Intimations of the Soul

    The bee draws honey from the poison flower
The wasp on sweetness feeds her venomed sting
    The simple heart, unwronged by fraud and power,
Wins in slow growth the good of everything.
Out of the soul’s deep yearning after truth —
    The unripe vintage of a savage vine —
    The spiritual anarch wrung the acrid wine
Of his benumbing eucharist, in the youth
    Of haired humanity brutal divine!
    Feet of the god Pan are the Pantheon’s scorn,
But they shall bring him where the great gods are!
    The natural wonder of the man-child, born
Into a world of wonder, is the star
That leads him to the manger, near or far,
    Where the new Christ is cradled – knowledge new,
    Waiting the worship of the wise and true.
        Weird mysteries curing him;
        Swift winds – dim Ariels – bring him
    Waits of faint odors from far Eden springs,
    Strange glimpses of unutterable things 
        Startle and stir and sting him;
Glories that flirt and vanish, and yet fling him
    A sudden hope from their receding wings!

Might deem some awful thaumaturge
Behind the darkness sat to urge
Those dim mutations on the immanent verge,
    The white, phantasmal play of shapes that die
    At their first throb, in black immensity.
A glimmer of heat-lightning, that reveals
    The hollow chambers of the unknown, perhaps
    For one quick pulse-beat, while the jester claps
His hands in muffled thunder-peals —
    Betrays the illusive secret! Who may tell?
    Who join the scattered signs that spell
    The mighty maker’s name ineffable?
Who guess how thin the veil is that conceals
    The face of Isis, or how weak the links
    Forged by the riddling sphinx,
For man, the enigma’s answer – who self-known
Stirs to a virgin kiss those lips of stone,
    Or blind, beneath her lion’s talon sinks?

While the awed soul, in trembling hope and fear,
Would pierce the darkness of the now and here,
    With eager askings – the wild hunger-cries
Of a lost child, long lost, who only misses
An unknown something, sweet as mother’s kisses,
    And yearns to grasp it, as dim pallors rise
And vanish in mysterious abysses –
The juggling priest whose faith’s black precipices
Engulf all natural sympathies –
    Out of these dim suggestions,
    And ever-unanswered questions,
Yearnings and terror, shapes his creed of lies
To crush the timid and delude the unwise. 
But fear not thou; the wise shall grasp the clue,
Slender as gossamere the morning dew
Can scarce reveal, but strong as steel;
And, shaking off the clankless chain
Of spiritual despotism, follow fain
That thread that never breaks, a faith bound fast
To knowledge by right reason, which, at last,
Shall lead him on to liberty, and through
Doubt’s tangled labyrinth to the good and true.