  As I shall die, let your belief Find in these words too poor and brief My soul's essential self. My grief Down to the day I knew you locks Its secret word in paradox: I who loved truth could not be true, Could only love the truth and glow With words of truth who loved it so, Even while I dishonored you. I who loved constancy was false, And heeded but in part the calls Of loveliness for love and you. I am but half of that I hoped, And that half hardly more than words I cheered my soul with as it groped: As from their bowers of rain the birds Sing feebly, pining for the sun. As I am all of this, by fate Lose what I could so well have won, Life leaves me half articulate, My failure, nature half-expressed, Or wholly hidden in my breast. Yes, dear, the secret of me lies Where words scarce come to analyze. Yet who knows why he is this or that? What moves, defeats him, works him ill? What blood ancestral of the bat Narrows his music to the shrill Squeak of a flitting thing that hunts For gnats, which never singing, fronts The full moon flooding down the vale, The perfect soul, the nightingale! You have wooed music all your life, And I have sought for love. I think My soul was marked, dear, by a wife Who loved a man immersed in drink, Who crushed her love which would not die. If this be true, my soul's great thirst Was blended with a fault accursed. My mother's love is my soul's cry. My father's vileness, lies and lusts, His cruel heart, inconstancy That kept my mother with the crusts Of life to gnaw, are in my blood. My rainbow wings I scarce can loose, Or if I free them, there's the mud That weighs and mars their use. You have wooed music. But suppose The hampered hours and poverty Broke down your spirit's harmony, Then if you found you could achieve The music in you, if you could But pick a pocket or deceive, Which would you call the greater good— The music or a sin withstood? Suppose you passed a window where The violin of your despair Lay ready for your hands! At last You stole it as you hurried past, And hid it underneath your rags Until you reached your attic room, Then tuned the strings and burned the tags. And drew the bow till lyric fire Should all your thieving thoughts consume: In such case what is your desire— The music or the violin? And what in such case is your sin? And if they caught you in your theft, Would you, just to be honest, dear, Forefront your thief-self as your deft And dominant genius, or the ear Which tortured you? Would you not say, Music intrigues me night and day? My soul is the musician's. First In my soul's love is music. Would You falsify to keep your good? Deny your theft, or put the worst Construction on your soul, obscure Thereby your soul's investiture Of music's gift and music's lure? If you were flame you would pretend What you would fain be to the end, Keep your good name and keep as well The violin. May this not be In some realm an integrity? Now for myself, dear, though I lack The gift of utterance to explain My life's pursuit and passion, pain, Or why I acted thus, concealed Thoughts that you hold were best revealed, Your eyes to heal themselves must track And find my soul's way in its quest Followed from girlhood without rest. Music is not its hope, but love.... And I saw somehow I could lift My life through you, and rise above What I had been. And since your gift Of love saw me as truthful, true I kept that best side to your view, And hoped to be what you desired If I but struggled, still aspired. And as for lapses, even while I fooled you with the wanton's smile, He was my lover till you came To light my life with purer flame. Was it, beloved, so great a sin? He was a practice violin. Oh, how I knew this when your strings Sang to me afterward when I slept Upon your breast again. I wept, Do you remember? I was grieving Neither for him, nor your deceiving, Rather (how strange is life) that he Was prelude to your harmony; Rather that while I walked with him, With you I found the cherubim, Left my old self at last with wings, Saw beauty clear where it was dim Before through my imaginings. Do you suppose the primrose knows What skill adds petals to its crown? How many failures laugh and frown Upon the hand that crosses, sows? The hand is ignorant of the power Obedient in the primrose flower To the hand's skill that toils to add New petals till the flower be clad In fuller glory. What's the bond Between us two, that I respond To what you are? Nor do you know What lies within |
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