A Dialogue
Long have I striven and now am overwrought
With sleepless nights and days whose blackened suns
Make pale my blood and drain my spirit of fire,
Mine eyes of light.
— But spring will come again.
— But not again that old ideal spring,
The essence of the Aprils that have been
And live as memories. All that is lost;
Now, even in my six and twentieth year,
Like winter twilight in a little room,
Over the wide expanse of wood and field,
Slow darkness thickens in the room of the world,
Which with the lamps of science and poetry
I must illuminate as best I can.
— But there is life beyond this darkening life.
Somewhere behind the narrow arch of blue
Dwell the imaginable verities
Which you have seen and whose remembered forces
Draw your sick heart in longing from your breast.
— They are there indeed but I am cast on earth.
After how long and how headlong a fall
There reside! where there is nothing true
But shadows and faint copies that suggest
Dimly and brokenly the real world,
Whence we are exiled here. O, how can I
See the truth shine beyond phantasmal shows
And thin the splendour of the gorgeous earth
And still be glad for either?
— But your spirit
Remembers yet the home from which you came
And gives ideal beauty to the fragments
And wreckage of this unpieced, fantastic life.
— Would it were so! The world in which we live
Was once my pleasure. Midday gleaming elms
And silent oaks with brooding night in their boughs
And the low-chanting aspens and the holy
Unreal thorn ablaze with silver flowers,
Whether amid the odorous meadows set
Or on the sides of smooth and lofty hills,
Delighted me and then were nought but trees.
The rayless blue of heavy August skies
Pleased me, and the clouds that floated stiffly past
Were solid toys that vision touched and played with.
I found my joy in beautiful forms and in
The fresh and supple body of my young love,
Her voice, her eyes, her arms about my neck,
And in all girls that passed me in the streets,
Light with the grace of youth and happy pride,
In colours and music and the lovely words
That then could bind my sorrows up with spells,
Such sorrows as then I knew. But now through these
Shines the intolerable sum of truth,
Gleams through the misty veil
Of the world's beauty and makes poor and thin
This life's imperfect grace.
— Yet do you not
Strive for perfection still,
Strain and glow warm in straining for the truth?
Are not the joys you had from earthly things
Transformed by musing on the original?
— Would it were so!
— Yet have you no inner faith
That from the mist of illusion you will at length
Emerge and move about the real world?
— Thence have I fallen far and farther fall
Headlong in ruin through these empty cheats.
Why should I hope (since hope is also a cheat)
Ever to find again that tangled way
I followed hither from eternity?
Still through the waste of dark and whirling time,
Through shadowed years and sombre centuries,
My spirit goes, like a lost child in a wood,
Crying for home amid the unfriendly boughs
And straying further from the invisible road.
With sleepless nights and days whose blackened suns
Make pale my blood and drain my spirit of fire,
Mine eyes of light.
— But spring will come again.
— But not again that old ideal spring,
The essence of the Aprils that have been
And live as memories. All that is lost;
Now, even in my six and twentieth year,
Like winter twilight in a little room,
Over the wide expanse of wood and field,
Slow darkness thickens in the room of the world,
Which with the lamps of science and poetry
I must illuminate as best I can.
— But there is life beyond this darkening life.
Somewhere behind the narrow arch of blue
Dwell the imaginable verities
Which you have seen and whose remembered forces
Draw your sick heart in longing from your breast.
— They are there indeed but I am cast on earth.
After how long and how headlong a fall
There reside! where there is nothing true
But shadows and faint copies that suggest
Dimly and brokenly the real world,
Whence we are exiled here. O, how can I
See the truth shine beyond phantasmal shows
And thin the splendour of the gorgeous earth
And still be glad for either?
— But your spirit
Remembers yet the home from which you came
And gives ideal beauty to the fragments
And wreckage of this unpieced, fantastic life.
— Would it were so! The world in which we live
Was once my pleasure. Midday gleaming elms
And silent oaks with brooding night in their boughs
And the low-chanting aspens and the holy
Unreal thorn ablaze with silver flowers,
Whether amid the odorous meadows set
Or on the sides of smooth and lofty hills,
Delighted me and then were nought but trees.
The rayless blue of heavy August skies
Pleased me, and the clouds that floated stiffly past
Were solid toys that vision touched and played with.
I found my joy in beautiful forms and in
The fresh and supple body of my young love,
Her voice, her eyes, her arms about my neck,
And in all girls that passed me in the streets,
Light with the grace of youth and happy pride,
In colours and music and the lovely words
That then could bind my sorrows up with spells,
Such sorrows as then I knew. But now through these
Shines the intolerable sum of truth,
Gleams through the misty veil
Of the world's beauty and makes poor and thin
This life's imperfect grace.
— Yet do you not
Strive for perfection still,
Strain and glow warm in straining for the truth?
Are not the joys you had from earthly things
Transformed by musing on the original?
— Would it were so!
— Yet have you no inner faith
That from the mist of illusion you will at length
Emerge and move about the real world?
— Thence have I fallen far and farther fall
Headlong in ruin through these empty cheats.
Why should I hope (since hope is also a cheat)
Ever to find again that tangled way
I followed hither from eternity?
Still through the waste of dark and whirling time,
Through shadowed years and sombre centuries,
My spirit goes, like a lost child in a wood,
Crying for home amid the unfriendly boughs
And straying further from the invisible road.
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