The New World

Celia was laughing. Hopefully I said:

“How shall this beauty that we share,

This love, remain aware

Beyond our happy breathing of the air?

How shall it be fulfilled and perfected?...

If you were dead,

How then should I be comforted?”

But Celia knew instead:

“He who finds beauty here, shall find it there.”

A halo gathered round her hair.

I looked and saw her wisdom bare

The living bosom of the countless dead.

... And there

I laid my head.

Again when Celia laughed, I doubted her and said:

“Life must be led

In many ways more difficult to see

Than this immediate way

For you and me.

We stand together on our lake’s edge, and the mystery

Of love has made us one, as day is made of night and night of day.

Aware of one identity

Within each other, we can say:

‘I shall be everything you are.’...

We are uplifted till we touch a star.

We know that overhead

Is nothing more austere, more starry, or more deep to understand

Than is our union, human hand in hand.

.... But over our lake come strangers—a crowded launch, a lonely sailing boy.

A mile away a train bends by. In every car

Strangers are travelling, each with particular

And unkind preference like ours, with privacy

Of understanding, with especial joy

Like ours. Celia, Celia, why should there be

Distrust between ourselves and them, disunity?

.... How careful we have been

To trim this little circle that we tread,

To set a bar

To strangers and forbid them!—Are they not as we,

Our very likeness and our nearest kin?

How can we shut them out and let stars in?”

She looked along the lake. And when I heard her speak,

The sun fell on the boy’s white sail and her white cheek.

“I touch them all through you,” she said. “I cannot know them now

Deeply and truly as my very own, except through you,

Except through one or two

Interpreters.

But not a moment stirs

Here between us, binding and interweaving us,

That does not bind these others to our care.”

The sunlight fell in glory on her hair....

And then said Celia, radiant, when I held her near:

“They who find beauty there, shall find it here.”

And on her brow,

When I heard Celia speak,

Cities were populous

With peace and oceans echoed glories in her ear

And from her risen thought

Her lips had brought,

As from some peak

Down through the clouds, a mountain-air

To guide the lonely and uplift the weak.

“Record it all,” she told me, “more than merely this,

More than the shine of sunset on our heads, more than a kiss,

More than our rapt agreement and delight

Watching the mountain mingle with the night....

Tell that the love of two incurs

The love of multitudes, makes way

And welcome for them, as a solitary star

Brings on the great array.

Go make a lovers’ calendar,”

She said, “for every day.”

And when the sun had put away

His dazzle, over the shadowy firs

The solitary star came out.... So on some night

To eyes of youth shall come my light

And hers.

“Where are you bound, O solemn voyager?”

She laughed one day and asked me in her mirth:

“Where are you from?

Why are you come?”

.... The questions beat like tapping of a drum;

And how could I be dumb,

I who have bugles in me? Fast

The answer blew to her,

For all my breath was worth....

“As a bird comes by grace of spring,

You are my journey and my wing—

And into your heart, O Celia,

My heart has flown, to sing

Solemn and long

A most undaunted song.”

This was the song that she herself had taught me how to sing:

.... As immigrants come toward America

On their continual ships out of the past,

So on my ship America have I, by birth,

Come forth at last

From all the bitter corners of the earth.

And I have ears to hear the westward wind blowing

And I have eyes to look beyond the scope Of sea

And I have hands to touch the hands

Of shipmates who are going

Wherever I go and the grace of knowing

That what for them is hope

Is hope for me.

I come from many times and many lands,

I look toward life and all that it shall hold,

Past bound and past divide.

And I shall be consoled

By a continent as wide

As the round invisible sky.

.... “The unseen shall become the seen....

O Celia, be my Spanish Queen!

The Genoan am I!”

And Celia cried:

“My jewels, they are yours,

Yours for the journey. Use them well.

Go find the new world, win the shores

Of which the old books tell!

.... Yet will they listen, poet? Will they sail with you?

Will they not call you dreamer of a dream?

Will they not laugh at you, because you seem

Concerned with words that people often say

And deeds they never do?”

The bright sails of my caravel shook seaward in reply:

“Though I be told

A thousand facts to hold

Me back, though the old boundary

Rise up like hatred in my way,

Though fellow-voyagers cry,

‘A lie!’—

Here as I come with heaven at my side