A Reading of Life, and Other Poems | Page 5

agony, misread for those
Imprisoned Powers warring
unappeased,
The ghost of his black adversary rose,
To smother light,
shut heaven, show earth diseased.
And long with him was wrestling

ere emerged
A mind to read in him the reflex shade
Of its fierce
torment; this way, that way urged;
By craven compromises 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