A Reasonable Protestation

    [To F., who complained of his vagueness and lack of dogmatic statement]

    Not, I suppose, since I deny
    Appearance is reality,
    And doubt the substance of the earth
    Does your remonstrance come to birth;
    Not that at once I both affirm
    'Tis not the skin that makes the worm
    And every tactile thing with mass
    Must find its symbol in the grass
    And with a cool conviction say
    Even a critic's more than clay
    And every dog outlives his day.
    This kind of vagueness suits your view,
    You would not carp at it; for you
    Did never stand with those who take
    Their pleasures in a world opaque.
    For you a tree would never be
    Lovely were it but a tree,
    And earthly splendours never splendid
    If by transience unattended.
    Your eyes are on a farther shore
    Than any of earth; nor do adore
    As godhead God's dead hieroglyph.
    Nor would you be perturbed if
    Some prophet with a voice of thunder
    And avalanche arm should blast and founder
    The logical pillars that maintain
    This visible world which loads the brain,
    Loads the brain and withers the heart
    And holds man from his God apart.

    But still with you remains the craving
    For some more solid substance, having
    Surface to touch, colour to see,
    And form compact in symmetry.
    You are not satisfied with these
    Vague throbbings, nameless ecstasies,
    Nor can your spirit find delight
    In an amorphic great white light.
    Not with such sickles can you reap;
    If a dense earth you cannot keep
    You want a dense heaven as substitute
    With trees of plump celestial fruit,
    Red apples, golden pomegranates,
    And a river flowing by tall gates
    Of topaz and of chrysolite
    And walls of twenty cubits height.

    Frank, you cry out against the age!
    Nor you nor I can disengage
    Ourselves from that in which we live
    Nor seize on things God does not give.
    Thirsty as you, perhaps, I long
    For courtyards of eternal song,
    Even as yours my feet would stray
    In a city where 'tis always day
    And a green spontaneous leafy garden
    With God in the middle for a warden;
    But though I hope with strengthening faith
    To taste when I have traversed death
    The unimaginable sweetness
    Of certitude of such concreteness,
    How should I draw the hue and scope
    Of substances I only hope
    Or blaze upon a paper screen
    The evidence of things not seen?
    This art of ours but grows and stirs
    Experience when it registers,
    And you know well as I know well
    This autumn of time in which we dwell
    Is not an age of revelations
    Solid as once, but intimations
    That touch us with warm misty fingers
    Leaving a nameless sense that lingers
    That sight is blind and Time's a snare
    And earth less solid than the air
    And deep below all seeming things
    There sits a steady king of kings
    A radiant ageless permanence,
    A quenchless fount of virtue whence
    We draw our life; a sense that makes
    A staunch conviction nothing shakes
    Of our own immortality.
    And though, being man, with certain glee
    I eat and drink, though I suffer pain,
    And love and hate and love again
    Well or in mode contemptible,
    Thus shackled by the body's spell
    I see through pupils of the beast
    Though it be faint and blurred with mist
    A Star that travels in the East.
    I see what I can, not what I will.
    In things that move, things that are still;
    Thin motion, even cloudier rest,
    I see the symbols God hath drest.
    The moveless trees, the trees that wave
    The clouds that heavenly highways have,
    Horses that run, rocks that are fixt,
    Streams that have rest and motion mixt,
    The main with its abiding flux,
    The wind that up my chimney sucks
    A mounting waterfall of flame,
    Sticks, straws, dust, beetles and that same
    Old blazing sun the Psalmist saw
    A testifier to the law:
    Divinely to the heart they speak
    Saying how they are but weak,
    Wan will-o'-the-wisps on the crystal sea;
    But stays that sea still dark to me.

    Did I now glibly insolent
    Chart the ulterior firmament,
    Would you not know my words were lies,
    Where not my testimonial eyes
    Mortal or spiritual lodge,
    Mere uncorroborated fudge?
    Praise me, though praise I do not want,
    Rather, that I have cast much cant,
    That what I see and feel I write,
    Read what I can in this dim light
    Granted to me in nether night.
    And though I am vague and shrink to guess
    God's everlasting purposes,
    And never save in perplext dream
    Have caught the least clear-shapen gleam
    Of the great kingdom and the throne
    In the world that lies behind our own,
    I have not lacked my certainties,
    I have not haggard moaned the skies,
    Nor waged unnecessary strife
    Nor scorned nor overvalued life.
    And though you say my attitude
    Is questioning, concede my mood
    Does never bring to tongue or pen
    Accents of gloomy modern men
    Who wail or hail the death of God
    And weigh and measure man the clod,
    Or say they draw reluctant breath
    And musically mourn that Death
    Is a queen omnipotent of woe
    And Life her lean cicisbeo,
    Abject and pale, whom vampire-like
    She playeth with ere she shall strike,
    And pose sad riddles to the Sphinx
    With raven quills in purple inks,
    Then send the boy to fetch more drinks.