Chapter I: DIM Wisdoms

NIGHT HAS ITS FEAR

Night has its fear:
As the slow dusk advances, and the day
Fades out in fire along the starry way,
The ancient doubt draws near.

Vague shapes of dread--
Soft owl, or moth, and timid, twittering things--
Move through the growing dark; on furtive wings
The bat flits overhead.

And in the house
The death-watch ticks, the dust of time is stirred
With timorous footfalls, in the night is heard
The gnawing of the mouse.

Through the old room
What phantoms throng, what shapes that to and fro
Tremble, and lips that laughed here long ago--
Gone back into the gloom!

A whip-poor-will
Bleakly across the baleful country cries
From a blurred mouth; and from the west replies
Echo--and all is still.

Now from her shell,
Her body’s prison, with the ancient doubt
And terror stricken, the scared soul looks out,
Asking if all be well.

Great kings have been,
Poets, and mighty prophets--shapes have cried
About the world, or moved in mournful pride;
And are no longer seen.

From many lands
Their plaint was lifted; from how many a shore
Sorrows have wailed, that are not any more!
They sleep with folded hands.

They have their day:
Their cry is loud about the earth, who come
To the one end; the singing lips grow dumb
Always in the one way.

Though they implore,
Brief is the plea, inflexible the fate!
Silence has the last word; and then--the great
Silence, forevermore.

Pondering these,
The fretful spirit in bewilderment
Quickens with a vague doubt, and, not content,
Broods--and is ill at ease.

Her being is
Throned on so frail a pulse; such fleeting breath
Bears up her dream across the gulf of death
And the obscure abyss.

Always she hears
The hurtling chariots of the hurrying blood,
Her shuttling breath that in the solitude
Weaves the one self she wears.

Now first the vast
Veil over heaven is rent, and bares the whole
Shining Reality; whereat the soul
Sickens, and is aghast!

Darkness reveals
The tragic truth; her will sinks hopeless wings
Before the inexorable Fact of things,
Humbling the dread she feels.

With the old Awes
Confronted and the flaming Mystery,
She may not speak; but pondering, suddenly
Grows silent, and withdraws.

She may not bear
That sight: the spangled heavens, from east to west,
Stretch out too wide the confines of the breast,
Straining in wonder there.

Upon what Brow
Of awful eminence--O thought that stuns!--
Is laid that chaplet of a million suns,
Upon what Forehead now?

Who was it wrought
This universal glory all around,
Of glittering worlds forever without bound?--
Great Poet, what a Thought!

It is a Word
Unutterable that is written there;
The spirit, gazing, is one voiceless prayer,
Careless if it be heard.

Her thoughts ascend,
Star beyond star, height beyond aching height
Upward, in adoration infinite,
Forever, without end.

So _shall_ it be!
Till heaven yield her sceptre; till the throne
Of night be shaken, and the Face be known
Beyond eternity:

Till God divide
And rend asunder the embroidered hem
Of darkness; till the starry diadem
And crown be set aside!

THE SORROWFUL MASQUERADE

Even as to a music, stately and sad,
The young girl’s feet begin to move in a dance,
And curiously, for joy, shift and advance;
So to a mournful waltz, sombre and sweet,
All laughing things move with delighted feet--
So all things that draw light and laughing breath
Move to the mournful waltz of life and death:
Comedy is a girl dancing in time
To the tragic pipes, sorrowful and sublime;
And ever she laughs back, and as she skips
Mimics the mournful music with her lips;
Then, for sheer anger at her own pretense,
Sobs violently at her own vehemence;
And mocks her tears. But when the pipings sleep,
She needs must cover up her face and weep.

OCTOBER MOONLIGHT

Heaven is like an empty room to-night;
From rim to chilly rim
Wells the clear radiance of the cold moonlight,
And the earth-ways are dim.

Who has departed from this perfect place!
What fiery one here set
His throne in splendor, whom, vanished now, the face
Of heaven remembers yet!

Emptiness--emptiness--the skies are bare,
And the stark earth no less
Grows vacant as a memory: everywhere
Sleeps the cold loveliness.

Old is the earth, too old; her voice is shrill
Against the end of things--
To the inevitable her bitter will
Grows humbler as she sings.

Now from my breast the very soul takes flight,
Leaving her chambers bare
Of all save lonely memory and moonlight--
And Song is silent there.

THE FLESH AND THE DREAM

The baffled dreamer, the defeated Christ
That for your love upon the cross-tree hung--
O take Him to your bosom, give Him rest
Close at the wanton wonder of your breast,
O carnal World, forever well and young!

VAUDEVILLE

When to a cheap and tawdry tune the orchestra cried out,
Frantic, in violent syncopation, and began
Your holy, adorable body in mournful grace to move about
Through the old, devious motions, the device of man--

How suddenly then, silent magnificence, you put to shame
The crowded and garish theatre, the strangled cries
Of flute and trumpet! O mortal body, bearer of our flame
Through the drear lands of death, flower of the eternities!

Revered, reviled, wept and adored, beseeched, cried out upon
By ravening lips of the ages--the sacred source of things,
That glimmered in Thrace, that shone in Rome, that swayed in Babylon,
Here moves to the vile throb of castanets and strings.

O through what generations have you lured, what secret ways,
Man’s fainting heart to be reborn! What splendors move
Deep in his breast when, dolorous, your reluctant beauty sways
In the old weary rhythms of eternal love!

1914

I lift my gaze beyond the night, and see,
Above the banners of Man’s hate unfurled,
The holy figure that on Calvary
Stretched arms out wide enough for all the world.

THE BELOVÈD

Life, Belovèd, I lay my heart against Your heart,
Long, long I peer into the dark pool of Your eyes;
Never will I forsake You, O adorable One!

I cannot comprehend You, but I love You.
In the shadow of Your locks I hide my eyes from the terrors;
But You are not greatly concerned--
Closer and closer I draw toward the dear Face.

See--I set my lips against Your lips,
But You do not answer:
Steadfast and grave beyond me Your eyes are burning,
As of one that dreams.

I am clinging here at Your heart!
I am singing my love of You for sheer joy!
Mother, what is it that trembles on Your lashes so soft--
And Your lips are salt as the taste of the sea?

Can it be for me Your eyes are brimming, Mother,
Even as they smile?
Can they be for me, these drops on Your lips so warm?
Dear One, do I understand at last!

O holy draught, wine of the world, bewildering and bitter-sweet!
Sacred tears, from the depths of what wild love welling!
Deeper and deeper let me drink and draw--
Nirvana, divine oblivion....

Bitter is the taste of Your lips, Belovèd!

* * * * *

Though I lie in the darkness, yet often do I remember You--and wonder--
And the touch of Your lips, how strange, and how sad.

PROUD DOOM

The crucifixion of Beauty on the cross
Of mortal destiny--the eternal law--
The thorny crown of death about her brows
Fills me with anger--then with sudden awe:

So dear, so lovely her adorable sorrow
Shows in the darkness, ’mid the tragic doom,
The very heart in me leaps up with laughter,
And hastens, proud and secret, toward the tomb.

THE SECRET ONE

Here, by this frame and network of the flesh
And wires of her control
Surrounded, central in her subtle mesh
And secret, sits the soul,

Urgent through all the body, while each part
Obeys, and all are one--
While in her dungeons labors the lone heart
To make her will be done.

She reins the forces in their wild career
That bear her, as they go,
Over the dark abyss; and knows how sheer
Reaches the gulf below.

How dubious her life and slenderly
Hangs, by a scarlet thread,
Between eternity and eternity--
She guesses, wise in dread;

And ever watchful, ever wary, set
In the centre all alone,
Feels ’round her cautiously if any threat
Be made against the throne.

Sometimes along her nerves the voice of pain
Bears tidings to her hate
And frantic wrath, that the old foe again
Is clamorous at the gate--

She rages up and down, and to and fro
In timid anger runs:
If the frontiers be menaced, it is known
All over, and at once.

She hears her breast of sorrows night and day
At labor; ’round her brood
The old oblivions, where she sits at bay;
She hears the battling blood.

Echoes assail her from far worlds that lie
Beyond the bourne of these--
Contact and color and the angry cry
Of the realities

Beat on the brain forever; the high dream,
By stratagem of speech,
Enters her portals, where she sits supreme
And silent, pondering each:

Weighing and challenging, for weal or woe,
All rumors, sending out
The emissaries of her will, that go
To the frontiers about.

But most she loves the hour that beauty brings,
Of rapture and release
From the crude hunger and the cry of things,
The hour of her peace--

When, by the inner light that floods her cell,
The spirit, even as here,
Travails, in secrecy and joy, to tell
Her passion and her fear.

Now to the listening soul in you who read
These lines, she tells it all--
How dear her day, how dark shall be, indeed,
The hour when night must fall.

THE UNDISSUADABLE AUSTERITY

Less than it is we would the Truth should seem:
Holy and marvellous the Actual is--
But stern her lips, and bitter is her kiss
Upon the brows of dream.

BLIND PLAYERS

Day breaks, and the old drama
Repeats itself anew:
The hind wakes to be hunted,
The huntsman to pursue--

The lover and the belovèd,
Each one doomed to his part;
The victor and the vanquished,
The hushed and the hurrying heart--

In terror and in triumph
They play it through again,
The old, unchanging drama
Of passion and of pain,

As the great Will has willed it,
That, in all forms being cast,
Wars on Itself forever.
O may they at the last--

The falcon, and the fledgling
He stoops to from the sky;
The lips that are so eager,
The lips that would deny--

When the old war is ended,
When the stern Will is done,
Meet in eternal pity
And know themselves as one!

TRAVAIL

Before the sacred beauty of the morn
How fade the wrangling wisdoms of the earth!
Wisdom is beauty in the womb, unborn;
Wisdom is beauty laboring for birth.

Wisdom, the ghost of Beauty, in the wide
Womb of the world lies clamoring for life,
While the white Beauty, the immortal Bride,
Sits throned upon the summits void of strife.

So the bright flower, bending from the soil,
Sums up and scorns the wisdom of the sage;
And Helen’s beauty, soaring beyond toil,
The laboring beauty of the poet’s page.

So, when the veils of mystery are furled,
Earth’s wisdom blooms in heaven’s beauty above ...
Beauty is all the wisdom of the world
Uttered by the seraphic lips of love!

THE POET TELLS OF HIS LOVE

How shall I sing of Her that is
My life’s long rapture and despair--
Sorrow eternal--Loveliness,
To whom each heart-beat is a prayer!

Utterly, endlessly, alone
Possessing me, yet unpossessed--
The dark, the drear belovèd One
That takes the tribute of this breast:

Dæmon disconsolate, in vain,
In vain petitioned and implored--
How many a midnight of disdain
Darkly and dreadfully adored!

Beauty, the virgin, evermore
Out of these arms with laughter fled--
Vanished--a voice by slope and shore
Haunting the world--Illusion dread--

Most secret Siren, on whose coast,
’Mid spray of perishing song, are hurled
All desolate lovers, all the lost
Souls, and half-poets of the world:

Through sleepless nights and lonely days
In tears and terror served and sought--
Light beyond light--the supreme Face
That blinds the adoring eyes of thought!

How shall I sing of Her? Nay all,
All song, all sorrow, all silence of
This desperate heart that is Her thrall,
Trembles and tries to tell my love!

THE BURIED DREAM

I hid a dream amid the sands of Time,
And said, “Now will I go upon my way--
I shall be free henceforward from this time,
And full of laughter all the livelong day.”

But it came following like the midnight voice
Of my true love behind her lattice-bars--
And it came following like the silver voice
Of my lost childhood strayed beyond the stars:

Like my dead self, so laughable, so sad,
So foolish and so lovable it rang--
That, for sheer laughter, I was very sad,
And took it back into my heart, and sang.

HAUNTED EARTH

Heaven at last
Is bared, and the whole world one radiant room--
Black are the shadows, in great pools of gloom
By copse and thicket cast.

The cattle browse
With sound of gentle breathing, and their breath
Is mild in glimmering meadows, or beneath
Drooped branches, where they drowse;

While ’mongst the chill
Shadows, and cold, clear moonlight all about,
A single bat goes dipping in and out
Softly; and all is still.

Silence around--
Save for a cricket! Lapped in slumb’rous peace
Lie hill and meadowland, the shining seas
Lap on them without sound.

It is earth’s cry
Lifted in adoration: the old dream,
Beauty, is with her, and her hour supreme
That goes so swiftly by.

Too well she knows
The sweet Illusion, from no earthly shore
Visitant, the bright word that evermore
Troubles her dark repose.

Her heart lies bare--
Drunken, drunken, she lifts a dreamy breast;
Hour by hour, in rapture and unrest
Flows the unending prayer.

The path of night
Reaches, from rim to rim, a radiant road
Whereon the exalted Beauty walks abroad
In wonder and wild light.

Upon what eyes,
Lifted in homesickness, now falls again
The loveliness that haunts the world with pain--
Light out of Paradise!

LONG AGO

Ah, once your quiet eyes were calm and deep
And wistful with much dreaming; long ago
Your solemn lips, so innocent of woe
And delicately parted, seemed to keep
A secret still unsaid, and murmured low:
But that was long ago.

And I, who saw and loved you from afar,
Prayed a hushed prayer, the first I ever prayed,
That God might keep you safe; and unafraid
I looked up through the night at my one star,
Moving mysteriously and bright-arrayed.
And silently I prayed.

While you passed singing tenderly and low,
Wandering through life’s meadows with slow tread,
Death laid his kiss on your belovèd head:
But that was long ago.

TCHAIKOVSKY: FIFTH SYMPHONY

My heart cried out in wonder: Can it be,
The form, from which this thrilling passion flows
On tides of beauty and eternal tone
Audibly now before the very sense
Of thronging thousands, somewhere in the clay
Of Russia lies, with folded hands--relapsed
Into the Formless?
And my mind replied:
The longing that so labors for release
Not wholly in that transient form was trapped
Wherein we perish miserably here--
But has escaped into the form supreme,
A deathless body; and now walks abroad
Among the generations of mankind,
Trailing the robes of the immortal woe.

And still that music poured. O sacred heart
And secret, well-head of those streams of song--
Are you content! How is it with you now,
O breast whose sorrows overflowed the world!

MIRROR

On the wide sea of sleep
I launch my gliding boat:
Over the rhythmic Deep
On flowing tides I float.

The curving shore around
Fades in the pale starlight--
A slumbering, sleepy sound
Goes drifting through the night.

It is the music of dreams
Along the horizon blown,
It stirs the glimmering streams
Where the pale stars lie strown.

The stars shine in the Deep,
Reflected from afar;
My eyes tremble with sleep,
Reflecting sea and star.

My eyes look up at me
Out of the mirrored eyes,
And in their depths I see
Mirrored the stars and skies.

Around--around--around
My boat whirls with the stream;
I feel a dizzy sound
Around me, like a dream.

Where may I moor my bark?
How may I lift my head?
What is that silence? Hark--
The sound of dreams is fled!

The breath of slumber lies,
Like perfume, on the Deep:
Night with a thousand eyes
Stares at herself in sleep.

PLAINT

Brief is Man’s travail here, and transitory
His wrath that soon is spent--
Brief his lament,
Lifted in vain against the harsh decrees
Of the high Destinies
That move not for the murmur of his woe:
Even as snow
On sunny meadows, as a lover’s story
Told in an April twilight long ago,
Brief is he even as these--
His little hour of tumult or of glory--
And to what end devised we may not guess,
Considering, as we go
Toward the same shadows, bearing the same spark,
His vanity and utter nothingness.
Yet in the mighty Dark
Dear is the spirit; grievously we know
Earth has one burden more, one soul the less.

ANDANTE

The evening steals like an ocean around your playing,
Whose perfect tones move on the sombre Deep
With a grave gesture, and sigh into a sleep,
George, where your hands, along the piano straying,
An intricate rhythm keep.

And all the room is starry with your dreaming,
And limitless and vague. O the white square
Of the window-pane shimmers behind you there,
Framing the street, where the first lights are gleaming,
Transfigured now and fair!

Now, while the heaven of night grows vast above her,
The soul from her lone dream has sure release;
The tumult and the ancient struggles cease--
The wars that Beauty wages on her lover
Dwindle into a peace,

When Schumann speaks so firmly and so sadly,
And all the twilight rustles, wave on wave.
O, at that smile his wondering spirit gave,
What new smile in all things shines back so gladly,
Grown dignified and grave!

The curtains by the window rise and flutter,
The ornaments on the mantel, row on row,
Seem touched with a melancholy of long ago--
What is it the music dreams, but cannot utter?
Schumann--we know, we know.

Ah George, what shall be said to you who feel it--
All the half-hope and passion unexpressed
When twilight heaves more gently in the breast!
Ah George, but you, when words would fain reveal it,
Smile--and divine the rest.

O wrap me in Beethoven’s storm and thunder!
My baffled spirit, with abated breath,
Flutters upon the verge of life and death--
And all my being, whirled along in wonder,
Dies between breath and breath.

Let me endure, within a single pulsing
Of the quick heart, in a storm of showering rain
Of sound, all joy, all grief--each breath again
Live through a life complete, in one convulsing
Moment of rapturous pain!

Silence--the lamplight, through the window streaming,
Falls on the listless keyboard, smooth and white--
Remembered music dreams in the dull light;
And you, too, George, sit silently and dreaming,
Alone, into the night.

THE DEAR MYSTERY

Joy, and the triumph and the doom of gladness
Make in my breast a music sweet as sadness;
Shall I not sing for sorrow, and again
Cry out, for the sheer joyousness of pain!
For all life’s moods go murmuring like strings
In a low chord, and all things sound all things,
Through alternations of the grave and glad:
Yet, in the end, all things are grave and sad.
I feel all things, but cannot comprehend;
And run, laughing and weeping, to the end
Of the dear mystery, the fated race--
And the deep darkness covers up my face.

IN THE DARK CITY

There is a harper plays
Through the long watches of the lonely night
When, like a cemetery,
Sleeps the dark city, with her millions, laid each in his tomb.

I feel it in my dream, but when I wake--
Suddenly, like some secret thing not to be overheard,
It ceases--
And the gray night grows dumb

Only in memory
Linger those veiled adagios, fading, fading ...
Till, with the morning, they are lost.

What door was opened then?
What worlds, undreamed of, lie around us in our sleep,
That yet we may not know?
Where is it one sat playing
Over and over, with such high and dreadful peace,
The passion and sorrow of the eternal doom?