Ur-Words: Orphic

1. Daimon: Daemon

As on the day that lent you to Creation,

The Sun stood up to meet the planets’ greeting,

You waxed and throve within the dispensation

Of that great Law you served in its completing;

So must you be, you brook no self-evasion,

So said the sibyls, prophets so repeating;

Nor time nor force can shatter the resolving

Of that stamped form, its vital self-evolving.

2. Tyche: Chance

A wanderer, within us and outside us,

Happily skirts those strictest limitations;

We’re not alone; we grow where others guide us,

Doing as others do on such occasions;

Chance in our lives can help or override us,

A toy that plays through us in its mutations.

So soon the cycling years have gently dwindled:

The lamp awaits the flame to be enkindled.

3. Eros: Love

Inevitable! Down from heaven falling,

Where once from ancient chaos he ascended,

But here he flits on airy wings excelling,

In heart and mind to make a spring day splendid,

He seems to flee, by fleeing still recalling,

Turns grief to joy, the tremblings sweetly ended.

Some hearts are only drawn to the ideal:

The noblest gives itself to one, the real.

4. Ananke: Necessity

Again, as the stars will, so it is fated:

Law and constraint—and will is but desiring

What we can’t help but want, predestinated,

And choice is silent in the will’s requiring,

And all that’s dearest flees as if it’s hated,

And the hard “Must” commands our art’s aspiring.

Then all these years we saw as freedom-winning

Leave us more trapped than in the first beginning.

5. Elpis: Hope

Such brazen walls, such bonds of vile constraining,

Such gates may be unlocked yet, though they’re founded

On rock and stone, their ancient rule sustaining.

A being parts them, weightless and unbounded,

From mist, from cloud, from shadows sweetly raining,

She wings us, lifts us up, free and ungrounded.

You know her well, in all climes she may waken;

One wingbeat!—and the aeons overtaken!

1817–18