The Star-Treader and other poems Part 2

I

O wonderful and winged flow'r, That hoverest in the garden-close, Finding in mazes of the rose, The beauty of a Summer hour!

O symbol of Impermanence, Thou art a word of Beauty's tongue, A word that in her song is sung, Appealing to the inner sense!

Of that great mystic harmony, All lovely things are notes and words-- The trees, the flow'rs, the songful birds, The flame-white stars, the surging sea,

The aureate light of sudden dawn, The sunset's crimson afterglow, The summer clouds, the dazzling snow, The brooks, the moonlight chaste and wan.

Lacking (who knows?) a cloud, a tree, A streamlet's purl, the ocean's roar From Nature's mult.i.tudinous store-- Imperfect were the melody!

II

O Beauty, why so sad my heart?

Why stirs in me a nameless pain Which seems like some remembered strain, As on this product of thine art

Enraptured, marvelling I gaze, And note how airily 'tis wrought-- A winged dream, a bodied thought, The spirit of the summer days?

Thy beauty opes, O b.u.t.terfly, The doors of being, with subtle sense Of Beauty's frail impermanence, And grief of knowing it must die.

Again I seem to know the tears Of other lives, the woe and pain Of days that died; resurgent wane The moons of countless bygone years.

III

On other worlds, on other stars, To us but tiny points of light, Or lost in distances of night Beyond our system's farthest bars,

A priest to Beauty's service sworn, I sought and served her all my days, With music and with hymns of praise.

In sunset and the fires of morn,

With thrilling heart her form I knew, And in the stars she whitely gleamed, And all the face of Nature seemed Expression of her shape and hue.

I grieved to watch the summers pa.s.s With all their gorgeous shows of bloom, And sterner autumn months a.s.sume Their realm with withered leaves and gra.s.s.

Mine was the grief of Change and Death, Of fair things gone beyond recall, The paling light of dawns, and all The flowers' vanished hues and breath.

IV

From out the web of former lives, The ancient catenated chain Of joy and sorrow, loss and gain, One certain truth my heart derives:--

Though Beauty pa.s.ses, this I know, From Change and Death, this verity: Her spirit lives eternally-- 'Tis but her forms that come and go.

V

Lo! I am Beauty's constant thrall, Must ever on her voice await, And follow through the maze of Fate Her luring, strange and mystical.

Obedient to her summonings, Forever must my soul aspire, And seek, on wings of lyric fire, To penetrate the Heart of Things,

Wherein she sits, augustly throned, In loveliness that renders dumb-- The Essence and the final Sum-- With peril and with wonder zoned

What though I fail, my duller sense Baffled as by a wall of stone?

The high desire, the search alone Are their own prize and recompense.

THE PRICE

Behind each thing a shadow lies; Beauty hath e'er its cost: Within the moonlight-flooded skies How many stars are lost!

THE MYSTIC MEANING

Alas! that we are deaf and blind To meanings all about us hid!

What secrets lurk the woods amid?

What prophecies are on the wind?

What tidings do the billows bring And cry in vain upon the strand?

If we might only understand The brooklet's cryptic murmuring!

The tongues of earth and air are strange.

And yet (who knows?) one little word Learned from the language of the bird Might make us lords of Fate and Change!

ODE TO MUSIC

O woven fabric and bright web of sound, Whose threads are magical, And with swift weaving thrall And hold the spirit bound!

We may not know whence thy strange sorceries fall-- Whether they be Earth's voices wild and strong, Her high and perfect song.

Or broken dreams of higher worlds unfound.

For, lo, thou art as dreams.

And to thy realm all hidden things belong-- All fugitive and evanescent gleams The soul hath vainly sought; All mystic immanence; All visions of ungrasped magnificence, And great ideals pinnacled in thought; All paths with marvel fraught That lead to lands obscure: For, lo, upon thy road of sound we pa.s.s, Seeking thy magic lure, To vales mist-implicated and unsure, Where all seems strange as visions in a gla.s.s; And wonder-haunted hills, Where Beauty is an echo and a dream In sighing pines, and rills Clouded and deep with imaged tree and sky; And where bright rivers gleam Past cities towering high, Each wonderful as some cloud-fantasy.

Thou loosenest the bondage of the years, Making the spirit free Of all sublunar joys and fears.

Who mounts on thine imperious wings shall see The ways of life as threads of day and night; Serene above their change, His eyes shall know but far transcendent things, His ears shall hark but voices free and strange; Vast seas of outer light Shall beat upon his sight, Eternal winds shall touch him with their wings; His heart shall thrill To larger, purer joy, and grief more deep Than earth may know; And e'en as dews of morning fill The opened flower, into his soul shall flow High melodies, like tears that angels weep.

Then shall he penetrate The veils and outer barriers of sound, And near the soul of melody, Where, rapt in aural splendors ultimate, His soul shall see The marvel and the glory that surround Eternal Beauty's shrine; And catch afar the glint divine Of her moon-colored robe, or haply hear, With world-oblivious ear, Some echo of her voice's mystery.

Thou hast Love's power to find The soul's most secret chords, that else were still, And stir'st them till they thrill Disclosed to least, faint movements of thy wind.