Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE RENEWAL OF YOUTH, by FREDERICK WILLIAM HENRY MYERS


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE RENEWAL OF YOUTH, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Ah, could the soul, from all earth's loves set free
Last Line: Save the child's heart and trust as of the child.
Alternate Author Name(s): Myers, Frederic
Subject(s): Art & Artists; Columbus, Christopher (1451-1506); Explorers; Faith; Grief; Immortality; Music & Musicians; Teneriffe, Canary Islands; Exploring; Discovery; Discoverers; Belief; Creed; Sorrow; Sadness


"AH, could the soul, from all earth's loves set free,
Plunge once for all and sink them in the sea!
Then naked thence, re-risen and reborn,
Shine in the gold of some tempestuous morn,
With one at last to lead her, one to say—
Come hither, hither is thy warlike way!—
Oh that air's deep were thronged from heaven to hell
With shadowy shapes of barque and caravel,
On rays of sunset and on storms that roll
Swept to a last Trafalgar of the soul!" 10

Ah me! how oft have such wild words confessed
The impetuous urgence of a fierce unrest,
When all the embracing earth, the inarching blue,
Seemed the soul's cage no wings might battle through,
And Faith was dumb, or all her voices vain,
Against the incumbent night, the baffling pain;—
Dumb, till some mastering call, with broadened scope,
Should ring the evangel of authentic hope,—
Show the strong soul, aroused, alive, afar,
From death's pale peace delivered into war,— 20
Bid Life live on, nor Love disdain to sing
Mid fading boughs his anthems of the spring.

Nathless, my soul, if thou perchance hast heard,
I say not whence, some clear disposing word,—
If on thy gaze has oped, I say not where,
Brighter than day the light that was thy prayer,—
Thereon keep silence; who of men will heed
That secret which to thee is life indeed?
For if thou sing of woes and wandering, then
Plain tale is thine, and words well-known to men; 30
But if of hope and peace, then each alone
Must find that peace by pathways of his own.

Yet many are there who some glimpse have seen
From this world's cave of waters wide and green,
Who have striven as strive they might, and found their rest
Each in such faith as for each soul is best;—
To such thy message lies, nor needs inquire
What path has led them there where they desire;—
If in sweet trance it hath to some been given
To stand unharmed in the outmost porch of heaven,— 40
To have seen the flamy spires of mounting prayer,
Crowns of election hanging in the air,
And guardian souls, and whatso waits to bless
Man all unknowing in all his loneliness;—
Or if the Father for their need have sent
No separate call nor strange admonishment,
Only such hopes as in the spirit spring
With a new calm that brooks not questioning,
Such loves as lift the ennobled life away
From earth and baseness thro' their native day, 50
Such faith as shines, far-off and undefiled,
Guessed in the glad eyes of a stainless child.
For such as these find thou, my heart, a voice
With souls rejoicing gravely to rejoice,
For souls at peace obscurely to express
Gleams of the light which cheers their steadfastness.

Ah me, how oft shall morn's pellucid ray
Stir the high heart for the unknown wondrous way!
How oft shall evening's slant and crimson fire
Immix the earthly and divine desire! 60
What yearning falls from twilight's shadowy dome
For the unchanged city and the abiding home!
Yet chiefliest when alone the watcher sees
Thro' the clear void the sparkling Pleiades,
Or marks from the underworld Orion bring
His arms all gold, and night encompassing,—
With night's cold scent upon his soul is borne
Firewise a mystic longing and forlorn
To strike one stroke and in a moment know
Those hanging Pleiads, why they cluster so;— 70
Thro' night to God to feel his flight begun,
And see this sun a star, that star a sun.
How might one watch the inwoven battalions sweep,—
A dance of atoms,—drifting in the deep!
Ah, to what goal—firm-fixed or flying far—
Drives yon unhurrying undelaying star?
Thro' space, if space it be, past count or ken,—
Thro' time, if that be time, not marked of men,—
From what beginning, what fire-fountain hurled
Burst the bright streams, and every spark a world? 80

And yet, methinks, men still to be might learn
Whatever eye can fathom, sense discern,
Might note the ether's whirl, the atom's play,
The thousand secrets thronging on the ray,—
Till for that knowledge' sake they scarce could bear
Veilless the tingling incidence of air;—
And yet no nigher for all their wisdom grew
To the old world's life, and pulse that beats therethro',
While round them still, with every hour that rolls,
Swept some unnoted populace of souls,— 90
Undreamt-of lay, as ere earth's life began,
The open secret and the end of man.

O living Love, that art all lives in one!
Soul of all suns, and of all souls the sun!
Earth, that to chosen eyes canst still display
The untarnished glory of thy primal day;—
Blue deep of Heaven, for purged sight opening far
Beyond the extreme abysm and smallest star;—
By subtler sense must those that know thee know;
Thy secret enters with a larger flow; 100
On her own deeps must the soul's gaze begin
And her whole Cosmos lighten from within,—
Showing what once hath been, what aye must be,
Her Cause at once and End, her Source and Sea,—
Felt deeplier still, as still she soars the higher,
Her inmost Being, her unfulfilled Desire.

"Ah dreamers!" some will say, "whose wildered ken
Shapes in the mist a Hope denied to men!
Too happy! hard to find and hard to keep
Such mythic haven in the guideless deep! 110
Ye think ye find; and men there are who thus
Themselves the enchanted isle Aprositus
Have seen from Teneriffe; to them was known
The eastward shadow of its phantasmal cone,
And the blue promontory, and vale that fills
That interspace of visionary hills;—
They saw them plain; yet all the while they wist
That San Borondon is but of the mist,
And such bold sailors as have thither prest
Come bootless back from the unrewarding quest; 120
Or if, they say, they touch it, they are driven
Far forth by all the angered winds of heaven,
And nevermore win thither, nevermore
Tread with firm feet that legendary shore,
Retrack the confluent billows, or survey
From poop or prow the innavigable way."

Must then all quests be nought, all voyage vain,
All hopes the illusion of the whirling brain?
Or are there eyes beyond earth's veil that see,
Dreamers made strong to dream what is to
be? 130
How should such prophet answer that his faith
Were in firm land and not a floating wraith?
What skill should judge him? who to each assign
The secret calling and the sight divine?

Say, by what grace was to Columbus given
To have pierced the unanswering verge of seas and heaven,
To have wrung from winds that screamed and storms that fled
Their wilder voice than voices of the dead;
Left the dear isles by Zephyr overblown,
Hierro's haven and Teyde's towering cone, 140
And forth, with all airs willing and all ways new,
Sailed, till the blue Peak melted in the blue?

And these too, these whose visionary gaze
Haunts not those weltering crimsoned waterways,
Whose dream is not of summer and shining seas,
Ind, and the East, and lost Atlantides;—
Who are set wholly and of one will to win
Kingdoms the spirit knows but from within,—
Whose eyes discern that glory glimmering through
The old earth and heavens that scarcely veil the new;— 150
Let them say plainly; "Nay, we know not well
What words shall prove the tale we have to tell;
Either we cannot or we hardly dare
Breathe forth that vision into earthly air;
And if ye call us dreamers, dreamers then
Be we esteemed amid you waking men;
Hear us or hear not as ye choose; but we
Speak as we can, and are what we must be."

Nor much, in very sooth, shall these men need
The world's applausive smile or answering meed; 160
Whose impulse was not of themselves, nor came
With Phœbus' call and whispering touch of Fame,
But for no worth of theirs, and past their will,
Fell like the lightning on the naked hill.
To them the aspects of the heavens recall
Those strange and hurrying hours that were their all;
For to one heart her bliss came unaware
Under white cloudlets in a morning air;
Another mid the thundering tempest knew
Peace, and a wind that where it listed blew; 170
And oped the heaven of heavens one soul before
In life's mid crash and London's whirling roar;—
Ay, and transfigured in the dream divine
The thronged precinct of Park and Serpentine,
Till horse and rider were as shades that rode
From an unknown to an unknown abode,
And that grey mere, in mist that clung and curled,
Lay like a water of the spirit-world.

Or long will one in a great garden stray
Thro' sunlit hours of visionary day, 180
Till, in himself his spirit deepening far,
The things that are not be the things that are,
And all the scarlet flowers and tossing green
Seem the bright ghosts of what elsewhere hath been,
And the sun's gold phantasmal, ay, and he
A slumbering phantom who has yet to be.
Or one from Plato's page uplifts his head,
Dazed in that mastering parley of the dead,
Till at dark curfew thro' the latticed gloom
What presence feels he in his lonely room, 190
Where mid the writ words of the wise he stands
Like a strange ghost in many-peopled lands,
Or issuing in some columned cloister, sees
Thro' the barred squares the moon-enchanted trees;
Till, when his slow resounding steps have made
One silence with their echoes and the shade,
How can he tell if for the first time then
He paces thus those haunts of musing men,
Or once already, or often long ago,
In other lives he hath known them and shall know, 200
And re-incarnate, unremembering, tread
In the old same footsteps of himself long dead?

Ay, yet maybe must many an age have past
Ere on this old earth thou have looked thy last;
Oft shall again thy child-eyes opening see
A strange scene brought by flashes back to thee;
Full oft youth's fire shall leap thy veins within,
And many a passion stir thee, many a sin,
And many a spirit as yet unborn entwine
Love unimagined with new lives of thine, 210
Ere yet thou pass, with thy last form's last breath,
Through some irremeable gate of death,
And earth, with all her life, with all her lore,
Whirl on, of thee unseen for evermore.

Ah, welcome then that hour which bids thee lie
In anguish of thy last infirmity!
Welcome the toss for ease, the gasp for air,
The visage drawn, and Hippocratic stare;
Welcome the darkening dream, the lost control,
The sleep, the swoon, the arousal of the soul! 220

Stayed on such hope, what hinders thee to live
Meanwhile as they that less receive than give?
Short time thou tarriest; wherefore shouldst thou then
Envy, or fear, or vex thyself with men?
Only care thou that strong thy life and free
Inward and onward sweep into the sea;
That mid earth's dizzying pains thou quit thee well,
Whose worst is now, nor waits a darker hell.
So,—round his path their lair tho' Centaurs made,
Harpies, and Gorgons, and a Threefold Shade,— 230
Yet strove the Trojan on, nor cared to stay
For shapes phantasmal flown about his way;
But with sword sheathed in scorn, and heart possest
With the one following of the one behest,
Beheld at last that folk Elysian, where
Their own sun gilds their own profounder air,—
Found the wise Sire, and in the secret vale
Heard and returned an unambiguous tale.
Or so this ancient stream thro' London flows,
Her tumult round him gathering as he goes; 240
All day he bears the traffic, hears the strife,
Reflects the pageant of that changeful life;
Then day declines; men's hurrying deeds are done;
Falls the deep night, and all their fates are one;
Their hopes, their fears, a truce imperious keep;
Sorrows and joys are stilled at last to sleep;
From dark to dark the dim-lit river rolls,
A silent highway thro' that place of souls;
As if he only of all their myriads knew
What sea unseen all streams are travelling to, 250
And on swirled eddy and silent onset bare
That city's being between a dream and prayer.

Ay, thou shalt mourn, my friend, yet not as when
Thou hadst fain been blotted from the roll of men,
Fain that what night begat thee and what day bare
Might sweep to nothing in the abyss of air,
And the earth engulf and the ocean overflow
Thy stinging shame, the wildness of thy woe.
For now thine anguish suddenly oft shall cease,
Caught in the flow of thy perpetual peace, 260
Nor aught shall greatly trouble or long dismay
Thy soul forth-faring thro' the inward day,—
Strong in that sight, and fashioned to sustain
Gladly the purging sacrament of pain;—
Ay, to thank God, who in his heightening plan
Hath chosen to show thee the full fate of man;—
Who not in peace alone hath bid thee go,
But thro' gross darkness, and a wildering woe;
With all his storms hath vext thee, and opprest
With wild despair thy lonely and labouring breast; 270
Till there hath somewhat grown in thee so strong
That neither force nor fear nor woe nor wrong
Can check that inward onset, or can still
Thy heart's bold hope, thy soaring flame of will;—
Since thou hast guessed that on thy side have striven
A host unknown, and hierarchs of heaven;
With whom shalt thou, in lands unseen afar,
Renew thy youth and go again to war;—
Ay, when earth's folk are dust, earth's voices dumb,
From world to world shalt strive and overcome. 280

Say, could aught else content thee? which were best,
After so brief a battle an endless rest,
Or the ancient conflict rather to renew,
By the old deeds strengthened mightier deeds to do,
Till all thou art, nay, all thou hast dreamed to be
Proves thy mere root or embryon germ of thee;—
Wherefrom thy great life passionately springs,
Rocked by strange blasts and stormy tempestings,
Yet still from shock and storm more steadfast grown,
More one with other souls, yet more thine own?— 290
Nay thro' those sufferings called and chosen then
A very Demiurge of unborn men,—
A very Saviour, bending half divine
To souls who feel such woes as once were thine;—
For these, perchance, some utmost fear to brave,
Teach with thy truth, and with thy sorrows save.

That hour may come when Earth no more can keep
Tireless her year-long voyage thro' the deep;
Nay, when all planets, sucked and swept in one,
Feed their rekindled solitary sun;— 300
Nay when all suns that shine, together hurled,
Crash in one infinite and lifeless world:—
Yet hold thou still, what worlds soe'er may roll,
Naught bear they with them master of the soul;
In all the eternal whirl, the cosmic stir,
All the eternal is akin to her;
She shall endure, and quicken, and live at last,
When all save souls has perished in the past.

And wouldst thou still thy hope's immenseness shun?
Shield from the storm thy soul's course scarce begun? 310
These shattering blows she shall not curse but bless;
How were she straitened with one pang the less!
Ah, try her, Powers! let many a heat distil
Her lucid essence from the insurgent ill;
Oh roughly, strongly work her bold increase!
Leave her not stagnant in a painless peace!
Nor let her, lulled in howso heavenly air,
Fold her brave pinions and forget to dare!

So thrives not Love; nor his great glory is shed
On thornless summers and a rosy bed; 320
Nor oft mid all things fair and full content
Soars he to rapture, blooms to ravishment;—
But even as Beauty is no vain image wrought
By man's mere senses or adventurous thought,
But founts austere maintain her lovesome youth,
And Beauty is the splendid bloom of Truth;—
So Love is Virtue's splendour; flame that starts
From the struck anvil of impassioned hearts;—
Who though sometimes their Paradisal care
Be but to till Life's field and leave it fair,— 330
For some sweet years charged only to prolong
Their lives' decline in new lives clear of wrong;—
Yet oftener these by sterner lessons taught
Shall know the hours when Love is all or naught,
When strong pains borne together and high deeds done,—
Ay, sundering Death by severance welds in one.

Thus be all life thy lesson; raised the higher
By whatsoe'er men scorn, or men desire;—
If lives untuned raise round thee a jarring voice,
Grieve thou for these, but for thyself rejoice; 340
Since fed by each strife won, each strenuous hour,
The strong soul grows; her patience ends in power;
And from the lowliest vale as lightly flown
As from a mount she soars and is alone.
Or thou, if all the arts their wealth have blent
To fashion some still home magnificent,
Wherein at eve thine heart is snared and tame
With lily odours and a glancing flame,
While sighs half-heard of women, and dim things fair,
Make the dusk magical and charm the air;— 350
If in that languorous calm thine ardours fade
And half-allured thy soul is half-betrayed,—
Yet with one thought shalt thou again be free,
Rapt in pure peace and inward ecstasy,
Since art and gold are but the shine and show
Of that true beauty which thy soul shall know;—
Ay, these things and things better shall she create
Of her own substance, in her glorious state,
When the unseen hope its visible end shall win
And her best house be builded from within. 360
For Art, the more she quickens, still the more
Must stretch her fair hands to the further shore,
Clearlier thro' fading images descry
Her fadeless home, and truth in phantasy.

Say, hast thou so known Art? hast felt her power
Leap in an instant, vanish in an hour?
Marked in her eyes those gleams auroral play
Mixt with this lumour of the worldly day?
Times have there been when all thy joys were naught
To the far following of a tameless thought? 370
When even the solid earth's foundations strong
Seemed but the fabric and the food of Song?—
In what world wert thou then? what spirit heard
That mounting cry which died upon a word?
Whence to thy soul that urgent answer came,
Force none of thine, and high hopes crowned with flame?
Which from thy lips fell slow, and lost the while
Their mystic radiance, momentary smile.

Yea, and unseen things round the Painter stand;
More than his eye directs the masterhand; 380
Dimly and bright, with rapture mixt and pain,
A heavenly image burns upon his brain;—
And many guessed it, but to one alone
God's house was open and His household known,—
Because the Lord had shown it him, and set
Such vision in the heart of Tintoret
That to his burning hurrying brush was given
Sphere beyond sphere the infinite of heaven;—
From light to light his leaping spirit flew,
The heaven of heavens was round him as he drew;— 390
Till clear-obscure in eddying circles lay
The golden folk, the inhabitants of day:—
Crowd all his walls, thro' all his canvas throng,
Those eyes enraptured in a silent song,
Hands of appeal, and starry brows that tell
A yearning joy, a wish inaudible.

So mounts the soul; so for her, mounting higher,
Is fresh apocalypse a fresh desire;
Vision is mystery, and Truth must still
By riddles teach, and as she fails fulfil. 400
And Music;—hast thou felt that how-soe'er
Her mastering preludes march upon the air,—
With whatso gladness her full stream she flings
Tumultuous thro' the swirl of terrene things,—
Though she awhile, when the airy notes have flown,
Encompass all men's passion in her own,
Till "ye who know what thing Love is" can see
His wings in the air vibrate enchantingly,—
Yet oftener, strangelier, are her accents set
Toward hopes unfathomed thro' an unknown regret;— 410
Ah listen! tremble! for no earthly fate
Knocks in that occult summons at the gate;—
Hark! for that wild appeal, that fierce acclaim
Cry to no earthly love with earthly flame;—
The august concent its joyaunce whirls away
From thy soul's compass thro' the ideal day;—
The lovely uplifted voice of girl or boy
Stirs the full heart with something strange to joy.

Then hadst thou thought that still the Thracian sent
Thro' all the chords his infinite lament, 420
Because himself, the minstrel sire of song,
Had loved so passionately, mourned so long,
And taught his seven sweet strings a sighing tone,
And made their wail the answer of his own?
Or must thou deem 'twas but some Past of thine
Confused the stream of Music's cry divine,
Because her entering Orphic touch revealed
Shrines ruined now, bride-chambers shut and sealed,
And thrilling through thee a gleam unwonted shed
On loves long lost, and days immortal dead? 430
Not so, but Music is a creature bound,
A voice not ours, the imprisoned soul of sound,—
Who fain would bend down hither and find her part
In the strong passion of a hero's heart,
Or one great hour constrains herself to sing
Pastoral peace and waters wandering;—
Then hark how on a chord she is rapt and flown
To that true world thou seest not nor hast known
Nor speech of thine can her strange thought unfold,
The bars' wild beat, and ripple of running gold, 440
Since needs must she the unending story tell
Of such sweet mates as with her for ever dwell,
Of very Truth, and Beauty sole and fair,
And Wisdom, made the sun of all that air,
Where now thou art not, but shalt be soon, and thus
Scale her high home, and find her glorious.

And Love? thine heart imagined, it may be,
Himself the Immortal here had lodged with thee?
Thou hadst clomb the heaven and caught him in the air,
And clasped him close and felt that he was fair?— 450
He hath but shown thee, when thou call'dst him sweet,
His eyes' first glance, and shimmer of flying feet,—
He hath but spoken, on his ascending way,
One least word of the words he hath yet to say,—
Who in the true world his true home has made
With fair things first-begotten and undecayed,—
Whereof thou too art, whither thou too shalt go,
Live with Love's self, and what Love knows shalt know.

Ah sweet division, excellent debate
Between this flesh and that celestial state, 460
When Love, long-prayed, hath wrought thee now and here
Peace in some heart so innocently dear
That thought of more than what before thee lies
Seems a mere scorn of present Paradise;
While yet Love rests not so, nor bates his breath
To name the stingless names of Eld and Death;
Knowing, through change without thee and within
His force must grow and his great years begin;—
Knowing himself the mightiest, Death the call
To his high realm and house primordial. 470

Ah, may the heart grow ever, yet retain
All she hath once acquired of glorious gain!
May all in freshness in her deeps endure
Which once hath entered in of high and pure,
Nor the sweet Present's dearness wear away
The grace and power of the old God-given day!
Nay, as some world-wide race count most divine
Of all their temples one first lowly shrine,
Whereat the vow was pledged, the onset sworn,
Which swept their standards deep into the Morn,— 480
So, howsoe'er thy soul's fate bear her far
Thro' counterchanging heaven and avatar,
Still shall her gaze that earliest scene survey
Where eyes heroic taught the heavenly way,
Where hearts grew firm to hold the august desire
Though sea with sky, though earth were mixt with fire,—
Where o'er themselves they seized the high control,
Each at the calling of the comrade soul.
Ay, in God's presence set them, let them see
The lifting veil of the inmost mystery, 490
Even then shall they remember, even so
Shall the old thoughts rise, and the old love's fountain flow.

Ah Fate! what home soe'er be mine at last,
Save me some look, some image of the Past!
O'er deep-blue meres be dark cloud-shadows driven;
Veil and unveil a storm-swept sun in heaven;—
Cold gusts of raining summer bring me still
Dreamwise the wet scent of the ferny hill!

Live then and love; thro' life, thro' love is won
All thy fair Future shall have dared and done: 500
Whate'er the æons unimagined keep
Stored for thy trial in the viewless deep;—
Though thy sad path should lead thee unafraid
Lonely thro' age-long avenues of shade;—
Though in strange worlds, on many a ghostly morn,
Thy soul dishomed shall shudder and be forlorn;—
Yet with thee still the World-soul's onset goes;
Wind of the Spirit on all those waters blows;
Still in all lives a Presence inlier known
Is Light and Truth and all men's and thine own; 510
Still o'er thy hid soul brooding as a dove
With Love alone redeems the wounds of Love;
Still mid the wildering war, the eternal strife,
Bears for Life's ills the healing gift of Life.

Live thou and love! so best and only so
Can thy one soul into the One Soul flow,—
Can thy small life to Life's great centre flee,
And thou be nothing, and the Lord in thee.
And therefore whoso reaches, whoso knows
This ardent peace, this passionate repose,— 520
In whomsoe'er from the heart forth shall swell
The indwelling tide, the inborn Emmanuel,—
Their peace no kings, no warring worlds destroy,
No strangers intermeddle and mar their joy;
These lives can neither Alp on Alp upborne
Hurl from the Glooming or the Thundering Horn,
Nor Nile, uprisen with all his waters, stay
Their march aerial and irradiant way;—
Who are in God's hand, and round about them thrown
The light invisible of a land unknown; 530
Who are in God's hand; in quietness can wait
Age, pain, and death, and all that men call Fate:—
What matter if thou hold thy loved ones prest
Still with close arms upon thy yearning breast,
Or with purged eyes behold them hand in hand
Come in a vision from that lovely land,—
Or only with great heart and spirit sure
Deserve them and await them and endure;
Knowing well, no shocks that fall, no years that flee,
Can sunder God from these, or God from thee; 540
Nowise so far thy love from theirs can roam
As past the mansions of His endless home.

Hereat, my soul, go softly; not for long
Runs thy still hour from prime till evensong;
Come shine or storm, rejoice thee or endure,
Set is thy course and all thy haven is sure;
Nor guide be thine thro' halcyon seas or wild
Save the child's heart and trust as of the child.





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