The doubleness of mind fails us, to glance
At our exterior presence amid things,
Sizing from otherness our countenance
And seeing our puppet will's act-acting strings.
An unknown language speaks in us, which we
Are at the words of, fronted from reality.
XXVI.
The world is woven all of dream and error
And but one sureness in our truth may lie--
That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror
We know it not by knowing it thereby.
For but one side of things the mirror knows,
And knows it colded from its solidness.
A double lie its truth is; what it shows
By true show's false and nowhere by true place.
Thought clouds our life's day-sense with strangeness, yet
Never from strangeness more than that it's strange
Doth buy our perplexed thinking, for we get
But the words' sense from words--knowledge, truth, change.
We know the world is false, not what is true.
Yet we think on, knowing we ne'er shall know.
XXVII.
How yesterday is long ago! The past
Is a fixed infinite distance from to-day,
And bygone things, the first-lived as the last,
In irreparable sameness far away.
How the to-be is infinitely ever
Out of the place wherein it will be Now,
Like the seen wave yet far up in the river,
Which reaches not us, but the new-waved flow!
This thing Time is, whose being is having none,
The equable tyrant of our different fates,
Who could not be bought off by a shattered sun
Or tricked by new use of our careful dates.
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