The Star-Treader and Other Poems

From out the web of former lives,
The ancient catenated chain
Of joy and sorrow, loss and gain,
One certain truth my heart derives:—
Though Beauty passes, this I know,
From Change and Death, this verity:
Her spirit lives eternally—
'Tis but her forms that come and go.

V

Lo! I am Beauty's constant thrall,
Must ever on her voice await,
And follow through the maze of Fate
Her luring, strange and mystical.
Obedient to her summonings,
Forever must my soul aspire,
And seek, on wings of lyric fire,
To penetrate the Heart of Things,
Wherein she sits, augustly throned,
In loveliness that renders dumb—
The Essence and the final Sum—
With peril and with wonder zoned
What though I fail, my duller sense
Baffled as by a wall of stone?
The high desire, the search alone
Are their own prize and recompense.

THE PRICE

Behind each thing a shadow lies;
Beauty hath e'er its cost:
Within the moonlight-flooded skies
How many stars are lost!

THE MYSTIC MEANING

Alas! that we are deaf and blind
To meanings all about us hid!
What secrets lurk the woods amid?
What prophecies are on the wind?
What tidings do the billows bring
And cry in vain upon the strand?
If we might only understand
The brooklet's cryptic murmuring!
The tongues of earth and air are strange.
And yet (who knows?) one little word
Learned from the language of the bird
Might make us lords of Fate and Change!

ODE TO MUSIC