The Ascent of Man

HEART'S-EASE

As opiates to the sick on wakeful nights,As light to flowers, as flowers in poor men's rooms,As to the fisher when the tempest gloomsThe cheerful twinkling of his village lights;As emerald isles to flagging swallow flights,As roses garlanding with tendrilled bloomsThe unweeded hillocks of forgotten tombs,As singing birds on cypress-shadowed heights,Thou art to me – a comfort past compare —For thy joy-kindling presence, sweet as MaySets all my nerves to music, makes awayWith sorrow and the numbing frost of care,Until the influence of thine eyes' bright swayHas made life's glass go up from foul to fair.

UNTIMELY LOVE

Peace, throbbing heart, nor let us shed one tearO'er this late love's unseasonable glow;Sweet as a violet blooming in the snow,The posthumous offspring of the widowed year,That smells of March when all the world is sere,And, while around the hurtling sea-winds blow —Which twist the oak and lay the pine tree low —Stands childlike in the storm and has no fear.Poor helpless blossom orphaned of the sun,How could it thus brave winter's rude estate?Oh love, more helpless love, why bloom so late,Now that the flower-time of the year is done?Since thy dear course must end when scarce begun,Nipped by the cold touch of untoward fate.

THE AFTER-GLOW

It is a solemn evening, golden-clear —The Alpine summits flame with rose-lit snowAnd headlands purpling on wide seas below,And clouds and woods and arid rocks appearDissolving in the sun's own atmosphereAnd vast circumference of light, whose slowTransfiguration – glow and after-glow —Turns twilight earth to a more luminous sphere.Oh heart, I ask, seeing that the orb of dayHas sunk below, yet left to sky and seaHis glory's spiritual after-shine:I ask if Love, whose sun hath set for thee,May not touch grief with his memorial ray,And lend to loss itself a joy divine?

L'ENVOI

Thou art the goal for which my spirit longs;As dove on dove,Bound for one home, I send thee all my songsWith all my love.Thou art the haven with fair harbour lights;Safe locked in thee,My heart would anchor after stormful nightsAlone at sea.Thou art the rest of which my life is fain,The perfect peace;Absorbed in thee the world, with all its painAnd toil, would cease.Thou art the heaven to which my soul would go!O dearest eyes,Lost in your light you would turn hell belowTo Paradise.Thou all in all for which my heart-blood yearns!Yea, near or far —Where the unfathomed ether throbs and burnsWith star on star,Or where, enkindled by the fires of June,The fresh earth glows,Blushing beneath the mystical white moonThrough rose on rose —Thee, thee I see, thee feel in all live things,Beloved one;In the first bird which tremulously singsEre peep of sun;In the last nestling orphaned in the hedge,Rocked to and fro,When dying summer shudders in the sedge,And swallows go;When roaring snows rush down the mountain-pass,March floods with rills,Or April lightens through the living grassIn daffodils;When poppied cornfields simmer in the heatWith tare and thistle,And, like winged clouds above the mellow wheat,The starlings whistle;When stained with sunset the wide moorlands glareIn the wild weather,And clouds with flaming craters smoke and flareRed o'er red heather;When the bent moon, on frostbound midnights waking,Leans to the snowLike some world-mother whose deep heart is breakingO'er human woe.As the round sun rolls red into the ocean,Till all the seaGlows fluid gold, even so life's mazy motionIs dyed with thee:For as the wave-like years subside and roll,O heart's desire,Thy soul glows interfused within my soul,A quenchless fire.Yea, thee I feel, all storms of life above,Near though afar;O thou my glorious morning star of love,And evening star.