Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/135

 He furrows; and the ploughs go back and forth, Turning the broken mould, year after year.'. . . '1 turned a little furrow of my own Once on a time, and everybody laughed— As I laughed afterwards; and I doubt not The First Intelligence, which we have drawn In our competitive humility As if it went forever on two legs, Had some diversion of it: I believe God's humor is the music of the spheres— But even as we draft omnipotence Itself to our own image, we pervert The courage of an infinite ideal To finite resignation. You have made The cement of your churches out of tears And ashes, and the fabric will not stand: The shifted walls that you have coaxed and shored So long with unavailing compromise Will crumble down to dust and blow away, And younger dust will follow after them; Though not the faintest or the farthest whirled First atom of the least that ever flew Shall be by man defrauded of the touch God thrilled it with to make a dream for man When Science was unborn. And after time, When we have earned our spiritual ears, And art's commiseration of the truth No longer glorifies the singing beast, Or venerates the clinquant charlatan,— Then shall at last come ringing through the sun, Through time, through flesh, a music that is true. For wisdom is that music, and all joy That wisdom:—you may counterfeit, you think, The burden of it in a thousand ways;