Classic Poem

I

The Song, at last unfolded, curve on curve,
Blooms to completion, and as lilies close,
Folds it in silence. So, with all the light,
It goes ...
No echo more; the memory must serve,
O vain to hark! —
The sweet, unpitying reticence of night:
Silence again, and dark.

To hear a music waning from my need,
It is to me
Bereavement. So the native shores recede
With all the faces dearest to a heart,
When it is time to part,
Not to be stayed, — fading relentlessly.
I watch the waters widen, I who know
How far I go.

II

All gone, all dark, the welcome and the dream
Of a lost godhead that was mine indeed;
Some source of all remembrances supreme,
And common with the planets and the seed.
Nigh to the heart of Light, I heard it send
Light throbbing without end
Through mist on mist, —
Colors and calls and echoed potencies
For earth and moon and seas.
Hooded with tempest, hovered at my wrist
The falcon lightning. ... Oh, I heard and saw
Familiar glories, greeted with no awe,
But human tears:
The ebb and flow of tide on tide of years;
The days like petals budding and unfurled;
The building of the World.
And then the making, — from what troubled clay,
Veined with the reddest dawn of summer day,
Sun-kindled with the flame to be, to seek, —
The Wonderful and Weak!

Then, for the little hour, a vagrant god
Brooding upon resplendent memories
The while he rests beside his path untrod,
With shadowed eyes,
I too — I too looked forth upon the Earth,
A child of royal birth,
And felt the proud assurance of my own,
In face of all wild beauty; — none so wild
Or beautiful, but had for me, the child,
Some look of home; for me —
With stranger ways, and threadbare and alone,
And shod so painfully.
" I knew you, Glories, in some outer place.
Oh, scorn not me, you rapturous wayside face
Of rose, that hast the lore from that brown earth,
What it is worth
To thrill you so and flush you fairer far
Than human faces are,
Flushing so transiently.
Rich breath, the life I was and I shall be —
Some day when I am come into my own —
Looks on you now, through eyes that comprehend
Beginning wrought with end,
Or ever you were, and when you shall be gone;
(And whither, what wind knows?)
Yea, dear, my Rose."

Clear sung. But while I muse, with eager eyes on
The vision that fulfills,
The one wild-bee that showed me pathway home
Is gone with daylight: down the mists are come
To cheat me out of knowledge of the hills,
And hide horizon.

III

My Violin, if I could call thee mine,
Interpreter,
I dream all ways were plain, all lovelier,
Through that soothsay of thine;
And how I should be led
By the sure quest of such a golden thread,
Through all vext mazes; beckoned along
Through Dark, a glory, — Silence, mother song,
Where harbors every omen that eludes,
The hidden tryst of all beatitudes,
All joys that none may capture or foresee.
And it will never be.

Oh, but some clew there must be here to wind
Through these appalling darknesses, that bind
The baffled heart in with dismay and doubt;
To lead us out
Unto a source, a first all-meaning Word,
Sure to enfold like some dear blinding hand
Of love shut in upon the rebel bird
That cannot understand!
Some farther voice must say
The path is there, though it be far withdrawn;
As if a child should point us out the way
To Eden, in the dawn.

And for the lives that own nor clew nor seer
To tell the meaning clear,
Whom Beauty startles as a newcomer
Shy in the door, — and they as shy to her —
For whom her foreign speech
Wakens a wistful pain too strange to teach,
For them the groping thought,
Unvalued and unsought,
Lives dark: until the chance interpreter,
The Song unfolding to a soundless call,
Most wonderful, says all;
At last, says all — ...and then,
As lilies fold again,
Even with the day that shone, —
Is gone.

IV

Yet, is it wasted, that which wells unseen, —
Escape that might have been?
The voice withheld, can vision wither so?
Shall not the risen longing overflow
Unto the needs
Of joyless duties, thronging parched and low
Along the days, like weeds?
May it not be, for them that find no speech,
The life unlived, the love unloved, the stress
Of thwarted songfulness,
The very reach
Of heart's desire, the utmost urge of want,
Shall find a way to grace
Poor hours, grown dull and gaunt
With longing for new day,
For sight of some far place? —
Dreamers of destined joy gone all astray.
(Heart's dim possession that the hands resign, —
My Violin, not mine!)
Ah, that which finds release when others sing,
Dies never so.
My World, thine own heart cannot hold the Spring
Long hid. The grass will know.