She fears him, and will always ask
      What fated her to choose him;
     She meets in his engaging mask
      All reasons to refuse him;
     But what she meets and what she fears
     Are less than are the downward years,
     Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
      Of age, were she to lose him.

     Between a blurred sagacity
      That once had power to sound him,
     And Love, that will not let him be
      The Judas that she found him,
     Her pride assuages her almost,
     As if it were alone the cost.—
     He sees that he will not be lost,
      And waits and looks around him.

     A sense of ocean and old trees
      Envelops and allures him;
     Tradition, touching all he sees,
      Beguiles and reassures him;
     And all her doubts of what he says
     Are dimmed of what she knows of days—
     Till even prejudice delays
      And fades, and she secures him.

     The falling leaf inaugurates
      The reign of her confusion;
     The pounding wave reverberates
      The dirge of her illusion;
     And home, where passion lived and died,
     Becomes a place where she can hide,
     While all the town and harbor side
      Vibrate with her seclusion.

     We tell you, tapping on our brows,
      The story as it should be,—
     As if the story of a house
      Were told, or ever could be;
     We'll have no kindly veil between
     Her visions and those we have seen,—
     As if we guessed what hers have been,
      Or what they are or would be.

     Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
      That with a god have striven,
     Not hearing much of what we say,
      Take what the god has given;
     Though like waves breaking it may be,
     Or like a changed familiar tree,
     Or like a stairway to the sea
      Where down the blind are driven.

         (Washington Square)

     I met him, as one meets a ghost or two,
     Between the gray Arch and the old Hotel.
     "King Solomon was right, there's nothing new,"
     Said he.  "Behold a ruin who meant well."

     He led me down familiar steps again,
     Appealingly, and set me in a chair.
     "My dreams have all come true to other men,"
     Said he; "God lives, however, and why care?

     "An hour among the ghosts will do no harm."
     He laughed, and something glad within me sank.
     I may have eyed him with a faint alarm,
     For now his laugh was lost in what he drank.

     "They chill things here with ice from hell," he said;
     "I might have known it."  And he made a face
     That showed again how much of him was dead,
     And how much was alive and out of place,

     And out of reach.  He knew as well as I
     That all the words of wise men who are skilled
     In using them are not much to defy
     What comes when memory meets the unfulfilled.

     What evil and infirm perversity
     Had been at work with him to bring him back?
     Never among the ghosts, assuredly,
     Would he originate a new attack;

     Never among the ghosts, or anywhere,
     Till what was dead of him was put away,
     Would he attain to his offended share
     Of honor among others of his day.

     "You ponder like an owl," he said at last;
     "You always did, and here you have a cause.
     For I'm a confirmation of the past,
     A vengeance, and a flowering of what was.

     "Sorry?  Of course you are, though you compress,
     With even your most impenetrable fears,
     A placid and a proper consciousness
     Of anxious angels over my arrears.

     "I see them there against me in a book
     As large as hope, in ink that shines by night.
     For sure I see; but now I'd rather look
     At you, and you are not a pleasant sight.

     "Forbear, forgive.  Ten years are on my soul,
     And on my conscience.  I've an incubus:
     My one distinction, and a parlous toll
     To glory; but hope lives on clamorous.

     "'Twas hope, though heaven I grant you knows of what—
     The kind that blinks and rises when it falls,
     Whether it sees a reason why or not—
     That heard Broadway's hard-throated siren-calls;

     "'Twas hope that brought me through December storms,
     To shores again where I'll not have to be
     A lonely man with only foreign worms
     To cheer him in his last obscurity.

     "But what it was that hurried me down here
     To be among the ghosts, I leave to you.
     My thanks are yours, no less, for one thing clear:
     Though you are silent, what you say is true.

     "There may have been the devil in my feet,
     For down I blundered, like a fugitive,
     To find the old room in Eleventh Street.
     God save us!—I came here again to live."

     We rose at that, and all the ghosts rose then,
     And followed us unseen to his old room.
     No longer a good place for living men
     We found it, and we shivered in the gloom.

     The goods he took away from there were few,
     And soon we found ourselves outside once more,
     Where now the lamps along the Avenue
     Bloomed white for miles above an iron floor.

     "Now lead me to the newest of hotels,"
     He said, "and let your spleen be undeceived:
     This ruin is not myself, but some one else;
     I haven't failed; I've merely not achieved."

     Whether he knew or not, he laughed and dined
     With more of an immune regardlessness
     Of pits before him and of sands behind
     Than many a child at forty would confess;

     And after, when the bells in 'Boris' rang
     Their tumult at the Metropolitan,
     He rocked himself, and I believe he sang.
     "God lives," he crooned aloud, "and I'm the man!"

     He was.  And even though the creature spoiled
     All prophecies, I cherish his acclaim.
     Three weeks he fattened; and five years he toiled
     In Yonkers,—and then sauntered into fame.

     And he may go now to what streets he will—
     Eleventh, or the last, and little care;
     But he would find the old room very still
     Of evenings, and the ghosts would all be there.

     I doubt if he goes after them; I doubt
     If many of them ever come to him.
     His memories are like lamps, and they go out;
     Or if they burn, they flicker and are dim.

     A light of other gleams he has to-day
     And adulations of applauding hosts;
     A famous danger, but a safer way
     Than growing old alone among the ghosts.

     But we may still be glad that we were wrong:
     He fooled us, and we'd shrivel to deny it;
     Though sometimes when old echoes ring too long,
     I wish the bells in 'Boris' would be quiet.

     When he, who is the unforgiven,
     Beheld her first, he found her fair:
     No promise ever dreamt in heaven
     Could then have lured him anywhere
     That would have been away from there;
     And all his wits had lightly striven,
     Foiled with her voice, and eyes, and hair.

     There's nothing in the saints and sages
     To meet the shafts her glances had,
     Or such as hers have had for ages
     To blind a man till he be glad,
     And humble him till he be mad.
     The story would have many pages,
     And would be neither good nor bad.

     And, having followed, you would find him
     Where properly the play begins;
     But look for no red light behind him—
     No fumes of many-colored sins,
     Fanned high by screaming violins.
     God knows what good it was to blind him,
     Or whether man or woman wins.

     And by the same eternal token,
     Who knows just how it will all end?—
     This drama of hard words unspoken,
     This fireside farce, without a friend
     Or enemy to comprehend
     What augurs when two lives are broken,
     And fear finds nothing left to mend.

     He stares in vain for what awaits him,
     And sees in Love a coin to toss;
     He smiles, and her cold hush berates him
     Beneath his hard half of the cross;
     They wonder why it ever was;
     And she, the unforgiving, hates him
     More for her lack than for her loss.

     He feeds with pride his indecision,
     And shrinks from what will not occur,
     Bequeathing with infirm derision
     His ashes to the days that were,
     Before she made him prisoner;
     And labors to retrieve the vision
     That he must once have had of her.

     He waits, and there awaits an ending,
     And he knows neither what nor when;
     But no magicians are attending
     To make him see as he saw then,
     And he will never find again
     The face that once had been the rending
     Of all his purpose among men.

     He blames her not, nor does he chide her,
     And she has nothing new to say;
     If he were Bluebeard he could hide her,
     But that's not written in the play,
     And there will be no change to-day;
     Although, to the serene outsider,
     There still would seem to be a way.

     By what serene malevolence of names
     Had you the gift of yours, Theophilus?
     Not even a smeared young Cyclops at his games
     Would have you long,—and you are one of us.

     Told of your deeds I shudder for your dreams,
     And they, no doubt, are few and innocent.
     Meanwhile, I marvel; for in you, it seems,
     Heredity outshines environment.

     What lingering bit of Belial, unforeseen,
     Survives and amplifies itself in you?
     What manner of devilry has ever been
     That your obliquity may never do?

     Humility befits a father's eyes,
     But not a friend of us would have him weep.
     Admiring everything that lives and dies,
     Theophilus, we like you best asleep.

     Sleep—sleep; and let us find another man
     To lend another name less hazardous:
     Caligula, maybe, or Caliban,
     Or Cain,—but surely not Theophilus.

     The ghost of Ninon would be sorry now
     To laugh at them, were she to see them here,
     So brave and so alert for learning how
     To fence with reason for another year.

     Age offers a far comelier diadem
     Than theirs; but anguish has no eye for grace,
     When time's malicious mercy cautions them
     To think a while of number and of space.

     The burning hope, the worn expectancy,
     The martyred humor, and the maimed allure,
     Cry out for time to end his levity,
     And age to soften its investiture;

     But they, though others fade and are still fair,
     Defy their fairness and are unsubdued;
     Although they suffer, they may not forswear
     The patient ardor of the unpursued.

     Poor flesh, to fight the calendar so long;
     Poor vanity, so quaint and yet so brave;
     Poor folly, so deceived and yet so strong,
     So far from Ninon and so near the grave.

     Long warned of many terrors more severe
     To scorch him than hell's engines could awaken,
     He scanned again, too far to be so near,
     The fearful seat no man had ever taken.

     So many other men with older eyes
     Than his to see with older sight behind them
     Had known so long their one way to be wise,—
     Was any other thing to do than mind them?

     So many a blasting parallel had seared
     Confusion on his faith,—could he but wonder
     If he were mad and right, or if he feared
     God's fury told in shafted flame and thunder?

     There fell one day upon his eyes a light
     Ethereal, and he heard no more men speaking;
     He saw their shaken heads, but no long sight
     Was his but for the end that he went seeking.

     The end he sought was not the end; the crown
     He won shall unto many still be given.
     Moreover, there was reason here to frown:
     No fury thundered, no flame fell from heaven.

     Think not, because I wonder where you fled,
     That I would lift a pin to see you there;
     You may, for me, be prowling anywhere,
     So long as you show not your little head:
     No dark and evil story of the dead
     Would leave you less pernicious or less fair—
     Not even Lilith, with her famous hair;
     And Lilith was the devil, I have read.
     I cannot hate you, for I loved you then.
     The woods were golden then.  There was a road
     Through beeches; and I said their smooth feet showed
     Like yours.  Truth must have heard me from afar,
     For I shall never have to learn again
     That yours are cloven as no beech's are.

     She'd look upon us, if she could,
     As hard as Rhadamanthus would;
     Yet one may see,—who sees her face,
     Her crown of silver and of lace,
     Her mystical serene address
     Of age alloyed with loveliness,—
     That she would not annihilate
     The frailest of things animate.

     She has opinions of our ways,
     And if we're not all mad, she says,—
     If our ways are not wholly worse
     Than others, for not being hers,—
     There might somehow be found a few
     Less insane things for us to do,
     And we might have a little heed
     Of what Belshazzar couldn't read.

     She feels, with all our furniture,
     Room yet for something more secure
     Than our self-kindled aureoles
     To guide our poor forgotten souls;
     But when we have explained that grace
     Dwells now in doing for the race,
     She nods—as if she were relieved;
     Almost as if she were deceived.

     She frowns at much of what she hears,
     And shakes her head, and has her fears;
     Though none may know, by any chance,
     What rose-leaf ashes of romance
     Are faintly stirred by later days
     That would be well enough, she says,
     If only people were more wise,
     And grown-up children used their eyes.

     Where a faint light shines alone,
     Dwells a Demon I have known.
     Most of you had better say
     "The Dark House", and go your way.
     Do not wonder if I stay.

     For I know the Demon's eyes,
     And their lure that never dies.
     Banish all your fond alarms,
     For I know the foiling charms
     Of her eyes and of her arms,

     And I know that in one room
     Burns a lamp as in a tomb;
     And I see the shadow glide,
     Back and forth, of one denied
     Power to find himself outside.

     There he is who is my friend,
     Damned, he fancies, to the end—
     Vanquished, ever since a door
     Closed, he thought, for evermore
     On the life that was before.

     And the friend who knows him best
     Sees him as he sees the rest
     Who are striving to be wise
     While a Demon's arms and eyes
     Hold them as a web would flies.

     All the words of all the world,
     Aimed together and then hurled,
     Would be stiller in his ears
     Than a closing of still shears
     On a thread made out of years.

     But there lives another sound,
     More compelling, more profound;
     There's a music, so it seems,
     That assuages and redeems,
     More than reason, more than dreams.

     There's a music yet unheard
     By the creature of the word,
     Though it matters little more
     Than a wave-wash on a shore—
     Till a Demon shuts a door.

     So, if he be very still
     With his Demon, and one will,
     Murmurs of it may be blown
     To my friend who is alone
     In a room that I have known.

     After that from everywhere
     Singing life will find him there;
     Then the door will open wide,
     And my friend, again outside,
     Will be living, having died.

     No longer torn by what she knows
     And sees within the eyes of others,
     Her doubts are when the daylight goes,
     Her fears are for the few she bothers.
     She tells them it is wholly wrong
     Of her to stay alive so long;
     And when she smiles her forehead shows
     A crinkle that had been her mother's.

     Beneath her beauty, blanched with pain,
     And wistful yet for being cheated,
     A child would seem to ask again
     A question many times repeated;
     But no rebellion has betrayed
     Her wonder at what she has paid
     For memories that have no stain,
     For triumph born to be defeated.

     To those who come for what she was—
     The few left who know where to find her—
     She clings, for they are all she has;
     And she may smile when they remind her,
     As heretofore, of what they know
     Of roses that are still to blow
     By ways where not so much as grass
     Remains of what she sees behind her.

     They stay a while, and having done
     What penance or the past requires,
     They go, and leave her there alone
     To count her chimneys and her spires.
     Her lip shakes when they go away,
     And yet she would not have them stay;
     She knows as well as anyone
     That Pity, having played, soon tires.

     But one friend always reappears,
     A good ghost, not to be forsaken;
     Whereat she laughs and has no fears
     Of what a ghost may reawaken,
     But welcomes, while she wears and mends
     The poor relation's odds and ends,
     Her truant from a tomb of years—
     Her power of youth so early taken.

     Poor laugh, more slender than her song
     It seems; and there are none to hear it
     With even the stopped ears of the strong
     For breaking heart or broken spirit.
     The friends who clamored for her place,
     And would have scratched her for her face,
     Have lost her laughter for so long
     That none would care enough to fear it.

     None live who need fear anything
     From her, whose losses are their pleasure;
     The plover with a wounded wing
     Stays not the flight that others measure;
     So there she waits, and while she lives,
     And death forgets, and faith forgives,
     Her memories go foraging
     For bits of childhood song they treasure.

     And like a giant harp that hums
     On always, and is always blending
     The coming of what never comes
     With what has past and had an ending,
     The City trembles, throbs, and pounds
     Outside, and through a thousand sounds
     The small intolerable drums
     Of Time are like slow drops descending.

     Bereft enough to shame a sage
     And given little to long sighing,
     With no illusion to assuage
     The lonely changelessness of dying,—
     Unsought, unthought-of, and unheard,
     She sings and watches like a bird,
     Safe in a comfortable cage
     From which there will be no more flying.

       Or the Contented Metaphysician

     To the lore of no manner of men
      Would his vision have yielded
     When he found what will never again
      From his vision be shielded,—
     Though he paid with as much of his life
      As a nun could have given,
     And to-night would have been as a knife,
      Devil-drawn, devil-driven.

     For to-night, with his flame-weary eyes
      On the work he is doing,
     He considers the tinder that flies
      And the quick flame pursuing.
     In the leaves that are crinkled and curled
      Are his ashes of glory,
     And what once were an end of the world
      Is an end of a story.

     But he smiles, for no more shall his days
      Be a toil and a calling
     For a way to make others to gaze
      On God's face without falling.
     He has come to the end of his words,
      And alone he rejoices
     In the choiring that silence affords
      Of ineffable voices.

     To a realm that his words may not reach
      He may lead none to find him;
     An adept, and with nothing to teach,
      He leaves nothing behind him.
     For the rest, he will have his release,
      And his embers, attended
     By the large and unclamoring peace
      Of a dream that is ended.

     Faint white pillars that seem to fade
     As you look from here are the first one sees
     Of his house where it hides and dies in a shade
     Of beeches and oaks and hickory trees.
     Now many a man, given woods like these,
     And a house like that, and the Briony gold,
     Would have said, "There are still some gods to please,
     And houses are built without hands, we're told."

     There are the pillars, and all gone gray.
     Briony's hair went white.  You may see
     Where the garden was if you come this way.
     That sun-dial scared him, he said to me;
     "Sooner or later they strike," said he,
     And he never got that from the books he read.
     Others are flourishing, worse than he,
     But he knew too much for the life he led.

     And who knows all knows everything
     That a patient ghost at last retrieves;
     There's more to be known of his harvesting
     When Time the thresher unbinds the sheaves;
     And there's more to be heard than a wind that grieves
     For Briony now in this ageless oak,
     Driving the first of its withered leaves
     Over the stones where the fountain broke.

     "When he was here alive, Eileen,
     There was a word you might have said;
     So never mind what I have been,
     Or anything,—for you are dead.

     "And after this when I am there
     Where he is, you'll be dying still.
     Your eyes are dead, and your black hair,—
     The rest of you be what it will.

     "'Twas all to save him?  Never mind,
     Eileen.  You saved him.  You are strong.
     I'd hardly wonder if your kind
     Paid everything, for you live long.

     "You last, I mean.  That's what I mean.
     I mean you last as long as lies.
     You might have said that word, Eileen,—
     And you might have your hair and eyes.

     "And what you see might be Lisette,
     Instead of this that has no name.
     Your silence—I can feel it yet,
     Alive and in me, like a flame.

     "Where might I be with him to-day,
     Could he have known before he heard?
     But no—your silence had its way,
     Without a weapon or a word.

     "Because a word was never told,
     I'm going as a worn toy goes.
     And you are dead; and you'll be old;
     And I forgive you, I suppose.

     "I'll soon be changing as all do,
     To something we have always been;
     And you'll be old...  He liked you, too.
     I might have killed you then, Eileen.

     "I think he liked as much of you
     As had a reason to be seen,—
     As much as God made black and blue.
     He liked your hair and eyes, Eileen."

     Could he have made Priscilla share
      The paradise that he had planned,
     Llewellyn would have loved his wife
      As well as any in the land.

     Could he have made Priscilla cease
      To goad him for what God left out,
     Llewellyn would have been as mild
      As any we have read about.

     Could all have been as all was not,
      Llewellyn would have had no story;
     He would have stayed a quiet man
      And gone his quiet way to glory.

     But howsoever mild he was
      Priscilla was implacable;
     And whatsoever timid hopes
      He built—she found them, and they fell.

     And this went on, with intervals
      Of labored harmony between
     Resounding discords, till at last
      Llewellyn turned—as will be seen.

     Priscilla, warmer than her name,
      And shriller than the sound of saws,
     Pursued Llewellyn once too far,
      Not knowing quite the man he was.

     The more she said, the fiercer clung
      The stinging garment of his wrath;
     And this was all before the day
      When Time tossed roses in his path.

     Before the roses ever came
      Llewellyn had already risen.
     The roses may have ruined him,
      They may have kept him out of prison.

     And she who brought them, being Fate,
      Made roses do the work of spears,—
     Though many made no more of her
      Than civet, coral, rouge, and years.

     You ask us what Llewellyn saw,
      But why ask what may not be given?
     To some will come a time when change
      Itself is beauty, if not heaven.

     One afternoon Priscilla spoke,
      And her shrill history was done;
     At any rate, she never spoke
      Like that again to anyone.

     One gold October afternoon
      Great fury smote the silent air;
     And then Llewellyn leapt and fled
      Like one with hornets in his hair.

     Llewellyn left us, and he said
      Forever, leaving few to doubt him;
     And so, through frost and clicking leaves,
      The Tilbury way went on without him.

     And slowly, through the Tilbury mist,
      The stillness of October gold
     Went out like beauty from a face.
      Priscilla watched it, and grew old.

     He fled, still clutching in his flight
      The roses that had been his fall;
     The Scarlet One, as you surmise,
      Fled with him, coral, rouge, and all.

     Priscilla, waiting, saw the change
      Of twenty slow October moons;
     And then she vanished, in her turn
      To be forgotten, like old tunes.

     So they were gone—all three of them,
      I should have said, and said no more,
     Had not a face once on Broadway
      Been one that I had seen before.

     The face and hands and hair were old,
      But neither time nor penury
     Could quench within Llewellyn's eyes
      The shine of his one victory.

     The roses, faded and gone by,
      Left ruin where they once had reigned;
     But on the wreck, as on old shells,
      The color of the rose remained.

     His fictive merchandise I bought
      For him to keep and show again,
     Then led him slowly from the crush
      Of his cold-shouldered fellow men.

     "And so, Llewellyn," I began—
      "Not so," he said; "not so, at all:
     I've tried the world, and found it good,
      For more than twenty years this fall.

     "And what the world has left of me
      Will go now in a little while."
     And what the world had left of him
      Was partly an unholy guile.

     "That I have paid for being calm
      Is what you see, if you have eyes;
     For let a man be calm too long,
      He pays for much before he dies.

     "Be calm when you are growing old
      And you have nothing else to do;
     Pour not the wine of life too thin
      If water means the death of you.

     "You say I might have learned at home
      The truth in season to be strong?
     Not so; I took the wine of life
      Too thin, and I was calm too long.

     "Like others who are strong too late,
      For me there was no going back;
     For I had found another speed,
      And I was on the other track.

     "God knows how far I might have gone
      Or what there might have been to see;
     But my speed had a sudden end,
      And here you have the end of me."

     The end or not, it may be now
      But little farther from the truth
     To say those worn satiric eyes
      Had something of immortal youth.

     He may among the millions here
      Be one; or he may, quite as well,
     Be gone to find again the Tree
      Of Knowledge, out of which he fell.

     He may be near us, dreaming yet
      Of unrepented rouge and coral;
     Or in a grave without a name
      May be as far off as a moral.

     Time was when his half million drew
      The breath of six per cent;
     But soon the worm of what-was-not
      Fed hard on his content;
     And something crumbled in his brain
      When his half million went.

     Time passed, and filled along with his
      The place of many more;
     Time came, and hardly one of us
      Had credence to restore,
     From what appeared one day, the man
      Whom we had known before.

     The broken voice, the withered neck,
      The coat worn out with care,
     The cleanliness of indigence,
      The brilliance of despair,
     The fond imponderable dreams
      Of affluence,—all were there.

     Poor Finzer, with his dreams and schemes,
      Fares hard now in the race,
     With heart and eye that have a task
      When he looks in the face
     Of one who might so easily
      Have been in Finzer's place.

     He comes unfailing for the loan
      We give and then forget;
     He comes, and probably for years
      Will he be coming yet,—
     Familiar as an old mistake,
      And futile as regret.

     Well, Bokardo, here we are;
      Make yourself at home.
     Look around—you haven't far
      To look—and why be dumb?
     Not the place that used to be,
     Not so many things to see;
     But there's room for you and me.
      And you—you've come.

     Talk a little; or, if not,
      Show me with a sign
     Why it was that you forgot
      What was yours and mine.
     Friends, I gather, are small things
     In an age when coins are kings;
     Even at that, one hardly flings
      Friends before swine.

     Rather strong?  I knew as much,
      For it made you speak.
     No offense to swine, as such,
      But why this hide-and-seek?
     You have something on your side,
     And you wish you might have died,
     So you tell me.  And you tried
      One night last week?

     You tried hard?  And even then
      Found a time to pause?
     When you try as hard again,
      You'll have another cause.
     When you find yourself at odds
     With all dreamers of all gods,
     You may smite yourself with rods—
      But not the laws.

     Though they seem to show a spite
      Rather devilish,
     They move on as with a might
      Stronger than your wish.
     Still, however strong they be,
     They bide man's authority:
     Xerxes, when he flogged the sea,
      May've scared a fish.

     It's a comfort, if you like,
      To keep honor warm,
     But as often as you strike
      The laws, you do no harm.
     To the laws, I mean.  To you—
     That's another point of view,
     One you may as well indue
      With some alarm.

     Not the most heroic face
      To present, I grant;
     Nor will you insure disgrace
      By fearing what you want.
     Freedom has a world of sides,
     And if reason once derides
     Courage, then your courage hides
      A deal of cant.

     Learn a little to forget
      Life was once a feast;
     You aren't fit for dying yet,
      So don't be a beast.
     Few men with a mind will say,
     Thinking twice, that they can pay
     Half their debts of yesterday,
      Or be released.

     There's a debt now on your mind
      More than any gold?
     And there's nothing you can find
      Out there in the cold?
     Only—what's his name?—Remorse?
     And Death riding on his horse?
     Well, be glad there's nothing worse
      Than you have told.

     Leave Remorse to warm his hands
      Outside in the rain.
     As for Death, he understands,
      And he will come again.
     Therefore, till your wits are clear,
     Flourish and be quiet—here.
     But a devil at each ear
      Will be a strain?

     Past a doubt they will indeed,
      More than you have earned.
     I say that because you need
      Ablution, being burned?
     Well, if you must have it so,
     Your last flight went rather low.
     Better say you had to know
      What you have learned.

     And that's over.  Here you are,
      Battered by the past.
     Time will have his little scar,
      But the wound won't last.
     Nor shall harrowing surprise
     Find a world without its eyes
     If a star fades when the skies
      Are overcast.

     God knows there are lives enough,
      Crushed, and too far gone
     Longer to make sermons of,
      And those we leave alone.
     Others, if they will, may rend
     The worn patience of a friend
     Who, though smiling, sees the end,
      With nothing done.

     But your fervor to be free
      Fled the faith it scorned;
     Death demands a decency
      Of you, and you are warned.
     But for all we give we get
     Mostly blows?  Don't be upset;
     You, Bokardo, are not yet
      Consumed or mourned.

     There'll be falling into view
      Much to rearrange;
     And there'll be a time for you
      To marvel at the change.
     They that have the least to fear
     Question hardest what is here;
     When long-hidden skies are clear,
      The stars look strange.

     Between me and the sunset, like a dome
     Against the glory of a world on fire,
     Now burned a sudden hill,
     Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,
     With nothing on it for the flame to kill
     Save one who moved and was alone up there
     To loom before the chaos and the glare
     As if he were the last god going home
     Unto his last desire.
     Dark, marvelous, and inscrutable he moved on
     Till down the fiery distance he was gone,—
     Like one of those eternal, remote things
     That range across a man's imaginings
     When a sure music fills him and he knows
     What he may say thereafter to few men,—
     The touch of ages having wrought
     An echo and a glimpse of what he thought
     A phantom or a legend until then;
     For whether lighted over ways that save,
     Or lured from all repose,
     If he go on too far to find a grave,
     Mostly alone he goes.

     Even he, who stood where I had found him,
     On high with fire all round him,—
     Who moved along the molten west,
     And over the round hill's crest
     That seemed half ready with him to go down,
     Flame-bitten and flame-cleft,—
     As if there were to be no last thing left
     Of a nameless unimaginable town,—
     Even he who climbed and vanished may have taken
     Down to the perils of a depth not known,
     From death defended though by men forsaken,
     The bread that every man must eat alone;
     He may have walked while others hardly dared
     Look on to see him stand where many fell;
     And upward out of that, as out of hell,
     He may have sung and striven
     To mount where more of him shall yet be given,
     Bereft of all retreat,
     To sevenfold heat,—
     As on a day when three in Dura shared
     The furnace, and were spared
     For glory by that king of Babylon
     Who made himself so great that God, who heard,
     Covered him with long feathers, like a bird.

     Again, he may have gone down easily,
     By comfortable altitudes, and found,
     As always, underneath him solid ground
     Whereon to be sufficient and to stand
     Possessed already of the promised land,
     Far stretched and fair to see:
     A good sight, verily,
     And one to make the eyes of her who bore him
     Shine glad with hidden tears.
     Why question of his ease of who before him,
     In one place or another where they left
     Their names as far behind them as their bones,
     And yet by dint of slaughter toil and theft,
     And shrewdly sharpened stones,
     Carved hard the way for his ascendency
     Through deserts of lost years?
     Why trouble him now who sees and hears
     No more than what his innocence requires,
     And therefore to no other height aspires
     Than one at which he neither quails nor tires?
     He may do more by seeing what he sees
     Than others eager for iniquities;
     He may, by seeing all things for the best,
     Incite futurity to do the rest.

     Or with an even likelihood,
     He may have met with atrabilious eyes
     The fires of time on equal terms and passed
     Indifferently down, until at last
     His only kind of grandeur would have been,
     Apparently, in being seen.
     He may have had for evil or for good
     No argument; he may have had no care
     For what without himself went anywhere
     To failure or to glory, and least of all
     For such a stale, flamboyant miracle;
     He may have been the prophet of an art
     Immovable to old idolatries;
     He may have been a player without a part,
     Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies
     For such a flaming way to advertise;
     He may have been a painter sick at heart
     With Nature's toiling for a new surprise;
     He may have been a cynic, who now, for all
     Of anything divine that his effete
     Negation may have tasted,
     Saw truth in his own image, rather small,
     Forbore to fever the ephemeral,
     Found any barren height a good retreat
     From any swarming street,
     And in the sun saw power superbly wasted;
     And when the primitive old-fashioned stars
     Came out again to shine on joys and wars
     More primitive, and all arrayed for doom,
     He may have proved a world a sorry thing
     In his imagining,
     And life a lighted highway to the tomb.

     Or, mounting with infirm unsearching tread,
     His hopes to chaos led,
     He may have stumbled up there from the past,
     And with an aching strangeness viewed the last
     Abysmal conflagration of his dreams,—
     A flame where nothing seems
     To burn but flame itself, by nothing fed;
     And while it all went out,
     Not even the faint anodyne of doubt
     May then have eased a painful going down
     From pictured heights of power and lost renown,
     Revealed at length to his outlived endeavor
     Remote and unapproachable forever;
     And at his heart there may have gnawed
     Sick memories of a dead faith foiled and flawed
     And long dishonored by the living death
     Assigned alike by chance
     To brutes and hierophants;
     And anguish fallen on those he loved around him
     May once have dealt the last blow to confound him,
     And so have left him as death leaves a child,
     Who sees it all too near;
     And he who knows no young way to forget
     May struggle to the tomb unreconciled.
     Whatever suns may rise or set
     There may be nothing kinder for him here
     Than shafts and agonies;
     And under these
     He may cry out and stay on horribly;
     Or, seeing in death too small a thing to fear,
     He may go forward like a stoic Roman
     Where pangs and terrors in his pathway lie,—
     Or, seizing the swift logic of a woman,
     Curse God and die.

     Or maybe there, like many another one
     Who might have stood aloft and looked ahead,
     Black-drawn against wild red,
     He may have built, unawed by fiery gules
     That in him no commotion stirred,
     A living reason out of molecules
     Why molecules occurred,
     And one for smiling when he might have sighed
     Had he seen far enough,
     And in the same inevitable stuff
     Discovered an odd reason too for pride
     In being what he must have been by laws
     Infrangible and for no kind of cause.
     Deterred by no confusion or surprise
     He may have seen with his mechanic eyes
     A world without a meaning, and had room,
     Alone amid magnificence and doom,
     To build himself an airy monument
     That should, or fail him in his vague intent,
     Outlast an accidental universe—
     To call it nothing worse—
     Or, by the burrowing guile
     Of Time disintegrated and effaced,
     Like once-remembered mighty trees go down
     To ruin, of which by man may now be traced
     No part sufficient even to be rotten,
     And in the book of things that are forgotten
     Is entered as a thing not quite worth while.
     He may have been so great
     That satraps would have shivered at his frown,
     And all he prized alive may rule a state
     No larger than a grave that holds a clown;
     He may have been a master of his fate,
     And of his atoms,—ready as another
     In his emergence to exonerate
     His father and his mother;
     He may have been a captain of a host,
     Self-eloquent and ripe for prodigies,
     Doomed here to swell by dangerous degrees,
     And then give up the ghost.
     Nahum's great grasshoppers were such as these,
     Sun-scattered and soon lost.

     Whatever the dark road he may have taken,
     This man who stood on high
     And faced alone the sky,
     Whatever drove or lured or guided him,—
     A vision answering a faith unshaken,
     An easy trust assumed of easy trials,
     A sick negation born of weak denials,
     A crazed abhorrence of an old condition,
     A blind attendance on a brief ambition,—
     Whatever stayed him or derided him,
     His way was even as ours;
     And we, with all our wounds and all our powers,
     Must each await alone at his own height
     Another darkness or another light;
     And there, of our poor self dominion reft,
     If inference and reason shun
     Hell, Heaven, and Oblivion,
     May thwarted will (perforce precarious,
     But for our conservation better thus)
     Have no misgiving left
     Of doing yet what here we leave undone?
     Or if unto the last of these we cleave,
     Believing or protesting we believe
     In such an idle and ephemeral
     Florescence of the diabolical,—
     If, robbed of two fond old enormities,
     Our being had no onward auguries,
     What then were this great love of ours to say
     For launching other lives to voyage again
     A little farther into time and pain,
     A little faster in a futile chase
     For a kingdom and a power and a Race
     That would have still in sight
     A manifest end of ashes and eternal night?
     Is this the music of the toys we shake
     So loud,—as if there might be no mistake
     Somewhere in our indomitable will?
     Are we no greater than the noise we make
     Along one blind atomic pilgrimage
     Whereon by crass chance billeted we go
     Because our brains and bones and cartilage
     Will have it so?
     If this we say, then let us all be still
     About our share in it, and live and die
     More quietly thereby.

     Where was he going, this man against the sky?
     You know not, nor do I.
     But this we know, if we know anything:
     That we may laugh and fight and sing
     And of our transience here make offering
     To an orient Word that will not be erased,
     Or, save in incommunicable gleams
     Too permanent for dreams,
     Be found or known.
     No tonic and ambitious irritant
     Of increase or of want
     Has made an otherwise insensate waste
     Of ages overthrown
     A ruthless, veiled, implacable foretaste
     Of other ages that are still to be
     Depleted and rewarded variously
     Because a few, by fate's economy,
     Shall seem to move the world the way it goes;
     No soft evangel of equality,
     Safe cradled in a communal repose
     That huddles into death and may at last
     Be covered well with equatorial snows—
     And all for what, the devil only knows—
     Will aggregate an inkling to confirm
     The credit of a sage or of a worm,
     Or tell us why one man in five
     Should have a care to stay alive
     While in his heart he feels no violence
     Laid on his humor and intelligence
     When infant Science makes a pleasant face
     And waves again that hollow toy, the Race;
     No planetary trap where souls are wrought
     For nothing but the sake of being caught
     And sent again to nothing will attune
     Itself to any key of any reason
     Why man should hunger through another season
     To find out why 'twere better late than soon
     To go away and let the sun and moon
     And all the silly stars illuminate
     A place for creeping things,
     And those that root and trumpet and have wings,
     And herd and ruminate,
     Or dive and flash and poise in rivers and seas,
     Or by their loyal tails in lofty trees
     Hang screeching lewd victorious derision
     Of man's immortal vision.

     Shall we, because Eternity records
     Too vast an answer for the time-born words
     We spell, whereof so many are dead that once
     In our capricious lexicons
     Were so alive and final, hear no more
     The Word itself, the living word no man
     Has ever spelt,
     And few have ever felt
     Without the fears and old surrenderings
     And terrors that began
     When Death let fall a feather from his wings
     And humbled the first man?
     Because the weight of our humility,
     Wherefrom we gain
     A little wisdom and much pain,
     Falls here too sore and there too tedious,
     Are we in anguish or complacency,
     Not looking far enough ahead
     To see by what mad couriers we are led
     Along the roads of the ridiculous,
     To pity ourselves and laugh at faith
     And while we curse life bear it?
     And if we see the soul's dead end in death,
     Are we to fear it?
     What folly is here that has not yet a name
     Unless we say outright that we are liars?
     What have we seen beyond our sunset fires
     That lights again the way by which we came?
     Why pay we such a price, and one we give
     So clamoringly, for each racked empty day
     That leads one more last human hope away,
     As quiet fiends would lead past our crazed eyes
     Our children to an unseen sacrifice?
     If after all that we have lived and thought,
     All comes to Nought,—
     If there be nothing after Now,
     And we be nothing anyhow,
     And we know that,—why live?
     'Twere sure but weaklings' vain distress
     To suffer dungeons where so many doors
     Will open on the cold eternal shores
     That look sheer down
     To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness
     Where all who know may drown.