THE SECRET ONE
Here, by this frame and network of the flesh
And wires of her control
Surrounded, central in her subtle mesh
And secret, sits the soul,
Urgent through all the body, while each part
Obeys, and all are one—
While in her dungeons labors the lone heart
To make her will be done.
She reins the forces in their wild career
That bear her, as they go,
Over the dark abyss; and knows how sheer
Reaches the gulf below.
How dubious her life and slenderly
Hangs, by a scarlet thread,
Between eternity and eternity—
She guesses, wise in dread;
And ever watchful, ever wary, set
In the centre all alone,
Feels ’round her cautiously if any threat
Be made against the throne.
Sometimes along her nerves the voice of pain
Bears tidings to her hate
And frantic wrath, that the old foe again
Is clamorous at the gate—
She rages up and down, and to and fro
In timid anger runs:
If the frontiers be menaced, it is known
All over, and at once.
She hears her breast of sorrows night and day
At labor; ’round her brood
The old oblivions, where she sits at bay;
She hears the battling blood.
Echoes assail her from far worlds that lie
Beyond the bourne of these—
Contact and color and the angry cry
Of the realities
Beat on the brain forever; the high dream,
By stratagem of speech,
Enters her portals, where she sits supreme
And silent, pondering each:
Weighing and challenging, for weal or woe,
All rumors, sending out
The emissaries of her will, that go
To the frontiers about.
But most she loves the hour that beauty brings,
Of rapture and release
From the crude hunger and the cry of things,
The hour of her peace—
When, by the inner light that floods her cell,
The spirit, even as here,
Travails, in secrecy and joy, to tell
Her passion and her fear.
Now to the listening soul in you who read
These lines, she tells it all—
How dear her day, how dark shall be, indeed,
The hour when night must fall.