95. THE PRECEPT OF SILENCE
Reading edition
I know you: solitary griefs, Desolate passions, aching hours! I know you: tremulous beliefs, Agonised hopes, and ashen flowers!
The winds are sometimes sad to me; The starry spaces, full of fear: Mine is the sorrow on the sea, And mine the sigh of places drear.
Some players upon plaintive strings Publish their wistfulness abroad: I have not spoken of these things, Save to one man, and unto God.
Lionel Johnson.
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96. IF THIS WERE FAITH
God, if this were enough, That I see things bare to the buff And up to the buttocks in mire; That I ask nor hope nor hire, Nut in the husk, Nor dawn beyond the dusk, Nor life beyond death: God, if this were faith?
Having felt thy wind in my face Spit sorrow and disgrace, Having seen thine evil doom In Golgotha and Khartoum, And the brutes, the work of thine hands, Fill with injustice lands And stain with blood the sea: If still in my veins the glee Of the black night and the sun And the lost battle, run: If, an adept, The iniquitous lists I still accept With joy, and joy to endure and be withstood, And still to battle and perish for a dream of good God, if that were enough?
If to feel, in the ink of the slough, And the sink of the mire, Veins of glory and fire Run through and transpierce and transpire, And a secret purpose of glory in every part,
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And the answering glory of battle fill my heart; To thrill with the joy of girded men, To go on for ever and fail and go on again, And be mauled to the earth and arise, And contend for the shade of a word and a thing not seen with the eyes: With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night That somehow the right is the right And the smooth shall bloom from the rough: Lord, if that were enough?
Robert Louis Stevenson.