A Reading of Life, and Other Poems | Page 5

hourly swayed.
Crouched as a nestling, still its wings untried,?The man's mind opened under weight of cloud.?To penetrate the dark was it endowed;?Stood day before a vision shooting wide.?Whereat the spectral enemy lost form;?The traversed wilderness exposed its track.?He felt the far advance in looking back;?Thence trust in his foot forward through the storm.
Under the low-browed tempest's eye of ire,?That ere it lightened smote a coward heart,?Earth nerved her chastened son to hail athwart?All ventures perilous his shrouded Sire;?A stranger still, religiously divined;?Not yet with understanding read aright.?But when the mind, the cherishable mind,?The multitude's grave shepherd, took full flight,?Himself as mirror raised among his kind,?He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight:?Knew that his force to fly, his will to see,?His heart enlarged beyond its ribbed domain,?Had come of many a grip in mastery,?Which held conjoined the hostile rival twain,?And of his bosom made him lord, to keep?The starry roof of his unruffled frame?Awake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deep?Below, above, aye with a wistful aim.
The mastering mind in him, by tempests blown,?By traitor inmates baited, upward burned;?Perforce of growth, the Master mind discerned,?The Great Unseen, nowise the Dark Unknown.?To whom unwittingly did he aspire?In wilderness, where bitter was his need:?To whom in blindness, as an earthy seed?For light and air, he struck through crimson mire.?But not ere he upheld a forehead lamp,?And viewed an army, once the seeming doomed,?All choral in its fruitful garden camp,?The spiritual the palpable illumed.
This gift of penetration and embrace,?His prize from tidal battles lost or won,?Reveals the scheme to animate his race:?How that it is a warfare but begun;?Unending; with no Power to interpose;?No prayer, save for strength to keep his ground,?Heard of the Highest; never battle's close,?The victory complete and victor crowned:?Nor solace in defeat, save from that sense?Of strength well spent, which is the strength renewed.?In manhood must he find his competence;?In his clear mind the spiritual food:?God being there while he his fight maintains;?Throughout his mind the Master Mind being there,?While he rejects the suicide despair;?Accepts the spur of explicable pains;?Obedient to Nature, not her slave:?Her lord, if to her rigid laws he bows;?Her dust, if with his conscience he plays knave,?And bids the Passions on the Pleasures browse:-?Whence Evil in a world unread before;?That mystery to simple springs resolved.?His God the Known, diviner to adore,?Shows Nature's savage riddles kindly solved.?Inconscient, insensitive, she reigns?In iron laws, though rapturous fair her face.?Back to the primal brute shall he retrace?His path, doth he permit to force her chains?A soft Persuader coursing through his veins,?An icy Huntress stringing to the chase:?What one the flash disdains;?What one so gives it grace.
But is he rightly manful in her eyes,?A splendid bloodless knight to gain the skies,?A blood-hot son of Earth by all her signs,?Desireing and desireable he shines;?As peaches, that have caught the sun's uprise?And kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines.?Earth fills him with her juices, without fear?That she will cast him drunken down the steeps.?All woman is she to this man most dear;?He sows for bread, and she in spirit reaps:?She conscient, she sensitive, in him;?With him enwound, his brave ambition hers:?By him humaner made; by his keen spurs?Pricked to race past the pride in giant limb,?Her crazy adoration of big thews,?Proud in her primal sons, when crags they hurled,?Were thunder spitting lightnings on the world?In daily deeds, and she their evening Muse.
This man, this hero, works not to destroy;?This godlike--as the rock in ocean stands; -?He of the myriad eyes, the myriad hands?Creative; in his edifice has joy.?How strength may serve for purity is shown?When he himself can scourge to make it clean.?Withal his pitch of pride would not disown?A sober world that walks the balanced mean?Between its tempters, rarely overthrown:?And such at times his army's march has been.
Near is he to great Nature in the thought?Each changing Season intimately saith,?That nought save apparition knows the death;?To the God-lighted mind of man 'tis nought.?She counts not loss a word of any weight;?It may befal his passions and his greeds?To lose their treasures, like the vein that bleeds,?But life gone breathless will she reinstate.
Close on the heart of Earth his bosom beats,?When he the mandate lodged in it obeys,?Alive to breast a future wrapped in haze,?Strike camp, and onward, like the wind's cloud-fleets.?Unresting she, unresting he, from change?To change, as rain of cloud, as fruit of rain;?She feels her blood-tree throbbing in her grain,?Yet skyward branched, with loftier mark and range.
No miracle the sprout of wheat from clod,?She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute;?But he, the flower at head and soil at root,?Is miracle, guides he the brute to God.?And that way seems he bound; that way the road,?With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone,?Wearifully through forest-tracts unsown,?He travels, urged by some internal goad.
Dares he behold the thing he is,