Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 3. BRIEF IS PAIN, by EDWARD CARPENTER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 3. BRIEF IS PAIN, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Slowly, out of all life unfolded, the supreme joy
Last Line: And opens at length on the sunlit world and the winds of heaven.
Subject(s): Pain; Suffering; Misery


SLOWLY, out of all life unfolded, the supreme joy;
Over all storms, above the clouds, beyond Night and the shadow of the
Earth,
The Sun in the blue aether changeless shining.

Grief passes, sorrow endures for a moment:
To a certain stage belonging it dogs the footsteps of the individual;
Then fading and passing it leaves him free, a new creature, transfigured to
more than mortal.
The myriad spindles of the grass reflecting the light, the long and level
meadows waving to the breeze,
The faint haze of summer, blue in deep shadows of the foliage,
The toilers toiling in the fields, the bathers to the water descending or
standing on the banks in the sunlight,
The secret that lies wrapt in the summer noon and the slow evolution of
races,
The which what voice can utter, what words avail to frame it?

Not pleasure alone is good, but pain also; not joy alone but sorrow;
Freed must the psyche be from the pupa, and pain is there to free it.
Throes and struggles and clenchings of teeth—but pain is there to free
it.

Lo! the prison walls must fall—even though the prisoner tremble.
Long the strain, sometimes seeming past endurance--then the dead shell
gives way, and a new landscape discloses.
Curtain behind curtain, wall behind wall, life behind life;
Dying here, to be born there, passing and passing and passing,
At last a new creature behold, transfigured to more than mortal!

For brief after all is pain, but joy ah! joy is eternal!
And thin the veil that divides, the subtle film of illusion—
The prison-wall so slight, at a touch it parts and crumbles,
And opens at length on the sunlit world and the winds of heaven.





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