Fragments
O world
Rebuked by utter silence of its best.
The modern wise,
That, like the men of Sodom, cannot see
The gate before their eyes.
The Daisy Innocence,
That gazes unconfounded on the Sun.
Save by the Old Road none attain the new,
And from the Ancient Hills alone we catch the view.
[ Pain in all love .]
From the small life that loves with tooth and nail
To the thorn'd brow that makes the heavens pale.
Let the response of her delight
Be tender, timely, slight.
Ah, great, sweet Lord, make Thou of little me
Only a soft reciprocal of Thee.
When the soul owns herself sincerely to be nought
The whole of heaven flows in as freely as a thought.
Who speaks the things that Love him shows
Shall say things deeper than he knows.
Pride gives no food unless he can a feast:
The quality of grace is goodness in the least.
A song
Loud with the truth which cannot be expressed.
List the forgotten spheres,
Till, like a lute-string that a trumpet hears,
Thy answering soul will magic airs resound.
[ Heaven .]
Softness, sweetness, ineffable variety and mutability,
Perception of each other's inmost bliss,
And no desire or any thought for anything but this.
To lie within His heart without annoy,
And only by believing,
And only by receiving,
Sans question of desert or scruple coy,
To give bliss to the Giver —
O bright, full-flooded river
Of nameless and intelligible joy!
With vision of Thee do Thou my heart so feed
That every word I breathe shall be a deed.
Faith is the light of the flame of love.
May I love Him with love and joy like them
So virginal, so wifely, so motherly, so marvellous!
Potency of Joy
To do, resist, or to destroy.
Men oft see God,
But never know 'tis He till He has passed.
I am
As one that knows a tune but cannot sing.
" I will lay me altogether down in peace" (Ps. lv. 8),
Till my posture is a Sacrament.
With Thee,
A Goddess made of amethystine light:
Without Thee, the most rank
And filthiest clot of carrion that ever stank.
Love that
Burns with desire of burning more and more.
God, in whose image we are made,
Let me not be afraid
To trace Thy likeness in what best we are.
All day for God to work or fight,
And be within His arms all night.
A million crowned Brides, and every queen
As diverse from the rest as red from green.
From me, thine altar, let no strange fire hiss.
Ah, heavenly fame,
Aye to do good and be for aye unknown.
Until at last
The bush of knowledge blazes with God's love,
Thou hid'st Thyself from me
Who have lost all and even myself for Thee.
I will not go beyond my door
To hunt for poor.
I am the poorest person that I know
That I should meet, where'er I go.
The eye of innocence renew'd in age.
All I ask for the reward of love
Is but to love thee more.
Shine, shine, and fill thy Flower
With colour, honey, and perfume.
Wandering with Thee alone among
The mountains of eternity.
The patient man, whate'er his hardships be,
Enjoys already sweet eternity.
Unelated, undejected, centred in its own humility.
The simple and the pure, into whose hearts
Truth falls, like dew into a fleece of wool.
The honour of the world, that waits to crown by name,
I hate thrice worse than shame.
[One Good better than Another.]
The flame that shoots above the fire.
The soul
Sucking its life from the deep breasts of love.
Just war and wedlock, which make right
Nature's twain joys, to kiss and fight.
It doth come
Of being deaf that men are dumb.
Whence joy and sorrow, in divine embrace,
Look down, with pitying face,
Towards the poor, terrestrial peaks of bliss,
Where pain and pleasure kiss.
Better blood-letting War than the foul-blooded ease
That breeds such boils as these.
In the soft arms of happy certitude.
A bee upon a briar-rose hung
And wild with pleasure suck'd and kiss'd;
A flesh-fly near, with snout in dung,
Sneer'd, " What a Transcendentalist!"
" O loving hint answering my longing guess,"
And whispering softly to my wildest wishes, " yes."
[The People.]
'Tis but a toss-up whether they cry
Hosanna, or Crucify!
The only kindness Wise can show to Fool
Is, firm to hold him on the whipping-stool.
Truth-teaching is a trade he only knows by half
Who does not o'er his labour sing and laugh.
As of old the truth,
Now falsehood has become self-evident.
Of God's love the many-coloured rays
Grow only visible in the incense of praise.
Love that weakens with its sweet the knee
That drops adoringly to thee.
Ah, Lord,
Thy vine still gives Thee vinegar to drink.
He found me in the desert, and then fell
In love with my exceeding loneliness.
A bee, beloved, is least of fowls with wings,
Yet is her fruit the sweetest of sweet things.
Who search for truth and do not start from God
For a long journey should be shod.
For the foul fume is matter of sweet flame.
Heaven, which is
The eternal agony of God's first kiss.
Not little children, but the man
That was as one of them, is he
Who Heaven's kingdom enter can
By right of his simplicity.
Science, the agile ape, may well
Up in his tree thus grin and grind his teeth
At us beneath,
The wearers of the bay and asphodel,
Laughing to be his butts,
And gathering up for use his ill-aim'd cocoa-nuts.
How should they win,
Who care not for the prize?
The darkness that precedes increase of light.
To evolve the sounds of joy and ruth
Out of pure law and hated truth.
The kiss of silence and of light.
This brightest hope is but thick smoke
By the sweet light in which the least saint lives.
As parched Egypt longs for rising Nile,
So I for thee.
[Thought.]
Idiots that take the prologue for the piece,
And think that all is ended just when it begins.
" The Virgin's womb." The narrowness of that dwelling, the darkness, the mode of nourishment: He could not hear, nor see, nor taste, nor move; He lay at all times fixed and bound;
And by that rapture of captivity
He made us free,
His blissful prisoners likewise to be.
Truth, the air in which Love flies and sings.
The night-brawler, remembering how he once met God in a daisied field, may feel
" Some saving sorrow of offended love."
Thus shalt thou grow:
By little and by little, and most rapidly.
The dull and heavy hate of fools.
Thou'st turned my substance all to honeycomb,
Each atomy a cell of discrete sweet.
When Jesus came
The world was all at peace in utter wickedness.
Bound fast
In marriage strange whose honeymoon comes last.
He ruddy with her love,
She splendid with his light.
The song that is the thing it says.
In the eternal peace and tempest of delight.
Rivers that give to Ocean but its own.
Dear Lord, for forty years I tried to raise in the wilderness a house for Thy abode. I painfully gathered bricks, and worked a bit of cornice here, and there a capital; but as I put it together all would suddenly fall, and still I gathered up material, though the more I gathered the greater seemed the chaos; but one day, why none could tell, except perhaps that I felt more despair than ever I had done before, I heard a winnowing of unseen wings, and lo, the bricks and stones all took their place.
And a gay palace fine
Beyond my deepest dreamt design.
May He who built it all
Take care it does not fall.
Self-doubting hope, sufficient for sure peace.
Their death is Easter who make life their Lent.
Life's warp of Heaven and woof of Hell.
Secret saints, unstain'd with human honour.
For happy 'tis to live from care exempt
In the safe shadow of the world's contempt.
Thou wilt not tarry if I wait for Thee.
From stocks or stones eliciting delight .
What is a woman without tears?
Society lies crushed
Under the rubbish of its broken thrones.
Glad Nature's upright purpose warps
To riot sad in his abused corpse.
Ah, Jesus, what delight;
And this the unjoyful third watch of the night.
O souls for marriage with your Maker made,
Your aim is meanness, misery your joy.
Hours are long but years are short.
Souls of the lost in fiery corpses clad.
Dear little Child with child of God.
What little, laughing Goddess comes this way
Round as an O and simple as Good-day,
Bearing upon the full breast of a Mother
One Cupid whom she does with kisses smother,
And, I should say,
Within her breast another?
You have already Cupids twain, I see.
Each is very He:
No mortal difference of identity.
From the light and pleasant land of self
To leap into the black gulf
Of His love and power.
A keen, sweet, and constant ardour.
The simple
Take fairer measure of the goods of Earth
To mean, because they should mean, fairer worth.
When evil is consummated
And runs into its punishment.
The great and all too common Truth in speech,
Great, simple, singular, to teach.
Rocket-like his road is fire.
The clearness of whose presence is repose.
Each novel favour from the store
Of unexhausted modesty,
This is the very quivering tip of the flame of love.
Thy neck is iron, and thy brow is brass,
But not the less shall this be brought to pass.
For I am worse and better than you know.
Gladstone's eloquence, like lava, bright
In dark, and dark in light.
A dishonest man who believes is still a man,
But not believing is as a rat or skunk.
(Of a poor and holy person.)
There was nothing about him to envy but his life manners.
As a little bone, questioned by the anatomist,
Remembers the whole beast, a million years deceased.
The eight beatitudes detested worse than death.
Thy love is an incessant trouble in my breast, like one of those little quiet wells where the upheaval of the sand never ceases.
Like milk from the kind, impatient breast, so willing to feed that, on the approach of the baby's mouth, it waits not to be pressed.
As a fountain seeks in air the hidden level of its far-off source.
I desire nothing now but to desire Thee more.
Give me to desire all which thou desirest to give.
Like the charred pole
Round which was built the festive fire extinct.
The liberties of Heaven administered
By petty parish tyrants.
Ah, turn away thine eyes, for they have made me flee,
And shut them, would'st thou see.
It is not fit that men who hear these songs should not know that I am no better than themselves. May I so do my works that men seeing them may praise my Father, and leave me from them
Exempt,
In the safe shadow of the world's contempt.
May I know by love and speak by silence.
My net, at last, is full of fishes, but I cannot draw it to land without Thy help.
I have an alabaster box, full of the praise of God, left to me from the riches I have left. I come, like that other sinner, to break it over Thee, and what this woman hath done shall be told in all the world, not to her honour, but to His, who by much pardon breeds exceeding love.
Enough's a surfeit to the soul.
And when I woke, it was as if a bird should wake and find a flood had risen in the night, and there was no world but water.
Light words are weighty sins.
Daisies . — Of flowers none
So lowly and so like the sun.
Primroses . — That touch'd mine eyes like kisses cool.
Sad as a ship far off at fall of day,
Alone upon the wide sea-way.
The countless chase of feet.
The baby leaves of aged elms in Spring.
The winds are playing with their friends the clouds.
The iron muscle and electric nerve.
A cloud-bank pale
With phantom portent of unhappy peace.
Under the lily-leaf lie the red tench.
The vent of feeling and the veil.
On store of memories . — Sad as a basket of old keys.
Crackles the hidden heat, and faster comes the smoke.
Dumbly the breakers flash'd: slow clomb great sighs.
The dead men got the battle; they
Who look'd on got the praise.
Her breath was like a bean-field,
Her body white as milk,
Straight as a stalk of lavender,
Soft as a robe of silk.
Puss, in her fervour of content,
Lay crackling like a fire.
Shafts of gauzy light.
And the fair sweep of soft, reposeful glades.
My only Dear,
The end is now intelligibly near.
A sweet and sunny intellect.
The herd of deer stood still,
Fronting me with their horns,
A little wood of wintry oaks.
A noxious flying thing
Winnowing the dusk.
The sunny field of shadowy stooks
Untied by ambush-fearing rooks.
Rebuked by utter silence of its best.
The modern wise,
That, like the men of Sodom, cannot see
The gate before their eyes.
The Daisy Innocence,
That gazes unconfounded on the Sun.
Save by the Old Road none attain the new,
And from the Ancient Hills alone we catch the view.
[ Pain in all love .]
From the small life that loves with tooth and nail
To the thorn'd brow that makes the heavens pale.
Let the response of her delight
Be tender, timely, slight.
Ah, great, sweet Lord, make Thou of little me
Only a soft reciprocal of Thee.
When the soul owns herself sincerely to be nought
The whole of heaven flows in as freely as a thought.
Who speaks the things that Love him shows
Shall say things deeper than he knows.
Pride gives no food unless he can a feast:
The quality of grace is goodness in the least.
A song
Loud with the truth which cannot be expressed.
List the forgotten spheres,
Till, like a lute-string that a trumpet hears,
Thy answering soul will magic airs resound.
[ Heaven .]
Softness, sweetness, ineffable variety and mutability,
Perception of each other's inmost bliss,
And no desire or any thought for anything but this.
To lie within His heart without annoy,
And only by believing,
And only by receiving,
Sans question of desert or scruple coy,
To give bliss to the Giver —
O bright, full-flooded river
Of nameless and intelligible joy!
With vision of Thee do Thou my heart so feed
That every word I breathe shall be a deed.
Faith is the light of the flame of love.
May I love Him with love and joy like them
So virginal, so wifely, so motherly, so marvellous!
Potency of Joy
To do, resist, or to destroy.
Men oft see God,
But never know 'tis He till He has passed.
I am
As one that knows a tune but cannot sing.
" I will lay me altogether down in peace" (Ps. lv. 8),
Till my posture is a Sacrament.
With Thee,
A Goddess made of amethystine light:
Without Thee, the most rank
And filthiest clot of carrion that ever stank.
Love that
Burns with desire of burning more and more.
God, in whose image we are made,
Let me not be afraid
To trace Thy likeness in what best we are.
All day for God to work or fight,
And be within His arms all night.
A million crowned Brides, and every queen
As diverse from the rest as red from green.
From me, thine altar, let no strange fire hiss.
Ah, heavenly fame,
Aye to do good and be for aye unknown.
Until at last
The bush of knowledge blazes with God's love,
Thou hid'st Thyself from me
Who have lost all and even myself for Thee.
I will not go beyond my door
To hunt for poor.
I am the poorest person that I know
That I should meet, where'er I go.
The eye of innocence renew'd in age.
All I ask for the reward of love
Is but to love thee more.
Shine, shine, and fill thy Flower
With colour, honey, and perfume.
Wandering with Thee alone among
The mountains of eternity.
The patient man, whate'er his hardships be,
Enjoys already sweet eternity.
Unelated, undejected, centred in its own humility.
The simple and the pure, into whose hearts
Truth falls, like dew into a fleece of wool.
The honour of the world, that waits to crown by name,
I hate thrice worse than shame.
[One Good better than Another.]
The flame that shoots above the fire.
The soul
Sucking its life from the deep breasts of love.
Just war and wedlock, which make right
Nature's twain joys, to kiss and fight.
It doth come
Of being deaf that men are dumb.
Whence joy and sorrow, in divine embrace,
Look down, with pitying face,
Towards the poor, terrestrial peaks of bliss,
Where pain and pleasure kiss.
Better blood-letting War than the foul-blooded ease
That breeds such boils as these.
In the soft arms of happy certitude.
A bee upon a briar-rose hung
And wild with pleasure suck'd and kiss'd;
A flesh-fly near, with snout in dung,
Sneer'd, " What a Transcendentalist!"
" O loving hint answering my longing guess,"
And whispering softly to my wildest wishes, " yes."
[The People.]
'Tis but a toss-up whether they cry
Hosanna, or Crucify!
The only kindness Wise can show to Fool
Is, firm to hold him on the whipping-stool.
Truth-teaching is a trade he only knows by half
Who does not o'er his labour sing and laugh.
As of old the truth,
Now falsehood has become self-evident.
Of God's love the many-coloured rays
Grow only visible in the incense of praise.
Love that weakens with its sweet the knee
That drops adoringly to thee.
Ah, Lord,
Thy vine still gives Thee vinegar to drink.
He found me in the desert, and then fell
In love with my exceeding loneliness.
A bee, beloved, is least of fowls with wings,
Yet is her fruit the sweetest of sweet things.
Who search for truth and do not start from God
For a long journey should be shod.
For the foul fume is matter of sweet flame.
Heaven, which is
The eternal agony of God's first kiss.
Not little children, but the man
That was as one of them, is he
Who Heaven's kingdom enter can
By right of his simplicity.
Science, the agile ape, may well
Up in his tree thus grin and grind his teeth
At us beneath,
The wearers of the bay and asphodel,
Laughing to be his butts,
And gathering up for use his ill-aim'd cocoa-nuts.
How should they win,
Who care not for the prize?
The darkness that precedes increase of light.
To evolve the sounds of joy and ruth
Out of pure law and hated truth.
The kiss of silence and of light.
This brightest hope is but thick smoke
By the sweet light in which the least saint lives.
As parched Egypt longs for rising Nile,
So I for thee.
[Thought.]
Idiots that take the prologue for the piece,
And think that all is ended just when it begins.
" The Virgin's womb." The narrowness of that dwelling, the darkness, the mode of nourishment: He could not hear, nor see, nor taste, nor move; He lay at all times fixed and bound;
And by that rapture of captivity
He made us free,
His blissful prisoners likewise to be.
Truth, the air in which Love flies and sings.
The night-brawler, remembering how he once met God in a daisied field, may feel
" Some saving sorrow of offended love."
Thus shalt thou grow:
By little and by little, and most rapidly.
The dull and heavy hate of fools.
Thou'st turned my substance all to honeycomb,
Each atomy a cell of discrete sweet.
When Jesus came
The world was all at peace in utter wickedness.
Bound fast
In marriage strange whose honeymoon comes last.
He ruddy with her love,
She splendid with his light.
The song that is the thing it says.
In the eternal peace and tempest of delight.
Rivers that give to Ocean but its own.
Dear Lord, for forty years I tried to raise in the wilderness a house for Thy abode. I painfully gathered bricks, and worked a bit of cornice here, and there a capital; but as I put it together all would suddenly fall, and still I gathered up material, though the more I gathered the greater seemed the chaos; but one day, why none could tell, except perhaps that I felt more despair than ever I had done before, I heard a winnowing of unseen wings, and lo, the bricks and stones all took their place.
And a gay palace fine
Beyond my deepest dreamt design.
May He who built it all
Take care it does not fall.
Self-doubting hope, sufficient for sure peace.
Their death is Easter who make life their Lent.
Life's warp of Heaven and woof of Hell.
Secret saints, unstain'd with human honour.
For happy 'tis to live from care exempt
In the safe shadow of the world's contempt.
Thou wilt not tarry if I wait for Thee.
From stocks or stones eliciting delight .
What is a woman without tears?
Society lies crushed
Under the rubbish of its broken thrones.
Glad Nature's upright purpose warps
To riot sad in his abused corpse.
Ah, Jesus, what delight;
And this the unjoyful third watch of the night.
O souls for marriage with your Maker made,
Your aim is meanness, misery your joy.
Hours are long but years are short.
Souls of the lost in fiery corpses clad.
Dear little Child with child of God.
What little, laughing Goddess comes this way
Round as an O and simple as Good-day,
Bearing upon the full breast of a Mother
One Cupid whom she does with kisses smother,
And, I should say,
Within her breast another?
You have already Cupids twain, I see.
Each is very He:
No mortal difference of identity.
From the light and pleasant land of self
To leap into the black gulf
Of His love and power.
A keen, sweet, and constant ardour.
The simple
Take fairer measure of the goods of Earth
To mean, because they should mean, fairer worth.
When evil is consummated
And runs into its punishment.
The great and all too common Truth in speech,
Great, simple, singular, to teach.
Rocket-like his road is fire.
The clearness of whose presence is repose.
Each novel favour from the store
Of unexhausted modesty,
This is the very quivering tip of the flame of love.
Thy neck is iron, and thy brow is brass,
But not the less shall this be brought to pass.
For I am worse and better than you know.
Gladstone's eloquence, like lava, bright
In dark, and dark in light.
A dishonest man who believes is still a man,
But not believing is as a rat or skunk.
(Of a poor and holy person.)
There was nothing about him to envy but his life manners.
As a little bone, questioned by the anatomist,
Remembers the whole beast, a million years deceased.
The eight beatitudes detested worse than death.
Thy love is an incessant trouble in my breast, like one of those little quiet wells where the upheaval of the sand never ceases.
Like milk from the kind, impatient breast, so willing to feed that, on the approach of the baby's mouth, it waits not to be pressed.
As a fountain seeks in air the hidden level of its far-off source.
I desire nothing now but to desire Thee more.
Give me to desire all which thou desirest to give.
Like the charred pole
Round which was built the festive fire extinct.
The liberties of Heaven administered
By petty parish tyrants.
Ah, turn away thine eyes, for they have made me flee,
And shut them, would'st thou see.
It is not fit that men who hear these songs should not know that I am no better than themselves. May I so do my works that men seeing them may praise my Father, and leave me from them
Exempt,
In the safe shadow of the world's contempt.
May I know by love and speak by silence.
My net, at last, is full of fishes, but I cannot draw it to land without Thy help.
I have an alabaster box, full of the praise of God, left to me from the riches I have left. I come, like that other sinner, to break it over Thee, and what this woman hath done shall be told in all the world, not to her honour, but to His, who by much pardon breeds exceeding love.
Enough's a surfeit to the soul.
And when I woke, it was as if a bird should wake and find a flood had risen in the night, and there was no world but water.
Light words are weighty sins.
Daisies . — Of flowers none
So lowly and so like the sun.
Primroses . — That touch'd mine eyes like kisses cool.
Sad as a ship far off at fall of day,
Alone upon the wide sea-way.
The countless chase of feet.
The baby leaves of aged elms in Spring.
The winds are playing with their friends the clouds.
The iron muscle and electric nerve.
A cloud-bank pale
With phantom portent of unhappy peace.
Under the lily-leaf lie the red tench.
The vent of feeling and the veil.
On store of memories . — Sad as a basket of old keys.
Crackles the hidden heat, and faster comes the smoke.
Dumbly the breakers flash'd: slow clomb great sighs.
The dead men got the battle; they
Who look'd on got the praise.
Her breath was like a bean-field,
Her body white as milk,
Straight as a stalk of lavender,
Soft as a robe of silk.
Puss, in her fervour of content,
Lay crackling like a fire.
Shafts of gauzy light.
And the fair sweep of soft, reposeful glades.
My only Dear,
The end is now intelligibly near.
A sweet and sunny intellect.
The herd of deer stood still,
Fronting me with their horns,
A little wood of wintry oaks.
A noxious flying thing
Winnowing the dusk.
The sunny field of shadowy stooks
Untied by ambush-fearing rooks.
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