It is they who paint themselves upon our hearts
In their own lights and darknesses, not we.
One stream of light is to us from above,
And that is that we see by, light of God.
We do not make our thoughts; they grow in us
Like grain in wood: the growth is of the skies,
Which are of nature, nature is of God.
The world is full of glorious liknesses.
The poet’s power is to sort these out,
And to make music from the common strings
With which the world is strung; to make the dumb
Earth utter heavenly harmony, and draw
Life clear and sweet and harmless as spring water,
Welling its way through flowers. Without faith,
Illimitable faith, strong as a state’s
In its own might, in God, no bard can be.
All things are signs of other and of nature.
It is at night we see heaven moveth, and
A darkness thick with suns. The thoughts we think
Subsist, the same in God as stars in Heaven.
And as these specks of light will prove great worlds
When we approach them sometime free from flesh,
So too our thoughts will become magnified
To mind-like things immortal. And as space
Is but a property of God, wherein
Is laid all matter, other attributes
May be the infinite homes of mind and soul.
And thoughts rise from our souls, as from the sea
The clouds sublimed in Heaven. The cloud is cold,
Although ablaze with lightning—though it shine
At all points like a constellation; so
We live not to ourselves, our work is life;
In bright end ceaseless labor as a star
Which shineth unto all worlds, but itself.
And were this friend and bard of whom thou speakest,
And she whom he did love, happy together?
True love is ever tragic, grievous, grave.
Bards and their beauties are like double stars,
One in their bright effect.
Whose light is love.
Or is it poesie thou meanest?
Both:
For love is poesie—it doth create;
From fading features, dim soul, doubtful heart,
And this world’s wretched happiness, a life
Which is as near to Heaven as are the stars.
They parted; and she named Heaven’s judgment-seat
As their next place of meeting: and ’twas kept
By her, at least, so far that no where else
Could it be made until the day of doom.
So soon men’s passion passes! yea, it sinks
Like foam into the troubled wave which bore it.
Merciful God! let me entreat Thy mercy!
I have seen all the woes of men—pain, death,
Remorse, and worldy ruin; they are little
Weighed with the woe of woman when forsaken
By him she loved and trusted. Hear, too, thou!
Lady of Heaven, Mother of God and man,
Who made the world His brother, one with God—
Maid-mother! mould of God, who wrought in thee
By model as He doth in the world’s womb,
So that the universe is great with God—
Thou in whom God did deify Himself,
Betaking him into mortality,
As in Thy Son He took it into Him,
And from the temporal and eternal made
Of the soul-world one same and ever God!
Oh, for the sake of thine own womanhood,
Pray away aught of evil from her soul,
And take her out of anguish unto thee,
Always, as thou didst this one!
Who doth not
Believe that lat he loveth cannot die?
There is no mote of death in thine eye’s beams
To hint of dust, or darkness, or decay;
Eclipse upon eclipse, and death on death;
No! immortality sits mirrored there
Like a fair face long looking on itself;
Yet thou shalt lie in death’s angelic garb
As in a dream of dress, my beautiful!
The worm shall trail across thine unsunned sweets,
And fatten him on that men pined to death for;
Yea, have a further knowledge of thy beauties
Than ever did thy best-loved lover dream of.
It is unkind to think of me in this wise.
Surely the stars must feel that they are bright,
In beauty, number, nature infinite;
And the strong sense we have of God in us
Makes me believe my soul can never cease.
The temples perish, but the God still lives.
It is therefore that I love thee; for that when
The fiery perfection of the world,
The sun, shall be a shadow and burnt out,
There is an impulse to eternity
Raised by this moment’s love.
I pray it may!
Time is the crescent shape to bounded eye
Of what is ever perfect unto God.
The bosom heaves to Heaven and to the stars;
Our very hearts throb upwards, our eyes look;
Our aspirations always are divine:
Yet is it in the gloom of soul we see
Most of the God about us, as at night.
For then the soul, like the mother-maid of Christ,
Is overshadowed by the Holy Spirit;
And in Creative darkness doth conceive
Its humanized Divinity of life.
Think then God shows his face to us no less
In spiritual darkness than in light.
But of thy friend? I would hear more of him.
Perhaps much happiness in friendship made
Amends for his love’s sorrows.
Ask me not.
But loved he never after? Came there none
To roll the stone from his sepulchral heart,
And sit in it an angel?
Ah, my life!
My more than life, my immortality!
Both man and kind belie their nature
When they are not kind: and thy words are kind,
And beautiful, and loving like thyself;
Thine eye and thy tongue’s tone, and all that speak
Thy soul, are like it. There’s a something in
The shape of harps as though they had been made
By music: beauty’s the effect of soul,
And he of whom thou askest loved again.
Could’st thou have loved one who was unlike men?
Whose heart was wrinkled long before his brow?
Who would have cursed himself if he had dared
Tempt God to ratify his curse in fire:
And yet with whom to look on beauty was
A need, a thirst, a passion?
Yes, I think
I could have loved him: but, no—not unless
He was like thee; unless he had been thee.
Tell me, what was it rendered him so wretched
At heart?
I will not tell thee.
But tell me
How and on what he wrote, this friend of thine?
Love, mirth, woe, pleasure, was in tum his theme,
And the great good which beauty does the soul;
And the God-made necessity of things.
And like that noble knight in olden tale,
Who
