Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

James Stephens (1882–1950)

302. The Breath of Life

AND while they talked and talked, and while they sat

Changing their base minds into baser coin;

And telling—they! how truth and beauty join,

And how a certain this was good, but that

Was baser than the viper or the toad,

Or the blind beggar glaring down the road.

I turned from them in fury, and I ran

To where the moon shone out upon the height,

Down the long reaches of a summer night,

Stretching slim fingers, and the starry clan

Grew thicker than the flowers that we see

Clustered in quiet fields of greenery.

Around me was the night-time sane and cold,

The clouds that knew no care and no restraint

Swung through the silences, or drifted faint

To pale horizons, wreathing fold on fold,

The moon’s sharp edge, each rolling cloud a sea,

A foam of silver shining gloriously.

The quietudes that sunder star from star,

The hazy distances of loneliness,

Where never eagle’s wing or timid press

Of lark or wren could venture, and the far

Profundities untravelled and unstirred

By any act of man or thought or word.

These held me with amazement and delight:

I yearned up through the spaces of the sky,

Beyond the rolling clouds, beyond the high

And delicate white moon, and up the height,

And past the rocking stars, and out to where

The ether failed in spaces sharp and bare.

The breath that is the very breath of life

Throbbed close to me: I heard the pulses beat,

That lift the universes into heat:

The slow withdrawal, and the deeper strife

Of His wide respiration, like a sea

It ebbed and flooded through immensity.

His breath alone in wave on mighty wave!

O moon and stars swell to a raptured song!

Ye mountains toss the harmony along!

O little men with little souls to save

Swing up glad chantings, ring the skies above,

With boundless gratitude for boundless love!

Probing the ocean to its steepest drop;

Rejoicing in the viper and the toad,

And the blind beggar glaring down the road;

And they who talk and talk and never stop

Equally quickening; with a care to bend

The gnat’s slant wing into a swifter end.

Searching the quarries of all life, the deep

Low crannies and shy places of the world,

To warm the smallest insect that is curled

In a deep root, or on the sun to heap

Fiercer combustion, spending love on all

In equal share, the mighty and the small.

The silence clung about me like a gift,

The tender night-time folded me around

Protectingly, and in a peace profound

The clouds drooped slowly backward drift on drift

Into the darkness, and the moon was gone,

And soon the stars had vanished every one.

But on the sky, a handsbreadth in the west,

A faint cold brightness crept and soared and spread,

Until the rustling heavens overhead,

And the grey trees and grass were manifest:

Then through the chill a golden spear was hurled,

And the big sun tossed laughter on the world.