Six 14-Line Poems Poem by Emily Pfeiffer

I.
PEACE to the odalisque, the facile slave,
Whose unrespective love rewards the brave,
Or cherishes the coward; she who yields
Her lord the fief of waste, uncultured fields
To fester in non-using; she whose hour
Is measured by her beauty's transient flower;
Who lives in man, as he in God, and dies
His parasite, who shuts her from the skies.
Graceful ephemera! Fair morning dream
Of the young world! In vain would women's hearts
In love with sacrifice, withstand the stream
Of human progress; other spheres, new parts
Await them. God be with them in their quest—
Our brave, sad working-women of the West!

II.
PEACE to the odalisque, whose morning glory
Is vanishing, to live alone in story;
Firm in her place, a dull-robed figure stands,
With wistful eyes, and earnest, grappling hands:
The working-woman, she whose soul and brain—
Her tardy right—are bought with honest pain.
Oh woman! sacrifice may still be thine—
More fruitful than the souls ye did resign
To sated masters; from your lives, so real,
Will shape itself a pure and high ideal,
That ye will seek with sad, wide-open eyes,
Till, finding nowhere, baffled love shall rise
To higher planes, where passion may look pale,
But charity's white light shall never fail.


III.
OH, Love, on thee a burden has been laid,
Now in this latter day of doubt and dread!
Be pure, that thou be strong, and unafraid
To meet the hosts wherewith thou art bested.
Thou only champion of the soul blasphemed
By arrogant young science! Show thine eyes
Immortal, and thy pledges unredeemed—
Then challenge them to shut thee from the skies!
Oh, Love, with thee we fall, with thee we rise:
Be pure, that thou be strong in death's despite;
Then creeds may wax or wane 'mid tears and sighs,
But never shall the world be lost in night.
Thine is the one evangel, through all forms
Of change surviving, riding out all storms.


V.
LOVE, show thine eyes, thy stature infinite;
Thou child of dust? Thou slave of breathing clay?
Remorseless mocker then, why blast with light
The dwarfs of time—the failures of a day?
Why lead them to the rifts within the veil
Where life with life communes, and where a kiss
Can open vistas of eternal bliss?
Is it to make the sharpened senses quail
Before that reeling blank, that sheer abyss
Of nothingness that waits us? Vindicate
Thy Godhead, and our trust in thee—our fate
Is linked with thine, O Love, as bent and pale
Thou stand'st arraigned, and in man's latest plan
Art shown the true arch-enemy of man.


VI.
NAY, Love so lives in sacrifice, he could
Be taught perchance to loose his highest hope—
His hold on life—and dying, hail the good,
The end to which the coming ages grope.
But Love, sad Love, that should his all forego,
What vision of the future were to show
His yearning eyes? If, looking through the years,
He saw the generations halting past,
More sad than ours, ay, if with rarer tears,
And struggling onward, with no eye upcast—
Still onward, onward, upward nevermore—
Then Love, lost Love, would turn him from the shore
To wait impatient till the end were won,
And the weird world were wrecked upon the sun!