Or where your sad and gentle reveries pass
To family and home—who have for signs
Of all your childhood, only the imagined grass
Of a bright steppe, the wind running in lines,
And only some old fairy-tale of sleighing,
Dark snow-deep forests, endless turning pines,
Bells tinkling, and wolves howling, and hounds baying.
Vague is your past, yet as your violin sings,
Its wildness held in desperate control,
I know them all, that world of bygone things
That have left their wounds and wonders in your soul.
Out in all weathers you have been, my friend,
Climbed into dawn, stood solitary and stark
Against the ashen quiet of twilight's end,
Brooded beneath the night's unanswering dark;
Through battering tempests you have blindly won,
And lived, and found a medicine for your scars
In resolution taken from the sun
And consolation from the unsleeping stars.
And here, in this crowded place an hour staying,
Your dim orchestra measuring off your bars,
So pale and proud, you stand your secrets flaying,
Resolving the tangle, pouring through your song
All your deep ache for Beauty, calm above
Your bitter silent anger and the strong
Ferocity and tenderness of your love,
Loud challenges and sweet and cynic laughter,
Movements of joy spontaneous and pure,
Remorse, and the dull grief that glimmers after
The obstinate sins you know you will not cure.
I see you subtly lying, soberly weighing
Gross questions, jesting at the things you hate,
In apathy, and wild despair, and praying
Bowed down before the shadowy knees of Fate,
And fearfully behind the visible groping
And standing by the heart's bottomless pit, and shrinking,
Who have known the lure and mockery of hoping,
The comic terrible uselessness of thinking.