The Pit of Bliss

When I was young I dared to sing
Of everything and anything :
Of joy and woe and fate and God,
Of dreaming cloud and teeming sod,
Of hill that thrust and amber spear
into the sunset, and the soul
Precipice that shakes the soul
To its black gape—I sang the whole
Of man and God, nor sought to know
God or man or joy or woe :
And, thought an older wight I be,
My Soul hath still such ecstasy
That, on a pulse, I sing and sing
Of everything and anything. There is a light shines in the head ;
It is not gold, it is not red ;
But, as the lightning's blinding light,
It is a stare of silver white
That one surmise would fancy blue :
On that mind-binding hue I gaze
An instant, and am in a maze
Of thinking—could one call it so ?
It is no feeling that I know
—An hurricane of knowing, that
Could whelm the soul that was not pat
To flinch and lose the deadly thing,
And sing, and sing again, and sing
Of everything and anything.

An eagle, whirling up the sky,
Sunblind, dizzy, urging high,
And higher urging yet a wing,
Until he can no longer cling,
Or hold, or do a thing, but fall
And sink and whirl and scream through all
The dizzy heaven-hell of pit,
In mile-a-minute flight from it
That he had dared—From height of height,
So the poet takes his flight
And tumble in the pit of bliss,
And, in the roar of that abyss,
And falling, he will sing and sing
Of everything and anything.

What is knowing—'tis to see :
What is feeling—'tis to be :
What is love—but more and more
To see and be, to be a pour
And avalanche of being, till
The being ceases and is still
For very motion—What is joy,
—Being, past all earthly cloy
And intermixture : being spun
Of itself is being won :
—That is joy, and this is God
To be that in cloud and clod,
And in cloud and clod and sing
Of everything and anything.

To Clemens J. France.