Song For Mercy, Courage, Kindness, Mirth,
There is no measure upon earth.
Nay, they wither, root and stem,
If an end be set to them.
Overbrim and overflow,
If your own heart you would know;
For the spirit born to bless
Lives but in its own excess.
Dancing figures silhouetted Contents
Commercial Gross, with protruding ears,
Sleek hair, brisk glance, fleshy and yet alert,
Red, full, and satisfied,
Cased in obtuseness confident not to be hurt,
He sits at a little table
In the crowded congenial glare and noise, jingling
Coin in his pocket; sips
His glass, with hard eye impudently singling
A woman here and there: —
Women and men, they are all priced in his thought,
All commodities staked
In the market, sooner or later sold and bought.
"Were I he," you are thinking,
You with the dreamer's forehead and pure eyes,
"What should I lose? — All,
All that is worthy the striving for, all my prize,
"All the truth of me, all
Life that is wonder, pity, and fear, requiring
Utter joy, utter pain,
From the heart that the infinite hurts with deep desiring
"Why is it I am not he?
Chance? The grace of God? The mystery's plan?
He, too, is human stuff,
A kneading of the old, brotherly slime of man.
"Am I a lover of men,
And turn abhorring as from fat slug or snake?
Lives obstinate in me too
Something the power of angels could not unmake?"
O self-questioner! None
Unlocks your answer. Steadily look, nor flinch.
This belongs to your kind,
And knows its aim and fails not itself at a pinch.
It is here in the world and works,
Not done with yet. — Up, then, let the test be tried!
Dare your uttermost, be
Completely, and of your own, like him, be justified.
Contents
Numbers Trefoil and Quatrefoil!
What shaped those destinied small silent leaves
Or numbered them under the soil?
I lift my dazzled sight
From grass to sky,
From humming and hot perfume
To scorching, quivering light,
Empty blue! — Why,
As I bury my face afresh
In a sunshot vivid gloom —
Minute infinity's mesh,
Where spearing side by side
Smooth stalk and furred uplift
Their luminous green secrets from the grass,
Tower to a bud and delicately divide —
Do I think of the things unthought
Before man was?
Bodiless Numbers!
When there was none to explore
Your winding labyrinths occult,
None to delve your ore
Of strange virtue, or do
Your magical business, you
Were there, never old nor new,
Veined in the world and alive: —
Before the Planets, Seven;
Before these fingers, Five!
You that are globed and single,
Crystal virgins, and you that part,
Melt, and again mingle!
We have hoisted sail in the night
On the oceans that you chart:
Dark winds carry us onward, on;
But you are there before us, silent Answers,
Beyond the bounds of the sun.
You body yourselves in the stars, inscrutable dancers,
Native where we are none.
O inhuman Numbers!
All things change and glide,
Corrupt and crumble, suffer wreck and decay,
But, obstinate dark Integrities, you abide,
And obey but them who obey.
All things else are dyed
In the colours of man's desire:
But you no bribe nor prayer
Avails to soften or sway.
Nothing of me you share,
Yet I cannot think you away.
And if I seek to escape you, still you are there
Stronger than caging pillars of iron
Not to be passed, in an air
Where human wish and word
Fall like a frozen bird.
Music asleep
In pulses of sound, in the waves!
Hidden runes rubbed bright!
Dizzy ladders of thought in the night!
Are you masters or slaves —
Subtlest of man's slaves, —
Shadowy Numbers?
In a vision I saw
Old vulture Time, feeding
On the flesh of the world; I saw
The home of our use undated —
Seasons of fruiting and seeding
Withered, and hunger and thirst
Dead, with all they fed on:
Till at last, when Time was sated,
Only you persisted,
DÆdal Numbers, sole and same,
Invisible skeleton frame
Of the peopled earth we tread on —
Last, as first.
Because naught can avail
To wound or to tarnish you;
Because you are neither sold nor bought,
Because you have not the power to fail
But live beyond our furthest thought,
Strange Numbers, of infinite clue,
Beyond fear, beyond ruth,
You strengthen also me
To be in my own truth.
Contents
The Children Dancing Away, sad thoughts, and teasing
Perplexities, away!
Let other blood go freezing,
We will be wise and gay;
For here is all heart-easing,
An ecstasy at play!
The children dancing, dancing,
Light upon happy feet,
Both eye and heart entrancing,
Mingle, escape, and meet,
Come joyous-eyed advancing
And floatingly retreat.
Now slow, now swifter treading
Their paces timed and true,
An instant poised, then threading
A maze of printless clue,
The music smoothly wedding
To motions ever new.
They launch in chime, and scatter
In looping ripples; they
Are Music's airy matter,
And their feet move, the way
The raindrops shine and patter
On tossing flowers in May.
As if those flowers were singing
For joy of the bright air,
As if you saw them springing
To dance the breeze — so fair
The lissom bodies swinging,
So light the flung-back hair.
And through the mind enchanted
A happy river goes,
By its own young carol haunted
And bringing, where it flows,
What all the world has wanted
But who in this world knows?
Contents / Contents, p. 4
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