Aylwin eBook

Theodore Watts-Dunton
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 645 pages of information about Aylwin.

Aylwin eBook

Theodore Watts-Dunton
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 645 pages of information about Aylwin.

The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me: 

’The omnipotence of love—­its power of knitting together the entire universe—­is, of course, best understood by the Oriental mind.  Just after the loss of my dear wife I wrote the following poem called “The Bedouin Child,” dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins about girl children, and I translated it into Arabic.  Among these Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.

’Ilyas the prophet, lingering ’neath the moon,
Heard from a tent a child’s heart-withering wail,
Mixt with the message of the nightingale,
And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon,
A little maiden dreaming there alone. 
She babbled of her father sitting pale
’Neath wings of Death—­’mid sights of sorrow and bale,
And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.

’"Poor child, plead on,” the succouring prophet saith,
While she, with eager lips, like one who tries
To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries
To Heaven for help—­“Plead on; such pure love-breath,
Beaching the Throne, might stay the wings of Death
That, in the Desert, fan thy father’s eyes.”

’The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand;
Seven sons await the morning vultures’ claws;
’Mid empty water-skins and camel maws
The father sits, the last of all the band. 
He mutters, drowsing o’er the moonlit sand,
“Sleep fans my brow:  sleep makes us all pashas;
Or, if the wings are Death’s, why Azraeel draws
A childless father from an empty land.”

’"Nay,” saith a Voice, “the wind of Azraeel’s wings
A child’s sweet breath has stilled:  so God decrees:” 
A camel’s bell comes tinkling on the breeze. 
Filling the Bedouin’s brain with bubble of springs
And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees,
Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.

’Between this reading of Nature, which makes her but “the superficial film” of the immensity of God, and that which finds a mystic heart of love and beauty beating within the bosom of Nature herself, I know no real difference.  Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly be confined to Asia.  The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune of universal love and beauty.’

This was followed by a still more mystical poem called ’The Persian Slave Girl’s Progress to Paradise,’ showing the Omnipotence of Love. [Footnote]

[Footnote:  This poem of Philip Aylwin’s appears now in the present writer’s volume, The Coming of Love.]

XIV

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Project Gutenberg
Aylwin from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.