Children of the Night






Octaves

       I
     To get at the eternal strength of things,
     And fearlessly to make strong songs of it,
     Is, to my mind, the mission of that man
     The world would call a poet.  He may sing
     But roughly, and withal ungraciously;
     But if he touch to life the one right chord
     Wherein God's music slumbers, and awake
     To truth one drowsed ambition, he sings well.
       II
     We thrill too strangely at the master's touch;
     We shrink too sadly from the larger self
     Which for its own completeness agitates
     And undetermines us; we do not feel —
     We dare not feel it yet — the splendid shame
     Of uncreated failure; we forget,
     The while we groan, that God's accomplishment
     Is always and unfailingly at hand.
       III
     To mortal ears the plainest word may ring
     Fantastic and unheard-of, and as false
     And out of tune as ever to our own
     Did ring the prayers of man-made maniacs;
     But if that word be the plain word of Truth,
     It leaves an echo that begets itself,
     Persistent in itself and of itself,
     Regenerate, reiterate, replete.
       IV
     Tumultuously void of a clean scheme
     Whereon to build, whereof to formulate,
     The legion life that riots in mankind
     Goes ever plunging upward, up and down,
     Most like some crazy regiment at arms,
     Undisciplined of aught but Ignorance,
     And ever led resourcelessly along
     To brainless carnage by drunk trumpeters.
       V
     To me the groaning of world-worshippers
     Rings like a lonely music played in hell
     By one with art enough to cleave the walls
     Of heaven with his cadence, but without
     The wisdom or the will to comprehend
     The strangeness of his own perversity,
     And all without the courage to deny
     The profit and the pride of his defeat.
       VI
     While we are drilled in error, we are lost
     Alike to truth and usefulness.  We think
     We are great warriors now, and we can brag
     Like Titans; but the world is growing young,
     And we, the fools of time, are growing with it: —
     We do not fight to-day, we only die;
     We are too proud of death, and too ashamed
     Of God, to know enough to be alive.
       VII
     There is one battle-field whereon we fall
     Triumphant and unconquered; but, alas!
     We are too fleshly fearful of ourselves
     To fight there till our days are whirled and blurred
     By sorrow, and the ministering wheels
     Of anguish take us eastward, where the clouds
     Of human gloom are lost against the gleam
     That shines on Thought's impenetrable mail.
       VIII
     When we shall hear no more the cradle-songs
     Of ages — when the timeless hymns of Love
     Defeat them and outsound them — we shall know
     The rapture of that large release which all
     Right science comprehends; and we shall read,
     With unoppressed and unoffended eyes,
     That record of All-Soul whereon God writes
     In everlasting runes the truth of Him.
       IX
     The guerdon of new childhood is repose: —
     Once he has read the primer of right thought,
     A man may claim between two smithy strokes
     Beatitude enough to realize
     God's parallel completeness in the vague
     And incommensurable excellence
     That equitably uncreates itself
     And makes a whirlwind of the Universe.
       X
     There is no loneliness: — no matter where
     We go, nor whence we come, nor what good friends
     Forsake us in the seeming, we are all
     At one with a complete companionship;
     And though forlornly joyless be the ways
     We travel, the compensate spirit-gleams
     Of Wisdom shaft the darkness here and there,
     Like scattered lamps in unfrequented streets.
       XI
     When one that you and I had all but sworn
     To be the purest thing God ever made
     Bewilders us until at last it seems
     An angel has come back restigmatized, —
     Faith wavers, and we wonder what there is
     On earth to make us faithful any more,
     But never are quite wise enough to know
     The wisdom that is in that wonderment.
       XII
     Where does a dead man go? —  The dead man dies;
     But the free life that would no longer feed
     On fagots of outburned and shattered flesh
     Wakes to a thrilled invisible advance,
     Unchained (or fettered else) of memory;
     And when the dead man goes it seems to me
     'T were better for us all to do away
     With weeping, and be glad that he is gone.
       XIII
     Still through the dusk of dead, blank-legended,
     And unremunerative years we search
     To get where life begins, and still we groan
     Because we do not find the living spark
     Where no spark ever was; and thus we die,
     Still searching, like poor old astronomers
     Who totter off to bed and go to sleep,
     To dream of untriangulated stars.
       XIV
     With conscious eyes not yet sincere enough
     To pierce the glimmered cloud that fluctuates
     Between me and the glorifying light
     That screens itself with knowledge, I discern
     The searching rays of wisdom that reach through
     The mist of shame's infirm credulity,
     And infinitely wonder if hard words
     Like mine have any message for the dead.
       XV
     I grant you friendship is a royal thing,
     But none shall ever know that royalty
     For what it is till he has realized
     His best friend in himself.  'T is then, perforce,
     That man's unfettered faith indemnifies
     Of its own conscious freedom the old shame,
     And love's revealed infinitude supplants
     Of its own wealth and wisdom the old scorn.
       XVI
     Though the sick beast infect us, we are fraught
     Forever with indissoluble Truth,
     Wherein redress reveals itself divine,
     Transitional, transcendent.  Grief and loss,
     Disease and desolation, are the dreams
     Of wasted excellence; and every dream
     Has in it something of an ageless fact
     That flouts deformity and laughs at years.
       XVII
     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.

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