Excerpt
Celia was laughing. Hopefully I said:
“How shall this beauty that we share,
This love, remain aware
Beyond our happy breathing of the air?
How shall it be fulfilled and perfected?...
If you were dead,
How then should I be comforted?”
But Celia knew instead:
“He who finds beauty here, shall find it there.”
A halo gathered round her hair.
I looked and saw her wisdom bare
The living bosom of the countless dead.
... And there
I laid my head.
Again when Celia laughed, I doubted her and said:
“Life must be led
In many ways more difficult to see
Than this immediate way
For you and me.
We stand together on our lake’s edge, and the mystery
Of love has made us one, as day is made of night and night of day.
Aware of one identity
Within each other, we can say:
‘I shall be everything you are.’...
We are uplifted till we touch a star.
We know that overhead
Is nothing more austere, more starry, or more deep to understand
Than is our union, human hand in hand.
.... But over our lake come strangers—a crowded launch, a lonely sailing boy.
A mile away a train bends by. In every car
Strangers are travelling, each with particular
And unkind preference like ours, with privacy
Of understanding, with especial joy
Like ours. Celia, Celia, why should there be
Distrust between ourselves and them, disunity?
.... How careful we have been
To trim this little circle that we tread,
To set a bar
To strangers and forbid them!—Are they not as we,
Our very likeness and our nearest kin?
How can we shut them out and let stars in?”
She looked along the lake. And when I heard her speak,
The sun fell on the boy’s white sail and her white cheek.
“I touch them all through you,” she said. “I cannot know them now
Deeply and truly as my very own, except through you,
Except through one or two
Interpreters.
But not a moment stirs
Here between us, binding and interweaving us,
That does not bind these others to our care.”
The sunlight fell in glory on her hair....
And then said Celia, radiant, when I held her near:
“They who find beauty there, shall find it here.”
And on her brow,
When I heard Celia speak,
Cities were populous
With peace and oceans echoed glories in her ear
And from her risen thought
Her lips had brought,
As from some peak
Down through the clouds, a mountain-air
To guide the lonely and uplift the weak.
“Record it all,” she told me, “more than merely this,
More than the shine of sunset on our heads, more than a kiss,
More than our rapt agreement and delight
Watching the mountain mingle with the night....
Tell that the love of two incurs
The love of multitudes, makes way
And welcome for them, as a solitary star
Brings on the great array.
Go make a lovers’ calendar,”
She said, “for every day.”
And when the sun had put away
His dazzle, over the shadowy firs
The solitary star came out.... So on some night
To eyes of youth shall come my light
And hers.
II“Where are you bound, O solemn voyager?”
She laughed one day and asked me in her mirth:
“Where are you from?
Why are you come?”
.......