Classic Poem

When the long freaks of light (new time still somewhere)
Reach into memory like fresh morning icicles,
The dead shiver between hot and cold,
Find their marked places in the grateful crypt
Where lying still decides all feeling well or ill.
Under the feverish snow of sudden day,
Stony refuge from the sun's maddening prophecy
Of instantaneousness (life to the living
But to the dead, death again, false pang) —
A crypt, darkened by daylight heavily,
Keeps death in snowy hiding obdurate
To the long icicles of memory
That no thought's quickening in death can melt.
Such angry monuments of indestructible calm
Lie underground only where near overhead
Religion fortifies the pride of skeletons
Soothing all envy of what never dead men owned.
Noiselessly, lest wakefulness overtake them,
They clamber to the cellulate recesses
And drop into the hollow, chequered pavement —
This their vindictive lettering of the sun
In the illegible dialect of tombs.
" To natural light let us seem natural corpses," they say.
" Light is a devil that once like sprightly fools we followed.
Swift cunning and clownish crafts he teaches,
And now to play such sciences would lose
The homely learning that death without a lesson
On the homely dead bestows — to do not, yet be wise
In so profiting of idleness by idleness.
For that's a death not death, weariness only,
A sick tossing, a country of no purpose
Where the deed comes first, then the reason of the deed,
And none to give it reason, the doer least —
Country of the great Why, and of whylessness.
Let us therefore be as irredeemable bones
When the day comes, to make us into souls
That cannot be our own, vain resurrection
Into an actuality of lost to-morrows."
And yet some few, impatient of such wisdom,
As secretly as others to their tombs
Up dawn's deceptive stairway creep
And, feeble with rebellion, seem to grow strong
At each step left behind, but strong in folly only.
For, at the first step mastered, the memorial soul
Transfixed in sculptural battle with self and self
In a blind niche leaves off majestically,
Immortal ravel of distracted wills.
Or, if the mind has taken fire with body along
And the sun lights up another flight where roofless
This museum-like enchantment blends into sky
With golden flash and bright invisible spectra —
Ah, dissolution into forgotten thoughts,
Truly one is no more oneself then:
A woman prettily upon a horse,
Delicate her habit, solitary the grove;
Or table of the poor, a family supper,
Dishes in the humble style, tasting of plenty;
And, where the walls are nearly sky, the sky pictured,
Nearly sky, scarcely that most reckless one
Thus become deathly mist in yielding to the dawn . . .
The ecstasy of rising toward a future
That never to that world descends, all hope there
Being but of things long gone, and better not missed
Lest death float up and like aspiring smoke
Lead into nothingness greater than itself.