Chapter I

What word of courage may I bring to you, What word of comfort--brothers and my friends-- Now the returning season gathers us Into these folds and pastures of our youth, Come for an hour of high communion here! Frail and imperfect is the instrument, And yet perhaps through me that Self may speak Which is most wise, being woven of us all-- And through the generations still endures, Shedding its generations like dead leaves, One Self--the spirit of Man; for we are one.

For we are one, who are emprisoned here Upon this turning planet as it swings Through the lone waste and labyrinth of heaven-- One in our plight, one in our common doom, One in our stubborn questioning, and one, Beyond all other creatures, in the sole Sad consciousness of our predicament-- Pilgrims and outcasts between birth and death, Scanning the frontiers of the night for news; Probing the atom; challenging the cell; Knocking at every gate and every door Of the inexorable silences; Wondering; doubting; grieving; worshipping-- Perplexed before the mystery of things.

Now while the earth turns eastward, half in light And half in darkness; from the Himalayan snows And Mongol uplands to the Texan desert Or where the starry waters dawnward heave Out of the west from Asia--on blue hills, ’Mid iron cities or green solitudes, By land or sea, in darkness or in light-- The restless Spirit moves in many ways, The multitudinous Being is abroad. We gather in theatres; we brood alone; We pour with laughter through the shining streets; We till the earth; we lift our towers to heaven; We watch beside the sick-bed; on grey capes, On crags and headlands of the world we set Our winking fires from coast to coast; or wander The wastes of ocean with a furrowing prow; We sleep; we turn the pages of a book, And move in silence out of space and time; We grapple each other; we hate; we fear; we kill; We cry aloud; we yearn, kneeling in prayer, Lifting our faces to the emptiness; In busy factories and teeming dens Weaving the fabric of the world’s desire; Lying in prisons; sitting upon thrones; Judging the earth in wisdom and in truth. Now while the earth turns eastward--even now, The divine tragedy of Man proceeds: The poet walks the room; the ballerina Advances to the footlights--on one body Is fixed the hunger of a thousand eyes; The priest moves to the altar; and the harlot Slinks through the alleys of the darkened town; The bride puts on her bridal-wreath; the judge Condemns the felon; and the dying man Coughs--and is silent, as the new-born babe Nestles in the exhausted mother’s arm. Over the death-bed now some head bows down; Somewhere the cry of the new soul is heard; While through the leafy lanes the lovers move With loitering step or pause among the shadows, Kindling between their lips the flame of life. Perpetual death, perpetual rebirth, Perpetual passion and perpetual pain! From shore to shore the violent Being rolls, With all its motions, all its warring wills-- Vast as the sea, forever in unrest; The waves foam upward, and the waves subside, And the one ocean gives and gathers all.

Now while the earth turns eastward, half in light And half in darkness, in her breast she bears Those other and much greater multitudes That are as one with us as our own blood-- The nameless or the unforgotten dead, Whose faces we have never looked upon Or voices ever heard--our forefathers, Buried long since: farmers and merchants, kings, Discoverers and captains, voyagers On ocean solitudes, sages and seers, Poets and lovers of the truth of old, Whereof all history is but the tale, All legend but the rumor; and who still Are vehement, and from old books and songs, From saga or from chronicle, cry out, Across the ever-widening gulf of time And the unfathomable night, such words Of courage and assurance as they may, To us who follow after--breathing back A fading music from the fields of death. They, too, knew the good earth and the glad sun, The trembling kiss, the infinite farewell; The lips of longing and the breasts of life Were sweet to them, who grieved even as we, Loved and were loved as we are, laughed and sighed, And had their hour of happiness; they, too, Asked the old questions--and, like us, in vain; Were troubled or were sorrowful. But now To them the moonlight and the starlight are Less than a voice in a forgotten dream, At morning, or a flower cast away-- So deep the oblivion that wraps them ’round, So dark the night that hides them. They sleep well, They take their fill of sleep; they have their rest As once, in the beginning, ere the womb Had travailed that conceived them.

And us, too, The lonely and inevitable Voice Shall summon, and the silence take us home. All shall be gathered homeward--he that sang And he that listened, the lover and the loved, The lips that pleaded and the hands that blessed Lie mingled in the darkness, and these hearts That beauty haunted be a little dust, Blown ’round the narrow margins of the world; We shall be one with the revolving planet Throughout the ages, till the earth itself, With all its millions, all its sleeping sons, Pass like a cinder down the Void or mix With the primeval fires casting up The foam of future worlds along the dark. Perpetual death, perpetual rebirth, Perpetual passion and perpetual pain! Is there no respite from the wheel of things? Is there no refuge from eternity? The heavens grow old and hunger for their peace; The father founts, Antares and Arcturus, Vega, and Sirius, and the nursling flames-- Ceaselessly dying, ceaselessly reborn-- Tire of the one tune and find no way Out of the woven web of space and time In which the worlds are tangled; but all move Through the fierce throes and cycles of rebirth Laboriously, with groaning forces held In iron bondage, to the eternal Rhythm, Whose meaning and whose end we may not guess.

What word of courage may I bring to you, What word of comfort! For the restless mind, Gnawing the riddle of eternity, Finds little solace there or sustenance. Our faiths have fallen from us and left us bare; The dream, fantastic and compassionate, That like a veil of love and glory hung Between us and the bitterness of things, Is lifted, and the universe has grown Vaster and much more lonely. Nor shall Thought-- Crying into the dark, and listening, listening-- Find any answer to her prayer: the night Is soundless, and the starry mouths are sealed.

Yet be assured indeed that all is well And the truth greater than we dare to dream-- Greater and more exalted! Though the mind, Fashioned for humbler uses, may not grasp The meaning of the mystery; though Thought-- For all her longing, all her labor--gain Hardly the comfort of a hope, there is A self within us, wiser than the mind And deeper than all thought, that still endures Firm at the helm through all the storms of chance Forever, in unquenchable belief And courage, not to be abated: Life, In wrath and fear, in love and agony, Weaving her splendor from the dust of death, Bears in her breast--though inarticulate-- A holier confidence; her running grass, Her herds trampling the uplands, her fierce wills In bush or brake, her ravening hosts that throng The fields of ocean and the aisles of air-- Furious, furious for continuance-- These answer, these bear witness all is well, These in indomitable joy affirm The wonder and glory of a universe Wherein all lusts, all hungers, all defeats, All agonies are woven to one Doom, Somehow sublime, somehow magnificent; And every heart-beat is an act of faith, Praising the hidden Purpose!

Stern, my friends, Are the realities: the wheel of heaven Revolves, with all its motions, and the planet Heaves forward blindly, bearing us along Into the Void--we know not why nor where; Embattled between two oblivions We stand, for a brief moment, and lift up Our faces to the light--but in our blood The voices of the generations past Strive, and the generations still unborn Are urgent in us that we play our part, As actors in a stately tragedy To some triumphant close. Courage and faith, These are most needful. Surely they shall avail! Surely they have the truth! And as for Him Whom we have sought beyond the stars in vain, Perhaps He may be nearer than we know.