Sprung of the father blood, the mother brain, Are they who point our pathway and sustain.
They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired.
When they do meet, it is our earth inspired.
To see Life's formless offspring and subdue Desire of times unripe, we have these two, Whose union is right reason: join they hands, The world shall know itself and where it stands;What cowering angel and what upright beast Make man, behold, nor count the low the least, Nor less the stars have round it than its flowers.
When these two meet, a point of time is ours.
As in a land of waterfalls, that flow Smooth for the leap on their great voice below, Some eddies near the brink borne swift along, Will capture hearing with the liquid song, So, while the headlong world's imperious force Resounded under, heard I these discourse.
First words, where down my woodland walk she led, To her blind sister Patience, Foresight said:
- Your faith in me appals, to shake my own, When still I find you in this mire alone.
- The few steps taken at a funeral pace By men had slain me but for those you trace.
- Look I once back, a broken pinion I:
Black as the rebel angels rained from sky!
- Needs must you drink of me while here you live, And make me rich in feeling I can give.
- A brave To-be is dawn upon my brow:
Yet must I read my sister for the How.
My daisy better knows her God of beams Than doth an eagle that to mount him seems.
She hath the secret never fieriest reach Of wing shall master till men hear her teach.
- Liker the clod flaked by the driving plough, My semblance when I have you not as now.
The quiet creatures who escape mishap Bear likeness to pure growths of the green sap:
A picture of the settled peace desired By cowards shunning strife or strivers tired.
I listen at their breasts: is there no jar Of wrestlings and of stranglings, dead they are, And such a picture as the piercing mind Ranks beneath vegetation. Not resigned Are my true pupils while the world is brute.
What edict of the stronger keeps me mute, Stronger impels the motion of my heart.
I am not Resignation's counterpart.
If that I teach, 'tis little the dry word, Content, but how to savour hope deferred.
We come of earth, and rich of earth may be;Soon carrion if very earth are we!
The coursing veins, the constant breath, the use Of sleep, declare that strife allows short truce;Unless we clasp decay, accept defeat, And pass despised; "a-cold for lack of heat,"Like other corpses, but without death's plea.
- My sister calls for battle; is it she?
- Rather a world of pressing men in arms, Than stagnant, where the sensual piper charms Each drowsy malady and coiling vice With dreams of ease whereof the soul pays price!
No home is here for peace while evil breeds, While error governs, none; and must the seeds You sow, you that for long have reaped disdain, Lie barren at the doorway of the brain, Let stout contention drive deep furrows, blood Moisten, and make new channels of its flood!
- My sober little maid, when we meet first, Drinks of me ever with an eager thirst.
So can I not of her till circumstance Drugs cravings. Here we see how men advance A doubtful foot, but circle if much stirred, Like dead weeds on whipped waters. Shout the word Prompting their hungers, and they grandly march, As to band-music under Victory's arch.
Thus was it, and thus is it; save that then The beauty of frank animals had men.
- Observe them, and down rearward for a term, Gaze to the primal twistings of the worm.
Thence look this way, across the fields that show Men's early form of speech for Yes and No.
My sister a bruised infant's utterance had;And issuing stronger, to mankind 'twas mad.
I knew my home where I had choice to feel The toad beneath a harrow or a heel.
- Speak of this Age.
- When you it shall discern Bright as you are, to me the Age will turn.
- For neither of us has it any care;
Its learning is through Science to despair.
- Despair lies down and grovels, grapples not With evil, casts the burden of its lot.
This Age climbs earth.
- To challenge heaven.
- Not less The lower deeps. It laughs at Happiness!
That know I, though the echoes of it wail, For one step upward on the crags you scale.
Brave is the Age wherein the word will rust, Which means our soul asleep or body's lust, Until from warmth of many breasts, that beat A temperate common music, sunlike heat The happiness not predatory sheds!
- But your fierce Yes and No of butting heads, Now rages to outdo a horny Past.
Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vast Are thrown by every novel light upraised.
The world's whole round smokes ominously, amazed And trembling as its pregnant AEtna swells.
Combustibles on hot combustibles Run piling, for one spark to roll in fire The mountain-torrent of infernal ire And leave the track of devils where men built.
Perceptive of a doom, the sinner's guilt Confesses in a cry for help shrill loud, If drops the chillness of a passing cloud, To conscience, reason, human love; in vain:
None save they but the souls which them contain.
No extramural God, the God within Alone gives aid to city charged with sin.
A world that for the spur of fool and knave, Sweats in its laboratory, what shall save?
But men who ply their wits in such a school, Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.
- Much have I studied hard Necessity!
To know her Wisdom's mother, and that we May deem the harshness of her later cries In labour a sure goad to prick the wise, If men among the warnings which convulse, Can gravely dread without the craven's pulse.
Long ere the rising of this Age of ours, The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers.
Of human lusts and lassitudes they spring, And are as lasting as the parent thing.
Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill, They might o'ermatch and have mankind at will.
Behold such army gathering: ours the spur, No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer.
Not fool or knave is now the enemy O'ershadowing men, 'tis Folly, Knavery!
A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach.
Now must the brother soul alive in each, His traitorous individual devildom Hold subject lest the grand destruction come.
