He may have had for evil or for good No argument; he may have had no care For what without himself went anywhere To failure or to glory, and least of all For such a stale, flamboyant miracle;He may have been the prophet of an art Immovable to old idolatries;He may have been a player without a part, Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies For such a flaming way to advertise;He may have been a painter sick at heart With Nature's toiling for a new surprise;He may have been a cynic, who now, for all Of anything divine that his effete Negation may have tasted, Saw truth in his own image, rather small, Forbore to fever the ephemeral, Found any barren height a good retreat From any swarming street, And in the sun saw power superbly wasted;And when the primitive old-fashioned stars Came out again to shine on joys and wars More primitive, and all arrayed for doom, He may have proved a world a sorry thing In his imagining, And life a lighted highway to the tomb.
Or, mounting with infirm unsearching tread, His hopes to chaos led, He may have stumbled up there from the past, And with an aching strangeness viewed the last Abysmal conflagration of his dreams, --A flame where nothing seems To burn but flame itself, by nothing fed;And while it all went out, Not even the faint anodyne of doubt May then have eased a painful going down From pictured heights of power and lost renown, Revealed at length to his outlived endeavor Remote and unapproachable forever;And at his heart there may have gnawed Sick memories of a dead faith foiled and flawed And long dishonored by the living death Assigned alike by chance To brutes and hierophants;And anguish fallen on those he loved around him May once have dealt the last blow to confound him, And so have left him as death leaves a child, Who sees it all too near;And he who knows no young way to forget May struggle to the tomb unreconciled.
Whatever suns may rise or set There may be nothing kinder for him here Than shafts and agonies;And under these He may cry out and stay on horribly;Or, seeing in death too small a thing to fear, He may go forward like a stoic Roman Where pangs and terrors in his pathway lie, --Or, seizing the swift logic of a woman, Curse God and die.
Or maybe there, like many another one Who might have stood aloft and looked ahead, Black-drawn against wild red, He may have built, unawed by fiery gules That in him no commotion stirred, A living reason out of molecules Why molecules occurred, And one for smiling when he might have sighed Had he seen far enough, And in the same inevitable stuff Discovered an odd reason too for pride In being what he must have been by laws Infrangible and for no kind of cause.
Deterred by no confusion or surprise He may have seen with his mechanic eyes A world without a meaning, and had room, Alone amid magnificence and doom, To build himself an airy monument That should, or fail him in his vague intent, Outlast an accidental universe --To call it nothing worse --Or, by the burrowing guile Of Time disintegrated and effaced, Like once-remembered mighty trees go down To ruin, of which by man may now be traced No part sufficient even to be rotten, And in the book of things that are forgotten Is entered as a thing not quite worth while.
He may have been so great That satraps would have shivered at his frown, And all he prized alive may rule a state No larger than a grave that holds a clown;He may have been a master of his fate, And of his atoms, -- ready as another In his emergence to exonerate His father and his mother;He may have been a captain of a host, Self-eloquent and ripe for prodigies, Doomed here to swell by dangerous degrees, And then give up the ghost.
Nahum's great grasshoppers were such as these, Sun-scattered and soon lost.
Whatever the dark road he may have taken, This man who stood on high And faced alone the sky, Whatever drove or lured or guided him, --A vision answering a faith unshaken, An easy trust assumed of easy trials, A sick negation born of weak denials, A crazed abhorrence of an old condition, A blind attendance on a brief ambition, --Whatever stayed him or derided him, His way was even as ours;And we, with all our wounds and all our powers, Must each await alone at his own height Another darkness or another light;And there, of our poor self dominion reft, If inference and reason shun Hell, Heaven, and Oblivion, May thwarted will (perforce precarious, But for our conservation better thus)Have no misgiving left Of doing yet what here we leave undone?
Or if unto the last of these we cleave, Believing or protesting we believe In such an idle and ephemeral Florescence of the diabolical, --If, robbed of two fond old enormities, Our being had no onward auguries, What then were this great love of ours to say For launching other lives to voyage again A little farther into time and pain, A little faster in a futile chase For a kingdom and a power and a Race That would have still in sight A manifest end of ashes and eternal night?
Is this the music of the toys we shake So loud, -- as if there might be no mistake Somewhere in our indomitable will?
Are we no greater than the noise we make Along one blind atomic pilgrimage Whereon by crass chance billeted we go Because our brains and bones and cartilage Will have it so?
If this we say, then let us all be still About our share in it, and live and die More quietly thereby.
Where was he going, this man against the sky?
You know not, nor do I.
But this we know, if we know anything:
That we may laugh and fight and sing And of our transience here make offering To an orient Word that will not be erased, Or, save in incommunicable gleams Too permanent for dreams, Be found or known.