Classic Poem

Slowly a sad, majestic voice began,
" Blind, like all mortals! Ye withhold the gods
From their unfinished blessings. Know ye me?
Demeter; from vain walking in this world
To find the lost Persephone, Pluto's bride,
Hither I came, and here for a little rest,
A little quietness to sorrow in,
I laid my godhood by, and hid myself
In human poverty and mortal years.
Could ye not guess, such blessings as I brought
Come only from the gods? First I bestowed
On yonder lad the mastery of earth.
The labors that men do beneath the sun
Shall be for him no burden but sheer joy;
He shall have knowledge of this world as it is,
He shall love what is kindred to his fate,
He shall know men, and he shall know his gods.
But for this other child, this dreaming babe
That stirred the memory of my ancient heart,
I would have furnished immortality.
So frail he seemed, so pitiful, so pure,
And time so stern a teacher, and the path
So rough, where he must stumble, fall by fall
Painfully fashioning his eternal soul —
To spare him, I desired, — to make his days
All of such moments as the happiest men
Dream only at their best. Here by the fire
I washed in deathless love the mortal mind,
And fast the god grew in him, till your fear
Ruined the heavenly will. Now he shall be
Master of nothing, but dreams shall master him.
A pilgrim of confusion shall he be;
Two worlds alternate shall be his, but rest
In neither; painfully shall his hand, his eye,
On the obdurate face of things lay hold,
The while his dreams look on what never was;
And for he cannot tell the twain apart,
Madness and ecstasy shall envelop him,
Out of the world he finds but will not see,
Building a world he sees but cannot find.
Nothing that is shall teach him what it is —
Pain of this world, still knocking at the door,
Nor grief that stabs, nor joy that comforts him;
He shall be strange to thee, for all thy love,
And for thy sake, for him all things be strange;
Whate'er he loves shall whisper him farewell,
And waft him on the exile of his dream —
A human face, a shining on the sea,
The cold moon, or the still march of stars,
If but the inexorable beauty call,
Eternity, rising in him like a tide,
Shall from their bases lift and set afloat
The stranded accidents of time. "
She ceased,
The light died from the room, and she was gone.
But Metaneira heard, far-off, the voice
Of Celeus, like a sound breaking on sleep.