Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, QUERY, by ALICE MONKS MEARS


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

QUERY, by                    
First Line: What holds the swift enquiring mind
Last Line: Murmured a spell to guard the soul.
Subject(s): Insanity; Reason; Shadows; Wandering & Wanderers; Madness; Mental Illness; Intellect; Rationalism; Brain; Mind; Intellectuals


I

What holds the swift enquiring mind
to sanity and rational mirth,
the while it probes this protean-designed,
this metamorphic earth?

Even to dip the hand in streams
of wintered sunlight will inspire
a wonder crossed with maddened dreams,
for sun is fiercest fire.
To touch round rock, the glacial sign,
confuses. Thoughts portentous stir
of storms of atoms pebbles can confine,
than glacier mightier.

What forms exist? What forms appear?
Shall this at last the mind derange
to mark at once all common things and dear
so variable and strange?

II

Oh, how our subtlety has broken us —
of microscopic powers aware,
taunted by might infinitesimal,
by voices in the soundless air!

Knowing how shadow mocks with force unseen,
that even accurate eye cannot discern
the secret energy that sleeps in light
on vein of leaf and frond of fern,

we live more haunted than those men who feared
demon and sprite, who crossed a daisied knoll
alert for elf, and passing dusky woods
murmured a spell to guard the soul.





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