Dear are some hidden things My soul has sealed in silence; past delights, Hope unconfessed; desires with hampered wings, Remembered in the nights.
But my best treasures are Ignoble, undelightful, abject, cold; Yet O! profounder hoards oracular No reliquaries hold.
There lie my trespasses, Abjured but not disowned. I’ll not accuse Determinism, nor, as the Master { 26} says, Charge even “the poor Deuce.”
Under my hand they lie, My very own, my proved iniquities, And though the glory of my life go by I hold and garner these.
How else, how otherwhere. How otherwise, shall I discern and grope For lowliness? How hate, how love, how dare, How weep, how hope?
“A riddling world!” one cried. “If pangs must be, would God that they were sent To the impure, the cruel, and passed aside The holy innocent!”
But I, “Ah no, no, no! Not the clean heart transpierced; not tears that fall For a child’s agony; not a martyr’s woe; Not these, not these appal.
“Not docile motherhood, Dutiful, frequent, closed in all distress; Not shedding of the unoffending blood; Not little joy grown less;
“Not all-benign old age With dotage mocked; not gallantry that faints And still pursues; not the vile heritage Of sin’s disease in saints;
“Not these defeat the mind. For great is that abjection, and august That irony. Submissive we shall find A splendour in that dust.
“Not these puzzle the will; Not these the yet unanswered question urge. But the unjust stricken; but the hands that kill Lopped; but the merited scourge;
“The sensualist at fast; The merciless felled; the liar in his snares. The cowardice of my judgment sees, aghast, The flail, the chaff, the tares.”
“_Audemus dicere_ ‘_Pater Noster_.’”—CANON OF THE MASS.
There is a bolder way, There is a wilder enterprise than this All-human iteration day by day. Courage, mankind! Restore Him what is His.
Out of His mouth were given These phrases. O replace them whence they came. He, only, knows our inconceivable “Heaven,” Our hidden “Father,” and the unspoken “Name”;
Our “trespasses,” our “bread,” The “will” inexorable yet implored; The miracle-words that are and are not said, Charged with the unknown purpose of their Lord.
“Forgive,” “give,” “lead us not”— Speak them by Him, O man the unaware, Speak by that dear tongue, though thou know not what, Shuddering through the paradox of prayer.