The
Tree of Truth
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THERE
grows a mighty centuried tree,
Its roots athwart
the world,
Its branches wide as earth’s wide girth
By thousand dews impearled.
Its top is hoary, its wide boughs
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Reach
out to heaven above,
Its roots are knowledge, and its sap
The yearning heart
of love.
Men hack its branches, curb its roots,
To trim it to their
ken,
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Or
hide its green in poisonous vines
From evil’s
grimmest fen.
But
evermore while ages wane,
And centuries rise
and die,
Through dark, though light, through good and ill,
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Its
sap the years defy.
For deeper in the heart of things,
And older far than
time,
Its roots are fixed in those sure deeps
From which the centuries
climb.
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Ages ago its girth was great;
Its boughs o’er
earth’s wide lands;
All peoples gathered ’neath its glades
Where now old ruin
stands.
But form and custom staled its green
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And
curbed it into bounds
Of pruning hooks and greedy walls
That hemmed its sacred
rounds.
And vast and wide where once to all
Its radiant leaves
were free,
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Far
peoples paid, with earth’s red gold,
Its sacred home to
see.
And summer by summer, yea, year by year,
Still lower shrank
its head,
Till shallow deceit and life’s despair |
35 |
Declared
its heart was dead.
Then men cried, “We will hew it down,
And build from out
its wood
A temple rare wherein to teach
Us memory of its good.
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“And ’neath its shelter we will keep,
To hold the ages’
youth,“
Those holy dreams our fathers drew
From out the tree
of truth.”
They
hacked and hewed, they sawed and planed,
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They
lopped its branches wide,
Till shorn and bare the old tree stood
To every wind and
tide.
And round its scathed and ruined trunk,
Whence life had fled
aloof,
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They
built a temple carved and arched
From floor to groined
roof.
And reared a shrine where art was all
The end of human pain,
Till a sprout shot forth from the old tree’s
trunk |
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And
burst its walls amain;
A sturdy, wayward, wilding growth,
That mocked their
maimèd dream
Of life and truth in legend carved
On groinèd
arch and beam.
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Men stood amazed. The teachers cried,
“Behold the
curse of earth!
Its life must die or all our words
Are but as nothing
worth.”
“Nay, nay,” cried others, “but
let it stand, |
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Perchance a miracle.
”Then straight about its burgeoning boughs
Old bloody battles
fell.
Wild clamor and clash of fiery arms,
The old against the
new.
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Mad
hosts arrayed with banner and blade,
Where war’s
wild trumpets blew.
But
as they strove by gates of blood,
With glad unconscious
youth,
Higher and wider skyward climbed
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The
newer tree of truth.
And blithe within its boughs their nests
The birds of heaven
made,
While at its foot mid earth’s old ruins,
The happy children
played.
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And form and cant were swept away,
While under its dream
sublime,
Men drank anew ’neath heaven’s arch
From nature for a
time.
Yea, still it spreads its antres vast,
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Through peace and
clash of arms,
And blossoms brave and blithe and free,
O’er all earth’s
shrunk alarms.
And
still men battle to destroy
The living for the
dead
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Old
ruined trunk of that which towers
Its glories overhead:
And strive for art’s distorted ways,
While from earth’s
heart of youth,
Higher and wider heavenward spreads
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| The
ancient tree of truth. |
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