Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE NEW RUBAIYAT, by CONDE BENOIST PALLEN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE NEW RUBAIYAT, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Old omar, subtle weaver of the skein
Last Line: Her eyes search deep and long, and make it thine.
Subject(s): Faith; Omar Khayyam (1048-1122); Wisdom; Belief; Creed


Old Omar, subtle weaver of the skein
Of doubt entangled in thy muddled brain
In that far East which saw thy distant day,
This later hour awakes thy voice again,

And in a newer tongue recasts the phrase,
That doubled glibly in thine olden ways
On life and death and those dark questionings
Which doubt may answer not, though doubt may raise.

This newer vase that holds thine ancient wine
Is rich with lines as gracious as were thine,
As delicately graved, as featly traced
With clinging tendril of the worshipped vine.

Nor deem I that the pouring of thy song
From old to newer vessel does thee wrong;
For deft the hand that fashioned the new clay,
A master's hand, and, as a master's, strong.

Nor strange that he should seek thine unfaith out,
Who felt a kindred sympathy in doubt
In this wild day when creeds have crumbled down,
Blown like the dust of simoons 'round about.

For that old plaint which sickened thy soft soul,
And to thy lips held up the poisoned bowl
Made luscious with the nectars of the sense,
Still sings your song and echoes all its dole.

And though his noisy doubt the newer man
Boast as fresh light upon the marching van
Of progress to the piping fife of change,
Your doubt was ancient ere his doubt began.

For you, as he, sang faith and unfaith's strife,
And he, as you, chants death the bourne of life;
He now, as you a thousand years ago,
Into the heart of faith drives deep the knife.

Thy dubious hand upon the shifting scale
Touched every trembling note, drew every wail,
Sounded each plaint and struck each quivering chord;
He now as you of old—to what avail?

As dark a riddle is that silent fate
To the blind sceptic of this later date,
As ever answered not to thy light word,
Who asked in dalliance at the outer gate.

For truth speaks only at the inner shrine,
Not in the tavern where they spill the wine;
Pours only through the cleansed and chastened sense
The cryptic sweetness of the living vine.

To list thy lilting numbers' softened strain,
And hear it chiming with the rhythmed pain
Thy later brothers plaint on modern lutes,
Wakes smiling comment on their little gain.

Alas, that you in mediæval years
Sang all their doubts, shed all their hopeless tears,
Their creedless creed in all its changes rang,
And coined their wisdom in your shallow fears.

Science but now, they cry with echoing bruit,
Has plucked the higher wisdom's ripened fruit,
Achieved the summit of a nobler view,
And struck in wider knowledge deeper root.

Yet all the garnered learning of the age
Has added not a tittle to your page;
Of that first truth and last the soul desires
Your word as wise as theirs, your wit as sage.

Your wit and theirs both dark as starless night,
Searching the universe with candle-light,
Agrope within the same abyss of dread,
Where depth grows black with depth and height with height.

In vain they seek, as vain you sought, the clue,
Where doubt makes mocking shadows of the true,
Dissolves the answer in the question's breath,
The doubt that asks from doubt that never knew.

And echo questioned back the mockery flings,
And doubt that asks of doubt with unfaith rings;
Responsive to the fingers wail the strings,
And as you key the patient chord, it sings.

You drew the music of your plaintive strain
From the sore grief of Philomel's sad pain,
But dashed the sweetness of her chastened song
With doubt, and poisoned all its balm with bane.

You sang, and sadly sweet your olden rhyme,
The fleeting footsteps of the phantom time,
The dying sweetness of the hastening rose,
Life's transient blush undone by death's swift crime.

Yea, vanity in him, who lays up store
Of hope to reap his harvest on time's shore,
And sowing all the fields that lie around,
Prepares the granary and the threshing floor.

Ah, swift the courses of the rushing sun,
And changeful are the glittering hours that run
Twixt hope's first blossom and the blown flower,
For evening sees not what the morn begun.

And Cæsar's dust beneath a peasant's feet,
For wisdom's eloquence were theme replete,
How levelled by the sweeping scythe of time,
Fame and unfame in one oblivion meet.

So has the ages' wisdom ever sung,
And from earth's hollow glories wailing rung
The tribute of its dole; not new your song,
Nor new the lesson of your mellow tongue.

Though Jamshýd long has quaffed the last black draught,
And Cæsar, smitten by the bitter shaft
That pricked his glory's bubble, heedless sleeps,
Their dust but shallow soil for wisdom's graft.

The rose you sing from Cæsar's clay that blows
Like Cæsar's glory for an instant shows,
And crumbles back to that from whence it bloomed;
From dust it came and into dust it goes.

Mortal to mortal is the primal law,
Earth back to earth again the whole world's saw:
Mortality is written broad and deep,
And fools that run the easy lesson draw.

Yes, easy is the folly that seems wise,
And cloaks short knowledge in a long disguise;
Easy the truth that time is swift of flight,
The flower that blooms to-day, to-morrow dies.

Easy to drown, the heedless cup within,
The gruesome memory of the death and sin,
That racked the soul with their black questionings,
And as unbidden guests of old stalked in.

Nor you the first, nor last, to thrust them out
And welcome in their place a reeling rout
Who drink and question not, but steep in floods
Of mellow vintage all the ghosts of doubt.

Brief wisdom and short triumph your poor plot
To cheat the destiny the years allot
By drowning memory in a shallow cup;—
Though now forgetting, you are not forgot.

And while you wander in a vinous mist
Through roseate ways as your soft pleasures list,
The spinner Time still plies his tireless loom,
And you and Death are drawing to the tryst.

What answer then in that appointed place,
When he breathes cold upon your yellowing face,
What answer echoing from the empty cup?
Remorse within the lees, think you, or grace?

TO-DAY the chosen mistress of your lot,
TO-MORROW banned and YESTERDAY forgot:
LO, YESTERDAY accuses from the dead;—
TO-MORROW beckons for TO-DAY is not:

Fast running out the limit of your thread,
TO-DAY and YESTERDAY forever sped;
The whirling loom roars distantly and faint,
And all your years are ashes with the dead.

So careful of the present and its joys,
Hoarding like children all the broken toys;
The little wrecks now strew the dusty floor,
And you forgotten with your childish noise.

So careful now within your eager hands
That not a grain shall waste of time's swift sands—
The very grain you clutch has trickled through;
TO-DAY holds not what YESTERDAY demands.

TO-DAY but borrows what TO-MORROW lends,
And pays to YESTERDAY what now it spends,
And debtor still with nothing of its own
A bankrupt in the hands of Death it ends.

Why stake on nothingness the all you own,
And cast life's ashes to the whirlwind blown?
He loses time who builds on time alone,
And nothing shall be reaped from nothing sown.

What boot the pleasures of a century's run,
If all their sweets but end where they begun
In that swift nothing of an instant's flight,
A prize that's lost before the prize is won.

The years gone down into the gaping tomb
Of YESTERDAY are dream wastes in the gloom,
Dim wraiths of time embraced but never held,
Visions that stare from out an ancient room.

Sum up their all and hoard your empty gain:
Hope crushed by fear, joy strangled in the pain,
Life smote by death at every baffled turn,
Dying to live and then to die again.

And when upon the darkened verge you stand,
Where life's faint stream is lost in death's quick sand,
What garnered treasure do the senses hold?
An eyeless skull within a fleshless hand.

Who turns all things to uses of the sense
Shall glean in sense his only recompense;
For time abused shall be by time avenged;
Life sown in death shall reap in impotence.

You tell us that you turned from Wisdom's door,
Sifting the heaped-up rubbish on the floor
Of learning's vestibule, but found no key;
And was the portal locked—are you so sure?

Think you that thus the road to Wisdom lies,
And on the rungs of knowledge men may rise
To that pure empyrean, as small boys
Plant little ladders to essay the skies?

Not all the gleaning of the labouring West,
Nor all the knowledge of the Orient's quest
May scale a single inch of that far height:
Who seeketh not is he who seeketh best.

Knowledge may reach from shining star to star,
Enthroned on three-ringed Saturn sit afar,
And still as distant be from Wisdom's house
As when it beat against this lower bar.

The door to which in vain your key you plied,
The door you found so tightly sealed, stands wide
To him who bends in leal humility:
He enters not who walks erect in pride.

You thought to compass with your little span
The wide abysses of creation's plan,
And finite measure infinite design;
You—you would be God, who are but man.

Believe th' Omniscient, who ordained the law,
The end as well as the beginning saw;
Trust thou th' Omnipotent, who made the whole,
O'errules it all: not His, but yours the flaw.

Heaven but countersigns your own decree,
And as you sow your years, so shall they be:
This much of fate is true, that as you plant,
So shall you pluck the fruitage of the tree.

The daring mind that seeks to wholly sift
The heart of mystery, may never lift
The veil that hides her face from prying eyes:
From Wisdom's hand you cannot wrest her gift.

Who would unchastely pierce her secret pale
Shall find her panoplied in hardest mail;
Who seeks to violate her fane shall meet
The entrance barred and closely drawn the veil.

The gathered lightnings shall about him play,
And thunderous wrath shall fill his fearful way,
Whose lustful eye would take her face unveiled;
The sacrilege with blindness shall he pay.

The question put the answer comes in kind:
Who seeks in simple faith in faith shall find
The answer; but pride re-echoes pride,
And blind the understanding of the blind.

Who asks of Earth shall hear of Earth reply:
Earth born of earth in earth again shall die;
A fugitive your little course you run,
And there return, and there forever lie.

Who asks of Heaven an unseen voice shall hear
Singing like chimings of the crystal sphere
Of interstellar spaces ringing clear:
There but a little while, forever here;

A little while to school the impatient soul
To read by faith the riddle of the scroll,
That Wisdom writes in hieroglyphs of time;
There but the lesser part, and here the whole.

For Love gazed on the Beauty of the Face
Of His Beloved and upward welled in grace,
As everlasting fountains pouring forth
Abundant floods make bloom a desert place.

Love in creation's wondrous mirror sought
To multiply the image of His Thought,
And pouring forth His Power upon the void,
In Love the likeness of His Love He wrought.

And back again as surging flames aspire
Creation lifts to Love's eternal fire;
Time but the rushing of her eager flight
Upon the outstretched pinions of desire;

Death, the instant of the journey done,
When all the courses of the way are run,
The door through which departs the passing guest,
Who goes upon the rising of the sun.

For Love devised the plan, and Love makes test
Of Faith to that far end that Love knows best;
And this the message Love by Wisdom sends:
In Faith abide, and leave to Love the rest.

Divorce not Reason from thy failing house
To make with concubines a vain carouse,
But take her, prudent partner of thy years,
To cherish chastely as a faithful spouse.

She, too, is of celestial origin,
And knows how close to Faith she is akin,
Faith, her elder sister, in whose eyes
Dissolves the secret, death, the riddle, sin.

For Reason, modest in her household lore,
Seeks not beyond the threshold of her door;
Diviner truths in Wisdom's utterance given,
Takes from the lips of Faith, and asks no more.

By Faith, and Faith alone in panic rout
The misbelieving horde is driven out,
Fate's nameless terror lifted from the soul,
Fate, the echo of the voice of doubt.

Forgetfulness in sense a sorry scheme
To cheat the conscience and make seem
The IS and IS NOT all a phantom show,
And time the fading shadow of a dream.

For Reason, drugged a thousand times and more,
A ravaged captive on the tavern floor,
Awakes again loathing her fallen state,
And clamours for her freedom at the door.

Though shamed and flouted victim of thy rape,
She does not die; and you may not escape
Her importuning voice, nor think to end
The issue in the lethe of the grape.

Come from the stifling tavern's baleful glare
Into the sunshine and the outer air,
With gladdened nature greeting everywhere,
And looking up to heaven, see, how fair!

How pure the wide savannah's vaulted sweep,
One sapphire flame from glowing deep to deep;
This crystal cup hold to thy crackled lip,
And drinking feel the freshened pulses leap.

Drink, and clear the phantoms from thy brain,
Cleanse from thy sluggish blood the lecherous bane
That poisoned all the wells of life and truth;
Drink! Look up! and once again be sane.

With chastened sense and in the cleaner mind
Look in pure nature's eyes, and you shall find
A secret half spelled out and half divined:
Within the emblem truth is not confined.

Her secret word a faint prefiguring;
She speaks in shadow of a higher thing,
Like pale penumbra of the light unseen,
The sun's veiled glory from an outer ring.

Within the deepened shadow's darkened plot
You sought the source of light and found it not;
Your eyes grew dim with searching in the dark,
And blindness out of darkness was begot.

The shadow is but shade of hidden light;
It is the sun by earth eclipsed makes night:
Heaven is gracious to our little power,
And her far secret tempers to our sight.

The need of Faith from nature's secret learn;
Reason from Faith and Faith from Love in turn
Draws life and light; in One see all else rest,
And in things seen the things unseen discern.

And though thy years are drawing to their close,
And youth and spring have faded with the rose,
Faith plucks the thorn of thy regret, and lo!
Upon the naked stem Hope's floweret blows;

And all the garden blossoms, and the Vine
Into Love's chalice pours diviner Wine:
Faith holds the secret of the sacred sign;
Her eyes search deep and long, and make it thine.





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