Classic Poem

I.

The Body .

What is to come of me frail flesh
Within this city's monstrous mesh,
That tangles men so cruelly?
The mortal shadows of the street,
The shapes, like shadows, that I meet, —
What mercy have they upon me?

Not all my passionate heat and power
Avail me now one passing hour:
Alone, an-hungered, I am driven
From crowd to crowd, and soon must see
The night fall, but no rest for me
On earth, and after earth no Heaven!

The S OUL .

And I am tired too: my body's pains and fears
Are mine. The desperate pass of men
At deadly odds, I know, — and women's tears
And children's cries! Oh these I hear, and then, —
The chant, the march, the music of the spheres.

II.

The Body .

What is to help my heart? It breaks
With all the sorrow it betakes
From the lost faces in the throng
That hurries on it knows not where,
Soon to o'erstep the black last stair
That leads to death, and ends the song.

Like vermin borne by some sick bird,
Blown out to sea, are men uprear'd
On this wild wheel of earth, whose race
Into the dark, amid the stars,
Unchecked by its pale charioteers,
Will soon be run in endless space.

The S OUL .

It is the strife, the soaring strife, that saves,
And turns even lust to love that has the stars
Upon its helm, that walks the homeless waves,
Marches the wind, and brings to life's red wars
Sweet death, with April grass to deck its graves.

III.

The Body .

Sweet death! — there comes the bitter last,
That only waits to see me cast
In some cold corner of the street:
Black snake! then, fanged with agony,
Creeps up to end this beggary,
And bring the death that men call sweet!

And those, they say, may have again,
Who had: who had not, yet their pain
May end so, with their indigence!
And the lost woman's lovely years,
And youth's heroic baffled tears,
May find dark death a recompense.

I loved a maid, but she is gone:
I had a friend, that walk alone:
And neither speak, dumb in the dust:
And all the poet's hope I had,
To help my race. But fate forbade:
And there's no justice to the just.

The S OUL .

If I am wrought now by my body's wrong
That's bruised and tired to death, and sick aTheart,
How shall I sing the old delivering song?
How shall I hymn, oh Heaven, and hold my part,
And show frail flesh that I, the soul, am strong?

IV.

The Body .

Now the dark river give me grace!
One step into the night of space,
And I forget in wakeless sleep,
The pain, the tired day I found
Alone in the disastrous round
This poor mortality may keep.

Let the cold clay reclaim its own!
Let me lie lost, and quite unknown!
Let never men remember more
That one, foregone, lived in such wise,
And made the thankless sacrifice,
Resuming dust, as long before.

V.

The D ISEMBODIED S OUL .

Beneath the stars, and far above the spires,
Now I go free, as godlike spirits do:
But my thought falls, far from yon airy fires,
Back to the poor spent clay that London knew,
To cover its cold face, and weep its dead desires.

Eternity, and the spheral dance forever,
Are mine, immortal: but o'er the dreadful past
Of my body's loss, and pain, and passionate fever,
And human hope of earthly joy at last, —
How o'er its shame my thought like a brooding wing is cast.
And for the clay, made man for strength and splendour, —
Not all Eternity can quite repay
What humanly it lost of love most tender,
And Earth's fair mornings after night's surrender:
And that is why the stars more sadly stray;
Oh, what the frail flesh lost on London Way,
Not even the Heavens themselves can quite repay.