"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by J. R. Barton

What use to weave, by art, a tapestry
Of thought and sense, of visions, images,
When mortal hands discolor all they touch,
And threads spun in the youth of mighty thoughts
Are dyed too soon in hues of impotence?
The wayward hand mistakes its planned design:
The line’s mislaid; the figure’s run awry:
Why then a wonder that the scheme of Truth,
The glory of eternity, is lost? —
If Truth, indeed, were ever truly seen,
And not instead a well-attired lie
Mistook in inborn ignorance.
                                                  It is
A mellow comfort that full-pictured Truth —
As heady as the golden mead of song —
As terrible as pagan hopeless courage —
As glorious as the dawn upon the hills —
Were light too blinding for our squinted sight.
Should the veil of human boundaries be rent,
We would, undone, bedazzled die of joy,
As Semele, who looked on Jupiter
And perished in his glory.
                                                  Yet if art
Be but a web of grand deception, thrown
To hide a light we dare not comprehend,
Then we are liars all, and in the guise
Of tapesters have wove the shroud of Truth.
It cannot be. The beauty of past things,
That can yet live, and waken us to life
As does the rising sun, cries out against it.
If art be vain, then all, else our own souls.
But nay! a careful hand and gentle touch,
The labor of a man not wholly dead
In fallenness, and aided by a Hand
Not his, a knowledge granted him — these things
Make alchemy. The threads spun in the youth
Of ardent thoughts, but dyed with fallacy,
By quiet transformation may become
A golden skein, wherewith to work indeed
The glories of what was, and is, and shall be.
Thus we, despising our futility,
May stand to view our web, and find that hues
Made dark by our dead touch have turned to gold,
That tangled threads are laid aright, and that
Our art transcended our most able thought:
For weaving, we unwove, and pierced the veil.

J. R. Barton is a student at Houston Baptist University, majoring in English and Art.