If Fate, indeed, with fixed and stony face,
Looked death on Aspiration's eager fire,
Stilled the strained chords of Hope's ecstatic lyre,
And mutely mocked life's glory, power, and grace,
The soul, as stolid as its sphinx-faced doom,
With cold and patient scorn might pass into the gloom.
If like the brave fore-fated band whose breasts
Court a beleaguered bastion's iron rain,
Humanity's fleeting myriads not in vain
Might pave fair paths to conquest's hidden crests
"With their dead generations, there are those
Who'd calmly pass to earth dreaming of life's full rose.
But shall it ever flower? If, in sooth,
From dust to dust in endless cycles sum
The hope of all the ages, love is dumb,
And sacrifice may mourn its squandered ruth.
What food hath faith, whose farthest dreams descry
Ephemeral motes that crowd a dull infinity?
Life! and what life? The life that, like a spark,
Quickens a moment deftly-moulded clay —
Teaching it torture's thrill, some passing play
Of cheating rapture, quenched in hastening dark —
Is worthless as a marsh-fire, though it light
Eyes numberless as are the stars of winter's night.
What interest, though selfless as the love
Of self-slain Deity, may live though all
The eternal farce of life ephemeral,
With dreams beyond its destiny, hopes above
Its highest stretch, and pains unmotived, save
As prelude to that birth whose portal is — a grave?
What welfare is there worth a prayer, a pain,
If rounded by the final ill of death?
Or boots it e'en to breathe unburthened breath
Some bare brief days, then stoop to dust again?
To whom, or man or God, hath life such worth
That's but an interlude of dreams 'twixt earth and earth?
Soul-life hath no true glory save the crown
Of immortality. If that's a dream,
Face we our fate, scorn we illusion's gleam,
But shape not lies to dupe us while we drown.
Why mock the man-mime's hour of storm and stress
With ghosts of baseless love and barren selflessness?