The Masquerade

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 vailed 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,
will rebuke thee for thy hardihed [sic].
            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 path with 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 arches in his path!

She changed her weapons, and a freezing damp
      Clung to the naked trees,
      Till you might hear the stamp
Of lightest winds clatter with stoney tramp
            And crackling knees!
   Palaces reared by genii art
   Thrilled no sultan’s eager heart
   As this new crystal world o'erblest
The Poet, while the sun blazed backward from the west.

Now with a dull and freezing 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 whole of ill;
   Maugre ever the doubling mask-
   Genius pierced her subtlest task,
   And brought away some prize of worth
From the vailed 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!