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Title: The New World

Author: Witter Bynner

Release date: January 7, 2009 [eBook #27731]

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by D. Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Barbara Tozier, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW WORLD ***

E-text prepared by D. Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Barbara Tozier,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)

The New World

BY WITTER BYNNER

AN ODE TO HARVARD
AND OTHER POEMS

TIGER

THE LITTLE KING

THE NEW WORLD

IPHIGENIA IN TAURIS

The New World

by WITTER BYNNER

NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
1918

COPYRIGHT 1915 BY
MITCHELL KENNERLEY

The greater part of this poem was delivered before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in June, 1911; several passages from it have appeared in Poetry, and others in The Bellman, the Boston Evening Transcript and the American Magazine.

Printed in America

To
Celia

The New World

I

Celia was laughing. Hopefully I said:

“How shall this beauty that we share,

This love, remain aware

Beyond our happy breathing of the air?

How shall it be fulfilled and perfected?...

If you were dead,

How then should I be comforted?”

But Celia knew instead:

“He who finds beauty here, shall find it there.”

A halo gathered round her hair.

I looked and saw her wisdom bare

The living bosom of the countless dead.

... And there

I laid my head.

Again when Celia laughed, I doubted her and said:

“Life must be led

In many ways more difficult to see

Than this immediate way

For you and me.

We stand together on our lake’s edge, and the mystery

Of love has made us one, as day is made of night and night of day.

Aware of one identity

Within each other, we can say:

‘I shall be everything you are.’...

We are uplifted till we touch a star.

We know that overhead

Is nothing more austere, more starry, or more deep to understand

Than is our union, human hand in hand.

.... But over our lake come strangers—a crowded launch, a lonely sailing boy.

A mile away a train bends by. In every car

Strangers are travelling, each with particular

And unkind preference like ours, with privacy

Of understanding, with especial joy

Like ours. Celia, Celia, why should there be

Distrust between ourselves and them, disunity?

.... How careful we have been

To trim this little circle that we tread,

To set a bar

To strangers and forbid them!—Are they not as we,

Our very likeness and our nearest kin?

How can we shut them out and let stars in?”

She looked along the lake. And when I heard her speak,

The sun fell on the boy’s white sail and her white cheek.

“I touch them all through you,” she said. “I cannot know them now

Deeply and truly as my very own, except through you,

Except through one or two

Interpreters.

But not a moment stirs

Here between us, binding and interweaving us,

That does not bind these others to our care.”

The sunlight fell in glory on her hair....

And then said Celia, radiant, when I held her near:

“They who find beauty there, shall find it here.”

And on her brow,

When I heard Celia speak,

Cities were populous

With peace and oceans echoed glories in her ear

And from her risen thought

Her lips had brought,

As from some peak

Down through the clouds, a mountain-air

To guide the lonely and uplift the weak.

“Record it all,” she told me, “more than merely this,

More than the shine of sunset on our heads, more than a kiss,

More than our rapt agreement and delight

Watching the mountain mingle with the night....

Tell that the love of two incurs

The love of multitudes, makes way

And welcome for them, as a solitary star

Brings on the great array.

Go make a lovers’ calendar,”

She said, “for every day.”

And when the sun had put away

His dazzle, over the shadowy firs

The solitary star came out.... So on some night

To eyes of youth shall come my light

And hers.

II

“Where are you bound, O solemn voyager?”

She laughed one day and asked me in her mirth:

“Where are you from?

Why are you come?”

.... The questions beat like tapping of a drum;

And how could I be dumb,

I who have bugles in me? Fast

The answer blew to her,

For all my breath was worth....

“As a bird comes by grace of spring,

You are my journey and my wing—

And into your heart, O Celia,

My heart has flown, to sing

Solemn and long

A most undaunted song.”

This was the song that she herself had taught me how to sing:

.... As immigrants come toward America

On their continual ships out of the past,

So on my ship America have I, by birth,

Come forth at last

From all the bitter corners of the earth.

And I have ears to hear the westward wind blowing

And I have eyes to look beyond the scope Of sea

And I have hands to touch the hands

Of shipmates who are going

Wherever I go and the grace of knowing

That what for them is hope

Is hope for me.

I come from many times and many lands,

I look toward life and all that it shall hold,

Past bound and past divide.

And I shall be consoled

By a continent as wide

As the round invisible sky.

.... “The unseen shall become the seen....

O Celia, be my Spanish Queen!

The Genoan am I!”

And Celia cried:

“My jewels, they are yours,

Yours for the journey. Use them well.

Go find the new world, win the shores

Of which the old books tell!

.... Yet will they listen, poet? Will they sail with you?

Will they not call you dreamer of a dream?

Will they not laugh at you, because you seem

Concerned with words that people often say

And deeds they never do?”

The bright sails of my caravel shook seaward in reply:

“Though I be told

A thousand facts to hold

Me back, though the old boundary

Rise up like hatred in my way,

Though fellow-voyagers cry,

‘A lie!’—

Here as I come with heaven at my side

None of the weary words they say

Remain with me,

I am borne like a wave of the sea

Toward worlds to be....

And, young and bold,

I am happier than they—

The timid unbelievers who grow old!”

She interceded: “How impatient, how unkind

You are! What secret do you know

To keep you young?

Age comes with keen and accurate advance

Against youth’s lightly handled lance.

Age is an ancient despot that has wrung

All hearts.”... My answer was the song forever sung:

“This that I need to know I know—

Onpouring and perpetual immigrants,

We join a fellowship beyond America

Yet in America....

Beyond the touch of age, my Celia,

In you, in me, in everyone, we join God’s growing mind.

For in no separate place or time, or soul, we find

Our meaning. In one mingled soul reside

All times and places. On a tide

Of mist and azure air

We journey toward that soul, through circumstance,

Until at last we fully care and dare

To make within ourselves divinity.”

“And what of all the others,” Celia said,

“Who ventured brave as you? What of the dead?”

Again I saw the halo in her hair

And said: “The dead sail forward, hid behind

This wave that we ourselves must mount to find

The eternal way.

Adventurers of long ago

Seeking a richer gain than earthy gold,

They have left for us, half-told,

Their guesses of the port, more numerous and blind

Than their unnumbered and forgotten faces.

... And though today, as then,

Death is a wind blowing them forward out of sight and out of mind,

Yet in familiar and in unfamiliar places

Inquiring by what means I may

The destination of the wind

Of death, I have found signs and traces

Of the way they go

And with a quicker heart I have beheld again

In visions, from my ship at sea,

The great new world confronting me,

Where, yesterday,

Today, tomorrow, dwell my countrymen.”

And then I looked away,

Over the pasture and the valley, to the New Hampshire town....

And my heart’s acclaim went down,

To Florida, Wisconsin, California,

And brought a good report to Celia:

“My ship America,

This whole wide-timbered land,

Well captained and well manned,

Ascends the sea

Of time, carrying me

And many passengers.

And every cabin stirs

With the pulsing of its engine over the sway of time,

Yes, every state and city, every village, every farm,

And every heart and everyone’s right arm.

... Celia, hold out your hand,

Or anyone in any field or street, hold out your hand—

And I can see it pulse the massive climb

And dip

Of this America,

My ship!”

“Why make your ship so small?

Can your America contain them all?”

How wisely I replied

In the province of my pride:

“But these are my own shipmates, these

Who share my ship America with me!

... On many seas

On other ships, even the ancient ships of Greece,

Have other immigrants set sail for peace.

But these are my own shipmates whom I see

At hand—these are my company.”

“What have you said,” she cried,

“Thinking you knew?

Whom have you called your shipmates? You were wrong!

Your ship is strong

With a more various crew

Than any one man’s country could provide,

To make it ride

So high and manifold and so complete.

This is the engine-beat

Of life itself, the ship of ships.

There is no other ship among the stars than this.

The wind of death is a bright kiss

Upon the lips

Of every immigrant, as upon yours and mine—

Theirs is the stinging brine

And sun and open sea,

And theirs the arching sky, eternity.”

And Celia had my homage. I was wrong.

Immigrants all, one ship we ride,

Man and his bride

The journey through.

O let it be with a bridal-song!...

“My shipmates are as many as eternity is long:

The unborn and the living and the dead—

And, Celia, you!”

III

That midnight when the moon was tall

I walked alone by the white lake—yet with a vanished race

And with a race to come. To walk with dead men is to pray,

To walk with men unborn—to find the way.

I have seen many days. That night I watched them all.

I have seen many a sign and trace

Of beauty and of hope:

An elm at night; an arrowy waterfall;

The illimitable round unbroken scope

Of life; a friend’s unfrightened dying face.

Though I have heard the cry of fear in crowded loneliness of space,

Dead laughter from the lips of lust,

Anger from fools, falsehood from sycophants,

(My fear, my lips, my anger, my disgrace)

Though I have held a golden cup and tasted rust,

Seen cities rush to be defiled

By the bright-fevered and consuming sin

Of making only coin and lives to count it in,

Yet once I watched with Celia,

Watched on a ferry an Italian child,

One whom America

Had changed.

His cheek was hardy and his mouth was frail

For sweetness, and his eyes were opening wild

As with wonder at an unseen figure carrying a grail.

Perhaps he faced, as I did in his glance,

The spirit of the living dead who, having ranged

Through long reverses, forward without fail

Carry deliverance

From privilege and disinheritance,

Until their universal soul shall prove

The only answer to the ache of love.

“America was wistful in that child,”

Said Celia afterwards—and smiled

Because all three of us were immigrants,

Each voyaging into each.

Over the city-roofs, the sun awoke

Bright in the dew

Of a marvellous morning, while she spoke

Of the sun, the dew, the wonder, in a child:

“He who devises tyranny,” she said,

“Denies the resurrection of the dead,

Beneath his own degree degrades himself,

Invades himself with ugliness and wars.

But he who knows all men to be himself,

Part of his own experiment and reach,

Humbles and amplifies himself

To build and share a tenement of stars.”

Once when we broke a loaf of bread

And shared the honey, Celia said:

“To share all beauty as the interchanging dust,

To be akin and kind and to entrust

All men to one another for their good,

Is to have heard and understood,

And carried to the common enemy

In you and me,

The ultimatum of democracy.”

“But to what goal?” I wondered. And I heard her happy speech:

“It is my faith that God is our own dream

Of perfect understanding of the soul.

It is my passion that, alike through me

And every member of eternity,

The source of God is sending the same stream.

It is my peace that when my life is whole,

God’s life shall be completed and supreme.”

And once when I had made complaint

About America, she warned me: “Be not faint

Of heart, but bold to see the soul’s advance.

The chances are not far nor few....

Face beauty,” Celia said, “then beauty faces you.”

And under all things her advice was true.

... Discovering what she knew,

Not only on a mountainous place

Or by the solving sea

But through the world I have seen endless beauty, as the number grows

Of those who, in a child cheated of simple joy

Or in a wasted rose

Or in a lover’s immemorial lonely eyes

Or in machines that quicken and destroy

A multitude or in a mother’s unregarded grace

And broken heart, through all the skies

And all humanity,

Seek out the single spirit, face to face,

Find it, become a conscious part of it

And know that something pure and exquisite,

Although inscrutably begun,

Surely exalts the many into one.

“I shall not lose, nor you,”

I said to Celia. Over the world the morning-dew

Moved like a hymn and sang to us: “Go now, fulfill

Your destiny and joy;

Each in the other, both in that Italian boy,

And he in you, like flowers in a hill!”

... She was the nearness of imperfect God

On whom in her perfection was at work.

Lest I should shirk

My share, I asked her for His blessing and His nod—

And His breath was in her shining hair like the wind in golden-rod.

“But, Celia, Celia, tell me what to be,”

I asked, “and what to do,

To keep your faith in me,

To witness mine in you!”

She answered: “Dare to see

In every man and woman everywhere

The making of us two.

See none that we can spare

From the creation of our soul.

Swear to be whole.

Let not your faith abate,

But establish it in persons and exalt it in the state.”

IV

Celia has challenged me....

Be my reply,

Challenge to poets who, with tinkling tricks,

Meet life and pass it by.

“Beauty,” they ask, “in politics?”

“If you put it there,” say I.

Wide the new world had opened its bright gates.

And a woman who had heard of the new world

All her life long and had saved her pence

By hard frugality, to be her competence

In the free home, came eagerly in nineteen seven

Into These States,

With her little earnings furled

In a large handkerchief—but with a heart

Too rich to be contained, for she had done her part:

She had come

With faith to Heaven.

But there was a panic that year,

No work, no wages in These States.

And a great fear

Seized on the immigrant. And so she took her pence

All of them, furled

Safe in her handkerchief, to a government cashier—

A clerk in the post-office. (And he relates

Her errand as a joke, yet tenderly

For I watched him telling me.)

... Not knowing English, being dumb,

She had brought with her a thin-faced lad

To interpret. And he made it clear,

While she unfurled

Her handkerchief and poured the heap of coins out of her hand,

That ‘she was giving all she had—

To be used no matter how, you understand’ ...

Lest harm should come to the new world.

O doubters of democracy,

Undo your mean contemptuous art!—

More than in all that poetry has said,

More than in mound or marble, in the living live the dead.

The past has done its reproductive part.

Hear now the cry of beauty’s present needs,

Of comrades levelling a thousand creeds,

Finding futility

In conflict, selfishness, hardness of heart!

For love has many poets who can see

Ascending in the sky

Above the shadowy passes

The everlasting hills: humanity.

O doubters of the time to be,

What is this might, this mystery,

Moving and singing through democracy,

This music of the masses

And of you and me—

But purging and dynamic poetry!—

What is this eagerness from sea to sea

But young divinity!

I have seen doubters, with a puny joy,

Accept amusement for their little while

And feed upon some nourishing employ

But otherwise shake their wise heads and smile—

Protesting that one man can no more move the mass

For good or ill

Than could the ancients kindle the sun

By tying torches to a wheel and rolling it downhill.

But not the wet circumference of the seas

Can quench the living light in even these,

These who forget,

Eating the fruits of earth,

That nothing ever has been done

To spur the spirit of mankind,

Which has not come to pass

Forth from the heart and mind

Of some one man, through other men birth after birth,

In thoughts that dare

And in deeds that share

And in a will resolved to find

A finer breath

Born in the deep maternity of death.

... If these be ecstasies of youth,

Yet they are news of which all time has need.

If they be lies, tell them yourselves and heed

How poets’ twice-told lies become the truth!

There was a poet Celia loved who, hearing all around

The multitudinous tread

Of common majesty,

(A hearty immigrant was he!)

Made of the gathering insurgent sound

Another continent of poetry?

His name is writ in his blood, mine and yours.

... “And when he celebrates

These States,”

She said, “how can Americans worth their salt

But listen to the wavesong on their shores,

The waves and Walt,

And hear the windsong over rock and wood,

The winds and Walt,

And let the mansong enter at their gates

And know that it is good!”

Walt Whitman, by his perfect friendliness

Has let me guess

That into Celia, into me,

He and unnumbered dead have come

To be our intimates,

To make of us their home

Commingling earth and heaven....

That by our true and mutual deeds

We shall at last be shriven

Of these hypocrisies and jealous creeds

And petty separate fates—

That I in every man and he in me,

Together making God, are gradually creating whole

The single soul.

Somebody called Walt Whitman—

Dead!

He is alive instead,

Alive as I am. When I lift my head,

His head is lifted. When his brave mouth speaks,

My lips contain his word. And when his rocker creaks

Ghostly in Camden, there I sit in it and watch my hand grow old

And take upon my constant lips the kiss of younger truth....

It is my joy to tell and to be told

That he, in all the world and me,

Cannot be dead,

That I, in all the world and him, youth after youth

Shall lift my head.

V

There is a vision, Celia, in your face....

Beauty had lived in India like a mad

And withdrawn prophetess, in Greece had set her pace

Between a laurelled lad

And a singing maiden, pitched her purple tents

In Rome, leaned with a mother’s fears

In Bethlehem to nurse a son of God upon her breast

And learned the tender loneliness of tears,

Awhile had hid in Europe, sad

In the shadow of magnificence,

Brooding, finding no rest,

And then of a sudden she had run forth from her hiding-place,

Rejoicing, desperate, intense

Against her enemy, a rod

Of fire in her hand, her tresses crowned

With liberty, her purpose bold and bound

That every son should be a son of God.

And then she wept for France.... But once more clad

In stars, she beckons to America, the land

Of hope. Behold her stand

With her bright finger scorning armaments

And on her lips the unconquerable common sense

Of love calling the world to challenge and confound

The empty idols of her enemy!

... Comforter of experience,

Enlightener of old events,

Beauty forever dares to widen and retrace

Her way, singing the marches of democracy,

Carrying banners of the time to be,

Calling companions to her high command.

There is a banner, Celia, in your hand!

Though sons, whose fathers bled

For freedom, struggle now instead

With heavier weapons and with weary-waking head

For bread;

Though sons, whose fathers fought in other ages

For fame, bear in their hearts today the scar

Of entering where the laborer sleeps

And rousing him with masterly inquiry where he keeps

His wages:

Though all the cunning coil of trade appear a baser thing

Than battles are,

O trace through time the orbit of this troubled star!

... See, from afar off, how the valiant few

Of old, each with a helmet on his head,

Practiced their inconclusive feud

Upon no battlefield of unfeeling dew—

But on the prostrate stillness of the multitude!

Even their knightliest prowess they must rear,

Tamerlane, Alexander, Arthur, every king,

Upon the common clay from which they spring.

For see how slaves, on whom war falls, renew

The strength of war and disappear

Year after year

Into the earth—fulfilling it to form and bear

Democracy!

Look nearer now along the modern sky

And watch where every man fastens the electric wing

Upon his foot, that he may leave his little sod

Of ignorance!

And look where, by and by,

Taking his high inheritance,

He knows himself and other men as the winged self of God!

The times are gone when only few were fit

To view with open vision the sublime,

When for the rest an altar-rail sufficed

To obscure the democratic Christ....

Perceiving now his gift, demanding it,

The benison of common benefit,

Men, women, all,

Interpreters of time,

Have found that lordly Christ apocryphal

While Christ the comrade comes again—no wraith

Of virtue in a far-off faith

But a companion hearty, natural,

Who sorrows with indomitable eyes

For his mistreated plan

To share with all men the upspringing sod,

The unfolding skies—

Not God who made Himself the Man,

But a man who proved man’s unused worth—

And made himself the God.

Once you had listened, Celia, to a stream

And lain a long time, silent as a sleeper.

And then your word arrived as from beyond

Your body, bending with its breath the frond

Of a fern. You whispered to the listening stream:

“As evil is yet wider than we dream,

So good is deeper.” ...

O how I try to bring

Your voice to say in mine that word!—to sing

Clear-hearted as a mountain-spring

Of the wonders we see deepening!

Time cannot bury what the blest have thought,

For there is resurrection far and near.

Often it seems as though a single day had brought

To each bright hemisphere

Courage to cast

The servitude

And blinded glory of the past

Away and in a flash had taught

Purpose and fortitude....

But not so swiftly are we wrought.

By many single days we learn to live,

By many flashes read the vision clear

That every heart is equal debtor

To its own and every breast

For the good before the better,

The better toward the best.

When we who hugged awhile the golden bowl

Of greed behold it now a sieve

Through which is drained invisibly

A nectar we were saving for the soul,

Then not in vain have many gone

The empty ways of stealth

Seeking a firmer base than honesty

For building happiness upon....

And by the ancient agonizing test

We have slowly guessed

That a just portion of the whole

Is all there is of wealth.

When those who labor wake

And care ...

And through the tingling air

A dead man’s voice, by living men renewed

And women, dares democracy

To self-respect: “Open the lands! Let mankind share

The ample livelihood they bear!”—

Then not in vain have the poor known distress,

Teaching the rich that happiness

Is something no man may—possess.

Little by little we, whose fathers fought

Impassioned, are ashamed

Of the familiar thought

That waste of blood is honourable feud:

Little by little from the wondering land

The agitation and the lie of war

Shall pass; for in the heart disclaimed

Murder shall be abandoned by the hand.

And while there grows a fellowship of unshed blood

To stop the wound and heal the scar

Of time, with sudden glorious aptitude

Woman assumes her part. Her pity in a flood

Flings down the gate.

She has been made to wait

Too long, undreaming and untaught

The touch and beauty of democracy.

But, entering now the strife

In which her saving sense is due,

She watches and she grows aware,

Holding a child more dear than property,

That the many perish to empower the few,

That homeless politics have split apart

The common country of the human heart.

(Your heart is beating, Celia, like a song!)

.... For man has need

Not merely of the lips that kiss and hands that feed

But of the hearts that heed

And of the minds that speed

Like rain.

Loving a mother or a wife,

Let him release her tenderness, to make him strong,

And use her beauty and receive her law:

The very life of life.

In temporary pain

The age is bearing a new breed

Of men and women, patriots of the world

And one another. Boundaries in vain,

Birthrights and countries, would constrain

The old diversity of seed

To be diversity of soul.

O mighty patriots, maintain

Your loyalty!—till flags unfurled

For battle shall arraign

The traitors who unfurled them, shall remain

And shine over an army with no slain,

And men from every nation shall enroll

And women—in the hardihood of peace!

What can my anger do but cease?

Whom shall I fight and who shall be my enemy

When he is I and I am he?

Let me have done with that old God outside

Who watched with preference and answered prayer,

The Godhead that replied

Now here, now there,

Where heavy cannon were

Or coins of gold!

Let me receive communion with all men,

Acknowledging our one and only soul!

For not till then

Can God be God, till we ourselves are whole.

VI

Once in a smoking-car, I saw a scene

That made my blood stand still....

While the sun smouldered in a great ravine,

And I, with elbow on the window-sill,

Was watching the dim ember of the west,

Half-heard, but poignant as a bell

For fire, there came a moan; the voice of one in hell.

I turned. Across the car were two young men,

Yet hardly more than boys,

French by their look, and brothers,

And one was moaning on the other’s breast.

His face was hid away. I could not tell

What words he said, half English and half French. I only knew

Both men were suffering, not one but two.

And then that face came into view,

Gaunt and unshaved, with shadows and wild eyes,

A face of madness and of desolation. And his cries,

For all his mate could do,

Rang out, a shrill and savage noise,

And tears ran down the stubble of his cheek.

The other face was younger, clean and sad

With the manful stricken beauty of a lad

Who had intended always to be glad.

.... The touch of his compassion, like a mother’s,

Pitied the madman, soothed him and caressed.

And then I heard him speak,

In a low voice: “Mon frère, mon frère!

Calme-toi! Right here’s your place.”

And, opening his coat, he pressed

Upon his heart the wanderer’s face

And smoothed the tangled hair.

After a moment peaceful there,

The maniac screamed—struck out and fell

Across his brother’s arm. Love could not quell

His anger. Wrists together high in air

He rose and with a yell

Brought down his handcuffs toward his brother’s face—

But his hands were pinned below his waist,

By a burly, silent sheriff, and some hideous thing was bound

Around his arms and feet

And he was laid upon the narrow seat.

And then that sound,

That moan

Of one forsaken and alone!

“Seigneur! Le createur du ciel et de la terre!

Forgotten me! Forgotten me!”

.... And when the voice grew weak

The brother leaned again, embraced

The huddled body. But a shriek

Repulsed him: “Non! Détache-moi! I don’t care

For you. Non! Tu es l’homme qui m’a trahi!

Non! Tu n’es pas mon frère!”

But as often as that stricken mind would fill

With the great anguish and the rush of hate,

The boy, his young eyes older, older,

Would curve his shoulder

To the other’s pain and hold that haunted face close to his face

And say: “O wait!

You will know me better by and by.

Mon pauvre petit, be still!

Right here’s your place.”

.... The gleam! and then the blinded stare,

The cry:

“Non, tu n’es pas mon frère!”

I saw myself, myself, as blind

As he. And something smothers

My reason. And I do not know my brothers....

But every day declare:

“Non, tu n’es pas mon frère!”

But in the outcome, I can see....

Closer than any brother

Shall they be to one another

And to me,

Closer than mother, father, daughter, son,

O closer than a lover shall they be,

When madness like a storm shall roll

Away, leaving illumination. Within everyone

The nearness has begun

Toward some loved life and toward the soul

Perceived therein: the elemental ache to be made whole

With beauty and with love.—O I have ached and longed in the embrace

Of one I love to be undone

Of differences, to yield and run

Within the very blood and being of my dear,

One body and one face,

One spirit in all space,

Mingled and indissoluble. And I have felt a mortal tear

Smart on my lids, when I had been so near

To Celia that I knew not which was I,

Yet the day returned between us and the sky

Held distances that were not clear

To us and we were two again that had been almost one.

A mother yields herself to enter

Her child, who nestles close and sleeps

With all his wisdom pressed

For comfort to her breast.

I can remember my relinquishment

Of consciousness and care,

Almost of life, upon my mother’s heart—the great content

Of being there.

And then I loved a starry boy of three,

Who looked about him, smiled and took to me,

Held out his arms and chose me among men

For his companion, to confide

His smiles in and to be

At ease with. Closely by my side

He sat and touched the world, to see

If it were solid and worth touching. When he died,

I too was dead ... and yet I hear him say,

Laughing within my heart today:

“Lo, being you,

And having lived your years, this will I do,

And this, and this!”

I have my boy again.

I greet him nearer than a kiss.

And so, from birth to death, out of confusion

The secret creeps

Across the deeps

From its eternal centre

In the soul.

Communion is the cause and the conclusion

And the unfailing sacrament

Not only of the mystical frequenter

Of temples, where the body of the dead

Creates divine

The living body through the bread

And wine,

But God discovers and discovers

His beauty in all lovers.

And, to make His beauty whole,

Body and body, soul and soul, combine

His one identity with yours and mine.

I know a fellow in a steel-mill who, intent

Upon his labours and his happiness, had meant

In his own wisdom to be blest,

Had made his own unaided way

To schooling, opportunity,

Success. And then he loved and married. And his bride,

After a brief year, died.

I went to him to see

If I might comfort him. The comfort came to me.

“David,” I said, “under the temporary ache

There is unwonted nearness with the dead.”

I felt his two hands take

The sentence from me with a grip

Forged in the mills. He told me that his tears were shed

Before her breath went. After that, instead

Of grief, she came herself. He felt her slip

Into his being like a miracle, her lip

Whispering on his, to slake

His need of her.—“And in the night I wake

With wonder and I find my bride

And her embrace there in our bed,

Within my very being, not outside!

.... We have each other more, much more,”

He said, “now than before.

This very moment while I shake

Your hand, my friend,

Not only I,

But she is touching you—and laughs with me because I cried

For her.... People would think me crazy if I told.

But something in what you said made me bold

To let you meet my bride!”

It was not madness. David’s eye

Was clear and open-seeing.

His life

Had faced in death and understood in his young wife,

As I when Celia died,

The secret of God’s being.

VII

Among good citizens, I praise

Again a woman whom I knew and know,

A citizen whom I have seen

Most heartily, most patiently

Making God’s mind,

A citizen who, dead,

Yet shines across her white-remembered ways

As the nearness of a light across the snow....

My Celia, mystical, serene,

Laughing and kind.

And still I hear among New Hampshire trees

Her happy speech:

“Democracy is beauty’s inmost reach.”

And still her voice announces plain

The mystic gain

Of friends from adversaries and of peace from pain:

Beauty’s control

Of every soul

Surrendering in victory.

.... Well I recall how she explained to me

With sunlight on her head

When last we looked, as many times before,

Over those hundred foothills rolling like the sea.

“Where mountains are, door after door

Unlocks within me, opens wide

And leaves no difference in my heart,” she said,

“From anything outside.”

Not only Celia, speaking, taught me these

The tenets of her beauty; but her life was such

That I believed as by a palpable touch

That heals and tends.

Not better nor more learned nor more wise

In many ways than others of my friends,

Celia was happier.

Their excellencies and their destinies

Became, contributing, a part of her,

Anointed her awhile among all men

An eminent citizen,

A generous arbiter.

Not less bereaved than others of my friends,

Celia was lovelier.

And now, though something of her dies,

Her heart of love assembles and transcends

Laws, letters, personalities,

Beginnings, passages and ends.

Often I start and look beside me for the stir

Of her sweet presence come again.

I have cried out to her,

So vivid has begun

Some dear-remembered sentence in her voice.

If a deluded wakeful thrush,

Seeing a light in a window, sings to the sun,

Yet he shall soon rejoice;

When the great dawn of day

Opens a thousand windows into one.

On a path where thrushes wake—called Celia’s Way—

Time after time

She led me high among the rills.

And always when I pass again our chosen pine

And feel upon my brow the fine

Soft pressure of an unseen web and brush

It from my face expectantly and climb

Wide-eyed into the mountains’ windy hush,

Among the green and healing hills

I have found Celia.

For the morning fills

With her and afternoon and twilight. She is always there

As sweet within me as the intimate air.

We are together still in the deep solitude

Which is the essence of all companies,

Not in its loneliness but in its brood

Of presences, the dawn chanting with birds, the trees

Translating unremembered memories

Of the returning dead.

And Celia, who has learned to die,

Is well aware—and so through her am I—

That, one by one interpreted,

All hopes and pains and powers

Are hers and mine to try

On every star, through every age.

.... And, still together, on this page

We quote the sun-dial of the sage:

”_I number none but happy hours._”

For we remember still

The morning-hymn we heard: “Ye shall fulfill

Your destiny and joy,

Each in the other, both in that Italian boy

And he in you, like flowers in a hill.”

She said to me one day, where a hill renewed its flowers,

“How easy it would be to live and die

If we would only see the ultimate

Oneness of life, quicken

Our hearts with it and know that they who hate

And strike become by their own blow the stricken!”...

“A stranger might be God,” the Hindus cry.

But Celia says, importunate:

“Everyone must be God and you and I.”

VIII

Almost the body leads the laggard soul; bidding it see

The beauty of surrender, the tranquillity

Of fusion with the earth. The body turns to dust

Not only by a sudden whelming thrust,

Or at the end of a corrupting calm,

But oftentimes anticipates and, entering flowers and trees

Upon a hillside or along the brink

Of streams, encounters instances

Of its eventual enterprise:

Inhabits the enclosing clay,

In rhapsody is caught away

On a great tide

Of beauty, to abide

Translated through the night and day

Of time and, by the anointing balm

Of earth, to outgrow decay.

Hark in the wind—the word of silent lips!

Look where some subtle throat, that once had wakened lust,

Lies clear and lovely now, a silver link

Of change and peace!

Hollows and willows and a river-bed,

Anemones and clouds,

Raindrops and tender distances

Above, beneath,

Inherit and bequeath

Our far-begotten beauty. We are wed

With many kindred who were seeming dead.

Only the delicate woven shrouds

Are vanished, beauty thrown aside

To honor and uncover

A deeper beauty—as the veil that slips

Breathless away between a lover

And his bride.

So, by the body, may the soul surmise

The beauty of surrender, the tranquillity

Of fusion: when, set free

From semblance of mortality,

Yielding its dust the richer to endue

A common avenue

Of earth for other souls to journey through,

It shall put on in purer guise

The mutual beauty of its destiny.

And who shall fear for his identity

And who shall cling to the poor privacy

Of incompleteness, when the end explains

That what pride forfeits, beauty gains!

Therefore, O spirit, as a runner strips

Upon a windy afternoon,

Be unencumbered of what troubles you—

Arise with grace

And greatly go!—the wind upon your face!

Grieve not for the invisible transported brow

On which like leaves the dark hair grew,

Nor for the lips of laughter that are now

Laughing inaudibly in sun and dew,

Nor for the limbs that, fallen low

And seeming faint and slow,

Shall alter and renew

Their shape and hue

Like birches white before the moon

Or a young apple-tree

In spring or the round sea

And shall pursue

More ways of swiftness than the swallow dips

Among ... and find more winds than ever blew

The straining sails of unimpeded ships!

A sudden music, Celia, through a poplar-bough,

Where leaves are small and new,

Comes laughing and goes hastening like you.

Beauty is more than hands or face or eyes

Or the long curve that lies

Upon a bed waiting, more than the rise

Of sun among the birds, more than the oar that plies

Under the moon for lovers, more than a tune that buys

Pennies from time. Vision and touch comprise

Yesterday’s promise, today’s token

Of a fulfillment that shall have no need to be perceived or spoken,

Wherein all love is the award

Poured upon beauty and no heart is broken

And no grief is stored.

For never beauty dies

That lived. Nightly the skies

Assemble stars, the light of hopeful eyes,

And daily brood on the communal breath—

Which we call death.

Nothing is lost. Nothing I have of loveliness

Exceeds a minute part

Of my own loveliness when it shall be fulfilled

With Celia’s and all loveliness that lies

In every heart.

All that I have is but the start

And the beginning, the bewildering guess

Of what shall be distilled

Out of my soul by you and you,

Each soul of all souls, till one soul remains

Which every beauty shall imbue

Clean of the differences and pains....

I shall be Celia’s everlastingness.

IX

A little hill among New Hampshire hills

Touches more stars than any height I know.

For there the whole earth—like a single being—fills

And expands with heaven.

It is the hill where Celia used to go

To watch Monadnock and the miles that met

In slow-ascending slopes of peace.

She said: “When I am here, I find release

From every petty debt I owe,

The goods I bring with me increase,

The ills are riven

And blown away. And there remains a single debt

Toward all the world for me,

A single duty and one destiny.”

“There shall be many births of God

In this humanity,”

She said, “and many crucifixions on the hills,

Before we learn that where Christ trod

We all shall tread; and as he died to give

Himself to us, we too shall die—and live.”

“Though slowly knowledge comes, yet in the birth

Is joy,” said Celia, “joy

As well as pain:

The clear and clouded beauty of the earth.

.... This I forget in cities. For cities are a great

Impassable gate

Of tumult. But by mountains and by seas I gain

Path after path of peace.”

One evening Celia led me, late,

Among the many whispers before rain,

To touch and climb her hill again.

I felt it rise invisible as fate,

Not for the eye but for the soul to see.

And when at last, among the oaks, we came

Upon the top, a perfect voice

Thrilled in the air like flame—

Was it uprisen death we heard?

Was it immortal youth,

Out of the body, witnessing the truth,

Attesting glory in an angel’s voice?

Blindly we listened to the singer and the single strain

Containing joy.

And then the voice was still and all the world and we—

Till “Run,” she said, “and bring him back to me!”

I ran, I called ... but in the nearing rain,

No mortal answered, nothing stirred.

Was it uprisen death we heard?

.... Perhaps the hills and night

Had made a prophet of some wandering boy,

Prompting him in that instant to rejoice

As never in his life before.

He must have had his own delight

As well in silence as in song;

For, though we waited long,

He sang no more.

Afterward Celia said: “That voice we heard

Singing among the oak-leaves, and then still,

We cannot answer how it sings or how it comes and goes....

But only that its beauty ever grows

Within us both, in ways no voice has told.

.... So let me be to you. When night has drawn its fold

Of darkness and no word

May reach your heart from mine,

Take then my love, my beauty! Hear me still

When you are old

And I am ageless as a changing hill!

O hear me like that voice at night,

Clearer than sound, nearer than sight,

And let me be—as beauty is—divine!”

There is a hill of hills

That holds my heart on high and stills

All other sound

Than joy.

Robins and thrushes, whip-poor-wills

And morning-sparrows sing it round

With echoes. Waterfalls abound

And many streams convoy

The breath of music. I have found

A hill-path rising sudden on a city-street,

Out of a quarrel, out of black despair,

And climbed it with my winged feet.

It hurries me above

All this illusion, all these ills,

It rises quickly to the shining air.

.... Celia, I hear you on the hill of hills,

Announcing love.

And O my citizen, perhaps the few

Whom I shall tell of you

Will see with me your beauty who are dead,

Will hear with me your voice and what it said!

Let but a line of mine,

A single one,

Be made to shine

With your whole-heartedness as with the sun,

And I shall so consign

Your touch to younger and yet younger hands,

That they shall carry beauty through more lands

Than ever Helen laid her touch upon.

In your new world I see

The immigrants arriving from the ships....

O Celia, my democracy,

My destiny,

Beauty has had its answer on your lips!

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