Sister Songs | Page 6

and sunders,
Grapples and thrusts
apart; endears, estranges;
- The dragon to its own Hesperides -
Is
gated under slow-revolving changes,
Manifold doors of heavy-hinged
years.
So once, ere Heaven's eyes were filled with wonders
To see
Laughter rise from Tears,
Lay in beauty not yet mighty,
Conched in
translucencies,
The antenatal Aphrodite,
Caved magically under
magic seas;
Caved dreamlessly beneath the dreamful seas.
"Whose sex is in thy soul!"
What think we of thy soul?
Which has
no parts, and cannot grow,
Unfurled not from an embryo;
Born of
full stature, lineal to control;
And yet a pigmy's yoke must undergo.

Yet must keep pace and tarry, patient, kind,
With its unwilling
scholar, the dull, tardy mind;
Must be obsequious to the body's
powers,
Whose low hands mete its paths, set ope and close its ways;
Must do obeisance to the days,
And wait the little pleasure of the
hours;
Yea, ripe for kingship, yet must be
Captive in statuted
minority!
So is all power fulfilled, as soul in thee.

So still the ruler
by the ruled takes rule,
And wisdom weaves itself i' the loom o' the
fool.
The splendent sun no splendour can display,
Till on gross
things he dash his broken ray,
From cloud and tree and flower
re-tossed in prismy spray.
Did not obstruction's vessel hem it in,

Force were not force, would spill itself in vain
We know the Titan by
his champed chain.
Stay is heat's cradle, it is rocked therein,
And by
check's hand is burnished into light;
If hate were none, would love

burn lowlier bright?
God's Fair were guessed scarce but for opposite
sin;
Yea, and His Mercy, I do think it well,
Is flashed back from the
brazen gates of Hell.
The heavens decree
All power fulfil itself as
soul in thee.
For supreme Spirit subject was to clay,
And Law from
its own servants learned a law,
And Light besought a lamp unto its
way,
And Awe was reined in awe,
At one small house of Nazareth;

And Golgotha
Saw Breath to breathlessness resign its breath,

And Life do homage for its crown to death.
So is all power, as soul in thee increased!
But, knowing this, in
knowledge's despite
I fret against the law severe that stains
Thy
spirit with eclipse;
When--as a nymph's carven head sweet water
drips,
For others oozing so the cool delight
Which cannot steep her
stiffened mouth of stone -
Thy nescient lips repeat maternal strains.

Memnonian lips!
Smitten with singing from thy mother's east,
And
murmurous with music not their own:
Nay, the lips flexile, while the
mind alone
A passionless statue stands.
Oh, pardon, innocent one!

Pardon at thine unconscious hands!
"Murmurous with music not
their own," I say?
And in that saying how do I missay,
When from
the common sands
Of poorest common speech of common day

Thine accents sift the golden musics out!
And ah, we poets, I
misdoubt,
Are little more than thou!
We speak a lesson taught we
know not how,
And what it is that from us flows
The hearer better
than the utterer knows.
Thou canst foreshape thy word;
The poet is not lord
Of the next
syllable may come
With the returning pendulum;

And what he
plans to-day in song,
To-morrow sings it in another tongue.
Where
the last leaf fell from his bough,
He knows not if a leaf shall grow,

Where he sows he doth not reap,
He reapeth where he did not sow;

He sleeps, and dreams forsake his sleep
To meet him on his waking
way.
Vision will mate him not by law and vow:
Disguised in life's
most hodden-grey,
By the most beaten road of everyday
She waits

him, unsuspected and unknown.
The hardest pang whereon
He lays
his mutinous head may be a Jacob's stone.
In the most iron crag his
foot can tread
A Dream may strew her bed,
And suddenly his limbs
entwine,
And draw him down through rock as sea-nymphs might
through brine. But, unlike those feigned temptress-ladies who
In
guerdon of a night the lover slew,
When the embrace has failed, the
rapture fled,
Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead!
And,
though he cherisheth
The babe most strangely born from out her
death,
Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe, -
It is not she!
Yet, even as the air is rumorous of fray
Before the first shafts of the
sun's onslaught
From gloom's black harness splinter,
And Summer
move on Winter
With the trumpet of the March, and the pennon of
the May;
As gesture outstrips thought;
So, haply, toyer with
ethereal strings!
Are thy blind repetitions of high things
The
murmurous gnats whose aimless hoverings
Reveal song's summer in
the air;
The outstretched hand, which cannot thought declare,
Yet is
thought's harbinger.
These strains the way for thine own strains
prepare;
We feel the music moist upon this breeze,
And hope the
congregating poesies.
Sundered yet by thee from us
Wait, with wild
eyes luminous,
All thy winged things that are to be;
They flit
against thee, Gate of Ivory!
They clamour on the portress Destiny, -

"Set her wide, so we may issue through!
Our vans are quick for
that they have to do
Suffer still your young desire;
Your plumes but
bicker at the tips with fire,
Tarry their kindling; they will beat the
higher.
And thou, bright girl, not long shalt thou repeat

Idly the
music from thy mother caught;
Not vainly has she wrought,
Not
vainly from the cloudward-jetting turret
Of her