Introduction and Conclusion of a Long Poem

I have gone sometimes by the gates of Death     And stood beside the cavern through whose doors     Enter the voyagers into the unseen.     From that dread threshold only, gazing back,     Have eyes in swift illumination seen     Life utterly revealed, and guessed therein     What things were vital and what things were vain.     Know then, like a vast ocean from my feet     Spreading away into the morning sky,     I saw unrolled my vanished days, and, lo,     Oblivion like a morning mist obscured     Toils, trials, ambitions, agitations, ease,     And like green isles, sun-kissed, with sweet perfume     Loading the airs blown back from that dim gulf,     Gleamed only through the all-involving haze     The hours when we have loved and been beloved.      Therefore, sweet friends, as often as by Love     You rise absorbed into the harmony     Of planets singing round magnetic suns,     Let not propriety nor prejudice     Nor the precepts of jealous age deny     What Sense so incontestably affirms;     Cling to the blessed moment and drink deep     Of the sweet cup it tends, as there alone     Were that which makes life worth the pain to live.     What is so fair as lovers in their joy     That dies in sleep, their sleep that wakes in joy?     Caressing arms are their light pillows. They     That like lost stars have wandered hitherto     Lonesome and lightless through the universe,     Now glow transfired at Nature's flaming core;     They are the centre; constellated heaven     Is the embroidered panoply spread round     Their bridal, and the music of the spheres     Rocks them in hushed epithalamium.          .    .    .    .    .      I know that there are those whose idle tongues     Blaspheme the beauty of the world that was     So wondrous and so worshipful to me.     I call them those that, in the palace where     Down perfumed halls the Sleeping Beauty lay,     Wandered without the secret or the key.     I know that there are those, of gentler heart,     Broken by grief or by deception bowed,     Who in some realm beyond the grave conceive     The bliss they found not here; but, as for me,     In the soft fibres of the tender flesh     I saw potentialities of Joy     Ten thousand lifetimes could not use. Dear Earth,     In this dark month when deep as morning dew     On thy maternal breast shall fall the blood     Of those that were thy loveliest and thy best,     If it be fate that mine shall mix with theirs,     Hear this my natural prayer, for, purified     By that Lethean agony and clad     In more resplendent powers, I ask nought else     Than reincarnate to retrace my path,     Be born again of woman, walk once more     Through Childhood's fragrant, flowery wonderland     And, entered in the golden realm of Youth,     Fare still a pilgrim toward the copious joys     I savored here yet scarce began to sip;     Yea, with the comrades that I loved so well     Resume the banquet we had scarce begun     When in the street we heard the clarion-call     And each man sprang to arms - ay, even myself     Who loved sweet Youth too truly not to share     Its pain no less than its delight. If prayers     Are to be prayed, lo, here is mine! Be this     My resurrection, this my recompense!