Canto 1 (WHAT REVERIES be in yonder heaven…)

WHAT REVERIES be in yonder heaven Whither, if yet faith rule it so, The tried and ransomed natures flow? If there peace after strife be given Shall hearts remember yet and know? Thy vista, Lord, of havens dear, May that in such entrancement bind That never starts a wandering tear For wail and willow left behind? Then wherefore, chaplet, quivering throw A dusk e'en on the martyr's brow You crown? Do seraphim shed balm At last on all of earnest mind, Unworldly yearners, nor the palm Awarded St. Teresa, ban To Leopardi, Obermann? Translated where the anthem's sung Beyond the thunder, in a strain Whose harmony unwinds and solves Each mystery that life involves; There shall the Tree whereon He hung, The olive wood, leaf out again— Again leaf out, and endless reign, Type of the peace that buds from sinless pain?

Exhalings! Tending toward the skies By natural law, from heart they rise Of one there by the moundless bed Where stones they roll to feet and head; Then mount, and fall behind the guard And so away. But whitherward? 'Tis the high desert, sultry Alp Which suns decay, which lightnings scalp. For now, to round the waste in large, Christ's Tomb re-win by Saba's marge Of grots and ossuary cells, And Bethlehem where remembrance dwells— From Sodom in her pit dismayed Westward they wheel, and there invade Judah's main ridge, which horrors deaden— Where Chaos holds the wilds in pawn, As here had happed an Armageddon, Betwixt the good and ill a fray, But ending in a battle drawn, Victory undetermined. Nay, For how an indecisive day When one side camps upon the ground Contested. Ere, enlocked in bound They enter where the ridge is riven, A look, one natural look is given Toward Margoth and his henchmen twain Dwindling to ants far off upon the plain.

"So fade men from each other!—Jew, We do forgive thee now thy scoff, Now that thou dim recedest off Forever. Fair hap to thee, Jew: Consolator whom thou disownest

Attend thee in last hour lonest!" Rolfe, gazing, could not all repress That utterance; and more or less, Albeit they left it undeclared, The others in the feeling shared.

They turn, and enter now the pass Wherein, all unredeemed by weeds, Trees, moss, the winding cornice leads For road along the calcined mass Of aged mountain. Slow they urge Sidelong their way betwixt the wall And flanked abyss. They hark the fall Of stones, hoof-loosened, down the crags: The crumblings note they of the verge. In rear one strange steed timid lags: On foot an Arab goes before And coaxes him to steepy shore Of scooped-out gulfs, would halt him there: Back shrinks the foal with snort and glare. Then downward from the giddy brim They peep; but hardly may they tell If the black gulf affrighted him Or lingering scent he caught in air From relics in mid lodgment placed,

Now first perceived within the dell— Two human skeletons inlaced In grapple as alive they fell, Or so disposed in overthrow, As to suggest encounter so. A ticklish rim, an imminent pass For quarrel; and blood-feud, alas, The Arab keeps, and where or when, Cain meeting Abel, closes then. That desert's age the gorge may prove, Piercing profound the mountain bare; Yet hardly churned out in the groove By a perennial wear and tear Of floods; nay, dry it shows within; But twice a year the waters flow,

Nor then in tide, but dribbling thin: Avers Mar Saba's abbot so. Nor less perchance before the day WhenJoshua met the tribes in fray, What wave here ran through leafy scene Like uplands in Vermont the green; What sylvan folk by mountain-base Descrying showers about the crown Of woods, foreknew the freshet's race Quick to descend in torrent down And watched for it, and hailed in glee, Then rode the comb of freshet wild, As peaked upon the roller free With gulls for mates, the Maldives' merry child? Or, earlier yet, could be a day, In time's first youth and pristine May When here the hunter stood alone— Moccasined Nimrod, belted Boone; And down the tube of fringed ravine Siddim descried, a lilied scene? But crime and earthquake, throes and war; And heaven remands the flower and star. Aside they turn, and leave that gorge, And slant upon the mountain long, And toward a ledge they toilsome urge High over Siddim, and overhung By loftier crags. In spirals curled And pearly nothings buoyant whirled, Eddies of exhalations light, As over lime-kilns, swim in sight. The fog dispersed, those vapors show Diurnal from the waters won By the athirst demanding sun— Recalling text of Scripture so; For on the morn which followed rain Of fire, when Abraham looked again, The smoke went up from all the plain. Their mount of vision, voiceless, bare, It is that ridge, the desert's own, Which by its dead Medusa stare,

Petrific o'er the valley thrown, Congeals Arabia into stone. With dull metallic glint, the sea Slumbers beneath the silent lee Of sulphurous hills. These stretch away Toward wilds of Kadesh Barnea, And Zin the waste. In pale regard Intent the Swede turned thitherward: "God came from Teman; in His hour The Holy One from Paran came; They knew Him not; He hid His power Within the forking of the flame, Within the thunder and the roll. Imperious in its swift control, The lion's instantaneous lick Not more effaces to the quick Than His fierce indignation then. Look! for His wake is here. O men, Since Science can so much explode, Evaporated is this God?— Recall the red year Forty-eight: He storms in Paris; thence divides; The menace scarce outspeeds the fate: He's over the Rhinc He's at Berlin—

At Munich—Dresden—fires Vien; He's over the Alps—the whirlwind rides In Rome; London's alert—the Czar: The portent and the fact of war, And terror that into hate subsides. There, through His instruments made known, Including Atheist and his tribes, Behold the prophet's marching One, He at whose coming Midian shook— The God, the striding God of Habakkuk."

Distempered! Nor might passion tire, Nor pale reaction from it quell The craze of grief's intolerant fire Unwearied and unweariable.