Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/32

22 Many the lands he saw, the seas he ploughed,

Seeking to find, wherever man had been,

The ways of beauty and the face of love;

But evil things he found,—evermore saw

How human wisdom like a suppliant bowed,

How human love, sad-eyed, did lift her prayer;

He could not slay the pity at his heart

To gladden in himself; he could not still

The noble strife of thought to gain his peace.

So struck the world's life in his single breast,

And set his nature with itself at war,

That half he was knew not the other half,

But, each to other, heart and mind, moved false,

Though to itself each true, as conscience bade;

Such discord ruled; oft to himself he seemed

Some unbelieving knower of things true,

Some loveless lover of things beautiful,

Some godless worshipper of things divine;

And beauty without joy, truth without faith,

All holy sanctities made soulless things,

Contrary currents, spun a whirl wherein

Sank action, passion, meditation down

Lost in himself; then, as the poets tell

Of that first strangeness of the world to sense

In early boyhood when the swooning earth

Drifts off unreal, and hard they grip the ground,