Battle-Retrospect, and Other Poems/Lines by Arno
LINES BY ARNO.
To-night this shell my soul long cast away
Unechoing from the chantings of the sea,
Rang once again sonorous with the beat
Of the eternal breakers, resonant
And shaken with the unintermittent surf
Of sound that did usurp its every niche.
Its porcelain chamber held the Atlantic main,
And all the pulses of the eternal heart
Opening a way into this fragile brain,
Trembling in mortal veins, found tabernacle
For the revolted betterness of God,
His ancient pities and august desires,
Within the narrow tenement of self
Whose walls expanding to the insurgent flow
Revealed the unexploited depths within.
This night the mood was on me, caught from prayer
And silent pacing by the Arno's bridges,
Notings of trudgers home, and knots of men
Boisterous in the wine-shops, beggars, children,
And lovers pausing in the gloom of columns,
And awed perusal of the other world's
Foothold in this,—the bell-tower, incandescent,
Moving upon the horizon as I moved,
Beside the dome's star-blotting canopy,
And many a sleeping tower and pinnacle
Impassive o'er the dark roofs and the lights,
And the six bridges whose deep-shadowed spans
Stir premonitions of obscurer worlds
That lie beneath the piers of this we tread;
This night the mood was on me and I knew
The ruth and pity of a million years,
Entered the shadows of forgotten times,
Tasted the powers of the age to come;
Saw all the temples, all the spires and domes,
Saw all the forums, and triumphal arches,
The aqueducts, the theatres, the quais,
Of all the peoples and of all the times,
Rise on the sky in broken silhouette
Of ruin, or in pride of living use:
The diverse stages of a thousand clans
Of this and other times; some, hives remote
And local whose forgotten murmur rose
In wars obscure and civic jubilation
Some several centuries and died away,
Bequeathing brooding pillars to the silence
That so succeeded; some, imperial lands
Whose strayers probed the gulfs of distant seas,
Whose legions woke the echoes of far isles,
And whose excitement in the blaze of day
Preoccupied the planet for an age,
Bridging oblivion with projected thought
And rolling back the muffling floods of death
With scaling dreams and song of stellar span,
Whose tumult in the silence of the sky,
Whose order in the gardens of the sun
No less was gulfed in peace, to leave its stones
Gouged with the indecipherable runes
Wherewith man passing all unwittingly
Lays his Hand on the eternal. And I saw
Besides these, occupying earth's horizons
The towers around which teem in myriads
The living, in far corners of the earth
Or here at hand, standing like lighthouses
Above the generations as they surge,—
The stages of the peoples, streets and fields,
Bastions and fortresses and masonries,
Whereto acceding from the mysterious ports
Of birth, uncounted souls take up their place,
Appropriating there with tower and spire
The attachments of their forebears, and their faiths,
To love and hate, traffic and fight and die,
Ruled by the ascendency of heritage
In their small cosmos, and from birth to death
Without a glance turned on the aghast abyss
Of thought, nor ever hearkening
To the appalling roaring of the waters
Risen in flood beneath the piers of day.
The ruth and pity of a million years
Spoke in my heart. I knew the voice was God
Articulate in the handiwork of man
Refined by time, whereby the Duomo globe,
The Giotto apparition, and the spears
Of thought that rose around me, seemed to rise
Out of the heart's core of humanity
Anonymously speaking from the dead,
Creative in its travail and divine
And bearing witness to its ground in God.
The myriads groping through the restricted course
Of their swift days, and each one baited on
Each in his place by life's sufficient lures
To lift the load of days and in hot blood
To meet the knives of life insensible
Through passion, found about these stones
That lie to-day in ruins, those same faiths
And loyalties which won their hearts to toil,
To strife, and so to life. Unconsciously
Building according to their thirst for life
They gave to God Himself a voice in clay
Which still speaks to us though the builders sleep.
No less the eternal spirit lures us on
Through baits commensurate with our little souls,
Objects but little nobler than the fees
And guerdons of the battle-games of old,
Yet 'round which that within the heart of man
Which is divine casts glamour not of earth,
To self-creation in the toils of action
And to the praise of God in self-abandon.
From our unconscious deed when we are gone
And others like us for a thousand years,
Doubt not that there shall rest aloft in time
A coral structure from our minute lives
Which towering ever as our seas subside
And sanctified by thought shall tell the races
Of other epochs that our submerged days
And straitened thought through prayer and toil and blood
Yet drew on God Who working o’er our heads
Transmuted imperfection into art
And built up glory from relinquished dreams
And made of clay memorial to stilled prayer,
Giving our silted graves power in the light,
Our dusted mouths voice in the upper air.
Yet every building shall be razed, nor shall
There rest one stone upon another placed
By our primeval days, for in the time
Of consummation such communities
Of worship, and such habitations
Shall rise, that all our most ethereal spires,
Our flame-transmuted monuments shall seem
But lead to gold or clay to alabaster;
Then shall tinged cities rise whose contours sweep
Harmonious with the lineaments of heaven,
Proportionate to nature, and of hues
That melt into the suffused tints of dawn,
Wherein a holier race shall walk in peace,
Sharers, by faith acquired through our stress,
In treasuries of splendour past our guess,
In whose deep hearts our pain and joy shall live,
As in their airiest temples, their sublimest towers
There shall rest token of our humbler shafts
In line and curve inbuilt into their art,
Our hope and aim ingrown into their faiths.
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