Man and the Years

Solemnly, oh, very solemn,
Rolling on in deathward columns,
    March the heavy laden Years;
Each his woe crown at the sundown,
    Yielding sternly, without tears;
Where the broken mould lies dampest,
Going down shroud-wrap’d in tempest.

Man looks on the fleeting pageant,
Pining, moaning, and impatient,
    Silent weeps, or curses loud;
Smites his breast in mad unresting –
    Hides his red eyes in his shroud;
Thinking that the Past alone hath
Any true thing, thus he moaneth:

“Heavy Years! what Fate pursues you,
That ye tread on thus, to lose you
    In the dumb, unmoving mirk, –
Hope’s torch flaring to despairing,
    Gainst the hand it lit to work, 
And your heaven-wings unsufficing,
Dark’ning Earth, but never rising?

Ye were white with blooming promise,
When your withered sires went from us, –
    Tender-voiced with gentleness;
And the storm-rise from your calm eyes
    Slunk off, moaning in distress,
Till a hush in our world-ferment,
Made men hopeful for a moment.

But ye move as moved your fathers,
With a woe that, snow-like, gathers
    Icy weight in rolling on;
All things crushing in your rushing
    To the sheer cliff of the Gone!
Down ye plunge, but leave yon woe back
Dark’ning any gleam ye throw back.

Where is Life, and where the music?
Where the goal the earnest True seek –
    Pledged of you, ye lying Years?
Stout Endeavor wearies ever;
    Death’s bow softens not with tears;
Channels of a present sorrow
Are the charnels of to-morrow.

Do to die, and know to suffer;
World’s-hate martyrs the world-lover;
    Hands are burned that snatch from fire,
And the kindly mar, by blindly
    Straining our faint life-chords higher;
Rude hands, carving the God-features,
Roughen them to their rude natures.

Babel overshadows Zion;
Discord strikes her harp of iron,
    And its clang shakes down the Good;
Falling Bastiles crush the castles
    That for Truth’s defences stood;
And the few who would not harm her,
Fall beside her in their armor.

Nathless for re-uttered pledges,
And your hopes that tinged the edges
    Of our doubts with rainbow light,
We are groping down the sloping
    Grave-yard path in stormy night,
Cheated oft to think the glooms done,
When our fronts but smite a tomb-stone.

Yes, amid the sparkles lighting
The red anguish of such smiting,
    We, to think the new day broke,
Cried ‘Eureka!’ till the bleaker
    Scorn-blast stung us, and we woke;
Woke to feel how deeply under
Fate still kept the folded wonder.

Veiled friend and foe together,
On we ride, we know not whither,
    Errant Knights of Destiny
In tomb-darkness, and the starkness
    Of mad-eyed Insanity,
Driving, each a mateless rover –
Pits below and thunders over.

Climbing up the hill-side crownward,
Sinking to its vale-bed downward,
    Over graves we toil to ours –
Full graves sloping to the open, –
    So we waste our vaunted powers;
All our wisest have but carried
Grave-lamps of the olden buried.

Born to stab the dead-laid Percy,
But loud cowards shrieking ‘mercy’
    To the foot-braced, living foe;
Faint at Pity’s far-off ditties,
    Blind-mad at old Pharaoh,
But at home oppression’s panders,
Supple-kneed to base commanders.

Or if we would pluck the darnel
From the flowers that rim our charnel,
    Strait they droop, their roots uptorn;
All our worship sinks to curship,
    Of its gracious manhood shorn;
It were better than this groping,
Naught to seek, and nothing hoping!

Striving to undo the meshes
Of oppression’s coil that gashes
    Limb and soul where’er it twines,
We are strangling in the tangling
    Of the steel wool’s knotted lines;
Our loud prayers from all these strange ills,
Drown the answers sweet o’ the Angels.

Go, ye false Years, to your ruin,
With your doing and undoing;
    We will trust your lies no more;
And thou last of Saturn’s cast off
    Children, fly with them before:
Sooner shall the doom hung o’er us
Shiver Life’s Phantasmagories!”

So from all his wants and workings,
Sorrows, sins, and under-lurkings
    Of divineness and high aims, –
Weak but willing, unfulfilling
    The grand sphere his being claims,
Man profaned the angel-Ages,
Reading but their darker pages.

Then a voice serene and saintly
From the Years came, clear but faintly,
    Full of love-low chimes of Hope;
Grew its murmur deep and firmer,
    As the speech took larger scope,
And from Truths by Trial yielded,
To the Soul a temple builded.

“We are cloud-like brief and passing,
In your souls our image glassing,
    That are dark or bright as we;
But around is calm and boundless
    The sky-broad Eternity —
We are changing mute or thunderous,
That is fathomless and wondrous.

Now we rain down want and sorrow,
Now from Kingly Orbs we borrow
    Light to make our dun sides laugh;
Through all ranges of our changes
    Runneth still God’s hierograph, —
Still He keeps, like kindly fathers,
Yule-gifts till the darkness gathers.

Life, that bounds from God’s heart-pulses
Is the sole Fate that convulses
    And pursues our heavy flight —
Everlasting Newness, casting
    The old glory into night –
And the Perfect struggling birthward,
Through the dead past trodden earthward

Spirit only is eternal,
Forms have autumn-days and vernal –
    Have their beauty and decay, 
But their trustees feeds the Newness,
    With the leaven of Life’s For-aye;
Blossoms grow to seed-burs rougher,
That the in-life shall not suffer.

Mounded graves and piled up sorrows
Shed no darkness on your morrows,
    They but veil the setting hope,
That the orient, with more floreant
    Beauty, its dawn-gates may ope;
While you climb their steeps before you
Heaven shuts down yet clearlier o’er you.

We are bearing forth on broad wings,
Sin’s unrest and Truth’s rewardings,
    And the doom that cannot fail –
As ye make them ye shall take them,
    Or in dew, or smiting hail;
What ye planted ye must gather,
Grapes or thorns it boots not whether.

Would ye be as rocks, and pangless?
Were the serpent Wisdom fangless,
    It would die among brute-hoofs;
Steps to Heaven are fire-paven,
    Stinging you with hot reproofs
For your lingering; – up! – awaken!
God is fleet and would be taken.

Life is in you, life is of you,
But its fountain springs above you,
    Pressing on your shut hearts’ will;
Fling them open ‘neath the sloping
    Heavens, and – ye shall have your fill,
Now it rains off to uncleanness,
From the low eaves of your meanness;

But may not be lost forever;
Growing to a crystal river,
    Earth shall gladden its flow,
And the goodness by your rudeness
    Spurned, shall bless the vales below;
Martyred Saviors of a nation
Bring the world’s regeneration.

Ye are in the Babel noises,
And know not how all your voices
    Fold their roughnness, tone on tone,
Into sweetness, whose completeness
    Is a Psalm before the Throne;
Hurl your works at wildest venture,
God shall sphere them round the center.

Not in us, but bowed above us,
Is in the Heaven of Virtue’s lovers –