AN ETERNAL SYMPHONY
(Cosmic Songs)
World! Master Poet! You have passed through aeons long
Before you set the stars in the verses of your song;
Before, each single sun and its planet’s varied flowers,
You wove in rhythmic cadences of poetic sparkling showers.
‘Ere out of the confusion of your chaotic thought
You brought the suns together and set their wars at nought.
‘Ere to the new-born earth you said: “Awake to life!”
When first you set the pace of a heart’s pulsating beat,
Brought light to human eyes and said: “Go forth to strife.”
World! Master Poet! Your Hymn outlives all time
Your every stanza breathes life’s restless, ageless rhyme
And when it blooms, your hands once more enfold
As grateful seeds of life, death’s lifeless, pallid mold.
World! Master Poet! What span your Hymns’ wide wings?
Darkened mystic depths, across the world’s hidden springs.
Tell me how far the wings of your hymns are spread?
When ’cross the sea they bic w, the ocean’s bottoms rise . . .
When through the land they blow, the earth smolders to the skies.
When o’er the skies they blow, worlds pause as in breathless dread.
World! Master Poet! What meaning holds your Hymn?
All that within it dies, immortally lives on?
There is no beauty known that does not bloom in you,
There is no morn yet born that shines not in your dew.
There is no ray of light that you do not reflect,
And not a flower to which you pay not your respect.
Nor are there feathered throats that do not sing your strain,
No children’s laughter where it does not ring out,
There are no tears through which your sorrow does not spout,
No wild despair wherein it does not tug in vain.
There is no struggle that your thunder does not feed,
No martyred hero known through whom you did not bleed.
There is no longing thought in which it does not breathe,
No love, no passion known wherein it does not seethe.
There are no hearts on earth with tender, kindred feeling,
That do not beat in tune with your Hymn’s majestic pealing.
World! Master Poet! You are the poet’s God
And yet a poet too, in whose footsteps all bards must plod.
And though your Hymn is as spacious as the sky,
What you offer therein, but your mere fragments of your ‘I’.
And we who read today the lines you wrote before,
We are enthused, yet say; “The poet felt much more.”
You with a creator’s joy must share the creator’s pain,
And who of those who read, know the anguish your Hymns contain.
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.
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| 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.
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