Poem by Alfred Noyes

The Mystic

With wounds out-reddening every moon-washed rose
King Love went thro' earth's garden-close!
  From that first gate of birth in the golden gloom,
I traced Him. Thorns had frayed His garment's hem,
Ay, and His flesh! I marked, I followed them
  Down to that threshold of--the tomb?

And there Love vanished, yet I entered! Night
And Doubt mocked at the dwindling light:
  Strange claw-like hands flung me their shadowy hate.
I clomb the dreadful stairways of desire
Between a thousand eyes and wings of fire
  And knocked upon the second Gate.

The second Gate! When, like a warrior helmed,
In battle on battle overwhelmed,
  My soul lay stabbed by all the swords of sense,
Blinded and stunned by stars and flowers and trees,
Did I not struggle to my bended knees
  And wrestle with Omnipotence?

Did earth not flee before me, when the breath
Of worship smote her with strange death,
  Withered her gilded garment, broke her sword,
Shattered her graven images and smote
All her light sorrows thro' the breast and throat
  Whose death-cry crowned me God and Lord?

Yea, God and Lord! Had tears not purged my sight?
I saw the myriad gates of Light
  Opening and shutting in each way-side flower,
And like a warder in the gleam of each,
Death, whispering in some strange eternal speech
  To every passing hour.

The second Gate? Was I not born to pass
A million? Though the skies be brass
  And the earth iron, shall I not win thro' all?
Shall I who made the infinite heavens my mark
Shrink from this first wild horror of the dark,
  These formless gulfs, these glooms that crawl?

Never was mine that easy faithless hope
Which makes all life one flowery slope
  To heaven! Mine be the vast assaults of doom,
Trumpets, defeats, red anguish, age-long strife,
Ten million deaths, ten million gates to life,
  The insurgent heart that bursts the tomb.

Vain, vain, unutterably vain are all
The sights and sounds that sink and fall,
  The words and symbols of this fleeting breath:
Shall I not drown the finite in the Whole,
Cast off this body and complete my soul
  Thro' deaths beyond this gate of death?

It will not open! Through the bars I see
The glory and the mystery
  Wind upward ever! The earth-dawn breaks! I bleed
With beating here for entrance. Hark, O hark,
Love, Love, return and give me the great Dark,
  Which is the Light of Life indeed.

1. Princeton, May, 1917
2. The Old Grey Squirrel
3. Haunted in Old Japan
4. The Old Sceptic
5. The Elfin Artist

Josephine Peabody The Mystic ("People say to me")

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