Classic Poem

With your hand in mine, your faith in shadowy retirements of jungled thought,
The lore of love retrieving the day to its confident dreams,
You yet rebuke my jubilant cry: O faithful companion, O my released other self, I am content .
You weep bitter tears, you ask: Can you be happy now?

The day brings you sorrow, arrogant power has subjugated your will to its will, again I hear your voice: Is there no pity in your heart for this?
The slaves wail, I see the starved outcast, the cold north wind is mad musical at the fireless hearth:
My neighbor does not say a word yet I hear his question:
O just judge, O passionless laughing optimist, are these in your cup, do you drain these to their dregs, still proclaiming your faith?

I mix these and more than these in my cup, they do not poison it,
As I drink I am moved out of my flesh and childborn again to visions unseen by the eye,
The slave is freed, his chains are wings: the harlot is purified, the passion that sold her restores.
Hark! An hour is struck! do you know the hour? it summons sin from its grave and gives it new form.
Bring all your sorrows, your weepers, here: I will sorrow, weep, with them: I will tell them why I do not mistake the passing shadow for a sunbeam.

The mendicant sits with extended hand by the roadside,
I accost him: he is blind, deaf, nothing moves him till I drop a warm coin in his cold desiring palm,
This wakes him to life, words vague thankful leap to his lips:
I am blind — yes: but I, too, have skies, seaswells, wonderful as any which eyes see — but I also have hunger,
I am here for my hunger's sake alone, my body's beggary.

The dark page reads white, the shadows are only playthings of sunshine,
Even failure is successful with success, they reach the goal twin-leaping.

I thought I heard as I passed the birds singing in forests carols windladen, sunbathed,
Now I am undeceived: these birds were my heart singing, light and breeze the outward theme and song of interior seasons:
The seasound did not come into me, it went out of me, I only supposed it there harptouched from unseen musical zephyrs making love to wavecrests,
The blue deep was only starrich by the unhesitating grace of my vision,
O apparition! O unsundered worlds! from me first cast, out of me created, my heart your sunfires, fused in exterior delusions, I surprised baffled by my own progeny!
To your beds, O philosophers: sleep yet another night,
It may chance with the morning, refreshed, you may be better worthy of your inheritance,
Your now blaspheming lips no longer reluctant ministers of joy
By specters led I go to the sea's edge, I see the wreckage strewn the shore,
By specters led I reach, I peer over the rim of the volcano,
By specters led I fearlessly traverse the narrow passes of devastated ambitions,
Before me the processional of sorrow, nothing withheld, no hard line softened, the cruel evil left as evil, inspiration of reformer, tradecoin of priest:
I do not banish these, all are welcome guests,
I had provided enough for all — the seats at the feast are not filled till the last evil has come.
Are all arrived? Well at last for all, for all shall go forth fed, clothed, satisfied.