Renascence: A Book of Verse — The Sirens Three LXXXI - C

LXXXI

All these I saw, as on time’s painted page The figure of man’s life from age to age Was figured, like his life of years and hours, And glassed his face—an infant or a mage.

LXXXII

In boyhood bright beneath the Grecian sun, I saw him stand, intent his race to run— To touch the golden goal of thought and art, And daring all man since hath dared or done.

LXXXIII

The apple of his life to Beauty’s hand Freely he gave, and she so dowered his land, That still that fond world takes it for her glass, And gazes, leaving knowledge and command.

LXXXIV

In youth a mystic shadow o’er him fell: He touched the lover’s lute beneath the spell;

He fought, a knight-at-arms, for lady’s grace;

He prayed a monk austere in haunted cell;

LXXXV

Till Nature roused him from his dreams again, And Reason broke the chains which bound him then;

New knowledge, power, and beauty filled life’s cup, And rolled the round world to his manhood’s ken.

LXXXVI

Yet old before his time he sits, out-worn With words and wars, upon the seat of scorn;

Weary of life’s vain round, love’s fruitless chase, False fortune’s whirling wheel, fame’s empty horn.

LXXXVII

For here, in living shape and semblance, shone The passions and the powers man’s soul hath won Through all his ages, like the starry signs Where through life’s year revolves the sleepless sun.

LXXXVIII

The pattern and the form of thoughts untold;

The book of being wrought in runes of gold;

The twisted net that holds all gain and loss The birth-clothes cover, or the shroud doth fold.

LXXXIX

The moving tapestry of human date, Where lives for threads are crossed in love or hate, Between the narrow beams of dark and day— Time’s shifting loom, the toil of threefold fate.

XC

At their eternal task the sisters dread, Who spin and weave and shear the slender thread With all its dyes, that doth sustain and fill This tangled web from pole to pole outspread.

XCI

The arras that doth clothe the house of Time, Stained with the hues of all man’s bliss and crime:— The chequered pageant of the changing earth Still through its folds doth ever sink and climb: XCII

Along the street of days and nights where rolls The world’s car onwards and its throng of souls, Like captives in a conqueror’s triumph chained— Compelled by fortune’s wheel that none controls.

XCIII

The glittering triumph of youth’s golden dreams, And ardent manhood in the zenith, beams Of love, and fame, and power that guides the car, And slow-pulsed eld still warmed in their last gleams.

XCIV

Masqued with the masquers in that endless race The hours go by at grief’s or passion’s pace, And cloaked alike in poverty or pride, Through all life’s masks death shows his ashen face.

XCV

The shadow clinging to the feet of life, As unto day doth cleave his silent wife— Sower and reaper in the self-same field— Twin spirits folded in immortal strife.

XCVI

There good and ill, brothers and bitter foes, Do strike the balance of man’s joys and woes;

And in the traffic of the world’s exchange Oft ill as good, and good as evil goes: XCVII

Two knights that battle for Truth’s painted targe, With flashing spears upon time’s river marge, Where, like the rushing waters, rise their steeds, And crash together in tremendous charge.

XCVIII

Their broken harness lies upon time’s plain, Their wars’ receding tide doth cast the slain, As shifts the battle ground from age to age, And earth its grim memorials retain.

XCIX

These things I marked, as in a moving show Before mine eyes life passed thro’ gloom and glow— The trappings and the garniture that decked This house of shadows still from room to room.

* * * * * C

Man was; man is; but who shall count the gain, Or measure out the sum of all life’s pain?

So to the play my thought made interlude, And still to fate’s sad music sang refrain.