Chapter 4

We lack the courage to be where we are: -- We love too much to travel on old roads, To triumph on old fields; we love too much To consecrate the magic of dead things, And yieldingly to linger by long walls Of ruin, where the ruinous moonlight That sheds a lying glory on old stones Befriends us with a wizard's enmity.

XVIII

Something as one with eyes that look below The battle-smoke to glimpse the foeman's charge, We through the dust of downward years may scan The onslaught that awaits this idiot world Where blood pays blood for nothing, and where life Pays life to madness, till at last the ports Of gilded helplessness be battered through By the still crash of salvatory steel.

XIX

To you that sit with Sorrow like chained slaves, And wonder if the night will ever come, I would say this: The night will never come, And sorrow is not always. But my words Are not enough; your eyes are not enough; The soul itself must insulate the Real, Or ever you do cherish in this life -- In this life or in any life -- repose.

XX

Like a white wall whereon forever breaks Unsatisfied the tumult of green seas, Man's unconjectured godliness rebukes With its imperial silence the lost waves Of insufficient grief. This mortal surge That beats against us now is nothing else Than plangent ignorance. Truth neither shakes Nor wavers; but the world shakes, and we shriek.

XXI

Nor jewelled phrase nor mere mellifluous rhyme Reverberates aright, or ever shall, One cadence of that infinite plain-song Which is itself all music. Stronger notes Than any that have ever touched the world Must ring to tell it -- ring like hammer-blows, Right-echoed of a chime primordial, On anvils, in the gleaming of God's forge.

XXII

The prophet of dead words defeats himself: Whoever would acknowledge and include The foregleam and the glory of the real, Must work with something else than pen and ink And painful preparation: he must work With unseen implements that have no names, And he must win withal, to do that work, Good fortitude, clean wisdom, and strong skill.

XXIII

To curse the chilled insistence of the dawn Because the free gleam lingers; to defraud The constant opportunity that lives Unchallenged in all sorrow; to forget For this large prodigality of gold That larger generosity of thought, -- These are the fleshly clogs of human greed, The fundamental blunders of mankind.

XXIV

Forebodings are the fiends of Recreance; The master of the moment, the clean seer Of ages, too securely scans what is, Ever to be appalled at what is not; He sees beyond the groaning borough lines Of Hell, God's highways gleaming, and he knows That Love's complete communion is the end Of anguish to the liberated man.

XXV

Here by the windy docks I stand alone, But yet companioned. There the vessel goes, And there my friend goes with it; but the wake That melts and ebbs between that friend and me Love's earnest is of Life's all-purposeful And all-triumphant sailing, when the ships Of Wisdom loose their fretful chains and swing Forever from the crumbled wharves of Time.

Two Quatrains

I

Unity

As eons of incalculable strife Are in the vision of one moment caught, So are the common, concrete things of life Divinely shadowed on the walls of Thought.

II

Paraphrase

We shriek to live, but no man ever lives Till he has rid the ghost of human breath; We dream to die, but no man ever dies Till he has quit the road that runs to death.

Romance

I

Boys

We were all boys, and three of us were friends; And we were more than friends, it seemed to me: -- Yes, we were more than brothers then, we three. . . . Brothers? . . . But we were boys, and there it ends.

II

James Wetherell

We never half believed the stuff They told about James Wetherell; We always liked him well enough, And always tried to use him well; But now some things have come to light, And James has vanished from our view, -- There is n't very much to write, There is n't very much to do.

The Torrent

I found a torrent falling in a glen Where the sun's light shone silvered and leaf-split; The boom, the foam, and the mad flash of it All made a magic symphony; but when I thought upon the coming of hard men To cut those patriarchal trees away, And turn to gold the silver of that spray, I shuddered. Yet a gladness now and then Did wake me to myself till I was glad In earnest, and was welcoming the time For screaming saws to sound above the chime Of idle waters, and for me to know The jealous visionings that I had had Were steps to the great place where trees and torrents go.

L'Envoi

Now in a thought, now in a shadowed word, Now in a voice that thrills eternity, Ever there comes an onward phrase to me Of some transcendent music I have heard; No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered, No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory, But a glad strain of some still symphony That no proud mortal touch has ever stirred.

There is no music in the world like this, No character wherewith to set it down, No kind of instrument to make it sing. No kind of instrument? Ah, yes, there is! And after time and place are overthrown, God's touch will keep its one chord quivering.