The Lion and the Rose by May Sarton Read Free Book Online Page B

sand,
    The best and dearest, the innumerable lost,
    Nor come too late, too late to understand.
    Now we must pay the full, the fearful cost,
    Now we must fight the war we could have won
    Without becoming what we hated most.
    Now we must kill or perish. It is done.
    And we fight for ourselves with little grace;
    Who sold out human lives, now spend our own.
    But through destruction fight back to the place
    Where in the end the pure and healing touch,
    The searching eyes and love’s long hidden face,
    Turning toward us in our self-made desolation,
    May teach us all through suffering so much
    What might have been learned through imagination.
    II
    Who is the refugee,
    The homesick one,
    Climbing the long stairs of exile
    And always alone?
    Who is the wanderer,
    At peace nowhere,
    The burning leaf before hot winds
    Blown here and there?
    Who is the sick stranger
    Whose thirst no well
    In all the world can slake,
    Nor fever, cool?
    Who is the poor beggar
    Bound in a cart
    To wander everlasting desert sand
    And eat his heart?
    That thirst, that hunger and that homesickness,
    The lonely burning day and sleepless night,
    When all seemed desert-waste and bitterness
    To be escaped in flight—
    That never was escape, nor rest, nor sleep
    But only long pursuit and pain—
    Who has not known it? Who so wholly blest
    Such loneliness could be to him unknown?
    Each is an exile from the whole. The agony
    Of separation is the human agony.
    From the four corners of the earth
    How bring us home into humanity?
    How bring us home, how bring us home at last,
    Who bear the old divisions of the past,
    The ancient hatreds and the ancient evils
    Held in the heart as if a thousand devils?
    How exorcize, how purify, how bless
    This fearful universal loneliness?
    III
    How faint the horn sounds in the mountain passes
    Where folded in the folds of memory
    All the heroic helmets lie in summer grasses,
    Who wore them vanished utterly.
    How dry the blood on ancient cross and stone
    Where folded in the folds of memory
    The martyrs cry out where each fails alone
    In his last faithful agony.
    How fresh and clear the stains of human weeping
    Where folded in the folds of memory
    The millions who have died for us are sleeping
    In our long tragic history.
    IV
    The need to kill what is unknown and strange
    Whether it be a poem or an ancient race,
    The fear of thought, fear of experience
    That might demand some radical heart-change—
    These are the mountains that hem a narrow place
    Out of the generous plains of our inheritance:
    Speak to the children of the world as whole,
    Whole as the heart that can include it all,
    And of the fear of thought as the first sin;
    Tell them the revolution is within.
    Open the mind, and the whole earth and sky
    Are freed from fear to be explored and known.
    Nothing so strange it is does not hold delight
    Once it is seen with clear and naked eye.
    The thinking man will never be alone—
    He travels where he sits, his heart alight:
    Speak to the children of a living Greece
    As real as Texas, and the whole earth a place
    Where everywhere men hope and work to be
    More greatly human and responsible and free.
    Tell them the deepest changes rise like rivers
    From hearts of men long dead; tell them that we
    Are borne now on the currents of their faith—
    The saints and martyrs and all great believers,
    As well at Rome with Paul as at Thermopylae:
    Our freedom rises from the body of this death.
    Tell them the rivers are rich to overflowing
    And as we love our fraction of the past in growing
    These floods of change are to be loved and cherished;
    That we may live, millions of men have perished.
    Give them their rich, their full inheritance:
    Open the whole past and see the future plain—
    The long treks across China, all the voyages.
    Look deep and know these were not done by chance.
    Look far enough ahead and see the fruits of pain,
    And see the harvests of all pilgrimages:
    Speak to the children now of revolution
    Not as a violence, a terror,