John Hay: Verses about Tears

God send me tears!
Loose the fierce band that binds my tired brain,
Give me the melting heart of other years,
And let me weep again!

Before me pass
The shapes of things inexorably true.
Gone is the sparkle of transforming dew
From every blade of grass.

In life's high noon
Aimless I stand, my promised task undone,
And raise my hot eyes to the angry sun
That will go down too soon.

Turned into gall
Are the sweet joys of childhood's sunny reign;
And memory is a torture, love a chain
That binds my life in thrall.

And childhood's pain
Could to me now the purest rapture yield;
I pray for tears as in his parching field
The husbandman for rain.

We pray in vain!
The sullen sky flings down its blaze of brass;
The joys of love all scorched and withering pass;
I shall not weep again.

When by Jabbok the patriarch waited
To learn on the morrow his doom,
And his dubious spirit debated
In darkness and silence and gloom,
There descended a Being with whom
He wrestled in agony sore,
With striving of heart and of brawn,
And not for an instant forbore
Till the east gave a threat of the dawn;
And then, as the Awful One blessed him,
To his lips and his spirit there came,
Compelled by the doubts that oppressed him,
The cry that through questioning ages
Has been wrung from the hinds and the sages.
"Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name!"

Most fatal, most futile, of questions!
Wherever the heart of man beats,
In the spirit's most sacred retreats,
It comes with its sombre suggestions,
Unanswered forever and aye.
The blessing may come and may stay,
For the wrestler's heroic endeavor;
But the question, unheeded forever,
Dies out in the broadening day.

In the ages before our traditions,
By the altars of dark superstitions,
The imperious question has come;
When the death-stricken victim lay sobbing
At the feet of his slayer and priest,
And his heart was laid smoking and throbbing
To the sound of the cymbal and drum
On the steps of the high Teocallis;
When the delicate Greek at his feast
Poured forth the red wine from his chalice
With mocking and cynical prayer;
When by Nile Egypt worshiping lay,
And afar, through the rosy, flushed air
The Memnon called out to the day;
Where the Muezzin's cry floats from his spire:
In the vaulted Cathedral's dim shades,
Where the crushed hearts of thousands aspire
Through art's highest miracles higher,
This question of questions invades
Each heart bowed in worship or shame;
In the air where the censers are swinging,
A voice, going up with the singing,
Cries, "Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name!"

No answer came back, not a word,
To the patriarch there by the ford;
No answer has come through the ages
To the poets, the seers, and the sages
Who have sought in the secrets of science
The name and the nature of God,
Whether cursing in desperate defiance
Or kissing his absolute rod.
But the answer which was and shall be,
"My name! Nay, what is it to thee?"

The search and the question are vain.
By use of the strength that is in you,
By wrestling of soul and of sinew
The blessing of God you may gain.
There are lights in the far-gleaming Heaven
That never will shine on our eyes;
To mortals it may not be given
To range those inviolate skies.
The mind, whether praying or scorning,
That tempts those dread secrets shall fail;
But strive through the night till the morning,
And mightily shalt thou prevail.

I tore this weed from the rank, dark soil
Where it grew in the monkish time,
I trimmed it close and set it again
In a border of modern rhyme.

I

Long years ago, when the Devil was loose
And faith was sorely tried,
Three monks of Basle went out to walk
In the quiet eventide.

A breeze as pure as the breath of Heaven
Blew fresh through the cloister-shades,
A sky as glad as the smile of Heaven
Blushed rose o'er the minster-glades.

But scorning the lures of summer and sense,
The monks passed on in their walk;
Their eyes were abased, their senses slept,
Their souls were in their talk.

In the tough grim talk of the monkish days
They hammered and slashed about,
Dry husks of logic, old scraps of creed,
And the cold gray dreams of doubt,

And whether Just or Justified
Was the Church's mystic Head,
And whether the Bread was changed to God,
Or God became the Bread.

But of human hearts outside their walls
They never paused to dream,
And they never thought of the love of God
That smiled in the twilight gleam.

II

As these three monks went bickering on
By the foot of a spreading tree,
Out from its heart of verdurous gloom
A song burst wild and free,

A wordless carol of life and love,
Of nature free and wild;
And the three monks paused in the evening shade,
Looked up at each other and smiled.

And tender and gay the bird sang on,
And cooed and whistled and trilled,
And the wasteful wealth of life and love
From his happy heart was spilled.

The song had power on the grim old monks
In the light of the rosy skies;
And as they listened the years rolled back,
And tears came into their eyes.

The years rolled back and they were young,
With the hearts and hopes of men,
They plucked the daisies and kissed the girls
Of dear dead summers again.

III

But the eldest monk soon broke the spell;
"'T is sin and shame," quoth he,
"To be turned from talk of holy things
By a bird's cry from a tree.

"Perchance the Enemy of Souls
Hath come to tempt us so.
Let us try by the power of the Awful Word
If it be he, or no!"

To Heaven the three monks raised their hands.
"We charge thee, speak!" they said,
"By His dread Name who shall one day come
To judge the quick and the dead,

"Who art thou? Speak!" The bird laughed loud.
"I am the Devil," he said.
The monks on their faces fell, the bird
Away through the twilight sped.

A horror fell on those holy men,
(The faithful legends say,)
And one by one from the face of earth
They pined and vanished away.

IV

So goes the tale of the monkish books,
The moral who runs may read,
He has no ears for Nature's voice
Whose soul is the slave of creed.

Not all in vain with beauty and love
Has God the world adorned;
And he who Nature scorns and mocks,
By Nature is mocked and scorned.