Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Nicholson & Lee, eds. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. 1917.

Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942)

248. A Ladder of Life

FROM age to age in the public place,

With the under steps in view,

The stairway stands, having earth for base,

But the heavens it passes through.

O height and deep,

And the quests, in sleep,

Yet the Word of the King says well,

That the heart of the King is unsearchable.

Of the utmost steps there are legends grand,

And far stars shine as they roll;

But, of child or man in the wonderful land,

Is there one who has scaled the whole?

Yet the great hope stirs,

Though His thoughts as yours

Are not, since the first man fell;

For the heart of the King is unsearchable.

A pulsing song of the stairway strange

Sing, lark, dissolved in the sky!

But no, for it passes beyond the range

Of thy song and thy soaring high.

The star is kin

To our soul within—

God orders His world so well:

Yet the heart of the King is unsearchable.

They say that the angels thereby come down,

Thereby do the saints ascend,

And that God’s light shining from God’s own Town

May be seen at the stairway’s end:

For good and ill

May be mixed at will,

The false shew true by a spell,

But the heart of the King is unsearchable.

Now, the stairway stands by the noisy mart

And the stairway stands by the sea;

About it pulses the world’s great heart

And the heart of yourself and me.

We may read amiss

Both in that and this,

And the truth we read in a well;

Since the heart of the King is unsearchable

For a few steps here and a few steps there

It is fill’d with our voices loud,

But above these slumbers the silent air

And the hush of a dreaming cloud.

In the strain and stress

Of that silentness,

Our hearts for the height may swell;

But the heart of the King is unsearchable.

Some few of us, fill’d with a holy fire,

The Cross and the Christ have kiss’d;

We have sworn to achieve our soul’s desire

By mass and evangelist:

Of step the third

I can bring down word,

And you on the fifth may dwell;

Yet the heart of the King is unsearchable.

As each of us stands at his place assign’d

And ponders the things we love,

It is meet and right we should call to mind

That some must have pass’d above:

Yes, some there are

Who have pass’d so far,

They have never return’d to tell;

And the heart of the King is unsearchable.

Some glimpse at least of the end we glean,

Of the spiral curve and plan;

For stretch as it may through the worlds unseen,

They are ever the worlds of man;

And—with all spaces—

His mind embraces

The way of the stairs as well—

For his heart, like the King’s, is unsearchable.