The Unknown Eros | Page 8

of the waves?That mount to 'whelm the freedom which enslaves.?Forward! bad corpses turn into good dung,?To feed strange futures beautiful and young.?Forward! God speed ye down the damn'd decline,?And grant ye the Fool's true good, in abject ruin's gulf?As the Wise see him so to see himself!
Ah, Land once mine,?That seem'd to me too sweetly wise,?Too sternly fair for aught that dies,?Past is thy proud and pleasant state,?That recent date?When, strong and single, in thy sovereign heart,?The thrones of thinking, hearing, sight,?The cunning hand, the knotted thew?Of lesser powers that heave and hew,?And each the smallest beneficial part,?And merest pore of breathing, beat,?Full and complete,?The great pulse of thy generous might,?Equal in inequality,?That soul of joy in low and high;?When not a churl but felt the Giant's heat,?Albeit he simply call'd it his,?Flush in his common labour with delight,?And not a village-Maiden's kiss?But was for this?More sweet,?And not a sorrow but did lightlier sigh,?And for its private self less greet,?The whilst that other so majestic self stood by!?Integrity so vast could well afford?To wear in working many a stain,?To pillory the cobbler vain?And license madness in a lord.?On that were all men well agreed;?And, if they did a thing,?Their strength was with them in their deed,?And from amongst them came the shout of a king!
But, once let traitor coward meet,?Not Heaven itself can keep its feet.?Come knave who said to dastard, 'Lo,?The Deluge!' which but needed 'No!'?For all the Atlantic's threatening roar,?If men would bravely understand,?Is softly check'd for evermore?By a firm bar of sand.?But, dastard listening knave, who said,?''Twere juster were the Giant dead,?That so yon bawlers may not miss?To vote their own pot-belly'd bliss,'?All that is past!?We saw the slaying, and were not aghast.?But ne'er a sun, on village Groom and Bride,?Albeit they guess not how it is,?At Easter or at Whitsuntide,?But shines less gay for this!
XVIII. THE TWO DESERTS.
Not greatly moved with awe am I?To learn that we may spy?Five thousand firmaments beyond our own.?The best that's known?Of the heavenly bodies does them credit small.?View'd close, the Moon's fair ball?Is of ill objects worst,?A corpse in Night's highway, naked, fire-scarr'd, accurst;?And now they tell?That the Sun is plainly seen to boil and burst?Too horribly for hell.?So, judging from these two,?As we must do,?The Universe, outside our living Earth,?Was all conceiv'd in the Creator's mirth,?Forecasting at the time Man's spirit deep,?To make dirt cheap.?Put by the Telescope!?Better without it man may see,?Stretch'd awful in the hush'd midnight,?The ghost of his eternity.?Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eye?The things which near us lie,?Till Science rapturously hails,?In the minutest water-drop,?A torment of innumerable tails.?These at the least do live.?But rather give?A mind not much to pry?Beyond our royal-fair estate?Betwixt these deserts blank of small and great.?Wonder and beauty our own courtiers are,?Pressing to catch our gaze,?And out of obvious ways?Ne'er wandering far.
XIX. CREST AND GULF.
Much woe that man befalls?Who does not run when sent, nor come when Heaven calls;?But whether he serve God, or his own whim,?Not matters, in the end, to any one but him;?And he as soon?Shall map the other side of the Moon,?As trace what his own deed,?In the next chop of the chance gale, shall breed.?This he may know:?His good or evil seed?Is like to grow,?For its first harvest, quite to contraries:?The father wise?Has still the hare-brain'd brood;?'Gainst evil, ill example better works than good;?The poet, fanning his mild flight?At a most keen and arduous height,?Unveils the tender heavens to horny human eyes?Amidst ingenious blasphemies.?Wouldst raise the poor, in Capuan luxury sunk??The Nation lives but whilst its Lords are drunk!?Or spread Heav'n's partial gifts o'er all, like dew??The Many's weedy growth withers the gracious Few!?Strange opposites, from those, again, shall rise.?Join, then, if thee it please, the bitter jest?Of mankind's progress; all its spectral race?Mere impotence of rest,?The heaving vain of life which cannot cease from self,?Crest altering still to gulf?And gulf to crest?In endless chace,?That leaves the tossing water anchor'd in its place!?Ah, well does he who does but stand aside,?Sans hope or fear,?And marks the crest and gulf in station sink and rear,?And prophesies 'gainst trust in such a tide:?For he sometimes is prophet, heavenly taught,?Whose message is that he sees only nought.
Nathless, discern'd may be,?By listeners at the doors of destiny,?The fly-wheel swift and still?Of God's incessant will,?Mighty to keep in bound, tho' powerless to quell,?The amorous and vehement drift of man's herd to hell.
XX. 'LET BE!'
Ah, yes; we tell the good and evil trees?By fruits: But how tell these??Who does not know?That good and ill?Are done in secret still,?And that which shews is verily but show!?How high of heart is one, and one how sweet of mood:?But not all height is holiness,?Nor every sweetness good;?And grace will sometimes lurk where who could guess??The Critic of his kind,?Dealing to each