One must say it; it presses against the brain;
It pours through the pulse like a deluge of mad, sweet spring rain;
How may one say it — the aching thing that is wordless, evanescent, concrete —
Jubilant, sorrowful, trumpet-toned, whispering; sometimes terrible, sometimes sweet?
How may one trap the flash of the wing of a passing bird?
How fold the rustle — and then the stillness — of the forest into a word?
It is life. Pushing, singing, dragging, winging, always rushing to be spoken;
Life, big in the hop of a sparrow, in adoring eyes of a dog — life, tender, fierce, joyful, heart-broken;
How, when it floods being, may we, going down under the rolling wave, many-splendored, unswerving,
Stand again, dripping wet with life, and catch the glory of it in a cupped palm curving?
How may one say it? For it urges, it aches in the nerves to be said;
Are they fools then, they who eagerly shoulder that pressure, and stammer pale words — so few — and are dead?
On sweeps the beautiful-universal ocean through racked, inadequate finite souls,
On and on; and one paints, and one writes; such a little — the fringe of creating; and the day is done; and on and on life rolls.
Against a copper-pink sunset sky
Black laces of tree-tops peacefully lie;
A robin, with antique art untold,
Both light feet together, is tearing the mould;
The sea roars with storms — is dimpled with calms;
A child runs, shouting, to its father's arms;
Lord, who are we to catalogue living?
Yet, Lord of life, 'tis to us you are giving
To suffer the joy, to exult in the pain of the glory of every day;
To see the thing, and to feel the thing, and forever be trying,
Till the day we are dying,
To say the thing some other way.