Poems (Jackson)/Truth
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TRUTH, art thou relentless? Wilt thou rest
Never? From solitude to solitude
Eternally wilt thou escape? Thy good
And beauty luring us to fatal quest,
Foredoomed to endless loss?
For works with similar titles, see Truth.
TRUTH.
TRUTH, art thou relentless? Wilt thou restNever? From solitude to solitude
Eternally wilt thou escape? Thy good
And beauty luring us to fatal quest,
Foredoomed to endless loss?
O royal guest
Of Nature's centuries, no spot so rude,
So void, thy secret cannot there elude
Our grasp; no thing too subtle to attest
Her royal sheltering; from spheres to spheres
Of light, through the incalculable years;
From force to force, through rock, through sound, through flame,
Our worship wrests but echo of thy name,
And builds at last, with patient stone, and sod,
And tears, its altar "to the unknown God."
Of Nature's centuries, no spot so rude,
So void, thy secret cannot there elude
Our grasp; no thing too subtle to attest
Her royal sheltering; from spheres to spheres
Of light, through the incalculable years;
From force to force, through rock, through sound, through flame,
Our worship wrests but echo of thy name,
And builds at last, with patient stone, and sod,
And tears, its altar "to the unknown God."