How shall we enter heaven?
By those dark mystic gates crowned with a rood,
Within whose portals white-robed angels sing
Their alleluias seven.
Where on the altar stands the flesh and blood
Of our consummating?

Ah no! For we, poor aliens must remain,
With howsoever deep assent we give
To the enraptured strain,
Or the dead which doth live;
Only our spirits pass the gates of death;
We worldlings can but see our paradise,
Or of its odours draw an incensed breath
Floating upon our nether world by chance,
Or catch notes that entice
But still forbid full-bodied entrance.

In the long night the moon rides queen of heaven,
And in the night men bless her gentle ray;
But when, at dawn, to us the sun is given,
Then the moon fades away,
Or like a silver wraith of cloud appears,
Her brightness paled to opalescent stone
As through the sky her aimless course she steers,
Fugitive from her now disputed throne;
So, from the heaven of truth, the lesser light
Gives place when brighter vision doth appear,
And faithless they who crave the vanished night,
And hopeless they who greet the dawn with fear.

O since these hands and eyes and all this flesh
By art of man and skill of human thought
Were never wrought,
Something of deity they must enmesh.
Since even the pot by the skilled potter made
Something of him that wrought it will confess,
Shall not this vessel, having once obeyed
Fingers divine, bear the divine impress?
May not the senses apprehensions be
Of that perfectibility
So deep desired, so far to see,
We name it with the word " divinity"?

The gates of heaven! The gates of heaven
Sensibly they will ope to you;
No longer need they bar your view;
No longer need you stand outside
To be the Lamb's unravished bride;
No longer need you beat the bars
Beseeching inauspicious stars,
Or, with insane courageous will,
Break down the doors, to your own ill,
Finding when you have entered in
Horror on horror, sin on sin,
Darkness and self-reflecting gloom,
Torturing hell in heaven's room.
For this remember and know well,
The gates of heaven are gates of hell
Whenever we their bars deride
And try to force our way inside;
They to assault will yield in pain,
And pain return, again, again:
Nay, they are but the devil's maw,
Devouring tooth and bitter claw
To us, if we with impious lust
Would gain heaven with a villain's thrust.
But, as the petals of a rose,
In spring time, in summer time,
Slowly and delicately unclose
Fold upon living fold, until
Excess of love the petals fill,
And they reveal the rose heart bare
And flood with scent the odorous air
And backward bend until they fall
Content to yield the sun their all,
So will the gates of heaven unclose
If as the sun we love the rose:
Of their own heavenly accord
They ope themselves without a word,
And gates of death are gates of life,
And red-robed angels sing our strife,
Till on the altar we too die
And rise to immortality.

But were the sun insensibly one day
To gather all his heat and brightness up
Into one burning cup,
And pour a molten stream in one fierce ray
Upon the rose alone,
To what were the rose grown?
Ashes and waste — a heap of cinderous dust
Devoured of lust:
And e'en so we, if heaven's gates bewitch
Our eyes to blindness of the earth they crown,
They will not yield to us the humble niche
We, with a false humility, desire
In that celestial town,
But we shall turn to a consuming fire
And perish on the peak of our renown.

The whole world is an ante-chamber to
The gates of heaven.
In your deep love, learn the world through and through.
Oh, it were villainous greed to snatch at heaven
While aught of this world lies unknown to you:
'Twere death without life: spirit unhousled here:
Ingratitude past thought: fear on the heels of fear:
The shadow snapt at and the substance lost:
Beauty betrayed: love wasted on a ghost.
The gates of heaven will not admit
Self: but then how be rid of it?
Only in this world can I lose
The self which would my bliss abuse:
Only by passing through the fire
Can I so purify desire
That I am all desire and glow
A white heat with the heat I know.
Thrown cold upon the fire, then I
Consume and perish utterly,
And should I bring of self one grain,
Its burning will be pain on pain;
But when I glow as doth the sun
Which loves the whole wide world as one,
Then the last grain of my desire
Is molten fire within the fire.
Then I may know the secret rose,
Then will the gates of heaven unclose,
Blissfully to my living touch
They yield to me an entrance such
As the pure angels never knew,
As the poor aliens thought was true;
For then the Angel of the Lord
Buries his burning two-edged sword,
And lo, the gates themselves are fire,
A glowing radiance of desire
Desiring me, drawing me in,
Ravished, consumed, exempt from sin:
A living coal upon the altar laid:
A soul reborn: a man, a woman, made.