So, my son, you came this morning at the blinking of the day,
“King, and heir for Uther,” riding swiftly shoreward on the spray
That, within my face, comes blowing from a stranger sea and sky,—
Felt, not seen—upon whose margin here, a sightless Merlin, I
Stand, and turn my head and harken to the whisper of the wind
Borne from seaward on to leeward,—dark before and dark behind.
II.
And they say you’re like your father?—How can I know, for I look
With a dead eye into darkness; yet I’ve felt upon a book
Something tell me: “In His form and with His likeness made He man:”
So you’re like your father, and he looks like God—but, ah! the ban,
A Damocles-blade, keeps hanging, as o’er ancient Adam’s head,
O’er last moment’s latest Adam, just arisen from the dead.
III.
Ban! Who banned you? Is it God, or is it man suspends the knife?
God decreed you’d toil for bread, but man decrees you’ll die for life!
IV.
“From the dead.”—You like the phrase not, wife; yet not from death he’s come,
But from life, of all the ages past the product and the sum.
Thine and mine,—yet neither mine nor thine, but heir of every hour,
Drawing through thee from the world’s breast,—we the stem and he the flower.
Ours, and yet not ours; the acorn from its parent will be broke,
Drop to earth, from earth to heaven stretch the fingers of the oak.
Acorn—oak, and back to acorn, hedging all the hills of time,
On and on forever, housing birds of every wing and clime.
Thus we die,—and thus we die not; mortal, yet immortal we;
Closely clasping crumbling fingers round the hand of the To Be;
Flingling out along the ages tendrils that will grip, and twine
In a slow attenuation down the long posterior line.
V.
Thus the generations, marching to an universal strain,
Start, and stop; and in the starting from Da Capo sing again.