Poems - Arnold Matthew

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Like spring flowers;

       Our vaunted life is one long funeral.

       Men dig graves with bitter tears

       For their dead hopes; and all,

       Mazed with doubts and sick with fears,

       Count the hours.

      We count the hours! These dreams of ours,

       False and hollow,

       Do we go hence, and find they are not dead?

       Joys we dimly apprehend

       Faces that smiled and fled,

       Hopes born here, and born to end,

       Shall we follow?

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      If, in the silent mind of One all-pure,

       At first imagined lay

       The sacred world; and by procession sure

       From those still deeps, in form and color drest,

       Seasons alternating, and night and day,

       The long-mused thought to north, south, east, and west,

       Took then its all-seen way;

      Oh, waking on a world which thus-wise springs!

       Whether it needs thee count

       Betwixt thy waking and the birth of things

       Ages or hours—oh, waking on life’s stream!

       By lonely pureness to the all-pure fount

       (Only by this thou canst) the colored dream

       Of life remount!

      Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow,

       And faint the city gleams;

       Rare the lone pastoral huts—marvel not thou!

       The solemn peaks but to the stars are known—

       But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;

       Alone the sun arises, and alone

       Spring the great streams.

      But, if the wild unfathered mass no birth

       In divine seats hath known;

       In the blank, echoing solitude, if Earth,

       Rocking her obscure body to and fro,

       Ceases not from all time to heave and groan,

       Unfruitful oft, and at her happiest throe

       Forms, what she forms, alone;

      Oh, seeming sole to awake, thy sun-bathed head

       Piercing the solemn cloud

       Round thy still dreaming brother-world outspread!

       O man, whom Earth, thy long-vexed mother, bare

       Not without joy—so radiant, so endowed

       (Such happy issue crowned her painful care)—

       Be not too proud!

      Oh, when most self-exalted most alone,

       Chief dreamer, own thy dream!

       Thy brother-world stirs at thy feet unknown;

       Who hath a monarch’s hath no brother’s part—

       Yet doth thine inmost soul with yearning teem.

       Oh, what a spasm shakes the dreamer’s heart!

       “I, too, but seem.”

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      “Why, when the world’s great mind

       Hath finally inclined,

       Why,” you say, Critias, “be debating still?

       Why, with these mournful rhymes

       Learned in more languid climes,

       Blame our activity

       Who, with such passionate will,

       Are what we mean to be?”

      Critias, long since, I know

       (For Fate decreed it so),

       Long since the world hath set its heart to live;

       Long since, with credulous zeal

       It turns life’s mighty wheel,

       Still doth for laborers send

       Who still their labor give,

       And still expects an end.

      Yet, as the wheel flies round,

       With no ungrateful sound

       Do adverse voices fall on the world’s ear.

       Deafened by his own stir,

       The rugged laborer

       Caught not till then a sense

       So glowing and so near

       Of his omnipotence.

      So, when the feast grew loud

       In Susa’s palace proud,

       A white-robed slave stole to the great king’s side.

       He spake—the great king heard;

       Felt the slow-rolling word

       Swell his attentive soul;

       Breathed deeply as it died,

       And drained his mighty bowl.

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      Moderate tasks and moderate leisure,

       Quiet living, strict-kept measure

       Both in suffering and in pleasure—

       ’Tis for this thy nature yearns.

      But so many books thou readest,

       But so many schemes thou breedest,

       But so many wishes feedest,

       That thy poor head almost turns.

      And (the world’s so madly jangled,

       Human things so fast entangled)

       Nature’s wish must now be strangled

       For that best which she discerns.

      So it must be! yet, while leading A strained life, while over-feeding, Like the rest, his wit with reading, No small profit that man earns—

      Who through all he meets can steer him,

       Can reject what cannot clear him,

       Cling to what can truly cheer him;

       Who each day more surely learns

      That an impulse, from the distance

       Of his deepest, best existence,

       To the words, “Hope, Light, Persistence,”

       Strongly sets and truly burns.

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      Mist

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