Collected Works (Vol. III)

IMAGES OF LIFE 95 EPILOGUE. PRAYER. Is fit for children. We are too well ware How vain is prayer, How nought is great, since all is immanent, The vast content Of all the universe unalterable. We know too well THE light streams stronger through the lamps How no one thing abides awhile at all, of sense. Intelligence Grows as we go. Alas: its icy glimmer Shows dimmer, dimmer The awful vaults we traverse. Were the sun Himself the one Glory of space, he would but illustrate The night of Fate. Are not the hosts of heaven in vain arrayed ? | Their light dismayed Before the vast blind spaces of the sky? O galaxy Of thousands upon thousands closely curled! Your golden world Incalculably small, its closest cluster Mere milky lustre Staining the infinite darkness! blind Our minion mind Seeks a great light, a light sufficient, light Insufferably bright, IIence hidden for an hour : imagining This vast vain thing, We call it God, and Father. Empty hand And prayer unplanned Stretch fatuous to the void. friends, What fury sends This folly to intoxicate your hearts? Dread air disparts Your vital ways from these unsavoury follies, Black melancholies Sit straddled on your bended backs. throne Of the unknown Base and The! Ah! men my: How all things fall, Fall from their seat, the lamentable place, Before their face, Weary and pass and are no more. Since hope must be, Look to the future, to the chance minute That life may shoot ‘Some flower at least to blossom in the night, Since vital light Is sure to fail us on the hideous way. What? Must we pray? Verily, O thou littlest babe, too weak To stir or speak, So we, Capable hardly of a thought, yet seed Of word and deed! ‘To thine assured fruition we may trust This weary dust. We who are old, and palsied, (and so wise !) Lift up our eyes To little children, as the storm-tossed bark Hails in the dark Some hardly visible harbour light ; we hold The hours of gold To our own breasts, whose hours are iron and brass :-— So swift they pass And grind us down :—we hold the wondrous light Our scattering sight Yet sees, the one star in a night of woe, We trust, and so Lift tp our voices in the dying day Indeed to pray: 0 little hands that are so soft and strong Lead us along!