Classic Poem

O anterior soul! I am emitted of you to the free spaces:
The light receives me, gravitation receives me, the sea wets me with its waves.

I am balanced in the gases, the boiling cauldron swings in infinite space,
I am safe in the fire, I ascend the slopes of flame:
O sun's self — O nebulous prophecies — O solace of promised restoration!

Cool the midnight air — moist the breeze of the morning:
I sleep, I am resting, I am happy.

An atom of dust in the whirling globe,
Eager to live, quickened on the wind's passion,
Floating in sunbeams, thrown into air to fall again,
Potent in rain and light, vielding my life to the desiring years

Open the doors wide!
I am born to new purposes, I turn in the lessening spiral,
I reach uncertain arms to the love that I attract — to the love I solicit:
By the dust am I entered to the new areas of sight.

Robed in flesh, the flesh my house, the flesh's joys my joys,
Yet never for the flesh, never passing to it my crown,
Still to the anterior soul retiring at will,
Refreshment, revivification, recrudescence mine.

I am transmuted ten thousand times,
I am man, I am beast, I am the soul of the song you sing:
I am that by which the orator speaks and the poet writes,
Seized from countless prior lives for this life,
On earth's fields won to the new exhibit, the expanded powers.

I walk erect, I trade, I am the lawyer in the court,
I labor with the chaingang, I am sailor and soldier.
I do not stop to count the years of the journey
Why should I stop for that which never stops, for that as to which I am unconcerned?

I am discoverer and sceptic, I wrangle and am at peace,
I am the knowing dreamer and the unknowing mathematician,
I set forth the new social order, I justify the theorem,
I lift fact high above reason, its circle is equal with heaven's span,
Socrates and Sancho Panza are the two sides of my demonstration

On, on I pass, pausing not with events,
Little by little the denied is accepted, the darkness is lighted, the seeming faithless is made faithful

Now I am at the human line: dare I still pas?
Warnings are sent me — father, mother sister, plead —
Loved one, most loved one, my other self, tempts me to stay, to turn my back to inviting hills.

There is a figure on the height:
I see it — O it embraces me!
It presses a kiss to my lips,
It sets me sail on immortal seas,
It vanishes, it comes again, it laves me in the delicious stream spread in its unmeasured hands,
It is day by day my single joy, my overmastering conviction
It, figure of light, its forehead to the sun,
It, the anterior soul, taking me, who am god, back to god,
Immersing the ubiquitous life in its own waters.