Anthem.

In nescientness, in nescientness,

Mother, we put these fleshly lendings on

Thou yield'st to thy poor children; took thy gift

Of life, which must, in all the after-days,

Be craved again with tears,—

With fresh and still-petitionary tears.

Being once bound thine almsmen for that gift,

We are bound to beggary, nor our own can call

The journal dole of customary life,

But after suit obsequious for't to thee.

Indeed this flesh, O Mother,

A beggar's gown, a client's badging,

We find, which from thy hands we simply took,

Nought dreaming of the after penury,

In nescientness.

In a little joy, in a little joy,

We wear awhile thy sore insignia,

Nor know thy heel o’ the neck. O Mother! Mother!

Then what use knew I of thy solemn robes,

But as a child, to play with them? I bade thee

Leave thy great husbandries, thy grave designs,

Thy tedious state which irked my ignorant years,

Thy winter-watches, suckling of the grain,

Severe premeditation taciturn

Upon the brooded Summer, thy chill cares,

And all thy ministries majestical,

To sport with me, thy darling. Thought I not

Thou set'st thy seasons forth processional

To pamper me with pageant,— thou thyself

My fellow-gamester, appanage of mine arms?

Then what wild Dionysia I, young Bacchanal,

Danced in thy lap! Ah for thy gravity!

Then, O Earth, thou rang'st beneath me,

Rocked to Eastward, rocked to Westward,

Even with the shifted

Poise and footing of my thought!

I brake through thy doors of sunset,

Ran before the hooves of sunrise,

Shook thy matron tresses down in fancies

Wild and wilful

As a poet's hand could twine them;

Caught in my fantasy's crystal chalice

The Bow, as its cataract of colours

Plashed to thee downward;

Then when thy circuit swung to nightward,

Night the abhorr-ed, night was a new dawning,

Celestial dawning

Over the ultimate marges of the soul;

Dusk grew turbulent with fire before me,

And like a windy arras waved with dreams.

Sleep I took not for my bedfellow,

Who could waken

To a revel, an inexhaustible

Wassail of orgiac imageries;

Then while I wore thy sore insignia

In a little joy, O Earth, in a little joy;

Loving thy beauty in all creatures born of thee,

Children, and the sweet-essenced body of woman;

Feeling not yet upon my neck thy foot,

But breathing warm of thee as infants breathe

New from their mother's morning bosom. So I,

Risen from thee, restless winnower of the heaven,

Most Hermes-like, did keep

My vital and resilient path, and felt

The play of wings about my fledg-ed heel —

Sure on the verges of precipitous dream,

Swift in its springing

From jut to jut of inaccessible fancies,

In a little joy.

In a little thought, in a little thought,

We stand and eye thee in a grave dismay,

With sad and doubtful questioning, when first

Thou speak'st to us as men: like sons who hear

Newly their mother's history, unthought

Before, and say —‘ She is not as we dreamed:

Ah me! we are beguiled!’ What art thou, then,

That art not our conceiving? Art thou not

Too old for thy young children? Or perchance,

Keep'st thou a youth perpetual-burnishable

Beyond thy sons decrepit? It is long

Since Time was first a fledgling;

Yet thou may'st be but as a pendant bulla

Against his stripling bosom swung. Alack!

For that we seem indeed

To have slipped the world's great leaping-time, and come

Upon thy pinched and dozing days: these weeds,

These corporal leavings, thou not cast'st us new,

Fresh from thy craftship, like the lilies’ coats,

But foist'st us off

With hasty tarnished piecings negligent,

Snippets and waste

From old ancestral wearings,

That have seen sorrier usage; remainder-flesh

After our father's surfeits; nay with chinks,

Some of us, that if speech may have free leave

Our souls go out at elbows. We are sad

With more than our sires’ heaviness, and with

More than their weakness weak; we shall not be

Mighty with all their mightiness, nor shall not

Rejoice with all their joy. Ay, Mother! Mother!

What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed,

Thou lustingly engender'st,

To sweat, and make his brag, and rot,

Crowned with all honour and all shamefulness?

From nightly towers

He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens,

Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust,

And yet is he successive unto nothing

But patrimony of a little mould,

And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth

Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,

All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs,

All beauty, and all starry majesties,

And dim transtellar things;— even that it may,

Filled in the ending with a puff of dust,

Confess —‘ It is enough.’ The world left empty

What that poor mouthful crams. His heart is builded

For pride, for potency, infinity,

All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,

Arrased with purple like the house of kings,—

To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm

Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries!

Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues,

Who bringest forth no saying yet so dark

As we ourselves, thy darkest! We the young,

In a little thought, in a little thought,

At last confront thee, and ourselves in thee,

And wake disgarmented of glory: as one

On a mount standing, and against him stands,

On the mount adverse, crowned with westering rays,

The golden sun, and they two brotherly

Gaze each on each;

He faring down

To the dull vale, his Godhead peels from him

Till he can scarcely spurn the pebble —

For nothingness of new-found mortality —

That mutinies against his gall-ed foot.

Littly he sets him to the daily way,

With all around the valleys growing grave,

And known things changed and strange; but he holds on,

Though all the land of light be widow-ed,

In a little thought.

In a little strength, in a little strength,

We affront thy unveiled face intolerable,

Which yet we do sustain.

Though I the Orient never more shall feel

Break like a clash of cymbals, and my heart

Clang through my shaken body like a gong;

Nor ever more with spurted feet shall tread

I’ the winepresses of song; nought's truly lost

That moulds to sprout forth gain: now I have on me

The high Phoebean priesthood, and that craves

An unrash utterance; not with flaunted hem

May the Muse enter in behind the veil,

Nor, though we hold the sacred dances good,

Shall the holy Virgins maenadize: ruled lips

Befit a votaress Muse.

Thence with no mutable, nor no gelid love,

I keep, O Earth, thy worship,

Though life slow, and the sobering Genius change

To a lamp his gusty torch. What though no more

Athwart its roseal glow

Thy face look forth triumphal? Thou put'st on

Strange sanctities of pathos; like this knoll

Made derelict of day,

Couchant and shadow-ed

Under dim Vesper's overloosened hair:

This, where emboss-ed with the half-blown seed

The solemn purple thistle stands in grass

Grey as an exhalation, when the bank

Holds mist for water in the nights of Fall.

Not to the boy, although his eyes be pure

As the prime snowdrop is,

Ere the rash Phoebus break her cloister

Of sanctimonious snow;

Or Winter fasting sole on Himalay

Since those dove-nuncioed days

When Asia rose from bathing;

Not to such eyes,

Uneuphrasied with tears, the hierarchical

Vision lies unoccult, rank under rank

Through all create down-wheeling, from the Throne

Even to the bases of the pregnant ooze.

This is the enchantment, this the exaltation,

The all-compensating wonder,

Giving to common things wild kindred

With the gold-tesserate floors of Jove;

Linking such heights and such humilities

Hand in hand in ordinal dances,

That I do think my tread,

Stirring the blossoms in the meadow-grass,

Flickers the unwithering stars.

This to the shunless fardel of the world

Nerves my uncurb-ed back; that I endure,

The monstrous Temple's moveless caryatid,

With wide eyes calm upon the whole of things,

In a little strength.

In a little sight, in a little sight,

We learn from what in thee is credible

The incredible, with bloody clutch and feet

Clinging the painful juts of jagg-ed faith.

Science, old noser in its prideful straw,

That with anatomising scalpel tents

Its three-inch of thy skin, and brags —‘ All's bare,’

The eyeless worm, that boring works the soil,

Making it capable for the crops of God;

Against its own dull will

Ministers poppies to our troublous thought,

A Balaam come to prophecy,— parables,

Nor of its parable itself is ware,

Grossly unwotting; all things has expounded

Reflux and influx, counts the sepulchre

The seminary of being, and extinction

The Ceres of existence: it discovers

Life in putridity, vigour in decay;

Dissolution even, and disintegration,

Which in our dull thoughts symbolise disorder,

Finds in God's thoughts irrefragable order,

And admirable the manner of our corruption

As of our health. It grafts upon the cypress

The tree of Life — Death dies on his own dart

Promising to our ashes perpetuity,

And to our perishable elements

Their proper imperishability; extracting

Medicaments from out mortality

Against too mortal cogitation; till

Even of the caput mortuum we do thus

Make a memento vivere. To such uses

I put the blinding knowledge of the fool,

Who in no order seeth ordinance;

Nor thrust my arm in nature shoulder-high,

And cry —‘ There's nought beyond!’ How should I so,

That cannot with these arms of mine engirdle

All which I am; that am a foreigner

In mine own region? Who the chart shall draw

Of the strange courts and vaulty labyrinths,

The spacious tenements and wide pleasances,

Innumerable corridors far-withdrawn,

Where I wander darkling, of myself?

Darkling I wander, nor I dare explore

The long arcane of those dim catacombs,

Where the rat memory does its burrows make,

Close-seal them as I may, and my stolen tread

Starts populace, a gens lucifuga;

That too strait seems my mind my mind to hold,

And I myself incontinent of me.

Then go I, my foul-venting ignorance

With scabby sapience plastered, aye forsooth!

Clap my wise foot-rule to the walls o’ the world,

And vow — A goodly house, but something ancient,

And I can find no Master? Rather, nay,

By baffled seeing, something I divine

Which baffles, and a seeing set beyond;

And so with strenuous gazes sounding down,

Like to the day-long porer on a stream,

Whose last look is his deepest, I beside

This slow perpetual Time stand patiently,

In a little sight.

In a little dust, in a little dust,

Earth, thou reclaim'st us, who do all our lives

Find of thee but Egyptian villeinage.

Thou dost this body, this enhavocked realm,

Subject to ancient and ancestral shadows;

Descended passions sway it; it is distraught

With ghostly usurpation, dinned and fretted

With the still-tyrannous dead; a haunted tenement,

Peopled from barrows and outworn ossuaries.

Thou giv'st us life not half so willingly

As thou undost thy giving; thou that teem'st

The stealthy terror of the sinuous pard,

The lion maned with curl-ed puissance,

The serpent, and all fair strong beasts of ravin,

Thyself most fair and potent beast of ravin;

And thy great eaters thou, the greatest, eat'st.

Thou hast devoured mammoth and mastodon,

And many a floating bank of fangs,

The scaly scourges of thy primal brine,

And the tower-crested plesiosaure.

Thou fill'st thy mouth with nations, gorgest slow

On purple aeons of kings; man's hulking towers

Are carcase for thee, and to modern sun

Disglutt'st their splintered bones.

Rabble of Pharaohs and Arsacidae

Keep their cold house within thee; thou hast sucked down

How many Ninevehs and Hecatompyloi,

And perished cities whose great phantasmata

O'erbrow the silent citizens of Dis: -

Hast not thy fill?

Tarry awhile, lean Earth, for thou shalt drink,

Even till thy dull throat sicken,

The draught thou grow'st most fat on; hear'st thou not

The world's knives bickering in their sheaths? O patience!

Much offal of a foul world comes thy way,

And man's superfluous cloud shall soon be laid

In a little blood.

In a little peace, in a little peace,

Thou dost rebate thy rigid purposes

Of imposed being, and relenting, mend'st

Too much, with nought. The westering Phoebus’ horse

Paws i’ the lucent dust as when he shocked

The East with rising; O how may I trace

In this decline that morning when we did

Sport‘ twixt the claws of newly-whelped existence,

Which had not yet learned rending? we did then

Divinely stand, not knowing yet against us

Sentence had passed of life, nor commutation

Petitioning into death. What's he that of

The Free State argues? Tellus! bid him stoop,

Even where the low hic jacet answers him;

Thus low, O Man! there's freedom's seignory,

Tellus’ most reverend sole free commonweal,

And model deeply-policied: there none

Stands on precedence, nor ambitiously

Woos the impartial worm, whose favours kiss

With liberal largesse all; there each is free

To be e'en what he must, which here did strive

So much to be he could not; there all do

Their uses just, with no flown questioning.

To be took by the hand of equal earth

They doff her livery, slip to the worm,

Which lacqueys them, their suits of maintenance,

And that soiled workaday apparel cast,

Put on condition: Death's ungentle buffet

Alone makes ceremonial manumission;

So are the heavenly statutes set, and those

Uranian tables of the primal Law.

In a little peace, in a little peace,

Like fierce beasts that a common thirst makes brothers,

We draw together to one hid dark lake;

In a little peace, in a little peace,

We drain with all our burthens of dishonour

Into the cleansing sands o’ the thirsty grave.

The fiery pomps, brave exhalations,

And all the glistering shows o’ the seeming world,

Which the sight aches at, we unwinking see

Through the smoked glass of Death; Death, wherewith's fined

The muddy wine of life; that earth doth purge

Of her plethora of man; Death, that doth flush

The cumbered gutters of humanity;

Nothing, of nothing king, with front uncrowned,

Whose hand holds crownets; playmate swart o’ the strong;

Tenebrous moon that flux and refluence draws

Of the high-tided man; skull-hous-ed asp

That stings the heel of kings; true Fount of Youth,

Where he that dips is deathless; being's drone-pipe;

Whose nostril turns to blight the shrivelled stars,

And thicks the lusty breathing of the sun;

Pontifical Death, that doth the crevasse bridge

To the steep and trifid God; one mortal birth

That broker is of immortality.

Under this dreadful brother uterine,

This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come,

Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-motherlike,

To turn thy weanlings’ mouth averse, embitter'st

Thine over-childed breast. Now, mortal-sonlike,

I thou hast suckled, Mother, I at last

Shall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel,

Here I pluck loose the body's cerementing,

And break the tomb of life; here I shake off

The bur o’ the world, man's congregation shun,

And to the antique order of the dead

I take the tongueless vows: my cell is set

Here in thy bosom; my little trouble is ended

In a little peace.