When torn with passion's insecure delights,
By love's sweet torments, ceaseless changes, worn,
As my swift sphere full twenty days and nights
Did make ere one slow morn and eve were born;
I passed within the dim sweet world of flowers,
Where only harmless lights, not hearts, are broken.
And weep but the sweet-watered summer showers —
World of white joys, cool dews, and peace unspoken.
I started even there among the flowers.
To find the tokens mute of what I fled,
Passions, and forces, and resistless powers.
That have uptorn the world, and stirred the dead.
In secret bowers, of amethyst and rose.
Close wrapped in fragrant golden curtains laid.
Where silver lattices to morn unclose.
The fairy lover clasps his flower-maid.
Patient she yields to his caresses' strength.
And in her simple bosom 'neath fair skies
Love's sweetness bears, till, giving birth at length,
She shuts her tender lids, and sweetly dies.
Ye blessed children of the jocund day!
What mean these mysteries of love and birth?
Caught up like solemn words by babes at play,
Who know not what they babble in their mirth.
Or of one stuff has some Hand made us all,
Baptised us all in one great sequent plan.
Where deep to ever vaster deep may call.
And all their large expression find in man?
Flowers climb to birds, and birds and beasts to man.
And man to God, by some strong instinct driven;
And so the golden ladder upward ran,
Its foot among the flowers, its top in heaven.
All lives man lives; of matter first, then tends
To plants, an animal next unconscious, dim,
A man, a spirit last, the cycle ends,
That all creation weds with God in him.
And if he fall, a world in him doth fall,
All things decline to lower uses; while
The golden chain that bound the each to all,
Falls broken in the dust, a linkless pile.
And love's fair sacraments and mystic rite
In nature, that their consummation find
In wedded hearts, and union infinite
With the divine, of married mind with mind,
Foul symbols of an idol temple grow,
And sun-white love is blackened into lust.
And man's impure doth into flower-cups flow.
And the fair kosmos mourneth in the dust.
O Thou, outtopping all we know or think.
Far off yet nigh, outreaching all we see.
Hold Thou my hand, that so the topmost link
Of the great chain may hold, from us to Thee;
And from my heaven-touched life may downward flow
Prophetic promise of a grace to be;
And flower, and bird, and beast, may upward grow.
And find their highest linked to God in me.
