Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, STANZAS TO TOLSTOY IN HIS OLD AGE, by HERBERT TRENCH


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

STANZAS TO TOLSTOY IN HIS OLD AGE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Is this some glowering titan, inly bright
Last Line: And the love, in them that perish, waxes more.
Subject(s): Tolstoy, Leo (1828-1910)


I

IS this some glowering Titan, inly bright,
Angered that summer grasses bloom and seethe
Only to taunt him -- strange to the upper light --
Born at the mouth of Tartarus to breathe
And lodged where vapor-dripping chasms ensheathe
The groping ire of his tremendous hands?
Are these the thews that kept in swaddling-bands
The winged Reason, and would now compel
Beauty, that Spirit clear,
And every art wherein the few excel
Under a peasant's smock to serve as drudges?
Is it one forgetful of a long career
Through many wars and loves, who now begrudges
To youth its fair love-season -- one who quarrels
With all not abject -- one whose mood would bind
Under one law the wearers of the laurels
With feet upon the uplands, in the wind?

II

Or may this peasant demiurge not mask
Mimir himself -- the friend of right in hell,
Him that gave Odin on his awful task
Water of insight from the world-deep well,
And stayed as the god's hostage, and so fell?
Perhaps this soul, half-savage, half-divine,
Is some freed ghost -- the slave from Palestine,
Grim Christopher, who strove as he had sworn
To bear through the mid-flood
That little Child -- so hardly to be borne? . . .
No, no, this is the prophet of the poor!
That face is theirs -- that heart hath understood
Their piteous certainty in things unsure.
And stay! -- those shaggy brows, and haunting them
Unrest, unrest -- O in the Dolorous Street
Have I not seen thee in Jerusalem,
With sheepskin coat and hat and dusty feet,

III

Like a poor herdsman, pilgrim from the snows
Far north of Volga, where his little hut
Lay warm, who on some glittering night arose
And blessed his old wife in the dark, and shut
On her the door, and took his newly-cut
Staff from the eaves -- a sapling iron-shod --
And set forth for the sepulcher of God?
Yes, thence by great plains, Taurus passes bleak,
And fire-lit caravanserai
On, on -- though fever sapped his bony cheek
Month after month, intent and still unbaulked,
Counting the dawns that met his wind-clear eye
Thousands of miles to find it had he walked!
But now -- since thou hast kissed the very stone,
Why restless still, gaunt shepherd come so far?
Why mourn because the ray that led thee on
Shines from a long-annihilated star?

IV

The Man upraised on the Judean crag
Captains for us the war with death no more.
His kingdom hangs as hangs the tattered flag
Over the tomb of a great knight of yore;
Nor shall one law to unity restore
Races or souls -- no staff of thine can urge
Nor knotted club compel them to converge,
Nor any backward summit lead them up:
The world-spring wherein hides
Formless the God that forms us, bursts its cup --
Is seen a Fountain -- breaking like a flower
High into light -- that at its height divides;
Changelessly scattering forth, -- in blaze and shower --
In drops of a trembling diaphaneity --
Dreams the God-breathings momently up-buoy
To melt a myriad ways. Those dreams are we,
Chanted from some unfathomable joy.

V

What! Wouldst to one conception mould mankind?
Hast thou not felt -- on thy lone mountain track
Seeing, from some ridge of forest-rushing wind
Where the oak-boughs overhead wrestle and crack,
Night-plains be-starred with cities mirror back
The naked deeps of stars -- hast thou not felt
The whole high scheme wherein we move and melt
With the swift world -- that its last secret is Not Good, nor Immortality,
But Beauty, -- once to behold the immensities
Filled with one soul, then to make room and die?
Hence the true faith: -- to the uttermost to be
Thyself -- to follow up that ecstasy
Compelling -- to let being take its course,
Rise like a song, and like a dream be free,
Poised on the breath of its own soul and source:
Enough -- the Fountain will re-gather thee!

VI

Rejoice then, Master, at the multitude
Of wills in the many-coloured nations -- yea
At the clouds of destinies distinct -- the flood
Of exploring visions -- all the radiant spray
Of hostile forces on their upward way
Spirals of the interweaving elements
And species, these are but the long ascents
Of the self-poised waters of the Universe
Opening like a rose,
Ingathering all it loses -- to disperse
Its soul in fragrance on the night's abyss,
Yet to build for aye the rainbow as it flows;
Rejoice that we have spectacle of this --
Of the Fountain opening, opening like a rose
And Eternal Wisdom rising from its core;
For the light increases, and the rapture grows,
And the love, in them that perish, waxes more.





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