BEHIND THE VEIL
(After Islwyn, 1832-1878, the Welsh Wordsworth)
| What say ye, can
we charge a master soul With error, when beyond all life's experience Between the cradle and the grave, it rises, Whispering of things unutterable, breaks its bond With outward sense and sinks into itself, As fades a star in space? Hath not that soul A history in itself, a refluent tide Of mystery murmuring out of unplumbed deeps, On distant inaccessible strands, whereon Memory lies dead amid the monstrous wreckage Of jarring worlds? Are yonder stars above As spiritually, magnificently bright As Poesy feigns? May not some slumbering sense, A memory dim of those diviner days, When all the Heavens were yet aglow with God, Transfuse them through and through with glimmering grace And glory? Still the Stars within us shine, And Poesy is but a recollection Of Something greater gone, a presage proud Of Something greater yet to be. What soul But sometimes thrills with hauntings of a world For long forgotten, at a glimpse begotten Once more, then gone again? Imaginations? Nay why not memories of a life than ours A thousand times more blest within us buried So deeply, the divine all-searching breath Of Poesy alone can lure it forth. All hail that hour when God's Redeeming Face Shall so illume our past existences, That through them all man's spirit shall see plain, And to his blessed past relink Life's broken chain. |