Yearning for Beauty, not to be for ever baulked.
What of you then, who when the dreamers dreamed
Sang praise of Hell; who your true treasures hawked
For coined dust, and all your days blasphemed?
For all else dies
But what is beautiful; the eternal dark,
Wherein nor moon nor star doth ever rise,
Bends o'er imperial Carthage, but the spark
That lit the soul of Hellas glows unquenched still.
Fast runs the world, and soon the massy gold
Casts from her, but her hungering mind doth fill
With all the loveliness e'er dreamed of old.
Little we know
Of Beauty who do never face to face
Speak with her now in all the ways we go;
She hath, we say, the wanton's swooning grace
And luscious tempting wiles the idle fool to snare.
So we divorce her who has been man's wife,
And hound with insults her who still would share
And lift his struggle and exalt his life.
Suffer us not
Longer to clutch our drifting lies unsure;
Lady, forgive us, who so soon forgot
The true incredible Thou—strong, eager, pure
As fits a thought God thinks throughout His endless day—
The something always singing overhead,
The vision man takes with him far away,
Most radiant then when all things else lie dead.
