Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. WHO BUT THE LOVER SHOULD KNOW, by EDWARD CARPENTER


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. WHO BUT THE LOVER SHOULD KNOW, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Ah! Who but the loved at last should know what death is?
Last Line: Ah! Who at last but the lover should know what death is?
Subject(s): Death; Dead, The


AH! who but the lover at last should know what Death is?

To give one's body to the earth;
To rise through the roots of the trees and to feel once more the
sunshine—floating as a leaf in air;
To star out months together with mosses and bog-plants on the lonely
mountain-sides, to lurk under the speckled fungi in the woods, looking up at the
traveller as he passes;
To be sucked in, in the mad rush of the sap through the veins of the
chestnut in spring, and to burst in its great shining buds;
To catch at, dimly as in dreams, the wonderful thoughts that sweep
through—the great rushing prophetic dreams of the life-laden earth;
To feel the call of existence in new and strange fashion—

To arise and ascend;
To mix with the animals roaming over the Earth;
To be and to include them—to put on purposely the mask which they put
innocently on;
To be one of two swallows clinging to the southern wall, twittering,
discussing sites for a nest; to be a snake basking coiled on a rock in the sun;
To rejoice in my swiftness and strength, my inevitable action and instinct;

To pass into the bodies of men and women, to be arrayed in their hair, and
to look forth out of their eyes;
To be the long lines of habit in them, the food that is sweet in their
mouths, the poison that is bitter;
To be the thoughts that they think, and the dreams that they dream; to
circle very close;
To circle closer than all thought; to touch and startle—like the sound
of distant music heard through the rushing of a storm;
To be the presentation of new unsuspected ideals—

To be buried in the ground;
To be buried deep in the ground of all existence;
To lie in the soil whence all human life springs, and whither it returns
again;
Listening as in a dream of joy to the sound of innumerable voices,
And to the sound of innumerable footsteps coming nearer through all the
ages;
To see and to be unseen; to hear and to be that which no ear hath heard;
To turn an open impartial eye without blame on every creature; to hold up a
mirror,
So tallying nature that to it all men and things run to look upon
themselves and learn their parts;
To give products and receive materials;
To have the adit, to be the hidden link, the life which does not appear;
To love without sorrow; and to send love forth to bathe the world, healing
it from its wounds—

Ah! who at last but the lover should know what Death is?





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