Life that was given for love’s sake and his law’s
Their powers have no more power on; they divide
Spoils wrung from lust or wrath of man or pride,
And keen oblivion without pity or pause
Sets them on fire and scatters them on air
Like ashes shaken from a suppliant’s hair.
But life they lay no hand on; life once given
No force of theirs hath competence to take;
Life that was given for some divine thing’s sake,
To mix the bitterness of earth with heaven,
Light with man’s night, and music with his breath,
Dies not, but makes its living food of death.
I have seen this, who live where men are not,
In the high starless air of fruitful night
On that serenest and obscurest height
Where dead and unborn things are one in thought
And whence the live unconquerable springs
Feed full of force the torrents of new things.
I have seen this, who saw long since, being man,
As now I know not if indeed I be,
The fair bare body of Wisdom, good to see
And evil, whence my light and night began;
Light on the goal and darkness on the way,
Light all through night and darkness all through day.
Mother, that by that Pegasean spring
Didst fold round in thine arms thy blinded son,
Weeping “O holiest, what thing hast thou done,
What, to my child? woe’s me that see the thing!
Is this thy love to me-ward, and hereof
Must I take sample how the gods can love?
“O child, thou hast seen indeed, poor child of mine,
The breasts and flanks of Pallas bare in sight,
But never shalt see more the dear sun’s light;
O Helicon, how great a pay is thine
For some poor antelopes and wild-deer dead,
My child’s eyes hast thou taken in their stead—”
Mother, thou knewest not what she had to give,
Thy goddess, though then angered, for mine eyes;
Fame and foreknowledge, and to be most wise,
And centuries of high-thoughted life to live,
And in mine hand this guiding staff to be
As eyesight to the feet of men that see.
Perchance I shall not die at all, nor pass
The general door and lintel of men dead;
Yet even the very tongue of wisdom said
What grace should come with death to Tiresias,
What special honour that God’s hand accord
Who gathers all men’s nations as their lord.
And sometimes when the secret eye of thought
Is changed with obscuration, and the sense
Aches with long pain of hollow prescience,
And fiery foresight with foresuffering bought
Seems even to infect my spirit and consume,
Hunger and thirst come on me for the tomb.
I could be fain to drink my death and sleep,
And no more wrapped about with bitter dreams
Talk with the stars and with the winds and streams
And with the inevitable years, and weep;
For how should he who communes with the years
Be sometime not a living spring of tears?