Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 3. A MESSAGE COMMITTED TO THE WAVES, by EDWARD CARPENTER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 3. A MESSAGE COMMITTED TO THE WAVES, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I see the waters flowing as of old - dancing, rippling
Last Line: Arise! For great is your triumph!
Subject(s): Humanity; Love - Nature Of


I SEE the waters flowing as of old—dancing, rippling, O so light and
beautiful;
The river-banks, and pollard willows leaning, and bulrushes where as boys
we used to linger.

All transmuted, turned into words and tongues, licking me round like
flames—unearthly, scorching;
All transmuted—the soft water-depths, the weeds below. the dimples of
sunlight dancing,
The shrill piping of the lark, the kine knee-deep in grass, and the piled
thunderclouds floating in the summer haze—
Like flames, unearthly, scorching.

For here on this water and round these banks we came floating—troops
of friends—yet not on this water; by these banks, yet not by them.
And the dimples glanced, and the birds sang—as now, yet O how
different!

Mystery, mystery!
O wonderful orb of creation!
O frame, beauteous ever-living twining frame of human love, chalice of
precious drops poured out, mystic scroll on which our lives in blood are
written,
Great great awful indivisible Nature—birthplace and grave of Humanity!

Tremble tremble, O waves—bear my love too on your breasts to
generations yet unborn;
(Lo! to you I commit it!)
Hear me ye perennial tongues and flames, ye fields and skies speak speak
what I command you!
Ye hieroglyphics stand untampered to remotest time!
O grasses growing so lush about my feet and the feet of those who pass,
while ever you grow on earth forget not the bleeding drops wherewith you have
been watered!
Waft, O breezes, our love and the love of all true lovers, and fail not
while you blow to bring glad messages to those who faint;
For we are borne upon you—
I am borne upon you. From this body, broken and useless, from this mortal
here and there, I fade, I fail utterly; I cannot remain, it is no use;
Pouring pouring out, losing my name and place, flowing abroad, surrendering
myself to all—I depart, to join the invisible.
Ah heaven! Ah sounds of harmony ineffable!
Ah tears, and deeps of sorrow dread and soundless!
Ah love! ah precious love including all!

So still to all—
To those lingering in prison,
To the aged and forsaken, stranded like wrecks on the bleak shore of life,
To the heartbroken and weary, to those stunned with despair;
To the wife awaking to the treachery of her husband;
To the exile leaving his dear ones, and probably for ever; to the crippled
and incapable and diseased;
To the pinned workers in back streets oscillating drearily between the home
and the workshop;
To those of the hopeless sad mechanical days over all the earth—the
outcast, the shunned, the persecuted;
The closing days, the narrowing grooves, the heart touched no more by the
sweet illusions, no more to hope responding, no more to the call of religion;
Ah to all in the mighty brotherhood sufferers—
Dearest, most precious ones,
Corner-stones of human life, hidden bearers of burdens, under-girders of
the great ship with its incalculable freight!
Dearest and most precious of all—ah, sufferers, sufferers,
To you we give our love—
Arise! for great is your triumph!





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