When in the widening circle of rebirth To a new flesh my travelled soul shall come, And try again the unremembered earth With the old sadness for the immortal home,...
Thought was born blind, but Thought knows what is seeing. Its careful touch, deciphering forms from shapes, Still suggests form as aught whose proper being Mere finding touch with erring darkness drapes....
My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man, Of some Egyptian art than Egypt older, Found in some tomb whose rite no guess can scan, Where all things else to coloured dust did moulder....
Even as upon a low and cloud-domed day, When clouds are one cloud till the horizon, Our thinking senses deem the sun away And say ''tis sunless' and 'there is no sun';...
Something in me was born before the stars And saw the sun begin from far away. Our yellow, local day on its wont jars, For it hath communed with an absolute day....
My weary life, that lives unsatisfied On the foiled off-brink of being e'er but this, To whom the power to will hath been denied And the will to renounce doth also miss;...
We are in Fate and Fate's and do but lack Outness from soul to know ourselves its dwelling, And do but compel Fate aside or back By Fate's own immanence in the compelling....
The world is woven all of dream and error And but one sureness in our truth may lie-- That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror We know it not by knowing it thereby....
How yesterday is long ago! The past Is a fixed infinite distance from to-day, And bygone things, the first-lived as the last, In irreparable sameness far away. How the to-be is infinitely ever...
The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss Upon the wetted sand. I look, yet dream. Surely reality cannot be this! Somehow, somewhere this surely doth but seem!...
I do not know what truth the false untruth Of this sad sense of the seen world may own, Or if this flowered plant bears also a fruit Unto the true reality unknown....
I am older than Nature and her Time By all the timeless age of Consciousness, And my adult oblivion of the clime Where I was born makes me not countryless. Ay, and dim through my daylight thoughts escape...
When I have sense of what to sense appears, Sense is sense ere 'tis mine or mine in me is. When I hear, Hearing, ere I do hear, hears. When I see, before me abstract Seeing sees....
He that goes back does, since he goes, advance, Though he doth not advance who goeth back, And he that seeks, though he on nothing chance, May still by words be said to find a lack....
Happy the maimed, the halt, the mad, the blind-- All who, stamped separate by curtailing birth, Owe no duty's allegiance to mankind Nor stand a valuing in their scheme of worth!...
Good. I have done. My heart weighs. I am sad. The outer day, void statue of lit blue, Is altogether outward, other, glad At mere being not-I (so my aches construe). I, that have failed in everything, bewail...