Introduction And Conclusion Of A Long Poem

I have gone sometimes by the gates of Death

And stood beside the cavern through whose doors

Enter the voyagers into the unseen.

From that dread threshold only, gazing back,

Have eyes in swift illumination seen

Life utterly revealed, and guessed therein

What things were vital and what things were vain.

Know then, like a vast ocean from my feet

Spreading away into the morning sky,

I saw unrolled my vanished days, and, lo,

Oblivion like a morning mist obscured

Toils, trials, ambitions, agitations, ease,

And like green isles, sun-kissed, with sweet perfume

Loading the airs blown back from that dim gulf,

Gleamed only through the all-involving haze

The hours when we have loved and been beloved.

Therefore, sweet friends, as often as by Love

You rise absorbed into the harmony

Of planets singing round magnetic suns,

Let not propriety nor prejudice

Nor the precepts of jealous age deny

What Sense so incontestably affirms;

Cling to the blessed moment and drink deep

Of the sweet cup it tends, as there alone

Were that which makes life worth the pain to live.

What is so fair as lovers in their joy

That dies in sleep, their sleep that wakes in joy?

Caressing arms are their light pillows. They

That like lost stars have wandered hitherto

Lonesome and lightless through the universe,

Now glow transfired at Nature's flaming core;

They are the centre; constellated heaven

Is the embroidered panoply spread round

Their bridal, and the music of the spheres

Rocks them in hushed epithalamium.

. . . . .

I know that there are those whose idle tongues

Blaspheme the beauty of the world that was

So wondrous and so worshipful to me.

I call them those that, in the palace where

Down perfumed halls the Sleeping Beauty lay,

Wandered without the secret or the key.

I know that there are those, of gentler heart,

Broken by grief or by deception bowed,

Who in some realm beyond the grave conceive

The bliss they found not here; but, as for me,

In the soft fibres of the tender flesh

I saw potentialities of Joy

Ten thousand lifetimes could not use. Dear Earth,

In this dark month when deep as morning dew

On thy maternal breast shall fall the blood

Of those that were thy loveliest and thy best,

If it be fate that mine shall mix with theirs,

Hear this my natural prayer, for, purified

By that Lethean agony and clad

In more resplendent powers, I ask nought else

Than reincarnate to retrace my path,

Be born again of woman, walk once more

Through Childhood's fragrant, flowery wonderland

And, entered in the golden realm of Youth,

Fare still a pilgrim toward the copious joys

I savored here yet scarce began to sip;

Yea, with the comrades that I loved so well

Resume the banquet we had scarce begun

When in the street we heard the clarion-call

And each man sprang to arms — ay, even myself

Who loved sweet Youth too truly not to share

Its pain no less than its delight. If prayers

Are to be prayed, lo, here is mine! Be this

My resurrection, this my recompense!