Brother, from what dim world of lonely light,
Trembling on heaven’s pinnacles to-night,
Is lifted your sad face of love while you
Stare upward toward me, staring upward, too,
At that faint flame which is your home, between
The leafy branches of these poplars seen—
So hushed, so far! Perhaps to-night you scan
Your starry heaven for the star of Man,
High in the trellis of eternity
And glittering arches hung; perhaps like me
You, too, look up and wonder. Is it fair,
That world of yours? Are there great cities there,
Populous millions, hearts that beat as these,
Clear meadows and far mountains, shoreless seas,
Shadows of moving armies, thrones that shake?
Does the heart thrill for love there, does it break—
Tell me, are there hushed gardens, quiet tombs?
And mighty poets weaving at their looms
The old, dim wisdoms that outweary Time;
And saints, and lifted saviours, and sublime
Faiths and high fortitudes beyond belief?
—All blotted out by one small poplar leaf
In the light wind of languid summer stirred!
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Brother, what news out of the night, what word
From the frontiers of mind beyond our ken,
Of mysteries unimagined yet of men,
Compassed by travail of your spirit? O
Could you but reach to us! Could we but know
Across the imperturbable old Dark
Some answering glimmer of the ancient Spark
Lifted—some token, tangible to sense,
Of the indomitable Intelligence
That thrones on matter—language visible—
Crying, “Eternity—and all is well!
Brother, be of good cheer; we, too, have known!
Not lonely moves, not utterly alone,
Your sad fraternity through the dark of God:
But the confederate legions are abroad,
Life’s flag advances on the starry way,
And Consciousness, still battling, still at bay,
Holds the bright forts against Oblivion—”
What answering thrill would ’round the planet run!
For we are one; all Consciousness is one,
Whatever form it wear, however dressed
In gray or glamour, in whatever breast
It lift its longing: glimmering it moves
Through the green wave; it stamps with startled hooves
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The upland pastures of the world, and soars
In heaven with the eagle; on bright shores
It basks a sunny body, or in dread
Lifts from the undergrowth a snaky head
And darts a flickering tongue; it is most clear
In the lark’s throat; among the grasses here,
That couch the ant, it turns a tiny eye
Around the darkness; scampers and is shy
In the scared rabbit; through the murmuring air
Wheels with the beetle, and, where heaven is bare,
Southward with the wild crane at summer’s close,
Hungering, an eternal pilgrim goes
On quests implacable. And from the eyes
Of the poised panther gleam the cruelties
Of its stern need that roams the world, and rends
With tooth or talon; in the hawk descends
On the stunned squirrel; in the squirrel moans
As the hawk strikes; darkens the earth with bones
Of its own wreck and, hungering again,
Knows in its body the old spur. For when
Hunger, the shadow cast by death, draws near,
Life on her thousand thrones feels the one fear,
And in the lion’s roar at dusk is heard
The unassuagable, insistent word
Of urgent Being, clamorous to be.
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Wreaking and wrought upon, eternally
Mingling and mixed; inextricably blent,
Victor and vanquished, in one sacrament—
Body with body—of delight and death,
It moves in splendor; lifts the shuddering breath
Of the spent stag; and in the mind of Man
Rebels against the miserable plan—
Flings its frail web of thought across the path
Of suns in heaven, and in holy wrath,
On blood of murdered brothers nourished, still
Thunders to all the world, Thou shall not kill!
And the worm’s death is in the sparrow’s song.
And I have seen it in the gnats that throng
Old shadowy forests, in tumultuous dance;
Or in the little measuring-worm advance,
Inch by slow inch, along the swaying stem
Of some exalted flower; or lift the hem
Of the frail butterfly’s embroidered cloak
In gentle breathings that the sun did stroke
Caressingly with fingers of his heat;
Or from the dog yearn upward, and entreat
With eyes of adoration or of fear
The great god, Man—“What message, master dear,
From the dim heights beyond me where you are?”
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In the mare’s tremulous whinny, in the far
Lowing of cattle from the upland sward,
Or wail of whip-poor-wills, at twilight poured
On pools of silence plaintively, or cry
Of the lone wolf beneath the glittering sky
Of soundless winter, I have heard the same
Splendor speak forth, and utter the one name
Of Life, the dreadful, the magnificent.
All afternoon the passion of heaven spent
On earth its fiery fury in blind, bright
Lightnings of dread and laughters of delight
Down shuddering deeps of shaken thunder, where
The delirious longing loosed its sorrowing hair
Of wind and shower and overshadowing cloud
Across the belovèd face, in darkness bowed
Or glimmering light revealed; and cried aloud
For anger of utter ecstasy; and shed
The wild love of the rushing rain that sped
To the thrilled heart, consenting, of the dim
And rapturous earth, that lifted up to him
Drowsed lips of thirsty flowers; and the cup
Of every flower for joy was lifted up,
And drank, and swayed! So, wearied out at length,
Flagged the bright pulses, and the ebbing strength,
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With muttering of remembered thunders, passed
Down the large shores of evening: till at last
The exhausted heaven of twilight from afar
Shone washed of all her sorrows; and a star
Brooded above the fading storm, and saw
The winnowed reaches deepening into awe
Of gradual darkness, and the fields that lay
All drenched and wearied out at dusk of day
And the worn end of things; while far away
The receding fury moaned.
And now they lie
In the same peace around me, and the sky
Holds up her stars; now in the rain-drenched wood
The tree-toad drinks the rain and finds it good,
And trills for joy—the sliding waters grieve
Quietly—now the bat begins to weave
With intricate motion on the cloudy loom,
Of glamourous starlight mingled and gray gloom,
His dipping flight among the darkened boughs
And dreamy vistas; and the little mouse
Furtively hurries through the lane, his eye
Turned up in terror as the owl goes by:
On softest feathers of silence overhead
Flits the dim shadow of the ancient dread,
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Hooded and vague, the cruelty of his beak
Bent on old lustful mysteries.—A squeak—
A scuffle—beating of wings—and in the lane
Silence—and the old wrong is done again,
That was ere Adam; the triumphant heart
And the defeated, each one doomed to his part,
They play it through, the old tragedy where one
Presence still wars and still is warred upon,
Slays and is slain: while fiercely all around
Shakes the eternal love-song in shrill sound,
Of grasshopper and cricket—sleepless flow
The immortal tides of longing to and fro
On waves of music; endless is the prayer
Of life to the belovèd, everywhere
Lifted in adoration: on dark shores
Beats the insistent passion that implores
The one dear breast of pity or disdain,
To be reborn, to be reborn again—
Nor perish wholly! The blind earth is thrilled
As with vague rites accomplished, dreams fulfilled,
Marriage and mystic union; all along
Her brimming meadows rings the bridal song
And chaunt ecstatic: that great heart of hers
Is touched now the eternal longing stirs
From hill to hollow and hollow to clear hill
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In many voices mingled, or the still
Ecstasy of the firefly that trails
Among the shadows where the starlight fails,
His body’s burning love. Forever flows
The dreadful drama to its stately close
And endless ending—the fierce carnival
Of death and passion, wherein each and all
Mix, and are mingled, slaughter, blend, and pass
Each into other—the high poem that has
No end and no beginning, that the one
Self in all living forms beneath the sun,
And on all worlds around him and above,
Weaves on the strands of hunger, death, and love.
I see it all, I hear it all, and lie
Under my swaying poplars, and the sky
Is fretted with frail leaves. The mortal dream
Is in my heart: I hear the night-hawk’s scream
Shatter the silver silences, I hear
The owl’s clear tremolo rise over-clear—
The mouse’s blood along his veins has made
His love-note lovelier and the night afraid
Of beauty’s dreadful secret—and I know
Soft shapes of stealth that in the darkness go,
Of furry lusts and gnawing hungers, small
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Twittering things obscene, that flit or crawl
In furtive secrecy, vague mouths and blurred
Of the night creature or nocturnal bird—
Amorphous moth and bat-wing—and the earth,
With all her burrows, nooks and nests of birth
Crowded, and wreck of many a perished might,
By the ebbed waters of Life’s fierce delight
Washed up on shores of silence—spoiled and spurned
Altars where once the sacred fire burned—
Forms flowing back into the Formlessness;
In a supreme embrace, a long caress,
Mixing their bodies with the mother mould—
And all the heaven of stars around me rolled,
Whose brooding eyes have stared so many an age
Upon this theatre of lust and rage,
Of death and adoration. And a breeze
Rustles the branches of the poplar-trees.
Dear Spark, that shinest in the solitude!
One Consciousness, that in the brotherhood
Of all earth’s living creatures movest on
The shaken ramparts of Oblivion—
Whose starry cry, across the darkness hurled,
Makes music in the silence of the world!
Life, whose sole splendor in red slaughter spills
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The blood of its own breast; in many wills
Wars on the one Will; and in wrath or dread
Feeds on itself and, on itself being fed,
Shines forth in song and color; gilds the dress
Of the green-fly; and pours its loveliness
In rapture on the earth; in theatres
Of crowded congregation sits—nor stirs—
Watching itself, itself the spectacle;
And builds the swallow’s breast, and shapes the shell
And all these mansions of its thought that are
Between the morning and the evening-star,
On earth, in heaven, or in the glimmering caves
And grottoes of the world below the waves—
Butchers the ox, and, gladdened by his meat,
In the young mother’s downward smile is sweet;
Or, sated on his body, walks abroad
In symphonies, and poems, and prayers to God;
Sins, and has conscience and, repenting, sins;
And in the lowly patient spider spins
Its fragile web; and in these words of mine
Flings out its groping utterance, line by line,
Across the intangible abyss of thought—
With infinite passion, infinite patience wrought—
Dread Loveliness! Be strong in me, be strong,
To utter forth your meaning in my song!
