gathered me, he lifted Stem, root and all—ay, and the clinging mud— And set me on his sill to spread and bloom After the common way, take sun and rain, And make a patch of brightness for the street, Though raised above rough fingers—so you make A weed a flower, and others, passing, think: “Next ditch I cross, I’ll lift a root from it, And dress my window” … and the blessing spreads. Well, so I grew, with every root and tendril Grappling the secret anchorage of his love, And so we loved each other till he died… .
Ah, that black night he left me, that dead dawn I found him lying in the woods, alive To gasp my name out and his life-blood with it, As though the murderer’s knife had probed for me In his hacked breast and found me in each wound… Well, it was there Christ came to me, you know, And led me home—just as that other led me. _(Just as that other?_ Father, bear with me!) My lover’s death, they tell me, saved my soul, And I have lived to be a light to men. And gather sinners to the knees of grace. All this, you say, the Bishop’s signet covers. But stay! Suppose my lover had not died? (At last my question! Father, help me face it.) I say: Suppose my lover had not died— Think you I ever would have left him living, Even to be Christ’s blessed Margaret? —We lived in sin? Why, to the sin I died to That other was as Paradise, when God Walks there at eventide, the air pure gold, And angels treading all the grass to flowers! He was my Christ—he led me out of hell— He died to save me (so your casuists say!)— Could Christ do more? Your Christ outpity mine? Why, yours but let the sinner bathe His feet; Mine raised her to the level of his heart… And then Christ’s way is saving, as man’s way Is squandering—and the devil take the shards! But this man kept for sacramental use The cup that once had slaked a passing thirst; This man declared: “The same clay serves to model A devil or a saint; the scribe may stain The same fair parchment with obscenities, Or gild with benedictions; nay,” he cried, “Because a satyr feasted in this wood, And fouled the grasses with carousing foot, Shall not a hermit build his chapel here And cleanse the echoes with his litanies? The sodden grasses spring again—why not The trampled soul? Is man less merciful Than nature, good more fugitive than grass?” And so—if, after all, he had not died, And suddenly that door should know his hand, And with that voice as kind as yours he said: “Come, Margaret, forth into the sun again, Back to the life we fashioned with our hands Out of old sins and follies, fragments scorned Of more ambitious builders, yet by Love, The patient architect, so shaped and fitted That not a crevice let the winter in—” Think you my bones would not arise and walk, This bruised body (as once the bruised soul) Turn from the wonders of the seventh heaven As from the antics of the marketplace? If this could be (as I so oft have dreamed), I, who have known both loves, divine and human, Think you I would not leave this Christ for that?
—I rave, you say? You start from me, Fra Paolo? Go, then; your going leaves me not alone. I marvel, rather, that I feared the question, Since, now I name it, it draws near to me With such dear reassurance in its eyes, And takes your place beside me…
Nay, I tell you, Fra Paolo, I have cried on all the saints— If this be devil’s prompting, let them drown it In Alleluias! Yet not one replies. And, for the Christ there—is He silent too? Your Christ? Poor father; you that have but one, And that one silent—how I pity you! He will not answer? Will not help you cast The devil out? But hangs there on the wall, Blind wood and bone—?
How if I call on Him— I, whom He talks with, as the town attests? If ever prayer hath ravished me so high That its wings failed and dropped me in Thy breast, Christ, I adjure Thee! By that naked hour Of innermost commixture, when my soul Contained Thee as the paten holds the host, Judge Thou alone between this priest and me; Nay, rather, Lord, between my past and present, Thy Margaret and that other’s—whose she is By right of salvage—and whose call should follow! Thine? Silent still.—Or his, who stooped to her, And drew her to Thee by the bands of love? Not Thine? Then his?
Ah, Christ—the thorn-crowned Head Bends … bends again … down on your knees,
Fra Paolo! If his, then Thine!
Kneel, priest, for this is heaven…
A TORCHBEARER
GREAT cities rise and have their fall; the brass That held their glories moulders in its turn. Hard granite rots like an uprooted weed, And ever on the palimpsest of earth Impatient Time rubs out the word he writ. But one thing makes the years its pedestal, Springs from the ashes of its pyre, and claps A skyward wing above its epitaph— The will of man willing immortal things.
The ages are but baubles hung upon The thread of some strong lives—and one slight wrist May lift a century above the dust; For Time, The Sisyphean load of little lives, Becomes the globe and sceptre of the great. But who are these that, linking hand in hand, Transmit across the twilight waste of years The flying brightness of a kindled hour? Not always, nor alone, the lives that search How they may snatch a glory out of heaven Or add a height to Babel; oftener they That in the still fulfilment of each day’s Pacific order hold great deeds in leash, That in the sober sheath of tranquil tasks Hide the attempered blade of high emprise, And leap like lightning to the clap of fate.
So greatly gave he, nurturing ‘gainst the call Of one rare moment all the daily store Of joy distilled from the acquitted task, And that deliberate rashness which bespeaks The pondered action passed into the blood; So swift to harden purpose into deed That, with the wind of ruin in his hair, Soul sprang full-statured from the broken flesh, And at one stroke he lived the whole of life, Poured all in one libation to the truth, A brimming flood whose drops shall overflow On deserts of the soul long beaten down By the brute hoof of habit, till they spring In manifold upheaval to the sun.
Call here no high artificer to raise His wordy monument—such lives as these Make death a dull misnomer and its pomp An empty vesture. Let resounding lives Re-echo splendidly through high-piled vaults And make the grave their spokesman—such as he Are as the hidden streams that, underground, Sweeten the pastures for the grazing kine, Or as spring airs that bring through prison bars The scent of freedom; or a light that burns Immutably across the shaken seas, Forevermore by nameless hands renewed, Where else were darkness and a glutted shore.
II
THE MORTAL LEASE
I
BECAUSE the currents of our love are poured Through the slow welter of the primal flood From some blind source of monster-haunted mud, And flung together by random forces stored Ere the vast void with rushing worlds was scored— Because we know ourselves but the dim scud Tossed from their heedless keels, the sea-blown bud That wastes and scatters ere the wave has roared—
Because we have this knowledge in our veins, Shall we deny the journey’s gathered lore— The great refusals and the long disdains, The stubborn questing for a phantom shore, The sleepless hopes and memorable pains, And all mortality’s immortal gains?
II
Because our kiss is as the moon to draw The mounting waters of that red-lit sea That circles brain with sense, and bids us be The playthings of an elemental law, Shall we forego the deeper touch of awe On love’s extremest pinnacle, where we, Winging the vistas of infinity, Gigantic on the mist our shadows saw?
Shall kinship with the dim first-moving clod Not draw the folded pinion from the soul, And shall we not, by spirals vision-trod, Reach upward to some still-retreating goal, As earth, escaping from the night’s control, Drinks at the founts of morning like a god?
III
All, all is sweet in that commingled draught Mysterious, that life pours for lovers’ thirst, And I would meet your passion as the first Wild woodland woman met her captor’s craft, Or as the Greek whose fearless beauty laughed And doffed her raiment by the Attic flood; But in the streams of my belated blood Flow all the warring potions love has quaffed.
How can I be to you the nymph who danced Smooth by Ilissus as the plane-tree’s bole, Or how the Nereid whose drenched lashes glanced Like sea-flowers through the summer sea’s long roll— I that have also been the nun entranced Who night-long held her Bridegroom in her soul?
IV
“Sad Immortality is dead,” you say, “And all her grey brood banished from the soul; Life, like the earth,