  I. On her great venture, Man, Earth gazes while her fingers dint the breast Which is his well of strength, his home of rest, And fair to scan. II. More aid than that embrace, That nourishment, she cannot give: his heart Involves his fate; and she who urged the start Abides the race. III. For he is in the lists Contentious with the elements, whose dower First sprang him; for swift vultures to devour If he desists. IV. His breath of instant thirst Is warning of a creature matched with strife, To meet it as a bride, or let fall life On life’s accursed. V. No longer forth he bounds The lusty animal, afield to roam, But peering in Earth’s entrails, where the gnome Strange themes propounds. VI. By hunger sharply sped To grasp at weapons ere he learns their use, In each new ring he bears a giant’s thews, An infant’s head. VII. And ever that old task Of reading what he is and whence he came, Whither to go, finds wilder letters flame Across her mask. VIII. She hears his wailful prayer, When now to the Invisible he raves To rend him from her, now his mother craves Her calm, her care. IX. The thing that shudders most Within him is the burden of his cry. Seen of his dread, she is to his blank eye The eyeless Ghost. X. Or sometimes she will seem Heavenly, but her blush, soon wearing white, Veils like a gorsebush in a web of blight, With gold-buds dim. XI. Once worshipped Prime of Powers, She still was the Implacable: as a beast, She struck him down and dragged him from the feast She crowned with flowers. XII. Her pomp of glorious hues, Her revelries of ripeness, her kind smile Her songs, her peeping faces, lure awhile With symbol-clues. XIII. The mystery she holds For him, inveterately he strains to see, And sight of his obtuseness is the key Among those folds. XIV. He may entreat, aspire, He may despair, and she has never heed. She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need, Not his desire. XV. She prompts him to rejoice, Yet scares him on the threshold with the shroud. He deems her cherishing of her best-endowed A wanton’s choice. XVI. Albeit thereof he has found Firm roadway between lustfulness and pain; Has half transferred the battle to his brain, From bloody ground; XVII. He will not read her good, Or wise, but with the passion Self obscures; Through that old devil of the thousand lures, Through that dense hood: XVIII. Through terror, through distrust; The greed to touch, to view, to have, to live Through all that makes of him a sensitive Abhorring dust. XIX. Behold his wormy home! And he the wind-whipped, anywhither wave Crazily tumbled on a shingle-grave To waste in foam. XX. Therefore the wretch inclines Afresh to the Invisible, who, he saith, Can raise him high: with vows of living faith For little signs. XXI. Some signs he must demand, Some proofs of slaughtered nature; some prized few, To satisfy the senses it is true, And in his hand, XXII. This miracle which saves Himself, himself doth from extinction clutch, By virtue of his worth, contrasting much With brutes and knaves. XXIII. From dust, of him abhorred, He would be snatched by Grace discovering worth. ‘Sever me from the hollowness of Earth! Me take, dear Lord!’ XXIV. She hears him. Him she owes For half her loveliness a love well won By work that lights the shapeless and the dun, Their common foes. XXV. He builds the soaring spires, That sing his soul in stone: of her he draws, Though blind to her, by spelling at her laws, Her purest fires. XXVI. Through him hath she exchanged, For the gold harvest-robes, the mural crown, Her haggard quarry-features and thick frown Where monsters ranged. XXVII. And order, high discourse, And decency, than which is life less dear, She has of him: the lyre of language clear, Love’s tongue and source. XXVIII. She hears him, and can hear With glory in his gains by work achieved: With grief for grief that is the unperceived In her so near. XXIX. |
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