —
Who sow in life the seeds of death,
And find in death the buds of birth, —
Who even in a lily's breath
Feel something mystic not of Earth —

We, who in our flesh have known,
Even in its very wounds and scars,
In nerve, and sinew, vein, and bone,
A milky way of tiny stars —
We who have burst or overthrown
Fetters, and barriers, and bars,

And rent the heavy veils of sense,
And seen the unseen ether stir,
And heard in matter dumb and dense,
Atomic constellations whir —
We who have solved the Unseen Immense,
What have our thoughts to do with her ?

Who is but what she hears and sees —
No more than can be heard and seen, —
Whose soul has no more mysteries
Than waters blue and meadows green,
Than blackbirds singing in the trees,
Than even-glow and morning-sheen —

Whom no celestial hope redeems
From mundane bar and carnal bond,
Who never in the silence dreams
Of something far above, beyond
The singing of a bird, the gleams
Of stars upon a mountain pond.

We vaunt the new world we have found,
Yet in that world the roses fade;
There is nor scent, nor light, nor sound
In the star-clusters we have made;
We have but loosened and unbound
The broideries of beauty's braid —

Have stripped the pearls and watched them melt
Like pearls in Cleopatra's wine;
Yet still in far Orion's belt
A million braided jewels shine;
And still in all things seen and felt
Is something holy and divine.

We have but rent the cord in twain
That gives the atoms shape and form,
Till every rock grows misty rain,
And every star becomes a storm;
Yet still the sheaves in Charles' Wain
Lie bound together ripe and warm.

We filch the sunlight from a tree,
And use its fire to melt and mould;
But still the tree a mystery
In every budding leaf doth hold;
And more than fire the flame we see
In April green and autumn gold.

And what has all our labour won?
From the cold flint a leaping spark
Has lit again the latent sun,
Pent and imprisoned in the bark.
Yet little, little we have done
To illume our spirits' inner dark.

We boast ourselves the lords of earth;
Our hammers clash, our flames devour,
Yet what is all our labour worth?
We have less beauty and less power
Than lies within the tiny girth
Of any little meadow flower.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

We boast with foolish heart and tongue,
Robbing a rose-leaf, shred by shred,
Of form and colour, and have wrung
Some trivial secrets from the dead;
Yet cannot rob her body young
Of all its living white and red.

We make a whirlwind of a bud
And whirl it down a Milky Way —
Make mud of flowers, and flowers of mud,
And clay of men, and men of clay;
Yet cannot blanch the crimson blood
That blossoms in her heart to-day.

Our dreams are darkened by a doubt,
Our hopes are mingled with despair;
What higher truth have we found out
Than that her eyes are bright and fair?
Our craven creeds are put to rout
By the brave banners of her hair.

At altars of despair we kneel
To the dead gods we have adored —
Dead gods of stone and steam and steel,
Of flying wheel and flashing sword —
When in her beauty we might feel
The strength and beauty of the Lord.

We have made level high and base —
Have proven man, and rose, and clod,
Infinitesmal stars in space,
Dark, though with lightning girt and shod;
Yet in the radiance of her face
We see the image of a God.

As children who dissect a toy,
So we dissect and analyse,
And merely darken and destroy,
Turning Life's meaning into lies;
But the bright stars of love and joy
Are mirrored in her shining eyes.

Perchance it were the wiser way
To look nor forward nor behind,
To take no thought beyond to-day,
To be to all deep meanings blind,
To drift at random and obey
Only the sunbeams and the wind —

To be a mirror to the light,
Æolian harp-strings to the breeze;
For happy he who has no sight
Beyond the lovely things he sees,
Nor ever soars above the height
Of the lark's daylight melodies.

Our soul is stormed by flower and star,
Our ears a million songs assail,
Can we annual a rose, or bar
The music of a nightingale?
Beside the light of things that are ,
The things of dream and vision pale.

Though with our dreams the world we drape,
And with our laws the world explain,
For us there can be no escape
From the sun's light, the lark's refrain.
Music and colour, sound and shape,
Besiege the heart and flood the brain.

And though her waters only stir.
When summer breezes breathe or move;
They mirror mountain, heath, and fir,
And bosom all the stars above;
And we can clearly see in her
The face of Beauty and of Love.

Wings dip into the waters still
And make a new Siloam there,
Till we can feel our being thrill
With ripples of her golden hair,
And eyes and lips our spirits fill
With something healing, something fair.