Classic Poem

By what unseen and subtile bands
Were you two lovers bound and wed?
By tiny unborn baby-hands
Your spirits were together led.

Your meeting passions, seeming-blind,
Were in Life's prescient control;
You looked — there was conceived a mind;
You smiled — there was conceived a soul;

You kissed — and in the country dim
That lies beyond the bounds of space,
Foreshadowed was a baby's limb,
Prefigured was a baby's face.

This was your love's supernal source,
And this its mystic mundane goal, —
The grip of the creative Force
That needs a body for a soul.

O wondrous is the eugeny
That finds a soul its avatar;
God's baby-dream you could not see
Drew you together from afar;

And if perchance you lovers twain
Had been by Fate asunder torn,
Then had God's baby-dream been vain,
A baby-soul had died unborn.