New Poems | Page 9

years?The reflex just appears,?But thine own bosom's year, still circling round?In ample and in ampler gyre?Toward the far completion, wherewith crowned,?Love unconsumed shall chant in his own furnace-fire.?How many trampled and deciduous joys?Enrich thy soul for joys deciduous still,?Before the distance shall fulfil?Cyclic unrest with solemn equipoise!?Happiness is the shadow of things past,?Which fools still take for that which is to be!?And not all foolishly:?For all the past, read true, is prophecy,?And all the firsts are hauntings of some Last,?And all the springs are flash-lights of one Spring.?Then leaf, and flower, and falless fruit?Shall hang together on the unyellowing bough;?And silence shall be Music mute?For her surcharg-ed heart. Hush thou!?These things are far too sure that thou should'st dream?Thereof, lest they appear as things that seem.
Shade within shade! for deeper in the glass?Now other imaged meanings pass;?And as the man, the poet there is read.?Winter with me, alack!?Winter on every hand I find:?Soul, brain, and pulses dead;?The mind no further by the warm sense fed,?The soul weak-stirring in the arid mind,?More tearless-weak to flash itself abroad?Than the earth's life beneath the frost-scorched sod.?My lips have drought, and crack,?By laving music long unvisited.?Beneath the austere and macerating rime?Draws back constricted in its icy urns?The genial flame of Earth, and there?With torment and with tension does prepare?The lush disclosures of the vernal time.?All joys draw inward to their icy urns,?Tormented by constraining rime,?And there?With undelight and throe prepare?The bounteous efflux of the vernal time.?Nor less beneath compulsive Law?Rebuk-ed draw?The numb-ed musics back upon my heart;?Whose yet-triumphant course I know?And prevalent pulses forth shall start,?Like cataracts that with thunderous hoof charge the disbanding snow. All power is bound?In quickening refusal so;?And silence is the lair of sound;?In act its impulse to deliver,?With fluctuance and quiver?The endeavouring thew grows rigid;?Strong?From its retracted coil strikes the resilient song.
Giver of spring,?And song, and every young new thing!?Thou only seest in me, so stripped and bare,?The lyric secret waiting to be born,?The patient term allowed?Before it stretch and flutteringly unfold?Its rumpled webs of amethyst-freaked, diaphanous gold.?And what hard task abstracts me from delight,?Filling with hopeless hope and dear despair?The still-born day and parch-ed fields of night,?That my old way of song, no longer fair,?For lack of serene care,?Is grown a stony and a weed-choked plot,?Thou only know'st aright,?Thou only know'st, for I know not.?How many songs must die that this may live!?And shall this most rash hope and fugitive,?Fulfilled with beauty and with might?In days whose feet are rumorous on the air,?Make me forget to grieve?For songs which might have been, nor ever were??Stern the denial, the travail slow,?The struggling wall will scantly grow:?And though with that dread rite of sacrifice?Ordained for during edifice,?How long, how long ago!?Into that wall which will not thrive?I build myself alive,?Ah, who shall tell me will the wall uprise??Thou wilt not tell me, who dost only know!?Yet still in mind I keep,?He which observes the wind shall hardly sow,?He which regards the clouds shall hardly reap.?Thine ancient way! I give,?Nor wit if I receive;?Risk all, who all would gain: and blindly. Be it so.
'And blindly,' said I?--No!?That saying I unsay: the wings?Hear I not in praevenient winnowings?Of coming songs, that lift my hair and stir it??What winds with music wet do the sweet storm foreshow!?Utter stagnation?Is the solstitial slumber of the spirit,?The blear and blank negation of all life:?But these sharp questionings mean strife, and strife?Is the negation of negation.?The thing from which I turn my troubled look?Fearing the gods' rebuke;?That perturbation putting glory on,?As is the golden vortex in the West?Over the foundered sun;?That--but low breathe it, lest the Nemesis?Unchild me, vaunting this--?Is bliss, the hid, hugged, swaddled bliss!?O youngling Joy carest!?That on my now first-mothered breast?Pliest the strange wonder of thine infant lip,?What this aghast surprise of keenest panging,?Wherefrom I blench, and cry thy soft mouth rest??Ah hold, withhold, and let the sweet mouth slip!?So, with such pain, recoils the woolly dam,?Unused, affrighted, from her yeanling lamb:?I, one with her in cruel fellowship,?Marvel what unmaternal thing I am.
Nature, enough! within thy glass?Too many and too stern the shadows pass.?In this delighted season, flaming?For thy resurrection-feast,?Ah, more I think the long ensepulture cold,?Than stony winter rolled?From the unsealed mouth of the holy East;?The snowdrop's saintly stoles less heed?Than the snow-cloistered penance of the seed.?'Tis the weak flesh reclaiming?Against the ordinance?Which yet for just the accepting spirit scans.?Earth waits, and patient heaven,?Self-bonded God doth wait?Thrice-promulgated bans?Of his fair nuptial-date.?And power is man's,?With that great word of 'wait,'?To still the sea of tears,?And shake the iron heart of Fate.?In that one word is strong?An else, alas, much-mortal song;?With sight to pass the frontier of all spheres,?And voice which does my sight such wrong.
Not without fortitude I wait?The dark majestical ensuit?Of destiny, nor peevish rate?Calm-knowledged Fate.?I, that no part have in the time's