Poems of Progress

by Lizzie Doten

“Go no farther,
For a phantom lures thee on thy way;
Upward striving
Will not bring thee nearer to the perfect day.
In the valley
All is warmth, and rest, and kindly cheer;
Go no farther;
It is lone and very cold up here.

“Trust not to your erring Reason
All your aspirations to control;
Man grows ripe before the season
When he heeds the promptings of the soul.

“Come up hither! come up hither,”
Cried the tuneful voice again;
“Doubt should never counsel duty,
When the way of truth is plain.

“Stay!” replied the watchful demon;
“Thou shalt lend an ear to Doubt,
For, by Heaven! thou shalt not pass me
Until thou hast heard me out.
Thou art deeply cursed from the beginning,
All thy nature is corrupt with sinning;
God refuses thee his grace to-day;
Christ alone his righteous wrath can stay.
All thy prayerful aspiration
But retards thy soul’s salvation;
All the efforts of thy godless will
Make thy deep damnation deeper still.
O thou self-deluded dreamer!
O thou transcendental schemer!
Leave thine idle speculations,
Trances, visions, exaltations,
And thy toilsome upward progress stay.
By thy fallen, lost condition,
By the depths of thy perdition,
I have promised,
Yea, have sworn, to turn thee from this way.

“Come up hither! come up hither!”
Cried the voice persuasive from above.
Then I looked, and bending o’er me,
I beheld my long-lost angel love.

“Back!” I shouted to the demon.
“Never!” in a measured tone he said,
“Till the final resurrection,
Till the earth and sea give up their dead.”

Then I smote him—
Smote him in the forehead and the eyes;
And I shouted,
“I will not be cozened by your lies!
Go to cowards
With your Hebrew husks and pious pelf,
For my soul is older than the truth,
One with God himself.”

Then my blows fell fiercer, harder, hotter,
Till he yielded
Like the clay-formed vessel of a potter;
And I crashed into his brainless skull,
Smote his stony eyes out, cold and dull;
Into shards amorphous dashed his lips profane,
And, as brittle as a bubble,
Clove his shattered trunk in twain.
Then, as if God’s mill-stones surely
Had been given me in trust,
On the rock I stood securely,
And those fragments ground to dust.

But, O, God! what wondrous transformation
Seized me in its mighty grasp of power!
As a bud, by Nature’s potent magic,
Bursts at once into a perfect flower!
Like the record of a wise historian,
Lay unsealed the wondrous Book of Life;
Swelling grandly, like a chant Gregorian,
Perfect unison arose from strife;
And I knew then that this grim, defiant elf,
That this clay-born image, was my weaker self;
That this demon, Doubt, with which I held such strife,
Was the sense’s logic—the phenomena of life;
And as Perseus slew the fabled Gorgon,
Must this mocking fiend be met and slain,
That transfixed in cold and stony silence
Faith and Hope no longer might remain.
Only when the conscious soul asserted
What the flesh and sense so long concealed,
God within—One with the weak and human,
Did the Inner Mystery stand revealed.
O, what glorious consummation to my strife!
Death of Death! and Life unto Eternal Life!
All around, the grand and awful mountains
Hushed in silent reverence seemed to stand,
White and shining,
Like the pearly portals of the better land.
Then I heard the angels singing,
Soft and clear the sweet notes ringing,
Dropping gently like a golden rain
From the treasured wealth of day;
And I caught these words of blessing,
Floating down the heavenly way:—

Song of the Angels.