Of Holy Poverty, and Her Threefold Heaven

O Love of Holy Poverty!Thou kingdom of Tranquillity!

Poverty, whose path is safe and clear,Hath no griefs, nor rancour, sheds no tear,Nor of robber hands hath any fear,Tempests cannot trouble Poverty.

Poverty can die in perfect peace ;Maketh neither will, nor bond, nor lease,Leaves the world behind, and lies at ease,And around her strife can never be.

Needs no judge, nor scribe, nor lawyer sort,Brings no fees to notary nor court,And can turn the miser into sport,Who is ever in anxiety.

Poverty, High Wisdom deep and sure,Unsubdued by earth and earthly lure,Scorns created things, detached and pure,Scorning, yet possessing utterly.

Who despiseth, surely doth possess,Owning all things without bitterness,—Nothing trips him up, his feet can pressOn their daily journey faithfully.

He whose wants are master, is a slave,Sells himself for what his longings crave,Him his purchased riches cannot save,He hath bargained very foolishly.

Mortal courage sure must hesitate,Shrink and turn from such a vassal state,Where God's image, beautiful and great,Is debased, and changed to vanity.

In a narrow heart God cannot bide ;Where the love is great, the heart is wide;Poverty, great-hearted, dignified,Entertains and welcomes Deity.

Poverty is highest Heaven revealed,—Yet to darkened souls on earth concealed:Those who reach this Third Heaven read, unsealed,Every deep and hidden mystery.

And the first Heaven is the Firmament, vPride and glory there are past and spent,Are but hindrance and impedimentTo the soul that seeks security.

That thy glory and thy pride may die,Give to all earth's riches the go-by ;Bid all learning dead and silent lie ;Flee from all repute of sanctity.

Riches will but steal thy time away ;Learning vanish like the winds at play ;Fame will nurse and nourish, day by day,Every form of vile hypocrisy.

Steadfast in the Stellar Heaven is heWho hath rid his being of these three;Then another Heaven shall he see,Crystalline, of highest purity.

Four great winds upon man's sea that blowWaste his mind with constant ebb and flow;Hope and Fear, that ceaseless come and go;Joy, and Grief, that vary endlessly.

And these tour his soul shall strip and spoil,Worse than wealth, or fame, or learning's toil;This is truth, that error cannot soil,Though the foolish will not credit me.

Even deepest Hell thou must not fear ;Hopes of Heaven must never charm thine ear;No delight must rouse thy heart, nor cheer;No distress must cause thee misery.

Virtue cannot be by causes bought,Incorruptible, she comes unsought ;All unknown and veiled, her power hath broughtHealing to thy deep infirmity.

If the virtues all are bare and nude,And the vices clothed, an evil brood,In the mortal strife 'twixt ill and good,Borne to earth and wounded must thou be.

When the vices are destroyed and dead,Every virtue lifts a lovely head,By divinest banquet comforted,Raised to God's Unchangeability.

This Third Heaven is highest and most fair;Limit, no, nor measure enters there;Man's imagination must despair,—So doth it transcend his fantasy.

Emptied when thou art of Good and Right,Dispossest of Virtue and Delight,Prize that bargain, clasp thy treasure tight,In thy lowness and humility:

—For this Heaven is built and 'stablished fast,In the Nothingness where First is Last,Where Pure Love, whence all alloy hath past,Dwelleth with Eternal Verity.

What thou seest is not What is There,That which Is, is high beyond compare,Pride must faint upon that heavenly air,Melt and die into humility.

For between the Visible and Real,Strangest transports do man's reason steal,Happy they, this deepest truth who feel,Crazed on earth they are content to be.

And this Heaven, the Nought, is deep and strange,Far beyond our tongue's faint stammering range,Love is prisoned there, and cannot change,In that Light, to us Obscurity.

Light is Darkness in that wondrous state,Darkness is the Dawn for which we wait,This new wine shall break and dissipateThe old bottles of philosophy.

Ah! where Christ is grafted on the spray,All the withered wood is cut away;See the freshness springing from decay!Changing to a wondrous Unity,—

Love, that lives and breathes without Desire;Wisdom, freed from Thought's consuming fire;Will, at one with God, that doth aspireBut to obey Him in simplicity.

Lo, I live! yet not my self alone;I am I, yet am I not mine own ;And this change, cross-wise, obscure, unknown,—Language cannot tell its mystery.

Poverty has nothing in her hand,Nothing craves, in sea, or sky, or land:Hath the Universe at her command!Dwelling in the heart of Liberty.