But the placing of an invisible finger upon our lips when we would
speak, the heart-throb of warning where we would love, that we grow
contemptuous of the prizes of life, does not mean that the spirit has
ceased from its labors, that the high-built beauty of the spheres is to
topple mistily into chaos, as a mighty temple in the desert sinks into
the sand, watched only by a few barbarians too feeble to renew its
ancient pomp and the ritual of its once shining congregations. Before
we, who were the bright children of the dawn, may return as the twilight
race into the silence, our purpose must be achieved, we have to assume
mastery over that nature which now overwhelms us, driving into the
Fire-fold the flocks of stars and wandering fires. Does it seem very
vast and far away? Do you sigh at the long, long time? Or does it appear
hopeless to you who perhaps return with trembling feet evening after
evening from a little labor? But it is behind all these things that
the renewal takes place, when love and grief are dead; when they loosen
their hold on the spirit and it sinks back into itself, looking out on
the pitiful plight of those who, like it, are the weary inheritors of so
great destinies: then a tenderness which is the most profound quality of
its being springs up like the outraying of the dawn, and if in that mood
it would plan or execute it knows no weariness, for it is nourished from
the First Fountain. As for these feeble children of the once glorious
spirits of the dawn, only a vast hope can arouse them from so vast a
despair, for the fire will not invigorate them for the repetition of
petty deeds but only for the eternal enterprise, the war in heaven,
that conflict between Titan and Zeus which is part of the never-ending
struggle of the human spirit to assert its supremacy over nature. We,
who he crushed by this mountain nature piled above us, must arise again,
unite to storm the heavens and sit on the seats of the mighty.
II.
We speak out of too petty a spirit to each other; the true poems, said
Whitman:
Bring none to his or to her terminus or to be content and full,
Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars,
to learn one of the meanings,
To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless
rings and never be quiet again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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