AN ORPHEAN EFFORT

yea plants, yea stones detest 
And love; all, all some properties invest

The ancient rays of the inanimate sun
Penetrate the dark, empty ether,
The endless space between, beyond the stars
Where is no trace of matter to gather warmth,
And pour down onto this silent sphere
Set brightly amidst perpetual darkness,
To warm all that has been, and shall be,
The many changing shapes and colours
Of this changeless mass, the constant earth.
And in spring, by teasing the bursting bud
The breaking egg, distinguish the more living
From the more dead, the brief animal
From the tree, the tree from the unmoving stone;
But as movement is only movement suspended
In that changing state between the explosion
Of creation and the stillness behind the stars,
Only has meaning as movement between
The frenzied chaos of formless energy
And the frozen forms devoid of energy,
While movement, which is our life, exists
Between two unmoving states, two deaths,
Can man call his the moving soul?

We have been given a kind of movement
Not owing to the stone, nor to the tree
Bent silently over us, given a time in which
To create, to contemplate, a memorable state
Capable of life and of death, and also
Capable of resurrection.
                                          But surrounded
By a darkness which surrounds the sun
And involves all space, we may only be moving
Towards some unknown destiny, moving on
Until the sun withers or stars collide,
When all that was ever known is obliterated
And given in hot whirling havoc
To the painful birth of some other planet.

Should man claim, and retain his soul
In the time of the brief flesh, the time between
The struggling seed and the silent stone
Were he to refuse the silence of that stone
Already still, waiting for the next birth—
The sudden release into a new death—
And the patient growth and quiet decay
Of the almost unmoving tree, wouldn’t he refuse
That final harmony of faith, the inevitable course
In which he, bird, stone and tree
Are all one, moving towards the same end,
In the same dance, distinguished only
By the quickness of their fading step,
Neither dead nor alive, but all moving
Under the influence of a single force
Shaping its own and our ultimate course?