OH may I join the choir invisible | |
| Of those immortal dead who live again | |
| In minds made better by their presence: live | |
| In pulses stirred to generosity. | |
| In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn | 5 |
| For miserable aims that end with self, | |
| In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, | |
| And with their mild persistence urge man’s search | |
| To vaster issues. | |
| |
| So to live is heaven: | 10 |
| To make undying music in the world, | |
| Breathing as beauteous order that controls | |
| With growing sway the growing life of man. | |
| So we inherit that sweet purity | |
| For which we struggled, failed and agonized | 15 |
| With widening retrospect that bred despair. | |
| Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued, | |
| A vicious parent shaming still its child, | |
| Poor anxious penitence, is quick dissolved; | |
| Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies, | 20 |
| Die in the large and charitable air. | |
| And all our rarer, better, truer self, | |
| That sobbed religiously in yearning song, | |
| That watched to ease the burden of the world, | |
| Laboriously tracing what must be, | 25 |
| And what may yet be better—saw within | |
| A worthier image for the sanctuary, | |
| And shaped it forth before the multitude | |
| Divinely human, raising worship so | |
| To higher reverence more mixed with love— | 30 |
| That better self shall live till human Time | |
| Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky | |
| Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb | |
| Unread forever. | |
| |
| This is life to come, | 35 |
| Which martyred men have made more glorious | |
| For us who strive to follow. May I reach | |
| That purest heaven, be to other souls | |
| The cup of strength in some great agony, | |
| Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, | 40 |
| Beget the smiles that have no cruelty— | |
| Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, | |
| And in diffusion ever more intense. | |
| So shall I join the choir invisible | |
Whose music is the gladness of the world.
1867 | 45 |
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