Shadows Which Haunt 
the Sun-Rain 

BY JOHN COLLIER 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/shadowswhichhaunOOcoll 



Shadows 

Which Haunt the 

Sun-Rain 



BY JOHN gOLLIER 
MCMXVII 






COPYRIGHT 1917 BY JOHN COLLIER 



©CI.A494048 

MAR 13 1918 



■ Uf 






INDEX 

T h e Golden Boo gh 9 

The Meaning of God 13 

Life Under Cloud : A Fragment 15 

Persephone 16 

To a Human Life 20 

The Silent Hound 21 

To Aalesund 23 

The Dunes 25 

The Christ 27 

The Festival 29 

Human Love 31 

The Soul Ministrant 32 

The Doctrinaire 33 

To Havelock Ellis 34 

To One in Distress 34 

Autumn and Time 36 

A Watch and a Vision 38 

Blue Flowers in October . 39 

Midsummer 40 

France 42 

Ruined Land 43 

De Profundis 48 

A World's Loss 49 

Life in the Milleniums 50 

The Challenge 51 

The Fulfillment of April 54 

The Will of God 55 

te Shadows Which Haunt the Sun- Rain" . . . 57 

The Voice of Unaka 58 

The Passage 60 

Swinburne's " Tristam of Lyonesse" . . . . 61 

The Debt of Love . 61 

Eternity 62 

The Infinite Desire 65 



Forget-me-not 7 , 

Oh I Cannot Leave the Valley 7- 

The Immutable Tryst "3 

Impossibility 7 6 

The Stoical Hope . 76 

The Last Chord 7 8 

Dedication 79 



'LET MEN REALIZE THAT THEIR MOST 
COMPREHENSIVE DUTY, IN THIS OR 
OTHER WORLDS, IS INTENSITY OF SPIRI- 
TUAL LIFE." FREDERIC W. H. MYER< 



THE GOLDEN BOUGH 

But if in your mind be such a deep desire, so great a passion, 
learn how in a shadowy tree there lurks a golden bough, golden 
in leaf and pliant twig. All the grove hides it; dells of sha- 
dow close it in. Bui if that bough be rent away, another suc- 
ceeds it, all of gold; and the branch breaks into foliage of gold. 

Into the hidden earth ?io man may go, but only he who has 
plucked from the tree its golden bough. For Proserpi?ie has 
ordaitied, it shall be brought to her; it is her own peculiar 
offering. — Virgil: dELneid, VI, 124. 

THERE is a waste of mountains, with inhabited 
valleys and with forests burnt and torn, but the 
calm of eternal years, on unfrequented lawns of the 
far smoky domes, is unchanged as of yore. There many 
Zarathustras will go, in years which are to be. For on 
those thousand summits, no fiery rain of the lumberer can 
ever fall. No gash of the digger for gold, or murk of foun- 
dries, will ever claim these sanctuaries. And their multi- 
tude, and thunder and fluctuating chill of summertime, 
and their humility of enchanting sameness, from hundreds 
of peaks to hundreds more, guards them from hurrying 
summer crowds. Shepherds will know these lawns, and 
kine will trample them, for yet a million years, and the 
sudden gush from sub-tropical lowlands will touch with 
thrilling purple and red the arctic flora in their cloudy 
blue, and the crowded and gnome-like beech and tortured 
oak-boughs will cry their cry of Terra del Fuego, and 
the flying menacing cloud will speed as combers do around 
the Horn. Forever and ever, most olden Mountains; 
builders of a continent in your silent invisible way, ve 
will be tombs of man when all his course is run. 

There the Golden Branch is shown. It is shown to all, 
who go with eyes to see. 

When out from their quiet dream, their monotony of 
frozen waves between verge and verge, their hum of bees 



or dropping of dew, there flames the Golden Bough, none 
who are truly living ever fail to see. When from the 
cumulus, miles upon miles in chasmic air, one sword of 
lightning falls : when sunrise rolls, a concentered infinity, 
on the eastward marge : when the last dim throne in the 
west becomes a shade : or when the Milky Way holds its 
arc from bound to bound: then, to the Golden Bough, I 
have seen an old, pitifully enduring Negro dumbly turn. 
I have seen mountain-girls thrilled as with flame by that 
Golden Bough, and three-year children made to dance as 
the sheep dance, solitary and ecstatically, on the Hebrid 
hills. I knew a man, who came from the troughs of a city, 
from the brothels, whose wild oats, sown too long, had 
bred a confining growth around his soul. He thrilled, at 
the sundown showing of the Golden Bough ; he did not 
renounce or weep, and he gloriously remembered, and 
(for this was his way) he passed, for all one windy night, 
through the whipping of mighty sounds around blazing 
boughs, to that place where, until death, he may not go 
again. < Deeper than bloom of virtue or stain of sin , : 
such was the Golden Bough to this elder friend, unmet 
since boyhood long ago. 

What is the Golden Bough? Is it not the magnetic 
destiny of all that is known ? It is no more One than souls 
are, in all the maze that we know as Life and all the maze 
that we think we do not know. Yet in human experience, 
myriadly involved, it is indeed One, and they who plumb 
the Soul, and they who trace World and Race as con- 
straining, unifying powers, shall meet through the Golden 
Bough. The Symbol it is, behind the desirous symbols of 
finite dream; the Will, burning unutterably toward us, 
impassioned personal wills, from past the immanent veils of 
cosmic law. Tragic, and irreducible, and unique, and 
glad, the Golden Bough flames on mortal brows, and God 
in His deeps is illumed. Earth, our titan Mother, lives 
where we are faded toward the eternal Golden Bough. 
In cathedral orioles it glows, on domes and obelisks of the 
sundered years; and on these mountains, gone into mystic 



rememberance from Thebes and Louvain, gone into death- 
less life, the Golden Bough more deeply blooms. 

To save the race; to clasp with ever widening arms a 
life ever gone; to fulfil desire, like the swiftness of flame, 
or tortuously by subtle sublimation ; to transmit, through 
art and creed and through collective forms, some mightier 
Life which comes from underneath dream : such, O Thou 
Golden Branch in Shadow, is the ageless quest for Thee. 
So in dawn-hours, of childhood and the earthly prime, so 
haply amid vanished dews of an earlier, dimmer dark, Thy 
garden grew: Thy garden, O Golden Bough, Thy close 
in the impenetrable wild yet near at hand for all. Through 
life in its battling inward ways, through the ashes and 
hates and dreams of the being and the clan, lead burdened 
roads, unchartered forever yet fateful, irretrievable, to Thy 
mystic close. But here, O Golden Bough, on mount- 
ains without a name save the euphonies of a perished race, 
where lesser fancy has not builded its walls or weaved its 
veils, where utility, resting upon the deeps, is the law of 
all of human life that abides : here, on the dim Unakas, the 
Nantahalas and Snowbird and Great Smoky mountains, 
surely the flash of Thy destiny, the moan and far thunder- 
call and plover- cry of Thy desire are supernally known, 

O Golden Bough, only our lives, only what passes 
ordered words and is the elusive and pain-haunted lovely- 
shadow within any form, can hint of Thee. So is Thy 
revelation a herdsman whomof our dreams and familiar 
virtues, our irreducible crimes and hopes, are the following 
sheep forever. To Thee, fleeing from the world, we 
return; to Thee, through its workways, its deserts and 
pastures, we go. Love is Thy mightiest sign ; love insati- 
ate, finite love, finite love in deed. On what far skies, 
divine with bloom of Thee, our groping or battling shad- 
ows are cast — this we may not yet know. We are more 
than we know; and the roots of these mountains and of 
these mountain-ages, even like the fleeing intensity of their 
passing hour, are near to our roots and haply are one with 



our piteous intensities. And He who goes and She who 
goes down the mystic steeps of tomorrow : heart of our 
heart, flesh of our flesh, soul of our soul: death of our 
death, life of our life : child of the dark womb of our 
tomorrow, breath of the marriage- dream : they are ot 
Thee, O Golden Bough; Thou art these; on us Thou 
waitest, with them ; unto us Thou comest. For them, 
for us, for Thee, these far-heaved mountains are not a 
tomb; not a dead temple, nor alien illusion turned to a 
symbol ; no cosmic waste or sphynx with claws beside the 
breast. To Thine, to us, to Thee, they are — our home! 

I would call them the Loved Home of Thee. Not I can 
breathe, what only genius would know to speak, the word 
for many who are wordless and lowly, whose clan is jour- 
neying fast toward these perished ones that loved for long 
this continental home ; whose tradition and hope are dying 
like dew in the blast of a fiercer transition- day. But genius 
O Golden Bough, is Thine own propulsive revelation; it 
is ours but through Thee; humanity shall woo it, as Thy 
love inhabiting the twilight verges and the dreams of night 
was wooed from darkness to day, shall snare it as Thy 
kindred lightning was willingly snared, shall dig it from 
the undepletable mines of Thy human ore, as the awful 
fountains or cataract- declensions of measurable Being are 
dug from radium mines. On mightier human emprise in 
the years that shall be, Thine abounding genius waits. 
From it, no pathetic identity, no sundered passion will be 
lost ; the crumbled years are new, in that Place of its home. 
Still there is love : O Golden Bough, here on Thy moun- 
tains, and on the mountains of Thy human way. And O, 
in Whose shadow alone, of limitation, of unwitholding joy, 
of pain or disillusionment or courageous lowliness, Thy 
light abides: Thou, though witholding genius, wilt even 
receive love : from these, Thy children, these, Thy mount- 
ains, these, leaves of Thy forest swaying to one wind, 
these, Thy faces of home ! 



THE MEANING OF GOD 
I 

SOUL! whence breathes it, heaving 
On thine uncharted shore, 
This tide-foam of believing 
In God evermore? 

On the dark cosmos, burning 

With the stars which outlast, 
Through thine eyes He is yearning 

Who is winged for that vast, 

Who through thy dream is pondering 
Toward the doom, toward the goal, 

And the foam of Whose wandering 
Is heaven in the soul. 

O Soul, thou hast symbol' d forth 

God, thy desire. 
He is light on thy silent north, 

In thy shrine He is fire. 

From thine own deep thou symbolest Him, 

Thou symbolest His shrine, 
Till out from His kingdom dim 

Symboleth He thine! 

II 

So there is a God of the world. 

And He little grieves 
How the years and their ruin are hurled j 

How the mountain heaves 

Green in the air of spring, 

Till there flee 
A million summers and bring 

The hill to the sea, 

Sand on the formless shore; 
And He little deems 



*3 



That bloom or ruin are more 
Than the mist of His dreams. 

No; through that dim World-Soul 

Who hath life indeed, 
We shall garner the thunder-roll 

With the whispering reed, 

Bloom on the bridal brow 

With the avalanche, 
And melting of April snow 

With the withered branch; 

And there, in a seven-fold shrine 

Like the heart of a child, 
We shall kindle a flame divine. 

Lo, the weary, the wild, 

The wondrous and ravenous 

Fuel of old earth 
And the yearning heart of us, 

Sorrow of birth, 

Sorrow of all defeat, 

All weariness, 
For the shrine of that God are meet : 

Thither our blind souls press. 

Ill 
And does any vibration waver 

In the vast march of ether through the night 
Pouring on dawning planet-shores forever, 

Because there is a God of love and might? 

And does any peal of thunder 

In the vague air from summer cloud to dome 
Of ancient mountain, breathe a different wonder 

Because through God the universe is home? 

The soul asks never; 

Only the brain asks what we scarce need deem. 



H 



The soul made God, who is but Love Forever, 
Knowing, law being law, God must be dream. 

But by those forges 

Mysterious, where the will is beaten to form, 
By the dark moaning of the windy surges 

Where inner life heaves to the inner storm, 

There is God : towering 

Life-wrought, silent while countless ages roll, 
Dim, never-known, unwearyingly dowering 

With love, love, love the never-wearying soul. 



LIFE UNDER CLOUD: A FRAGMENT 

MIST on thy ruddy bloom 
And rain upon thy grass : 
Let not the cloudy doom 
Change, or the dumb hour pass ! 

Here the divine fain hands, 
The brow gleaming in shade 

And feet on lonely sands 
Dim heaven have made. 

Deep in thy rooted grain, 
In thy dripping oaken boles, 

Through chemic power again 
Great sunfire rolls! 

There where the sunfires glow, 
Where the sun-fountains play, 

In thy dark drenched sod below, 
Spring hath her deathless day. 

I do not crave the hour 

When, like a laughing sea, 
Sun power shall meet sun power 

And gloom be past from thee ! 



l 5 



PERSEPHONE 

(under the live oak, Charleston) 

"Faint as the climate-changing bird, which flies 
All night across the darkness . . . ." 

NO light have I known more lovely on land or sea, 
No wind more Arcadian on valley or mountain far, 
Nor the olden haunted campagnas of Italy 
Hold more of the years and the dreams and the way of 

the star. 
Here under the sculptural live-oak, the arms afar, 
Moss-flowing and olive-dark, of the ancient tree, 

In a world self-bounden, the shrines of Wonder are — 
A cloud 'round the oracle of Eternity! 

Now through me, vaguely as on strings a player plays 

Music not heard by his own inward ear, 
By faint tides breathed over far drowned estrays, 

The calm power of dumb music breathes like prayer. 

Now the dark solitude of the world's year 
Eternal, flows again with living rays; 

And Demeter returns, Enna is here, 
Persephone returns on mystic ways. 

What is there garnered, here on the haunted shore! 

Here are long-lost dim Aprils, faintly blown, 
And old pains heaped dim in the cloistered store, 

And lost fulfillments, and what seed unknown: 

Persephone knows them for all her own, 
She garners their wild longings evermore, 

Her wavering wings are never never flown 
Through the glittering invisible opened door! 

And our own soul weds with the life of these, 

Oaks and gray waters, wastes of shell and sand; 
We are yon moan of the far travailing seas — 
Harp strings played by a deliberate hand. 
* No desire of the flesh alone, or memory fanned 

16 



To illusion in brooding finite reveries, 

Nor perishing glow is this Lightning along our strand, 
The indwelling lightning of earth-realities ! 

No revelation degrades the Fact into cloud. 

I see them and measure, and name and comprehend, 
These trees and birds and the far-off ocean loud, 

Tides of the deep and the hours, flights of the wind, 

Mysteries the yellow tide- weeds drown and bind. 
In the ancient grapple the ancient back is bowed; 

Still is innumerable Being fain and blind, 
Utterly the Plower keeps the field he ploughed. 

Nor in vicarious being they link and climb, 

Nor any borrowed pulse-beat, like hum of hives, 
Thrills through the redbreast nigh and the nether clime 

Whose expiring tide in these flooded bayous lives. 

Ah, naught She takes who a further glory gives! 
No stern dark consequence and no budding prime 

Is forbidden, though here the mysterious lightning rives 
All bonds of the human vision from our night of time ! 

Demeter is not less here than of old, 

She our laboring Mother of famine and doom, 
Of stormy wailing along the world-wide wold 

And the undying hope flaming in gloom. 

She is not less ; Demeter keeps her womb 
Of earth in burden, the 'wildering fold on fold 

Of the unsolved tomorrow, dust and bloom, 
Undying wandering, passionate will untold. 

But is there word that can tell the thing I deem — 

What the moment deems, and I its messenger — 
The chord smote far off yonder by waves that stream 

Fain to the morning sunlight on the bar, 

Oh any word, before it has gone afar 
On other world-ways, and down the ancient beam 

Of that same vast sun another mote is a star 
And I am the whisperer whispering into dream? 

*7 



It tells me earth is Demeter of old years, 

Seeking Persephone on mystic shore. 
Born of Demeter is Life. Yet she who bears 

Desires Life. Into the darkling door, 

Womb of the mother, Life gives back its store, 
Gives back its toils, its laughter, thirsts and fears 

And all desire of life forevermore 
And centuries of all its love and tears. 

Vague, vague the dream out of the shrine upflowing .... 

The Soul and its Mistress-mother on an olden way, 
And an ecstacy and long long toil into moonflowers blowing, 

First-born of the Earth and Soul, Persephone; 

And she went away as clouds into sunset flee, 
And above our Aetna her beauteous cloud hangs glowing, 

And our quest for her fountain hath its mystic Sicily, 
And the world is a harvest for her far and supernal mowing! 

Earth-mother, Demeter, dark and passionate-fair, 
On whose vague knees, oh Mystery, we are stayed, 

Whose Will of Shadow crowns our love, our prayer, 
Whose Romance glows on all our ways of shade — 
In thy deep eyes her deeper shadow is laid, 

And her supernal Enna is everywhere, 

Persephone, whom thine endless age hath made, 

Born of our life, thy womb, her dream is there ! 

She was old when Plato dreamed 'neath Hymettos' brow; 

She gleamed like a snowdrop in holy cloistral gloom; 
Over the ice and the deep, like a northern glow 

She brightened when the modern Argo went forth to roam. 

She is young today as when earth's last dawn shall bloom; 
From eternal wellsprings all her communions flow — 

Persephone, deep in the cosmic tomb 
Desiring .... Demeter .... and we who fade like snow! 

She shall breathe back glory into our living, 

Strength to our wings fleeing from pole to pole, 
And her large peace not weary with ever striving, 

18 



Her pang which is as heaven in our soul: 
For she has rounded the all-outwearing goal, 

And she is eager-eyed for the arriving 

Of the young God, journeying 'mid ageless dole 

Labyrinths of law of the divine contriving! 

Year after year she deepens but does not change. 

May after May with its rout of odor and fire, 
April by April, wing through their skyey range. 

Sun after sun goes down to its wildwood-pyre 

On jasmine and palm and the pine-sea's tidal choir: 
And the Soul, who through Earth wrought Wonder nor 
found her strange, 

Is a child made silent by love's dim first desire, 
And fain is the Mistress-mother in her world-deep grange! 



*9 



TO A HUMAN LIFE 

I 

OU are a sword-blade held across all reckoning, 

You are a burning angel at the gate. 
Life you are, dream you are, poignantly beckoning 
Past Eden— loved, desirous human Fate ! 

Never in Eden such desire bloomed ! 

On the world's wild ways your compassion leads. 
You lighten toward a world more blithely doomed, 

Toward goals more urgent and diviner speeds. 

II 

From the inner dark gushes your spirit-rain 

Formless in its divine intensity 
But Ys hath faded down into the main; 

There is no symbol left for speech with thee ! 

Far off the sunward deep the night-wraiths flee, 
The great Light burns into the east again, 

The symbols fade into the mother-sea 
And the spells fade in this old prison-brain. 

All, all the symbols of yesternight fall wan 

And the dreamer wakens, who .... wills now to go. 
Deep were the veils, proud, deep, ended and gone, 

But deeper, lovelier the engulfing flow 
Oceanic, of this living human Dawn 

Where no dream truly dies, where Life dares know I 

III 

And the symbols flee as shadows flee away. 
There is no symbol left but love and deed, 

Unwearying deed down the world's dim estray, 
Love wheresoever life's dim hosts shall lead, 
Laughter where life's blind feet shall burn or bleed, 

Unwearying joyance where life's fires fall gray, 



Unwearying giving to life's boundless need, 
Unwearying faith in life's and love's dim sway, 
And in life's bitter fruitage, plenteous meed! 

So Life out of a Manger called the soul 

Back from its cloudy land, its tombs and lees, 

To track 'mid beauteous bitter earth its goal 
And 'mid the lilies its futurities 

And 'mid the marriage- wine its hope grown whole. 
You call .... and I seem like the least of these ! 



N 



THE SILENT HOUND 

OT reasonably, but oh, forlorn, forlorn, 
Forlorn, when the great portals open wide ! 



Dull gold flows heaped on the western marge .... 
Dull crimson flows .... and fiery violet .... 
And flowing green of near cool luminous oceans .... 
And now — the Night .... Winds, poured from the dark 

sundown ; 
Under the cold half-moon are the spires wavering, 
The unearthly cedars shake their spiring plumes. 
Now, now .... Forlorn as the last voice of man 
On the last shore of the last life's last dream, 
Forlorn, forlorn, folorn .... unreasonably ! 

Why by the gleaming of the moon, forlorn, 
Oh why forlorn, by the great ruby blaze 
In the heart of cedarn ashes, the wind pouring 
Life 'round the flying wizardry of night-fire, 
And all the crowding and all the soaring wonder 
Of night in a cedarn forest, a windy forest, 
An autumn wildwood under the icy moon: 



Forlorn, here by the throne of Magic deathless, 

By the trampling of earth's pallid phantom wonders, 

Earth's dream and passion of all my living years? 

.... Yet the soul goes its own vain infinite journey ; 

The glory of the world opens the portal. 

I hear the Hound of Heaven seeking afar, 

And the following Love, a flying torch in heaven 

And flying rumor of the dark Lover of all. 

But I no longer on the track of worlds or ages 

Seek the lone quarry of human wandering; 

The insatiable quest unto one questing soul, 

Soul for one only soul, and the piteous hour 

Of soul clasping desirous soul in vain, 

This is enough. I am the Hound of Heaven 

Tracking through wastes volcanic and perished stars 

And the cold graves of peoples on moons grown cold, 

I am the Hound of Heaven. Oh my friend, 

I am forlorn for you, and I am vain, 

Forlorn unreasonably, since our life is well, 

Unreasonably, because our human road 

Wending through mists and in sleep-walking ways, 

Hardly is meant to lead where the Hound wanders 

To whom fulfillment is but an ash of fire, 

But more forlorn for that the ineffable night, 

Raining around me beauty whereof I die, 

Wherefore I seem to live, brings a dark magic. 

Opened the gate, gone forth the Hound of Heaven. 
The silent Hound gleams in the search of old, 
And the forlorn stars and wastes of dead stars 
Token the quest of soul for human soul ! 



TO AALESUND 

A VOICE out of darkness 
Calls to you, calls to you, 
A voice out of darkness, 
And that is life. 

A gleam in the darkness 
Shines to you now. 
A gleam in your darkness — ■ 
Your life is the gleam. 

We are children of darkness. 
Oh the vast dark 
Where worlds in the darkness 
Float in that sea! 

Deep Being is darkness. 
Light is good, 

But no war against darkness 
Need reality sustain. 

We are born out of darkness, 
Dark is our heart. 
We dream within darkness — 
Our source is dream. 

Only from darkness, 
Creation breathes. 
There is light in darkness 
Our eye cannot see. 

Nor far into darkness 
Lead the voice or gleam. 
They are heralds of darkness 
To our margins of light. 



23 



We shall know darkness, 
Simply and sure 
As this marge of darkness, 
Our light of the brain. 

We go to darkness — 
There are other eyes. 
God in His darkness 
Is like our soul. 

Out of darkness 
Wells the living stream 
From the heart of darkness 
Of mountains afar. 

Around in darkness 
The ages wait, 
Guardians of darkness, 
And it is well. 

Keep we our darkness, 
Fear it not. 
Our life is darkness. 
Love is our life. 



24 



THE DUNES 

(provincetown) 

f I ^HE whispering 

As of a vast Soul taking flight, I hear, 
JL And it is gone. 
And yet .... Returning, past the last keen bound 
Of all intensity, 
Thundering 

Are the unseen dreadful wings of holy Beauty, 
Thundering 

Are the World Soul's impalpable wings. A torment 
At the inner shrine of mortal being, the dunes ! 

Whispering 

Oh, multitudinous, when the glimmering river 

Floods on dune-grass, and the keen shadows hasten: 

The dark wind-river shakes the enchanted grasses 

And the sea crowds whitening against the dunes : 

Moon-flood on dunes and desert .... 

Whispering 

Goes the vast Soul, winged for eternity, 

And there is moaning at the inner human shrine.. 

Man can cope with the sea; 

Not irremediably vain ever and ever 

Is the passion for the wave 

Or the loud song, wakening in mountain chasms 

Or toward far heaven 

And spraying gulf even of the Milky Way. 

There is some utterance, some work, some end ; 

At least oblivion 

Palpably comes, murmuring, Sleep, it is ended ! 

But there is no peace on the unutterable, 

The intense, the impassable, oh the passionate dunes. 

Man can cope never 

With What strikes yet all chords of passionate pain 



2 5 



And racks all nerves with a last ecstacy 

Beyond all tongue or deed or any gesture, 

Leading to the intense court of the Gods 

Man, wrought Its own image, 

Made as an instrument for Its fleet passion, 

Tissue of the tissue of supreme Dominion, 

Knowing Its infinity, 

Yet utterly dumb, all vain .... when whispering 

Waits the ineffable court of the dim Nameless, 

When thundering 

Are the gleaming and invisible godly wings, 

When silently 

Flees the dune-Soul to the unreachable Throne! 



26 



c 



THE CHRIST 



HRIST in Gethsemane? On Golgotha? . 
There is no wakening soul of humankind 
Who is not Christ over, over and over ! 



No wakening brain of all, 

Which is not the fleet nesting place of birds 

Journeying from other climes to other climes; 

Till the remembering nest falls, wasted afar 

On world winds blowing from climes to unknown climes. 

All our awakening souls 

Are but winged creatures blown in the vast storm. 

Now is the equinox: from clime to clime 

Wing the controlling values of our souk 

And they beat down the Atlantic's autumn gloom 

Or the March-blast at ocean, and do not fail; 

But our life is only a storming air 

Pierced by those gray wings flying from clime to clime, 

It is no resting-place, no Labrador's 

Field of the berry fringing the unchanging snow 

Or pampa where snow falls no more forever. 

No matter, oh no matter, 

Be we the world or be we souls desiring, 

Let only understanding come, or dream 

Turn into wine the water as it can do; 

Let us but follow where light leads or wings 

Throb to a signal in the unsounding dark, 

Oh let us clasp aught greater fairer values, 

And we are Christs, even as that One who moaned 

Knowing in Gethsemane the burden of man, 

Knowing on Golgotha what in the equinox 

The bird knows, plying from clime to unknown clime, 

Curlew of the Arctic, following the scudding cloud 

Or cold aurora or the instant lightning's flare. 

But there is no rest for those passionate wings; 



27 



They leap from the Argentine to Labrador, 

Leap, and fail never though myriad myriads fail, 

Myriad myriads drowned in the Atlantic 

While the race of Curlews journeys from pole to pole. 

No humblest among us all, 
But he is in very truth Christ's doom divine, 
Christ's doom man's migratory dream desires, 
Ail of that Christ hopeless to furthest hope, 
Yes, all of Christ, seeing how the rock is cloud, 
Seeing the glowing pampas are sheet-lightning 
And the snow-fringing fields are cold auroras: 
For these things Christ saw in Gethsemane 
And on Golgotha these things Christ must know, 
Being divine, being of us, the fleeing 
Race of gray curlews of nether destiny. 

Wonderful thought — we are Christs, since we live, 
For of the race of mortal Man we are ... . 



28 



THE FESTIVAL 

"So thou shalt have thy silent festival, ere the end. " — Fiona MacleocL 

THE rumurous gorge lies blind like love or death. 
1 



Slowly to radiant ash the fire dies. 
Tumultuous water crowds the dark beneath, 
Echoing through woodland glooms 'mid the night cries. 



.... Like life it seems, as in our heart of hearts 
We human wanderers would that life might be. 

Only the arrowing Nantahala parts 
Our night, our mountains of mortality. 

Far on dim domes of mountains without name, 

From springs where lean the burden' d berry-boughs 

And beechen ardens, Nantahala came. 
Glorious toward eternal seas it flows. 

It gladdens — ah, young waves on basalt shoal ! 

Saddens — memory older than the tomb! 
It fills with shouting and with music's soul 

This quarried gorge towering through viewless gloom. 

Father of gorges, maker of the hills, 

Child of the Sea which was and is for aye — 

Ah Nantahala how your roaring stills 
Our wayward roarings of a little day ! 

.... There .... where in memory a Shadow gleams 
Against a shadow of shadowy white-pine bole 

From irrecoverable hours, grope the dreams — 
They go toward ice-jloes of the utireach? d Pole 

Along the old, unhopeful, fateful way 

Of life's adventure since the cave-man roamed, 

The quest of souls and of love's victory 
By fitful-finite man divine and doomed, 

29 



The quest of God. Yet boundlessly supreme 
O'er the wasted unfulfill'd intention, glows 

That quest, which is its own fulfilling dream — 
Pulse of the world! and Nantahala knows. 

.... What wannest radiance floats among the skies ? 

What foam of Nantahala shimmers there 
Beyond the laurel ? What lone exstacies 

From olden mountain sky lands wing like air 

Toward the eastern world- wall ? Oh the Dawn of Dawns, 
The moon-dawn glimmers! How the mountain-pent 

Fain Nantahala thunders! far-off lawns, 

Far domes of mountains drink their sacrament, 

.... And out into the valley mystical 

Which seems our life indeed, the Shadow flows 

Who hath made deeper even the Dream of All, 
The dream, the passion Nantahala knows ! 



3° 



HUMAN LOVE 

WINDS, blown over worlds of the rooted pine, 
Over the stormy boundaries of wide ocean, 
Great happy atmospheres breathed in the 
sundown, 
Breathed with their bounty to the unasking waters, 
Then through some human revery, far on the ocean, 
Quickening in intimation of holy land .... 
So the great Yearning of our life breathes now. 

It is so ministrant, so beautiful, 

So healing with remembrance grown more fair 

Across the brief eternal hours between! 

Ah, it is moving, it is beautiful, 

Knowing how the life-yearning breathes and dreams 

Through the selfsame hour, in places never known 

To each, to each an utter home today! 

It is so beautiful and so forlorn, 

Knowing all the human years to-be its own, 

And beyond all the human years to-be 

Knowing it will breathe over the close of all, 

Knowing it will blow over the storming bound 

Of the great Ocean like pine-odorous air, 

When we who love more infinitely hour on hour 

Shall be but odor and rumor thinning there 

Where the great wind blows down the quiet sea! 

Mournful, and beautiful! But O Love in God, 

If there is any meaning in all Being, 

In any form or power of the world, 

Any sufficiency or peace or home 

To the eternal striving of desire 

Up the long spiral of the lives of races, 

Then our life-yearning, love past understanding, 

Our beating of the wings of more than man 

In a life more than man's brain can imagine, 

Our yearning of soul for embodied soul, 

Is peace, is home and is sufficiency 

In a world saddened with wonder through its power! 

3' 



THE SOULMINISTRANT 



T 



HAT far low line of purple shore, 

Elusive, unaltering, 
Intimates you forevermore, 
O Soul, faltering 



Perduring soul ! It can not give 

All to our heart's desire, 
Yet 'mid its vague horizons live 

Our own twilights and fire. 

And you give not all of your dream 
To us in your strange shadow 

Who creep or wing in your dim gleam, 
Who drowse in your marsh-meadow. 

Yet, Soul ! We to yon silent tides, 
Those vast pines to our heaven, 

Through your one mystery, which abides, 
Are utterly given ! 

Is there not somewhere, long unknown, 
Soul — all veils entered through — 

One place where verily and alone 
We shall know you ? 



3* 



THE DOCTRINAIRE 

"The deep meaning of the laws of Mechanism lay heavily on these 
anchorites in the desert of understanding." — Novalis. 

HE is armored by his own soul against wonder. 
He waits on the slow waves of time to sunder 
Or the slow freezing in the crumbling stone 
To rift, the gray still wall his dream has builded 
That his own gaze may from the stars be shielded 
And the flaming distances claim not their own. 

He looks on the present's ringing wildernesses 

With sounds and energies and pathless places 

And men with sorrow and magic in their faces 

And the sweeping highroad where a world's march presses 

And the boundless horizon that shines of God. 

He looks on the past with all its tombs and glories 

And its dominating brow of runic stories 

And its wings that beat with more heroic stresses 

Than ours, and the mightier hopes that bore its load. 

And the great world seems an onwelling flood 
To others, and its last law none has known, 
And who has its confining margin trod ! 
He can descry the boundary, he alone; 
Minute, tyrannic, clangorous grows life's good, 
And the sublime Experience is done. 

Oh soul, oh soul, walled in by his own stone ! 

Till the confines of the half understood 
Which seemed a world's wall, melt before the sun, 
And toward the old verge blooms the deathless mood 
And the prison built from dream sinks and is gone, 

And the dim generation knows the glories 

Of earth, and the marvel of unfinished stories .... 



33 



TO HAVELOCK ELLIS 

(On reading the concluding volume of "Studies in the 
Psychology of Sex." ) 

YOU have shown us what none has all-shown before, 
What each has guess' d though all our eyes were 
blind, 
What few dared claim though its mysterious store 
Heap'd high the world-wide granary of our kind. 
Sweet, oh and terrible it dawns, to find 
Our shame's irradiation earth's white lore; 

Strange, oh and sweet, to know our winged mind 
Shame's beauteous avatar forevermore ! 

You write of the torch-race sung long ago. 

To me it seems you clasp a whole world's hand, 
Leading a whole world toward a throne of snow, 

A truth and dream calm o'er our turmoil' d land. 
Fields, homes, lone dells, fang'd glaciers are below, 

And any little child can understand ! 



TO ONE IN DISTRESS 

WHAT old, old symbol of the Race 
Can I bring thee, to quicken thee 
Out of the dust-devoted place 
Wherein, beside a wither' d tree, 
Thou criest in lesser fealty? 

Symbol of running waters, yea 

And watchword of the rolling tide 

Snow-fair around gaunt shores for aye, 
And light of sunsets that abide 
Though the zone of dark be deep and wide ! 

34 



Symbol of dust, symbol of rain ; 
And of the dark seed in the womb 

And birth through the dark doors of pain, 
And last illusion of the tomb, 
And all the mystic human doom. 

Oh Life, controll'd by circumstance 
Down roads by other ages worn, 

Oh living Soul, by boundless Chance 
Constrain' d, and now indeed o'erborne 
In thy due hour: oh forlorn, 

Most wavering Soul, oh Face of Fear : 
They speak anew in tongues untold 

From out their high eternal year — 
The symbols and the hopes of old. 
Hath not their ageless summons roll'd 

Already, where thy moaning brain 
In its own moaning seems to die? 

From thy deep heart they chant again 
Like matins to the morning sky .... 
Frail Life, which art Eternity! 

Thou can'st not waste that awful boon 

Laid on thy far ancestral brow. 
Thou can'st not sleep, thou can'st not swoon 

So deeply that thou shalt not go 

Down to that place where thou shalt Know. 

Thou can'st not flinch, thou can'st not fail: 
Because, or now, or far beneath, 

The battle where thou shalt not quail 
Eludes thy fear and scorns thy death. 
Thine ultimate soul remembereth. 



35 



AUTUMN AND TIME 

A SOUL forgotten, a World forgotten, join 
In the great flame of autumn, the dim flame, 
Rose of the world flaming into the sundown, 
Aureole of the home-going soul of Being 
And torch at the throne-door of mighty Time. 

Time in the boundless ages, dimly suspended, 
Arching the future, quiet as a cirrus cloud; 
Time is the Lord through long dim regal hours, 
Time gathering temporality sheaf on sheaf .... 
The passage of Time's feet ages ago 
Wavers in the heat yonder where cornfields die ! 

So we dream .... how the thought of Egypt in fain 



Voyaged toward darkness which was Light Beyond, 

And through form voyaged to the Life of Things, 

And through form become symbol, tracked those plumes 

Dense, dark and flushing with sheet-lightning's glimmer, 

Or Time's wings beating the swift centuries, 

Beating the ages of one sunbeam's halting, 

Beating the crumbling of the sphinx to sand, 

Beating the coming and passing of shadow forever. 

Here seems the dream of Egypt near, unfading ; 

For Time's wings and Time's throne were real of old, 

A manifest, occult and sublating flame. 

The mystic rythm rises as it wanes. 

And the dark fire is one, or Time, or God. 

Ah, the suspended autumn afternoon ! 
The pulse beats and the wings beat of slow Time, 
Time the dim Mighty floods in waveless air 
And in vague atmospheres of lambent maple — 
Floods the inhabited afternoon, Time, Time ! 

It is the autumn, when intensity, 

All odor and white burning tremulous fire, 

All ecstacy of wan foam the May-dawn knew, 

3 6 



And pearl and gold and snow of the cumulus, 
All these intensities and their vaster bloom 
Down the remote enormous July heaven, 
Are folded like bird-wings in a windless evening 
Or clear moist stars falling toward the verge 
Dark on mid-ocean, the calm infinite ocean. 

And they are folded, the immortal victories 

Of God in labor toward the intense Divine, 

The Beauties more than beauty, though known as flower, 

Known as foam, star and wind and April grasses, 

Folded, ah, like those intensities 

Beating with fiery wing and lightning sheen 

Into our souls which are immortal worlds, 

Our souls which are Lords within mighty Time, 

Which are Time knowing its own Majesty, 

Time in white Aprils and waning Octobers, 

In child life and life of gray Alpine stone, 

Time which forever all around the globe 

Shakes in the wells of dawn a pearly wing 

And with dull ruby wing wafts on the sundown, 

Pulse of white passionate never-waning spring 

And sigh of deathless autumn by the glad tomb. 

Oh it is passing on quiet fields today, 

Great Time, as though they were souls of dim Man: 

Time in the mighty World, the Soul mighty, 

Time in the patient World, the patient Soul ! 



37 



A WATCH AND A VISION 

HOW dimly haunting all the soul of me, 
How from my brooding hope no moment sped ! 
So, long agone, in childhood seemed the sea 
And that far moontrack where my life was fled. 
You would not be more silent were you dead; 
Nor more articulate conceivably 

Though the world's air owned all your yoice and tread, 
Not only dreams and silence ! Ah, but we, 

We are not only childhood hearts, or throng 
Of moontrod waves remembered fain and long; 

You are not like the sea which, being Fate, 
Requires no victory, fears no dearth or wrong; 
And I am not the singer of a song ; 

And human hopes too often say "Too late! " 

Such divers communings hath our humankind ! 

Not that we would but that we must love on, 
And though we would, that we can not be blind. 

So swiftly our first years have flashed and flown : 

We are old, and yet our heart's love hath but grown 
And our hearts are as wild as the dawn-wind, 

And all our unreaped harvest is just sown 
And all our life's hope is but just divined. 

And the following love finds ampler aims forever, 
Yet love is love and its wildness changes never ; 

The smithy of life beats out its marvellous plan, 
Yet love is love from the hillspring to the river 
And our wild love is the one gift we deliver 

To the last deep where God is love in man ! 

Oh you are as an arrow on the cord, 

Your life a marvellous bow bent to the spring, 

And my far longing has one only word — 
Outward, wild Arrow, on your journeying ! 

38 



Sea- wave, wild Lark, outward ! and I would bring 
To you no personal craving that hath stirred 

Since the moon in the vast vale turned everything 
Into your image, arrow, wave and bird ! 

And in the long years you will understand 
That all of human love however fanned 

Is tameless, hopeless, dark like mine and doomed, 
A strange and holy fire through every land, 
Builder of all fair forms life's eye hath scanned, 

Forgotten sower of each fair deed that bloomed! 






BLUE FLOWERS IN OCTOBER 

LUE flowers, you are dying in the gleam! 



Here autumn rises like a wave to the shore, 
All power of the far-wandering storms behind — 
Hushed, poised, foam-crowned, silent before it thunders. 

All the long summer, every day you bloomed; 

You were a glory and joy with every dawn ; 

To every blazing sun you thrilled, you glowed ; 

From every moon's intensity you folded. 

Each day the marvel waned from the blue flowers, 

And every starlight found you sealed and sleeping, 

And the dawn drank again your blue of the wellspring. 

Flower by flower you have perished, but as dew fades ; 
In your dying maze no single bloom grown wan 
Hints that you dream beauty or pride can die. 
The equinox has trampled you, frost has laid 
Its irrevocable sign of winter on all your stems, 
Yet in no morn of June seemed you more fair ; 
Your blue is yet a fountain, a wand of God, 
A star in timeless heaven. 

39 



And this last day, 
When all day long the wings of winter gloom 
And all day long the ritual dance and song 
Unheard, of the mystic marriage, the apocalypse 
Of summer, haunts a world from sod to sky — 
All day you bloom ; all the long day unsleeping, 
Luminous all day long with thirst of being, 
All day passionate, fountains of glad proud fire, 
Olympian still till the last bloom shall fade. 

Leal flowers, human life shall be like you ! 

It is the funeral of the burning year, 

An Attic funeral ! Oh blue flowers, you 

Scant on your sere stems, while the last bird hovers 

And the northwest wind murmurs of worlds of snow, 

You are like Grecian maidenhood .... or old men 

dauntless, 
Clear-eyed, garlanded, singing around a tomb 
' Mid cedars where the Olympian violets grow ! 

Blue flowers, yours the mystic funeral 
And that strange marriage of the eternal poles 
Hymned in all rituals of all old dim lands ; 
Here, in your fadeless blue, the mystic meeting, 
The mystic flight taking no life away ! 



MIDSUMMER 

NOW, when the low sun lights flower and child 
And the child voices and the voice of birds 
In windless air make an earth sweetly wild : 
Surely now, in a calm ocean isled 
Under a sundown and dim fronds far-piled 

On glooming mountain, fade my dark wild words ! 

Surely now, in the northern clime at peace, 
Now while symbolic Indian oceans flow 

40 



Toward purpureal margins, have they not surcease, 
Those wild words with their hum of thundering bees 
In unknown lands of grave intensities 

And destiny human thought can never know? 

Ah! but I guess a whole world's preluding 

Of marvel which shall burn life up like fire. 
Ah! but I hear some deeper murmuring 
Under the child's cry and all birds which sing, 
Of onward marvels and the awe they bring 
And loneliness at heart of all desire ! 

Oh far away, you who dare not make dark 

The lights, although sleep has drawn near around: 
You who on lonely sands with me made mark 
Of haunted waves and waiting shadowy bark 
And wreathed stars and the pale auroral spark — 
Oh far away, hear you the nameless sound? 

Doom is in that vague undertone. Old doom 
Calling the tribesman from his firewarmed hearth 

Into the rumurous night and forest gloom ; 

Still the ecstatic Shaman gropes toward bloom 

In the lone darkness, and his hope seeks room 
For vaster winging o'er an unknown earth. 

We are within the dark stone age of time. 

Though the earth gleam and every bird cry loud 
And plenteous be our life and nigh sublime, 
Still toward our strange soul beckons from the prime, 
Murmurs from near, invisible, lonelier clime 

The o'ermastering destiny vague in dream and cloud. 

Oh far away, you who the arrow have thrown 
Of longing, and the wine none can forget 

Have tasted, on old sands no chart hath shown; 

Oh you my Friend of the vague verge unknown, 

We are alone yet never never alone. 

It is man* 8 soul thrids our lost darkness yet! 



FRANCE 
(easter, 1917) 

ON that composite brow scarred and divine, 
On that most awful brow, calm o'er the stone 
Where 'mid innumerable ruin alone 
Rises thine altar and that brow of thine : 
Lo ! all of flowers and stars and dews that shine 
In all our dream of man are there thine own, 
Throned there in horror, fronting the overthrown 
Rending of Titan hordes of the wizard swine. 

Supremely horrible, ah, that France must bleed 
Bare-breasted against swine raging for meat, 

Knowing nor from man nor God this fiery meed, 
Fronting the trampling of the bestial feet; 

Supremely glorious : for life Divine indeed 

Burns on that fadeless brow, benignant, sweet ! 

Not since Christ broke the tomb has Easter day 

Flushed with more marvel down our planet's cloud. 
To a new world opens this Easter's shroud; 

Toward far, far onward worlds leads this new way. 

Ah ! for the wizard swine are there at bay 

Heaped backward on waste fields their hoof has ploughed, 
And gone from man's own heart their malign crowd 

Which through long ages held life's hope in stay. 

Full of what meaning the eternal age shall deem, 

How France, saving a world's soul, saved her own; 

How France, defending man's far visioning gleam, 
Into the color of the gleam has grown, 

France, who through horror has attained the dream, 
Whose ravished life has to pure lilies blown ! 



42 



RUINED LAND 

(a vision in nantahala, north Carolina) 

JUNE, I 9 14 



o 



From the Mountain 
I 
H FRIEND, come away from the grapple of 
nations and classes; 
Come away to the shadowy wold, the dying 
wold. 

Here gushing fountains are wandering in odorous grasses 
Down flowery sky-meadows with the pungent fog- 
wreaths cold, 
On smoky mountains in a netherland untrod, untold. 
Here, in the furthest reach of untraversed passes, 
It is heaven-on-earth, no hillstream, which purls, which 
glasses 
All those hoarier cloudland battlements of ivory or gold. 

Lo ! unthinkable times, aeons on aeons outbearing, 

Have these old, old mountains known the millenial faring 

Of starry galaxies which form and melt and are gone, 
While the hillstream, ages on galactic ages wearing, 
Has engendered, has nurtured a far-spread continent, pre- 
paring 

For the myriad lives and all the hopes they have known. 

II 

O Friend, where the eagle has rested, pause, and be still ! . . . 

Not only there, where the tremor of battle goes heaving 
Through the whited modern sepulchre from mine or mill, 

Or the gangrene and pestilence of battle through the 
dumbly- grieving 

Unmarshalled myriads, but here on the azure-cleaving, 
The eternal and lonely and remembering world-old hill, 
You shall know how our masters poison and rape and kill. 

Though you were dead, you should go from this place 
believing ! 

43 



Far from the rock of the eagle's pause, lo, yonder! 
There was a time, when exultant and ever profounder 

To the verge of the world flowed the cloudy wilder- 
ness on; 
When the myriad shadowy coves, uniting to sunder 
The enormous ranges, were arcadias of flowery wonder, 

Yes, cataracts of the lily and laurel of a southern sun. 

Ill 

From the rock of the eagle, behold ! Where the murk up- 
streaming 
Veils the sad prone forests and the ashes of forest, of old 
There was worth in the toil of the hillstream. The laurel's 
dreaming 
Was an odor and fire and a beacon to hearts of gold. 
Not in vain was the ancient travail, the manifold 
And desiring deed of the cosmic year, when teeming 
With such life as receives the eternal signet gleaming 
And confronts the dawn, where yon valleys whose tale 
is told. 

There was a time when the heart of humanity 
Throbbed never more glad or more proud, or gently free 

Than in yonder ruined wilderness of ruined homes. 
They upbuilded, they bore through a growing century 
A noble folk-life unguessed by you or me ... . 

That their sons might be brutes of burden in yon smoul- 
dering glooms ! 

IV 

There, Friend, far to the right, where the murk is rifted; 

There in the narrowing valley where, like emerald, shows, 
Far off, the grass for the gleaning ! Their banner is lifted 

For the last impossible stand of a hope that goes 

Unsung into silence. Their dauntless banner glows 
O'er one lonely resisting homestead .... The murk has 

shifted ; 
Now the ashes of the ruin of mammon are gray and drifted 

On the human hope and the wilderness. The ruin flows 

44 



On to some further valley. 

This is lumbering. 
The courageous adventure whereof sagas and bard-harps sing 
From the morning of man. The engines and the wheels 
and fire, 
The greed and the ruin, the wage-bait's poisoning 
And yon forest and humanity turned to an ashen thing — 
This is our masters' will for a world entire ! 

From the Farm 
I 
For whom has the cosmic toil paved an infinite road, 

For whom is stored the illimitable store? 
Whose is the flash revealing the hoped-for God 
And inner will of this world since dawn of yore ? 
It is theirs, on this mountain farm — the hewer and sower, 
The reclaimer, the builder, the mother, uncowed by the 

load 
Hopeless, nor mastered by the earth-mastering goad 
Of inferior wills on thrones of a tottering power. 

Oh turn from the outer truth for a little span ! 
Here — here the phoenix-hope of eternal man, 

The human heart of it all, the olden dream 
Has life like the radiant cloud over twilight wan-. 
Here, on the battling farm, the unutterable Plan 

' Mid immanence of night drinks from the eternal stream ! 

II 

The eternity hallowing old ethnic tombs — 

Eternity of prayer, of defiance, of the cold 
Calm wedge of endeavor eternal, broods here and glooms. 

Here is all life glorious from of old. 

Ah, cribbed and powerless while the cyclone sweeps 
the wold, 
While Attila is king and god ! Yet the glory blooms, 
The human fervor which shall sunder a million dooms, 

The eternity of nameless hope our dreams enfold. 

45 



They are helpless to save even this hillside nigh 
On whose front sleeps an image of a moon-dark and starry sky 
With cloudy pines and with springfire bowered in its 
glade. 
Yet at hand is the primal corn, the billowing rye, 
And from old, a token forever, a child's dumb cry. 

Eternity hath life through these hearts which wear its 
shade ! 

Ill 

Here a little ruinous farm in the hills is an altar. 

Here the Promethian fire hath its lonely shrine. 
Here, 'mid all ravin of change, they do not falter 

In whose voiceless hearts the eternal hope is wine. 

Skyward, no more is the azure glad and benign. 
The title to earth is in ruining hands which palter. 
The reins of power of the ages are made a halter 

Dragged fierce on the steeds of the chariot of life divine. 

They have ravaged the wondrous forests on the world-old 

heights. 
They have poisoned a fair folk-life with the lure which 
blights. 
Now behind their ravage the bale of the dreadful flame 
Casts its pall on the sun and its blood-sign across the 

nights .... 
Here on the little farm the eternal lights 

Burn on, and the dream which hath no end and no name. 

IV 

Like a beam of the sun, their eternity ! a ray of a star. 

Fugitive and transitory as gleams of the sea 
When faint waves, heaving, die in foam on the bar, 

Or like rain in summer, it goes as transiently. 

Like beam of the sun or tide of the ancient sea 
It is deeper and more strong than works of the kingliest are; 
Than beacons of victory it shines more glad and more far; 

Of all we may claim it is nighest Infinity. 

4 6 



Yearning of the humble, lashed as a steed of fire 
To that chariot of mystic cloud of primal desire; 

Wings of the humble, hovering in fate all dumb 
Where the priests of mammon, lord of the earth entire, 
With childbloom of earth feed the insensate pyre — 

Hope of the humble, hope of all worlds to come ! 



Harsh, roughened palms, bent forms, and the ceaseless 
striving 
While the generations are enwoven and the dark earth 
glows ; 
Yet powerless remains their uttermost contriving. 
Around their home the modern sirocco blows. 
Far away, asleep or vindictive, is he who knows 
How soon shall the tempest fall and the fires, driving 
In wake of the tempest, leave never a fern-bosk thriving 
Nor a hemlock or bloom for his laughter, their babe 
who grows. 

They love their land, they are loftier even in fate 
Than the lesser men, lords of this modern estate. 

Their life is the root-life wherefrom have the ages fed. 
Though they go in defeat like the great hills, they are great. 
For the torch from their hands the eternal centuries wait. 

They are that breed which arises out of the dead ! 



The Afterword 

O Human Race, how long must the weary fable 

Of this maniac-lapse of thy throne to a clown be told? 
Of thy gift of thy wizard word to tongues of babel, 

Of thy gift to fools of thy heritage from of old? 

Of thy drunken mart where life is bartered for gold 
And where gold is a sceptre of the brazen, the perishable, 
Till in shamefast and hidden ways the unconquerable 

Far-visioning hope of the world alone is told ! 

47 



O Human Race, how long shall it be a token 
Of thy world-wide way, that here, where the rooftree i 
broken, 

In powerless persistency thy sacred fire yet bears, 
While at hand the life of the very mountains is choken 
And the word of power by a drunken giant spoken 

Reels, scattering the garnered good of a million years ! 



c 



DE PROFUNDIS 

ONSCIOUSNESS, consciousness! Experience, 
obligation, desire! Experience! 

We are nothing but you, and yet you are not us ! 



48 



A WORLD'S LOSS 

(In thought of the Jews in Russia and Gaiacia, 191 6) 
"^HEY are crushed down a thousand times, scattered 



T 

A thousand times on the listless winds where fade 
JL Unnumbered dreams, unnumbered hopes, great 
prides, 
Passions of races . . . . Crush the quicksilver, 
Scatter the lightning! No, they will not die 
To whom all ruin seems but tempering flame 
And bath of the beaten blade tempered anew. 

In the tragic light still flows the fountain free, 
From lonely ethnic mountains, from Caucasus; 
Through earth- deep crypts the outlasting waters flow. 

Marvelous is the fountain of the jew ! 
But oh ye gardeners, oh ye nations, shame; 
Not that the indestructible water flows 
To a salt and sunken desert, not for its sake 
The great shame cries and will cry on for aye. 
But that the yearning growths of humankind, 
Panting for the folk-waters, are denied; 
Shame, that our garden of the soul of man, 
Our modern garden, pants for watering 
In vain, while yet the lasting fountain pours 
Its waters to be scattered on the sand, 
Wasted on the sirocco, trampled as brine 
On the margins of old desolate tideless seas ! 



49 



LIFE IN THE MILLENIUMS 

HEY are more subtle and simple than we guess, 

Those humans of the unvision'd years that come, 
Gardeners in time's long after- wilderness. 
They have profoundly brooded on their doom; 



T 



Profoundly brooding they have come to know 
What moves behind these queries of the brain, 

A cloud on high and fountain -source below, 
An ancient road their feet shall tread again. 

From none of our true mysteries have they gone 

Hopeless, indifFerent or victorious. 
What peace their vastly-temper' d heart has won 

Or genius fashion' d, is at hand for us. 

Their tongues are gentle and their hearts are warm. 

Their hands bear well the load of every day. 
Their joy has energy and their vision form, 

Yet undivinable is their inward way, 

Their undiscernable way along the foam 
Of a beloved shingle, where the flood 

Rolls lifeward from that Sea where God is home, 
And yearning deepward rolli where Life is God. 

Assuredly, through whatever zone on zone 
Unfolded, reft by lightning of the soul 

Or conquer' d through this Will against the Unknown 
Of hand and brain, Life shall be beautiful 

And therefore like the stars, or like the shell 
Or voice of children or love's divining way, 

Or like lark-song or tone of vesper-bell, — 
Holy and simple beauties of to-day. 

Three million years on earth has Life to last 
While even the constellations form and fade; 

And we who throb, who burn, we are but The Past, 
Forgotten dwellers of times of primal shade. 

5° 



Vain is even fancy, for a hundred years 

Shall wrap our world in splendor and gloom undream' d, 
And yet .... what key the last millenium bears 

For heaven's last gate, each human heart hath deem'd! 



THE CHALLENGE 

THERE is the cosmic writing on the scroll. 
There is dream warring against dream, 
and love 
Forfending love; and there in heaven above, 
Silent, the unconcerned infinities roll ! 

.... I saw the glory upon the sunward rim 
Blaze in one jewelled mist and die away; 
And gladly into that glad dying day 

My soul would die, knowing its heaven dim. 

I, who am earth, remain, and Beauty dies. 
For us, only our heart's joys never gain 
That secular Everlasting whereof pain 

Is lord — pain in the sparkling silent skies. 

There in the flooded mist Eternity 
Had life alone, and only there I go 
Who, mazed within the labyrinth below, 

Am bound to learn Beauty alone can die. 

Until the last life dies Beauty shall bloom; 
Until the last life dies Beauty shall go 
In dimning memory where no dream may know; 

Nor any life conquers that seeming doom. 

Beauty alone, of all the worlds which seem 
From endless age to endless age, can wane; 
There is not any thing utterly vain 

Save only personality and its dream. 



5 1 



There is not any thing in all the stars 

Which is not fulfilled in the glorious whole, 
Not any thing but the desiring soul 

Beating its finite wings on infinite bars. 

.... Unless through such vain doomful longing driven 
Where death is life at last, Beauty shall draw 
Mysteriously unto it the cosmic law, 

And every wild heart be creation's heaven! 

. . . .We will surrender the eternal aim 
If that need be, but we will not pretend 
Of life, that it is nerved toward that great end 

Which blazed on our young eyes when the dawn 
came: 

When dawn came rolling out of pearly seas 
Or bloomed in ruddy rose on Alpine lands, 
Or cried in the near voice none understands, 

Or lit heaven's void with love's intensities. 

Because we do not know that none can know, 
Because we do not know that victory, 
Crowning life's giant year, can never be, 

Because the riddle is not yet spelled through, 

Because in all the obscure enormity 

Of human hope mazed amid cosmic law, 

Still toward uncharted wastes the dim tides draw 

And there is no Impossibility, 

Therefore nerved for the supremest end 

Are our hearts, and the fierce flame we pass on 
To generations of dawns beyond the dawn; 

Still life's great simple hope our souls defend. 

But well we know, and we dare speak aloud: 
That if death ends our life of personal souls, 
If limitation forfends our nobler goals 

And unto everlasting the God is bowed, 



52 



Bowed under space and time and choice and death, 
The immortal God who through our eyes looks on, 
The unresting God who through our brain has blown, 

Blown through our finite brain an infinite Breath — 

Well do we know, if life for us is vain 

And the passions which make heaven are dust at last 
For our dim lives, then for those fair and last 

Millenial children of our blood, ^such pain 

Clings, and such anguish as our frail hearts wait, 

Such silent horror under the cold stars 

And such eternity of inward wars, 
And loves like ours broken by cosmic fate. 

God ! if our children are to purchase peace — 
If the Prometheus and his fire must die, 
If infinite, infinite personal destiny 

And all its wings and pangs and stars must cease, 

Be it ours at least, the last deluded souls, 

To clasp that hand leading toward desert ways 
Where great beasts roam and the vague sand-leagues 
blaze 

And the immortal mirage lone unrolls, 

Ours, ours to choose the vast blocks overthrown 
Of Nile and of Arabia, home and tomb; 
For the mirage made glory of the doom 

And what of meaning life has ever known ! 



53 



THE FULFILLMENT OF APRIL 

CLAIRVOYANTLY, dim, vet with sheen 
of dew 
From the long mists of summer, bloom 
those days 
Grown far more fair adown the somber hue 
Of earth's obscurer ways. 

Life's ways. Wide was the thunder-zone, the rush 
Of rains athwart our slippery road which came 

Bafflingly, till here the daisy-glades we brush 
And breathe their autumn flame. 

Futile, when fell July was like a hound 
Fast on the panting of a famished hind, 

Futile as bloom on heaped and reddened mound 
Seemed all our Life behind ; 

It's dream seemed futile. So the bounding main 
Would be remembered by the otter caged 

Or the sea-bird with shattered wing, in vain 
Fluttering, and unassuaged. 

Far more than inner desolation .... fear, 
And the pain beyond all pain, of helpless love 

When on loved cheeks the uncompensated tear 
Reflects no light above 

And no illusion veils the dark or warms 

The sudden air from gulfs which seem to keep 

Our only peace beyond the last of storms, 
Our last and dreamless sleep. 

And all the bitter fainting of our soul, 

The failure not of deed but even of dream, 

The vision stumbling past its blinded goal .... 
And now .... like heaven gleam 



54 



Far fields of April which at last are ours. 

All the rains of decrescent summer are but haunt- 
ing dew. 
Never in all our day have flamed such flowers, 

Have rolled such waves of blue 

As in autumn now .... whose heart of interior fire 

Is the lost Apriltide reborn at last, 
Its glory of wise victorous desire 

Sealed by that nigher Past, 

By midworld hours of wild disharmony 

Made grave and assured, and eager as a child 

And as the phoenix risen from ashes, free, 
And as the centaur, wild ! 



THE WILL OF GOD 

N no age of long ago are we quite powerless to see 
God, militant or laborious in man, moving toward 
ends which neither they knew nor even wholly we. 

They are like meteors flying in the dark night, under 
silent stars; like comets, grown nigh and faded to grow 
nigh again. Like journeying migratory flights of the wild 
geese or plover they seem, those ages long ago whose pulse 
is in our blood ; those ages long ago whose gleam is at our 
threshold. Flaming and elusive Will of God, fugitive, eter- 
nal! And shall it again be known, to ages beyond our sleep, 
the meteor, voyager toward unknown zones of migratory 
being, comet of untraced parabola .... the Will of God 
in this our life, in our own age? 

Most haunting music, thunder on the hills, whisper of 
the tide : bewildering is our age, whose souls of fire, whose 
adventurous energies know not Thee. O Destiny of the 



55 



I 



Horizons : knowing Thee not, we do Thy will. It is, 
amid complexities so infinite, our way; we do Thy will, 
yet know not Thee. 

I look toward the hemlock titan, toward the grape- 
leaves far in its rythmic branches. Sunlight and gloom, and 
green-gloom luminosity on its bole; and beneath, in the 
sunfilled chasm, with arrowy swiftness the river lows. 
What herds of protean sheep of the skies, what mountains 
of transcending snow, what wreaths of dark under-cloud, 
drive with the world- wind through an azure dome, on face 
of the waters of measureless heaven, waters whose pure 
white foam is on all the shores of the itars ! They seem to 
know Thy will, O God. Is it only on silent mountain 
heights, in forgotten hours, that we may ever know as they? 

Oh will there never a trumpet sound, or banner be cast 
to some gleam of day which all our nature knows? Divided 
lives, may we not wholly do Thy will, and know Thy will, 
before our end? The fusing electric spark, shall it never 
come; our work of God, must it only be woven deep in 
inscrutible hazardous deed, whose light of meaning in God 
shall appear, far off, to ages beyond our sleep, the light of 
dead stars, or gleam on a horn of olden mountain, distant 
and untrod, whose sand shall be ploughed in the fields of 
a thousand years? 

Oh to hear Thy trumpet sounding on Thy plain of a 
thousand years! 

But now, with divided lives, conscripts of hazardous 
deed, inscrutibles in an inscrutible world, we do Thy will 
yet know it not. 



56 



"SHADOWS WHICH HAUNT THE 

SUN- RAIN" 

(e,. a. w. and a. g. w.) 

IT is not willed that Death should let us be. 
Not earth's, nor heaven's children yet were we 
If in our life the Shadow paled from day. 
Where earth hath wedded with Eternity 
Our life is born. And where that exstacy 

Burns into shadow, leads our haunted way. 

.... You pass'd when August lilies were pure as foam, 
And you, O Greatheart, in wild rains and gloom 

Of darkening winter; and mould and changeless stars 
And dark winds 'round a planet were all your home. 
Where are you now, when the wild-apple bloom, 

The song and violet burst all mortal bars? 

Oh where the Shadow haunts the heart of spring, 
Where from dark wells the dragon-fly takes wing, 

Where from dark fonts our joyous love is fed 
And from dark choirs in sleep our far souls sing; 
In the dark dawn of God-in-everything 

We are together, and naught in you is dead. 

For like yon rolling wheel of morn Life rolls 
Eternally, past never-ending goals ; 

And it is perenduring as the wave 
Or flight of hope in mystic human souls; 
Forever silvern, 'twixt the whirling poles 

Like spring, it crowns with bloom the unconquer' d 
grave. 

"I am the Life, the Resurrection I !" 

Oh how the overpowering dawn-winds sigh 

In teeming flaming orchards with life of you ! 
Deep in the heart of spring's long acstacy 
You are one with Life Indeed which can not die — 

Enduring shadow whose breath is April's dew! 



57 



*► 



N 



THE VOICE OF UNAKA 

T OW as of yore, O Spirit of Man, 
Eternity speaks out of me. 
The great Dream keeps its rainbow-span . 
And the raindrop falls into the sea. 



Articulate, not as they of old, 

The archaic kindred of your blood, 

Dumb seekers of the Fleece of Gold, 
You greet the coming of the God. 

Yet through your life they have lived on; 

And in yon chasm and in yon sky 
And in my heart's most buried stone, 

Their Shadow clasps their Ecstacy. 

I am the old hill of strange lands, 

Oh, numberless as all dreams in you. 

Of me are the far ocean sands 

And the last sheen of morning's dew. 

Through dim milleniums, morn by morn, 
Throne after throne of evening's blaze, 

The Races on my flanks are born .... 
And mine are their unmemoried days. 

Yield, oh yield up your personal plan. 

The raindrop falls into the sea, 
But the one dream embracing Man 

Floods the last darkling gorge of me. 

Oftenest falls the innumerable 

Rain where no conscious ear or eye 

May hark the faint reverberant bell 
Or watch the encircling ripple die. 

Lone in the dim unconsciousness, 
Your own, or beast, or tree, or bird, 

The eternal revelations press 

Moulding no movement and no word 

58 



4P 



And by the marge of conscious day, 

Masked in strange shape of fire and flower, 

These revelations haunt alway 

The boundaries of your luminous hour. 

Unmitigable, solitary, dread 

In wildernesses 'neath the stars, 
The Inscrutible bends down its head .... 

The enmeshed soul flutters at the bars. 

And to each being comes at last, 

O Race of Man, such boon as brings 

The authentic glory from the Vast 
And dew from everlasting springs. 

It comes in creature-love, in death 

On battle-fields of many names, 
In fountains welling underneath 

Utter confessionals and shames. 

It comes as moonlight balm to these, 

To others, like a solar fire, 
Whispering, Toil in blameless peace! 

Whispering, Furnace of desire ! 

And the eternal rainbow flames, 
The raindrop falls into the flood; 

And many dreams, and many names 
Hath life, at home at last in God. 

To each one life Redemption comes, 
A Voyager in the night, and goes, 

And the meaning of Whose strange fain dooms 
None unto everlasting knows. 

The raindrop falls into the sea ... . 

Deep in the radiant west I gleam, 
And from my brow Eternity 

Makes answer to desiring dream, 



59 



But the raindrop falls, and not in kind 
Differing from beasts or from dumb men 

Or all the dumb world's legions blind, 
O conscious heart, you sink again. 

The redemption is beneath my stones, 
Which are as the stark world of old. 

It is where the world's ocean moans, 

Yea, where dark suns through heaven are rolled. 

O conscious Man, enough : rejoice ! 

Into the sea the raindrop dies, 
But it is the sublimer choice 

To be earth's brother 'neath the skies, 

Deep-woven in the undying spell, 

One with unconscious Being all; 
To have not ever 6aid, Farewell, 

Lost sea, where alien raindrops fall! 

THE PASSAGE 

I 

ON these meadows where the mountains gloom and 
vastness guards its own 
I am rapt as they, and the years are moving like 
vague distant tides 
Streaming northward under sundown, or the deep and 
single tone 
Far beneath all vibrant harmony, a deep tone that abides. 

II 

On these meadows where the storm-gust and the wild 
rains eddy fast 
And the yonder cornfields bow and the swift cry of 
toil rings loud, 
They are dim as dream and faint as old desires of an alien 
past, 
Those deeps of the One and Silent, grown now a war- 
rior crowd! 

60 



SWINBURNE'S "TRISTAM OF LYONESSE " 

"^k TOW drifting vast over a changeless land 
^^ In a swan's brain,, on wings mournful and 

^L. ^1 slow, 

A fading glory shines upon the sand — 
Sahara, dim, unmeasurable below. 

Is there not odor of the violet 

Faint in remembered whispering of old pine ? 
Where is the fountain, glimmering jet on jet 

Absolute, pure in bosk of spring divine ? 

I, the swan's soul, wing onward the lone vast, 
Desert illimitable, on and on the same. 

Is there wild rose twined on the burning blast ? 
The sand blast whirls keen like a whirling flame. 

There are loud waves ringing as bells ring loud, 
Thundering bells by Hebridean graves. 

I am the swan drifting 'mid spumy cloud, 

Gusts of sand spume blown from the unmoving 
waves. 

Innumerable the dunes heap on and on. 

Low on the southward verge, enow mountains 
gleam. 
How are my plumes drenched in unpassing dawn, 

Vain lost Mediterraneans of dream ! 



THE DEBT OF LOVE 

TIS the last truth, scarce learned ere we grow cold: 
Our debt, O Friends, we never can repay ! 
For we have loved Her, the World Mother old; 
The eternal Mother holds our love in sway. 
From that dim breast and knee we can not stray 
Though the dark land burns into spirit gold. 
We are by love bonded to Love untold; 
We love, and we are bonded souls for aye. 

61 



Oh it is long, how long our love hath poured, 

Heedless of seeming law, toward Love unknown. 

For that one debt, dwindles earth's highest-heaped hoard. 
There is never word on flutes of dreamland blown 

Can bless that holy sweetness, Mother or Lord, 

Toward Whom the innumerable sand glows great and 
lone ! 

We have loved the Mother. She? . . . What debt She pays? 

Since even we, dreams of an hour, can guess 
No imaginable repayment for the faint blaze 

Lit each in each toward each through vain caress; 

Never we humans, each toward each, may press, 
Though we may bleed on yearning lifelong ways, 
To that dreamed heaven where, rays on living rays, 

Lover to lover would repay and bless. 

So She, the Mother, Who yearns through our blood 
As through yon silent flashing of the skies, 

In Her so human, infinite Way of Good 
Gropes bailed to repay infinities; 

For She has loved us! Ah! None understood 
Why from of old the God in heaven sighs ! 



ETERNITY 

A N alien is shadow today. 
Zjlk It is youth's day 
A. JsL And the day of social power, 
Of kindly common sense, 
Of objective toil 
And the flowing life of the world. 

Yet shadow remains, 

An alien come from no land save the heart alone ; 

And over the transitory 

And the tiny and awkward things, 

Over our comic life, 

Still an eternity weeps. 

62 



It is our way. 

We must see eternity in the now 

Or else the now in eternity. 

For we are of eternity. 

It is the creation of the soul, 

The image of the soul, 

And we — our wonder and doom — 

We are souls. 

All is of time but the soul, 

And time will have all else. 

Yes, things and power and beauty and joy, 

All are of time. 

And of time and of place and of change, 
Of these is the meeting of souk 
And the parting of souls 
And the relation of souls. 
Time is the keeper of them all. 

And the soul? 

Of the soul is eternity; 

Eternity is the instinct of the soul .... 

Eternity in the now 

Or the now in eternity, 

And soul, which is mortal love — longing and love 

alone, 
And eternity, the reflex of the soul ! 

Change, and the fading of all, process and time ; 
And the noise of their passing, the dust on then- 
way, stirred by their movement, 
Such is the meeting of souls 
And the parting of souls 
And the relation of souls. 
There is one Irony, 
One alone — 
The Irony of love 
And of its shadow, eternity, 
And the meeting of souls and their parting, 

6 3 



Souls which are blown in the wind of rime, 
Whose opportunity- 
Is wrought and unwrought by time, 
And whose hope, whose relationship, 
Whose longing to build and to endow 
Is enfranchised by the soul, 
Blood-bonded with its eternity 
And at last is known 
As only a token 
Writ upon water, upon sand, 
A reflex of process and change. 

Need we be calm, 

Or laugh, or conceal, or forego 

At least the balm, 

The balm of that shadowing wing 

Of solemn eternity, 

When on us there breathes 

That breath of the doom of all, 

When souls are divided by change, 

By the labyrinth and maze of time, 

When limitation curbs the illimitable? 

Leave us our sorrow, and the moan 

In the breast of wordless souls, 

Even the mist on our brow 

And our moan of waves on a shore 

Lit by no stars or sun .... 

Ah, leave us 

Eternity, its gloom, its dream, 

Leave us the way of the soul, 

The eternity in the now 

Even if the now have no eternity ! 



6 4 



THE INFINITE DESIRE 

'Thy years pass not away.' 

ON the remotest and sheer horn or the hills 
There has rained all night Thy moving celestial fire. 
Thy loneliness in Thy night whelms me and thrills. 
Now lies that solemn dream on the eastward pyre. 
Between unfathomed dark and the boundless choir 
Of wild winds and birds to wake when Thy dark 
word stills — 
Ere Thou God of Conquering Day clasp Thy 
mountain-lyre 
Or Thy flaming orient this yearning of shade fulfills, 
I recall once more Thy mystery of infinite desire. 

Here there is silence : faint is the dreadful crying 
Of a world blasted with darkest mystery, 

And faint past the northern mountains dies the sighing 
Of one loved life wasted through love for Thee, 
Calling Thee, dumbly, Justice, Loyalty: 

Faint is that loved life, silent, where no flying 
Wings on the shore of the vast dawn shake free 

The unaging hope, nor the great Hand seems plying 
On the loom of reachless hush'd infinity. 

Yet beyond any other marvel of dreaming 

It comes anew — burning from God's own hand 

Down the world's wrack, a silent lightning gleaming, 
And rolling answer on a ruined mountain land — 
How the beginning and the end, long planned, 

The destiny of every dew-drenched meadow beaming 
Or dark ice-labyrinth of the last Arctic strand, 

Is the salt unaging wave, the sun' 6 redeeming 

And yon glory in darkness none may understand. 

And the last soul on the last Mount of Yearning, 
Unknowing all illusion, all our fears, 

Winged with white understanding, vastly earning 
The indifferent passion, the rythm of the spheres, 
Still shall the last soul meet with tears Thy tears, 

6; 



Thine everlasting sigh with sighs returning; 

Unto Thy night of stars life's last hope bares 
The uncreate bosom, faithful, mystic, burning 

On the world-altar of the triumphing years. 

In the dawn-dark on the silent mountain, how Thy 
lamps wander 
' Mid deeps where our time is unreal, unknown, O Hand 
Freighted with desirous futurities ! While dimning yonder 
Fall Thine aureoles of starry destiny, while laved and 

fann' d 
By sunward imminent destiny, the golden strand 
Of Thy chang'd, Thine earthward world- wandering 
knows the wonder 
Of one beam in Thy deep, one shrine-fire in holy land, 
Still on Thy mystery of infinite dream I ponder, 
On Thine arc o' er the night of stars and of souls 
dim-spann'd. 

Laden, Oh God s with marvel and pain and yearning 

Come the rumors of Thy tomorrow, Thy yesterday. 
They were fain — yonder Scorpion, yon Bear — unto eye* 
lone-burning 

On the Persian desert, on fields of Thessaly. 

And where all these constellations are but whitening spray 
On Thy shores of fathomless intent — where unreturning 

Goes Alcyone, yea, Andromeda — outlastingly 
Freighted with lovely awe to souls discerning 

In all times, all worlds, bides yon westering Milky 
Way .... 

How its smoke was blown all night in heaven, O Desirer ! 

Stupendously changeless, elusive as smoke in a wood, 
Exquisite and icy and tender as Thee, O Firer 

Of the lamps of patient night, seems Thy wan abode 
Through whose many mansions our wondering life has 
glow* d, 
Through whose many ages and dim worlds to Thee, 
Inspirer 

66 



Of finite dream, we have breathed our longing for God 
And through Thee, no futile half-dream or finite conspirer 
But illimitable beauteous Love, have borne our load ! 

.... Dream .... desire? We have known desire, 
inscrutible Lord ! 

Finite desire we have known, whose shadow are we : 
For Thou made'st it in lonely centuries without word, 

To burn till our life shall end, unwearyingly. 

Ages on ages unto Thy haven flee; 
Through unnumbered deific zones our dream hath soar'd; 

Many the names we have named, dim Lord, for Thee : 
While through dumbness on hath the inner night-wind 
pour'd 

On the inner will, namelessly, tonguelessly 

Beneath innumerable dreams of our human hour. 

We know in what vasts of Time those seeds were sown 
Which in every brain of man are the dreamful flower 

And furtive intimacy of every soul alone; 

How through dreams the innumerable Man is known 
Whose seeds of dream are a baleful and beauteous dower. 

There in the strange dream-garden world-winds moan, 
In star-dusk there wavers the runic sower, 

Desirous Life, guarding its mystic own ! 

And soul beyond soul, clan following clan, we ponder, 

Through deed or dream the mysterious bars which hold 
The flesh, the pang, the inheritance and wonder 

Of human life wide on our earthly wold; 

And dream following dream, Desire doth dare the cold 
Denying gulfs impossible which sunder 

A whole world's being from the Dream Untold, 
And peal on peal comes the responding thunder, 

O God, down airless night, now as of old ! 

We of the dreams, O desiring God,, we know Thee ! 

Creative God, Dreamer in Mystery, 
Partaking God ! we, dreamers, are drawn unto Thee 

6 7 



Like mountain-waterfalls unresting for the sea. 

And the deep ocean is our type of Thee ; 
Down Thy moontracks of the far deep we trow Thee 

Who had? 'st no tide if Thou wert wholly free, 
Who had* st no love Thine own if all below Thee 

Were seaV d, nor dreams wert Thou not even as we! 

.... Voiceless, not vain, the Desire ! Vain not forever 

Through our life, hath burned that inward flame alway. 
Far on Thy cosmic hills its fiery river 

Is recalled within shelly stone and the fossilPd clay; 

Thy cloven gorges are stored with its ancient day, 
Thy innumerable flowers proclaim it: 'Giver, 

Creator, Lover !' And at last, to Thy zenith play 
These tongues of our fiery finite desire; they shiver 

' Mid Thy skyey fells, Thy maze of siderial spray, 

Thy forge and Thy cosmic shrine-fire, O Kindred Flame ! 

Finite desire we have known, dumbly, whose deed, 
Being finite, withers in the supernal gleam' 

Even as Thou, Godly Desire, art a withering reed 

To the supplication of any finite need. 
Finite desire we have known, and hopeless blame 

Of any work or word where those wild fires lead, 
The destiny-haunted insights of finite dream. 

O Infinite Dream, what work, what word were Thy 
meed ! 

.... On Thy hills now a turbulent splendor. Intricate 
past moil 
Of the loom of intricate minds not pattern' d on Thee 
Though constrain' d in Thine incommensurable team-work 
toil; 
Turbulent, intricate like foam on a heaving sea 
Go blooming and burning Thy mists of eternity. 
They are broken by Thy chasms of gloom, which do not foil 
The overeaching splendor of Thy legion whose dawn- 
gleams flee 
Down transient hoary paths of the mountain-coil, 

68 



Turbulent dawn-highroads aflame with ecstacy. 

All night they were builded under the changeless skies. 

Dim were a thousand gorges while the dawn-fogs grew. 
Gone from the lowlands, lost to their yearning eyes 

Were Septentrion and Pleides, all joy Thy mountains knew 

Of that chasmic loveliness beyond the noon-hour's blue, 
Of the awe in heaven and Thy plenteous galaxies. 

All night 'mid enshrouding deepening mists they flew, 
The shuttles of Thy silent loom of mysteries, 

And all night 'mid Thy weaving fell deeper the raven-hue. 

Woven is Thy tapestry ; builded are the argent ways. 

Ten thousand miles o'er a land wide as Thy beam, 
Old as Thy world, fresh as Thy fount of days, 

In rivers of the ruby and argent Thy mysteries stream. 

Yet fades not the raven-mood from the victory-gleam: 
There where through chasms and wells go the living rays, 

Where dark in Thy gorges Thy leaf and Thy flesh - 
life teem, 
On the yonder wall of the mist-gulf Thy raven stays — 

Yea, in hearts on yon viewless floor bides that 
shadowier dream. 

God of the dawn of splendor ! God of the loom 

Who by might of shadow weavest a mist of flame, 
Who with ruddy flame thriddest yon heart of gloom: 

O Change, O Immanent Unchanging God Whence it 
came, 

God Who exceedest judgment, nor any name 
May name Thee, nor any hope nor its surer doom 

May of Thee be the sum or end, nor worth nor blame 
In Thy star or mountain or soul be crown or tomb, 

Being Infinite Thee in aimlessness or in aim: 

O Conquering God ! Though vistas have flash' d on us 
Of Thy lonely constellations, Thy siderial time, 

And long horizons of the death-grip ravenous 

Of life-past-thought in this world of blast-heat and rime ; 
Though Thine is more than an infinite human crime; 

Though God-in- Man of old is an icy dross 

6 9 



In dead stars of Thy night, lone cosmic tombs sublime; 
Oh and for all and for all, our infinite loss, 

Thou art Conquering God. Unmitigably Thy chime 

Beats out the transcending measure, O Passionate God ! 

By no proof, but as thunder rolls or volcano quakes 
Or on breathless shores wells the unwhispering flood 

And phosphorescence in night, Thy communion wakes. 

Yea, as in phosphorescent water there shakes 
Around every moving life an illumined road, 

So Thou God in Deed art a rain of starry flakes 
Around lives in all ways under heaven knowing Thee good, 

Knowing Thee God the Desirer for their dim sakes. 

That which they have known since Thy lurid lightnings 
were o'er them 
And Thy blood-heat of the tiger and Thy wing of the 
eagle they knew, 
Whose inveterate leal love, while Thy cosmic talons tore 
them, 
O'er fierce nests in the wilderness the guardian pinion 

threw ; 
What they will' d, beyondThy lightning, of hallowing blue, 
What coercion of Thy vaster will scathed and upbore them 
While Thy lightning, Thine eagle and Thy tiger to 
beauty grew 
And their dauntless mortal love out of night before them 
Glow'd growingly from Thee Indeed, the God and 
the True, 

Make it ours through Thy day-dark, O God, Ineffable ! 

Now all Thy fields of calm night are paled and are ended. 
One little lonely lamp in Thy deep hangs full, 
Whelming, on the brow of an eastward world. Extended 

Is Thy mace of the awful sun, on a hill-land splendid 
With tropic power and white like the frozen pole. 

There Thine infinite Desire with all finite will burns 
blended — 
Thy minotaur-labyrinth, O God, of the finite soul 

In finite doom, by infinite Love defended ! 

70 



FORGET-ME-NOT 

(Called in the Northern States " Quaker Lady") 
AT COUNTY CORNERS, NORTH CAROLINA 

PLOTINUS' flower- 
Such to my dream, Forget-me-not, art Thou ! 

In the desert of space, the ruin of years, he dream' d thee; 
Wintry, in gray ages, he dream' d the supernal dream. 

Now on the wintry mountain .... the unwakening 

forest, 
Tortur'd and sombre, clings. The grasses are sere, 
And the wind's cry is winter. 

But the clouds in heaven, 
And the sun in his throne-garden of reachless bloom, 
And here on earth thy token, Forget-me-not ! 
Guide still the journey of the one to the One. 

Structural and delicate and absolute, O spiritual being ! 

Wavering, pulsating legion 

Innumerable, over dark stone and sod ; 

Oh innumerable 

As globes of water and fire on evening's marge, 

The innumerable dews, fading in air, 

Those clouded legion is a grail of eternity; 

Yet perfect one 

As that following love in music's unearthly passage 

Or as dew on petal 'neath the moon or in dawn's own 

blaze : 
Lo ! here on the wild, the tremendous mountain, thy 

sacrament, 
Though the tread of winter, a titan in a waste of ages, 
And his power of winter, on this doomful way is the lord ! 

And, dim blue flower 

As the violet bloom' d in Hellas, surely thou, 

When Plato netted the wild swan of the stars, 



Had' st bloom under Hymettos' far escarpment, 
Flower of" all mystics and lovers, ever and ever ! 

Plotinus' flower 

As Plato's, though never may these have named thy 

name — 
Flame of the old world, bride of the stars of morning, 
O lamp, whose original flame was Fountain of all — 
Though hast yielded anew, to a soul wintry and dumb, 
On a mountain dumb with winter, the desired sign. 
There is beauty anew in a heart which hath wrong' d its 

dream ; 
The journey of the one to the One drinks hope through 

thee! 



OH I CANNOT LEAVE THE VALLEY 

OH I cannot leave the valley 
For all the haunting and sky-fed purple heights 
Whose crying and glooming fills the spiritual 
nights 
And whose legions rally 

Beyond my threshold like smoke or arrowing flights, 

For I cannot leave the returning 

Of bee and bloom in the valley of miracle, 
All its mist and murmur and ruby chalices full 

Of the earth wine yearning 

Through veins of the lilac — Spring, the illimitable, 

The Merlin of ages 

Who is known in one apple-blossom sole and supreme, 
Who in all the world-wide orchard is breath and gleam, 

Who is keeper of the pages 

Of the book of the Starry Wizard Who dreams the 
dream ! 



72 



Not yet from the valley, 
Though the host-fires are yonder nigh on the wintry zone, 
Though deeply at night the mountains have call'd their 
own; 

For continually 

Through graven arcs of the soul is lilac blown, 

And the bees are desiring 

In winds of the south, and the flash of the starry page 
In Merlin's hand is our life from age to age, 

Yea, our life aspiring 

Toward the lists of the Lonelier Gods and their sterner 
guage ! 

THE IMMUTABLE TRYST 

THE rushing crowd on the street, 
The shouting mart, 
The high illuminations, 
Paens and battles of the social way, 
The fleet commanding tryst of the onward Races .... 
Yet all the time I knew, somewhere beyond 
Another tryst was waiting — 
A far more poignant tryst 
But terrible, shadowed, inevitable. 

And where the sundown folded 

And the red waves marched under the sundown verge, 

Or in the Milky Way 

When all of tenderness and all of awe 

And all of exstacy world without end 

Seemed like a dove's moan down the infinite sky, 

Still I have known 

Another tryst, another sanctuary, 

Another unlatched gate 

And a desire, and a terror more 

My own, and more unmittigable than these. 

Then I have guessed, 

When many human beauties were anigh, 

73 



When love more tain than death came close to me, 

When from divine brows and diviner souls 

A lightning leaped piercing and hallowing me, 

Or when like grass 

Under the feet of lives all beautiful, 

Of lives desired past all hope or dream, 

I have bowed down, 

Then I have guessed sometimes 

That the tryst so beautiful, 

So terrible, so passionately vain 

And self-regardless, that the infinite 

And finite were made one by it alone, 

Was here in the love of soul for human soul. 

But like a bell sounding out of the core 

Of a granite mountain, like a wave that heaves 

On its deeper heaving way all waves of the heart, 

A pulse on which the throbbing of the blood 

Tosses like leaves on a heaving mountain stream, 

Still even beneath that love which conquers life 

And death and the seeming-self and gathers all 

Of sundown longing and the Milky Way 

Unto a breast known by a human name, — 

Beneath this deepest deep, beyond this bound 

I knew a tryst was waiting — terrible, 

Poignant, desired with power of the rushing world, 

Patient as rock or far star-nebulae 

And sure as lightning when its hour should fall. 

I have known that tyrst, which had no place or name, 

Was as a try sting place of the Great Lord. 

I have known, that the glory of the crowd, 

And dream of nature, and the crushing joy 

Of love for one alone, child, woman, friend, 

Were wrapped within that tenfold lightning-beam 

Whiter than lightning and more sundering 

That hung invisibly forevermore 

Over that trysting place so near, so nameless; 



74 



And that my soul should save the world, should save 
Itself, through clasping utterly that faint flame, 
That lightning, that destroying conquering blade 
Which kills and heals unto eternity; 
And I have known that every human soul 
Must save the world and me, even as I save. 

I have called 'Self that nameless trysting place. 
Once actually, on the world's rim alone, 
God pointed me ... . how every life of man 
Bore in its arms, and not unknowingly, 
Another Life wherein the world's fate lay 
As a child lies upon the mother's breast: 
How every life of man should wonderingly 
Sometime breathe out and clasp this lovelier Breath, 
And so should clasp the mystic Breath of All 
Which was a yearning child and yearning mother 
And yearning lover toward each life of man. 

When I, the Keeper of the Tryst, shall go 

To that so immanent Place which is indeed 

No place, which dwells in an eternal Now 

And like a dark sun bides the dreadful hour 

Of crashing onset and unthinkable flame, 

Of measureless intensity and far-strown 

Semen of worlds and worlds of lives to be, 

When I shall go that so-immanent tryst 

And shall embrace that Lightning! .... ah, at hand 

In the billowing day, in love and dread it presses, 

Here at the crossroads of the living Real 

Wherein is death already a thousand times 

Dead and a thousand times from ashes born, 

Wherein is life already like a sword 

Tempered in ancient fires, and re-fed flame 

Of the Will ever fiery winged anew 

Burns through us and burns through our friends and foes 

And is a shattering lightning even toward these 

For whom we yearn to break our hearts and die! 



75 



IMPOSSIBILITY 

MID the strange wild sweet land, in antique dream 
I faced at last The Impossibility. 
In fugue of night, under the unchanging Gleam, 
That still cold precipice rose confronting Me. 
And in the night- dream truth indifferently 
Dared. In the ancient mood the icy beam 

Searched the stark precipice of reality 
Beneath our heaven of the auroral stream. 

For the night-dream requires possible dooms; 

The original longings heed not our sigh 
For whom only the ineffable aurora blooms, 

Who can not know The Impossibility, 
The indifferent truth of the milleniums 

Which the soul must not know, or it would die! 



T 



THE STOICAL HOPE 

HERE is one hope: How consciousness, 

Passing from dark flow to dark flow 
Of effort in the Limitless, 
Freed by brief death, may truly know .... 

O happy Ones — since they are passed, 
The warring duties — happy Dead : 

O happy Dead, ye no more cast 
On any balance, any thread 

The weight that sinks, the weight that breaks 

Or scale of the Dividing God 
Or intimate' filament which shakes 

Our life over the drowning flood. 

Oh happy Dead, ye go no more 

Seduced by will, by truth scourged on, 
Over the narrow glimmering shore, 
Life's hour beneath the misty sun, 

76 



Compelled by sateless thought, whose wing 
Beats toward the sky of ages deep, 

Toward mornings where the unborn shall sing 
Beyond our waking or your sleep .... 

Beyond your sleep, oh happy Dead, 
Since ye no more bear up that fire 

Into whose white heart we are fed 
Alike by duty and desire. 

Oh happy Dead, we no more dream 

How, quiet souls in holy rood, 
Ye bask under a lesser gleam 

Oh quail from the strange doom of God. 

Far we gaze we can not mark 

On life's track, even through starry gyres, 
Aught ultimate marriage of the Dark, 

The Infinite, with our laboring fires; 

And there is no last home of man; 

Nor do we dream life is with ye 
Like fair cry of the dying swan 

Floating to an enchanted sea. 

A strange, a humbler, ah, more great 
Mournful and lordly dream we keep 

Of the dark countenance of Fate 
And your way in the mystic deep: 

Oh happy Dead, our one demand 

Of the unplumbed unreached heart of God, 

Is ... . somehow that ye understand, 
(Pausing within the timeles Mood,) 

Why God, who loves us, planted here 
Love infinite in the hour that dies, 

Thought winging a remoter year, 

Conflicting goals 'neath warring skies; 



77 



How God, who loves us, breathing breath 
Of infinite heat from infinite flame 

In infinite beings doomed to death, 

Can yet be God whom the stars name — , 

The cold, illimitable, throbbing stars, 

The unheard and trumpeting stars, crying 

Over the wild heart's and thought's wars 
The Passion beyond Everything ! 



THE LAST CHORD 

T II iHE glory of the sum of things 

Would flash along the chords and go:" 
JL- And where these world-vibrations flow 
The spirit of man takes world-wide wings. 

I know not why, in the last word, 

This foaming river and the cries 

Thronging the valley to the skies 
Change the soul in me to a bird 

And to a bird change the world's weight, 
And through one beat of instant wings 
Make glory of the sum of things 

And heart's joy of the cosmic fate. 

But morn by morn, as my years fold, 
More potent grows the ecstacy, 
Lovelier the beat of wings through me 

When wedded with the mountains cold, 

When given to the sounding choir 

Crying the glory of the doom 

Through the dark gorge, past gleam and gloom 
To the bastions of far-wandering fire. 



78 



Now I come, an unquestioning child. 
It is enough .... The laurel shakes 
Out on the foam. The moist wind wakes 

Down the long chasm. Fain and mild 

Like a bird gathering to her brood 
One other nestling gone an hour, 
Hovers the gathering cosmic power. 

The moaning dove of the world's mood, 

The last vibration of the chord, 
The throb of planetary wings, 
The glory of the sum of things, 

Includes me without touch or word! 



T 



DEDICATION 

HREE souls .... in each a darkness and a light, 
And each more lovely than my own forever ! 



There is one soul, a foam on the sea, a whispering 

Of waters on loved sands; warm and salt waves, 

Warm ripples on faint shores ineffable. 

I know no joy like that joy your soul owns, 

Which is such joy even as the Buddha knew 

When from the Indian garden home returning 

He saw the hour-old first-born dreaming at last 

And her, the ten-years' loved one, lying asleep ; 

j\nd yet he turned (because the plains were glimmering 

And because far the human cry wailed low,) 

And went away, and knew the untold-of marvel 

Dark in the chill heart of stones nameless ever 

And dark in the lone waste of human need — 

Joy, which in truth is the Divine grown nigh, 

Which is the Godhead freed from selfish will 

As it is Godhead freed from vacancy. 

From you the laughter of solemn childhood pours. 



79 



The eternity which throws on sand-dunes its mantle 

As on the vanishing granite or any cloud, 

The achieved eternity is yours .... I can no more. 

Still ever the far rolling of the ocean 

Rumoring and moaning from the invisible 

Down the entrancing shingle, claims your nature. 

Only the currents of the mighty Water 

Have borne palm fragments and the gleaming bergs 

Of austere ice to this marge of your soul, 

Your strong soul, fierce, urgent, disconsolate; 

And the vast tides from the vast human deep, 

The deep of sorrow, yea of the homeless wave, 

Rise and fall until death where your soul lingers. 

There is one soul, a lightning beyond the mountain 
And a star on the precipice of the cloud. 
And I have seen in your dewdrop in the morning 
And the broad waters of your lifelong way 
That lightning. Oh the marvel of the human ! 
For I have witnessed, faithful amid calm anguish, 
Unwavering while the heart's blood flowed away, 
You, in the glory of youth fair and passionate, 
Warrior and victor through long merciless seasons, 
Warrier and victor for the divine lightning. 
No desert's solitude more still than yours 
Who day by day amid life critical, surging, 
Have waged the ancient battle of the soul, 
Have borne the victory to that One in Silence 
Who takes, and gives but little thanks to these 
His heralds and his warriors in the twilight. 
And all the human burden, and all illusion 
Bides with you still. You guess, in the flying hour, 
How sometime, in that long long year your own 
Or other year of the slow-widening confluence 
Of human life our bark sails to the sea — 
You guess, how in the secular age you own 
Or far, far hence in mortal works to-be, 
The mystic lightning shall find home in deed, 



80 



And consummation of fire, thunder and wave, 

With no bird's warble foregone, shall all be rendered 

Into one human heart, one love, one victory. 

So you have marked gloriously a foredoomed goal, 

Here and now foredoomed. O Breath of the Storm-wind, 

O Intimation of skies beyond the storm, 

Dream you or I the unresting lightning pauses 

In any deed forever, or any dream 

Or any heart, even that heart of marvel 

Of the divine fire or of motherhood ? 

Down the lone skies toward other human ages 

And toward life's meaning our brains do not deem, 

Down the lone uncompanioned ways it flushes, 

And where your lightning goes there your life seeketh. 

Wherefore is glory everywhere you go; 

And you in difficult deed have wrought some passion 

Of the vibration of that chord of being 

Incredible, unknowable, beyond forever. 

O human Heart frail in a human form, 

How are these warring splendors of a one nature 

Like the antimonies which make our world, 

Which make its marvel, its doom, its fascination, 

Which wed yon trampled grass by the roaring highway 

With the silence of Andromeda! O mystic Soul! 

And there is one soul in whom is all power, 

A larger soul than earth was meant to know, 

A soul born long ages before life 

(What we call life) shall be prepared to hold it. 

So, quietly (out of enormous power,) 

And gently (out of an intensity 

Beside which all I know is dull red fire,) 

You have put life away. Sphered and o'erclouded, 

Lit with such gleam as bathes the long dead moon, 

As far away as God may hold this world 

Often you hold our life, our love, our all. 

But oh, greatest of souls that I shall ever 

Till my life's end know, whom I shall not know, 



Still the wild holy doom follows you on. 
God cannot go so far love goes not farther, 
God cannot so love that he does not need, 
And you are immersed in the doom eternal 
Of love beating its wings against the bars, 
Of love beating its wings within the void, 
Of love beating its wings of tragic power. 

There are three souls .... And I seem like a wanderer 

Far on some moorland in a night of summer. 

I see and do not see the intense world soul, 

I know and do not know the o'erwhelming joy, 

And the great sorrow is muffled in my faint pain. 

The vast clouds pour silent, immeasurable, 

Cumulus mountains and cirrus pale in the moon, 

And the stars wreathe away through the cloud chasms. 

Ah me — clouds and the heavens' silent fire 

Mysteriously grow one with my dim brain, 

Through my dim soul mysteriously grow fairer, 

And a flying moment weds their life with mine. 

But my imagination flags forever .... 

Far toward the Milky Way their glory reaches, 

They move in wonder to an unmeasured rythm, 

And I see through a glass vainly and darkly, 

In vision vain even as in action vain, 

Till my lids drowse on the moorland in summer. 

So I, a moment in the long human ages, 
Discern in these three souls Eternity .... 



82 



By the Same Writer: 

THE INDWELLING SPLENDOR, 191 1, 75 pages 

HARP OF THE HUMAN, 1913, 34 pages 

70 Fifth Avenue, New York