Colors of Life Part 7

THE THOUGHT OF PROTAGORAS

My memory holds a tragic hour to prove, Or paint with bleeding stroke, the ancient thought That will to sorrow move all minds forever-- All that love to know. It was the hour When lamps wink yellow in the winter twilight, And the hurriers go home to rest; And we whose task was meditation rose And wound a murmuring way among the books And effigies, the fading fragrance, of A vaulted library--a place to me Most like a dim vast cavernous brain, that holds All the world hath of musty memory In sombre convolutions that are dying.

There at our faithful table every day, In the great shadow of this dissolution, We would speak of things eternal, things Divine, that change not. And we spoke with one Who was a leader of the way to them; A man born regal to the realms of thought.

High, pale, and sculptural his brow, And high his concourse with the kings of old, Plato, and Aristotle, and the Jew-- The bold, mild Jew who in his pensive chamber Fell in love with G.o.d. It was of him, And that unhungering love of his, he told us; And with soft and stately melody, The scholar's eloquence, he lifted us Sublime above the very motions of Our mortal being, and we walked with him The heights of meditation like the G.o.ds.

I have no memory surpa.s.sing this.

And yet--strange pity of our natures or Of his--there ran a rumor poisonous.

Scandal breeds her brood in the house of prayer.

And we, to whom these were like hours of prayer, We whispered things not all philosophy When he was gone. We knew but little where He went, or whence he came, but this we knew, That there was other love in him than what He taught us--love that makes more quickly pale!

Ay, even he was tortured with the lure Of mortal motion in the eyes--and lips And limbs that were not warm to him alone Were warm to him. He drank mortality.

Dim care, the ghost of retribution, sat In pallor on his brow, and made us whisper In the shadow of our meditations.

Faintly, faintly did we feel the hour Advancing--livid painting of a thought!

He spoke of Substance,--strangely--on that day-- Eternal, self-existent, infinite-- He seemed, I thought, to rest upon the name.

And as he spoke there came on me that trance Of inattention, when the words would seem To drop their magic of containing things, And, by a shift, become but things themselves-- Mere partial motions of the flesh of lips.

I watched these motions, watched them blandly, till I knew I watched them, and that roused me, and I heard him saying, "Things, and moving things, Are merely modes of but one attribute, Of what is infinite in attributes, And may be called----" He spoke to there, and then-- His pencil, the thin pencil, dropped--A crack Behind us--A quick step among the books-- His hand, his head, his body all collapsed And fell, or settled utterly, before The fact came on us--he was shot and killed.

But little I remember after that.

What matters it? The deed, the quick red deed Was done, and all his speculations vanished Like a sound.

TO THE ASCENDING MOON

Rise, rise, aerial creature, fill the sky With supreme wonder, and the bleak earth wash With mystery! Pale, pale enchantress, steer Thy flight high up into the purple blue, Where faint the stars beholding--rain from there Thy lucent influence upon this sphere!

I fear thee, sacred mother of the mad!

With thy deliberate magic thou of old Didst soothe the perplexed brains of idiots whipped, And scared, and lacerated for their cure-- Ay, thou didst spread the balm of sleep on them, Give to their minds a curved emptiness Of silence like the heaven thou dwellest in; Yet didst thou also, with thy rayless light, Make mad the surest, draw from their smooth beds The very sons of Prudence, maniacs To wander forth among the bushes, howl Abroad like eager wolves, and s.n.a.t.c.h the air!

Oft didst thou watch them prowl among the tombs Inviolate of the patient dead, toiling In deeds obscure with stealthy ecstasy, And thou didst palely peer among them, and Expressly shine into their unhinged eyes!

I fear thee, languid mother of the mad!

For thou hast still thy alien influence; Thou dost sow forth thro' all the fields and hills, And in all chambers of the natural earth, A difference most strange and luminous.

This tree, that was the river sycamore, Is in thy pensive effluence become But the mind's mystic essence of a tree, Upright luxuriance thought upon--the stream Is liquid timeless motion undefined-- The world's a gesture dim. Like rapturous thought, Which can the rigorous concrete obscure Unto annihilation, and create Upon the dark a universal vision, Thou--even on this bold and local earth, The site of the obtruding actual-- Thou dost erect in awful purity The filmy architecture of all dreams.

And they are perfect. Thou dost shed like light Perfection, and a vision give to man Of things superior to the tough act, Existence, and almost co-equals of His own unnamed, and free, and infinite wish!

Phantoms, phantoms of the transfixed mind!

Pour down, O moon, upon the listening earth-- The earth unthinking, thy still eloquence!

Shine in the children's eyes. They drink thy light, And laugh in innocence of sorcery, And love thy silver. I laugh not, nor gaze With half-closed lids upon the awakened night.

Nay, oft when thou art hailed above the hill, I lean not forth, I hide myself in tasks, Even to the blunt comfort of routine I cling, to drowse my soul against thy charm, Yearning for thee, ethereal miracle!

LEIF ERICSON

Through the murk of the ocean of history northward and far, I descry thee, O Sailor! Thy deed like the dive of a star Doth startle the ages of darkness through which it is hurled, Doth flash, and flare out, and is gone from the eyes of the world!

What watchers beheld thee, and heralding followed thy lead, Or bugled the nations into the track of thy deed?

What continent soundeth thy name, what people thy praise?

Who sendeth the signal of grat.i.tude back to the days When thou in thy boat didst put forth from the world, and defy Infinity, ignorance, tempest, and ocean, and sky?

No, history brags not of G.o.d, nor doth history brag Of thee, sailor, who carried thy sail and thy sea-colored flag Clear over His seas, drove into His mystery old The prow of thy sixty-foot skerry, whose quivering hold Could dip but a cupful out of His watery wrath, That stormed thee, and s.n.a.t.c.hed at thy bowsprit, and licked up thy path!

When mythical rumor sky-carried ran over the earth, With the whisper of lands that were dreamed of beyond the red birth Of the west-wind, the blood of thy body took running fire To launch and be swift o'er the sea as a man's desire!

O rare is the northern morning that shineth for thee!

A million silvering crests on the cold blue sea-- And the wind drives in from the jubilant sea to the land, And, catching thy laughter, it tosses the cloak in thy hand, As taunting thee forth to thy sails in the frosty air, Where thousands surround thee with awe and a wondering prayer.

And they that stand with thee--tumultuous-hearted they stand!

They bend at thy word--I hear the boat sing on the sand-- And they slip to their oars as the boat leaps aloft on a wave, With thee at the windy helm, joyful and joyfully brave!

The depth of the billows is awful, the depth of the sky Is silent as G.o.d. Silent the dark on high.

Naught sings to thy heart save thy heart and the wind, the wild giant Of ocean, agrin in the darkness, who rattles defiant A laugh through thy rigging, and howls from the clouds at thee, And moans in a mimic of pain and a murmurous glee.

Still stern I behold thee, thy stature dim through the dark, Unmoved, unreleasing the helm of thy storm-driven bark.

"O G.o.d of our fathers, give signs to our sea-worn eyes!

Give sight to Thy sailors! Give but the sun to arise In the morn on an island pale in the haze of the west!

O beam of the star in the north, is thy only behest To gesture me onward eternally unto no sh.o.r.e Of these high and wild waters, famed for their hunger of yore?

Then give to thy sailor for life the courage of death, To encounter the taunt of this wind with a rougher breath Of gigantic contempt in the soul for where and when, So it be onward impetuous, living, onward again!

He saileth safe who carrieth death on board, He flieth a laughing sail in the wrath of the Lord!"

So sang thy heart to thy heart, and so to the swinging sea In a lull of the wind, the song of a spirit free!

Serene adventurer, lover of distance divine, Pursuing thy love forever though never thine, O sun-tanned king with thy blue eyes over the sea, Who dares to sing, and live, the praise of thee?

Not they that safe in a haven of certainty, steer From mooring to mooring with faith and with fear, And pray for a map of the universe, pointer, and plan, When all the blue waves of the ocean the courage of man Challenge to venture, not they are the praisers of thee!

Nor they who sail for the cargo, and dream that the sea, In its wanton wild infinite wonder of motion and sound, Is bound by a purpose, as their little breathing is bound.

The profit of thy great sailing to thee was small, And unto the world it was nothing--a man, that was all, And his deed like a star, to flame in the dull old sky!

Of the story of apathy, age after decorous age going by!

Grapes were thy import, winey and luscious to eat, Grapes, and a story--"The dew in the west was sweet!"

Wine of the distance ever the reddest seems, And sweet is the world to the dreamer and doer of dreams!

Weigh them, O pale-headed merchant--little ye know!

Compute, O desk-dwellers, ye will not measure him so, For ye know only knowledge, ye know not the drive of the will That brought it with pa.s.sion to birth--it driveth still Through the hearts of the kindred of earth, the forward fleeing, The kin of the stormy soul at the helm of all-being!

Sailors, unreefed, and high-masted, and wet, and free, Who sail in the love of the billows, whose port is the sea-- They sing thee, O Leif the Lucky, they sing thee sublime, And launch with thee, glad as with G.o.d, on the ocean of time!

Leif Ericson, the Norse adventurer, sailed to America 500 years before Columbus.

MIDNIGHT

Midnight is come, And thinly in the deepness of the gloom Truth rises startle-eyed out of a tomb, And we are dumb.

A death-bell tolls, And we still shudder round the too smooth bed, For Truth makes pallid watch above the dead, Freezing our souls.