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Christopher Pearse Cranch
Inworld and Outworld
Not a Theosophical or Judge work: a pair of poems by the Transcendentalist poet Christopher Pearse Cranch, first published anonymously (signed "C.") in The Dial, the Transcendentalists' journal edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, in January 1842, and reprinted — with the editorial note reproduced below — in The Path in May 1886. In the original printing, each poem's verse is set in two parallel columns; this transcription follows the left column to its end and then the right column, as the clearest linear reading of the page, but the columns may have been intended to be read as a paired call-and-response.
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Inworld.
[A poem taken from the January number of "The Dial," 1842, the organ of the Transcendentalists, edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson.]
Amid the watches of the windy night
A poet sat, and listened to the flow
Of his own changeful thoughts, until there passed
A vision by him, murmuring as it moved,
A wild and mystic lay—to which his thoughts
And pen kept time—and thus the measure ran:
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All is but as it seems,
The round, green earth,
With river and glen;
The din and the mirth
Of the busy, busy men;
The world's great fever
Throbbing forever;
The creed of the sage,
The hope of the age,
All things we cherish,
All that live and all that perish,
These are but inner dreams.
The great world goeth on
To thy dreaming;
To thee alone
Hearts are making their moan,
Eyes are streaming,
Thine is the white moon turning night to day,
Thine is the dark wood sleeping in her ray,
Thee the winter chills,
Thee the spring-time thrills,
All things nod to thee—
All things come to see
If thou art dreaming on,
If thy dream should break,
And thou should'st awake,
All things would be gone.
Nothing is, if thou art not,
From thee as from a root
The blossoming stars upshoot,
The flower cups drink the rain.
Joy and grief and weary pain
Spring aloft from thee,
And toss their branches free
Thou art under, over all;
Thou dost hold and cover all;
Thou art Atlas—thou art Jove:—
The mightiest truth
Hath all its youth
From thy enveloping thought.
Thy thought itself lay in thy earliest love.
Nature keeps time to thee
With voice unbroken:
Still doth she rhyme to thee
When thou hast spoken,
When the sun shines to thee,
'Tis thy own joy,
Opening mines to thee,
Nought can destroy,
When the blast moans to thee
Still doth the wind
Echo the tones to thee
Of thy own mind.
Laughter but saddens thee
When thou art sad,
Life is not life to thee,
But as thou livest,
Labor is strife to thee
When thou least strivest:—
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More did the spirit sing, and made the night,
Most musical with inward melodies,
But vanished soon, and left the listening bard
Wrapt in unearthly silence—till the morn
Reared up the screen that shuts the spirit world
From loftiest poet and from wisest sage.
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Outworld.
The sun was shining on the busy earth,
All men and things were moving on their way—
The old, old way which we call life. The soul
Shrank from the giant grasp of Space and Time,
Yet, for it was, her dreamy hour half yielded
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57
To the omnipotent delusion—and looked out
On the broad glare of things, and felt itself
Dwindling before the universe: Then came unto the bard
Another spirit with another voice,
And sang:—
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Said he, that all but seems?
Said he, the world is void and lonely,
A strange vast crowd of dreams
Coming to thee only?
And that thy feeble soul
Hath such a strong control
O'er sovereign Space and sovereign Time
And all their train sublime?
Said he, thou art the eye
Reflecting all that is—
The ear that hears, while it creates
All sounds and harmonies?
The central sense that bides amid
All shows and tunes and realities?
Listen mortal while the sound
Of this life intense is flowing!
Dost thou find all things around
Go as thou art going?
Dost thou dream that thou art free,
Making, destroying all that thou dost see
In the unfettered might of thy soul's liberty?
Lo, an atom troubles thee.
One bodily fibre crushes thee,
One nerve tortures and maddens thee,
One drop of blood is death to thee.
Art thou but a withering leaf,
For a summer season brief
Clinging to the tree,
'Till the winds of circumstance,
Whirling in their hourly dance,
Prove too much for thee?
Art thou but a speck, a mote
In the system universal?
Art thou but a passing note
Woven in the great rehearsal?
Canst thou roll back the tide of Thought
And unmake the creed of the age,
By the prophet and the sage?
Art thou but a shadow
Chasing o'er a meadow?
The great world goes on
Spite of thy dreaming;
Not to be alone
Hearts are making their moan
And tear-drops streaming,
And the mighty voice of Nature
Is thy parent, not thy creature,
Is no pupil but thy teacher:
And the world would still move on
Were thy soul forever flown.—
For while thou dreamest unfolded
In nature's wide embrace,
All thy life is daily moulded
By her informing grace,
And Time and Space must reign
And rule o'er thee forever,
And the Outworld lifts its chain
From off thy spirit never:
But in the dream of thy half-waking fever
Thou shalt be mocked with gleam and show
Of truths thou pinest for, and yet canst never know.
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And then the Spirit fled and left the bard
Still wondering—for he felt that voices twain
Had come from different spheres with different truths
That seemed at war and yet agreed in one.
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C.
Footnotes
