Collected Works (Vol. III)

THE. STAR AND THE GARTER 15 Are you not ready? Let us leave This little Paris to its fate ! Our friends a little while may grieve, And then forget: but we, elate, Live in a larger air: awake, Compassion in the Halls of Truth ! Disdain love for love’s very sake ! Take all our beauty, strength, and youth, And melt them in the crucible To that quintessence at whose gleam Gold shudders and grows dull; expel The final dross by intimate stream Of glowing truth, our lunar light ! Are you not ready? Who would stay? Arise, O Queen, O Queen of Night ! Arise, and leave the little day! XXXII. Lapy, awake the dread abyss Of knowledge in impassioned eyes ! Fathom the gulfs of awful bliss With the poised plummet of a kiss ! Love hath the arcanum of the wise ; Love is the elixir, love the stone ; The rosy tincture shall arise Out of its shadowy cadences. Love is the Work, and love alone Rewards the ingenious alchemist. Chaste fervours chastely overthrown Awake the infinite monotone. So, Lady, if thy lips I kissed ; So, lady, if in eyes of steel I read the steady secret, wist Of no gray ghosts moulded of mist ; I did not bid my purpose kneel, Nor thine retire : I probe the scar Of self, the goddess keen and real Supreme within the naked wheel Of sun and moon and star and star, And find her but the ambient coil, Imagination’s avatar, A Buddha on his nenuphar Elaborate of Indian toil ; A mockery of a self; outrun Its days and dreams, its strength and spoil, As runs the conquering counterfoil. Thou art not ; thou the moon and sun, Thou the sole star in trackless night, The unguessed spaces one by one That mask their Sphinx, the horizon: Thou, these ; and one above them, light, Light of the inmost heaven and hell :— Art changed and fallen and lost to sight, Who wast as waters of delight. And I, who am not, know thee well Who art not: then the chain divides From love-enlightened limbs, and swell The choral cries unutterable. Out of the salt, out of the tides, The sea, whose drink is death by thirst ! The triumph anthem overrides The ocean’s lamentable sides, And we are done with life; accurst Who linger; lost who find; but we Follow the gold wake of the first Who found in losing ; who reversed The dictates of eternity. Lo ! in steep meditation hearsed, Coffined in knowledge, fast we flee Unto the island from the sea. XXXITI. THE note of the silence is changed; the quarrel is over That rather endeared than estranged : lover to lover Flows in the infinite river of knowledge and peace : Not a ripple or eddy or quiver: the monitors cease That were eager to warn, to awaken: a sleep is Opposed, And the leaves of the rose wind-shaken are curled and closed,.