Читать книгу Starved Rock - Edgar Lee Masters - Страница 4

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O, you who have gone from the ways of cities,

From the peopled places, the streets of strife,

From offices, markets, rooms, retreats,

Pastoral ways, hamlets, everywhere from the earth,

And have made of the emptiness of your departure

A land, a country, a realm all your own,

Set above the hills of our vision, an empire

Within, around, above our empire of days,

Of pain and clamorous tongues;

An empire which out of a sovereign silence

Stretches its power over the restless multitude

Of our thoughts, and the ceaseless music of our beings,

And surrounds us even as the air we breathe—

O ye majestic Dead, hear our hymn!

*****

The clown, the wastrel and the fool in life

Are lifted up by you, O Death!

The least of these who has entered in

Your realm, O Death,

Is greater than the greatest of us,

And by a transfiguration has been clothed

With the glory and the wonder of nature.

He has drunk of the purple cup of apotheosis,

And passed through the mystical change,

And accomplished the cycle of being.

He has risen from the lowlands of earth

Into the air on wings of breath.

He has rejected the shell of the body, feet and hands,

He has become one with the majesty of Time,

And taken the kingdom of triumph

Whether it be cessation or bliss.

For he has entered into the kingdom of primal powers,

Being or ceasing to be,

Even as he has re-entered the womb of nature.

Or he has found peace,

States of wisdom, or vision—

Hail! realm of Silence,

Whence comes the unheard symphony too deep for strings,

Hail, infinite Light,

Darkness to eyes of flesh—

All hail!

*****

What are we, the living, beside you the dead?

We of daily hunger, daily food, daily ablutions,

The daily rising and lying down,

Waking and sleep;

The daily care of the body's needs;

And daily desire to pass the gift of life;

And daily fears of the morrow to come;

And daily pains for things that are gone;

And daily longing for things that fly us;

And sorrow that follows wherever we go;

And love that mocks us, and peace that breaks,

And shame that tracks us, and want that gnaws.

But O ye Dead! Ye great ones,

Triumphant over these, released

From the duties of dust, all chains of desire,

And made inhabitants of breathless spaces,

Immanent in a realm of calm,

Rulers of a sphere of tideless air,

Victors returned from the war of death in life,

Victors over death in death!

*****

For the growing soul turns in

Even as the seed turns in on itself,

And becomes hard, transparent,

An encased life, condensed

In the process of saving itself

From rains that beat in the fall,

And frosts that descend from skies grown cold.

And we who shed away old thoughts and hopes,

Days and dreams of life

Turn in, grow clear like grains of rice,

Until the realm of death

Is as snow delivered land

Luring the seed—

And it becomes our home, our country,

Our native land that calls us back

From this sojourn of adventure,

And place of profit;

For O ye majestic Dead, your absence draws us,

If it be naught but absence still you summon,

Your absence has become a very Presence,

A Power, a hierarchy of Life!

*****

Even as leaves enrich the earth

Layer on layer,

Even as bodies of men enrich the soil

Generation on generation,

So do the spirits of those departed

Enrich our soil of life

With delights, wisdoms, purest hopes,

And shapes of beauty.

But oh beyond all these, is our life enriched

With exalted contemplations

Of you, O glorious Dead,

Who have eaten of the tree of life and become gods,

Friendly divinities to us who remain,

Dear familiars, as you were with us

Fathers, children, lovers, friends.

Ye who sense with the inner eye,

Since nothing in our days of living

Moves uncolored of your splendors,

Presences to which all things relate!

*****

O realm of the Dead,

Black Mountain, if you be,

Which darkens heaven,

And shadows earth,

Round which our spirits flutter

Like startled moths.

Black mountain with whose blackness

The light of life is mixed,

Whereof all hues are made:

All thoughts, all lofty wanderings of the soul,

All meanings, divinations

Of briefest hours, and frailest joys,

All wonders of the spectrum of the soul

Out of life and death!

*****

Realm of the Dead! Supreme Reality

All Hail!