Sin against immaturity, the sin
     Of ravenous excess, what deed divides
     Man from vitality; these bleed within;
     Bleed in the crippled relic that abides. 
     Perpetually they bleed; a limb is lost,
     A piece of life, the very spirit maimed. 
     But culprit who the law of man has crossed
     With Nature’s dubiously within is blamed;
     Despite our cry at cutting of the whip,
     Our shiver in the night when numbers frown,
     We but bewail a broken fellowship,
     A sting, an isolation, a fall’n crown.

     Abject of sinners is that sensitive,
     The flesh, amenable to stripes, miscalled
     Incorrigible:  such title do we give
     To the poor shrinking stuff wherewith we are walled;
     And, taking it for Nature, place in ban
     Our Mother, as a Power wanton-willed,
     The shame and baffler of the soul of man,
     The recreant, reptilious.  Do thou build
     Thy mind on her foundations in earth’s bed;
     Behold man’s mind the child of her keen rod,
     For teaching how the wits and passions wed
     To rear that temple of the credible God;
     Sacred the letters of her laws, and plain,
     Will shine, to guide thy feet and hold thee firm: 
     Then, as a pathway through a field of grain,
     Man’s laws appear the blind progressive worm,
     That moves by touch, and thrust of linking rings
     The which to endow with vision, lift from mud
     To level of their nature’s aims and springs,
     Must those, the twain beside our vital flood,
     Now on opposing banks, the twain at strife
     (Whom the so rosy ferryman invites
     To junction, and mid-channel over Life,
     Unmasked to the ghostly, much asunder smites)
     Instruct in deeper than Convenience,
     In higher than the harvest of a year. 
     Only the rooted knowledge to high sense
     Of heavenly can mount, and feel the spur
     For fruitfullest advancement, eye a mark
     Beyond the path with grain on either hand,
     Help to the steering of our social Ark
     Over the barbarous waters unto land.

     For us the double conscience and its war,
     The serving of two masters, false to both,
     Until those twain, who spring the root and are
     The knowledge in division, plight a troth
     Of equal hands:  nor longer circulate
     A pious token for their current coin,
     To growl at the exchange; they, mate and mate,
     Fair feminine and masculine shall join
     Upon an upper plane, still common mould,
     Where stamped religion and reflective pace
     A statelier measure, and the hoop of gold
     Rounds to horizon for their soul’s embrace. 
     Then shall those noblest of the earth and sun
     Inmix unlike to waves on savage sea. 
     But not till Nature’s laws and man’s are one,
     Can marriage of the man and woman be.