If Beauty be at all, if, beyond sense, There be a wisdom piercing into brains, Why should the glory wait on impotence, Biding its time till blood is in the veins?
There is no beauty, but, when thought is quick, Out of the noisy sickroom of ourselves Some flattery comes to try to cheat the sick, Some drowsy drug is groped for on the shelves.
There is no beauty, for we tread a scene Red to the eye with blood of living things; Thought is but joy from murder that has been, Life is but brute at war upon its kings.
There is no beauty, nor could beauty care For us, this dust, that men make everywhere.
If all be governed by the moving stars, If passing planets bring events to be, Searing the face of Time with bloody scars, Drawing men’s souls even as the moon the sea, If as they pass they make a current pass Across man’s life and heap it to a tide, We are but pawns, ignobler than the grass Cropped by the beast and crunched and tossed aside. Is all this beauty that doth inhabit heaven Train of a planet’s fire? Is all this lust A chymic means by warring stars contriven To bring the violets out of Cæsar’s dust? Better be grass, or in some hedge unknown The spilling rose whose beauty is its own.
In emptiest furthest heaven where no stars are, Perhaps some planet of our master sun Still rolls an unguessed orbit round its star, Unthought, unseen, unknown of anyone. Roving dead space according to its law, Casting our light on burnt-out suns and blind, Singing in the frozen void its word of awe, One wandering thought in all that idiot mind. And, in some span of many a thousand year, Passing through heaven its influence may arouse Beauty unguessed in those who habit here, And men may rise with glory on their brows And feel new life like fire, and see the old Fall from them dead, the bronze’s broken mould.
Death lies in wait for you, you wild thing in the wood, Shy-footed beauty dear, half-seen, half-understood. Glimpsed in the beech-wood dim and in the dropping fir, Shy like a fawn and sweet and beauty’s minister. Glimpsed as in flying clouds by night the little moon, A wonder, a delight, a paleness passing soon.
Only a moment held, only an hour seen, Only an instant known in all that life has been, One instant in the sand to drink that gush of grace, The beauty of your way, the marvel of your face.