Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 18031882670. Uriel
IT fell in the ancient periods | |
Which the brooding soul surveys, | |
Or ever the wild Time coin’d itself | |
Into calendar months and days. | |
This was the lapse of Uriel, | 5 |
Which in Paradise befell. | |
Once, among the Pleiads walking, | |
Sayd overheard the young gods talking; | |
And the treason, too long pent, | |
To his ears was evident. | 10 |
The young deities discuss’d | |
Laws of form, and metre just, | |
Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams, | |
What subsisteth, and what seems. | |
One, with low tones that decide, | 15 |
And doubt and reverend use defied, | |
With a look that solved the sphere, | |
And stirr’d the devils everywhere, | |
Gave his sentiment divine | |
Against the being of a line. | 20 |
‘Line in nature is not found; | |
Unit and universe are round; | |
In vain produced, all rays return; | |
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.’ | |
As Uriel spoke with piercing eye, | 25 |
A shudder ran around the sky; | |
The stern old war-gods shook their heads; | |
The seraphs frown’d from myrtle-beds; | |
Seem’d to the holy festival | |
The rash word boded ill to all; | 30 |
The balance-beam of Fate was bent; | |
The bounds of good and ill were rent; | |
Strong Hades could not keep his own, | |
But all slid to confusion. | |
A sad self-knowledge withering fell | 35 |
On the beauty of Uriel; | |
In heaven once eminent, the god | |
Withdrew that hour into his cloud; | |
Whether doom’d to long gyration | |
In the sea of generation, | 40 |
Or by knowledge grown too bright | |
To hit the nerve of feebler sight. | |
Straightway a forgetting wind | |
Stole over the celestial kind, | |
And their lips the secret kept, | 45 |
If in ashes the fire-seed slept. | |
But, now and then, truth-speaking things | |
Shamed the angels’ veiling wings; | |
And, shrilling from the solar course, | |
Or from fruit of chemic force, | 50 |
Procession of a soul in matter, | |
Or the speeding change of water, | |
Or out of the good of evil born, | |
Came Uriel’s voice of cherub scorn, | |
And a blush tinged the upper sky, | 55 |
And the gods shook, they knew not why. |