Poems, Chiefly Lyrical/Love

by Alfred Tennyson

LOVE.

 

I.
Thou, from the first, unborn, undying love,
Albeit we gaze not on thy glories near,
Before the face of God did'st breathe and move,
Though night and pain and ruin and death reign here.
Thou foldest, like a golden atmosphere,
The very throne of the eternal God:
Passing through thee the edicts of his fear
Are mellowed into music, borne abroad
By the loud winds, though they uprend the sea,
Even from its central deeps: thine empery
Is over all: thou wilt not brook eclipse;
Thou goest and returnest to His lips
Like lightning: thou dost ever brood above
The silence of all hearts, unutterable Love.

II.
To know thee is all wisdom, and old age
Is but to know thee: dimly we behold thee
Athwart the veils of evil which infold thee.
We beat upon our aching hearts in rage;
We cry for thee; we deem the world thy tomb.
As dwellers in lone planets look upon
The mighty disk of their majestic sun,
Hollowed in awful chasms of wheeling gloom,
Making their day dim, so we gaze on thee.
Come, thou of many crowns, whiterobéd love,
Oh! rend the veil in twain: all men adore thee;
Heaven crieth after thee; earth waiteth for thee:
Breathe on thy wingéd throne, and it shall move
In music and in light o'er land and sea.

III.
And now—methinks I gaze upon thee now,
As on a serpent in his agonies
Awestricken Indians; what time laid low
And crushing the thick fragrant reeds he lies,
When the new year warmbreathéd on the earth,
Waiting to light him with her purple skies,
Calls to him by the fountain to uprise.
Already with the pangs of a new birth
Strain the hot spheres of his convulséd eyes,
And in his writhings awful hues begin
To wander down his sable-sheeny sides,
Like light on troubled waters: from within
Anon he rusheth forth with merry din,
And in him light and joy and strength abides;
And from his brows a crown of living light
Looks through the thickstemmed woods by day and night.