[Editor: This poem by Mary Eliza Fullerton was published in Moods and Melodies: Sonnets and Lyrics (1908).]
Sense
Sense walked amid his broad inheritance:
“Now am I filled,” he cried, “the man complete”
“Life overbrims and to the core, is sweet
With Taste, and Touch, and Sound and Radiance,
And Odours from the groves of young Romance.
“’Twas well that hour and for my greatness meet
When I arose, and flung beneath my feet
The Beast and Father of low Circumstance.”
“I am complete.” But even as he spoke
The Higher Aspiration rose in tide;
Through levels of his Consciousness it broke,
And bore him on that journey far and wide
That each must travel, ere alive and whole,
Out of the riot and wrack he stands — a Soul.
Source:
Mary E. Fullerton, Moods and Melodies: Sonnets and Lyrics, Melbourne: Thomas C. Lothian, 1908, p. 43
Editor’s notes:
ere = (archaic) before (from the Middle English “er”, itself from the Old English “aer”, meaning early or soon)
wrack = wreck, wreckage, especially a wrecked ship; something destroyed, or a remnant thereof (such as a shipwreck, or a piece of wreckage); collapse, destruction, or ruin (as in the phrase “wrack and ruin”)
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