Hymn of the Heart
"The chorus a poet bleeds ..."
Before the tongue had cognisance of praise,
Before the lungs negotiated breath,
There kept, beneath all unrecorded days,
A psalm surviving every little death—
Not sung, but waiting, with such patient art
As roots employ beneath the wintered heart.
The blood possessed an elder scholarship
Than all the grammars ever speech compiled.
It held, in crimson covenant, the script
Whereby the Infinite rehearsed the child.
No eye could read it. Yet its hidden claim
Outlived the parchment of remembered name.
Then Visitation entered—not to mar,
But as the frost instructeth April's seed:
Undoing only what we never are,
To husband what eternity shall need.
The chalice yielded to the faithful cleft;
The wine discovered more than had been left.
I deemed the hymn proceeded out of me.
The silence smiled and gently proved me wrong.
No fountain drinketh of itself. The sea
Was ancient long before the first gull's song.
I was no source.
I was the place made still
Enough for what had always sought my will.
Then came the hour no doctrine could foresee.
A wound,
long faithful to a single breast,
forgot
the grammar of possession.
It crossed, without a footfall or a voice,
into the hearing of the world.
Thereafter no man suffered wholly lone.
For what departed me
returned as recognition.
Then understood I what no laurel knows:
The poet holdeth no dominion here.
He is the interval wherein there grows
A listening greater than the listening ear.
His gift is not invention, but consent—
The open gate through which the Unsent went.
Therefore I leave no maxim after me.
Only this:
One evening,
when the last reader had closed the book,
the silence,
finding no mouth remaining,
Began
to sing.
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