Beauty of the World (incomplete)
Frank Wilmot
Not what men see,
Not what they draw from the spread
Of hills looming in cloud-
Not this makes them proud;
But what they can hold in fee
With difficulty and dread
To tell their hearts in pain
Over and over again.
The terror of Beauty is this:
That something may find the abyss,
Some fact of miracle that you have seen
And no one ever know it ever had been
Nor what its miracle would mean.
The spacious suns
Flow through the heart as water runs,
Known and not held,
Leaving no trace.
O'er Earth's wind-ruffled face
Goes the sun-shuddering air...
Of all the Beauty that rides
Violent or velvet-footed everywhere,
So little abides-
The hunger of life's unquelled!
Full well we know
Must pass, must pass away
This joy, that woe;
And learn full well in quiet dismay
That Beauty cannot stay.
But this content for which we vainly grope,
This desperate reach for miracle may give place,
Through an intenser waiting, a more passionate hope,
To nobleness in small things, acts of grace.
