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Title: The New World
Author: Witter Bynner
Release Date: January 7, 2009 [eBook #27731]
Language: English
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THE NEW WORLD
* * * * *
BY WITTER BYNNER
An Ode to Harvard and Other Poems
Tiger
The Little King
The New World
Iphigenia in Tauris
* * * * *
THE NEW WORLD
by
WITTER BYNNER
New York
Mitchell Kennerley
1918
Copyright 1915 by
Mitchell Kennerley
The greater part of this poem was delivered before the Harvard
Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in June, 1911; several
passages from it have appeared in _Poetry_, and others in _The
Bellman_, the Boston _Evening Transcript_ and the _American
Magazine_.
Printed in America
_To
Celia_
The New World
I
Celia was laughing. Hopefully I said:
"How shall this beauty that we share,
This love, remain aware
Beyond our happy breathing of the air?
How shall it be fulfilled and perfected?...
If you were dead,
How then should I be comforted?"
But Celia knew instead:
"He who finds beauty here, shall find it there."
A halo gathered round her hair.
I looked and saw her wisdom bare
The living bosom of the countless dead.
... And there
I laid my head.
Again when Celia laughed, I doubted her and said:
"Life must be led
In many ways more difficult to see
Than this immediate way
For you and me.
We stand together on our lake's edge, and the mystery
Of love has made us one, as day is made of night and night of day.
Aware of one identity
Within each other, we can say:
'I shall be everything you are.'...
We are uplifted till we touch a star.
We know that overhead
Is nothing more austere, more starry, or more deep to understand
Than is our union, human hand in hand.
.... But over our lake come strangers--a crowded launch, a lonely sailing boy.
A mile away a train bends by. In every car
Strangers are travelling, each with particular
And unkind preference like ours, with privacy
Of understanding, with especial joy
Like ours. Celia, Celia, why should there be
Distrust between ourselves and them, disunity?
.... How careful we have been
To trim this little circle that we tread,
To set a bar
To strangers and forbid them!--Are they not as we,
Our very likeness and our nearest kin?
How can we shut them out and let stars in?"
She looked along the lake. And when I heard her speak,
The sun fell on the boy's white sail and her white cheek.
"I touch them all through you," she said. "I cannot know them now
Deeply and truly as my very own, except through you,
Except through one or two
Interpreters.
But not a moment stirs
Here between us, binding and interweaving us,
That does not bind these others to our care."
The sunlight fell in glory on her hair....
And then said Celia, radiant, when I held her near:
"They who find beauty there, shall find it here."
And on her brow,
When I heard Celia speak,
Cities were populous
With peace and oceans echoed glories in her ear
And from her risen thought
Her lips had brought,
As from some peak
Down through the clouds, a mountain-air
To guide the lonely and uplift the weak.
"Record it all," she told me, "more than merely this,
More than the shine of sunset on our heads, more than a kiss,
More than our rapt agreement and delight
Watching the mountain mingle with the night....
Tell that the love of two incurs
The love of multitudes, makes way
And welcome for them, as a solitary star
Brings on the great array.
Go make a lovers' calendar,"
She said, "for every day."
And when the sun had put away
His dazzle, over the shadowy firs
The solitary star came out.... So on some night
To eyes of youth shall come my light
And hers.
II
"Where are you bound, O solemn voyager?"
She laughed one day and asked me in her mirth:
"Where are you from?
Why are you come?"
.... The questions beat like tapping of a drum;
And how could I be dumb,
I who have bugles in me? Fast
The answer blew to her,
For all my breath was worth....
"As a bird comes by grace of spring,
You are my journey and my wing--
And into your heart, O Celia,
My heart has flown, to sing
Solemn and long
A most undaunted song."
This was the song that she herself had taught me how to sing:
.... As immigrants come toward America
On their continual ships out of the past,
So on my ship America have I, by birth,
Come forth at last
From all the bitter corners of the earth.
And I have ears to hear the westward wind blowing
And I have eyes to look beyond the scope Of sea
And I have hands to touch the hands
Of shipmates who are going
Wherever I go and the grace of knowing
That what for them is hope
Is hope for me.
I come from many times and many lands,
I look toward life and all that it shall hold,
Past bound and past divide.
And I shall be consoled
By a continent as wide
As the round invisible sky.
.... "The unseen shall become the seen....
O Celia, be my Spanish Queen!
The Genoan am I!"
And Celia cried:
"My jewels, they are yours,
Yours for the journey. Use them well.
Go find the new world, win the shores
Of which the old books tell!
.... Yet will they listen, poet? Will they sail with you?
Will they not call you dreamer of a dream?
Will they not laugh at you, because you seem
Concerned with words that people often say
And deeds they never do?"
The bright sails of my caravel shook seaward in reply:
"Though I be told
A thousand facts to hold
Me back, though the old boundary
Rise up like hatred in my way,
Though fellow-voyagers cry,
'A lie!'--
Here as I come with heaven at my side
None of the weary words they say
Remain with me,
I am borne like a wave of the sea
Toward worlds to be....
And, young and bold,
I am happier than they--
The timid unbelievers who grow old!"
She interceded: "How impatient, how unkind
You are! What secret do you know
To keep you young?
Age comes with keen and accurate advance
Against youth's lightly handled lance.
Age is an ancient despot that has wrung
All hearts."... My answer was the song forever sung:
"This that I need to know I know--
Onpouring and perpetual immigrants,
We join a fellowship beyond America
Yet in America....
Beyond the touch of age, my Celia,
In you, in me, in everyone, we join God's growing mind.
For in no separate place or time, or soul, we find
Our meaning. In one mingled soul reside
All times and places. On a tide
Of mist and azure air
We journey toward that soul, through circumstance,
Until at last we fully care and dare
To make within ourselves divinity."
"And what of all the others," Celia said,
"Who ventured brave as you? What of the dead?"
Again I saw the halo in her hair
And said: "The dead sail forward, hid behind
This wave that we ourselves must mount to find
The eternal way.
Adventurers of long ago
Seeking a richer gain than earthy gold,
They have left for us, half-told,
Their guesses of the port, more numerous and blind
Than their unnumbered and forgotten faces.
... And though today, as then,
Death is a wind blowing them forward out of sight and out of mind,
Yet in familiar and in unfamiliar places
Inquiring by what means I may
The destination of the wind
Of death, I have found signs and traces
Of the way they go
And with a quicker heart I have beheld again
In visions, from my ship at sea,
The great new world confronting me,
Where, yesterday,
Today, tomorrow, dwell my countrymen."
And then I looked away,
Over the pasture and the valley, to the New Hampshire town....
And my heart's acclaim went down,
To Florida, Wisconsin, California,
And brought a good report to Celia:
"My ship America,
This whole wide-timbered land,
Well captained and well manned,
Ascends the sea
Of time, carrying me
And many passengers.
And every cabin stirs
With the pulsing of its engine over the sway of time,
Yes, every state and city, every village, every farm,
And every heart and everyone's right arm.
... Celia, hold out your hand,
Or anyone in any field or street, hold out your hand--
And I can see it pulse the massive climb
And dip
Of this America,
My ship!"
"Why make your ship so small?
Can your America contain them all?"
How wisely I replied
In the province of my pride:
"But these are my own shipmates, these
Who share my ship America with me!
... On many seas
On other ships, even the ancient ships of Greece,
Have other immigrants set sail for peace.
But these are my own shipmates whom I see
At hand--these are my company."
"What have you said," she cried,
"Thinking you knew?
Whom have you called your shipmates? You were wrong!
Your ship is strong
With a more various crew
Than any one man's country could provide,
To make it ride
So high and manifold and so complete.
This is the engine-beat
Of life itself, the ship of ships.
There is no other ship among the stars than this.
The wind of death is a bright kiss
Upon the lips
Of every immigrant, as upon yours and mine--
Theirs is the stinging brine
And sun and open sea,
And theirs the arching sky, eternity."
And Celia had my homage. I was wrong.
Immigrants all, one ship we ride,
Man and his bride
The journey through.
O let it be with a bridal-song!...
"My shipmates are as many as eternity is long:
The unborn and the living and the dead--
And, Celia, you!"
III
That midnight when the moon was tall
I walked alone by the white lake--yet with a vanished race
And with a race to come. To walk with dead men is to pray,
To walk with men unborn--to find the way.
I have seen many days. That night I watched them all.
I have seen many a sign and trace
Of beauty and of hope:
An elm at night; an arrowy waterfall;
The illimitable round unbroken scope
Of life; a friend's unfrightened dying face.
Though I have heard the cry of fear in crowded loneliness of space,
Dead laughter from the lips of lust,
Anger from fools, falsehood from sycophants,
(My fear, my lips, my anger, my disgrace)
Though I have held a golden cup and tasted rust,
Seen cities rush to be defiled
By the bright-fevered and consuming sin
Of making only coin and lives to count it in,
Yet once I watched with Celia,
Watched on a ferry an Italian child,
One whom America
Had changed.
His cheek was hardy and his mouth was frail
For sweetness, and his eyes were opening wild
As with wonder at an unseen figure carrying a grail.
Perhaps he faced, as I did in his glance,
The spirit of the living dead who, having ranged
Through long reverses, forward without fail
Carry deliverance
From privilege and disinheritance,
Until their universal soul shall prove
The only answer to the ache of love.
"America was wistful in that child,"
Said Celia afterwards--and smiled
Because all three of us were immigrants,
Each voyaging into each.
Over the city-roofs, the sun awoke
Bright in the dew
Of a marvellous morning, while she spoke
Of the sun, the dew, the wonder, in a child:
"He who devises tyranny," she said,
"Denies the resurrection of the dead,
Beneath his own degree degrades himself,
Invades himself with ugliness and wars.
But he who knows all men to be himself,
Part of his own experiment and reach,
Humbles and amplifies himself
To build and share a tenement of stars."
Once when we broke a loaf of bread
And shared the honey, Celia said:
"To share all beauty as the interchanging dust,
To be akin and kind and to entrust
All men to one another for their good,
Is to have heard and understood,
And carried to the common enemy
In you and me,
The ultimatum of democracy."
"But to what goal?" I wondered. And I heard her happy speech:
"It is my faith that God is our own dream
Of perfect understanding of the soul.
It is my passion that, alike through me
And every member of eternity,
The source of God is sending the same stream.
It is my peace that when my life is whole,
God's life shall be completed and supreme."
And once when I had made complaint
About America, she warned me: "Be not faint
Of heart, but bold to see the soul's advance.
The chances are not far nor few....
Face beauty," Celia said, "then beauty faces you."
And under all things her advice was true.
... Discovering what she knew,
Not only on a mountainous place
Or by the solving sea
But through the world I have seen endless beauty, as the number grows
Of those who, in a child cheated of simple joy
Or in a wasted rose
Or in a lover's immemorial lonely eyes
Or in machines that quicken and destroy
A multitude or in a mother's unregarded grace
And broken heart, through all the skies
And all humanity,
Seek out the single spirit, face to face,
Find it, become a conscious part of it
And know that something pure and exquisite,
Although inscrutably begun,
Surely exalts the many into one.
"I shall not lose, nor you,"
I said to Celia. Over the world the morning-dew
Moved like a hymn and sang to us: "Go now, fulfill
Your destiny and joy;
Each in the other, both in that Italian boy,
And he in you, like flowers in a hill!"
... She was the nearness of imperfect God
On whom in her perfection was at work.
Lest I should shirk
My share, I asked her for His blessing and His nod--
And His breath was in her shining hair like the wind in golden-rod.
"But, Celia, Celia, tell me what to be,"
I asked, "and what to do,
To keep your faith in me,
To witness mine in you!"
She answered: "Dare to see
In every man and woman everywhere
The making of us two.
See none that we can spare
From the creation of our soul.
Swear to be whole.
Let not your faith abate,
But establish it in persons and exalt it in the state."
IV
Celia has challenged me....
Be my reply,
Challenge to poets who, with tinkling tricks,
Meet life and pass it by.
"Beauty," they ask, "in politics?"
"If you put it there," say I.
Wide the new world had opened its bright gates.
And a woman who had heard of the new world
All her life long and had saved her pence
By hard frugality, to be her competence
In the free home, came eagerly in nineteen seven
Into These States,
With her little earnings furled
In a large handkerchief--but with a heart
Too rich to be contained, for she had done her part:
She had come
With faith to Heaven.
But there was a panic that year,
No work, no wages in These States.
And a great fear
Seized on the immigrant. And so she took her pence
All of them, furled
Safe in her handkerchief, to a government cashier--
A clerk in the post-office. (And he relates
Her errand as a joke, yet tenderly
For I watched him telling me.)
... Not knowing English, being dumb,
She had brought with her a thin-faced lad
To interpret. And he made it clear,
While she unfurled
Her handkerchief and poured the heap of coins out of her hand,
That 'she was giving all she had--
To be used no matter how, you understand' ...
Lest harm should come to the new world.
O doubters of democracy,
Undo your mean contemptuous art!--
More than in all that poetry has said,
More than in mound or marble, in the living live the dead.
The past has done its reproductive part.
Hear now the cry of beauty's present needs,
Of comrades levelling a thousand creeds,
Finding futility
In conflict, selfishness, hardness of heart!
For love has many poets who can see
Ascending in the sky
Above the shadowy passes
The everlasting hills: humanity.
O doubters of the time to be,
What is this might, this mystery,
Moving and singing through democracy,
This music of the masses
And of you and me--
But purging and dynamic poetry!--
What is this eagerness from sea to sea
But young divinity!
I have seen doubters, with a puny joy,
Accept amusement for their little while
And feed upon some nourishing employ
But otherwise shake their wise heads and smile--
Protesting that one man can no more move the mass
For good or ill
Than could the ancients kindle the sun
By tying torches to a wheel and rolling it downhill.
But not the wet circumference of the seas
Can quench the living light in even these,
These who forget,
Eating the fruits of earth,
That nothing ever has been done
To spur the spirit of mankind,
Which has not come to pass
Forth from the heart and mind
Of some one man, through other men birth after birth,
In thoughts that dare
And in deeds that share
And in a will resolved to find
A finer breath
Born in the deep maternity of death.
... If these be ecstasies of youth,
Yet they are news of which all time has need.
If they be lies, tell them yourselves and heed
How poets' twice-told lies become the truth!
There was a poet Celia loved who, hearing all around
The multitudinous tread
Of common majesty,
(A hearty immigrant was he!)
Made of the gathering insurgent sound
Another continent of poetry?
His name is writ in his blood, mine and yours.
... "And when he celebrates
These States,"
She said, "how can Americans worth their salt
But listen to the wavesong on their shores,
The waves and Walt,
And hear the windsong over rock and wood,
The winds and Walt,
And let the mansong enter at their gates
And know that it is good!"
Walt Whitman, by his perfect friendliness
Has let me guess
That into Celia, into me,
He and unnumbered dead have come
To be our intimates,
To make of us their home
Commingling earth and heaven....
That by our true and mutual deeds
We shall at last be shriven
Of these hypocrisies and jealous creeds
And petty separate fates--
That I in every man and he in me,
Together making God, are gradually creating whole
The single soul.
Somebody called Walt Whitman--
Dead!
He is alive instead,
Alive as I am. When I lift my head,
His head is lifted. When his brave mouth speaks,
My lips contain his word. And when his rocker creaks
Ghostly in Camden, there I sit in it and watch my hand grow old
And take upon my constant lips the kiss of younger truth....
It is my joy to tell and to be told
That he, in all the world and me,
Cannot be dead,
That I, in all the world and him, youth after youth
Shall lift my head.
V
There is a vision, Celia, in your face....
Beauty had lived in India like a mad
And withdrawn prophetess, in Greece had set her pace
Between a laurelled lad
And a singing maiden, pitched her purple tents
In Rome, leaned with a mother's fears
In Bethlehem to nurse a son of God upon her breast
And learned the tender loneliness of tears,
Awhile had hid in Europe, sad
In the shadow of magnificence,
Brooding, finding no rest,
And then of a sudden she had run forth from her hiding-place,
Rejoicing, desperate, intense
Against her enemy, a rod
Of fire in her hand, her tresses crowned
With liberty, her purpose bold and bound
That every son should be a son of God.
And then she wept for France.... But once more clad
In stars, she beckons to America, the land
Of hope. Behold her stand
With her bright finger scorning armaments
And on her lips the unconquerable common sense
Of love calling the world to challenge and confound
The empty idols of her enemy!
... Comforter of experience,
Enlightener of old events,
Beauty forever dares to widen and retrace
Her way, singing the marches of democracy,
Carrying banners of the time to be,
Calling companions to her high command.
There is a banner, Celia, in your hand!
Though sons, whose fathers bled
For freedom, struggle now instead
With heavier weapons and with weary-waking head
For bread;
Though sons, whose fathers fought in other ages
For fame, bear in their hearts today the scar
Of entering where the laborer sleeps
And rousing him with masterly inquiry where he keeps
His wages:
Though all the cunning coil of trade appear a baser thing
Than battles are,
O trace through time the orbit of this troubled star!
... See, from afar off, how the valiant few
Of old, each with a helmet on his head,
Practiced their inconclusive feud
Upon no battlefield of unfeeling dew--
But on the prostrate stillness of the multitude!
Even their knightliest prowess they must rear,
Tamerlane, Alexander, Arthur, every king,
Upon the common clay from which they spring.
For see how slaves, on whom war falls, renew
The strength of war and disappear
Year after year
Into the earth--fulfilling it to form and bear
Democracy!
Look nearer now along the modern sky
And watch where every man fastens the electric wing
Upon his foot, that he may leave his little sod
Of ignorance!
And look where, by and by,
Taking his high inheritance,
He knows himself and other men as the winged self of God!
The times are gone when only few were fit
To view with open vision the sublime,
When for the rest an altar-rail sufficed
To obscure the democratic Christ....
Perceiving now his gift, demanding it,
The benison of common benefit,
Men, women, all,
Interpreters of time,
Have found that lordly Christ apocryphal
While Christ the comrade comes again--no wraith
Of virtue in a far-off faith
But a companion hearty, natural,
Who sorrows with indomitable eyes
For his mistreated plan
To share with all men the upspringing sod,
The unfolding skies--
Not God who made Himself the Man,
But a man who proved man's unused worth--
And made himself the God.
Once you had listened, Celia, to a stream
And lain a long time, silent as a sleeper.
And then your word arrived as from beyond
Your body, bending with its breath the frond
Of a fern. You whispered to the listening stream:
"As evil is yet wider than we dream,
So good is deeper." ...
O how I try to bring
Your voice to say in mine that word!--to sing
Clear-hearted as a mountain-spring
Of the wonders we see deepening!
Time cannot bury what the blest have thought,
For there is resurrection far and near.
Often it seems as though a single day had brought
To each bright hemisphere
Courage to cast
The servitude
And blinded glory of the past
Away and in a flash had taught
Purpose and fortitude....
But not so swiftly are we wrought.
By many single days we learn to live,
By many flashes read the vision clear
That every heart is equal debtor
To its own and every breast
For the good before the better,
The better toward the best.
When we who hugged awhile the golden bowl
Of greed behold it now a sieve
Through which is drained invisibly
A nectar we were saving for the soul,
Then not in vain have many gone
The empty ways of stealth
Seeking a firmer base than honesty
For building happiness upon....
And by the ancient agonizing test
We have slowly guessed
That a just portion of the whole
Is all there is of wealth.
When those who labor wake
And care ...
And through the tingling air
A dead man's voice, by living men renewed
And women, dares democracy
To self-respect: "Open the lands! Let mankind share
The ample livelihood they bear!"--
Then not in vain have the poor known distress,
Teaching the rich that happiness
Is something no man may--possess.
Little by little we, whose fathers fought
Impassioned, are ashamed
Of the familiar thought
That waste of blood is honourable feud:
Little by little from the wondering land
The agitation and the lie of war
Shall pass; for in the heart disclaimed
Murder shall be abandoned by the hand.
And while there grows a fellowship of unshed blood
To stop the wound and heal the scar
Of time, with sudden glorious aptitude
Woman assumes her part. Her pity in a flood
Flings down the gate.
She has been made to wait
Too long, undreaming and untaught
The touch and beauty of democracy.
But, entering now the strife
In which her saving sense is due,
She watches and she grows aware,
Holding a child more dear than property,
That the many perish to empower the few,
That homeless politics have split apart
The common country of the human heart.
(Your heart is beating, Celia, like a song!)
.... For man has need
Not merely of the lips that kiss and hands that feed
But of the hearts that heed
And of the minds that speed
Like rain.
Loving a mother or a wife,
Let him release her tenderness, to make him strong,
And use her beauty and receive her law:
The very life of life.
In temporary pain
The age is bearing a new breed
Of men and women, patriots of the world
And one another. Boundaries in vain,
Birthrights and countries, would constrain
The old diversity of seed
To be diversity of soul.
O mighty patriots, maintain
Your loyalty!--till flags unfurled
For battle shall arraign
The traitors who unfurled them, shall remain
And shine over an army with no slain,
And men from every nation shall enroll
And women--in the hardihood of peace!
What can my anger do but cease?
Whom shall I fight and who shall be my enemy
When he is I and I am he?
Let me have done with that old God outside
Who watched with preference and answered prayer,
The Godhead that replied
Now here, now there,
Where heavy cannon were
Or coins of gold!
Let me receive communion with all men,
Acknowledging our one and only soul!
For not till then
Can God be God, till we ourselves are whole.
VI
Once in a smoking-car, I saw a scene
That made my blood stand still....
While the sun smouldered in a great ravine,
And I, with elbow on the window-sill,
Was watching the dim ember of the west,
Half-heard, but poignant as a bell
For fire, there came a moan; the voice of one in hell.
I turned. Across the car were two young men,
Yet hardly more than boys,
French by their look, and brothers,
And one was moaning on the other's breast.
His face was hid away. I could not tell
What words he said, half English and half French. I only knew
Both men were suffering, not one but two.
And then that face came into view,
Gaunt and unshaved, with shadows and wild eyes,
A face of madness and of desolation. And his cries,
For all his mate could do,
Rang out, a shrill and savage noise,
And tears ran down the stubble of his cheek.
The other face was younger, clean and sad
With the manful stricken beauty of a lad
Who had intended always to be glad.
.... The touch of his compassion, like a mother's,
Pitied the madman, soothed him and caressed.
And then I heard him speak,
In a low voice: "Mon frère, mon frère!
Calme-toi! Right here's your place."
And, opening his coat, he pressed
Upon his heart the wanderer's face
And smoothed the tangled hair.
After a moment peaceful there,
The maniac screamed--struck out and fell
Across his brother's arm. Love could not quell
His anger. Wrists together high in air
He rose and with a yell
Brought down his handcuffs toward his brother's face--
But his hands were pinned below his waist,
By a burly, silent sheriff, and some hideous thing was bound
Around his arms and feet
And he was laid upon the narrow seat.
And then that sound,
That moan
Of one forsaken and alone!
"Seigneur! Le createur du ciel et de la terre!
Forgotten me! Forgotten me!"
.... And when the voice grew weak
The brother leaned again, embraced
The huddled body. But a shriek
Repulsed him: "Non! Détache-moi! I don't care
For you. Non! Tu es l'homme qui m'a trahi!
Non! Tu n'es pas mon frère!"
But as often as that stricken mind would fill
With the great anguish and the rush of hate,
The boy, his young eyes older, older,
Would curve his shoulder
To the other's pain and hold that haunted face close to his face
And say: "O wait!
You will know me better by and by.
Mon pauvre petit, be still!
Right here's your place."
.... The gleam! and then the blinded stare,
The cry:
"Non, tu n'es pas mon frère!"
I saw myself, myself, as blind
As he. And something smothers
My reason. And I do not know my brothers....
But every day declare:
"Non, tu n'es pas mon frère!"
But in the outcome, I can see....
Closer than any brother
Shall they be to one another
And to me,
Closer than mother, father, daughter, son,
O closer than a lover shall they be,
When madness like a storm shall roll
Away, leaving illumination. Within everyone
The nearness has begun
Toward some loved life and toward the soul
Perceived therein: the elemental ache to be made whole
With beauty and with love.--O I have ached and longed in the embrace
Of one I love to be undone
Of differences, to yield and run
Within the very blood and being of my dear,
One body and one face,
One spirit in all space,
Mingled and indissoluble. And I have felt a mortal tear
Smart on my lids, when I had been so near
To Celia that I knew not which was I,
Yet the day returned between us and the sky
Held distances that were not clear
To us and we were two again that had been almost one.
A mother yields herself to enter
Her child, who nestles close and sleeps
With all his wisdom pressed
For comfort to her breast.
I can remember my relinquishment
Of consciousness and care,
Almost of life, upon my mother's heart--the great content
Of being there.
And then I loved a starry boy of three,
Who looked about him, smiled and took to me,
Held out his arms and chose me among men
For his companion, to confide
His smiles in and to be
At ease with. Closely by my side
He sat and touched the world, to see
If it were solid and worth touching. When he died,
I too was dead ... and yet I hear him say,
Laughing within my heart today:
"Lo, being you,
And having lived your years, this will I do,
And this, and this!"
I have my boy again.
I greet him nearer than a kiss.
And so, from birth to death, out of confusion
The secret creeps
Across the deeps
From its eternal centre
In the soul.
Communion is the cause and the conclusion
And the unfailing sacrament
Not only of the mystical frequenter
Of temples, where the body of the dead
Creates divine
The living body through the bread
And wine,
But God discovers and discovers
His beauty in all lovers.
And, to make His beauty whole,
Body and body, soul and soul, combine
His one identity with yours and mine.
I know a fellow in a steel-mill who, intent
Upon his labours and his happiness, had meant
In his own wisdom to be blest,
Had made his own unaided way
To schooling, opportunity,
Success. And then he loved and married. And his bride,
After a brief year, died.
I went to him to see
If I might comfort him. The comfort came to me.
"David," I said, "under the temporary ache
There is unwonted nearness with the dead."
I felt his two hands take
The sentence from me with a grip
Forged in the mills. He told me that his tears were shed
Before her breath went. After that, instead
Of grief, she came herself. He felt her slip
Into his being like a miracle, her lip
Whispering on his, to slake
His need of her.--"And in the night I wake
With wonder and I find my bride
And her embrace there in our bed,
Within my very being, not outside!
.... We have each other more, much more,"
He said, "now than before.
This very moment while I shake
Your hand, my friend,
Not only I,
But she is touching you--and laughs with me because I cried
For her.... People would think me crazy if I told.
But something in what you said made me bold
To let you meet my bride!"
It was not madness. David's eye
Was clear and open-seeing.
His life
Had faced in death and understood in his young wife,
As I when Celia died,
The secret of God's being.
VII
Among good citizens, I praise
Again a woman whom I knew and know,
A citizen whom I have seen
Most heartily, most patiently
Making God's mind,
A citizen who, dead,
Yet shines across her white-remembered ways
As the nearness of a light across the snow....
My Celia, mystical, serene,
Laughing and kind.
And still I hear among New Hampshire trees
Her happy speech:
"Democracy is beauty's inmost reach."
And still her voice announces plain
The mystic gain
Of friends from adversaries and of peace from pain:
Beauty's control
Of every soul
Surrendering in victory.
.... Well I recall how she explained to me
With sunlight on her head
When last we looked, as many times before,
Over those hundred foothills rolling like the sea.
"Where mountains are, door after door
Unlocks within me, opens wide
And leaves no difference in my heart," she said,
"From anything outside."
Not only Celia, speaking, taught me these
The tenets of her beauty; but her life was such
That I believed as by a palpable touch
That heals and tends.
Not better nor more learned nor more wise
In many ways than others of my friends,
Celia was happier.
Their excellencies and their destinies
Became, contributing, a part of her,
Anointed her awhile among all men
An eminent citizen,
A generous arbiter.
Not less bereaved than others of my friends,
Celia was lovelier.
And now, though something of her dies,
Her heart of love assembles and transcends
Laws, letters, personalities,
Beginnings, passages and ends.
Often I start and look beside me for the stir
Of her sweet presence come again.
I have cried out to her,
So vivid has begun
Some dear-remembered sentence in her voice.
If a deluded wakeful thrush,
Seeing a light in a window, sings to the sun,
Yet he shall soon rejoice;
When the great dawn of day
Opens a thousand windows into one.
On a path where thrushes wake--called Celia's Way--
Time after time
She led me high among the rills.
And always when I pass again our chosen pine
And feel upon my brow the fine
Soft pressure of an unseen web and brush
It from my face expectantly and climb
Wide-eyed into the mountains' windy hush,
Among the green and healing hills
I have found Celia.
For the morning fills
With her and afternoon and twilight. She is always there
As sweet within me as the intimate air.
We are together still in the deep solitude
Which is the essence of all companies,
Not in its loneliness but in its brood
Of presences, the dawn chanting with birds, the trees
Translating unremembered memories
Of the returning dead.
And Celia, who has learned to die,
Is well aware--and so through her am I--
That, one by one interpreted,
All hopes and pains and powers
Are hers and mine to try
On every star, through every age.
.... And, still together, on this page
We quote the sun-dial of the sage:
"_I number none but happy hours._"
For we remember still
The morning-hymn we heard: "Ye shall fulfill
Your destiny and joy,
Each in the other, both in that Italian boy
And he in you, like flowers in a hill."
She said to me one day, where a hill renewed its flowers,
"How easy it would be to live and die
If we would only see the ultimate
Oneness of life, quicken
Our hearts with it and know that they who hate
And strike become by their own blow the stricken!"...
"A stranger might be God," the Hindus cry.
But Celia says, importunate:
"Everyone must be God and you and I."
VIII
Almost the body leads the laggard soul; bidding it see
The beauty of surrender, the tranquillity
Of fusion with the earth. The body turns to dust
Not only by a sudden whelming thrust,
Or at the end of a corrupting calm,
But oftentimes anticipates and, entering flowers and trees
Upon a hillside or along the brink
Of streams, encounters instances
Of its eventual enterprise:
Inhabits the enclosing clay,
In rhapsody is caught away
On a great tide
Of beauty, to abide
Translated through the night and day
Of time and, by the anointing balm
Of earth, to outgrow decay.
Hark in the wind--the word of silent lips!
Look where some subtle throat, that once had wakened lust,
Lies clear and lovely now, a silver link
Of change and peace!
Hollows and willows and a river-bed,
Anemones and clouds,
Raindrops and tender distances
Above, beneath,
Inherit and bequeath
Our far-begotten beauty. We are wed
With many kindred who were seeming dead.
Only the delicate woven shrouds
Are vanished, beauty thrown aside
To honor and uncover
A deeper beauty--as the veil that slips
Breathless away between a lover
And his bride.
So, by the body, may the soul surmise
The beauty of surrender, the tranquillity
Of fusion: when, set free
From semblance of mortality,
Yielding its dust the richer to endue
A common avenue
Of earth for other souls to journey through,
It shall put on in purer guise
The mutual beauty of its destiny.
And who shall fear for his identity
And who shall cling to the poor privacy
Of incompleteness, when the end explains
That what pride forfeits, beauty gains!
Therefore, O spirit, as a runner strips
Upon a windy afternoon,
Be unencumbered of what troubles you--
Arise with grace
And greatly go!--the wind upon your face!
Grieve not for the invisible transported brow
On which like leaves the dark hair grew,
Nor for the lips of laughter that are now
Laughing inaudibly in sun and dew,
Nor for the limbs that, fallen low
And seeming faint and slow,
Shall alter and renew
Their shape and hue
Like birches white before the moon
Or a young apple-tree
In spring or the round sea
And shall pursue
More ways of swiftness than the swallow dips
Among ... and find more winds than ever blew
The straining sails of unimpeded ships!
A sudden music, Celia, through a poplar-bough,
Where leaves are small and new,
Comes laughing and goes hastening like you.
Beauty is more than hands or face or eyes
Or the long curve that lies
Upon a bed waiting, more than the rise
Of sun among the birds, more than the oar that plies
Under the moon for lovers, more than a tune that buys
Pennies from time. Vision and touch comprise
Yesterday's promise, today's token
Of a fulfillment that shall have no need to be perceived or spoken,
Wherein all love is the award
Poured upon beauty and no heart is broken
And no grief is stored.
For never beauty dies
That lived. Nightly the skies
Assemble stars, the light of hopeful eyes,
And daily brood on the communal breath--
Which we call death.
Nothing is lost. Nothing I have of loveliness
Exceeds a minute part
Of my own loveliness when it shall be fulfilled
With Celia's and all loveliness that lies
In every heart.
All that I have is but the start
And the beginning, the bewildering guess
Of what shall be distilled
Out of my soul by you and you,
Each soul of all souls, till one soul remains
Which every beauty shall imbue
Clean of the differences and pains....
I shall be Celia's everlastingness.
IX
A little hill among New Hampshire hills
Touches more stars than any height I know.
For there the whole earth--like a single being--fills
And expands with heaven.
It is the hill where Celia used to go
To watch Monadnock and the miles that met
In slow-ascending slopes of peace.
She said: "When I am here, I find release
From every petty debt I owe,
The goods I bring with me increase,
The ills are riven
And blown away. And there remains a single debt
Toward all the world for me,
A single duty and one destiny."
"There shall be many births of God
In this humanity,"
She said, "and many crucifixions on the hills,
Before we learn that where Christ trod
We all shall tread; and as he died to give
Himself to us, we too shall die--and live."
"Though slowly knowledge comes, yet in the birth
Is joy," said Celia, "joy
As well as pain:
The clear and clouded beauty of the earth.
.... This I forget in cities. For cities are a great
Impassable gate
Of tumult. But by mountains and by seas I gain
Path after path of peace."
One evening Celia led me, late,
Among the many whispers before rain,
To touch and climb her hill again.
I felt it rise invisible as fate,
Not for the eye but for the soul to see.
And when at last, among the oaks, we came
Upon the top, a perfect voice
Thrilled in the air like flame--
Was it uprisen death we heard?
Was it immortal youth,
Out of the body, witnessing the truth,
Attesting glory in an angel's voice?
Blindly we listened to the singer and the single strain
Containing joy.
And then the voice was still and all the world and we--
Till "Run," she said, "and bring him back to me!"
I ran, I called ... but in the nearing rain,
No mortal answered, nothing stirred.
Was it uprisen death we heard?
.... Perhaps the hills and night
Had made a prophet of some wandering boy,
Prompting him in that instant to rejoice
As never in his life before.
He must have had his own delight
As well in silence as in song;
For, though we waited long,
He sang no more.
Afterward Celia said: "That voice we heard
Singing among the oak-leaves, and then still,
We cannot answer how it sings or how it comes and goes....
But only that its beauty ever grows
Within us both, in ways no voice has told.
.... So let me be to you. When night has drawn its fold
Of darkness and no word
May reach your heart from mine,
Take then my love, my beauty! Hear me still
When you are old
And I am ageless as a changing hill!
O hear me like that voice at night,
Clearer than sound, nearer than sight,
And let me be--as beauty is--divine!"
There is a hill of hills
That holds my heart on high and stills
All other sound
Than joy.
Robins and thrushes, whip-poor-wills
And morning-sparrows sing it round
With echoes. Waterfalls abound
And many streams convoy
The breath of music. I have found
A hill-path rising sudden on a city-street,
Out of a quarrel, out of black despair,
And climbed it with my winged feet.
It hurries me above
All this illusion, all these ills,
It rises quickly to the shining air.
.... Celia, I hear you on the hill of hills,
Announcing love.
And O my citizen, perhaps the few
Whom I shall tell of you
Will see with me your beauty who are dead,
Will hear with me your voice and what it said!
Let but a line of mine,
A single one,
Be made to shine
With your whole-heartedness as with the sun,
And I shall so consign
Your touch to younger and yet younger hands,
That they shall carry beauty through more lands
Than ever Helen laid her touch upon.
In your new world I see
The immigrants arriving from the ships....
O Celia, my democracy,
My destiny,
Beauty has had its answer on your lips!
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