at her laws,
     Neither song nor smile in ruth,
     Nor promise of things to reveal,
     Has she, nor a word she saith: 
     We are asking her wheels to pause. 
     Well knows she the cry of unfaith. 
     If we strain to the farther shore,
     We are catching at comfort near. 
     Assurances, symbols, saws,
     Revelations in legends, light
     To eyes rolling darkness, these
     Desired of the flesh in affright,
     For the which it will swear to adore,
     She yields not for prayers at her knees;
     The woolly beast bleating will shear. 
     These are our sensual dreams;
     Of the yearning to touch, to feel
     The dark Impalpable sure,
     And have the Unveiled appear;
     Whereon ever black she beams,
     Doth of her terrible deal,
     She who dotes over ripeness at play,
     Rosiness fondles and feeds,
     Guides it with shepherding crook,
     To her sports and her pastures alway. 
     Not she gives the tear for the tear: 
     Harsh wisdom gives Earth, no more;
     In one the spur and the curb: 
     An answer to thoughts or deeds;
     To the Legends an alien look;
     To the Questions a figure of clay. 
     Yet we have but to see and hear,
     Crave we her medical herb. 
     For the road to her soul is the Real: 
     The root of the growth of man: 
     And the senses must traverse it fresh
     With a love that no scourge shall abate,
     To reach the lone heights where we scan
     In the mind’s rarer vision this flesh;
     In the charge of the Mother our fate;
     Her law as the one common weal.

     We, whom the view benumbs,
     We, quivering upward, each hour
     Know battle in air and in ground
     For the breath that goes as it comes,
     For the choice between sweet and sour,
     For the smallest grain of our worth: 
     And he who the reckoning sums
     Finds nought in his hand save Earth. 
     Of Earth are we stripped or crowned. 
     The fleeting Present we crave,
     Barter our best to wed,
     In hope of a cushioned bower,
     What is it but Future and Past
     Like wind and tide at a wave! 
     Idea of the senses, bred
     For the senses to snap and devour: 
     Thin as the shell of a sound
     In delivery, withered in light. 
     Cry we for permanence fast,
     Permanence hangs by the grave;
     Sits on the grave green-grassed,
     On the roll of the heaved grave-mound. 
     By Death, as by Life, are we fed: 
     The two are one spring; our bond
     With the numbers; with whom to unite
     Here feathers wings for beyond: 
     Only they can waft us in flight. 
     For they are Reality’s flower. 
     Of them, and the contact with them,
     Issues Earth’s dearest daughter, the firm