The Project Gutenberg eBook of The New World, by Witter Bynner

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Title: The New World

Author: Witter Bynner

Release Date: January 7, 2009 [eBook #27731]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW WORLD***

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THE NEW WORLD

* * * * *

BY WITTER BYNNER

An Ode to Harvard and Other Poems
Tiger
The Little King
The New World
Iphigenia in Tauris

* * * * *

THE NEW WORLD

by

WITTER BYNNER

New York
Mitchell Kennerley
1918

Copyright 1915 by
Mitchell Kennerley

The greater part of this poem was delivered before the Harvard
Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in June, 1911; several
passages from it have appeared in _Poetry_, and others in _The
Bellman_, the Boston _Evening Transcript_ and the _American
Magazine_.

Printed in America

_To
Celia_

The New World

I

Celia was laughing. Hopefully I said:
"How shall this beauty that we share,
This love, remain aware
Beyond our happy breathing of the air?
How shall it be fulfilled and perfected?...
If you were dead,
How then should I be comforted?"
But Celia knew instead:
"He who finds beauty here, shall find it there."
A halo gathered round her hair.
I looked and saw her wisdom bare
The living bosom of the countless dead.
... And there
I laid my head.

Again when Celia laughed, I doubted her and said:
"Life must be led
In many ways more difficult to see
Than this immediate way
For you and me.
We stand together on our lake's edge, and the mystery
Of love has made us one, as day is made of night and night of day.
Aware of one identity
Within each other, we can say:
'I shall be everything you are.'...
We are uplifted till we touch a star.
We know that overhead
Is nothing more austere, more starry, or more deep to understand
Than is our union, human hand in hand.
.... But o