With human mind to question what was hidden. 
At summer dusk the broad moon rising high
Put gentleness in the vast strength of the sky,
Easing its weight; or the hot summer sun
Made noonday kind, and the hours lightly run. 
But in those blazing midnights of the stars
Gathered and brightening for immortal wars
With spears and darts and arrows of sharp light,
She read the indifference of the infinite,
The high strife flashing through eternity
While on the earth stared mortals but as she.

O ’twas a living world that rose around
And in her sentience burned a hollow wound. 
Such easy brightness as the poets see,
Or easy gloom, or hues of faerie,
She never saw, but into her own heart peered
To find what spirit indeed it was she feared:—­
Whether in antique days a divine foe
Sprung branchlike from dense woods had wrought her woe;
Whether in antique days a pagan rite
(Herself a pagan still) unfilmed her sight
And taught her secrets never to be forgot,
And by man’s generation pardoned not.... 
The same blood in ancestral veins ran fleet
As now made hers a road for pain’s quick feet. 
Into the marrow of her hidden life
Had poured the agony of their termless strife
With immaterial and material things;
And as a bird an unlearned music sings
Because a million generations sang,
So in her breast the old alarum rang,
So the old sorrowfulness in her thought
Renewed, and apprehensions all untaught;
As if indeed a creature primitive
Still did she in the world’s dim morning live,
That wanted human warmth and gentleness
To make its solitude a little less.

Kindness gave solitude the lovely light
She loved, and made less terrible black midnight. 
Even as a bird its unlearned music pours
Though windows all be blind and shut the doors,
And sings on still though no faint sound be heard
But wind and leaves and another lonely bird: 
So poured she untaught kindness all around
And in that human music comfort found—­
Music her own and music heard from others,
Prime music of all lovers, children, mothers,
Precarious music between all men sounding,
The horror of silent and dark Powers confounding. 
Singing that music she could bravely live;
Hearing it, find less sorrow to forgive.

THE CANDLE

Time like a cloud
Has risen from the East
And whelmed the sky over
Even to the wide-arched West,
Darkening the blue,
Embrowning the early gold,
Until no more the eternal Sun
Looks simply through.

In each man’s eyes
The cloud is set,
With but the chill light
Of silver January skies. 
On each man’s heart
Time’s firm shadow falls,
And the mind throws but a candle’s beam
On the dark walls.

But on those walls
Man paints his dream
Rejoicing purely
In the faithful candle’s beam: 
Lives by its beauty,
Pictures his heart’s delight,
And with that only beam outbraves
Time’s gathering night.