Life Poems

Life! Austere arbiter of each man's fate,
By whom he learns that Nature's steadfast laws
Are as decrees immutable; O pause
Your even forward march! Not yet too late
Teach me the needed lesson, when to wait
Inactive as a ship when no wind draws
To stretch the loosened cordage. One implores
Thy clemency, whose wilfulness innate
Has gone uncurbed and roughshod while the years
Have lengthened into decades; now distressed
He knows no rule by which to move or stay,
And teased with restlessness and desperate fears
He dares not watch in silence thy wise way
Bringing about results none could have guessed.

Must all of worth be travailled for, and those
Life's brightest stars rise from a troubled sea?
Must years go by in sad uncertainty
Leaving us doubting whose the conquering blows,
Are we or Fate the victors? Time which shows
All inner meanings will reveal, but we
Shall never know the upshot. Ours to be
Wasted with longing, shattered in the throes,
The agonies of splendid dreams, which day
Dims from our vision, but each night brings back;
We strive to hold their grandeur, and essay
To be the thing we dream. Sudden we lack
The flash of insight, life grows drear and gray,
And hour follows hour, nerveless, slack.

I thought of life
as though it were a space
with walls and floor
and ceiling,
sought to make it solid, fixed,
construct it well,
so I should have security of place.

Then I heard the small stars'
laughter pealing far away.
"Fall!" they cried,
"and fly,
for you cannot break your bones,
nor die.

There is no ground
upon which you can land.
It's all pure ether,
solid as the sand
that fills Egyptian deserts,
solid as the water in the sea.
Let go and fall
and then you will be free."

Always we are following a light,
Always the light recedes; with groping hands
We stretch toward this glory, while the lands
We journey through are hidden from our sight
Dim and mysterious, folded deep in night,
We care not, all our utmost need demands
Is but the light, the light! So still it stands
Surely our own if we exert our might.
Fool! Never can'st thou grasp this fleeting gleam,
Its glowing flame would die if it were caught,
Its value is that it doth always seem
But just a little farther on. Distraught,
But lighted ever onward, we are brought
Upon our way unknowing, in a dream.

Ah, what is life!
'T is but a passing touch upon the world;
A print upon the beaches of the earth
Next flowing wave will wash away; a mark
That something passed; a shadow on a wall,
While looking for the substance, shade departs;
A drop from the vast spirit-cloud of God
That rounds upon a stock, a stone, a leaf,
A moment, then exhales again to God.

Ever the undiscouraged, resolute, struggling soul of man;
(Have former armies fail'd? then we send fresh armies--and fresh again;)
Ever the grappled mystery of all earth's ages old or new;
Ever the eager eyes, hurrahs, the welcome-clapping hands, the loud
applause;
Ever the soul dissatisfied, curious, unconvinced at last;
Struggling to-day the same--battling the same.

If sweet my songs, or these sufficient be
Which I have sung to give renown to me,
I know not; but it misbeseems to strain
At things we have not learned, and toil in vain.
If sweet these songs are not, what profit more
Have I to labour at them o'er and o'er?
If Saturn's son, and changeful Fate, assigned
A double life-time to our mortal kind,
That one in joys and one in woes be past,
Who had his woes first would have joys at last.
But since Heaven wills one life to man should fall,
And this is very brief--too brief for all
We think to do, why should we fret and moil,
And vex ourselves with never-ending toil?
To what end waste we life, exhaust our health
On gainful arts and sigh for greater wealth?
We surely all forget our mortal state--
How brief the life allotted us by Fate!

OUT of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it,--so you ignore
So you make perfect the present,--condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense--
Merged in a moment which gives me at last
You around me for once, you beneath me, above me--
Me--sure that despite of time future, time past,--
This tick of our life-time's one moment you love me!
How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet--
The moment eternal--just that and no more--
When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core
While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!

Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart;
The end lost in dream,
They float past our view,
We only watch their glad, early start.

Freighted with hope,
Crimsoned with joy,
We scatter the leaves of our opening rose;
Their widening scope,
Their distant employ,
We never shall know. And the stream as it flows
Sweeps them away,
Each one is gone
Ever beyond into infinite ways.
We alone stay
While years hurry on,
The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

When I reflect on Heaven's just sway,
Each anxious thought is driven away;
But, ah! too soon, hope's flattering prospect ends,
And in this harass'd soul despair succeeds;
When I compare with human deeds,
What fate those deeds attends.
At each various period changing,
Form'd upon no settled plan,
In a maze of errors ranging,
Veers the precarious life of man.