10 Best Famous Indifference Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Indifference poems. This is a select list of the best famous Indifference poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Indifference poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of indifference poems.

• All Famous Indifference Poems

The night has been long,
The wound has been deep,
The pit has been dark,
And the walls have been steep.

Under a dead blue sky on a distant beach,
I was dragged by my braids just beyond your reach.
Your hands were tied, your mouth was bound,
You couldn't even call out my name.
You were helpless and so was I,
But unfortunately throughout history
You've worn a badge of shame.

I say, the night has been long,
The wound has been deep,
The pit has been dark
And the walls have been steep.

But today, voices of old spirit sound
Speak to us in words profound,
Across the years, across the centuries,
Across the oceans, and across the seas.
They say, draw near to one another,
Save your race.
You have been paid for in a distant place,
The old ones remind us that slavery's chains
Have paid for our freedom again and again.

The night has been long,
The pit has been deep,
The night has been dark,
And the walls have been steep.

The hells we have lived through and live through still,
Have sharpened our senses and toughened our will.
The night has been long.
This morning I look through your anguish
Right down to your soul.
I know that with each other we can make ourselves whole.
I look through the posture and past your disguise,
And see your love for family in your big brown eyes.

I say, clap hands and let's come together in this meeting ground,
I say, clap hands and let's deal with each other with love,
I say, clap hands and let us get from the low road of indifference,
Clap hands, let us come together and reveal our hearts,
Let us come together and revise our spirits,
Let us come together and cleanse our souls,
Clap hands, let's leave the preening
And stop impostering our own history.
Clap hands, call the spirits back from the ledge,
Clap hands, let us invite joy into our conversation,
Courtesy into our bedrooms,
Gentleness into our kitchen,
Care into our nursery.

The ancestors remind us, despite the history of pain
We are a going-on people who will rise again.

And still we rise.

Poem read at the Million Man March

 Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there's a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves--and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!

But we, my love!--doth a like spell benumb
Our hearts, our voices?--must we too be dumb?

Ah! well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment, can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchain'd;
For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain'd!

Fate, which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be--
By what distractions he would be possess'd,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity--
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being's law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us--to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves--
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well--but 't#is not true!
And then we will no more be rack'd
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.
Only--but this is rare--
When a belov{'e}d hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen'd ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

 Indeed I live in the dark ages!
A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens
A hard heart. He who laughs
Has not yet heard
The terrible tidings.

Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
And he who walks calmly across the street,
Is he not out of reach of his friends
In trouble?

It is true: I earn my living
But, believe me, it is only an accident.
Nothing that I do entitles me to eat my fill.
By chance I was spared. (If my luck leaves me
I am lost.)

They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink
When my food is snatched from the hungry
And my glass of water belongs to the thirsty?
And yet I eat and drink.

I would gladly be wise.
The old books tell us what wisdom is:
Avoid the strife of the world
Live out your little time
Fearing no one
Using no violence
Returning good for evil --
Not fulfillment of desire but forgetfulness
Passes for wisdom.
I can do none of this:
Indeed I live in the dark ages!

2.

I came to the cities in a time of disorder
When hunger ruled.
I came among men in a time of uprising
And I revolted with them.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

I ate my food between massacres.
The shadow of murder lay upon my sleep.
And when I loved, I loved with indifference.
I looked upon nature with impatience.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

In my time streets led to the quicksand.
Speech betrayed me to the slaughterer.
There was little I could do. But without me
The rulers would have been more secure. This was my hope.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

3.

You, who shall emerge from the flood
In which we are sinking,
Think --
When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also of the dark time
That brought them forth.

For we went,changing our country more often than our shoes.
In the class war, despairing
When there was only injustice and no resistance.

For we knew only too well:
Even the hatred of squalor
Makes the brow grow stern.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.

But you, when at last it comes to pass
That man can help his fellow man,
Do no judge us
Too harshly.

translated by H. R. Hays

 (ALCAICS)


Confused, he found her lavishing feminine 
Gold upon clay, and found her inscrutable; 
And yet she smiled. Why, then, should horrors 
Be as they were, without end, her playthings? 

And why were dead years hungrily telling her 
Lies of the dead, who told them again to her? 
If now she knew, there might be kindness 
Clamoring yet where a faith lay stifled. 

A little faith in him, and the ruinous 
Past would be for time to annihilate,
And wash out, like a tide that washes 
Out of the sand what a child has drawn there. 

God, what a shining handful of happiness, 
Made out of days and out of eternities, 
Were now the pulsing end of patience—
Could he but have what a ghost had stolen! 

What was a man before him, or ten of them, 
While he was here alive who could answer them, 
And in their teeth fling confirmations 
Harder than agates against an egg-shell?

But now the man was dead, and would come again 
Never, though she might honor ineffably 
The flimsy wraith of him she conjured 
Out of a dream with his wand of absence. 

And if the truth were now but a mummery,
Meriting pride’s implacable irony, 
So much the worse for pride. Moreover, 
Save her or fail, there was conscience always. 

Meanwhile, a few misgivings of innocence, 
Imploring to be sheltered and credited,
Were not amiss when she revealed them. 
Whether she struggled or not, he saw them. 

Also, he saw that while she was hearing him 
Her eyes had more and more of the past in them; 
And while he told what cautious honor
Told him was all he had best be sure of, 

He wondered once or twice, inadvertently, 
Where shifting winds were driving his argosies, 
Long anchored and as long unladen, 
Over the foam for the golden chances.

“If men were not for killing so carelessly, 
And women were for wiser endurances,” 
He said, “we might have yet a world here 
Fitter for Truth to be seen abroad in; 

“If Truth were not so strange in her nakedness,
And we were less forbidden to look at it, 
We might not have to look.” He stared then 
Down at the sand where the tide threw forward 

Its cold, unconquered lines, that unceasingly 
Foamed against hope, and fell. He was calm enough,
Although he knew he might be silenced 
Out of all calm; and the night was coming. 

“I climb for you the peak of his infamy 
That you may choose your fall if you cling to it. 
No more for me unless you say more.
All you have left of a dream defends you: 

“The truth may be as evil an augury 
As it was needful now for the two of us. 
We cannot have the dead between us. 
Tell me to go, and I go.”—She pondered:

“What you believe is right for the two of us 
Makes it as right that you are not one of us. 
If this be needful truth you tell me, 
Spare me, and let me have lies hereafter.” 

She gazed away where shadows were covering
The whole cold ocean’s healing indifference. 
No ship was coming. When the darkness 
Fell, she was there, and alone, still gazing.

 Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there's a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves--and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!

But we, my love!--doth a like spell benumb
Our hearts, our voices?--must we too be dumb?

Ah! well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment, can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchain'd;
For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain'd!

Fate, which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be--
By what distractions he would be possess'd,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity--
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being's law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us--to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves--
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well--but 't#is not true!
And then we will no more be rack'd
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.
Only--but this is rare--
When a belov{'e}d hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen'd ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

 Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,
one a hack's hired prose, I earn
me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,

tan, burn
to slough off
this live of ocean that's self-love.

To change your language you must change your life.

I cannot right old wrongs.
Waves tire of horizon and return.
Gulls screech with rusty tongues

Above the beached, rotting pirogues,
they were a venomous beaked cloud at Charlotteville.

One I thought love of country was enough,
now, even if I chose, there is no room at the trough.

I watch the best minds rot like dogs
for scraps of flavour.
I am nearing middle
age, burnt skin
peels from my hand like paper, onion-thin,
like Peer Gynt's riddle.

At heart there is nothing, not the dread
of death. I know to many dead.
They're all familiar, all in character,

even how they died. On fire,
the flesh no longer fears that furnace mouth
of earth,

that kiln or ashpit of the sun,
nor this clouding, unclouding sickle moon
withering this beach again like a blank page.

All its indifference is a different rage.

 Gawaine, aware again of Lancelot 
In the King’s garden, coughed and followed him; 
Whereat he turned and stood with folded arms 
And weary-waiting eyes, cold and half-closed— 
Hard eyes, where doubts at war with memories
Fanned a sad wrath. “Why frown upon a friend? 
Few live that have too many,” Gawaine said, 
And wished unsaid, so thinly came the light 
Between the narrowing lids at which he gazed. 
“And who of us are they that name their friends?” 
Lancelot said. “They live that have not any. 
Why do they live, Gawaine? Ask why, and answer.” 

Two men of an elected eminence, 
They stood for a time silent. Then Gawaine, 
Acknowledging the ghost of what was gone,
Put out his hand: “Rather, I say, why ask? 
If I be not the friend of Lancelot, 
May I be nailed alive along the ground 
And emmets eat me dead. If I be not 
The friend of Lancelot, may I be fried
With other liars in the pans of hell. 
What item otherwise of immolation 
Your Darkness may invent, be it mine to endure 
And yours to gloat on. For the time between, 
Consider this thing you see that is my hand.
If once, it has been yours a thousand times; 
Why not again? Gawaine has never lied 
To Lancelot; and this, of all wrong days— 
This day before the day when you go south 
To God knows what accomplishment of exile—
Were surely an ill day for lies to find 
An issue or a cause or an occasion. 
King Ban your father and King Lot my father, 
Were they alive, would shake their heads in sorrow 
To see us as we are, and I shake mine
In wonder. Will you take my hand, or no? 
Strong as I am, I do not hold it out 
For ever and on air. You see—my hand.” 
Lancelot gave his hand there to Gawaine, 
Who took it, held it, and then let it go,
Chagrined with its indifference. 
“Yes, Gawaine, 
I go tomorrow, and I wish you well; 
You and your brothers, Gareth, Gaheris,— 
And Agravaine; yes, even Agravaine,
Whose tongue has told all Camelot and all Britain 
More lies than yet have hatched of Modred’s envy. 
You say that you have never lied to me, 
And I believe it so. Let it be so. 
For now and always. Gawaine, I wish you well.
Tomorrow I go south, as Merlin went, 
But not for Merlin’s end. I go, Gawaine, 
And leave you to your ways. There are ways left.” 
“There are three ways I know, three famous ways, 
And all in Holy Writ,” Gawaine said, smiling:
“The snake’s way and the eagle’s way are two, 
And then we have a man’s way with a maid— 
Or with a woman who is not a maid. 
Your late way is to send all women scudding, 
To the last flash of the last cramoisy,
While you go south to find the fires of God. 
Since we came back again to Camelot 
From our immortal Quest—I came back first— 
No man has known you for the man you were 
Before you saw whatever ’t was you saw,
To make so little of kings and queens and friends 
Thereafter. Modred? Agravaine? My brothers? 
And what if they be brothers? What are brothers, 
If they be not our friends, your friends and mine? 
You turn away, and my words are no mark
On you affection or your memory? 
So be it then, if so it is to be. 
God save you, Lancelot; for by Saint Stephen, 
You are no more than man to save yourself.” 

“Gawaine, I do not say that you are wrong,
Or that you are ill-seasoned in your lightness; 
You say that all you know is what you saw, 
And on your own averment you saw nothing. 
Your spoken word, Gawaine, I have not weighed 
In those unhappy scales of inference
That have no beam but one made out of hates 
And fears, and venomous conjecturings; 
Your tongue is not the sword that urges me 
Now out of Camelot. Two other swords 
There are that are awake, and in their scabbards
Are parching for the blood of Lancelot. 
Yet I go not away for fear of them, 
But for a sharper care. You say the truth, 
But not when you contend the fires of God 
Are my one fear,—for there is one fear more.
Therefore I go. Gawaine, I wish you well.” 

“Well-wishing in a way is well enough; 
So, in a way, is caution; so, in a way, 
Are leeches, neatherds, and astrologers. 
Lancelot, listen. Sit you down and listen:
You talk of swords and fears and banishment. 
Two swords, you say; Modred and Agravaine, 
You mean. Had you meant Gaheris and Gareth, 
Or willed an evil on them, I should welcome 
And hasten your farewell. But Agravaine
Hears little what I say; his ears are Modred’s. 
The King is Modred’s father, and the Queen 
A prepossession of Modred’s lunacy. 
So much for my two brothers whom you fear, 
Not fearing for yourself. I say to you,
Fear not for anything—and so be wise 
And amiable again as heretofore; 
Let Modred have his humor, and Agravaine 
His tongue. The two of them have done their worst, 
And having done their worst, what have they done?
A whisper now and then, a chirrup or so 
In corners,—and what else? Ask what, and answer.” 

Still with a frown that had no faith in it, 
Lancelot, pitying Gawaine’s lost endeavour 
To make an evil jest of evidence,
Sat fronting him with a remote forbearance— 
Whether for Gawaine blind or Gawaine false, 
Or both, or neither, he could not say yet, 
If ever; and to himself he said no more 
Than he said now aloud: “What else, Gawaine?
What else, am I to say? Then ruin, I say; 
Destruction, dissolution, desolation, 
I say,—should I compound with jeopardy now. 
For there are more than whispers here, Gawaine: 
The way that we have gone so long together
Has underneath our feet, without our will, 
Become a twofold faring. Yours, I trust, 
May lead you always on, as it has led you, 
To praise and to much joy. Mine, I believe, 
Leads off to battles that are not yet fought,
And to the Light that once had blinded me. 
When I came back from seeing what I saw, 
I saw no place for me in Camelot. 
There is no place for me in Camelot. 
There is no place for me save where the Light
May lead me; and to that place I shall go. 
Meanwhile I lay upon your soul no load 
Of counsel or of empty admonition; 
Only I ask of you, should strife arise 
In Camelot, to remember, if you may,
That you’ve an ardor that outruns your reason, 
Also a glamour that outshines your guile; 
And you are a strange hater. I know that; 
And I’m in fortune that you hate not me. 
Yet while we have our sins to dream about,
Time has done worse for time than in our making; 
Albeit there may be sundry falterings 
And falls against us in the Book of Man.” 

“Praise Adam, you are mellowing at last! 
I’ve always liked this world, and would so still;
And if it is your new Light leads you on 
To such an admirable gait, for God’s sake, 
Follow it, follow it, follow it, Lancelot; 
Follow it as you never followed glory. 
Once I believed that I was on the way
That you call yours, but I came home again 
To Camelot—and Camelot was right, 
For the world knows its own that knows not you; 
You are a thing too vaporous to be sharing 
The carnal feast of life. You mow down men
Like elder-stems, and you leave women sighing 
For one more sight of you; but they do wrong. 
You are a man of mist, and have no shadow. 
God save you, Lancelot. If I laugh at you, 
I laugh in envy and in admiration.”

The joyless evanescence of a smile, 
Discovered on the face of Lancelot 
By Gawaine’s unrelenting vigilance, 
Wavered, and with a sullen change went out; 
And then there was the music of a woman
Laughing behind them, and a woman spoke: 
“Gawaine, you said ‘God save you, Lancelot.’ 
Why should He save him any more to-day 
Than on another day? What has he done, 
Gawaine, that God should save him?” Guinevere,
With many questions in her dark blue eyes 
And one gay jewel in her golden hair, 
Had come upon the two of them unseen, 
Till now she was a russet apparition 
At which the two arose—one with a dash
Of easy leisure in his courtliness, 
One with a stately calm that might have pleased 
The Queen of a strange land indifferently. 
The firm incisive languor of her speech, 
Heard once, was heard through battles: “Lancelot,
What have you done to-day that God should save you? 
What has he done, Gawaine, that God should save him? 
I grieve that you two pinks of chivalry 
Should be so near me in my desolation, 
And I, poor soul alone, know nothing of it.
What has he done, Gawaine?” 

With all her poise, 
To Gawaine’s undeceived urbanity 
She was less queen than woman for the nonce, 
And in her eyes there was a flickering
Of a still fear that would not be veiled wholly 
With any mask of mannered nonchalance. 
“What has he done? Madam, attend your nephew; 
And learn from him, in your incertitude, 
That this inordinate man Lancelot,
This engine of renown, this hewer down daily 
Of potent men by scores in our late warfare, 
Has now inside his head a foreign fever 
That urges him away to the last edge 
Of everything, there to efface himself
In ecstasy, and so be done with us. 
Hereafter, peradventure certain birds 
Will perch in meditation on his bones, 
Quite as if they were some poor sailor’s bones, 
Or felon’s jettisoned, or fisherman’s,
Or fowler’s bones, or Mark of Cornwall’s bones. 
In fine, this flower of men that was our comrade 
Shall be for us no more, from this day on, 
Than a much remembered Frenchman far away. 
Magnanimously I leave you now to prize
Your final sight of him; and leaving you, 
I leave the sun to shine for him alone, 
Whiles I grope on to gloom. Madam, farewell; 
And you, contrarious Lancelot, farewell.”

 Morning, a glass door, flashes
Gold names off the new city,
Whose white shelves and domes travel
The slow sky all day.
I land to stay here;
And the windows flock open
And the curtains fly out like doves
And a past dries in a wind.

Now let me lie down, under
A wide-branched indifference,
Shovel-faces like pennies
Down the back of the mind,
Find voices coined to
An argot of motor-horns,
And let the cluttered-up houses
Keep their thick lives to themselves.

For this ignorance of me
Seems a kind of innocence.
Fast enough I shall wound it:
Let me breathe till then
Its milk-aired Eden,
Till my own life impound it-
Slow-falling; grey-veil-hung; a theft,
A style of dying only.

 I
When I considered it too closely, when I wore it like an element
 and smelt it like water,
Life is become less lovely, the net nearer than the skin, a
 little troublesome, a little terrible.

I pledged myself awhile ago not to seek refuge, neither in death
 nor in a walled garden,
In lies nor gated loyalties, nor in the gates of contempt, that
 easily lock the world out of doors.

Here on the rock it is great and beautiful, here on the foam-wet
 granite sea-fang it is easy to praise
Life and water and the shining stones: but whose cattle are the
 herds of the people that one should love them?

If they were yours, then you might take a cattle-breeder's
 delight in the herds of the future. Not yours.
Where the power ends let love, before it sours to jealousy.
 Leave the joys of government to Caesar.

Who is born when the world wanes, when the brave soul of the
 world falls on decay in the flesh increasing
Comes one with a great level mind, sufficient vision, sufficient
 blindness, and clemency for love.

This is the breath of rottenness I smelt; from the world
 waiting, stalled between storms, decaying a little,
Bitterly afraid to be hurt, but knowing it cannot draw the
 savior Caesar but out of the blood-bath.

The apes of Christ lift up their hands to praise love: but
 wisdom without love is the present savior,
Power without hatred, mind like a many-bladed machine subduing
 the world with deep indifference.

The apes of Christ itch for a sickness they have never known;
 words and the little envies will hardly
Measure against that blinding fire behind the tragic eyes they
 have never dared to confront.

II
Point Lobos lies over the hollowed water like a humped whale
 swimming to shoal; Point Lobos
Was wounded with that fire; the hills at Point Sur endured it;
 the palace at Thebes; the hill Calvary.

Out of incestuous love power and then ruin. A man forcing the
 imaginations of men,
Possessing with love and power the people: a man defiling his
 own household with impious desire.

King Oedipus reeling blinded from the palace doorway, red tears
 pouring from the torn pits
Under the forehead; and the young Jew writhing on the domed hill
 in the earthquake, against the eclipse

Frightfully uplifted for having turned inward to love the
 people: -that root was so sweet O dreadful agonist? -
I saw the same pierced feet, that walked in the same crime to
 its expiation; I heard the same cry.

A bad mountain to build your world on. Am I another keeper of
 the people, that on my own shore,
On the gray rock, by the grooved mass of the ocean, the
 sicknesses I left behind me concern me?

Here where the surf has come incredible ways out of the splendid
 west, over the deeps
Light nor life sounds forever; here where enormous sundowns
 flower and burn through color to quietness;

Then the ecstasy of the stars is present? As for the people, I
 have found my rock, let them find theirs.
Let them lie down at Caesar's feet and be saved; and he in his
 time reap their daggers of gratitude.

III
Yet I am the one made pledges against the refuge contempt, that
 easily locks the world out of doors.
This people as much as the sea-granite is part of the God from
 whom I desire not to be fugitive.

I see them: they are always crying. The shored Pacific makes
 perpetual music, and the stone mountains
Their music of silence, the stars blow long pipings of light:
 the people are always crying in their hearts.

One need not pity; certainly one must not love. But who has seen
 peace, if he should tell them where peace
Lives in the world...they would be powerless to understand; and
 he is not willing to be reinvolved.

IV
How should one caught in the stone of his own person dare tell
 the people anything but relative to that?
But if a man could hold in his mind all the conditions at once,
 of man and woman, of civilized

And barbarous, of sick and well, of happy and under torture, of
 living and dead, of human and not
Human, and dimly all the human future: -what should persuade him
 to speak? And what could his words change?

The mountain ahead of the world is not forming but fixed. But
 the man's words would be fixed also,
Part of that mountain, under equal compulsion; under the same
 present compulsion in the iron consistency.

And nobody sees good or evil but out of a brain a hundred
 centuries quieted, some desert
Prophet's, a man humped like a camel, gone mad between the mud-
 walled village and the mountain sepulchres.

V
Broad wagons before sunrise bring food into the city from the
 open farms, and the people are fed.
They import and they consume reality. Before sunrise a hawk in
 the desert made them their thoughts.

VI
Here is an anxious people, rank with suppressed
 bloodthirstiness. Among the mild and unwarlike
Gautama needed but live greatly and be heard, Confucius needed
 but live greatly and be heard:

This people has not outgrown blood-sacrifice, one must writhe on
 the high cross to catch at their memories;
The price is known. I have quieted love; for love of the people
 I would not do it. For power I would do it.

--But that stands against reason: what is power to a dead man,
 dead under torture? --What is power to a man
Living, after the flesh is content? Reason is never a root,
 neither of act nor desire.

For power living I would never do it; they'are not delightful to
 touch, one wants to be separate. For power
After the nerves are put away underground, to lighten the
 abstract unborn children toward peace...

A man might have paid anguish indeed. Except he had found the
 standing sea-rock that even this last
Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace
 that quiets the desire even of praising it.

VII
Yet look: are they not pitiable? No: if they lived forever they
 would be pitiable:
But a huge gift reserved quite overwhelms them at the end; they
 are able then to be still and not cry.

And having touched a little of the beauty and seen a little of
 the beauty of things, magically grow
Across the funeral fire or the hidden stench of burial
 themselves into the beauty they admired,

Themselves into the God, themselves into the sacred steep
 unconsciousness they used to mimic
Asleep between lamp's death and dawn, while the last drunkard
 stumbled homeward down the dark street.

They are not to be pitied but very fortunate; they need no
 savior, salvation comes and takes them by force,
It gathers them into the great kingdoms of dust and stone, the
 blown storms, the stream's-end ocean.

With this advantage over their granite grave-marks, of having
 realized the petulant human consciousness
Before, and then the greatness, the peace: drunk from both
 pitchers: these to be pitied? These not fortunate

But while he lives let each man make his health in his mind, to
 love the coast opposite humanity
And so be freed of love, laying it like bread on the waters; it
 is worst turned inward, it is best shot farthest.

Love, the mad wine of good and evil, the saint's and murderer's,
 the mote in the eye that makes its object
Shine the sun black; the trap in which it is better to catch the
 inhuman God than the hunter's own image.

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
   Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
   By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
 
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
   Thou madest Life in man and brute;
   Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.
 
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.
 
Thou seemest human and divine,
   The highest, holiest manhood, thou.
   Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.
 
Our little systems have their day;
   They have their day and cease to be:
   They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.
 
We have but faith: we cannot know;
   For knowledge is of things we see
   And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.
 
Let knowledge grow from more to more,
   But more of reverence in us dwell;
   That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
 
But vaster. We are fools and slight;
   We mock thee when we do not fear:
   But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.
 
Forgive what seem'd my sin in me;
   What seem'd my worth since I began;
   For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.
 
Forgive my grief for one removed,
   Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
   I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.
 
Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
   Confusions of a wasted youth;
   Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise.
 
I
I held it truth, with him who sings
   To one clear harp in divers tones,
   That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
 
But who shall so forecast the years
   And find in loss a gain to match?
   Or reach a hand thro' time to catch
The far-off interest of tears?
 
Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd,
   Let darkness keep her raven gloss:
   Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
To dance with death, to beat the ground,
 
Than that the victor Hours should scorn
   The long result of love, and boast,
   `Behold the man that loved and lost,
But all he was is overworn.'
 
II
Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
   That name the under-lying dead,
   Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.
 
The seasons bring the flower again,
   And bring the firstling to the flock;
   And in the dusk of thee, the clock
Beats out the little lives of men.
 
O, not for thee the glow, the bloom,
   Who changest not in any gale,
   Nor branding summer suns avail
To touch thy thousand years of gloom:
 
And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
   Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
   I seem to fail from out my blood
And grow incorporate into thee.
 
III
O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
   O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
   O sweet and bitter in a breath,
What whispers from thy lying lip?
 
'The stars,' she whispers, `blindly run;
   A web is wov'n across the sky;
   From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun:
 
'And all the phantom, Nature, stands—
   With all the music in her tone,
   A hollow echo of my own,—
A hollow form with empty hands.'
 
And shall I take a thing so blind,
   Embrace her as my natural good;
   Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
Upon the threshold of the mind?
 
IV
To Sleep I give my powers away;
   My will is bondsman to the dark;
   I sit within a helmless bark,
And with my heart I muse and say:
 
O heart, how fares it with thee now,
   That thou should'st fail from thy desire,
   Who scarcely darest to inquire,
'What is it makes me beat so low?'
 
Something it is which thou hast lost,
   Some pleasure from thine early years.
   Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!
 
Such clouds of nameless trouble cross
   All night below the darken'd eyes;
   With morning wakes the will, and cries, 
'Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.'
 
V
I sometimes hold it half a sin
   To put in words the grief I feel;
   For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
 
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
   A use in measured language lies;
   The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
 
In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
   Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
   But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.
 
VI
One writes, that `Other friends remain,'
   That `Loss is common to the race'—
   And common is the commonplace,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.
 
That loss is common would not make
   My own less bitter, rather more:
   Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.
 
O father, wheresoe'er thou be,
   Who pledgest now thy gallant son;
   A shot, ere half thy draught be done,
Hath still'd the life that beat from thee.
 
O mother, praying God will save
   Thy sailor,—while thy head is bow'd,
   His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud
Drops in his vast and wandering grave.
 
Ye know no more than I who wrought
   At that last hour to please him well;
   Who mused on all I had to tell,
And something written, something thought;
 
Expecting still his advent home;
   And ever met him on his way
   With wishes, thinking, `here to-day,'
Or `here to-morrow will he come.'
 
O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove,
   That sittest ranging golden hair;
   And glad to find thyself so fair,
Poor child, that waitest for thy love!
 
For now her father's chimney glows
   In expectation of a guest;
   And thinking `this will please him best,'
She takes a riband or a rose;
 
For he will see them on to-night;
   And with the thought her colour burns;
   And, having left the glass, she turns
Once more to set a ringlet right;
 
And, even when she turn'd, the curse
   Had fallen, and her future Lord
   Was drown'd in passing thro' the ford,
Or kill'd in falling from his horse.
 
O what to her shall be the end?
   And what to me remains of good?
   To her, perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend.
 
VII
Dark house, by which once more I stand
   Here in the long unlovely street,
   Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
 
A hand that can be clasp'd no more—
   Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
   And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
 
He is not here; but far away
   The noise of life begins again,
   And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
 
VIII
A happy lover who has come
   To look on her that loves him well,
   Who 'lights and rings the gateway bell,
And learns her gone and far from home;
 
He saddens, all the magic light
   Dies off at once from bower and hall,
   And all the place is dark, and all
The chambers emptied of delight:
 
So find I every pleasant spot
   In which we two were wont to meet,
   The field, the chamber, and the street,
For all is dark where thou art not.
 
Yet as that other, wandering there
   In those deserted walks, may find
   A flower beat with rain and wind,
Which once she foster'd up with care;
 
So seems it in my deep regret,
   O my forsaken heart, with thee
   And this poor flower of poesy
Which little cared for fades not yet.
 
But since it pleased a vanish'd eye,
   I go to plant it on his tomb,
   That if it can it there may bloom,
Or, dying, there at least may die.
 
IX
Fair ship, that from the Italian shore
   Sailest the placid ocean-plains
   With my lost Arthur's loved remains,
Spread thy full wings, and waft him o'er.
 
So draw him home to those that mourn
   In vain; a favourable speed
   Ruffle thy mirror'd mast, and lead
Thro' prosperous floods his holy urn.
 
All night no ruder air perplex
   Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright
   As our pure love, thro' early light
Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.
 
Sphere all your lights around, above;
   Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;
   Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,
My friend, the brother of my love;
 
My Arthur, whom I shall not see
   Till all my widow'd race be run;
   Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.
 
X
I hear the noise about thy keel;
   I hear the bell struck in the night:
   I see the cabin-window bright;
I see the sailor at the wheel.
 
Thou bring'st the sailor to his wife,
   And travell'd men from foreign lands;
   And letters unto trembling hands;
And, thy dark freight, a vanish'd life.
 
So bring him; we have idle dreams:
   This look of quiet flatters thus
   Our home-bred fancies. O to us,
The fools of habit, sweeter seems
 
To rest beneath the clover sod,
   That takes the sunshine and the rains,
   Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God;
 
Than if with thee the roaring wells
   Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine;
   And hands so often clasp'd in mine,
Should toss with tangle and with shells.
 
XI
Calm is the morn without a sound,
   Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
   And only thro' the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground:
 
Calm and deep peace on this high world,
   And on these dews that drench the furze,
   And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold:
 
Calm and still light on yon great plain
   That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
   And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main:
 
Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
   These leaves that redden to the fall;
   And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair:
 
Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,
   And waves that sway themselves in rest,
   And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.
 
XII
Lo, as a dove when up she springs
   To bear thro' Heaven a tale of woe,
   Some dolorous message knit below
The wild pulsation of her wings;
 
Like her I go; I cannot stay;
   I leave this mortal ark behind,
   A weight of nerves without a mind,
And leave the cliffs, and haste away
 
O'er ocean-mirrors rounded large,
   And reach the glow of southern skies,
   And see the sails at distance rise,
And linger weeping on the marge,
 
And saying; `Comes he thus, my friend?
   Is this the end of all my care?'
   And circle moaning in the air:
'Is this the end? Is this the end?'
 
And forward dart again, and play
   About the prow, and back return
   To where the body sits, and learn
That I have been an hour away.
 
XIII
Tears of the widower, when he sees
   A late-lost form that sleep reveals,
   And moves his doubtful arms, and feels
Her place is empty, fall like these;
 
Which weep a loss for ever new,
   A void where heart on heart reposed;
   And, where warm hands have prest and closed,
Silence, till I be silent too.
 
Which weep the comrade of my choice,
   An awful thought, a life removed,
   The human-hearted man I loved,
A Spirit, not a breathing voice.
 
Come, Time, and teach me, many years,
   I do not suffer in a dream;
   For now so strange do these things seem,
Mine eyes have leisure for their tears;
 
My fancies time to rise on wing,
   And glance about the approaching sails,
   As tho' they brought but merchants' bales,
And not the burthen that they bring.
 
XIV
If one should bring me this report,
   That thou hadst touch'd the land to-day,
   And I went down unto the quay,
And found thee lying in the port;
 
And standing, muffled round with woe,
   Should see thy passengers in rank
   Come stepping lightly down the plank,
And beckoning unto those they know;
 
And if along with these should come
   The man I held as half-divine;
   Should strike a sudden hand in mine,
And ask a thousand things of home;
 
And I should tell him all my pain,
   And how my life had droop'd of late,
   And he should sorrow o'er my state
And marvel what possess'd my brain;
 
And I perceived no touch of change,
   No hint of death in all his frame,
   But found him all in all the same,
I should not feel it to be strange.
 
XV
To-night the winds begin to rise
   And roar from yonder dropping day:
   The last red leaf is whirl'd away,
The rooks are blown about the skies;
 
The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd,
   The cattle huddled on the lea;
   And wildly dash'd on tower and tree
The sunbeam strikes along the world:
 
And but for fancies, which aver
   That all thy motions gently pass
   Athwart a plane of molten glass,
I scarce could brook the strain and stir
 
That makes the barren branches loud;
   And but for fear it is not so,
   The wild unrest that lives in woe
Would dote and pore on yonder cloud
 
That rises upward always higher,
   And onward drags a labouring breast,
   And topples round the dreary west,
A looming bastion fringed with fire.
 
XVI
What words are these have falle'n from me?
   Can calm despair and wild unrest
   Be tenants of a single breast,
Or sorrow such a changeling be?
 
Or cloth she only seem to take
   The touch of change in calm or storm;
   But knows no more of transient form
In her deep self, than some dead lake
 
That holds the shadow of a lark
   Hung in the shadow of a heaven?
   Or has the shock, so harshly given,
Confused me like the unhappy bark
 
That strikes by night a craggy shelf,
   And staggers blindly ere she sink?
   And stunn'd me from my power to think
And all my knowledge of myself;
 
And made me that delirious man
   Whose fancy fuses old and new,
   And flashes into false and true,
And mingles all without a plan?
 
XVII
Thou comest, much wept for: such a breeze
   Compell'd thy canvas, and my prayer
   Was as the whisper of an air
To breathe thee over lonely seas.
 
For I in spirit saw thee move
   Thro' circles of the bounding sky,
   Week after week: the days go by:
Come quick, thou bringest all I love.
 
Henceforth, wherever thou may'st roam,
   My blessing, like a line of light,
   Is on the waters day and night,
And like a beacon guards thee home.
 
So may whatever tempest mars
   Mid-ocean, spare thee, sacred bark;
   And balmy drops in summer dark
Slide from the bosom of the stars.
 
So kind an office hath been done,
   Such precious relics brought by thee;
   The dust of him I shall not see
Till all my widow'd race be run.
 
XVIII
'Tis well; 'tis something; we may stand
   Where he in English earth is laid,
   And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.
 
'Tis little; but it looks in truth
   As if the quiet bones were blest
   Among familiar names to rest
And in the places of his youth.
 
Come then, pure hands, and bear the head
   That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep,
   And come, whatever loves to weep,
And hear the ritual of the dead.
 
Ah yet, ev'n yet, if this might be,
   I, falling on his faithful heart,
   Would breathing thro' his lips impart
The life that almost dies in me;
 
That dies not, but endures with pain,
   And slowly forms the firmer mind,
   Treasuring the look it cannot find,
The words that are not heard again.
 
XIX
The Danube to the Severn gave
   The darken'd heart that beat no more;
   They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
 
There twice a day the Severn fills;
   The salt sea-water passes by,
   And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.
 
The Wye is hush'd nor moved along,
   And hush'd my deepest grief of all,
   When fill'd with tears that cannot fall,
I brim with sorrow drowning song.
 
The tide flows down, the wave again
   Is vocal in its wooded walls;
   My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then.
 
XX
The lesser griefs that may be said,
   That breathe a thousand tender vows,
   Are but as servants in a house
Where lies the master newly dead;
 
Who speak their feeling as it is,
   And weep the fulness from the mind:
   `It will be hard,' they say, `to find
Another service such as this.'
 
My lighter moods are like to these,
   That out of words a comfort win;
   But there are other griefs within,
And tears that at their fountain freeze;
 
For by the hearth the children sit
   Cold in that atmosphere of Death,
   And scarce endure to draw the breath,
Or like to noiseless phantoms flit;
 
But open converse is there none,
   So much the vital spirits sink
   To see the vacant chair, and think,
'How good! how kind! and he is gone.'
 
XXI
I sing to him that rests below,
   And, since the grasses round me wave,
   I take the grasses of the grave,
And make them pipes whereon to blow.
 
The traveller hears me now and then,
   And sometimes harshly will he speak:
   `This fellow would make weakness weak,
And melt the waxen hearts of men.'
 
Another answers, `Let him be,
   He loves to make parade of pain
   That with his piping he may gain
The praise that comes to constancy.'
 
A third is wroth: `Is this an hour
   For private sorrow's barren song,
   When more and more the people throng
The chairs and thrones of civil power?
 
'A time to sicken and to swoon,
   When Science reaches forth her arms
   To feel from world to world, and charms
Her secret from the latest moon?'
 
Behold, ye speak an idle thing:
   Ye never knew the sacred dust:
   I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing:
 
And one is glad; her note is gay,
   For now her little ones have ranged;
   And one is sad; her note is changed,
Because her brood is stol'n away.
 
XXII
The path by which we twain did go,
   Which led by tracts that pleased us well,
   Thro' four sweet years arose and fell,
From flower to flower, from snow to snow:
 
And we with singing cheer'd the way,
   And, crown'd with all the season lent,
   From April on to April went,
And glad at heart from May to May:
 
But where the path we walk'd began
   To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
   As we descended following Hope,
There sat the Shadow fear'd of man;
 
Who broke our fair companionship,
   And spread his mantle dark and cold,
   And wrapt thee formless in the fold,
And dull'd the murmur on thy lip,
 
And bore thee where I could not see
   Nor follow, tho' I walk in haste,
   And think, that somewhere in the waste
The Shadow sits and waits for me.
 
XXIII
Now, sometimes in my sorrow shut,
   Or breaking into song by fits,
   Alone, alone, to where he sits,
The Shadow cloak'd from head to foot,
 
Who keeps the keys of all the creeds,
   I wander, often falling lame,
   And looking back to whence I came,
Or on to where the pathway leads;
 
And crying, How changed from where it ran
   Thro' lands where not a leaf was dumb;
   But all the lavish hills would hum
The murmur of a happy Pan:
 
When each by turns was guide to each,
   And Fancy light from Fancy caught,
   And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought
Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech;
 
And all we met was fair and good,
   And all was good that Time could bring,
   And all the secret of the Spring
Moved in the chambers of the blood;
 
And many an old philosophy
   On Argive heights divinely sang,
   And round us all the thicket rang
To many a flute of Arcady.
 
XXIV
And was the day of my delight
   As pure and perfect as I say?
   The very source and fount of Day
Is dash'd with wandering isles of night.
 
If all was good and fair we met,
   This earth had been the Paradise
   It never look'd to human eyes
Since our first Sun arose and set.
 
And is it that the haze of grief
   Makes former gladness loom so great?
   The lowness of the present state,
That sets the past in this relief?
 
Or that the past will always win
   A glory from its being far;
   And orb into the perfect star
We saw not, when we moved therein?
 
XXV
I know that this was Life,—the track
   Whereon with equal feet we fared;
   And then, as now, the day prepared
The daily burden for the back.
 
But this it was that made me move
   As light as carrier-birds in air;
   I loved the weight I had to bear,
Because it needed help of Love:
 
Nor could I weary, heart or limb,
   When mighty Love would cleave in twain
   The lading of a single pain,
And part it, giving half to him.
 
XXVI
Still onward winds the dreary way;
   I with it; for I long to prove
   No lapse of moons can canker Love,
Whatever fickle tongues may say.
 
And if that eye which watches guilt
   And goodness, and hath power to see
   Within the green the moulder'd tree,
And towers fall'n as soon as built—
 
Oh, if indeed that eye foresee
   Or see (in Him is no before)
   In more of life true life no more
And Love the indifference to be,
 
Then might I find, ere yet the morn
   Breaks hither over Indian seas,
   That Shadow waiting with the keys,
To shroud me from my proper scorn.
 
XXVII
I envy not in any moods
   The captive void of noble rage,
   The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:
 
I envy not the beast that takes
   His license in the field of time,
   Unfetter'd by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;
 
Nor, what may count itself as blest,
   The heart that never plighted troth
   But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.
 
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
   I feel it, when I sorrow most;
   'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.