The Singing Man | Page 3

did make,
And Man himself hath marred?
It sounds!--And may the anguish of that birth
Seize on the world; and
may all shelters fail,
Till we behold new Heaven and new Earth
Through the rent Temple-vail!
When the high-tides that threaten near
and far
To sweep away our guilt before the sky,--
Flooding the
waste of this dishonored Star,
Cleanse, and o'erwhelm, and cry!--
Cry, from the deep of world-accusing waves,
With longing more than
all since Light began,
Above the nations,--underneath the graves,--
'Give back the Singing Man!'
THE TREES
I
Now, in the thousandth year,
When April's near,
Now comes it that

the great ones of the earth
Take all their mirth
Away with them, far
off, to orchard-places,--
Nor they nor Solomon arrayed like these,--

To sun themselves at ease;
To breathe of wind-swept spaces;
To see
some miracle of leafy graces;--
To catch the out-flowing rapture of
the trees.
Considering the lilies.
--Yes. And when
Shall they consider Men?
(_O showering May-clad tree,
Bear yet awhile with me._)
II
For now at last, they have beheld the trees.
Lo, even these!--
The
men of sounding laughter and low fears;
The women of light laughter,
and no tears;
The great ones of the town.
And those, of most
renown,
That once sold doves,--now grown so pennywise
To
bargain with forlorner merchandise,--
They buy and sell, they buy
and sell again,
The life-long toil of men.
Worn with their market
strife to dispossess
The blind,--the fatherless,
They too go forth, to
breathe of budding trees,
And woods with beckoning wonders new
unfurled.
Yes, even these:
The money-changers and the Pharisees;

The rulers of the darkness of this world.
(_O choiring Summer tree,
Bear yet awhile with me._)
III
For now, behold their heart's desire is thrall
To simpleness.--O new
delight, unguessed,
In very rest!
And precious beyond all,
A
garden-place, a garden with a wall!
To the green earth! All bountiful
to bless
Hearts sickening with excess.
To the green earth, whose
blithe replenishments
Shall fresh the jaded sense!
To the green
earth, the dust-corrupted soul
Returns to be made whole.
For now it
comes indeed,
They will go forth, all they, to see a reed
So shaken
by the wind.
Men are no longer blind
To aught, save human kind.

(_O mellowing August tree,
Bear yet awhile with me._)
IV
The wonder this. For some there are no trees;
Or in the trees no
beauty and no mirth:--
Those dullest millions, pent
In life-long
banishment
From all the gifts and creatures of the earth,
Shut in the
inner darkness of the town;
Those blighted things you see,
But the
Sun sees not, at its going down:--
Warped outcasts of some human
forestry;
Blind victims of the blind,
Wreckt ones and dark of mind,

With the poor fruit, after their piteous kind.
And if you take some
Old One to the fields,
To see what Nature yields
With fullest hands
to men already free,
It well may be,
As on some indecipherable
book
The Guest will look,
With eyes too old,--too old, too dim to
see;
Too old, too old to learn;
Or to discern--
Before it slips away,

The joy of such a late half-holiday!
Proffer those starved eyes your
belated cup:
They look not up.
Too late, too late for any sky to do

Brief kindness with its blue.
And what behold they, then?
In the
shamed moment, when
Old eyes bow down again?
_Down in the night and blackness of the heart,
The drowned things
start.
And he recks nothing of the meadow air,
Because of what is
There.
Lost things of hope and sorrow without tongue:
The human
lilies, sprung
Out of the ooze, and trodden,
Even as they breathed
and clung!
Lost lilies, bruised and sodden;
Lost faces, gleaming
there,
Where misery blasphemes the sacred young!

Mute outcry,
most, of those
Small suffering hands defrauded of their rose;
Faces
the daylight shuns;
Ruinous faces of the little ones,--
Pale witness,
unaware.
Starved lips, and withering blood--
O broken in the bud!--

Blank eyes, and blighted hair._
(_O golden, golden tree!
Bear yet awhile with me._)
So is it, haply, when
Dull eyes look up, and then
Dull eyes look

down again.
Waste no vain holiday on such as these;
For them there
is no joy in blossomed trees.
V
For them there is no joy in blossomed trees.
And with what eye-shut
ease
We leave them, at the last, for company,
The Tree,
Whose
two stark boughs no springtime yet unfurled,
Ever, since time began;

Nor bloom so strange to see!--
Behold, the Man,
With His two
arms outstretched to fold the world.
_O, do you remember?--How it came to be?
Far, golden windows
gazing from the shore;
Golden ebb of daylight; heart could hold no
more:
Belovèd and Belovèd, and the sea._
_Westward the sun,--low, slow and golden;
Eastward the moon
climbed, honey-pale.
O do you remember? while our eyes were
holden,
Close, close upon us,--the Golden Sail?
Wind-swift she
came,--thing of living flame,
Sea-breathing Glory, to make the heart
afraid!
The ripples, fold on fold
Of coiling gold,
Trailing a
thousand ways
Her golden maze,
Rocked in a golden tumult, every
one,
The gondolas, the ships ..
Westward she made .....
A portent
from the sky,--gone by, gone by,
To golden, far eclipse; ...
Into the
Sun._
_Behold, a mystery
That shook to golden throbbing all the sea.
Oh,
and what needed one more wonder be
For thee and me, Belovèd?
thee and me?_
RICH MAN, POOR MAN
'_Rich man, Poor man, Beggar man, Thief,
Doctor, Lawyer,
Merchant,