Chapter III

Ah me, as faint as you, as slight,
As hopelessly remote
As you, who still across the night
Innumerably float,
Intangible as you, I see
The motives of our destiny.

For ah, no angel of the stars,
No guardian of the soul,
Stoops down beyond the heavenly bars
Our courses to control.
But filled and nourished with our breath
Are the dim hands that weave our death.

They weave with many threads our souls,
A subtle-tinted thing,
So interwoven that none controls
His own imagining;
For every strand with other strands
They twine and bind with viewless hands.

They weave the future of the past;
Their mystic web is wrought
With dreams from which we woke at last,
And many a secret thought;
For still they weave, howe’er we strive,
The web new-woven for none alive.