From “Affirmation”:
What word of courage may I bring to you,
What word of solace or of sustenance?
Our faiths have fallen from us and left us bare;
The dream, fantastic and compassionate,
That like a veil of love and glory hung
Between us and the bitterness of things,
Is lifted, and the universe has grown
Vaster, and much more lonely. Nor shall Thought—
Crying into the dark, and listening, listening—
Get any answer to its prayer: the night
Is soundless and the starry mouths are sealed.
Yet the deep heart still knows that all is well
And the truth greater than we dare to dream,
Greater and more exalted! Though the mind,
Fashioned for humbler uses, may not grasp
The meaning of the mystery; though Thought—
For all its longing, all its labor—gain
Hardly the comfort of a hope, there is
A self within us, wiser than the mind,
And deeper than all thought, that still endures
Firm at the helm through all the storms of chance
Forever, in unquenchable belief
And courage not to be abated: life,
In rage and fear, in love and agony,
Weaving her splendor from the dust of death,
Bears in her breast—though inarticulate—
A holier confidence; her running grass,
Her herds trampling the uplands, her fierce wills
In bush and brake, her ravening hosts that throng
The fields of ocean and the aisles of air—
Furious, furious, for continuance—
These answer, these bear witness, all is well;
These in indomitable zest affirm
The wonder and glory of a universe
In which all lusts, all hungers, all defeats,
All agonies, are woven to one Doom,
And every heart-beat is an act of faith
Praising the hidden purpose!
Stern, indeed,
Are the realities; the wheel of heaven
Revolves, with all its motions, and the planet
Heaves forward blindly, bearing us along
Into the Void—we know not why nor where;
Embattled between two oblivions
We stand, for a brief moment, and lift up
Our faces to the light—but in our blood
The voices of the generations past
Strive, and the generations yet unborn
Are urgent in us that we play our part,
As actors in a stately tragedy,
To some triumphant close. Courage and faith,
These will best serve us here. And as for Him
Whom we have sought beyond the stars in vain,
Perhaps He may be nearer than we know.
—John Hall Wheelock