Classic Poem

The reason of the saint that he is saintly,
And of the hero that to him
Glory the mirror and the beauty;
And of the brigand that to prowl abhorred
Makes him renowned unto himself
And dear the evil name;

Of girls like evening angels
From the mass of heaven fluttering
To earth in wanton whispers —
That they invite their flesh to loose
All yet unbaptized terrors on them
And will to-morrow change the virgin glance
For the long wandering gaze;

The reason of the dark one that his heart
For love of hell is empty
And that the empty maze consoles
In that the bare heart is
Of heaven the augury
As of hell;

The reasons of each are lone,
And lone the fate of each.
To private death-ear will they tell
Why they have done so.
Such were the reasons of the lives they lived.
Then they are dead,
And the cause was themselves.

Each to himself is the cause of himself.
These are the agencies of freedom
Which necessity compels,
As birds are flown from earth
By that earth utters no command
Of fixity, but waits on motion
To consume itself, and stillness
To be earth of earth, ingenerate
Cohesion without cause.

For they are uncaused, the minds
Which differ not in sense.
They are the mind which saves
Sense to itself
Against interpretation's waste;
They are the sense dispartable
Which senses cannot change.

The reasons, then, of this one, that one,
That they unlike are this one, that one —
This is as the telling of beads.
The chain hangs round the neck of lamentation —
They are lost.
Or as to watch the sun's purposeful clouds
Mingle with moonlight and be nothing.

The brow of unanimity
Perplexes as each goes his unlike way.
But soon the vagrant thought is out of sight.
To go is short,
Though slow the shadow trailing after
Which the backward look a reason names.