| BETWEEN me and the sunset, like a dome | |
| Against the glory of a world on fire, | |
| Now burned a sudden hill, | |
| Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher, | |
| With nothing on it for the flame to kill | 5 |
| Save one who moved and was alone up there | |
| To loom before the chaos and the glare | |
| As if he were the last god going home | |
| Unto his last desire. | |
| |
| Dark, marvelous, and inscrutable he moved on | 10 |
| Till down the fiery distance he was gone, | |
| Like one of those eternal, remote things | |
| That range across a man’s imaginings | |
| When a sure music fills him and he knows | |
| What he may say thereafter to few men,— | 15 |
| The touch of ages having wrought | |
| An echo and a glimpse of what he thought | |
| A phantom or a legend until then; | |
| For whether lighted over ways that save, | |
| Or lured from all repose, | 20 |
| If he go on too far to find a grave, | |
| Mostly alone he goes. | |
| |
| Even he, who stood where I had found him, | |
| On high with fire all round him, | |
| Who moved along the molten west, | 25 |
| And over the round hill’s crest | |
| That seemed half ready with him to go down, | |
| Flame-bitten and flame-cleft, | |
| As if there were to be no last thing left | |
| Of a nameless unimaginable town,— | 30 |
| Even he who climbed and vanished may have taken | |
| Down to the perils of a depth not known, | |
| From death defended though by men forsaken, | |
| The bread that every man must eat alone; | |
| He may have walked while others hardly dared | 35 |
| Look on to see him stand where many fell; | |
| And upward out of that, as out of hell, | |
| He may have sung and striven | |
| To mount where more of him shall yet be given, | |
| Bereft of all retreat, | 40 |
| To sevenfold heat,— | |
| As on a day when three in Dura shared | |
| The furnace, and were spared | |
| For glory by that king of Babylon | |
| Who made himself so great that God, who heard, | 45 |
| Covered him with long feathers, like a bird. | |
| |
| Again, he may have gone down easily, | |
| By comfortable altitudes, and found, | |
| As always, underneath him solid ground | |
| Whereon to be sufficient and to stand | 50 |
| Possessed already of the promised land, | |
| Far stretched and fair to see: | |
| A good sight, verily, | |
| And one to make the eyes of her who bore him | |
| Shine glad with hidden tears. | 55 |
| Why question of his ease of who before him, | |
| In one place or another where they left | |
| Their names as far behind them as their bones, | |
| And yet by dint of slaughter toil and theft, | |
| And shrewdly sharpened stones, | 60 |
| Carved hard the way for his ascendency | |
| Through deserts of lost years? | |
| Why trouble him now who sees and hears | |
| No more than what his innocence requires, | |
| And therefore to no other height aspires | 65 |
| Than one at which he neither quails nor tires? | |
| He may do more by seeing what he sees | |
| Than others eager for iniquities; | |
| He may, by seeing all things for the best, | |
| Incite futurity to do the rest. | 70 |
| |
| Or with an even likelihood, | |
| He may have met with atrabilious eyes | |
| The fires of time on equal terms and passed | |
| Indifferently down, until at last | |
| His only kind of grandeur would have been, | 75 |
| Apparently, in being seen. | |
| He may have had for evil or for good | |
| No argument; he may have had no care | |
| For what without himself went anywhere | |
| To failure or to glory, and least of all | 80 |
| For such a stale, flamboyant miracle; | |
| He may have been the prophet of an art | |
| Immovable to old idolatries; | |
| He may have been a player without a part, | |
| Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies | 85 |
| For such a flaming way to advertise; | |
| He may have been a painter sick at heart | |
| With Nature’s toiling for a new surprise; | |
| He may have been a cynic, who now, for all | |
| Of anything divine that his effete | 90 |
| Negation may have tasted, | |
| Saw truth in his own image, rather small, | |
| Forbore to fever the ephemeral, | |
| Found any barren height a good retreat | |
| From any swarming street, | 95 |
| And in the sun saw power superbly wasted; | |
| And when the primitive old-fashioned stars | |
| Came out again to shine on joys and wars | |
| More primitive, and all arrayed for doom, | |
| He may have proved a world a sorry thing | 100 |
| In his imagining, | |
| And life a lighted highway to the tomb. | |
| |
| Or, mounting with infirm unsearching tread, | |
| His hopes to chaos led, | |
| He may have stumbled up there from the past, | 105 |
| And with an aching strangeness viewed the last | |
| Abysmal conflagration of his dreams,— | |
| A flame where nothing seems | |
| To burn but flame itself, by nothing fed; | |
| And while it all went out, | 110 |
| Not even the faint anodyne of doubt | |
| May then have eased a painful going down | |
| From pictured heights of power and lost renown, | |
| Revealed at length to his outlived endeavor | |
| Remote and unapproachable forever; | 115 |
| And at his heart there may have gnawed | |
| Sick memories of a dead faith foiled and flawed | |
| And long dishonored by the living death | |
| Assigned alike by chance | |
| To brutes and hierophants; | 120 |
| And anguish fallen on those he loved around him | |
| May once have dealt the last blow to confound him, | |
| And so have left him as death leaves a child, | |
| Who sees it all too near; | |
| And he who knows no young way to forget | 125 |
| May struggle to the tomb unreconciled. | |
| Whatever suns may rise or set | |
| There may be nothing kinder for him here | |
| Than shafts and agonies; | |
| And under these | 130 |
| He may cry out and stay on horribly; | |
| Or, seeing in death too small a thing to fear, | |
| He may go forward like a stoic Roman | |
| Where pangs and terrors in his pathway lie,— | |
| Or, seizing the swift logic of a woman, | 135 |
| Curse God and die. | |
| |
| Or maybe there, like many another one | |
| Who might have stood aloft and looked ahead, | |
| Black-drawn against wild red, | |
| He may have built, unawed by fiery gules | 140 |
| That in him no commotion stirred, | |
| A living reason out of molecules | |
| Why molecules occurred, | |
| And one for smiling when he might have sighed | |
| Had he seen far enough, | 145 |
| And in the same inevitable stuff | |
| Discovered an odd reason too for pride | |
| In being what he must have been by laws | |
| Infrangible and for no kind of cause. | |
| Deterred by no confusion or surprise | 150 |
| He may have seen with his mechanic eyes | |
| A world without a meaning, and had room, | |
| Alone amid magnificence and doom, | |
| To build himself an airy monument | |
| That should, or fail him in his vague intent, | 155 |
| Outlast an accidental universe— | |
| To call it nothing worse— | |
| Or, by the burrowing guile | |
| Of Time disintegrated and effaced, | |
| Like once-remembered mighty trees go down | 160 |
| To ruin, of which by man may now be traced | |
| No part sufficient even to be rotten, | |
| And in the book of things that are forgotten | |
| Is entered as a thing not quite worth while. | |
| He may have been so great | 165 |
| That satraps would have shivered at his frown, | |
| And all he prized alive may rule a state | |
| No larger than a grave that holds a clown; | |
| He may have been a master of his fate, | |
| And of his atoms,—ready as another | 170 |
| In his emergence to exonerate | |
| His father and his mother; | |
| He may have been a captain of a host, | |
| Self-eloquent and ripe for prodigies, | |
| Doomed here to swell by dangerous degrees, | 175 |
| And then give up the ghost. | |
| Nahum’s great grasshoppers were such as these, | |
| Sun-scattered and soon lost. | |
| |
| Whatever the dark road he may have taken, | |
| This man who stood on high | 180 |
| And faced alone the sky, | |
| Whatever drove or lured or guided him,— | |
| A vision answering a faith unshaken, | |
| An easy trust assumed of easy trials, | |
| A sick negation born of weak denials, | 185 |
| A crazed abhorrence of an old condition, | |
| A blind attendance on a brief ambition,— | |
| Whatever stayed him or derided him, | |
| His way was even as ours; | |
| And we, with all our wounds and all our powers, | 190 |
| Must each await alone at his own height | |
| Another darkness or another light; | |
| And there, of our poor self dominion reft, | |
| If inference and reason shun | |
| Hell, Heaven, and Oblivion, | 195 |
| May thwarted will (perforce precarious, | |
| But for our conservation better thus) | |
| Have no misgiving left | |
| Of doing yet what here we leave undone? | |
| Or if unto the last of these we cleave, | 200 |
| Believing or protesting we believe | |
| In such an idle and ephemeral | |
| Florescence of the diabolical,— | |
| If, robbed of two fond old enormities, | |
| Our being had no onward auguries, | 205 |
| What then were this great love of ours to say | |
| For launching other lives to voyage again | |
| A little farther into time and pain, | |
| A little faster in a futile chase | |
| For a kingdom and a power and a Race | 210 |
| That would have still in sight | |
| A manifest end of ashes and eternal night? | |
| Is this the music of the toys we shake | |
| So loud,—as if there might be no mistake | |
| Somewhere in our indomitable will? | 215 |
| Are we no greater than the noise we make | |
| Along one blind atomic pilgrimage | |
| Whereon by crass chance billeted we go | |
| Because our brains and bones and cartilage | |
| Will have it so? | 220 |
| If this we say, then let us all be still | |
| About our share in it, and live and die | |
| More quietly thereby. | |
| |
| Where was he going, this man against the sky? | |
| You know not, nor do I. | 225 |
| But this we know, if we know anything: | |
| That we may laugh and fight and sing | |
| And of our transience here make offering | |
| To an orient Word that will not be erased, | |
| Or, save in incommunicable gleams | 230 |
| Too permanent for dreams, | |
| Be found or known. | |
| No tonic and ambitious irritant | |
| Of increase or of want | |
| Has made an otherwise insensate waste | 235 |
| Of ages overthrown | |
| A ruthless, veiled, implacable foretaste | |
| Of other ages that are still to be | |
| Depleted and rewarded variously | |
| Because a few, by fate’s economy, | 240 |
| Shall seem to move the world the way it goes; | |
| No soft evangel of equality, | |
| Safe-cradled in a communal repose | |
| That huddles into death and may at last | |
| Be covered well with equatorial snows— | 245 |
| And all for what, the devil only knows— | |
| Will aggregate an inkling to confirm | |
| The credit of a sage or of a worm, | |
| Or tell us why one man in five | |
| Should have a care to stay alive | 250 |
| While in his heart he feels no violence | |
| Laid on his humor and intelligence | |
| When infant Science makes a pleasant face | |
| And waves again that hollow toy, the Race; | |
| No planetary trap where souls are wrought | 255 |
| For nothing but the sake of being caught | |
| And sent again to nothing will attune | |
| Itself to any key of any reason | |
| Why man should hunger through another season | |
| To find out why ’twere better late than soon | 260 |
| To go away and let the sun and moon | |
| And all the silly stars illuminate | |
| A place for creeping things, | |
| And those that root and trumpet and have wings, | |
| And herd and ruminate, | 265 |
| Or dive and flash and poise in rivers and seas, | |
| Or by their loyal tails in lofty trees | |
| Hang screeching lewd victorious derision | |
| Of man’s immortal vision. | |
| Shall we, because Eternity records | 270 |
| Too vast an answer for the time-born words | |
| We spell, whereof so many are dead that once | |
| In our capricious lexicons | |
| Were so alive and final, hear no more | |
| The Word itself, the living word | 275 |
| That none alive has ever heard | |
| Or ever spelt, | |
| And few have ever felt | |
| Without the fears and old surrenderings | |
| And terrors that began | 280 |
| When Death let fall a feather from his wings | |
| And humbled the first man? | |
| Because the weight of our humility, | |
| Wherefrom we gain | |
| A little wisdom and much pain, | 285 |
| Falls here too sore and there too tedious, | |
| Are we in anguish or complacency, | |
| Not looking far enough ahead | |
| To see by what mad couriers we are led | |
| Along the roads of the ridiculous, | 290 |
| To pity ourselves and laugh at faith | |
| And while we curse life bear it? | |
| And if we see the soul’s dead end in death, | |
| Are we to fear it? | |
| What folly is here that has not yet a name | 295 |
| Unless we say outright that we are liars? | |
| What have we seen beyond our sunset fires | |
| That lights again the way by which we came? | |
| Why pay we such a price, and one we give | |
| So clamoringly, for each racked empty day | 300 |
| That leads one more last human hope away, | |
| As quiet fiends would lead past our crazed eyes | |
| Our children to an unseen sacrifice? | |
| If after all that we have lived and thought, | |
| All comes to Nought,— | 305 |
| If there be nothing after Now, | |
| And we be nothing anyhow, | |
| And we know that,—why live? | |
| ’Twere sure but weaklings’ vain distress | |
| To suffer dungeons where so many doors | 310 |
| Will open on the cold eternal shores | |
| That look sheer down | |
| To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness | |
| Where all who know may drown. | |
