The Soul Of A Century/A return
A RETURN
Your souls own life is like a heaving wave,
’tis hard to tell its origin or crest.
The mind knows not to what mood to be a slave,
When the wave shall rise, or when to seek its rest.
From lofty dreams, when skyward soars the soul,
You will embrace coarse matter once again.
And he who would Raphael’s fame extol,
Will soon return to Giotto’s style and plane.
From Beethoven’s hymns of unrestricted storms,
Wherein with the Gods, the roaring thunders war,
The soul returns to its more simple forms,
To the cradle tunes that mother sang of yore.
From Hamlet’s skull, Nirvana’s mystic waste,
From truth that in the fables buried lies,
When you unearth it, frightfully in haste
You will return to man’s Lost Paradise.
From orgies wild that fill the cup with glee,
And pour red wine o’er nudes in ecstasy,
You will return to a babe on mother’s knee
And find at length true, unspoiled poesy.
The wings of Odes, for which you tried to borrow,
The blush of dawn, and the pearls from the stars,
These you will drop, and awed by fear and sorrow
You’ll try to soothe your musings burning scars.
And when you ask what is Life’s goal or thread,
Is it the crest or the pit where the waves must start?
The wings of life hum softly about your head,
And you find the tree of life, bloom in your heart.
This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.
| Original: |
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse |
|---|---|
| Translation: |
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was legally published within the United States (or the United Nations Headquarters in New York subject to Section 7 of the United States Headquarters Agreement) between 1929 and 1977 (inclusive) without a copyright notice. The longest-living author of this work died in 1987, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 36 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse |
