Classic Poem

If ever had a covenant been sought,
If ever truth had been like night sat up with
As one house in a city may till dawn
With sleepless lamp eke out the day before —

But the war that was, and again was,
Never did it lapse, never was there peace,
A vigil sworn to peace, peace only.
Never was there not, in hearts, on tongues,
A protest of to-morrows,
According to the desire of the heart,
And to the will of the tongue.

There were never covenants:
The covenants which are told of were but trials.
There have been trials but never covenants.
Man is a fretful man, truth is a patient goal,
An end which waits all ending.
Between fretfulness and patience have been trials.
Races have been run and won,
Triumphs foretold, and triumphs celebrated.
But never between man and truth
Has been less strife than a kiss's strife;
Never has man more than loved;
Never has he not, fretful, torn the embrace,
Never rested but he rose,
Never covenanted but he bargained.

And each new covenant made the other old;
And old was each new covenant,
By that it was a trial,
Truth-magic of the moment,
A mortal winning-post exalted,
Dressed in the winner's garments
And, man-like scarecrow,
Hailed in the wooden name of God .

There has been much mist always.
A day often is named fair.
But never clouds lack, though soft to see,
Where to-morrow's passions huddle,
And which to-morrow will make weather of,
Even the natural temper of a day.
Between death and death hovers the course of man.
Much mist attends his time,
Banks of obscurity ensphere his place.
His world has been a fitful veering,
Paling and blush of troth and impulse,
Pleasure and resolve.

He has scored shadowy vantages on air,
Mounted among the ruins of self
The weary trophies of intransigence.
These are not immortalities, nor monuments,
But rotting gages, limp where thrown,
Relics of dreamt victories.
For truth is no historian,
To touch the random scene
With probability's enchantment.
She is the muse that serves herself,
An eye that strays not after passing sights,
An enemy not lightly brought to battle,
A friend not lightly given drink,
Primed to the banquet's need of company —
No friend at reach of chance
Or love at distance of bold lover's legs,
Neared by mercurial familiarities:
But in the selfless thought a thought
Most far, yet as man's own
By selflessness, by covenant
Of peace eventual — one sense
The words which importune
And the words which dispose.

And those pledges
Which between man and heaven held
By rapt contrivance, stumblings, stutterings,
And the visions of wan, rheumy eyes?
And those infatuated ordinances
Scratched on the stubborn tablets of persuasion?
Those promises of multiple remissions,
Mercies like days,
A flow of timeless time?
Has nothing yet been everlasting,
Nothing yet locked from forfeit,
Certain beyond faith, logic or conjecture?

Nothing yet: it was all trial,
Man's private humour of things unplain.
Heaven was the mist, thoughts left unthought,
Blind scheming, unvoiced secrecies.
So they who plot against a king enthroned
Do reverence to a ghost-king:
Their king's a something born of whispers,
Sanction of craven charters,
Whose signature's their own.
From where the power, so to continue
In more days, more semblances?
Is truth then to be parried
With the instruments of time,
Taunted with prematurities —
A future ever future?
Whose the power,
If man has power to proclaim,
" Here is state, and this the rule,"
And there take stand, and that make master?
It is a borrowed power,
If not returned is taken away;
And the end, death,
As in a foreign country,
Not as the fortunate bring travel home
To native recognition and embrace.

Roses are buds, and beautiful,
One petal leaning toward adventure.
Roses are full, all petals forward,
Beauty and power indistinguishable.
Roses are blown, startled with life,
Death young in their faces.
Shall they die?
Then comes the halt, and recumbence, and failing.
But none says, " A rose is dead."
But men die: it is said, it is seen.
For a man is a long, late adventure;
His budding is a purpose,
His fullness more purpose,
His blowing a renewal,
His death a cramped spilling
Of rash measures and miles.

To the roses no tears:
Which flee before the race is called.
And to man no mercy but his will:
That he has had his will, and is done.
The mercy of truth — it is to be truth.
She has bestowed power and will take back power.
There will be dead men, and there will be truth.
And with truth there will be truth:
Voices like truth's voice,
Power surrendered, home-keeping,
Memories of lives that read death-strange
In language new-familiar.

When! Who! Be it never, it is now:
The trials are waning hazard all,
By waning hazard clears the constant.
And be there none to count,
Yet is the count entire,
Yet is truth.
Be there none, yet are there many.
Be there none, truth is many —
Hers the voices covenanting.
Be there many, truth is one —
Theirs the voices, hers the concord.

Was all silence then, before: her silence?
All was silence and your silence-breaking,
Making of mock-covenants, mock-peace.
Did no god speak then,
When you were prophesied a scattered number,
Starry, or as the sands lie hoarded,
Each the other's miser?
It was a god of stars and sands.
Are you not men?
Truth's treaty is a covenant with men.

What is man?
It is that which is less than truth.
And what is that which is less than man?
It is that which lifts to fall,
Abashed to be, better content to be not.
And what is that which is more than man?
Nor yet is truth?
It is divinity,
Man-monster of self-fright
Uplifted to self-fascination,
To cast the guardian shadow, pride.
And how shall man, that is less than truth,
Endure into truth's always, self-outlasting?
Has not a man a mind?
A mind is a way to be with truth.
It is a power asked, and a power granted,
And when delivered up again
Is vested in a covenant of power
By which all is made changeless
That power could not change,
That power taught desistance.
And this is power: to remain.

And what remains?
What now keeps covenant,
What last things have attested a last covenant?
Truth remains, by which a world remains.
The same world?
And was that a world?
What were its excellences, dignities,
But that, for every jewel found rare,
A prattle spread,
Of jealous baubles claiming kinship —
And which its cousins in confusion were?
There remains a world,
As, after clamour's obstinate exhaustion,
A sobered murmur hangs.
And in that world?
The count is homely:
These are not nameless multitudes.

If they were nice in pleasure
And scrupulous in praise,
The pleasure was a whim of the time,
As the time was young;
And the praise was a boast of the time,
As the time was old.
There were times and times,
And no time young but old also,
And no time old but young also.
They who delighted were the children of themselves,
And they who judged were the parents of themselves:
The pleasure was a mischief,
The praise a rebuke.
All were divided between wildness and wiseness;
And none was himself.
For man is no child of himself
And no parent of himself.
Man asks himself and is given himself,
But the giver is not man.

Man is a time only
When himself his flesh and spirit is,
Created and creator,
Suicidal resurrection;
And in every time a wildness and a wiseness,
Worse than he is, and better —
His comedies all vice,
His tragedies all horror of vice,
His truth a desperation of extremes.

Is the sweet thing then a sweet lie?
And the good thing then a sour lie?
There shall be sweet things which are true things
And good things which are sweet things —
When time on time has cooled
The madness which is self,
When the sane season comes
That muffles greedy joy
And shames sagacity to falter.

There shall be a world,
And it shall be so, and its things so,
In being world entire,
Nor such seizure of truth, or such —
Time's empty grasp.
You shall have:
By that your having shows
Small in your hand,
And the hand known for small.
Thus is the sweet possession true,
And the holding of it good.
You shall have delight in these furnishings;
And it shall be well beyond delightful —
You shall know it to be well.
But what sights, tastes, sounds,
What feel and fragrance?

Often, where it was and was not well
Delightful and not delightful,
In those places sometimes a world,
As often chaos of crossed trials —
Have you not halted, as between two moments,
And there been mindful,
As a man dead and not dead,
Dying and yet living,
Of a standstill swiftness:
That nothing was not nothing?
To see, and yet it was not common sight,
Nor blindness? A scarcest sight,
Yet, as a painted picture,
More visible than naked spectacle?
Such are these furnishings
Sifted from gross variety,
Time's stinking wealth —
The perishable marvels which bedeck
The dream-bazaars of fain exaggeration.

What wish is left
When appetites have their deceit —
By foods that flattered taste, but fed not,
Swollen insufficiencies
Swallowed as names of better things?
What wish is left, and what contenting?
There is left the wish and its contenting.
There has vanished, with that tiring,
The succession of things mutable,
By which the wish grows lasting
And the things not sooner tasted still to taste.
And must these be proved?
Ticketed with legends that they are so?
Let the wish speak
And claim the loath contenting
Which turned from fickleness.

You shall leave those places,
Each a camp raised in a shifting wilderness;
And no camp stayed its wilderness,
But wandered with it, into failing distance.
You shall reach this place.
You shall prophesy: " I have arrived here
And will discover to myself what is here."

But not because of you,
That you shall have better, know better,
Than you had, than you knew,
Is truth that delight, that truth,
That lengthened age
Past death's abrupt meridian —
The temporal habit put away
Like drudging error.

And not because of her,
That she, debated myth,
May to herself be justified
And hold a sudden mirror to herself,
Exclaiming, " This was I!"
She is no cause to herself,
Being not other then —
Though toiled in hydra-myth —
Than now she will be, is;
No miracle of mist born,
No mist that into sheerness turns,
Astounding self.
Same, same was she
As she is and is to be:
Last safety against nothingness
Where trials of number, power,
Are stopped from fall impetuous
To downward triumph,
Abyss of lone eternities.
There her surveillance,
And herself the common treasure —
That which is, and cannot fail to be,
Ultimate something, living thread
By which the cloth of being,
Though an ancient rag,
Moulders not utterly.
And thus she at the last is,
And thus first was she,
Who in those ageing futures was
As present doom prorogued in hearsay.

Not because of you, not because of her,
That you had need, that she had need,
But that toward this far verge
The far surmises, ships of roving chance:
The way is over sullen depths,
Round angry headlands,
Listing past ghostly settlements
(Coasts of the dogged dead),
And nowhere making port.
The way is onward,
And travel has one end,
This unitary somewhere.

And if they come not?
If they have perished early, all,
Bequeathing the discovery to itself?
Then is this still a place eventual,
To itself a goal,
Relic of outworn visions,
Unseen, seen of itself,
Faithfullest witness.

And if they know not?
Then is she still herself,
Nor has complaint of desolation.
For she has need neither of lovers
Nor of a populace,
Nor to be adored nor hailed —
As if truth flesh were, or a tyranny.
She has no need but of herself,
That truth be truth, nor less:
Revealment has no need
But of identicality.
And never was truth less, except as man,
By furious dispute of oneness,
Made quarrelsome variety to seem
One's littling into lesserness of one,
And lesserness a greatness,
Titanic dissipation.
Over this seeming she now rises.
Venus, they say, so rose.
But shameful, to be loved, divided,
Fed to the mathematic hounds
Whose pack increased of her,
Made whelpish worlds to howl profusion.
This was her dreaming:
Her sleep they gave a turbid waking,
And called it day, and all that happened real.
But it happened not, it was not rising:
Thus they desired,
And were cursed with passion's stolen images,
Which to the thievish touch dissolve.
Against those louring weathers she rises now.
And the mist passes:
It was but sulky fabrication.

And if you know not,
If with the mist you pass?
And if you come not,
If she rises solitary?
With whom full covenant,
What windy host puffs out totality?
And know you not, or know you,
And come you not, or come you,
There is binding and accounting,
There is oneness, and the sign
Truth shall not yield to mist again.
Cloudy prediction shall not dim again
The sparkling end: which sparkles now as source.
And though you come not, yet you come.
In that she so gave power,
The given power must own its springhead —
Though you like hasty rivers rush
Toward lightless seas of ancient self.
Choose, therefore, to be now, or then.