The Problem Of Life Poem by Alfred W Arrington

Making early with the twilight
When the leaves of June are rife,
Let me forth incline to ponder
On the mysteries of life.

Sunless secrets which have baffled
All the wisdom of the wise,
Since the twinkling dawn of ages,
In the night of nameless skies.

Lo the gleam of golden arrows,
In the purple East afar,
While a field of airy roses
Blooms around the morning star.

Can ye tell me winged splendors,
Brighter than a poet's dream,
Are ye actual or ideal?
Is the great world what it seems?

Take away my nerves of feeling,
And the mountain's fall like mist,
If there were no eye to see it,
Would you star of love exist?

Vainer still the choral voices
Of the rich revolving year,
What were wind or wave or thunder,
To a soul that could not hear?

Then are all but self-creations?
Rock ribbed earth and rolling main?
All the lights that live above us,
Beauties borrowed from the brain!

Darker glooms the dreary problem!
Blind solution for the blind!
If the mind of all is maker,
Who is maker of the mind ?

All the laws have Janus-faces--
One is nothing, left alone;
Sun and shadow both must mingle,
Weaving nature's magic zone.

God doth build galvanic circles.
Brains and senses are the poles:
When the two are joined together,
Comes the lightning flash of souls.

Darker glooms the dreary problem!
Brain and senses what are they?
What are time, and space, and matter,
If ye take the mind away?

Will brute atoms blend in order?
Or shall chance direct the course?
Can nerve-fibre find their places,
Moved by automatic force?

Hush the great world spirits whisper
Sweetly in the new born breeze,
While a rain of molten jewels,
Singing patters through the trees,

Hush and solve the painful problem,
Not by study but with scorn;
Not to brook such barren torture,
Man the heir of time was born.

What he needs, alone he knoweth,
Or may know by patient thought;
All beyond are sunless secrets,
Which if known would profit naught