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Title: The Optimist
Author: Alfred Noyes [
More Titles by Noyes]
Teach me to live and to forgive
The death that all must die
Who pass in slumber through this heaven
Of earth and sea and sky;
Who live by grace of Time and Space
At which their peace is priced;
And cast their lots upon the robe
That wraps the cosmic Christ;
Who cannot see the world-wide Tree
Where Love lies bleeding still;
This universal cross of God
Our star-crowned Igdrasil.
Teach me to live; I do not ask
For length of earthly days,
Or that my heaven-appointed task
Should fall in pleasant ways;
If in this hour of warmth and light
The last great knell were knolled;
If Death should close mine eyes to-night
And all the tale be told;
While I have lips to speak or sing
And power to draw this breath,
Shall I not praise my Lord and King
Above all else, for death?
When on a golden eve he drove
His keenest sorrow deep
Deep in my heart, and called it love;
I did not wince or weep.
A wild Hosanna shook the world
And wakened all the sky,
As through a white and burning light
Her passionate face went by.
When on a golden dawn he called
My best beloved away,
I did not shrink or stand appalled
Before the hopeless day.
The joy of that triumphant dearth
And anguish cannot die;
The joy that casts aside this earth
For immortality.
I would not change one word of doom
Upon the dreadful scroll,
That gave her body to the tomb
And freed her fettered soul.
For now each idle breeze can bring
The kiss I never seek;
The nightingale has heard her sing,
The rose caressed her cheek.
And every pang of every grief
That ruled my soul an hour,
Has given new splendours to the leaf,
New glories to the flower;
And melting earth into the heaven
Whose inmost heart is pain,
Has drawn the veils apart and given
Her soul to mine again.
[The end]
Alfred Noyes's poem: Optimist
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