A MEDITATION
by: Paul Hookham
- HE
SELF is Peace; that Self am I.
- The Self is Strength; that Self am I.
- What needs this trembling strife
- With phantom threats of Form and Time and Space?
- Could once my Life
- Be shorn of their illusion, and efface
- From its clear heaven that stormful imagery,
- My Self were seen
- An Essence free, unchanging, strong, serene.
-
- The Self is Peace. How placid dawns
- The Summers parent hour
- Over the dewy maze that drapes the fields,
- Each drooped wild flower,
- Or where the lordship of the garden shields
- Select Court beauties and exclusive lawns!
- Tis but the show
- And fitful dream of Peace the Self can know.
-
- The Self is Strength. Let Nature rave,
- And tear her maddened breast,
- Now doom the drifting ship, with blackest frown,
- Or now, possessed
- With rarer frenzy, wreck the quaking town,
- And bury quick beneath her earthy wave--
- She cannot break
- One fibre of that Strength, one atom shake.
-
- The Self is one with the Supreme
- Father in fashioning,
- Though clothed in perishable weeds that feel
- Pains mortal sting,
- The unlifting care, the wound that will not heal;
- Yet these are not the Self--they only seem.
- From faintest jar
- Of whirring worlds the true Self broods afar.
-
- Afar he whispers to the mind
- To rest on the Good Law,
- To know that naught can fall without its range,
- Nor any flaw
- Of Chance disturb its reign, or shadow of Change;
- That what can bind the life the Law must bind--
- Whatever hand
- Dispose the lot, it is by that Command;
-
- To know no suffering can beset
- Our lives, that is not due,
- That is not forged by our own act and will;
- Calmly to view
- Whateer betide of seeming good or ill.
- The worst we can conceive but pays some debt
- Or breaks some seal,
- To free us from the bondage of the Wheel.
"A Meditation" is reprinted
from The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. Ed. Nicholson
& Lee. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1917. |
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