Soul

Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her, And tempted her out of her gloom.

Here once, through an alley Titanic, Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul— Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.

I should not dare to call my soul my own.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Have ye souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new?

And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame.

Be but organic harps diversely fram’d, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of All?

O the one life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere— Methinks, it should have been impossible Not to love all things in a world so filled.

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, But trailing clouds of glory do we come Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart; Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life’s common way, In cheerful godliness.

Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society.

When Nature her great masterpiece design’d, And fram’d her last, best work, the human mind, Her eye intent on all the mazy plan, She form’d of various stuff the various Man.

The voice of Nature loudly cries, And many a message from the skies, That something in us never dies.

Whoever you are, behold your master, He is, or was, or has to be. 13

I was all ear, And took in strains that might create a soul Under the ribs of Death.

And looks commercing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.

I am a little world made cunningly Of elements, and an angelic sprite.

Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls; For, thus friends absent speak.

Who ever comes to shroud me, do not harm Nor question much That subtle wreath of hair, which crowns my arm; The mystery, the sign you must not touch, For ’tis my outward soul, Viceroy to that, which then to heaven being gone, Will leave this to control, And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution.

I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost, Who died before the god of love was born.

Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.