II
O Beauty, why so sad my heart?
Why stirs in me a nameless pain
Which seems like some remembered strain,
As on this product of thine art
Enraptured, marvelling I gaze,
And note how airily 'tis wrought—
A wingèd dream, a bodied thought,
The spirit of the summer days?
Thy beauty opes, O Butterfly,
The doors of being, with subtle sense
Of Beauty's frail impermanence,
And grief of knowing it must die.
Again I seem to know the tears
Of other lives, the woe and pain
Of days that died; resurgent wane
The moons of countless bygone years.
III
On other worlds, on other stars,
To us but tiny points of light,
Or lost in distances of night
Beyond our system's farthest bars,
A priest to Beauty's service sworn,
I sought and served her all my days,
With music and with hymns of praise.
In sunset and the fires of morn,
With thrilling heart her form I knew,
And in the stars she whitely gleamed,
And all the face of Nature seemed
Expression of her shape and hue.
I grieved to watch the summers pass
With all their gorgeous shows of bloom,
And sterner autumn months assume
Their realm with withered leaves and grass.
Mine was the grief of Change and Death,
Of fair things gone beyond recall,
The paling light of dawns, and all
The flowers' vanished hues and breath.
IV
From out the web of former lives,
The ancient catenated chain
Of joy and sorrow, loss and gain,
One certain truth my heart derives:—
Though Beauty passes, this I know,
From Change and Death, this verity:
Her spirit lives eternally—
'Tis but her forms that come and go.
V
Lo! I am Beauty's constant thrall,
Must ever on her voice await,
And follow through the maze of Fate
Her luring, strange and mystical.
Obedient to her summonings,
Forever must my soul aspire,
And seek, on wings of lyric fire,
To penetrate the Heart of Things,
Wherein she sits, augustly throned,
In loveliness that renders dumb—
The Essence and the final Sum—
With peril and with wonder zoned
What though I fail, my duller sense
Baffled as by a wall of stone?
The high desire, the search alone
Are their own prize and recompense.
THE PRICE
Behind each thing a shadow lies;
Beauty hath e'er its cost:
Within the moonlight-flooded skies
How many stars are lost!
THE MYSTIC MEANING
Alas! that we are deaf and blind
To meanings all about us hid!
What secrets lurk the woods amid?
What prophecies are on the wind?
What tidings do the billows bring
And cry in vain upon the strand?
If we might only understand
The brooklet's cryptic murmuring!
The tongues of earth and air are strange.
And yet (who knows?) one little word
Learned from the language of the bird
Might make us lords of Fate and Change!
ODE TO MUSIC
O woven fabric and bright web of sound,
Whose threads are magical,
And with swift weaving thrall
And hold the spirit bound!
We may not know whence thy strange sorceries fall—
Whether they be Earth's voices wild and strong,
Her high and perfect song.
Or broken dreams of higher worlds unfound.
For, lo, thou art as dreams.
And to thy realm all hidden things belong—
All fugitive and evanescent gleams
The soul hath vainly sought;
All mystic immanence;
All visions of ungrasped magnificence,
And great ideals pinnacled in thought;
All paths with marvel fraught
That lead to lands obscure:
For, lo, upon thy road of sound we pass,
Seeking thy magic lure,
To vales mist-implicated and unsure,
Where all seems strange as visions in a glass;
And wonder-haunted hills,
Where Beauty is an echo and a dream
In sighing pines, and rills
Clouded and deep with imaged tree and sky;
And where bright rivers gleam
Past cities towering high,
Each wonderful as some cloud-fantasy.
Thou loosenest the bondage of the years,
Making the spirit free
Of all sublunar joys and fears.
Who mounts on thine imperious wings shall see
The ways of life as threads of day and night;
Serene above their change,
His eyes shall know but far transcendent things,
His ears shall hark but voices free and strange;
Vast seas of outer light
Shall beat upon his sight,
Eternal winds shall touch him with their wings;
His heart shall thrill
To larger, purer joy, and grief more deep
Than earth may know;
And e'en as dews of morning fill
The opened flower, into his soul shall flow
High melodies, like tears that angels weep.
Then shall he penetrate
The veils and outer barriers of sound,
And near the soul of melody,
Where, rapt in aural splendors ultimate,
His soul shall see
The marvel and the glory that surround
Eternal Beauty's shrine;
And catch afar the glint divine
Of her moon-colored robe, or haply hear,
With world-oblivious ear,
Some echo of her voice's mystery.
Thou hast Love's power to find
The soul's most secret chords, that else were still,
And stir'st them till they thrill
Disclosed to least, faint movements of thy wind.
Thine aural sorcery
O'erwhelms the heart as sunset storms the sight,
For thou art Beauty bodied forth in sound—
Her colors bright
And diverse forms expressed in harmony:
Within thy bound,
The flare of morning is become a song,
And tree and flower a music sweet and long.
And in thy speech
The power and majesty that swing
Planet and sun, and each
Dim atom of the system manifest,
Become articulate, expressed
Like ocean in the brooklet's whispering.
Beyond the woof of finite things,
Thy threads of wonder deep-entangled lie—
Time's intertexturings
Within Eternity—
With Song, mayhap, to be his memories;
For Beauty borders nigh
The ultimate, eternal Verities.