Rebirth
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Not soon is God’s delight in us completed, Nor with one life we end; Termlessly in us are our spirits seated And termless joy intend.
Our souls and heaven are of an equal stature And have a dateless birth; The unending seed, the infinite mould of Nature, They were not made on earth,
Nor to the earth do they bequeath their ashes, But in themselves they last. An endless future brims beneath thy lashes, Child of an endless past.
Old memories come to us, old dreams invade us, Lost people we have known, Fictions and pictures; but their frames evade us, – They stand out bare, alone.
Yet all we dream and hope are memories treasured, Are forecasts we misspell, But of what life or scene he who has measured The boundless heavens can tell.
Time is a strong convention; future and present Were living in the past; They are one image that our wills complaisant Into three schemes have cast.
Our past that we forget, is with us deathless, Our births and later end Already accomplished. To a summit breathless Sometimes our souls ascend,
Whence the mind comes back helped; for there emerges The ocean vast of Time Spread out before us with its infinite surges, Its symphonies sublime; Page-51
And even from this veil of mind the spirit Looks out sometimes and sees The bygone aeons that our lives inherit, The unborn centuries:
It sees wave-trampled realms expel the Ocean, – From the vague depths uphurled Where now Himaloy stands, the flood’s huge motion Sees measuring half the
world; And on its threads we gaze, – Past motions of the stars, scenes long since travelled In Time’s far-backward days.
Day and night begin, you tell me, When the sun may choose to set or rise. Well, it may be; but for me their changing Is determined only by her eyes.
Summer, spring, the fruitless winter Hinge, you say, upon the heavenly sun? Oh, but I have known a yearlong winter! Spring was by her careless smiles begun. Page-52 |