| THAT which eludes this verse and any verse, | |
| Unheard by sharpest ear, unform’d in clearest eye or cunningest mind, | |
| Nor lore nor fame, nor happiness nor wealth, | |
| And yet the pulse of every heart and life throughout the world incessantly, | |
| Which you and I and all pursuing ever ever miss, | 5 |
| Open but still a secret, the real of the real, an illusion, | |
| Costless, vouchsafed to each, yet never man the owner, | |
| Which poets vainly seek to put in rhyme, historians in prose, | |
| Which sculptor never chisel’d yet, nor painter painted, | |
| Which vocalist never sung, nor orator nor actor ever utter’d, | 10 |
| Invoking here and now I challenge for my song. | |
| |
| Indifferently, ’mid public, private haunts, in solitude, | |
| Behind the mountain and the wood, | |
| Companion of the city’s busiest streets, through the assemblage, | |
| It and its radiations constantly glide. | 15 |
| |
| In looks of fair unconscious babes, | |
| Or strangely in the coffin’d dead, | |
| Or show of breaking dawn or stars by night, | |
| As some dissolving delicate film of dreams, | |
| Hiding yet lingering. | 20 |
| |
| Two little breaths of words comprising it. | |
| Two words, yet all from first to last comprised in it. | |
| |
| How ardently for it! | |
| How many ships have sail’d and sunk for it! | |
| How many travelers started from their homes and ne’er return’d! | 25 |
| How much of genius boldly staked and lost for it! | |
| What countless stores of beauty, love, ventur’d for it! | |
| How all superbest deeds since Time began are traceable to it—and shall be to the end! | |
| How all heroic martyrdoms to it! | |
| How, justified by it, the horrors, evils, battles of the earth! | 30 |
| How the bright fascinating lambent flames of it, in every age and land, have drawn men’s eyes, | |
| Rich as a sunset on the Norway coast, the sky, the islands, and the cliffs, | |
| Or midnight’s silent glowing northern lights unreachable. | |
| |
| Haply God’s riddle it, so vague and yet so certain, | |
| The soul for it, and all the visible universe for it, | 35 |
| And heaven at last for it. | |
