On the Night of a Friend's Wedding

If ever I am old, and all alone,I shall have killed one grief, at any rate;For then, thank God, I shall not have to waitMuch longer for the sheaves that I have sown.The devil only knows what I have done,But here I am, and here are six or eightGood friends, who most ingenuously prateAbout my songs to such and such a one.

But everything is all askew to-night, --As if the time were come, or almost come,For their untenanted mirage of meTo lose itself and crumble out of sight,Like a tall ship that floats above the foamA little while, and then breaks utterly.

The master and the slave go hand in hand,Though touch be lost. The poet is a slave,And there be kings do sorrowfully craveThe joyance that a scullion may command.But, ah, the sonnet-slave must understandThe mission of his bondage, or the graveMay clasp his bones, or ever he shall saveThe perfect word that is the poet's wand!

The sonnet is a crown, whereof the rhymesAre for Thought's purest gold the jewel-stones;But shapes and echoes that are never doneWill haunt the workshop, as regret sometimesWill bring with human yearning to sad thronesThe crash of battles that are never won.

Why do you dig like long-clawed scavengersTo touch the covered corpse of him that fledThe uplands for the fens, and riotedLike a sick satyr with doom's worshippers?Come! let the grass grow there; and leave his verseTo tell the story of the life he led.Let the man go: let the dead flesh be dead,And let the worms be its biographers.

Song sloughs away the sin to find redressIn art's complete remembrance: nothing clingsFor long but laurel to the stricken browThat felt the Muse's finger; nothing lessThan hell's fulfilment of the end of thingsCan blot the star that shines on Paris now.

When we can all so excellently giveThe measure of love's wisdom with a blow, --Why can we not in turn receive it so,And end this murmur for the life we live?And when we do so frantically striveTo win strange faith, why do we shun to knowThat in love's elemental over-glowGod's wholeness gleams with light superlative?

Oh, brother men, if you have eyes at all,Look at a branch, a bird, a child, a rose, --Or anything God ever made that grows, --Nor let the smallest vision of it slip,Till you can read, as on Belshazzar's wall,The glory of eternal partnership!

There is a drear and lonely tract of hellFrom all the common gloom removed afar:A flat, sad land it is, where shadows are,Whose lorn estate my verse may never tell.I walked among them and I knew them well:Men I had slandered on life's little starFor churls and sluggards; and I knew the scarUpon their brows of woe ineffable.

But as I went majestic on my way,Into the dark they vanished, one by one,Till, with a shaft of God's eternal day,The dream of all my glory was undone, --And, with a fool's importunate dismay,I heard the dead men singing in the sun.