Sight and Insight

‘Wisdom is easily seen by them that love her, and is found by them that seek her.
To think therefore upon her is perfect understanding.’

Wisdom, vi.

The Mistress of Vision

Secret was the garden;
      Set i’ the pathless awe
      Where no star its breath can draw.
      Life, that is its warden,
Sits behind the fosse of death. Mine eyes saw not, and I saw.

It was a mazeful wonder;
      Thrice three times it was enwalled
      With an emerald—
      Sealèd so asunder.
All its birds in middle air hung a-dream, their music thralled.

III

The Lady of fair weeping,
      At the garden’s core,
      Sang a song of sweet and sore
      And the after-sleeping;
In the land of Luthany, and the tracts of Elenore.

With sweet-panged singing,
      Sang she through a dream-night’s day;
      That the bowers might stay,
      Birds bate their winging,
Nor the wall of emerald float in wreathèd haze away.

The lily kept its gleaming,
      In her tears (divine conservers!)
      Washèd with sad art;
      And the flowers of dreaming
      Palèd not their fervours,
      For her blood flowed through their nervures;
And the roses were most red, for she dipt them in her heart.

There was never moon,
      Save the white sufficing woman:
      Light most heavenly-human—
      Like the unseen form of sound,
      Sensed invisibly in tune,—
      With a sun-derivèd stole
      Did inaureole
      All her lovely body round;
Lovelily her lucid body with that light was interstrewn.

VII

The sun which lit that garden wholly,
      Low and vibrant visible,
      Tempered glory woke;
      And it seemèd solely
      Like a silver thurible
      Solemnly swung, slowly,
Fuming clouds of golden fire, for a cloud of incense-smoke.

VIII

But woe’s me, and woe’s me,
      For the secrets of her eyes!
      In my visions fearfully
      They are ever shown to be
      As fringèd pools, whereof each lies
      Pallid-dark beneath the skies
      Of a night that is
      But one blear necropolis.
And her eyes a little tremble, in the wind of her own sighs.

Many changes rise on
      Their phantasmal mysteries.
      They grow to an horizon
      Where earth and heaven meet;
      And like a wing that dies on
      The vague twilight-verges,
      Many a sinking dream doth fleet
      Lessening down their secrecies.
      And, as dusk with day converges,
      Their orbs are troublously
Over-gloomed and over-glowed with hope and fear of things to be.

There is a peak on Himalay,
      And on the peak undeluged snow,
      And on the snow not eagles stray;
      There if your strong feet could go,—
      Looking over tow’rd Cathay
      From the never-deluged snow—
      Farthest ken might not survey
Where the peoples underground dwell whom antique fables know.

East, ah, east of Himalay,
      Dwell the nations underground;
      Hiding from the shock of Day,
      For the sun’s uprising-sound:
      Dare not issue from the ground
      At the tumults of the Day,
      So fearfully the sun doth sound
      Clanging up beyond Cathay;
For the great earthquaking sunrise rolling up beyond Cathay.

XII

Lend me, O lend me
      The terrors of that sound,
      That its music may attend me.
      Wrap my chant in thunders round;
While I tell the ancient secrets in that Lady’s singing found.

XIII

On Ararat there grew a vine,
      When Asia from her bathing rose;
      Our first sailor made a twine
      Thereof for his prefiguring brows.
      Canst divine
Where, upon our dusty earth, of that vine a cluster grows?

XIV

On Golgotha there grew a thorn
Round the long-prefigured Brows.
Mourn, O mourn!
For the vine have we the spine? Is this all the Heaven allows?

On Calvary was shook a spear;
Press the point into thy heart—
Joy and fear!
All the spines upon the thorn into curling tendrils start.

XVI

O, dismay!
      I, a wingless mortal, sporting
      With the tresses of the sun?
      I, that dare my hand to lay
      On the thunder in its snorting?
      Ere begun,
Falls my singed song down the sky, even the old Icarian way.

XVII

From the fall precipitant
      These dim snatches of her chant
      Only have remainèd mine;—
      That from spear and thorn alone
      May be grown
For the front of saint or singer any divinizing twine.

XVIII

Her song said that no springing
      Paradise but evermore
      Hangeth on a singing
      That has chords of weeping,
      And that sings the after-sleeping
      To souls which wake too sore.
‘But woe the singer, woe!’ she said; ‘beyond the dead his singing-lore,
      All its art of sweet and sore,
      He learns, in Elenore!’

XIX

Where is the land of Luthany,
Where is the tract of Elenore?
I am bound therefor.

‘Pierce thy heart to find the key;
      With thee take
      Only what none else would keep;
      Learn to dream when thou dost wake,
      Learn to wake when thou dost sleep.
Learn to water joy with tears,
      Learn from fears to vanquish fears;
      To hope, for thou dar’st not despair,
      Exult, for that thou dar’st not grieve;
      Plough thou the rock until it bear;
      Know, for thou else couldst not believe;
      Lose, that the lost thou may’st receive;
      Die, for none other way canst live.
      When earth and heaven lay down their veil,
      And that apocalypse turns thee pale;
      When thy seeing blindeth thee
      To what thy fellow-mortals see;
      When their sight to thee is sightless;
      Their living, death; their light, most lightless;
      Search no more—
Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore.’

XXI

Where is the land of Luthany,
      And where the region Elenore?
      I do faint therefor.
      ‘When to the new eyes of thee
All things by immortal power,
      Near or far,
      Hiddenly
      To each other linkèd are,
      That thou canst not stir a flower
      Without troubling of a star;
      When thy song is shield and mirror
      To the fair snake-curlèd Pain,
      Where thou dar’st affront her terror
      That on her thou may’st attain
      Persean conquest; seek no more,
      O seek no more!
Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore.’

XXII

So sang she, so wept she,
      Through a dream-night’s day;
      And with her magic singing kept she—
      Mystical in music—
      That garden of enchanting
      In visionary May;
      Swayless for my spirit’s haunting,
Thrice-threefold walled with emerald from our mortal mornings grey.

XXIII

And as a necromancer
      Raises from the rose-ash
      The ghost of the rose;
      My heart so made answer
      To her voice’s silver plash,—
      Stirred in reddening flash,
And from out its mortal ruins the purpureal phantom blows.

XXIV

Her tears made dulcet fretting,
      Her voice had no word,
      More than thunder or the bird.
      Yet, unforgetting,
The ravished soul her meanings knew. Mine ears heard not, and I heard.

XXV

When she shall unwind
      All those wiles she wound about me,
      Tears shall break from out me,
      That I cannot find
Music in the holy poets to my wistful want, I doubt me!

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