A Soul came once upon our rugged earth
Who sought through common things
The source of deeper worth
Than shone apparent in their sensate birth;
In sooth, their wings.
Master of every veiled result,
Of their harmonies occult,
He well revealed in song to man.
The rhythmic wonders of maternal Nature’s plan.
The Matron murmured in her heart, and said:
“Now, though thou art my son
Whom I have borne and bred,
I will rebuke thee for thy hardihood,
Insolent one!
Prying into my secret crypts,
Hieroglyphs and mystic scripts,
And putting thy familiar hand
On all my holy things, my Little and my Grand!”
So she began to smother his green wold
In waters that fell dry,
And covered with white cold
His sweet rose-fields, the blooming, manifold
Pride of his eye;
Buried his architectural woods,
Stifled all his brawling floods,
And piled his verdant paths in snow
That heaped its heavy curls like waves that could not go!
Then laughed the Wise Man a low, quiet laugh,
As with his cunning eye, —
In Beauty’s sweet behalf, —
He traced her germs through Nature’s winnowing chaff.
They could not die:
Delicate shapes of leaf and vine,
Ever yet more clear and fine,
Grew in her snowy work of wrath,
And new Art bent and flung new glories in his path!
She changed her weapons, and a freezing damp
Clung to the naked trees,
Till you might hear the stamp
Of the lightest winds clatter with stony tramp,
And crackling knees!
Palaces reared by genii-art
Thrilled no Sultan’s eager heart
As this new crystal world o’er-blest
The Poet, while the sun blazed backward from the west.
Now with a dull and dreary thaw she sought
To sink into his bones
The seeds of desperate thought,
What time her good should be too deeply wrought
To soothe his groans:
But he espied her genial powers
Fluent under chilliest showers;
Saw the Spring coiled in icy germs,
And wings of brooding Life thaw down their rigid terms.
So through the changes of her course she ran,
Baffled, yet trying still
To thwart her master, Man, —
To tame his spirit by some conquering ban, —
Some total ill;
Ever, maugre the doubling mask,
Genius pierced her subtlest task,
And brought away some prize of worth
From the veiled game she played with all the powers of earth
“Ha, ha! Eureka!” cried the flouted dame,
“My cunning Son, I trust,
Is not too strong to tame!”
And she sent grizzled Death to crush his frame
Into fine dust!
Suddenly, then, she stood aghast,
To see burst her bonds, at last,
And from those shales a Deathless Thing
Soar, singing, into Life on free triumphant wing! 1849
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