Читать книгу The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 18, April, 1859 - Various - Страница 8

  Oh, let me not die young!

  Full-hearted, yet without a tongue,—

  Thy green earth stretched before my feet, untrod,—

  Thy blue sky bending over,

  As her most tender lover,

  With infinite meaning in its starry eyes,

  Full of thy silent majesty, O God!

  And wild, weird whispers from the solemn deep

  Of the Great Sea ascending, with the sweep

  Of the Wind-angel's wings across the skies,

  Burdened with hints of awful memories,

  Whose half-guessed grandeur thrills us till we weep!—

  I love thy marvellous world too well—

  Its sunny nooks of hill and dell,

  Its majesty of mountains, and the swell

  Of volumed waters—for my heart to yearn

  Away from the deep truth which veils its splendor

  In beauty there less dazzling, but more tender.

  With grave delight I turn

  To all its glories, from the tiniest bloom

  Whose hour-long life just sweetens its own tomb

  As with funereal spices,

  To the far stars which burn

  And blossom in fire through their vast periods,—

  Borne in thy palm,

  Like the pale lotus in the hand of Isis,

  When throned white, and calm,

  In solemn conclave of the mythic gods.

  Oh, let me not die young,

  A brother unclaimed among

  The countless millions of thy happy flock,

  Whose deepest joy is to obey,

  Whereby they feel the measured sway

  Of thy life in them, their own living part,

  Whether in centuried pulses of the rock

  By slow disintegration

  Ascending to its higher,

  Or the quick fluttering of the Storm-god's heart,—

  An instant's palpitation

  Through all its arteries of fire!

  One common blood runs down life's myriad veins,

  From Archangelic Hierarchs who float

  Broad-winged in the God-glory, to the mote

  That trembles with a braided dance

  In the warm sunset's vivid glance;

  And one great Heart that boundless flow sustains!

  In all the creatures of thy hand divine

  Thy love-light is a living guest,

  Whether a petal's palm confine

  Its glitter to a lily's breast,

  Or in unbounded space a starry line

  Stretches, till flagging Thought must droop her wing to rest.

  Oh, let me not die young,

  A powerless child among

  The ancient grandeurs of thy awful world!

  I catch some fragment of the mighty song

  Which, ere to darkness hurled,

  My elder brothers in the eternal throng

  Have caught before,—

  Faint murmurs of the surge,

  The deep, surrounding, everlasting roar

  Of a life-ocean without port or shore,—

  Ere I depart, compelled to urge

  My fragile bark with trembling from the verge

  Of this Earth-island, into that Unknown,

  Where worlds, like souls forlorn, go wandering alone!

  Oh, let me not die young,

  With all that song unsung,

  A swift and voiceless fugitive,

  From darkness coming and in darkness lost,

  Before thy solemn Pentecost,

  Dawning within the soul, shall give

  The burning utterance of its flaming tongue,—

  The boon whereby to other souls we live!

  Thy worlds are flashing with immortal splendor,

  For human speech on heights of human song

  Faintly to render,

  And pour back along

  Its mountain grandeur, the accumulate rain

  Of star-light, dream-light, thoughts of joy and pain,

  Of love, hate, right and wrong,

  In floods of utterance sublime and strong,

  In dewy effluence beautiful and tender.

  The kindred darknesses

  Of caverned earth and fathomless thought,

  Of Life and Death, and their twin mysteries,

  Before and After, on my spirit press

  Tempting and awful, with high promise fraught,

  And guardian terrors, whose out-flashing swords

  Beleaguer Paradise and the holy Tree

  Sciential. Step by step the way is fought

  That leads from Darkness, through her miscreant hordes,

  Back to the heavens of wise, and true, and free:

  Minerva's Gorgon, Ammon's cyclic Asp,

  And the fierce flame-sword of the Cherubim,

  That flashed like hate across the pallid gasp

  Of exiled Eve and Adam, flare, and glare,

  And hiss venenate, round the steps of him

  Who thirsts for heavenly Wisdom, if he dare

  Climb to her bosom, or with artless grasp

  Pluck the sweet fruits that hang around him, ripe and fair.

  Oh! glorious Youth

  Is the true age of prophecy, when Truth

  Stands bared in beauty, and the young blood boils

  To hurl us in her arms, before the blur

  Of time makes dim her rounded form,

  Or the cold blood recoils

  From the polluted swarm

  Of armed Chimeras that environ her.

  But worthy Age to ripened fruit shall bring

  The glorious blooming of its hopeful spring,

  And pile the garners of immortal Truth

  With sheaves of golden grain,

  To sow the world again,

  And fill the eager wants of the New Age's youth.

  A thousand flashes of uncertain light

  Cleave the thick darkness, driving far athwart

  The up-piled glooms, as lightnings plough their bright

  Fire-furrows through the barren cloud

  They sow with thunders. Thought on burning thought

  Shatters the doubts and terrors which have bowed

  Weak hearts on weaker leaning in a crowd

  Self-crushing and self-fettering; gleams are caught

  From some far centre set by God to keep

  His brave world spinning, or some drifting isle

  Of swift wildfire shot out by the wide sweep

  Of wings demoniac,

  Far winnowing and black,

  Our cheated souls to 'wilder and beguile.

  Only the years, the imperturbable,

  Impassionate years, can sheave the scattered rays

  Into one sun, these mingled arrows tell

  Each to its quiver, the divine and fell,

  And life's lone meteors to their centre trace.

  O Father, let me not die young!

  Earth's beauty asks a heart and tongue

  To give true love and praises to her worth;

  Her sins and judgment-sufferings call

  For fearless martyrs to redeem thy Earth

  From her disastrous fall.

  For though her summer hills and vales might seem

  The fair creation of a poet's dream,—

  Ay, of the Highest Poet,

  Whose wordless rhythms are chanted by the gyres

  Of constellate star-choirs,

  That with deep melody flow and overflow it,—

  The sweet Earth,—very sweet, despite

  The rank grave-smell forever drifting in

  Among the odors from her censers white

  Of wave-swung lilies and of wind-swung roses,—

  The Earth sad-sweet is deeply attaint with sin!

  The pure air, which incloses

  Her and her starry kin,

  Still shudders with the unspent palpitating

  Of a great Curse, that to its utmost shore

  Thrills with a deadly shiver

  Which has not ceased to quiver

  Down all the ages, nathless the strong beating

  Of Angel-wings, and the defiant roar

  Of Earth's Titanic thunders.

  Fair and sad,

  In sin and beauty, our beloved Earth

  Has need of all her sons to make her glad;

  Has need of martyrs to re-fire the hearth

  Of her quenched altars,—of heroic men

  With Freedom's sword, or Truth's supernal pen,

  To shape the worn-out mould of nobleness again.

  And she has need of Poets who can string

  Their harps with steel to catch the lightning's fire,

  And pour her thunders from the clanging wire,

  To cheer the hero, mingling with his cheer,

  Arouse the laggard in the battle's rear,

  Daunt the stern wicked, and from discord wring

  Prevailing harmony, while the humblest soul

  Who keeps the tune the warder angels sing

  In golden choirs above,

  And only wears, for crown and aureole,

  The glow-worm light of lowliest human love,

  Shall fill with low, sweet undertones the chasms

  Of silence, 'twixt the booming thunder-spasms.

  And Earth has need of Prophets fiery-lipped

  And deep-souled, to announce the glorious dooms

  Writ on the silent heavens in starry script,

  And flashing fitfully from her shuddering tombs,—

  Commissioned Angels of the new-born Faith,

  To teach the immortality of Good,

  The soul's God-likeness, Sin's coeval death,

  And Man's indissoluble Brotherhood.

  Yet never an age, when God has need of him,

  Shall want its Man, predestined by that need,

  To pour his life in fiery word or deed,—

  The strong Archangel of the Elohim!

  Earth's hollow want is prophet of his coming:

  In the low murmur of her famished cry,

  And heavy sobs breathed up despairingly,

  Ye hear the near invisible humming

  Of his wide wings that fan the lurid sky

  Into cool ripples of new life and hope,

  While far in its dissolving ether ope

  Deeps beyond deeps, of sapphire calm, to cheer

  With Sabbath gleams the troubled Now and Here.

  Father! thy will be done,

  Holy and righteous One!

  Though the reluctant years

  May never crown my throbbing brows with white,

  Nor round my shoulders turn the golden light

  Of my thick locks to wisdom's royal ermine:

  Yet by the solitary tears,

  Deeper than joy or sorrow,—by the thrill,

  Higher than hope or terror, whose quick germen,

  In those hot tears to sudden vigor sprung,

  Sheds, even now, the fruits of graver age,—

  By the long wrestle in which inward ill

  Fell like a trampled viper to the ground.

  By all that lifts me o'er my outward peers

  To that supernal stage

  Where soul dissolves the bonds by Nature bound,—

  Fall when I may, by pale disease unstrung,

  Or by the hand of fratricidal rage,

  I cannot now die young!