A Captain of Song
(ON A PORTRAIT OF COVENTRY PATMOREBY J. S. SARGENT, R.A.)
LOOK on him. This is he whose works ye know;Ye have adored, thanked, loved him,—no, not him!But that of him which proud portentous woeTo its own grimPresentment was not potent to subdue,Nor all the reek of Erebus to dim.This, and not him, ye knew.Look on him now. Love, worship if ye can,The very man.Ye may not. He has trod the ways afar,The fatal ways of parting and farewell,Where all the paths of painèd greatness are;Where round and always roundThe abhorrèd words resound,The words accursed of comfortable men,—‘For ever’; and infinite glooms intolerableWith spacious replication give again,And hollow jar,The words abhorred of comfortable men.You the stern pities of the gods debarTo drink where he has drunkThe moonless mere of sighs,And pace the places infamous to tell,Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes,Where-through the ways of dreadful greatness areHe knows the perilous routThat all those ways aboutSink into doom, and sinking, still are sunk.And if his sole and solemn term thereoutHe has attained, to love ye shall not dareOne who has journeyed there;Ye shall mark wellThe mighty cruelties which arm and marThat countenance of control,With minatory warnings of a soulThat hath to its own selfhood been most fell,And is not weak to spare:And lo, that hairIs blanchèd with the travel-heats of hell.
If any beThat shall with rites of reverent pietyApproach this strongSad soul of sovereign Song,Nor fail and falter with the intimidate throng;If such there be,These, these are only theyHave trod the self-same way;The never-twice-revolving portals heardBehind them clang infernal, and that wordAbhorrèd sighed of kind mortality,As he—Ah, even as he!