What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt Held in cohesion by unresting cells, Which work they know not why, which never halt, Myself unwitting where their Master dwells. I do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin; A world which uses me as I use them, Nor do I know which end or which begin Nor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn. So, like a marvel in a marvel set, I answer to the vast, as wave by wave The sea of air goes over, dry or wet, Or the full moon comes swimming from her cave, Or the great sun comes north, this myriad I Tingles, not knowing how, yet wondering why. If I could get within this changing I, This ever altering thing which yet persists, Keeping the features it is reckoned by, While each component atom breaks or twists, If, wandering past strange groups of shifting forms, Cells at their hidden marvels hard at work, Pale from much toil, or red from sudden storms, I might attain to where the Rulers lurk. If, pressing past the guards in those grey gates, The brain's most folded intertwisted shell, I might attain to that which alters fates, The King, the supreme self, the Master Cell, Then, on Man's earthly peak, I might behold The unearthly self beyond, unguessed, untold. What is this atom which contains the whole, This miracle which needs adjuncts so strange, This, which imagined God and is the soul, The steady star persisting amid change? What waste, that smallness of such power should need Such clumsy tools so easy to destroy, Such wasteful servants difficult to feed, Such indirect dark avenues to joy. Why, if its business is not mainly earth, Should it demand such heavy chains to sense? A heavenly thing demands a swifter birth, A quicker hand to act intelligence. An earthly thing were better like the rose At peace with clay from which its beauty grows. Ah, we are neither heaven nor earth, but men; Something that uses and despises both, That takes its earth's contentment in the pen, Then sees the world's injustice and is wroth, And flinging off youth's happy promise, flies Up to some breach, despising earthly things, And, in contempt of hell and heaven, dies, Rather than bear some yoke of priests or kings. Our joys are not of heaven nor earth, but man's, A woman's beauty or a child's delight, The trembling blood when the discoverer scans The sought-for world, the guessed-at satellite; The ringing scene, the stone at point to blush For unborn men to look at and say "Hush."