(After Islwyn, 1832-1878, the Welsh Wordsworth)
What say ye, can we charge a master soul
With error, when beyond all life's experience
Between the cradle and the grave, it rises,
Whispering of things unutterable, breaks its bond
With outward sense and sinks into itself,
As fades a star in space? Hath not that soul
A history in itself, a refluent tide
Of mystery murmuring out of unplumbed deeps,
On distant inaccessible strands, whereon
Memory lies dead amid the monstrous wreckage
Of jarring worlds? Are yonder stars above
As spiritually, magnificently bright
As Poesy feigns? May not some slumbering sense,
A memory dim of those diviner days,
When all the Heavens were yet aglow with God,
Transfuse them through and through with glimmering grace
And glory? Still the Stars within us shine,
And Poesy is but a recollection
Of Something greater gone, a presage proud
Of Something greater yet to be. What soul
But sometimes thrills with hauntings of a world
For long forgotten, at a glimpse begotten
Once more, then gone again? Imaginations?
Nay why not memories of a life than ours
A thousand times more blest within us buried
So deeply, the divine all-searching breath
Of Poesy alone can lure it forth.
All hail that hour when God's Redeeming Face
Shall so illume our past existences,
That through them all man's spirit shall see plain,
And to his blessed past relink Life's broken chain.