This life that glides away
As in a night and day —
This that is shade and shine from Night brought forth
To Night returning on a cloudy wing,
As if it took with it out of the earth
Everything!
A specimen of Time — a fact
Which hope and fear have verified,
Whate'er the after aeons may enact,
Whate'er has been or will be thought of here;
Something that must still in itself abide
As if in its own sphere.
Oh! who can sing it — the immaterial I,
One with the earth, one with the sky?
It is so brief, so everlasting too,
So all apart from Him and You —
This that within itself contains
The first and last of all we hear and see,
Time centred in Eternity
With all its joys and pains,
Its hopes and fears through all the years
That still like an ethereal dew
Fall on the senses, which therethrough
Still gloom and gleam — This that is as apart
As the Universal Heart,
That re-absorbs itself, as if it were,
Beyond all praise and prayer
Within its own immensity —
This patent, yet impalpable ME
Like a divine thing in a mystic mart
Trading on its own authenticity ...
It cannot sing itself, self-dumb
'Mid the world's hum,
Though vocal in all else, as thought
Embodied in itself all things,
Yet left the Thinker by himself apart
As in a region whose
Shadows and lights confuse
The semblances of his identity
With mystic movements, eerie vanishings;
Until his being seems to be
A very dream, imbued
With some primeval mood
In which weird pictures of the soul appear,
Grotesque and crude
As the first rude
Conceits of the untutored eye and ear
In prehistoric breathings fraught
With all the little there was then
Divine in thought.
It cannot sing itself, and yet
Pourtraying the world's heart
It has, as if it were, command
Of an interior land
Untraced on any mortal chart,
Beneath a sky whose sun has never set
Since first Thought's eastern curtains drawn
Let in the dawn
Of the illusive light by which we know
That we are here, and go
To a most certain end not far away!