Classic Poem

To think! to think and never rest from thinking!
To feel this great globe flying through the sky
And reckon by the rising and the sinking
Of stars how long to live, how soon to die!

This, this is life. Is life, then, worth the living?
This plotting for his freedom by the slave!
This agony of loving and forgiving!
This effort of the coward to be brave!

Our freedom! We are sin-scourged into being,
And ills of birth enslave us all our days;
No chance of flying and no way of fleeing,
Until the last chance and the end of ways.

We are walled in by darkness — wall behind us,
From whose sprung dungeon-gates Fate dragged us in,
And wall before us, where Fate waits to bind us
And thrust us out through swinging gates of sin.

But what is Fate? It is a mere breath spoken,
To echo clamoring between the walls
Of darkness — blind phrase uttered to betoken
This blind Unreason which our life enthralls.

Out through abysmal depths of heaven round us
We think our way past orbs of day and night,
Till skies of empty outer darkness bound us
And place and time are fixed pin-points of light;

But nowhere from the silent planets wheeling,
And nowhere from the thundering hell of suns,
And nowhere in the darkness comes revealing
Itself a Fate that through all being runs.

No ghostly presence, no mysterious voices,
The midnight of these infinite spaces thrill;
And even chaos flies hence and rejoices
To find and feel yon universe's Will.

Thought follows chaos — nay, without the places
And times of matter globed and motion whirled,
Thought chaos is, a spread dead wing in space is,
Drifting for wafture somewhere toward a world.

Where shall it reach and touch the Will Universal?
How with its confines bound an Infinite Mind?
One atom of the Allsoul's whole dispersal
Assuming how the whole shall be defined!

Such thinkings are not Thought, they are but dreamings
Of what perchance may be itself but dream;
Our truths are to the Truth as moonlight's gleamings
In dungeon are to open midnoon's beam.

All worlds of matter, all the world of spirit,
How these are one, eternal, increate —
Soul can not clutch it, sense come never near it;
It is unthinkable, and it is Fate!

This awful riddle, wherewith we have struggled
Since the dim dawn of human consciousness,
With whatsoever dread words we have juggled —
Ptah, Zeus, Jove, God — we fail, we fail to guess.

Whether there be of all intelligences
A total sum, a comprehending whole —
Great sea, wherefrom rise all these mists, the senses,
And back whereto flow all the streams of soul?

Whether this lives, a selfexistent Essence,
With its own passions, wills, imaginings,
Or is but everlasting evanescence,
But perfume of the bloom of living things?

How cosmic spirit can take hold of matter
And give dead elements the living breath?
How gather into selfhoods, and how scatter,
To work the miracles of life and death?

Poets in grand imagination's trances
Conceive the gods and give them wondrous birth,
And martyrs bleed for Faith's divine romances,
And priests go forth to proselyte the earth;

But what terrestrial religion reaches
Out into heaven's majesty so far
That it can guess what god strange nature teaches
To the strange dwellers on the nearest star?

Is Buddha known to denizens of Saturn?
Is Jesus preached upon the Jovian moons?
And what are gods of any earthly pattern
To far spheres drifting in the Force-monsoons?

Yon sun's flame, in whose glare our worlds go darkling
To eyes that from another system gaze —
Yon flaming sun is but a glimmer sparkling
To like worlds blotted in the Dogstar's blaze.

And, howsoever gravitation labors,
It lets a million, suns from vision slip;
While the ten million world-groups are not neighbors
Even by light's fine far swift fellowship.

How these immensities dwarf and obscure us!
What, what are we amid such scenes as these?
Our earth unguessed in planets of Arcturus,
Undreamed in orbs around the Pleiades!

By such infinitudes of distance bounded
(These chasms of darkness that no light can leap),
We seem a dream with glooms of sleep surrounded —
" Our little life is rounded with a sleep!"