A TORCHBEARER

  GREAT cities rise and have their fall; the brass
  That held their glories moulders in its turn.
  Hard granite rots like an uprooted weed,
  And ever on the palimpsest of earth
  Impatient Time rubs out the word he writ.
  But one thing makes the years its pedestal,
  Springs from the ashes of its pyre, and claps
  A skyward wing above its epitaph—
  The will of man willing immortal things.

  The ages are but baubles hung upon
  The thread of some strong lives—and one slight wrist
  May lift a century above the dust;
  For Time,
  The Sisyphean load of little lives,
  Becomes the globe and sceptre of the great.
  But who are these that, linking hand in hand,
  Transmit across the twilight waste of years
  The flying brightness of a kindled hour?
  Not always, nor alone, the lives that search
  How they may snatch a glory out of heaven
  Or add a height to Babel; oftener they
  That in the still fulfilment of each day's
  Pacific order hold great deeds in leash,
  That in the sober sheath of tranquil tasks
  Hide the attempered blade of high emprise,
  And leap like lightning to the clap of fate.

  So greatly gave he, nurturing 'gainst the call
  Of one rare moment all the daily store
  Of joy distilled from the acquitted task,
  And that deliberate rashness which bespeaks
  The pondered action passed into the blood;
  So swift to harden purpose into deed
  That, with the wind of ruin in his hair,
  Soul sprang full-statured from the broken flesh,
  And at one stroke he lived the whole of life,
  Poured all in one libation to the truth,
  A brimming flood whose drops shall overflow
  On deserts of the soul long beaten down
  By the brute hoof of habit, till they spring
  In manifold upheaval to the sun.

  Call here no high artificer to raise
  His wordy monument—such lives as these
  Make death a dull misnomer and its pomp
  An empty vesture. Let resounding lives
  Re-echo splendidly through high-piled vaults
  And make the grave their spokesman—such as he
  Are as the hidden streams that, underground,
  Sweeten the pastures for the grazing kine,
  Or as spring airs that bring through prison bars
  The scent of freedom; or a light that burns
  Immutably across the shaken seas,
  Forevermore by nameless hands renewed,
  Where else were darkness and a glutted shore.

II

THE MORTAL LEASE

I

  BECAUSE the currents of our love are poured
  Through the slow welter of the primal flood
  From some blind source of monster-haunted mud,
  And flung together by random forces stored
  Ere the vast void with rushing worlds was scored—
  Because we know ourselves but the dim scud
  Tossed from their heedless keels, the sea-blown bud
  That wastes and scatters ere the wave has roared—

  Because we have this knowledge in our veins,
  Shall we deny the journey's gathered lore—
  The great refusals and the long disdains,
  The stubborn questing for a phantom shore,
  The sleepless hopes and memorable pains,
  And all mortality's immortal gains?

II

  Because our kiss is as the moon to draw
  The mounting waters of that red-lit sea
  That circles brain with sense, and bids us be
  The playthings of an elemental law,
  Shall we forego the deeper touch of awe
  On love's extremest pinnacle, where we,
  Winging the vistas of infinity,
  Gigantic on the mist our shadows saw?

  Shall kinship with the dim first-moving clod
  Not draw the folded pinion from the soul,
  And shall we not, by spirals vision-trod,
  Reach upward to some still-retreating goal,
  As earth, escaping from the night's control,
  Drinks at the founts of morning like a god?

III

  All, all is sweet in that commingled draught
  Mysterious, that life pours for lovers' thirst,
  And I would meet your passion as the first
  Wild woodland woman met her captor's craft,
  Or as the Greek whose fearless beauty laughed
  And doffed her raiment by the Attic flood;
  But in the streams of my belated blood
  Flow all the warring potions love has quaffed.

  How can I be to you the nymph who danced
  Smooth by Ilissus as the plane-tree's bole,
  Or how the Nereid whose drenched lashes glanced
  Like sea-flowers through the summer sea's long roll—
  I that have also been the nun entranced
  Who night-long held her Bridegroom in her soul?

IV

  "Sad Immortality is dead," you say,
  "And all her grey brood banished from the soul;
  Life, like the earth, is now a rounded whole,
  The orb of man's dominion. Live to-day."
  And every sense in me leapt to obey,
  Seeing the routed phantoms backward roll;
  But from their waning throng a whisper stole,
  And touched the morning splendour with decay.

  "Sad Immortality is dead; and we
  The funeral train that bear her to her grave.
  Yet hath she left a two-faced progeny
  In hearts of men, and some will always see
  The skull beneath the wreath, yet always crave
  In every kiss the folded kiss to be."

V

  Yet for one rounded moment I will be
  No more to you than what my lips may give,
  And in the circle of your kisses live
  As in some island of a storm-blown sea,
  Where the cold surges of infinity
  Upon the outward reefs unheeded grieve,
  And the loud murmur of our blood shall weave
  Primeval silences round you and me.

  If in that moment we are all we are
  We live enough. Let this for all requite.
  Do I not know, some winged things from far
  Are borne along illimitable night
  To dance their lives out in a single flight
  Between the moonrise and the setting star?

VI

  The Moment came, with sacramental cup
  Lifted—and all the vault of life grew bright
  With tides of incommensurable light—
  But tremblingly I turned and covered up
  My face before the wonder. Down the slope
  I heard her feet in irretrievable flight,
  And when I looked again, my stricken sight
  Saw night and rain in a dead world agrope.

  Now walks her ghost beside me, whispering
  With lips derisive: "Thou that wouldst forego—
  What god assured thee that the cup I bring
  Globes not in every drop the cosmic show,
  All that the insatiate heart of man can wring
  From life's long vintage?—Now thou shalt not know."

VII

  Shall I not know? I, that could always catch
  The sunrise in one beam along the wall,
  The nests of June in April's mating call,
  And ruinous autumn in the wind's first snatch
  At summer's green impenetrable thatch—
  That always knew far off the secret fall
  Of a god's feet across the city's brawl,
  The touch of silent fingers on my latch?

  Not thou, vain Moment! Something more than thou
  Shall write the score of what mine eyes have wept,
  The touch of kisses that have missed my brow,
  The murmur of wings that brushed me while I slept,
  And some mute angel in the breast even now
  Measures my loss by all that I have kept.

VIII

  Strive we no more. Some hearts are like the bright
  Tree-chequered spaces, flecked with sun and shade,
  Where gathered in old days the youth and maid
  To woo, and weave their dances: with the night
  They cease their flutings, and the next day's light
  Finds the smooth green unconscious of their tread,
  And ready its velvet pliancies to spread
  Under fresh feet, till these in turn take flight.

  But other hearts a long long road doth span,
  From some far region of old works and wars,
  And the weary armies of the thoughts of man
  Have trampled it, and furrowed it with scars,
  And sometimes, husht, a sacred caravan
  Moves over it alone, beneath the stars.