O Lazarus, I have called thee all these years,
It is so long for me to reach to thee,
Across the ages of this mighty sea,
That loometh dark, dense, like eternity;
Which I have bridged by anguished prayers and tears:
“Which I have bridged by knowledge of God’s love,
That even penetrates this anguished glare;
A gleaming ray, a tremulous star-built stair,
A road by which love-hungered souls may fare
Past hate and doubt, to heaven and God above.”
So calleth it ever upward unto me:
It creepeth in through heaven’s golden doors:
It echoes all along the sapphire floors:
Like smoke of sacrifice, it soars and soars,
It fills the vastness of eternity;
Until my sense of love is waned and dimmed:
The music-rounded spheres do clash and jar,
No more those spirit-calls from star to star,
Those harmonies that float and melt afar,
Those belts of light by which all heaven is rimmed.
No more I hear the beat of heavenly wings,
The seraph chanting in my rest-tuned ear:
I only know a cry, a prayer, a tear,
That rises from the depths up to me here;
A soul that to me suppliant leans and clings.
O Father Abram, thou must bid me go
Into the spaces of the deep abyss;
Where far from us and our God-given bliss,
Do dwell those souls that have done Christ amiss;
For through my rest I hear that upward woe.
I hear it crying through the heavenly night,
When curvèd, hung in space, the million moons
Lean planet-ward, and infinite space attunes
Itself to silence. As from drear gray dunes
A cry is heard along the shuddering light,
Of wild dusk-bird, a sad, heart-curdling cry,
So comes to me that call from out hell’s coasts;
I see an infinite shore with gaping ghosts!
This is no heaven, with all its shining hosts!
This is no heaven, until that hell doth die!
So spake the soul of Lazarus, and from thence,
Like new-fledged bird from its sun-jewelled nest,
Drunk with the music of the young year’s quest,
He sank out into heaven’s gloried breast,
Spaceward turned, toward darkness dim, immense.
Hellward he moved like a radiant star shot out
From heaven’s blue with rain of gold at even,
When Orion’s train and that mysterious seven
Move on in mystic range from heaven to heaven—
Hellward he sank, followed by radiant rout.