Page:The poetical works of Matthew Arnold, 1897.djvu/70

32 Can I look on your sweet faces,

And your proud heads backward thrown,

From this dusk of leaf-strewn places

With the dumb woods and the night alone?

Yet, indeed, this flux of guesses,—

Mad delight, and frozen calms,—

Mirth to-day, and vine-bound tresses,

And to-morrow—folded palms;

Is this all? this balanced measure?

Could life run no happier way?

Joyous at the height of pleasure,

Passive at the nadir of dismay?

But, indeed, this proud possession,

This far-reaching, magic chain,

Linking in a mad succession

Fits of joy and fits of pain,—

Have you seen it at the closing?

Have you tracked its clouded ways?

Can your eyes, while fools are dozing,

Drop, with mine, adown life's latter days?

When a dreary light is wading

Through this waste of sunless greens,

When the flashing lights are fading

On the peerless cheek of queens,

When the mean shall no more sorrow,

And the proudest no more smile;

While the dawning of the morrow

Widens slowly westward all that while?

Then, when change itself is over,

When the slow tide sets one way,

Shall you find the radiant lover,

Even by moments, of to-day?