Man What Is He?
WHAT is Man? The question floweth
From the lips with ease, and yet
He who best can answer knoweth,
Answer true were hard to get.
Not the Sphinx in Egypt olden
Did a deeper question ask;
Love to strengthen and embolden
Be to answer mine the task!
But a feeble mortal merely,—
An immortal now believed;
One too complex to be clearly
Even by himself conceived;
One both complex and immortal,
Say I inward going, yea,
Death is but to Life the portal,
As the poets always say.
From the Inner Sun, a sparklet,
He (Man) glows a star in turn,
From whose life-evolving circlet
Other living powers are born;
These again their source enringing,
To the seeric ken’s unfurl’d,
On its way unending winging
In the great a lesser world.
Each deep thought and each great action
Shrined within our inner skies,
To our rapture or distraction,
Greets us when the Earth-man dies:
There a meteor, or a starlet,
Burns it while the years take wing;
To the check the guilt-born scarlet,
Or the glow of bliss to bring.
Empires come and go; the granite
Boulder moulders into clay—
From each pathway shall each planet
And its splendour pass away.
But whilst these away have vanished,
Not one thought and not one deed,
Tho’ awhile to Lethe banished,
But shall live our worth to meed.
Not our merit or demerit,
But to crown or punish—ne’er;
In the regions of the spirit,
Other ends life’s issues bear.
Deeper than the ocean, even,
Higher than Orion still—
Still to them the power is given,
On to go for good or ill.
Boundless still for good and evil;
Not for good or evil—loth,
Loth were truth to call him devil,
Man’s a god and devil both.
But the devil weakens, stronger
In his person grows the god,
Till a slave to sin no longer,
Bright’s the pathway by him trod.
Up thro’ ill the good still rises,
And the souls thus risen see
What still hid from dimmer eyes, is
Without ill no good can be.
Nay thro’ strife with the infernal,
And the sinful only can,
In the courts of the Eternal,
Be a high seat won by Man.
From the shattered limbs of Cælus
Given to the ocean waves,
Venus rose as legends tell us,
She whose grace the heart enslaves.
So thro’ strife with evil shatter’d,
May we seem a moment when
Lo! from out the relics scattered
Springs what’s hailed a God to Men.
What is Man? You have my answer,
In a may be less prized song,
Than a tip-toed, tight-rope dance, were
By yon wonder stricken throng.
Yet however faulty seems it,
From a soul the truth would know,
And for Truth’s advantage streams it—
Would all lauded songs did so.
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