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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/38410-8.txt b/38410-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3e492a2 --- /dev/null +++ b/38410-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,2982 @@ +Project Gutenberg's The Star-Treader and other poems, by Clark Ashton Smith + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Star-Treader and other poems + +Author: Clark Ashton Smith + +Release Date: December 25, 2011 [EBook #38410] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS *** + + + + +Produced by David Starner, Matthew Wheaton and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This +file was produced from images generously made available +by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + + + + + + + + + THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS + + BY + + CLARK ASHTON SMITH + + + A. M. ROBERTSON + + STOCKTON STREET AT UNION SQUARE + SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA + + MCMXII + + + COPYRIGHT 1912 + BY + A. M. ROBERTSON + + + Philopolis Press + San Francisco + + + TO MY MOTHER + + + + + CONTENTS + + + NERO + CHANT TO SIRIUS + THE STAR-TREADER + THE MORNING POOL + THE NIGHT FOREST + THE MAD WIND + SONG TO OBLIVION + MEDUSA + ODE TO THE ABYSS + THE SOUL OF THE SEA + THE BUTTERFLY + THE PRICE + THE MYSTIC MEANING + ODE TO MUSIC + THE LAST NIGHT + ODE ON IMAGINATION + THE WIND AND THE MOON + LAMENT OF THE STARS + THE MAZE OF SLEEP + THE WINDS + THE MASK OF FORSAKEN GODS + A SUNSET + THE CLOUD-ISLANDS + THE SNOW-BLOSSOMS + THE SUMMER MOON + THE RETURN OF HYPERION + LETHE + ATLANTIS + THE UNREVEALED + THE ELDRITCH DARK + THE CHERRY SNOWS + FAIRY LANTERNS + NIRVANA + THE NEMESIS OF SUNS + WHITE DEATH + RETROSPECT AND FORECAST + SHADOW OF NIGHTMARE + THE SONG OF A COMET + THE RETRIBUTION + TO THE DARKNESS + A DREAM OF BEAUTY + THE DREAM BRIDGE + A LIVE-OAK LEAF + PINE NEEDLES + TO THE SUN + THE FUGITIVES + AVERTED MALEFICE + THE MEDUSA OF THE SKIES + A DEAD CITY + THE SONG OF THE STARS + COPAN + A SONG OF DREAMS + THE BALANCE + SATURN + FINIS + + + + + NERO + + + This Rome, that was the toil of many men, + The consummation of laborious years-- + Fulfilment's crown to visions of the dead, + And image of the wide desire of kings-- + Is made my darkling dream's effulgency, + Fuel of vision, brief embodiment + Of wandering will, and wastage of the strong + Fierce ecstacy of one tremendous hour, + When ages piled on ages were a flame + To all the years behind, and years to be. + + Yet any sunset were as much as this, + Save for the music forced by hands of fire + From out the hard strait silences which bind + Dull Matter's tongueless mouth--a music pierced + With the tense voice of Life, more quick to cry + Its agony--and save that I believed + The radiance redder for the blood of men. + Destruction hastens and intensifies + The process that is Beauty, manifests + Ranges of form unknown before, and gives + Motion and voice and hue where otherwise + Bleak inexpressiveness had leveled all. + + If one create, there is the lengthy toil; + The laboured years and days league tow'rd an end + Less than the measure of desire, mayhap, + After the sure consuming of all strength, + And strain of faculties that otherwhere + Were loosed upon enjoyment; and at last + Remains to one capacity nor power + For pleasure in the thing that he hath made. + But on destruction hangs but little use + Of time or faculty, but all is turned + To the one purpose, unobstructed, pure, + Of sensuous rapture and observant joy; + And from the intensities of death and ruin, + One draws a heightened and completer life, + And both extends and vindicates himself. + + I would I were a god, with all the scope + Of attributes that are the essential core + Of godhead, and its visibility. + I am but emperor, and hold awhile + The power to hasten Death upon his way, + And cry a halt to worn and lagging Life + For others, but for mine own self may not + Delay the one, nor bid the other speed. + There have been many kings, and they are dead, + And have no power in death save what the wind + Confers upon their blown and brainless dust + To vex the eyeballs of posterity. + But were I god, I would be overlord + Of many kings, and were as breath to guide + Their dust of destiny. And were I god, + Exempt from this mortality which clogs + Perception, and clear exercise of will, + What rapture it would be, if but to watch + Destruction crouching at the back of Time, + The tongueless dooms which dog the travelling suns; + The vampire Silence at the breast of worlds, + Fire without light that gnaws the base of things, + And Lethe's mounting tide, that rots the stone + Of fundamental spheres. This were enough + Till such time as the dazzled wings of will + Came up with power's accession, scarcely felt + For very suddenness. Then would I urge + The strong contention and conflicting might + Of chaos and creation, matching them, + Those immemorial powers inimical, + And all their stars and gulfs subservient-- + Dynasts of Time, and anarchs of the dark-- + In closer war reverseless; and would set + New discord at the universal core, + A Samson-principle to bring it down + In one magnificence of ruin. Yea, + The monster Chaos were mine unleashed hound, + And all my power Destruction's own right arm! + + I would exult to mark the smouldering stars + Renew beneath my breath their elder fire, + And feed upon themselves to nothingness. + The might of suns, slow-paced with swinging weight + Of myriad worlds, were made at my desire + One long rapidity of roaring light, + Through which the voice of Life were audible, + And singing of the immemorial dead + Whose dust is loosened into vaporous wings + With soaring wrack of systems ruinous. + And were I weary of the glare of these, + I would tear out the eyes of light, and stand + Above a chaos of extinguished suns, + That crowd, and grind, and shiver thunderously, + Lending vast voice and motion, but no ray + To the stretched silence of the blinded gulfs. + Thus would I give my godhead space and speech + For its assertion, and thus pleasure it, + Hastening the feet of Time with casts of worlds + Like careless pebbles, or with shattered suns + Brightening the aspect of Eternity. + + + + + CHANT TO SIRIUS + + + What nights retard thee, O Sirius! + Thy light is as a spear, + And thou penetratest them + As a warrior that stabbeth his foe + Even to the center of his life. + Thy rays reach farther than the gulfs; + They form a bridge thereover, + That shall endure till the links of the universe + Are unfastened, and drop apart, + And all the gulfs are one, + Dissevered by suns no longer. + + How strong art thou in thy place! + Thou stridest thine orbit, + And the darkness shakes beneath thee, + As a road that is trodden by an army. + Thou art a god, + In thy temple that is hollowed with light + In the night of infinitude, + And whose floor is the lower void; + Thy worlds are as priests and ministers therein. + Thou furrowest space, + Even as an husbandman, + And sowest it with alien seed; + It beareth alien fruits, + And these are thy testimony, + Even as the crops of his fields + Are the testimony of an husbandman. + + + + + THE STAR-TREADER + + + I + + A voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams, + Saying, "Make haste: the webs of death and birth + Are brushed away, and all the threads of earth + Wear to the breaking; spaceward gleams + Thine ancient pathway of the suns, + Whose flame is part of thee; + And deeps outreach immutably + Whose largeness runs + Through all thy spirit's mystery. + Go forth, and tread unharmed the blaze + Of stars where through thou camest in old days; + Pierce without fear each vast + Whose hugeness crushed thee not within the past. + A hand strikes off the chains of Time, + A hand swings back the door of years; + Now fall earth's bonds of gladness and of tears, + And opens the strait dream to space sublime." + + + II + + Who rides a dream, what hand shall stay! + What eye shall note or measure mete + His passage on a purpose fleet, + The thread and weaving of his way! + It caught me from the clasping world, + And swept beyond the brink of Sense, + My soul was flung, and poised, and whirled, + Like to a planet chained and hurled + With solar lightning strong and tense. + Swift as communicated rays + That leap from severed suns a gloom + Within whose waste no suns illume, + The wingèd dream fulfilled its ways. + Through years reversed and lit again + I followed that unending chain + Wherein the suns are links of light; + Retraced through lineal, ordered spheres + The twisting of the threads of years + In weavings wrought of noon and night; + Through stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll, + Those folds that form the raiment of the soul. + + + III + + Enkindling dawns of memory, + Each sun had radiance to relume + A sealed, disused, and darkened room + Within the soul's immensity. + Their alien ciphers shown and lit, + I understood what each had writ + Upon my spirit's scroll; + Again I wore mine ancient lives, + And knew the freedom and the gyves + That formed and marked my soul. + + + IV + + I delved in each forgotten mind, + The units that had builded me, + Whose deepnesses before were blind + And formless as infinity-- + Knowing again each former world-- + From planet unto planet whirled + Through gulfs that mightily divide + Like to an intervital sleep. + One world I found, where souls abide + Like winds that rest upon a rose; + Thereto they creep + To loose all burden of old woes. + And one I knew, where warp of pain + Is woven in the soul's attire; + And one, where with new loveliness + Is strengthened Beauty's olden chain-- + Soft as a sound, and keen as fire-- + In light no darkness may depress. + + + V + + Where no terrestrial dreams had trod + My vision entered undismayed, + And Life her hidden realms displayed + To me as to a curious god. + Where colored suns of systems triplicate + Bestow on planets weird, ineffable, + Green light that orbs them like an outer sea, + And large auroral noons that alternate + With skies like sunset held without abate, + Life's touch renewed incomprehensibly + The strains of mirth and grief's harmonious spell. + Dead passions like to stars relit + Shone in the gloom of ways forgot; + Where crownless gods in darkness sit + The day was full on altars hot. + I heard--once more a part of it-- + The central music of the Pleiades, + And to Alcyone my soul + Swayed with the stars that own her song's control. + Unchallenged, glad I trod, a revenant + In worlds Edenic longly lost; + Or walked in spheres that sing to these, + O'er space no light has crossed, + Diverse as Hell's mad antiphone uptossed + To Heaven's angelic chant. + + + VI + + What vasts the dream went out to find! + I seemed beyond the world's recall + In gulfs where darkness is a wall + To render strong Antares blind! + In unimagined spheres I found + The sequence of my being's round-- + Some life where firstling meed of Song, + The strange imperishable leaf, + Was placed on brows that starry Grief + Had crowned, and Pain anointed long; + Some avatar where Love + Sang like the last great star at morn + Ere Death filled all its sky; + Some life in fresher years unworn + Upon a world whereof + Peace was a robe like to the calms that lie + On pools aglow with latter spring: + There Life's pellucid surface took + Clear image of all things, nor shook + Till touch of Death's obscuring wing; + Some earlier awakening + In pristine years, when giant strife + Of forces darkly whirled + First forged the thing called Life-- + Hot from the furnace of the suns-- + Upon the anvil of a world. + + + VII + + Thus knew I those anterior ones + Whose lives in mine were blent; + Till, lo! my dream, that held a night + Where Rigel sends no word of might, + Was emptied of the trodden stars, + And dwindled to the sun's extent-- + The brain's familiar prison-bars, + And raiment of the sorrow and the mirth + Wrought by the shuttles intricate of earth. + + + + + THE MORNING POOL + + + All night the pool held mysteries, + Vague depths of night that lay in dream, + Where phantoms of the pale-white stars + Wandered, with darkness-tangled gleam. + + And now it holds the limpid light + And shadeless azure of the skies, + Wherein, like some enclaspèd gem, + The morning's golden glamour lies. + + + + + THE NIGHT FOREST + + + Incumbent seemingly + On the jagged points of peaks + That end the visible west, + The rounded moon yet floods + The valleys hitherward + With fall of torrential light, + Ere from the overmost + Aggressive mountain-cusp, + She slip to the lower dark. + But here, on an eastward slope + Pointed and thick with its pine, + The forest scarcely remembers + Her light that is gone as a vision + Or ecstasy too poignant + And perilous for duration. + Withdrawn in what darker web + Or dimension of dream I know not, + In silence pre-occupied + And solemnest rectitude + The pines uprear, and no sigh + For the rapture of moonlight past, + Comes from their bosom of boughs. + Far in their secrecy + I stand, and the burden of dusk + Dull, but at times made keen + With tingle of fragrances, + Falls on me as a veil + Between my soul and the world. + + What veil of trance, O pines, + Divides you from my soul, + That I feel but enter not + Your distances of dream? + Ah! strange, imperative sense + Of world-deep mystery + That shakes from out your boughs-- + A fragrance yet more keen, + Pressing upon the mind. + + The wind shall question you + Of the dream I may not gain, + And all its sombreness + And depth immeasurable, + Shall tremble away in sound + Of speech not understood + That my heart must break to hear. + + + + + THE MAD WIND + + + What hast thou seen, O wind, + Of beauty or of terror + Surpassing, denied to us, + That with precipitate wings, + Mad and ecstatical, + Thou spurnest the hollows and trees + That offer thee refuge of peace, + And findest within the sky + No safety nor respite + From the memory of thy vision? + + + + + SONG TO OBLIVION + + + Art thou more fair + For all the beauty gathered up in thee, + As gold and gems within some lightless sea? + For light of flowers, and bloom of tinted air, + Art thou more fair? + + Art thou more strong + For powers that turn to thee as unto sleep? + For world and star that find thy ways more deep + Than light may tread, too wearisome for song + Art thou more strong? + + Nay! thou art bare + For power and beauty on thine impotence + Bestowed by fruitful Time's magnificence; + For fruit of all things strong, and bloom of fair, + Thou still art bare. + + + + + MEDUSA + + + As drear and barren as the glooms of Death, + It lies, a windless land of livid dawns, + Nude to a desolate firmament, with hills + That seem the fleshless earth's outjutting ribs, + And plains whose face is crossed and rivelled deep + With gullies twisting like a serpent's track. + The leprous touch of Death is on its stones, + Where for his token visible, the Head + Is throned upon a heap of monstrous rocks, + Grotesque in everlasting ugliness, + Within a hill-ravine, that splits athwart + Like some old, hideous and unhealing scar. + Her lethal beauty crowned with twining snakes + That mingle with her hair, the Gorgon reigns. + Her eyes are clouds wherein Death's lightnings lurk, + Yet, even as men that seek the glance of Life, + The gazers come, where, coiled and serpent-swift, + Those levins wait. As 'round an altar-base + Her victims lie, distorted, blackened forms + Of postured horror smitten into stone,-- + Time caught in meshes of Eternity-- + Drawn back from dust and ruin of the years, + And given to all the future of the world. + The land is claimed of Death: the daylight comes + Half-strangled in the changing webs of cloud + That unseen spiders of bewildered winds + Weave and unweave across the lurid sun + In upper air. Below, no zephyr comes + To break with life the circling spell of death. + Long vapor-serpents twist about the moon, + And in the windy murkness of the sky, + The guttering stars are wild as candle-flames + That near the socket. + + Thus the land shall be, + And Death shall wait, throned in Medusa's eyes. + Till, in the irremeable webs of night + The sun is snared, and the corroded moon + A dust upon the gulfs, and all the stars + Rotted and fall'n like rivets from the sky, + Letting the darkness down upon all things. + + + + + ODE TO THE ABYSS + + + O many-gulfed, unalterable one, + Whose deep sustains + Far-drifting world and sun, + Thou wast ere ever star put out on thee; + And thou shalt be + When never world remains; + When all the suns' triumphant strength and pride + Is sunk in voidness absolute, + And their majestic music wide + In vaster silence rendered mute. + And though God's will were night to dusk the blue, + And law to cancel and disperse + The tangled tissues of the universe, + And mould the suns anew, + His might were impotent to conquer thee, + O invisible infinity! + Thy darks subdue + All light that treads thee down a space, + Exulting o'er thy deeps. + The cycles die, and lo! thy darkness reaps + The flame of mightiest stars; + In aeon-implicating wars + Thou tearest planets from their place; + Worlds granite-spined + To thine erodents yield + Their treasures centrally confined + In crypts by continental pillars sealed. + What suns and worlds have been thy prey + Through unhorizoned stretches of the Past! + What spheres that now essay + Time's undimensioned vast, + Shall plunge forgotten to thy gloom at length, + With life that cried its query of the Night + To ears with silence filled! + What worlds unborn shall dare thy strength, + Girt by a sun's unwearied might, + And dip to darkness when the sun is stilled! + + O incontestable Abyss, + What light in thine embrace of darkness sleeps-- + What blaze of a sidereal multitude + No peopled world is left to miss! + What motion is at rest within thy deeps-- + What gyres of planets long become thy food-- + Worlds unconstrainable, + That plunged therein to peace, + Like tempest-worn and crew-forsaken ships; + And suns that fell + To huge and ultimate eclipse, + And lasting gyre-release! + What sound thy gulfs of silence hold! + Stupendous thunder of the meeting stars, + And crash of orbits that diverged, + With Life's thin song are merged; + Thy quietudes enfold + Paean and threnody as one, + And battle-blare of unremembered wars + With festal songs + Sung in the Romes of ruined spheres, + And music that belongs + To younger, undiscoverable years + With words of yesterday. + Ah, who may stay + Thy soundless world-devouring tide? + O thou whose hands pluck out the light of stars, + Are worlds grown but as fruit for thee? + May no sufficient bars, + Nor marks inveterate abide + To baffle thy persistency? + Still and unstriving now, + What plottest thou, + Within thy universe-ulterior deeps, + Dark as the final lull of suns? + What new advancement of the night + On citadels of stars around whose might + Thy slow encroachment runs, + And crouching silence, thunder-potent, sleeps? + + + + + THE SOUL OF THE SEA + + + A wind comes in from the sea, + And rolls through the hollow dark + Like loud, tempestuous waters. + As the swift recurrent tide, + It pours adown the sky, + And rears at the cliffs of night + Uppiled against the vast. + + Like the soul of the sea-- + Hungry, unsatisfied + With ravin of shores and of ships-- + Come forth on the land to seek + New prey of tideless coasts, + It raves, made hoarse with desire, + And the sounds of the night are dumb + With the sound of its passing. + + + + + THE BUTTERFLY + + + I + + O wonderful and wingèd flow'r, + That hoverest in the garden-close, + Finding in mazes of the rose, + The beauty of a Summer hour! + + O symbol of Impermanence, + Thou art a word of Beauty's tongue, + A word that in her song is sung, + Appealing to the inner sense! + + Of that great mystic harmony, + All lovely things are notes and words-- + The trees, the flow'rs, the songful birds, + The flame-white stars, the surging sea, + + The aureate light of sudden dawn, + The sunset's crimson afterglow, + The summer clouds, the dazzling snow, + The brooks, the moonlight chaste and wan. + + Lacking (who knows?) a cloud, a tree, + A streamlet's purl, the ocean's roar + From Nature's multitudinous store-- + Imperfect were the melody! + + + II + + O Beauty, why so sad my heart? + Why stirs in me a nameless pain + Which seems like some remembered strain, + As on this product of thine art + + Enraptured, marvelling I gaze, + And note how airily 'tis wrought-- + A wingèd dream, a bodied thought, + The spirit of the summer days? + + Thy beauty opes, O Butterfly, + The doors of being, with subtle sense + Of Beauty's frail impermanence, + And grief of knowing it must die. + + Again I seem to know the tears + Of other lives, the woe and pain + Of days that died; resurgent wane + The moons of countless bygone years. + + + III + + On other worlds, on other stars, + To us but tiny points of light, + Or lost in distances of night + Beyond our system's farthest bars, + + A priest to Beauty's service sworn, + I sought and served her all my days, + With music and with hymns of praise. + In sunset and the fires of morn, + + With thrilling heart her form I knew, + And in the stars she whitely gleamed, + And all the face of Nature seemed + Expression of her shape and hue. + + I grieved to watch the summers pass + With all their gorgeous shows of bloom, + And sterner autumn months assume + Their realm with withered leaves and grass. + + Mine was the grief of Change and Death, + Of fair things gone beyond recall, + The paling light of dawns, and all + The flowers' vanished hues and breath. + + + IV + + From out the web of former lives, + The ancient catenated chain + Of joy and sorrow, loss and gain, + One certain truth my heart derives:-- + + Though Beauty passes, this I know, + From Change and Death, this verity: + Her spirit lives eternally-- + 'Tis but her forms that come and go. + + + V + + Lo! I am Beauty's constant thrall, + Must ever on her voice await, + And follow through the maze of Fate + Her luring, strange and mystical. + + Obedient to her summonings, + Forever must my soul aspire, + And seek, on wings of lyric fire, + To penetrate the Heart of Things, + + Wherein she sits, augustly throned, + In loveliness that renders dumb-- + The Essence and the final Sum-- + With peril and with wonder zoned + + What though I fail, my duller sense + Baffled as by a wall of stone? + The high desire, the search alone + Are their own prize and recompense. + + + + + THE PRICE + + + Behind each thing a shadow lies; + Beauty hath e'er its cost: + Within the moonlight-flooded skies + How many stars are lost! + + + + + THE MYSTIC MEANING + + + Alas! that we are deaf and blind + To meanings all about us hid! + What secrets lurk the woods amid? + What prophecies are on the wind? + + What tidings do the billows bring + And cry in vain upon the strand? + If we might only understand + The brooklet's cryptic murmuring! + + The tongues of earth and air are strange. + And yet (who knows?) one little word + Learned from the language of the bird + Might make us lords of Fate and Change! + + + + + ODE TO MUSIC + + + O woven fabric and bright web of sound, + Whose threads are magical, + And with swift weaving thrall + And hold the spirit bound! + We may not know whence thy strange sorceries fall-- + Whether they be Earth's voices wild and strong, + Her high and perfect song. + Or broken dreams of higher worlds unfound. + For, lo, thou art as dreams. + And to thy realm all hidden things belong-- + All fugitive and evanescent gleams + The soul hath vainly sought; + All mystic immanence; + All visions of ungrasped magnificence, + And great ideals pinnacled in thought; + All paths with marvel fraught + That lead to lands obscure: + For, lo, upon thy road of sound we pass, + Seeking thy magic lure, + To vales mist-implicated and unsure, + Where all seems strange as visions in a glass; + And wonder-haunted hills, + Where Beauty is an echo and a dream + In sighing pines, and rills + Clouded and deep with imaged tree and sky; + And where bright rivers gleam + Past cities towering high, + Each wonderful as some cloud-fantasy. + + Thou loosenest the bondage of the years, + Making the spirit free + Of all sublunar joys and fears. + Who mounts on thine imperious wings shall see + The ways of life as threads of day and night; + Serene above their change, + His eyes shall know but far transcendent things, + His ears shall hark but voices free and strange; + Vast seas of outer light + Shall beat upon his sight, + Eternal winds shall touch him with their wings; + His heart shall thrill + To larger, purer joy, and grief more deep + Than earth may know; + And e'en as dews of morning fill + The opened flower, into his soul shall flow + High melodies, like tears that angels weep. + Then shall he penetrate + The veils and outer barriers of sound, + And near the soul of melody, + Where, rapt in aural splendors ultimate, + His soul shall see + The marvel and the glory that surround + Eternal Beauty's shrine; + And catch afar the glint divine + Of her moon-colored robe, or haply hear, + With world-oblivious ear, + Some echo of her voice's mystery. + + Thou hast Love's power to find + The soul's most secret chords, that else were still, + And stir'st them till they thrill + Disclosed to least, faint movements of thy wind. + Thine aural sorcery + O'erwhelms the heart as sunset storms the sight, + For thou art Beauty bodied forth in sound-- + Her colors bright + And diverse forms expressed in harmony: + Within thy bound, + The flare of morning is become a song, + And tree and flower a music sweet and long. + And in thy speech + The power and majesty that swing + Planet and sun, and each + Dim atom of the system manifest, + Become articulate, expressed + Like ocean in the brooklet's whispering. + Beyond the woof of finite things, + Thy threads of wonder deep-entangled lie-- + Time's intertexturings + Within Eternity-- + With Song, mayhap, to be his memories; + For Beauty borders nigh + The ultimate, eternal Verities. + + + + + THE LAST NIGHT + + + I dreamed a dream: I stood upon a height, + A mountain's utmost eminence of snow, + Whence I beheld the plain outstretched below + To a far sea-horizon, dim and white. + Beneath the sun's expiring, ghastly light, + The dead world lay, phantasmally aglow; + Its last fear-weighted voice, a wind, came low; + The distant sea lay hushed, as with affright. + + I watched, and lo! the pale and flickering sun, + In agony and fierce despair, flamed high, + And shadow-slain, went out upon the gloom. + Then Night, that grim, gigantic struggle won, + Impended for a breath on wings of doom, + And through the air fell like a falling sky. + + + + + ODE ON IMAGINATION + + + Imagination's eyes + Outreach and distance far + The vision of the greatest star + That measures instantaneously-- + Enisled therein as in a sea-- + Its cincture of the system-laden skies. + Abysses closed about with night + A tribute yield + To her retardless sight; + And Matter's gates disclose the candent ores + Rock-held in furnaces of planet-cores. + She penetrates the sun's transplendent shield, + And through the obstruction of his vestment dire, + Pierces the centermost sublimity + Of his terrific heart, whose gurge of fire + Heaves upward like a monstrous sea, + And inly riven by Titanic throes, + Fills all his frame with outward cataract + Of separate and immingling torrent streams. + Her eyes exact + From the Moon-Sphinx that wanes and grows + In wastes celestial, alien dreams + Brought down on wings of fleetest beams. + Adown the clefts of under-space + She rides, her steed a falling star, + To seek, where void and vagueness are, + Some mark or certainty of place. + Upon their heavenly precipice + The gathered suns shrink back aghast + From that interminate abyss, + And threat of sightless anarchs vast. + + She stands endued + With supermundane crown, and vestitures + Of emperies that include + All under-worlds and over-worlds of dream-- + Kingdoms o'ercast, and eminent heights extreme + Where moon-transcending light endures. + She wanders in fantastic lands, where grow + In scarce-discernèd fields and closes blind, + Vague blossoms stirred by wings of eidolons; + Or roves in forests where all sound is low: + Each voice that shuns + The noiseful day, and enters there to find + Twilight that naught exalts nor grieves, + Is quickly tuned to the susurrous leaves. + + Upon some supersensual eminence + She hears the fragments of a thunder loud, + Where lightnings of ulterior Truth intense + Flame through the walls of hollow cloud. + But these she may not wholly grasp + With incomplete terrestrial clasp. + Her eyes inevitably see, + 'Neath rounds and changes of exterior things, + The movements of Essentiality-- + Of ageless principles--that alter not + To temporal alterings-- + Unswerved by shattered worlds upbuilt once more. + And stars no longer hot; + Or broken constellations strewn + Like coals about the heavenly floor, + And rush of night upon the noon + Of their lost worlds, unsphered restorelessly + In icy deserts of the sky. + From the beginning of the spheres, + When systems nebulous out-thrown + Drove back the brinks + Of nullity with limitary marks, + Till end of suns, and sunless death of years, + To her are known + The unevident inseparable links + That bind all deeps, all suns, all days and darks. + + + + + THE WIND AND THE MOON + + + Oh, list to the wind of the night, oh, hark, + How it shrieks as it goes on its hurrying quest! + Forever its voice is a voice of the dark, + Forever its voice is a voice of unrest. + Oh, list to the pines as they shiver and sway + 'Neath the ceaseless beat of its myriad wings-- + How they moan and they sob like living things + That cry in the darkness for light and day! + Now bend they low as the wind mounts higher, + And its eerie voice comes piercingly, + Like the plaint of humanity's misery, + And its burden of vain desire. + Now to a sad, tense whisper it fails, + Then wildly and madly it raves and it wails. + + Oh, the night is filled with its sob and its shriek, + Its weird and its restless, yearning cry, + As it races adown the darkened sky, + With scurry of broken clouds that seek, + Borne on the wings of the hastening wind, + A place of rest that they never can find. + And around the face of the moon they cling, + Its fugitive face to veil they aspire; + But ever and ever it peereth out, + Rending the cloud-ranks that hem it about; + And it seemeth a lost and phantom thing, + Like a phantom of dead desire. + + + + + LAMENT OF THE STARS + + + One tone is mute within the starry singing, + The unison fulfilled, complete before; + One chord within the music sounds no more, + And from the stir of flames forever winging + The pinions of our sister, motionless + In pits of indefinable duress, + Are fallen beyond all recovery + By exultation of the flying dance, + Or rhythms holding as with sleep or trance + The maze of stars that only death may free-- + Flung through the void's expanse. + + In gulfs depressed nor in the gulfs exalted + Shall shade nor lightening of her flame be found; + In space that litten orbits gird around, + Nor in the bottomless abyss unvaulted + Of unenvironed, all-outlying night. + Allotted gyre nor lawless comet-flight + Shall find, and with its venturous ray return + From gloom of undiscoverable scope, + One ray of her to gladden into hope + The doubtful eyes denied that truthward yearn, + The faltering feet that grope. + + Beyond restrainless boundary-nights surpassing + All luminous horizons limited, + The substance and the light of her have fed + Ruin and silence of the night's amassing: + Abandoned worlds forever morningless; + Suns without worlds, in frory beamlessness + Girt for the longer gyre funereal; + Inviolate silence, earless, unawaking + That once was sound, and level calm unbreaking + Where motion's many ways in oneness fall + Of sleep beyond forsaking. + + Circled with limitation unexceeded + Our eyes behold exterior mysteries + And gods unascertainable as these-- + Shadows and shapes irresolubly heeded; + Phantoms that tower, and substance scarcely known. + Our sister knows all mysteries one alone, + One shape, one shadow, crowding out the skies; + Whose eyeless head and lipless face debar + All others nameless or familiar, + Filling with night all former lips and eyes + Of god, and ghost, and star: + + For her all shapes have fed the shape of night; + All darker forms, and dubious forms, or pallid, + Are met and reconciled where none is valid. + But unto us solution nor respite + Of mystery's multiform incessancy + From unexplored or system-trodden sky + Shall come; but as a load importunate, + Enigma past and mystery foreseen + Weigh mightily upon us, and between + Our sorrow deepens, and our songs abate + In cadences of threne. + + A gloom that gathers silence looms more closely, + And quiet centering darkness at its heart; + But from the certitude of night depart + Uncertain god nor eidolon less ghostly; + But stronger grown with strength obtained from light + That failed, and power lent by the stronger night, + Perplex us with new mystery, and doubt + If these our flames, that deathward toss and fall + Be festal lights or lights funereal + For mightier gods within the gulfs without, + Phantoms more cryptical. + + New shadows from the wings of Time unfolding + Across the depth and eminence of years, + Fall deeplier with the broadening gloom of fears. + Prophetic-eyed, with planet-hosts beholding + The night take form upon the face of suns, + We see (thus grief's vaticination runs-- + Presageful sorrow for our sister slain) + A night wherein all sorrow shall be past, + One with night's single mystery at last; + Nor vocal sun nor singing world remain + As Time's elegiast. + + + + + THE MAZE OF SLEEP + + + Sleep is a pathless labyrinth, + Dark to the gaze of moons and suns, + Through which the colored clue of dreams, + A gossamer thread, obscurely runs. + + + + + THE WINDS + + + To me the winds that die and start, + And strive in wars that never cease, + Are dearer than the level peace + That lies unstirred at summer's heart; + + More dear to me the shadowed wold, + Where, with report of tempest rife, + The air intensifies with life, + Than quiet fields of summer's gold. + + I am the winds' admitted friend: + They seal our linked fellowships + With speech of warm or icy lips, + With touch of west and east that blend. + + And when my spirit listless stands, + With folded wings that do not live, + Their own assuageless wings they give + To lift her from the stirless lands. + + * * * * * + + Within the place unmanifest + Where central Truth is immanent, + Lies there a vast, entire content + Of sound and movement one in rest? + + I know not this. Yet in my heart, + I feel that where all truths concur, + The shrine is peaceless with the stir + Of winds that enter and depart. + + + + + THE MASQUE OF FORSAKEN GODS + + SCENE: _A moonlit glade on a summer midnight_ + + + THE POET + + What consummation of the toiling moon + O'ercomes the midnight blue with violet, + Wherein the stars turn grey! The summer's green, + Edgèd and strong by day, is dull and faint + Beneath the moon's all-dominating mood, + That in this absence of the impassioned sun, + Sways to a sleep of sound and calm of color + The live and vivid aspect of the world-- + Subdued as with the great expectancy + Which blurs beginning features of a dream, + Things and events lost 'neath an omening + Of central and oppressive bulk to come. + Here were the theatre of a miracle, + If such, within a world long alienate + From its first dreams, and shut with skeptic years, + Might now befall. + + + THE PHILOSOPHER + + The Huntress rides no more + Across the upturned faces of the stars: + 'Tis but the dead shell of a frozen world, + Glittering with desolation. Earth's old gods-- + The gods that haunt like dreams each planet's youth-- + Are fled from years incredulous, and tired + With penetrating of successive masks, + That give but emptiness they served to hide. + Remains not faith enough to bring them back-- + Pan to his wood, Diana to her moon, + And all the visions that made populous + An eager world where Time grows weary now. + Yet Youth, that lives, might for a little claim + The pantheon of dream, on such a night, + When 'neath the growing marvel of the moon + The films of time wear perilously thin, + And thought looks backward to the simpler years, + Till all the vision seems but just beyond. + If one have faith, it may be that he shall + Behold the gods--once only, and no more, + Because of Time's inhospitality, + For which they may not stay. + + + THE POET + + Within the marvel of the light, what flower + Of active wonder from quiescence springs! + Is it a throng of luminous white clouds, + Phantoms of some old storm's death-driven Titans, + That float beneath the moon, and speak with voices + Like the last echoes of a thunder spent? + 'Tis the forsaken gods, that win a foothold + About the magic circle which the moon + Draws like some old enchantress round the glade. + + + THE PHILOSOPHER + + I see them not: the vision is addressed + Only to thine acute and eager youth. + + + JOVE + + All heaven and earth were once my throne; + Now I have but the wind alone + For shifting judgment-seat. + The pillared world supported me: + Yet man's old incredulity + Left nothing for my feet. + + + PAN + + Man hath forgotten me: + Yet seems it that my memory + Saddens the wistful voices of the wood; + Within each erst-frequented spot + Echo forgets my music not, + Nor Earth my tread where trampling years have stood. + + + ARTEMIS + + Time hath grown cold + Toward beauty loved of old. + The gods must quake + When dreams and hopes forsake + The heart of man, + And disillusion's ban + More chill than stone, + Rears till the former throne + Of loveliness + Is dark and tenantless. + Now must I weep-- + Homeless within the deep + Where once of old + Mine orbèd chariot rolled,-- + And mourn in vain + Man's immemorial pain + Uncomforted + Of light and beauty fled. + + + APOLLO + + Time wearied of my song-- + A satiate and capricious king + Who for his pleasure bade me sing, + First of his minstrel throng. + Till, cloyed with melody, + His ear grew faint to voice and lyre; + Forgotten then of Time's desire, + His thought was void of me. + + + APHRODITE + + I, born of sound and foam, + Child of the sea and wind, + Was fire upon mankind-- + Fuelled with Syria, and with Greece and Rome. + Time fanned me with his breath; + Love found new warmth in me, + And Life its ecstasy, + Till I grew deadly with the wind of death. + + + A NYMPH + + How can the world be still so beautiful + When beauty's self is fled? Tis like the mute + And marble loveliness of some dead girl; + And we that hover here, are as the spirit + Of former voice and motion, and live color + In that which shall not stir nor speak again. + + + ANOTHER NYMPH + + Nay, rather say this lovely, lifeless world + Is but a rigid semblance, counterfeiting + The world which was. Nor have the gods retained + Such power as once informed and rendered vital + The cryptic irresponsiveness of stone,-- + That statue which Pygmalion made and loved. + + + ATÈ + + I, who was discord among men, + Alone of all Time's hierarchy + Find that Time hath no need of me, + No lack that I might fill again. + + + THE POET + + Tell me, O gods, are ye forever doomed + To fall and flutter among spacial winds, + Finding release nor foothold anywhere-- + Debarred from doors of all the suns, like spirits + Whose names are blotted from the lists of Time, + Though they themselves yet wander undestroyed? + + + THE GODS TOGETHER + + Throneless, discrowned, and impotent, + In man's sad disillusionment, + We passed with Earth's returnless youth, + Who were the semblances of truth, + The veils that hid the vacantness + Infinite, naked, meaningless, + The blank and universal Sphinx + Each world beholds at last--and sinks. + New gods protect awhile the gaze + Of man--each one a veil that stays-- + Till the new gods, discredited, + Like mist that melts with noon, are fled-- + That power oppressive, limitless, + The tyranny of nothingness. + Our power is dead upon the earth + With the first dews and dawns of Time; + But in the far and younger clime + Of other worlds, it hath re-birth. + Yea, though we find not entrance here-- + Astray like feathers on the wind, + To neither earth nor heaven consigned-- + Fresh altars in a distant sphere + Are keen with fragrance, bright with fire, + New hearths to warm us from the night, + Till, banished thence, we pass in flight + While all the flames of dream expire. + + + + + A SUNSET + + + As blood from some enormous hurt + The sanguine sunset leapt; + Across it, like a dabbled skirt, + The hurrying tempest swept. + + + + + THE CLOUD-ISLANDS + + + What islands marvellous are these, + That gem the sunset's tides of light-- + Opals aglow in saffron seas? + How beautiful they lie, and bright, + Like some new-found Hesperides! + + What varied, changing magic hues + Tint gorgeously each shore and hill! + What blazing, vivid golds and blues + Their seaward winding valleys fill! + What amethysts their peaks suffuse! + + Close held by curving arms of land + That out within the ocean reach, + I mark a faery city stand, + Set high upon a sloping beach + That burns with fire of shimmering sand. + + Of sunset-light is formed each wall; + Each dome a rainbow-bubble seems; + And every spire that towers tall + A ray of golden moonlight gleams; + Of opal-flame is every hall. + + Alas! how quickly dims their glow! + What veils their dreamy splendours mar! + Like broken dreams the islands go, + As down from strands of cloud and star, + The sinking tides of daylight flow. + + + + + THE SNOW-BLOSSOMS + + + But yestereve the winter trees + Reared leafless, blackly bare, + Their twigs and branches poignant-marked + Upon the sunset-flare. + + White-petaled, opens now the dawn, + And in its pallid glow, + Revealed, each leaf-lorn, barren tree + Stands white with flowers of snow. + + + + + THE SUMMER MOON + + + How is it, O moon, that melting, + Unstintedly, prodigally, + On the peaks' hard majesty, + Till they seem diaphanous + And fluctuant as a veil, + And pouring thy rapturous light + Through pine, and oak, and laurel, + Till the summer-sharpened green, + Softening and tremulous, + Is a lustrous miracle-- + How is it that I find, + When I turn again to thee, + That thy lost and wasted light + Is regained in one magic breath? + + + + + THE RETURN OF HYPERION + + + The dungeon-clefts of Tartarus + Are just beyond yon mountain-girdle, + Whose mass is bound around the bulk + Of the dark, unstirred, unmoving East. + Alike on the mountains and the plain, + The night is as some terrific dream, + That closes the soul in a crypt of dread + Apart from touch or sense of earth, + As in the space of Eternity. + + What light unseen perturbs the darkness? + Behold! it stirs and fluctuates + Between the mountains and the stars + That are set as guards above the prison + Of the captive Titan-god. I know + That in the deeps beneath, Hyperion + Divides the pillared vault of dark, + And stands a space upon its ruin. + Then light is laid upon the peaks, + As the hand of one who climbs beyond; + And, lo! the Sun! The sentinel stars + Are dead with overpotent flame, + And in their place Hyperion stands. + The night is loosened from the land, + As a dream from the mind of the dreamer. + A great wind blows across the dawn, + Like the wind of the motion of the world. + + + + + LETHE + + + I flow beneath the columns that upbear + The world, and all the tracts of heaven and hell; + Foamless I sweep, where sounds nor glimmers tell + My motion nadir-ward; no moment's flare + Gives each to each the shapes that, unaware, + Commingle at my verge, to test the spell + Of waves intense with night, whose deeps compel + One face from pain, and rapture, and despair. + + The fruitless earth's denied and cheated sons + Meet here, where fruitful and unfruitful cease. + And when their lords, the mightier, hidden Ones, + Have drained all worlds till being's wine is low, + Shall they not come, and from the oblivious flow + Drink at one draught a universe of peace? + + + + + ATLANTIS + + + Above its domes the gulfs accumulate + To where the sea-winds trumpet forth their screed; + But here the buried waters take no heed-- + Deaf, and with closèd lips from press of weight + Imposed by ocean. Dim, inanimate, + On temples of an unremembered creed + Involved in long, slow tentacles of weed, + The dead tide lies immovable as Fate. + + From out the ponderous-vaulted ocean-dome, + A clouded light is questionably shed + On altars of a goddess garlanded + With blossoms of some weird and hueless vine; + And wingèd, fleet, through skies beneath the foam, + Like silent birds the sea-things dart and shine. + + + + + THE UNREVEALED + + + How dense the glooms of Death, impervious + To aught of old memorial light! How strait + The sunless road, suspended, separate, + That leads to later birth! Untremulous + With any secret morn of stars, to us + The Past is closed as with division great + Of planet-girdling seas--unknown its gate, + Beyond the mouths of shadows cavernous. + + Oh! may it be that Death in kindness strips + The soul of memory's raiment, rendering blind + Our vision, lest surmounted deeps appal, + As when on mountain peaks a glance behind + Betrays with knowledge, and the climber slips + Down gulfs of fear to some enormous fall? + + + + + THE ELDRITCH DARK + + + Now as the twilight's doubtful interval + Closes with night's accomplished certainty, + A wizard wind goes crying eerily; + And in the glade unsteady shadows crawl, + Timed to the trees, whose voices rear and fall + As with some dreadful witches' ecstasy, + Flung upward to the dark, whence glitters free + The crooked moon, impendent over all. + + Twin veils of covering cloud and silence thrown + Across the movement and the sound of things, + Make blank the night, till in the broken west + The moon's ensanguined blade awhile is shown.... + The night grows whole again.... The shadows rest, + Gathered beneath a greater shadow's wings. + + + + + THE CHERRY-SNOWS + + + The cherry-snows are falling now; + Down from the blossom-clouded sky + Of zephyr-troubled twig and bough, + In widely settling whirls they fly. + + The orchard earth, unclothed and brown, + Is wintry-hued with petals bright; + E'en as the snow they glimmer down; + Brief as the snow's their stainless white. + + + + + FAIRY LANTERNS + + + 'Tis said these blossom-lanterns light + The elves upon their midnight way; + That fairy toil and elfin play + Receive their beams of magic white. + + I marvel not if it be true; + I know this flower has lighted me + Nearer to Beauty's mystery, + And past the veils of secrets new. + + + + + NIRVANA + + + Poised as a god whose lone, detachèd post, + An eyrie, pends between the boundary-marks + Of finite years, and those unvaried darks + That veil Eternity, I saw the host + Of worlds and suns, swept from the furthermost + Of night--confusion as of dust with sparks-- + Whirl tow'rd the opposing brink; as one who harks + Some warning trumpet, Time, a withered ghost, + Fled with them; disunited orbs that late + Were atoms of the universal frame, + They passed to some eternal fragment-heap. + And, lo, the gods, from space discorporate, + Who were its life and vital spirit, came, + Drawn outward by the vampire-lips of Sleep! + + + + + THE NEMESIS OF SUNS + + + Lo, what are these, the gyres of sun and world, + Fulfilled with daylight by each toiling sun-- + Lo, what are these but webs of radiance spun + Beneath the roof of Night, and torn or furled + By Night at will? All opposite powers upwhirled + Are less than chaff to this imperious one-- + As wind-tossed chaff, until its sport be done, + Scattered, and lifted up, and downward hurled. + + All gyres are held within the path unspanned + Of Night's aeonian compass--loosely pent + As with the embrace of lethal-tightening weight; + All suns are grasped within the hollow hand + Of Night, the godhead sole, omnipotent, + Whose other names are Nemesis and Fate. + + + + + WHITE DEATH + + + Methought the world was bound with final frost; + The sun, made hueless as with fear and awe, + Illumined yet the lands it could not thaw. + Then on my road, with instant evening crost, + Death stood, and in its shadowy films enwound, + Mine eyes forgot the light, until I came + Where poured the inseparate, unshadowed flame + Of phantom suns in self-irradiance drowned. + + Death lay revealed in all its haggardness-- + Immitigable wastes horizonless; + Profundities that held nor bar nor veil; + All hues wherewith the suns and worlds were dyed + In light invariable nullified; + All darkness rendered shelterless and pale. + + + + + RETROSPECT AND FORECAST + + + Turn round, O Life, and know with eyes aghast + The breast that fed thee--Death, disguiseless, stern; + Even now, within thy mouth, from tomb and urn, + The dust is sweet. All nurture that thou hast + Was once as thou, and fed with lips made fast + On Death, whose sateless mouth it fed in turn. + Kingdoms debased, and thrones that starward yearn, + All are but ghouls that batten on the past. + + Monstrous and dread, must it fore'er abide, + This unescapable alternity? + Must loveliness find root within decay, + And night devour its flaming hues alway? + Sickening, will Life not turn eventually, + Or ravenous Death at last be satisfied? + + + + + SHADOW OF NIGHTMARE + + + What hand is this, that unresisted grips + My spirit as with chains, and from the sound + And light of dreams, compels me to the bound + Where darkness waits with wide, expectant lips? + Albeit thereat my footing holds, nor slips, + The threats of that Omnipotence confound + All days and hours of gladness, girt around + With sense of near, unswervable eclipse. + + So lies a land whose noon is plagued with whirr + Of bats, than their own shadows swarthier, + Whose flight is traced on roofs of white abodes, + Wherein from court to court, from room to room, + In hieroglyphics of abhorrent doom, + Is slowly trailed the slime of crawling toads. + + + + + THE SONG OF A COMET + + + A plummet of the changing universe, + Far-cast, I flare + Through gulfs the sun's uncharted orbits bind, + And spaces bare + That intermediate darks immerse + By road of sun nor world confined. + Upon my star-undominated gyre + I mark the systems vanish one by one; + Among the swarming worlds I lunge, + And sudden plunge + Close to the zones of solar fire; + Or 'mid the mighty wrack of stars undone, + Flash, and with momentary rays + Compel the dark to yield + Their aimless forms, whose once far-potent blaze + In ashes chill is now inurned. + A space revealed, + I see their planets turned, + Where holders of the heritage of breath + Exultant rose, and sank to barren death + Beneath the stars' unheeding eyes. + Adown contiguous skies + I pass the thickening brume + Of systems yet unshaped, that hang immense + Along mysterious shores of gloom; + Or see--unimplicated in their doom-- + The final and disastrous gyre + Of blinded suns that meet, + And from their mingled heat, + And battle-clouds intense, + O'erspread the deep with fire. + + Through stellar labyrinths I thrid + Mine orbit placed amid + The multiple and irised stars, or hid, + Unsolved and intricate, + In many a planet-swinging sun's estate. + Ofttimes I steal in solitary flight + Along the rim of the exterior night + That grips the universe; + And then return, + Past outer footholds of sidereal light, + To where the systems gather and disperse; + And dip again into the web of things, + To watch it shift and burn, + Hearted with stars. On peaceless wings + I pierce, where deep-outstripping all surmise, + The nether heavens drop unsunned, + By stars and planets shunned. + And then I rise + Through vaulting gloom, to watch the dark + Snatch at the flame of failing suns; + Or mark + The heavy-dusked and silent skies, + Strewn thick with wrecked and broken stars, + Where many a fated orbit runs. + An arrow sped from some eternal bow, + Through change of firmaments and systems sent, + And finding bourn nor bars, + I flee, nor know + For what eternal mark my flight is meant. + + + + + THE RETRIBUTION + + + Old Egypt's gods, Osiris, Ammon, Thoth, + Came on my dream in thunder, and their feet + Revealed, were as the levin's fire and heat. + The hosts of Rome, the Arab and the Goth + Have left their altars dark, yet stern and wroth + In olden power they stood, whose wings were fleet, + And mighty as with strength of storms that meet + In mingled foam of clouds and ocean-froth. + + Above my dream, with arch of dreaded wings, + In judgement and in sentence of what crime + I knew not, sate the gods outcast of time. + They passed, and lo, a plague of darkness fell, + Unsleeping, and accurst with nameless things, + And dreams that stood the ministers of Hell! + + + + + TO THE DARKNESS + + + Thou hast taken the light of many suns, + And they are sealed in the prison-house of gloom. + Even as candle-flames + Hast thou taken the souls of men, + With winds from out a hollow place; + They are hid in the abyss as in a sea, + And the gulfs are over them + As the weight of many peaks, + As the depth of many seas; + Thy shields are between them and the light; + They are past its burden and bitterness; + The spears of the day shall not touch them, + The chains of the sun shall not hale them forth. + + Many men there were, + In the days that are now of thy realm, + That thou hast sealed with the seal of many deeps; + Their feet were as eagles' wings in the quest of Truth-- + Aye, mightily they desired her face, + Hunting her through the lands of life, + As men in the blankness of the waste + That seek for a buried treasure-house of kings. + But against them were the veils + That hands may not rend nor sabers pierce; + And Truth was withheld from them, + As a water that is seen afar at dawn, + And at noon is lost in the sand + Before the feet of the traveller. + The world was a barrenness, + And the gardens were as the waste. + And they turned them to the adventure of the dark, + To the travelling of the land without roads, + To the sailing of the sea that hath no beacons. + Why have they not returned? + Their quest hath found end in thee, + Or surely they had fared + Once more to the place whence they came, + As men that have travelled to a fruitless land. + They have looked on thy face, + And to them it is the countenance of Truth. + Thy silence is sweeter to them than the voice of love, + Thine embrace more dear than the clasp of the beloved. + They are fed with the emptiness past the veil, + And their hunger is filled; + They have found the waters of peace, + And are athirst no more. + They know a rest that is deeper than the gulfs, + And whose seal is unbreakable as the seal of the void; + They sleep the sleep of the suns, + And the vast is a garment unto them. + + + + + A DREAM OF BEAUTY + + + I dreamed that each most lovely, perfect thing + That Nature hath, of sound, and form, and hue-- + The winds, the grass, the light-concentering dew, + The gleam and swiftness of the sea-bird's wing; + Blueness of sea and sky, and gold of storm + Transmuted by the sunset, and the flame + Of autumn-colored leaves, before me came, + And, meeting, merged to one diviner form. + + Incarnate Beauty 'twas, whose spirit thrills + Through glaucous ocean and the greener hills, + And in the cloud-bewildered peaks is pent. + Like some descended star she hovered o'er, + But as I gazed, in doubt and wonderment, + Mine eyes were dazzled, and I saw no more. + + + + + THE DREAM-BRIDGE + + + All drear and barren seemed the hours, + That passed rain-swept and tempest-blown. + The dead leaves fell like brownish notes + Within the rain's grey monotone. + + There came a lapse between the showers; + The clouds grew rich with sunset gleams; + Then o'er the sky a rainbow sprang-- + A bridge unto the Land of Dreams. + + + + + A LIVE-OAK LEAF + + + How marvellous this bit of green + I hold, and soon shall throw away! + Its subtile veins, its vivid sheen, + Seem fragment of a god's array. + + In all the hidden toil of earth, + Which is the more laborious part-- + To rear the oak's enormous girth, + Or shape its leaves with poignant art? + + + + + PINE NEEDLES + + + O little lances, dipped in grey, + And set in order straight and clean, + How delicately clear and keen + Your points against the sapphire day! + + Attesting Nature's perfect art + Ye fringe the limpid firmament, + O little lances, keenly sent + To pierce with beauty to the heart! + + + + + TO THE SUN + + + Thy light is as an eminence unto thee, + And thou are upheld by the pillars of thy strength. + Thy power is a foundation for the worlds; + They are builded thereon as upon a lofty rock + Whereto no enemy hath access. + Thou puttest forth thy rays, and they hold the sky + As in the hollow of an immense hand. + Thou erectest thy light as four walls, + And a roof with many beams and pillars. + Thy flame is a stronghold based as a mountain; + Its bastions are tall, and firm like stone. + + The worlds are bound with the ropes of thy will; + Like steeds are they stayed and contrained + By the reins of invisible lightnings. + With bands that are stouter than iron manifold, + And stronger than the cords of the gulfs, + Thou withholdest them from the brink + Of outward and perilous deeps, + Lest they perish in the desolations of the night, + Or be stricken of strange suns; + Lest they be caught in the pitfalls of the abyss, + Or fall into the furnace of Arcturus. + Thy law is as a shore unto them, + And they are restrained thereby as the sea. + + Thou art food and drink to the worlds; + Yea, by thy toil are they sustained, + That they fail not upon the road of space, + Whose goal is Hercules. + When thy pillars of force are withdrawn, + And the walls of thy light fall inward, + Borne down by the sundering night, + And thy head is covered with the Shadow, + The worlds shall wander as men bewildered + In the sterile and lifeless waste. + Athirst and unfed shall they be, + When the springs of thy strength are dust, + And thy fields of light are black with dearth. + They shall perish from the ways + That thou showest no longer, + And emptiness shall close above them. + + + + + THE FUGITIVES + + + O fugitive fragrances + That tremble heavenward + Unceasing, or if ye linger, + Halt but as memories + On the verge of forgetfulness, + Why must ye pass so fleetly + On wings that are less than wind, + To a death unknowable? + Soon ye are gone, and the air + Forgets your faint unrest + In the garden's breathlessness, + Where fall the snows of silence. + + + + + AVERTED MALEFICE + + + Where mandrakes, crying from the moonless fen, + Told how a witch, with gaze of owl or bat + Found, and each root malevolently fat + Pulled for her waiting cauldron, on my ken + Upstole, escaping to the world of men, + A vapor as of some infernal vat; + Against the stars it clomb, and caught thereat + As if their bright regard to veil again. + + Despite the web, methought they saw, appalled, + The stealthier weft in which all sound was still ... + Then sprang, as if the night found breath anew, + A wind whereby the stars were disenthralled ... + Far off, I heard the cry of frustrate ill-- + A witch that wailed above her curdled brew. + + + + + THE MEDUSA OF THE SKIES + + + Haggard as if resurgent from a tomb, + The moon uprears her ghastly, shrunken head, + Crowned with such light as flares upon the dead + From pallid skies more death-like than the gloom. + Now fall her beams till slope and plain assume + The whiteness of a land whence life is fled; + And shadows that a sepulcher might shed + Move livid as the stealthy hands of doom. + + O'er rigid hills and valleys locked and mute, + A pallor steals as of a world made still + When Death, that erst had crept, stands absolute-- + An earth now frozen fast by power of eyes + That malefice and purposed silence fill, + The gaze of that Medusa of the skies. + + + + + A DEAD CITY + + + The twilight reigns above the fallen noon + Within an ancient land, whose after-time + Lies like a shadow o'er its ruined prime. + Like rising mist the night increases soon + Round shattered palaces, ere yet the moon + On mute, unsentried walls and turrets climb, + And touch with whiteness of sepulchral rime + The desert where a city's bones are strewn. + + She comes at last; unburied, thick, they show + In all the hoary nakedness of stone. + From out a shadow like the lips of Death + Issues a wind, that through the stillness blown, + Cries like a prophet's ghost with wailing breath + The weirds of finished and forgotten woe. + + + + + THE SONG OF THE STARS + + + From the final reach of the upper night + To the nether darks where the comets die, + From the outmost bourn of the reigns of light + To the central gloom of the midmost sky, + In our mazeful gyres we fly. + And our flight is a choral chant of flame, + That ceaseless fares to the outer void, + With the undersong of the peopled spheres, + The voices of comet and asteroid, + And the wail of the spheres destroyed. + Forever we sing to a god unseen-- + In the dark shall our voices fail? + The void is his robe inviolate, + The night is his awful veil-- + How our fires grow dim and pale! + + From the ordered gyres goes ever afar + Our song of flame o'er the void unknown, + Where circles nor world, nor comet, nor star. + Shall it die ere it reach His throne? + + On the shoreless deeps of the seas of gloom + Sailing, we venture afar and wide, + Where ever await the tempests of doom, + Where the silent maelstroms lurk and hide, + And the darkling reefs abide. + And the change and ruin of stars is a song + That rises and ebbs in a tide of fire-- + A music whose notes are of dreadful flame, + Whose harmonies ever leap high'r + Where the suns and the worlds expire. + Is such music not fit for a god? + Yet ever the deep is a dark, + And ever the night is a void, + Nor brightens a word nor a mark + To show if our God may hark. + + From the gyres of change goes ever afar + Our flaming chant o'er the deep unknown, + The song of the death of planet and star. + Shall it die ere it reach His throne? + + In our shadows of light the planets sweep, + And endure for the span of our prime-- + Globed atoms that hazard the termless deep + With races that bow to the law of Time, + And yet cherish a dream sublime. + And they cry to the god behind the veil. + Yet how should their voices pass the night, + The silence that waits in the rayless void, + If he hear not our music of light, + And the thundrous song of our might? + And they strive in the gloom for truth-- + Yet how should they pierce the veil, + When we, with our splendors of flame, + In the darkness faint and fail, + Our fires how feeble and pale! + + From the ordered gyres goes ever afar + Our song of flame o'er the void unknown, + Where circles nor world, nor comet, nor star, + Shall it die ere it reach His throne? + + + + + COPAN + + + Around its walls the forests of the west + Gloom, as about some mystery's final pale + Might lie its multifold exterior veil. + Sculptured with signs and meanings unconfessed, + Its lordly fanes and palaces attest + A past before whose wall of darkness fail + Reason and fancy, finding not the tale + Erased by time from history's palimpsest. + + Within this place, that from the gloom of Eld + Still meets the light, a people came and went + Like whirls of dust between its columns blown-- + An alien race, whose record, shadow-held, + Is sealed with those of others long forespent + That died in sunless planets lost and lone. + + + + + A SONG OF DREAMS + + + A voice came to me from the night, and said, + What profit hast thou in thy dreaming + Of the years that are set + And the years yet unrisen? + Hast thou found them tillable lands? + Is there fruit that thou canst pluck therein, + Or any harvest to be mown? + Shalt thou dig aught of gold from the mines of the past, + Or trade for merchandise + In the years where all is rotten? + Are they a sea that will bring thee to any shore, + Or a desert that vergeth upon aught but the waste? + Shalt thou drink from the springs that are emptied, + Or find sustenance in shadows? + What value hath the future given thee? + Is there aught in the days yet dark + That thou canst hold with thy hands? + Are they a fortress + That will afford thee protection + Against the swords of the world? + Is there justice in them + To balance the world's inequity, + Or benefit to outweigh its loss? + + Then spake I in answer, saying, + Of my dreams I have made a road, + And my soul goeth out thereon + To that unto which no eye hath opened, + Nor ear become keen to hearken-- + To the glories that are shut past all access + Of the keys of sense; + Whose walls are hidden by the air, + And whose doors are concealed with clarity. + And the road is travelled of secret things, + Coming to me from far-- + Of bodiless powers, + And beauties without colour or form + Holden by any loveliness seen of earth. + And of my dreams have I builded an inn + Wherein these are as guests. + And unto it come the dead + For a little rest and refuge + From the hollowness of the unharvestable wind, + And the burden of too great space. + + The fields of the past are not void to me, + Who harvest with the scythe of thought; + Nor the orchards of future years unfruitful + To the hands of visionings. + I have retrieved from the darkness + The years and the things that were lost, + And they are held in the light of my dreams, + With the spirits of years unborn, + And of things yet bodiless. + As in an hospitable house, + They shall live while the dreams abide. + + + + + THE BALANCE + + + The world upheld their pillars for awhile-- + Now, where imperial On and Memphis stood, + The hot wind sifts across the solitude + The sand that once was wall and peristyle, + Or furrows like the main each desert mile, + Where ocean-deep above its ancient food + Of cities fame-forgot, the waste is nude, + Traceless as billows of each sunken pile. + + Lo! for that wrong shall vengeance come at last, + When the devouring earth, in ruin one + With royal walls and palaces undone, + And sunk within the desolated past, + Shall drift, and winds that wrangle through the vast + Immingle it with ashes of the sun. + + + + + SATURN + + + Now were the Titans gathered round their king, + In a waste region slipping tow'rd the verge + Of drear extremities that clasp the world-- + A land half-moulded by the hasty gods, + And left beneath the bright scorn of the stars, + Grotesque, misfeatured, blackly gnarled with stone; + Or worn and marred from conflict with the deep + Conterminate, of Chaos. Here they stood, + Old Saturn midmost, like a central peak + Among the lesser hills that guard its base. + Defeat, that gloamed within each countenance + Like the first tinge of death, upon a sun + Gathering like some dusk vapor, found them cold, + Clumsy of limb, and halting as with weight + Of threatened worlds and trembling firmaments. + A wind cried round them like a trumpet-voice + Of phantom hosts--hurried, importunate, + And intermittent with a tightening fear. + Far off the sunset leapt, and the hard clouds, + Molten among the peaks, seemed furnaces + In which to make the fetters of the world. + + Seared by the lightning of the younger gods, + They saw, beyond the grim and crouching hills, + Those levins thrust like spears into the heart + Of swollen clouds, or tearing through the sky + Like severing swords. Then, as the Titans watched, + The night rose like a black, enormous mist + Around them, wherein naught was visible + Save the sharp levin leaping in the north; + And no sound came, except of seas remote, + That seemed like Chaos ravening past the verge + Of all the world, fed with the crumbling coasts + Of Matter. + + Till the moon, discovering + That harsh swart wilderness of sand and stone + Tissued and twisted in chaotic weld, + Lit with illusory fire each Titan's form, + They sate in silence, mute as stranded orbs-- + The wrack of Time, upcast on ruinous coasts, + And in the slow withdrawal of the tide + Safe for awhile. Small solace did they take + From that frore radiance glistering on the dull + Black desert gripped in iron silences, + Like a false triumph o'er contestless fates, + Or a mirage of life in wastes of Death. + Yet were they moved to speak, and Saturn's voice + Seeming the soul of that tremendous land + Set free in sound, startled the haughty stars. + + "O Titans, gods, sustainers of the world, + Is this the end? Must Earth go down to Chaos, + Lacking our strength, beneath the unpracticed sway + Of godlings vain, precipitate with youth, + Who think, unrecking of disastrous chance, + To bind their will as reins upon the sun, + Or stand as columns to the ponderous heavens? + Must we behold, with eyes of impotence + That universal wrack, even though it whelm + These our usurpers in impartial doom + Beneath the shards and fragments of the world? + Were it not preferable to return, + And meeting them in fight unswervable, + Drag down the earth, ourselves, and these our foes, + One sacrifice unto the gods of Chaos? + Why should we stay, and live the tragedy + Of power that survives its use?" + + Now spake + Enceladus, when that the echoings + Of Saturn's voice had fled remote, and seemed + Dead thunders caught and flung from star to star; + "Wouldst hurl thy kingdom down the nightward gulf, + Like to a stone a curious child might cast + To test the fall of some dark precipice? + Patience and caution should we take as mail, + Not rashness for a weapon--too keen sword + That cuts the strainèd knot of destiny, + Ne'er to be tied again. Were it not best + To watch the slow procedure of the days, + That we may grasp a time more opportune, + When desperation is not all our strength, + Nor the foe newly filled with victory? + Then may we hope to conquer back thy realm + For thee, not for the gods of nothingness." + + He ceased, and after him no lesser god + Gave voice upon the shaken silences, + None venturing to risk comparison, + Inevitable then, of eloquence + With his; but silence like the ambiguousness + Of signal and of lesser stars o'ercast + And merged in one confusion by the moon, + Possessed that multitude, till Saturn rose. + Around his form the light intensified, + And strengthened with addition wild and strange, + Investing him as with a phantom robe, + And gathering like a crown about his brow. + His sword, whereon the shadows lay like rust + He took, and dipping it within the moon, + Made clean its length of blade, and from it cast + Swift flickerings at the stars. And then his voice + Came like a torrent, and from out his eyes + Streamed wilder power that mingled with the sound. + + * * * * * + + And his resurgent power, in glance and word, + Poured through the Titans' souls, and was become + The fountains of their own, and at his flame + Their fires were lit once more, whose restlessness + Leapt and aspired against the steadfast stars. + And now they turned, majestic with resolve, + Where, red upon the forefront of the north, + Arcturus was a beacon to the winds. + And with the flickering winds, that lightly struck + The desert dust, then sprang again in air, + They passed athwart the foreland of the north. + + Against their march they saw the shrunken waste, + A rivelled region like a world grown old + Whose sterile breast knew not the lips of Life + In all its epoch; or a world that was + The nurse of infant Death, ere he became + Too large, too strong for its restraining arms, + And towered athwart the suns. + + And there they crossed + Metallic slopes that rang like monstrous shields, + But gave not to their tread, and clanging plains + Like body-mail of greater, vaster gods. + Where hills made gibbous shadows in the moon, + They heard the eldritch laughters of the wind, + Seeming the mirth of death; and 'neath their gaze + Gaunt valleys deepened like an old despair. + Yet strode they on, through the moon's fantasies, + Bold with resolve, across a land like doubt. + + And now they passed among huge mountain-bulks, + Themselves like peaks detached, and moving slow + 'Mid fettered brethren, adding weight and gloom + To that mute conclave great against the stars. + Emerging thence, the Titans marched where still + Their own portentous shadows went before + Like night that fled but shrunk not, dusking all + That desert way. + + And thus they came where Sleep, + The sleep of weary victory, had seized + The younger gods as captives, borne beyond + All flight of mounting battle-ecstasies + In that high triumph of forgetfulness. + And on that sleep the striding Titans broke, + Vague and immense at first like forming dreams + To those disturbèd gods, in mist of drowse + Purblind and doubtful yet, though soon they knew + Their erst-defeated foes, and rising stood + In silent ranks expectant, that appeared + To move, with shaking of astonished fires + That bristled forth, or were displayed like plumes + Late folded close, now trembling terribly, + Pending between the desert and the stars. + Then, sudden as the waking from a dream, + The battle leapt, where striving shapes of gods + Moved brightly through the whirled and stricken air, + Sweeping it to a froth of fire; and all + That ancient, deep-established desert rocked, + Shaken as by an onset of the gulfs + Of gathered and impatient Chaos, while, + Above the place where central battle burned + The stars drew back in fright or dazzlement, + Paling to more secluded distances. + Lo, where the moon had wrought illusive dreams + That clothed the wild in doubt and fantasy, + Hiding its hideousness with bright mirage, + Or deepening it with gulfs and glooms of Hell, + Mightier confusion, chaos absolute + Upon the imperilled sky and trembling world, + Now made a certainty within itself, + The one thing sure in shaken sky or world. + Maelstroms of battle caught in storms of fire, + Torn and involved by weaponry of gods-- + Crescented blades that met with rounds of shields; + Grappling of shapes, seen through the riven blaze + An instant, then once more obscure, and known + Only by giant heavings of that war + Of furious gods and roused elements, + Divided, leagued, contending evermore + Along the desert--these, augmentative + Round one thick center, stunned the faltering night. + + So huge that chaos, complicate within + With movements of gigantic legionry, + Antagonistic streams, impetuous-hurled + Where Jove and Saturn thunder-crested, led + In fight unswervable--so wide the strife + Of differing impulse, that Decision found + No foothold, till that first confusion should + In ordered conflict re-arrange, and stand + With its true forces known. This seemed remote, + With that wide struggle pending terribly, + As if all-various, colored Time had made + A truce with white Eternity, and both + Stood watching from afar. + + Through drifts of haze + The broadening moon, made ominous with red, + Glared from the westering night. And now that war + Built for itself, far up, a cope of cloud, + And drew it down, far off, upon all sides, + Impervious to the moon and sworded stars. + And by their own wild light the gods fought on + 'Neath that stupendous concave like a sky + Filled and illumed with glare of bursting suns. + And cast by their own light, upon that sky + The gods' own shadows moved like shapen gloom, + Phantasmagoric, changed and amplified, + A shifting frieze that flickered dreadfully + In spectral battle indecisive. Then, + Swift, as it had begun, the contest turned, + And on the heaving Titans' massive front + It seemed that all the motion and the strength + Self-thwarting and confounded, of that strife, + Was flung in centered impact terrible, + With rush of all that fire, tempestuous-blown + As if before some wind of further space, + Striking the earth. Lo, all the Titans' flame + Bent back upon themselves, and they were hurled + In vaster disarray, with vanguard piled + On rear and center. Saturn could not stem + The loosened torrents of long-pent defeat; + He, with his host, was but as drift thereon, + Borne wildly down the whelmed and reeling world. + + Hurling like slanted rain, the lurid levin + Fell o'er that flight of Titans, and behind, + In striding menace, all-victorious Jove + Loomed like some craggy cloud with thunders crowned + And footed with the winds. In that defeat, + With Jove's pursuit involved and manifold, + Few found escape unscathed, and some went down + Like senile suns that grapple with the dark, + And reel in flame tremendous, and are still. + + Ebbing, the battle left those elder gods + Upcast once more on coasts of black defeat-- + Gripped in despair, a vaster Tartarus. + The victor gods, their storms and thunders spent, + Went dwindling northward like embattled clouds, + And where the lingering haze of fight dissolved, + The pallor of the dawn began to spread + On darkness purple like the pain of Death. + Ringed with that desolation, Saturn stood + Mute, and the Titans answered unto him + With brother silence. Motionless, they seemed + Some peristyle or range of columns great, + Alone enduring of a fallen fane + In deserts of some vaster world whence Life + And Faith have vanished long, that vaguely slips + To an immemoried end. And twilight slow + Crept round those lofty shapes august, and seemed + Such as might be the faltering ghostly noon + Of mightier suns that totter down to death. + + Then turned they, passing from that dismal place + Blasted anew with battle, ere the swift + Striding of light athwart stupendous chasms + And wasteful plains, should overtake them there, + Bowed with too heavy a burden of defeat. + Slowly they turned, and passed upon the west + Where, like a weariness immovable + In menace huge, the plain its monstrous bulk, + The peaks its hydra heads, the whole world crouched + Against their march with the diminished stars. + + + + + FINIS + + + It seemed that from the west + The live red flame of sunset, + Eating the dead blue sky + And cold insensate peaks, + Was loosened slowly, and fell. + Above it, a few red stars + Burned down like low candle-flames + Into the gaunt black sockets + Of the chill insensible mountains. + But in the ascendant skies + (Cloudless, like some vast corpse + Unfeatured, cerementless) + Succeeded nor star nor planet. + It may have been that black, + Pulseless, dead stars arose + And crossed as of old the heavens. + But came no living orb, + Nor comet seeming the ghost, + Homeless, of an outcast world, + Seeking its former place + That is no more nor shall be + In all the Cosmos again. + Null, blank, and meaningless + As a burnt scroll that blackens + With the passing of the fire, + Lay the dead infinite sky. + Lo! in the halls of Time, + I thought, the torches are out-- + The revelry of the gods, + Or lamentation of demons + For which their flames were lit, + Over and quiet at last + With the closing peace of night, + Whose dumb, dead, passionless skies + Enfold the living world + As the sea a sinking pebble. + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Star-Treader and other poems, by +Clark Ashton Smith + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS *** + +***** This file should be named 38410-8.txt or 38410-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/4/1/38410/ + +Produced by David Starner, Matthew Wheaton and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This +file was produced from images generously made available +by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Star-Treader and other poems + +Author: Clark Ashton Smith + +Release Date: December 25, 2011 [EBook #38410] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS *** + + + + +Produced by David Starner, Matthew Wheaton and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This +file was produced from images generously made available +by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + + + + + +</pre> + + +<div class="figcenter"> +<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="400" height="611" alt="" /> + +</div> + +<h1 class="booktitle">THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS</h1> + +<p class="h3">BY<br /><br /> + +CLARK ASHTON SMITH</p> + +<p class="spacer"> </p> + +<div class="figcenter"> +<img class="border2" src="images/title.jpg" width="400" height="611" alt="" /> +</div> + +<p class="caption">THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS<br /> +BY<br /> +CLARK ASHTON SMITH<br /> +<br /> +A. M. ROBERTSON<br /> +STOCKTON STREET AT UNION SQUARE<br /> +SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA<br /> +<br /> +MCMXII</p> + +<p class="spacer"> </p> + +<p class="h4">COPYRIGHT 1912<br /> +BY<br /> +A. M. ROBERTSON</p> + +<p class="spacer"> </p> + +<p class="h5">Philopolis Press<br /> +San Francisco</p> + +<p class="spacer"> </p> + +<p class="h3">TO MY MOTHER</p> + +<p class="spacer"> </p> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2>CONTENTS</h2> +<div class="toc"> +<p> +<span class="right"><small>Page</small></span><br /> +<a href="#NERO">NERO</a> +<span class="right">1</span><br /> +<a href="#CHANT_TO_SIRIUS">CHANT TO SIRIUS</a> +<span class="right">5</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_STAR-TREADER">THE STAR-TREADER</a> +<span class="right">6</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_MORNING_POOL">THE MORNING POOL</a> +<span class="right">11</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_NIGHT_FOREST">THE NIGHT FOREST</a> +<span class="right">12</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_MAD_WIND">THE MAD WIND</a> +<span class="right">14</span><br /> +<a href="#SONG_TO_OBLIVION">SONG TO OBLIVION</a> +<span class="right">15</span><br /> +<a href="#MEDUSA">MEDUSA</a> +<span class="right">16</span><br /> +<a href="#ODE_TO_THE_ABYSS">ODE TO THE ABYSS</a> +<span class="right">18</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_SOUL_OF_THE_SEA">THE SOUL OF THE SEA</a> +<span class="right">21</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_BUTTERFLY">THE BUTTERFLY</a> +<span class="right">22</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_PRICE">THE PRICE</a> +<span class="right">26</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_MYSTIC_MEANING">THE MYSTIC MEANING</a> +<span class="right">27</span><br /> +<a href="#ODE_TO_MUSIC">ODE TO MUSIC</a> +<span class="right">28</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_LAST_NIGHT">THE LAST NIGHT</a> +<span class="right">31</span><br /> +<a href="#ODE_ON_IMAGINATION">ODE ON IMAGINATION</a> +<span class="right">32</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_WIND_AND_THE_MOON">THE WIND AND THE MOON</a> +<span class="right">35</span><br /> +<a href="#LAMENT_OF_THE_STARS">LAMENT OF THE STARS</a> +<span class="right">36</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_MAZE_OF_SLEEP">THE MAZE OF SLEEP</a> +<span class="right">39</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_WINDS">THE WINDS</a> +<span class="right">40</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_MASQUE_OF_FORSAKEN_GODS">THE MASQUE OF FORSAKEN GODS</a> +<span class="right">42</span><br /> +<a href="#A_SUNSET">A SUNSET</a> +<span class="right">49</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_CLOUD-ISLANDS">THE CLOUD-ISLANDS</a> +<span class="right">50</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_SNOW-BLOSSOMS">THE SNOW-BLOSSOMS</a> +<span class="right">52</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_SUMMER_MOON">THE SUMMER MOON</a> +<span class="right">53</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_RETURN_OF_HYPERION">THE RETURN OF HYPERION</a> +<span class="right">54</span><br /> +<a href="#LETHE">LETHE</a> +<span class="right">55</span><br /> +<a href="#ATLANTIS">ATLANTIS</a> +<span class="right">56</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_UNREVEALED">THE UNREVEALED</a> +<span class="right">57</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_ELDRITCH_DARK">THE ELDRITCH DARK</a> +<span class="right">58</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_CHERRY-SNOWS">THE CHERRY-SNOWS</a> +<span class="right">59</span><br /> +<a href="#FAIRY_LANTERNS">FAIRY LANTERNS</a> +<span class="right">60</span><br /> +<a href="#NIRVANA">NIRVANA</a> +<span class="right">61</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_NEMESIS_OF_SUNS">THE NEMESIS OF SUNS</a> +<span class="right">62</span><br /> +<a href="#WHITE_DEATH">WHITE DEATH</a> +<span class="right">63</span><br /> +<a href="#RETROSPECT_AND_FORECAST">RETROSPECT AND FORECAST</a> +<span class="right">64</span><br /> +<a href="#SHADOW_OF_NIGHTMARE">SHADOW OF NIGHTMARE</a> +<span class="right">65</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_SONG_OF_A_COMET">THE SONG OF A COMET</a> +<span class="right">66</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_RETRIBUTION">THE RETRIBUTION</a> +<span class="right">69</span><br /> +<a href="#TO_THE_DARKNESS">TO THE DARKNESS</a> +<span class="right">70</span><br /> +<a href="#A_DREAM_OF_BEAUTY">A DREAM OF BEAUTY</a> +<span class="right">72</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_DREAM-BRIDGE">THE DREAM-BRIDGE</a> +<span class="right">73</span><br /> +<a href="#A_LIVE-OAK_LEAF">A LIVE-OAK LEAF</a> +<span class="right">74</span><br /> +<a href="#PINE_NEEDLES">PINE NEEDLES</a> +<span class="right">75</span><br /> +<a href="#TO_THE_SUN">TO THE SUN</a> +<span class="right">76</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_FUGITIVES">THE FUGITIVES</a> +<span class="right">78</span><br /> +<a href="#AVERTED_MALEFICE">AVERTED MALEFICE</a> +<span class="right">79</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_MEDUSA_OF_THE_SKIES">THE MEDUSA OF THE SKIES</a> +<span class="right">80</span><br /> +<a href="#A_DEAD_CITY">A DEAD CITY</a> +<span class="right">81</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_SONG_OF_THE_STARS">THE SONG OF THE STARS</a> +<span class="right">82</span><br /> +<a href="#COPAN">COPAN</a> +<span class="right">85</span><br /> +<a href="#A_SONG_OF_DREAMS">A SONG OF DREAMS</a> +<span class="right">86</span><br /> +<a href="#THE_BALANCE">THE BALANCE</a> +<span class="right">88</span><br /> +<a href="#SATURN">SATURN</a> +<span class="right">89</span><br /> +<a href="#FINIS">FINIS</a> +<span class="right">99</span> +</p> +</div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<p><span class="pagenum">[1]</span></p> + +<div class="figure"> +<img src="images/ill1.jpg" width="300" height="112" alt="" /> +</div> + +<h2 id="NERO">NERO</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">This Rome, that was the toil of many men,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The consummation of laborious years—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Fulfilment's crown to visions of the dead,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And image of the wide desire of kings—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is made my darkling dream's effulgency,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Fuel of vision, brief embodiment<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of wandering will, and wastage of the strong<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Fierce ecstacy of one tremendous hour,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">When ages piled on ages were a flame<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To all the years behind, and years to be.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Yet any sunset were as much as this,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Save for the music forced by hands of fire<br /></span> +<span class="i0">From out the hard strait silences which bind<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Dull Matter's tongueless mouth—a music pierced<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With the tense voice of Life, more quick to cry<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Its agony—and save that I believed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The radiance redder for the blood of men.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Destruction hastens and intensifies<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The process that is Beauty, manifests<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Ranges of form unknown before, and gives<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Motion and voice and hue where otherwise<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Bleak inexpressiveness had leveled all.<span class="pagenum">[2]</span><br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">If one create, there is the lengthy toil;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The laboured years and days league tow'rd an end<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Less than the measure of desire, mayhap,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">After the sure consuming of all strength,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And strain of faculties that otherwhere<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Were loosed upon enjoyment; and at last<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Remains to one capacity nor power<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For pleasure in the thing that he hath made.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">But on destruction hangs but little use<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of time or faculty, but all is turned<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To the one purpose, unobstructed, pure,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of sensuous rapture and observant joy;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And from the intensities of death and ruin,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">One draws a heightened and completer life,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And both extends and vindicates himself.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I would I were a god, with all the scope<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of attributes that are the essential core<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of godhead, and its visibility.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I am but emperor, and hold awhile<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The power to hasten Death upon his way,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And cry a halt to worn and lagging Life<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For others, but for mine own self may not<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Delay the one, nor bid the other speed.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">There have been many kings, and they are dead,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And have no power in death save what the wind<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Confers upon their blown and brainless dust<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To vex the eyeballs of posterity.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">But were I god, I would be overlord<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of many kings, and were as breath to guide<span class="pagenum">[3]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Their dust of destiny. And were I god,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Exempt from this mortality which clogs<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Perception, and clear exercise of will,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What rapture it would be, if but to watch<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Destruction crouching at the back of Time,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The tongueless dooms which dog the travelling suns;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The vampire Silence at the breast of worlds,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Fire without light that gnaws the base of things,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And Lethe's mounting tide, that rots the stone<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of fundamental spheres. This were enough<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Till such time as the dazzled wings of will<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Came up with power's accession, scarcely felt<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For very suddenness. Then would I urge<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The strong contention and conflicting might<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of chaos and creation, matching them,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Those immemorial powers inimical,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And all their stars and gulfs subservient—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Dynasts of Time, and anarchs of the dark—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In closer war reverseless; and would set<br /></span> +<span class="i0">New discord at the universal core,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A Samson-principle to bring it down<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In one magnificence of ruin. Yea,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The monster Chaos were mine unleashed hound,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And all my power Destruction's own right arm!<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I would exult to mark the smouldering stars<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Renew beneath my breath their elder fire,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And feed upon themselves to nothingness.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The might of suns, slow-paced with swinging weight<span class="pagenum">[4]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of myriad worlds, were made at my desire<br /></span> +<span class="i0">One long rapidity of roaring light,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Through which the voice of Life were audible,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And singing of the immemorial dead<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose dust is loosened into vaporous wings<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With soaring wrack of systems ruinous.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And were I weary of the glare of these,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I would tear out the eyes of light, and stand<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Above a chaos of extinguished suns,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That crowd, and grind, and shiver thunderously,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Lending vast voice and motion, but no ray<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To the stretched silence of the blinded gulfs.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thus would I give my godhead space and speech<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For its assertion, and thus pleasure it,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Hastening the feet of Time with casts of worlds<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like careless pebbles, or with shattered suns<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Brightening the aspect of Eternity.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[5]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="CHANT_TO_SIRIUS">CHANT TO SIRIUS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">What nights retard thee, O Sirius!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thy light is as a spear,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And thou penetratest them<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As a warrior that stabbeth his foe<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Even to the center of his life.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thy rays reach farther than the gulfs;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They form a bridge thereover,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That shall endure till the links of the universe<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Are unfastened, and drop apart,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And all the gulfs are one,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Dissevered by suns no longer.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">How strong art thou in thy place!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thou stridest thine orbit,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And the darkness shakes beneath thee,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As a road that is trodden by an army.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thou art a god,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In thy temple that is hollowed with light<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In the night of infinitude,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And whose floor is the lower void;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thy worlds are as priests and ministers therein.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thou furrowest space,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Even as an husbandman,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And sowest it with alien seed;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">It beareth alien fruits,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And these are thy testimony,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Even as the crops of his fields<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Are the testimony of an husbandman.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[6]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_STAR-TREADER">THE STAR-TREADER</h2> + +<h3>I</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">A voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Saying, "Make haste: the webs of death and birth<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Are brushed away, and all the threads of earth<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Wear to the breaking; spaceward gleams<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thine ancient pathway of the suns,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose flame is part of thee;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And deeps outreach immutably<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose largeness runs<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Through all thy spirit's mystery.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Go forth, and tread unharmed the blaze<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of stars where through thou camest in old days;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Pierce without fear each vast<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose hugeness crushed thee not within the past.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A hand strikes off the chains of Time,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A hand swings back the door of years;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Now fall earth's bonds of gladness and of tears,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And opens the strait dream to space sublime."<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>II</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Who rides a dream, what hand shall stay!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What eye shall note or measure mete<br /></span> +<span class="i0">His passage on a purpose fleet,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The thread and weaving of his way!<span class="pagenum">[7]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">It caught me from the clasping world,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And swept beyond the brink of Sense,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">My soul was flung, and poised, and whirled,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like to a planet chained and hurled<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With solar lightning strong and tense.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Swift as communicated rays<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That leap from severed suns a gloom<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Within whose waste no suns illume,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The wingèd dream fulfilled its ways.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Through years reversed and lit again<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I followed that unending chain<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Wherein the suns are links of light;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Retraced through lineal, ordered spheres<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The twisting of the threads of years<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In weavings wrought of noon and night;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Through stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Those folds that form the raiment of the soul.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>III</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Enkindling dawns of memory,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Each sun had radiance to relume<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A sealed, disused, and darkened room<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Within the soul's immensity.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Their alien ciphers shown and lit,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I understood what each had writ<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Upon my spirit's scroll;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Again I wore mine ancient lives,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And knew the freedom and the gyves<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That formed and marked my soul.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[8]</span></div></div> + +<h3>IV</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I delved in each forgotten mind,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The units that had builded me,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose deepnesses before were blind<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And formless as infinity—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Knowing again each former world—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">From planet unto planet whirled<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Through gulfs that mightily divide<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like to an intervital sleep.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">One world I found, where souls abide<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like winds that rest upon a rose;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thereto they creep<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To loose all burden of old woes.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And one I knew, where warp of pain<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is woven in the soul's attire;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And one, where with new loveliness<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is strengthened Beauty's olden chain—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Soft as a sound, and keen as fire—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In light no darkness may depress.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>V</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Where no terrestrial dreams had trod<br /></span> +<span class="i0">My vision entered undismayed,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And Life her hidden realms displayed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To me as to a curious god.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where colored suns of systems triplicate<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Bestow on planets weird, ineffable,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Green light that orbs them like an outer sea,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And large auroral noons that alternate<span class="pagenum">[9]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">With skies like sunset held without abate,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Life's touch renewed incomprehensibly<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The strains of mirth and grief's harmonious spell.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Dead passions like to stars relit<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shone in the gloom of ways forgot;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where crownless gods in darkness sit<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The day was full on altars hot.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I heard—once more a part of it—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The central music of the Pleiades,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And to Alcyone my soul<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Swayed with the stars that own her song's control.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Unchallenged, glad I trod, a revenant<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In worlds Edenic longly lost;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or walked in spheres that sing to these,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">O'er space no light has crossed,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Diverse as Hell's mad antiphone uptossed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To Heaven's angelic chant.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>VI</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">What vasts the dream went out to find!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I seemed beyond the world's recall<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In gulfs where darkness is a wall<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To render strong Antares blind!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In unimagined spheres I found<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The sequence of my being's round—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Some life where firstling meed of Song,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The strange imperishable leaf,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Was placed on brows that starry Grief<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Had crowned, and Pain anointed long;<span class="pagenum">[10]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Some avatar where Love<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Sang like the last great star at morn<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Ere Death filled all its sky;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Some life in fresher years unworn<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Upon a world whereof<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Peace was a robe like to the calms that lie<br /></span> +<span class="i0">On pools aglow with latter spring:<br /></span> +<span class="i0">There Life's pellucid surface took<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Clear image of all things, nor shook<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Till touch of Death's obscuring wing;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Some earlier awakening<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In pristine years, when giant strife<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of forces darkly whirled<br /></span> +<span class="i0">First forged the thing called Life—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Hot from the furnace of the suns—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Upon the anvil of a world.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>VII</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Thus knew I those anterior ones<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose lives in mine were blent;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Till, lo! my dream, that held a night<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where Rigel sends no word of might,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Was emptied of the trodden stars,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And dwindled to the sun's extent—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The brain's familiar prison-bars,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And raiment of the sorrow and the mirth<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Wrought by the shuttles intricate of earth.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[11]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_MORNING_POOL">THE MORNING POOL</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">All night the pool held mysteries,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Vague depths of night that lay in dream,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where phantoms of the pale-white stars<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Wandered, with darkness-tangled gleam.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">And now it holds the limpid light<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And shadeless azure of the skies,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Wherein, like some enclaspèd gem,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The morning's golden glamour lies.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[12]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_NIGHT_FOREST">THE NIGHT FOREST</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Incumbent seemingly<br /></span> +<span class="i0">On the jagged points of peaks<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That end the visible west,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The rounded moon yet floods<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The valleys hitherward<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With fall of torrential light,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Ere from the overmost<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Aggressive mountain-cusp,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">She slip to the lower dark.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">But here, on an eastward slope<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Pointed and thick with its pine,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The forest scarcely remembers<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Her light that is gone as a vision<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or ecstasy too poignant<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And perilous for duration.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Withdrawn in what darker web<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or dimension of dream I know not,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In silence pre-occupied<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And solemnest rectitude<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The pines uprear, and no sigh<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For the rapture of moonlight past,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Comes from their bosom of boughs.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Far in their secrecy<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I stand, and the burden of dusk<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Dull, but at times made keen<span class="pagenum">[13]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">With tingle of fragrances,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Falls on me as a veil<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Between my soul and the world.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">What veil of trance, O pines,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Divides you from my soul,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That I feel but enter not<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Your distances of dream?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Ah! strange, imperative sense<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of world-deep mystery<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That shakes from out your boughs—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A fragrance yet more keen,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Pressing upon the mind.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">The wind shall question you<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of the dream I may not gain,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And all its sombreness<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And depth immeasurable,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shall tremble away in sound<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of speech not understood<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That my heart must break to hear.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[14]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_MAD_WIND">THE MAD WIND</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">What hast thou seen, O wind,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of beauty or of terror<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Surpassing, denied to us,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That with precipitate wings,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Mad and ecstatical,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thou spurnest the hollows and trees<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That offer thee refuge of peace,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And findest within the sky<br /></span> +<span class="i0">No safety nor respite<br /></span> +<span class="i0">From the memory of thy vision?<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[15]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="SONG_TO_OBLIVION">SONG TO OBLIVION</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Art thou more fair<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For all the beauty gathered up in thee,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As gold and gems within some lightless sea?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For light of flowers, and bloom of tinted air,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Art thou more fair?<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Art thou more strong<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For powers that turn to thee as unto sleep?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For world and star that find thy ways more deep<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Than light may tread, too wearisome for song<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Art thou more strong?<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Nay! thou art bare<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For power and beauty on thine impotence<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Bestowed by fruitful Time's magnificence;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For fruit of all things strong, and bloom of fair,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thou still art bare.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[16]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="MEDUSA">MEDUSA</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">As drear and barren as the glooms of Death,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">It lies, a windless land of livid dawns,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Nude to a desolate firmament, with hills<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That seem the fleshless earth's outjutting ribs,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And plains whose face is crossed and rivelled deep<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With gullies twisting like a serpent's track.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The leprous touch of Death is on its stones,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where for his token visible, the Head<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is throned upon a heap of monstrous rocks,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Grotesque in everlasting ugliness,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Within a hill-ravine, that splits athwart<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like some old, hideous and unhealing scar.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Her lethal beauty crowned with twining snakes<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That mingle with her hair, the Gorgon reigns.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Her eyes are clouds wherein Death's lightnings lurk,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Yet, even as men that seek the glance of Life,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The gazers come, where, coiled and serpent-swift,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Those levins wait. As 'round an altar-base<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Her victims lie, distorted, blackened forms<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of postured horror smitten into stone,—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Time caught in meshes of Eternity—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Drawn back from dust and ruin of the years,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And given to all the future of the world.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The land is claimed of Death: the daylight comes<span class="pagenum">[17]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Half-strangled in the changing webs of cloud<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That unseen spiders of bewildered winds<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Weave and unweave across the lurid sun<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In upper air. Below, no zephyr comes<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To break with life the circling spell of death.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Long vapor-serpents twist about the moon,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And in the windy murkness of the sky,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The guttering stars are wild as candle-flames<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That near the socket.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i8">Thus the land shall be,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And Death shall wait, throned in Medusa's eyes.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Till, in the irremeable webs of night<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The sun is snared, and the corroded moon<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A dust upon the gulfs, and all the stars<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Rotted and fall'n like rivets from the sky,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Letting the darkness down upon all things.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[18]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="ODE_TO_THE_ABYSS">ODE TO THE ABYSS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">O many-gulfed, unalterable one,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose deep sustains<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Far-drifting world and sun,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thou wast ere ever star put out on thee;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And thou shalt be<br /></span> +<span class="i0">When never world remains;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">When all the suns' triumphant strength and pride<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is sunk in voidness absolute,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And their majestic music wide<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In vaster silence rendered mute.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And though God's will were night to dusk the blue,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And law to cancel and disperse<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The tangled tissues of the universe,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And mould the suns anew,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">His might were impotent to conquer thee,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">O invisible infinity!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thy darks subdue<br /></span> +<span class="i0">All light that treads thee down a space,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Exulting o'er thy deeps.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The cycles die, and lo! thy darkness reaps<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The flame of mightiest stars;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In aeon-implicating wars<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thou tearest planets from their place;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Worlds granite-spined<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To thine erodents yield<span class="pagenum">[19]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Their treasures centrally confined<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In crypts by continental pillars sealed.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What suns and worlds have been thy prey<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Through unhorizoned stretches of the Past!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What spheres that now essay<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Time's undimensioned vast,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shall plunge forgotten to thy gloom at length,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With life that cried its query of the Night<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To ears with silence filled!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What worlds unborn shall dare thy strength,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Girt by a sun's unwearied might,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And dip to darkness when the sun is stilled!<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">O incontestable Abyss,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What light in thine embrace of darkness sleeps—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What blaze of a sidereal multitude<br /></span> +<span class="i0">No peopled world is left to miss!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What motion is at rest within thy deeps—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What gyres of planets long become thy food—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Worlds unconstrainable,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That plunged therein to peace,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like tempest-worn and crew-forsaken ships;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And suns that fell<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To huge and ultimate eclipse,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And lasting gyre-release!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What sound thy gulfs of silence hold!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Stupendous thunder of the meeting stars,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And crash of orbits that diverged,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With Life's thin song are merged;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thy quietudes enfold<span class="pagenum">[20]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Paean and threnody as one,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And battle-blare of unremembered wars<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With festal songs<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Sung in the Romes of ruined spheres,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And music that belongs<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To younger, undiscoverable years<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With words of yesterday.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Ah, who may stay<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thy soundless world-devouring tide?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">O thou whose hands pluck out the light of stars,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Are worlds grown but as fruit for thee?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">May no sufficient bars,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Nor marks inveterate abide<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To baffle thy persistency?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Still and unstriving now,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What plottest thou,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Within thy universe-ulterior deeps,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Dark as the final lull of suns?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What new advancement of the night<br /></span> +<span class="i0">On citadels of stars around whose might<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thy slow encroachment runs,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And crouching silence, thunder-potent, sleeps?<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[21]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_SOUL_OF_THE_SEA">THE SOUL OF THE SEA</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">A wind comes in from the sea,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And rolls through the hollow dark<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like loud, tempestuous waters.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As the swift recurrent tide,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">It pours adown the sky,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And rears at the cliffs of night<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Uppiled against the vast.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Like the soul of the sea—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Hungry, unsatisfied<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With ravin of shores and of ships—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Come forth on the land to seek<br /></span> +<span class="i0">New prey of tideless coasts,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">It raves, made hoarse with desire,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And the sounds of the night are dumb<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With the sound of its passing.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[22]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_BUTTERFLY">THE BUTTERFLY</h2> + +<h3>I</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">O wonderful and wingèd flow'r,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">That hoverest in the garden-close,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Finding in mazes of the rose,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The beauty of a Summer hour!<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">O symbol of Impermanence,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Thou art a word of Beauty's tongue,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">A word that in her song is sung,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Appealing to the inner sense!<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Of that great mystic harmony,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">All lovely things are notes and words—<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The trees, the flow'rs, the songful birds,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The flame-white stars, the surging sea,<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">The aureate light of sudden dawn,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The sunset's crimson afterglow,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The summer clouds, the dazzling snow,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The brooks, the moonlight chaste and wan.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Lacking (who knows?) a cloud, a tree,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">A streamlet's purl, the ocean's roar<br /></span> +<span class="i2">From Nature's multitudinous store—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Imperfect were the melody!<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[23]</span></div></div> + +<h3>II</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">O Beauty, why so sad my heart?<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Why stirs in me a nameless pain<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Which seems like some remembered strain,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As on this product of thine art<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Enraptured, marvelling I gaze,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And note how airily 'tis wrought—<br /></span> +<span class="i2">A wingèd dream, a bodied thought,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The spirit of the summer days?<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Thy beauty opes, O Butterfly,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The doors of being, with subtle sense<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Of Beauty's frail impermanence,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And grief of knowing it must die.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Again I seem to know the tears<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Of other lives, the woe and pain<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Of days that died; resurgent wane<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The moons of countless bygone years.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>III</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">On other worlds, on other stars,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">To us but tiny points of light,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Or lost in distances of night<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Beyond our system's farthest bars,<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">A priest to Beauty's service sworn,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">I sought and served her all my days,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">With music and with hymns of praise.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In sunset and the fires of morn,<span class="pagenum">[24]</span><br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">With thrilling heart her form I knew,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And in the stars she whitely gleamed,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And all the face of Nature seemed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Expression of her shape and hue.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I grieved to watch the summers pass<br /></span> +<span class="i2">With all their gorgeous shows of bloom,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And sterner autumn months assume<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Their realm with withered leaves and grass.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Mine was the grief of Change and Death,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Of fair things gone beyond recall,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The paling light of dawns, and all<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The flowers' vanished hues and breath.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>IV</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">From out the web of former lives,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The ancient catenated chain<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Of joy and sorrow, loss and gain,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">One certain truth my heart derives:—<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Though Beauty passes, this I know,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">From Change and Death, this verity:<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Her spirit lives eternally—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">'Tis but her forms that come and go.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[25]</span></div></div> + +<h3>V</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Lo! I am Beauty's constant thrall,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Must ever on her voice await,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And follow through the maze of Fate<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Her luring, strange and mystical.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Obedient to her summonings,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Forever must my soul aspire,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And seek, on wings of lyric fire,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To penetrate the Heart of Things,<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Wherein she sits, augustly throned,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">In loveliness that renders dumb—<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The Essence and the final Sum—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With peril and with wonder zoned<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">What though I fail, my duller sense<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Baffled as by a wall of stone?<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The high desire, the search alone<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Are their own prize and recompense.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[26]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_PRICE">THE PRICE</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Behind each thing a shadow lies;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Beauty hath e'er its cost:<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Within the moonlight-flooded skies<br /></span> +<span class="i2">How many stars are lost!<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[27]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_MYSTIC_MEANING">THE MYSTIC MEANING</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Alas! that we are deaf and blind<br /></span> +<span class="i2">To meanings all about us hid!<br /></span> +<span class="i2">What secrets lurk the woods amid?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What prophecies are on the wind?<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">What tidings do the billows bring<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And cry in vain upon the strand?<br /></span> +<span class="i2">If we might only understand<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The brooklet's cryptic murmuring!<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">The tongues of earth and air are strange.<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And yet (who knows?) one little word<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Learned from the language of the bird<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Might make us lords of Fate and Change!<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[28]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="ODE_TO_MUSIC">ODE TO MUSIC</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">O woven fabric and bright web of sound,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose threads are magical,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And with swift weaving thrall<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And hold the spirit bound!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">We may not know whence thy strange sorceries fall—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whether they be Earth's voices wild and strong,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Her high and perfect song.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or broken dreams of higher worlds unfound.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For, lo, thou art as dreams.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And to thy realm all hidden things belong—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">All fugitive and evanescent gleams<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The soul hath vainly sought;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">All mystic immanence;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">All visions of ungrasped magnificence,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And great ideals pinnacled in thought;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">All paths with marvel fraught<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That lead to lands obscure:<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For, lo, upon thy road of sound we pass,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Seeking thy magic lure,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To vales mist-implicated and unsure,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where all seems strange as visions in a glass;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And wonder-haunted hills,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where Beauty is an echo and a dream<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In sighing pines, and rills<span class="pagenum">[29]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Clouded and deep with imaged tree and sky;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And where bright rivers gleam<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Past cities towering high,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Each wonderful as some cloud-fantasy.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Thou loosenest the bondage of the years,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Making the spirit free<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of all sublunar joys and fears.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Who mounts on thine imperious wings shall see<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The ways of life as threads of day and night;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Serene above their change,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">His eyes shall know but far transcendent things,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">His ears shall hark but voices free and strange;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Vast seas of outer light<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shall beat upon his sight,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Eternal winds shall touch him with their wings;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">His heart shall thrill<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To larger, purer joy, and grief more deep<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Than earth may know;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And e'en as dews of morning fill<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The opened flower, into his soul shall flow<br /></span> +<span class="i0">High melodies, like tears that angels weep.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Then shall he penetrate<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The veils and outer barriers of sound,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And near the soul of melody,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where, rapt in aural splendors ultimate,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">His soul shall see<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The marvel and the glory that surround<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Eternal Beauty's shrine;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And catch afar the glint divine<span class="pagenum">[30]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of her moon-colored robe, or haply hear,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With world-oblivious ear,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Some echo of her voice's mystery.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Thou hast Love's power to find<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The soul's most secret chords, that else were still,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And stir'st them till they thrill<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Disclosed to least, faint movements of thy wind.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thine aural sorcery<br /></span> +<span class="i0">O'erwhelms the heart as sunset storms the sight,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For thou art Beauty bodied forth in sound—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Her colors bright<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And diverse forms expressed in harmony:<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Within thy bound,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The flare of morning is become a song,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And tree and flower a music sweet and long.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And in thy speech<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The power and majesty that swing<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Planet and sun, and each<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Dim atom of the system manifest,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Become articulate, expressed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like ocean in the brooklet's whispering.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Beyond the woof of finite things,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thy threads of wonder deep-entangled lie—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Time's intertexturings<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Within Eternity—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With Song, mayhap, to be his memories;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For Beauty borders nigh<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The ultimate, eternal Verities.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[31]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_LAST_NIGHT">THE LAST NIGHT</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I dreamed a dream: I stood upon a height,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">A mountain's utmost eminence of snow,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Whence I beheld the plain outstretched below<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To a far sea-horizon, dim and white.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Beneath the sun's expiring, ghastly light,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The dead world lay, phantasmally aglow;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Its last fear-weighted voice, a wind, came low;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The distant sea lay hushed, as with affright.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I watched, and lo! the pale and flickering sun,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">In agony and fierce despair, flamed high,<br /></span> +<span class="i4">And shadow-slain, went out upon the gloom.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Then Night, that grim, gigantic struggle won,<br /></span> +<span class="i4">Impended for a breath on wings of doom,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And through the air fell like a falling sky.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[32]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="ODE_ON_IMAGINATION">ODE ON IMAGINATION</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Imagination's eyes<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Outreach and distance far<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The vision of the greatest star<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That measures instantaneously—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Enisled therein as in a sea—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Its cincture of the system-laden skies.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Abysses closed about with night<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A tribute yield<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To her retardless sight;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And Matter's gates disclose the candent ores<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Rock-held in furnaces of planet-cores.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">She penetrates the sun's transplendent shield,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And through the obstruction of his vestment dire,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Pierces the centermost sublimity<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of his terrific heart, whose gurge of fire<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Heaves upward like a monstrous sea,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And inly riven by Titanic throes,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Fills all his frame with outward cataract<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of separate and immingling torrent streams.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Her eyes exact<br /></span> +<span class="i0">From the Moon-Sphinx that wanes and grows<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In wastes celestial, alien dreams<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Brought down on wings of fleetest beams.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Adown the clefts of under-space<br /></span> +<span class="i0">She rides, her steed a falling star,<span class="pagenum">[33]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">To seek, where void and vagueness are,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Some mark or certainty of place.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Upon their heavenly precipice<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The gathered suns shrink back aghast<br /></span> +<span class="i0">From that interminate abyss,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And threat of sightless anarchs vast.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">She stands endued<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With supermundane crown, and vestitures<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of emperies that include<br /></span> +<span class="i0">All under-worlds and over-worlds of dream—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Kingdoms o'ercast, and eminent heights extreme<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where moon-transcending light endures.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">She wanders in fantastic lands, where grow<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In scarce-discernèd fields and closes blind,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Vague blossoms stirred by wings of eidolons;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or roves in forests where all sound is low:<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Each voice that shuns<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The noiseful day, and enters there to find<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Twilight that naught exalts nor grieves,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is quickly tuned to the susurrous leaves.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Upon some supersensual eminence<br /></span> +<span class="i0">She hears the fragments of a thunder loud,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where lightnings of ulterior Truth intense<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Flame through the walls of hollow cloud.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">But these she may not wholly grasp<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With incomplete terrestrial clasp.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Her eyes inevitably see,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">'Neath rounds and changes of exterior things,<span class="pagenum">[34]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">The movements of Essentiality—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of ageless principles—that alter not<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To temporal alterings—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Unswerved by shattered worlds upbuilt once more.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And stars no longer hot;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or broken constellations strewn<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like coals about the heavenly floor,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And rush of night upon the noon<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of their lost worlds, unsphered restorelessly<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In icy deserts of the sky.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">From the beginning of the spheres,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">When systems nebulous out-thrown<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Drove back the brinks<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of nullity with limitary marks,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Till end of suns, and sunless death of years,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To her are known<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The unevident inseparable links<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That bind all deeps, all suns, all days and darks.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[35]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_WIND_AND_THE_MOON">THE WIND AND THE MOON</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Oh, list to the wind of the night, oh, hark,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">How it shrieks as it goes on its hurrying quest!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Forever its voice is a voice of the dark,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Forever its voice is a voice of unrest.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Oh, list to the pines as they shiver and sway<br /></span> +<span class="i0">'Neath the ceaseless beat of its myriad wings—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">How they moan and they sob like living things<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That cry in the darkness for light and day!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Now bend they low as the wind mounts higher,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And its eerie voice comes piercingly,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like the plaint of humanity's misery,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And its burden of vain desire.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Now to a sad, tense whisper it fails,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Then wildly and madly it raves and it wails.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Oh, the night is filled with its sob and its shriek,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Its weird and its restless, yearning cry,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As it races adown the darkened sky,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With scurry of broken clouds that seek,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Borne on the wings of the hastening wind,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A place of rest that they never can find.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And around the face of the moon they cling,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Its fugitive face to veil they aspire;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">But ever and ever it peereth out,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Rending the cloud-ranks that hem it about;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And it seemeth a lost and phantom thing,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like a phantom of dead desire.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[36]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="LAMENT_OF_THE_STARS">LAMENT OF THE STARS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">One tone is mute within the starry singing,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The unison fulfilled, complete before;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">One chord within the music sounds no more,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And from the stir of flames forever winging<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The pinions of our sister, motionless<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In pits of indefinable duress,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Are fallen beyond all recovery<br /></span> +<span class="i0">By exultation of the flying dance,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or rhythms holding as with sleep or trance<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The maze of stars that only death may free—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Flung through the void's expanse.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">In gulfs depressed nor in the gulfs exalted<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shall shade nor lightening of her flame be found;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In space that litten orbits gird around,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Nor in the bottomless abyss unvaulted<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of unenvironed, all-outlying night.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Allotted gyre nor lawless comet-flight<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shall find, and with its venturous ray return<br /></span> +<span class="i0">From gloom of undiscoverable scope,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">One ray of her to gladden into hope<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The doubtful eyes denied that truthward yearn,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The faltering feet that grope.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[37]</span></div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Beyond restrainless boundary-nights surpassing<br /></span> +<span class="i0">All luminous horizons limited,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The substance and the light of her have fed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Ruin and silence of the night's amassing:<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Abandoned worlds forever morningless;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Suns without worlds, in frory beamlessness<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Girt for the longer gyre funereal;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Inviolate silence, earless, unawaking<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That once was sound, and level calm unbreaking<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where motion's many ways in oneness fall<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of sleep beyond forsaking.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Circled with limitation unexceeded<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Our eyes behold exterior mysteries<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And gods unascertainable as these—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shadows and shapes irresolubly heeded;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Phantoms that tower, and substance scarcely known.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Our sister knows all mysteries one alone,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">One shape, one shadow, crowding out the skies;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose eyeless head and lipless face debar<br /></span> +<span class="i0">All others nameless or familiar,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Filling with night all former lips and eyes<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of god, and ghost, and star:<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">For her all shapes have fed the shape of night;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">All darker forms, and dubious forms, or pallid,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Are met and reconciled where none is valid.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">But unto us solution nor respite<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of mystery's multiform incessancy<br /></span> +<span class="i0">From unexplored or system-trodden sky<span class="pagenum">[38]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shall come; but as a load importunate,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Enigma past and mystery foreseen<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Weigh mightily upon us, and between<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Our sorrow deepens, and our songs abate<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In cadences of threne.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">A gloom that gathers silence looms more closely,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And quiet centering darkness at its heart;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">But from the certitude of night depart<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Uncertain god nor eidolon less ghostly;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">But stronger grown with strength obtained from light<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That failed, and power lent by the stronger night,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Perplex us with new mystery, and doubt<br /></span> +<span class="i0">If these our flames, that deathward toss and fall<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Be festal lights or lights funereal<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For mightier gods within the gulfs without,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Phantoms more cryptical.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">New shadows from the wings of Time unfolding<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Across the depth and eminence of years,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Fall deeplier with the broadening gloom of fears.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Prophetic-eyed, with planet-hosts beholding<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The night take form upon the face of suns,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">We see (thus grief's vaticination runs—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Presageful sorrow for our sister slain)<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A night wherein all sorrow shall be past,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">One with night's single mystery at last;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Nor vocal sun nor singing world remain<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As Time's elegiast.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[39]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_MAZE_OF_SLEEP">THE MAZE OF SLEEP</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Sleep is a pathless labyrinth,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Dark to the gaze of moons and suns,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Through which the colored clue of dreams,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">A gossamer thread, obscurely runs.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[40]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_WINDS">THE WINDS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">To me the winds that die and start,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And strive in wars that never cease,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Are dearer than the level peace<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That lies unstirred at summer's heart;<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">More dear to me the shadowed wold,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Where, with report of tempest rife,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The air intensifies with life,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Than quiet fields of summer's gold.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I am the winds' admitted friend:<br /></span> +<span class="i2">They seal our linked fellowships<br /></span> +<span class="i2">With speech of warm or icy lips,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With touch of west and east that blend.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">And when my spirit listless stands,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">With folded wings that do not live,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Their own assuageless wings they give<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To lift her from the stirless lands.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0"> + * + * + * + * + * + * + * +<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Within the place unmanifest<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Where central Truth is immanent,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Lies there a vast, entire content<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of sound and movement one in rest?<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[41]</span></div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I know not this. Yet in my heart,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">I feel that where all truths concur,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The shrine is peaceless with the stir<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of winds that enter and depart.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[42]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_MASQUE_OF_FORSAKEN_GODS">THE MASQUE OF FORSAKEN GODS</h2> + +<p><span class="in3 smcap">Scene</span>: <i>A moonlit glade on a summer midnight</i></p> + +<h3>THE POET</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">What consummation of the toiling moon<br /></span> +<span class="i0">O'ercomes the midnight blue with violet,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Wherein the stars turn grey! The summer's green,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Edgèd and strong by day, is dull and faint<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Beneath the moon's all-dominating mood,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That in this absence of the impassioned sun,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Sways to a sleep of sound and calm of color<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The live and vivid aspect of the world—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Subdued as with the great expectancy<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Which blurs beginning features of a dream,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Things and events lost 'neath an omening<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of central and oppressive bulk to come.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Here were the theatre of a miracle,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">If such, within a world long alienate<br /></span> +<span class="i0">From its first dreams, and shut with skeptic years,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Might now befall.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>THE PHILOSOPHER</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">The Huntress rides no more<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Across the upturned faces of the stars:<span class="pagenum">[43]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">'Tis but the dead shell of a frozen world,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Glittering with desolation. Earth's old gods—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The gods that haunt like dreams each planet's youth—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Are fled from years incredulous, and tired<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With penetrating of successive masks,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That give but emptiness they served to hide.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Remains not faith enough to bring them back—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Pan to his wood, Diana to her moon,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And all the visions that made populous<br /></span> +<span class="i0">An eager world where Time grows weary now.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Yet Youth, that lives, might for a little claim<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The pantheon of dream, on such a night,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">When 'neath the growing marvel of the moon<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The films of time wear perilously thin,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And thought looks backward to the simpler years,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Till all the vision seems but just beyond.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">If one have faith, it may be that he shall<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Behold the gods—once only, and no more,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Because of Time's inhospitality,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For which they may not stay.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>THE POET</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Within the marvel of the light, what flower<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of active wonder from quiescence springs!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is it a throng of luminous white clouds,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Phantoms of some old storm's death-driven Titans,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That float beneath the moon, and speak with voices<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like the last echoes of a thunder spent?<span class="pagenum">[44]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">'Tis the forsaken gods, that win a foothold<br /></span> +<span class="i0">About the magic circle which the moon<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Draws like some old enchantress round the glade.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>THE PHILOSOPHER</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I see them not: the vision is addressed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Only to thine acute and eager youth.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>JOVE</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">All heaven and earth were once my throne;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Now I have but the wind alone<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For shifting judgment-seat.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The pillared world supported me:<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Yet man's old incredulity<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Left nothing for my feet.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>PAN</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Man hath forgotten me:<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Yet seems it that my memory<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Saddens the wistful voices of the wood;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Within each erst-frequented spot<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Echo forgets my music not,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Nor Earth my tread where trampling years have stood.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[45]</span></div></div> + +<h3>ARTEMIS</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Time hath grown cold<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Toward beauty loved of old.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The gods must quake<br /></span> +<span class="i0">When dreams and hopes forsake<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The heart of man,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And disillusion's ban<br /></span> +<span class="i0">More chill than stone,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Rears till the former throne<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of loveliness<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is dark and tenantless.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Now must I weep—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Homeless within the deep<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where once of old<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Mine orbèd chariot rolled,—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And mourn in vain<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Man's immemorial pain<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Uncomforted<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of light and beauty fled.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>APOLLO</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Time wearied of my song—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A satiate and capricious king<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Who for his pleasure bade me sing,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">First of his minstrel throng.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Till, cloyed with melody,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">His ear grew faint to voice and lyre;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Forgotten then of Time's desire,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">His thought was void of me.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[46]</span></div></div> + +<h3>APHRODITE</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I, born of sound and foam,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Child of the sea and wind,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Was fire upon mankind—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Fuelled with Syria, and with Greece and Rome.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Time fanned me with his breath;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Love found new warmth in me,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And Life its ecstasy,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Till I grew deadly with the wind of death.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>A NYMPH</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">How can the world be still so beautiful<br /></span> +<span class="i0">When beauty's self is fled? Tis like the mute<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And marble loveliness of some dead girl;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And we that hover here, are as the spirit<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of former voice and motion, and live color<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In that which shall not stir nor speak again.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>ANOTHER NYMPH</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Nay, rather say this lovely, lifeless world<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is but a rigid semblance, counterfeiting<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The world which was. Nor have the gods retained<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Such power as once informed and rendered vital<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The cryptic irresponsiveness of stone,—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That statue which Pygmalion made and loved.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[47]</span></div></div> + +<h3>ATÈ</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I, who was discord among men,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Alone of all Time's hierarchy<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Find that Time hath no need of me,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">No lack that I might fill again.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>THE POET</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Tell me, O gods, are ye forever doomed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To fall and flutter among spacial winds,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Finding release nor foothold anywhere—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Debarred from doors of all the suns, like spirits<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose names are blotted from the lists of Time,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Though they themselves yet wander undestroyed?<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<h3>THE GODS TOGETHER</h3> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Throneless, discrowned, and impotent,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In man's sad disillusionment,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">We passed with Earth's returnless youth,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Who were the semblances of truth,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The veils that hid the vacantness<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Infinite, naked, meaningless,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The blank and universal Sphinx<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Each world beholds at last—and sinks.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">New gods protect awhile the gaze<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of man—each one a veil that stays—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Till the new gods, discredited,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like mist that melts with noon, are fled<span class="pagenum">[48]</span>—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That power oppressive, limitless,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The tyranny of nothingness.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Our power is dead upon the earth<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With the first dews and dawns of Time;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">But in the far and younger clime<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of other worlds, it hath re-birth.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Yea, though we find not entrance here—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Astray like feathers on the wind,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To neither earth nor heaven consigned—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Fresh altars in a distant sphere<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Are keen with fragrance, bright with fire,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">New hearths to warm us from the night,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Till, banished thence, we pass in flight<br /></span> +<span class="i0">While all the flames of dream expire.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[49]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="A_SUNSET">A SUNSET</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">As blood from some enormous hurt<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The sanguine sunset leapt;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Across it, like a dabbled skirt,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The hurrying tempest swept.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[50]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_CLOUD-ISLANDS">THE CLOUD-ISLANDS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">What islands marvellous are these,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">That gem the sunset's tides of light—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Opals aglow in saffron seas?<br /></span> +<span class="i2">How beautiful they lie, and bright,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like some new-found Hesperides!<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">What varied, changing magic hues<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Tint gorgeously each shore and hill!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What blazing, vivid golds and blues<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Their seaward winding valleys fill!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What amethysts their peaks suffuse!<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Close held by curving arms of land<br /></span> +<span class="i2">That out within the ocean reach,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I mark a faery city stand,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Set high upon a sloping beach<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That burns with fire of shimmering sand.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Of sunset-light is formed each wall;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Each dome a rainbow-bubble seems;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And every spire that towers tall<br /></span> +<span class="i2">A ray of golden moonlight gleams;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of opal-flame is every hall.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[51]</span></div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Alas! how quickly dims their glow!<br /></span> +<span class="i2">What veils their dreamy splendours mar!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like broken dreams the islands go,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">As down from strands of cloud and star,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The sinking tides of daylight flow.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[52]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_SNOW-BLOSSOMS">THE SNOW-BLOSSOMS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">But yestereve the winter trees<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Reared leafless, blackly bare,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Their twigs and branches poignant-marked<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Upon the sunset-flare.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">White-petaled, opens now the dawn,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And in its pallid glow,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Revealed, each leaf-lorn, barren tree<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Stands white with flowers of snow.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[53]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_SUMMER_MOON">THE SUMMER MOON</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">How is it, O moon, that melting,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Unstintedly, prodigally,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">On the peaks' hard majesty,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Till they seem diaphanous<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And fluctuant as a veil,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And pouring thy rapturous light<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Through pine, and oak, and laurel,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Till the summer-sharpened green,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Softening and tremulous,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is a lustrous miracle—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">How is it that I find,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">When I turn again to thee,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That thy lost and wasted light<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is regained in one magic breath?<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[54]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_RETURN_OF_HYPERION">THE RETURN OF HYPERION</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">The dungeon-clefts of Tartarus<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Are just beyond yon mountain-girdle,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose mass is bound around the bulk<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of the dark, unstirred, unmoving East.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Alike on the mountains and the plain,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The night is as some terrific dream,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That closes the soul in a crypt of dread<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Apart from touch or sense of earth,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As in the space of Eternity.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">What light unseen perturbs the darkness?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Behold! it stirs and fluctuates<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Between the mountains and the stars<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That are set as guards above the prison<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of the captive Titan-god. I know<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That in the deeps beneath, Hyperion<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Divides the pillared vault of dark,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And stands a space upon its ruin.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Then light is laid upon the peaks,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As the hand of one who climbs beyond;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And, lo! the Sun! The sentinel stars<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Are dead with overpotent flame,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And in their place Hyperion stands.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The night is loosened from the land,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As a dream from the mind of the dreamer.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A great wind blows across the dawn,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like the wind of the motion of the world.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[55]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="LETHE">LETHE</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I flow beneath the columns that upbear<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The world, and all the tracts of heaven and hell;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Foamless I sweep, where sounds nor glimmers tell<br /></span> +<span class="i0">My motion nadir-ward; no moment's flare<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Gives each to each the shapes that, unaware,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Commingle at my verge, to test the spell<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Of waves intense with night, whose deeps compel<br /></span> +<span class="i0">One face from pain, and rapture, and despair.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">The fruitless earth's denied and cheated sons<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Meet here, where fruitful and unfruitful cease.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And when their lords, the mightier, hidden Ones,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Have drained all worlds till being's wine is low,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Shall they not come, and from the oblivious flow<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Drink at one draught a universe of peace?<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[56]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="ATLANTIS">ATLANTIS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Above its domes the gulfs accumulate<br /></span> +<span class="i2">To where the sea-winds trumpet forth their screed;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">But here the buried waters take no heed—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Deaf, and with closèd lips from press of weight<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Imposed by ocean. Dim, inanimate,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">On temples of an unremembered creed<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Involved in long, slow tentacles of weed,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The dead tide lies immovable as Fate.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">From out the ponderous-vaulted ocean-dome,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">A clouded light is questionably shed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">On altars of a goddess garlanded<br /></span> +<span class="i2">With blossoms of some weird and hueless vine;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And wingèd, fleet, through skies beneath the foam,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Like silent birds the sea-things dart and shine.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[57]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_UNREVEALED">THE UNREVEALED</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">How dense the glooms of Death, impervious<br /></span> +<span class="i2">To aught of old memorial light! How strait<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The sunless road, suspended, separate,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That leads to later birth! Untremulous<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With any secret morn of stars, to us<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The Past is closed as with division great<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Of planet-girdling seas—unknown its gate,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Beyond the mouths of shadows cavernous.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Oh! may it be that Death in kindness strips<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The soul of memory's raiment, rendering blind<br /></span> +<span class="i4">Our vision, lest surmounted deeps appal,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">As when on mountain peaks a glance behind<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Betrays with knowledge, and the climber slips<br /></span> +<span class="i4">Down gulfs of fear to some enormous fall?<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[58]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_ELDRITCH_DARK">THE ELDRITCH DARK</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Now as the twilight's doubtful interval<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Closes with night's accomplished certainty,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">A wizard wind goes crying eerily;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And in the glade unsteady shadows crawl,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Timed to the trees, whose voices rear and fall<br /></span> +<span class="i2">As with some dreadful witches' ecstasy,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Flung upward to the dark, whence glitters free<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The crooked moon, impendent over all.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Twin veils of covering cloud and silence thrown<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Across the movement and the sound of things,<br /></span> +<span class="i4">Make blank the night, till in the broken west<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The moon's ensanguined blade awhile is shown....<br /></span> +<span class="i4">The night grows whole again.... The shadows rest,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Gathered beneath a greater shadow's wings.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[59]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_CHERRY-SNOWS">THE CHERRY-SNOWS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">The cherry-snows are falling now;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Down from the blossom-clouded sky<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of zephyr-troubled twig and bough,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">In widely settling whirls they fly.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">The orchard earth, unclothed and brown,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Is wintry-hued with petals bright;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">E'en as the snow they glimmer down;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Brief as the snow's their stainless white.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[60]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="FAIRY_LANTERNS">FAIRY LANTERNS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">'Tis said these blossom-lanterns light<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The elves upon their midnight way;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">That fairy toil and elfin play<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Receive their beams of magic white.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I marvel not if it be true;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">I know this flower has lighted me<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Nearer to Beauty's mystery,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And past the veils of secrets new.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[61]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="NIRVANA">NIRVANA</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Poised as a god whose lone, detachèd post,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">An eyrie, pends between the boundary-marks<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Of finite years, and those unvaried darks<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That veil Eternity, I saw the host<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of worlds and suns, swept from the furthermost<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Of night—confusion as of dust with sparks—<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Whirl tow'rd the opposing brink; as one who harks<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Some warning trumpet, Time, a withered ghost,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Fled with them; disunited orbs that late<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Were atoms of the universal frame,<br /></span> +<span class="i4">They passed to some eternal fragment-heap.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And, lo, the gods, from space discorporate,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Who were its life and vital spirit, came,<br /></span> +<span class="i4">Drawn outward by the vampire-lips of Sleep!<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[62]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_NEMESIS_OF_SUNS">THE NEMESIS OF SUNS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Lo, what are these, the gyres of sun and world,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Fulfilled with daylight by each toiling sun—<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Lo, what are these but webs of radiance spun<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Beneath the roof of Night, and torn or furled<br /></span> +<span class="i0">By Night at will? All opposite powers upwhirled<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Are less than chaff to this imperious one—<br /></span> +<span class="i2">As wind-tossed chaff, until its sport be done,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Scattered, and lifted up, and downward hurled.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">All gyres are held within the path unspanned<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Of Night's aeonian compass—loosely pent<br /></span> +<span class="i4">As with the embrace of lethal-tightening weight;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">All suns are grasped within the hollow hand<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Of Night, the godhead sole, omnipotent,<br /></span> +<span class="i4">Whose other names are Nemesis and Fate.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[63]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="WHITE_DEATH">WHITE DEATH</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Methought the world was bound with final frost;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The sun, made hueless as with fear and awe,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Illumined yet the lands it could not thaw.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Then on my road, with instant evening crost,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Death stood, and in its shadowy films enwound,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Mine eyes forgot the light, until I came<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Where poured the inseparate, unshadowed flame<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of phantom suns in self-irradiance drowned.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Death lay revealed in all its haggardness—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Immitigable wastes horizonless;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Profundities that held nor bar nor veil;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">All hues wherewith the suns and worlds were dyed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In light invariable nullified;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">All darkness rendered shelterless and pale.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[64]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="RETROSPECT_AND_FORECAST">RETROSPECT AND FORECAST</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Turn round, O Life, and know with eyes aghast<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The breast that fed thee—Death, disguiseless, stern;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Even now, within thy mouth, from tomb and urn,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The dust is sweet. All nurture that thou hast<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Was once as thou, and fed with lips made fast<br /></span> +<span class="i2">On Death, whose sateless mouth it fed in turn.<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Kingdoms debased, and thrones that starward yearn,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">All are but ghouls that batten on the past.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Monstrous and dread, must it fore'er abide,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">This unescapable alternity?<br /></span> +<span class="i4">Must loveliness find root within decay,<br /></span> +<span class="i4">And night devour its flaming hues alway?<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Sickening, will Life not turn eventually,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or ravenous Death at last be satisfied?<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[65]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="SHADOW_OF_NIGHTMARE">SHADOW OF NIGHTMARE</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">What hand is this, that unresisted grips<br /></span> +<span class="i2">My spirit as with chains, and from the sound<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And light of dreams, compels me to the bound<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where darkness waits with wide, expectant lips?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Albeit thereat my footing holds, nor slips,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The threats of that Omnipotence confound<br /></span> +<span class="i2">All days and hours of gladness, girt around<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With sense of near, unswervable eclipse.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">So lies a land whose noon is plagued with whirr<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of bats, than their own shadows swarthier,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Whose flight is traced on roofs of white abodes,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Wherein from court to court, from room to room,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In hieroglyphics of abhorrent doom,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Is slowly trailed the slime of crawling toads.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[66]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_SONG_OF_A_COMET">THE SONG OF A COMET</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">A plummet of the changing universe,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Far-cast, I flare<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Through gulfs the sun's uncharted orbits bind,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And spaces bare<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That intermediate darks immerse<br /></span> +<span class="i0">By road of sun nor world confined.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Upon my star-undominated gyre<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I mark the systems vanish one by one;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Among the swarming worlds I lunge,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And sudden plunge<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Close to the zones of solar fire;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or 'mid the mighty wrack of stars undone,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Flash, and with momentary rays<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Compel the dark to yield<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Their aimless forms, whose once far-potent blaze<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In ashes chill is now inurned.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A space revealed,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I see their planets turned,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where holders of the heritage of breath<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Exultant rose, and sank to barren death<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Beneath the stars' unheeding eyes.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Adown contiguous skies<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I pass the thickening brume<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of systems yet unshaped, that hang immense<span class="pagenum">[67]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Along mysterious shores of gloom;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or see—unimplicated in their doom—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The final and disastrous gyre<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of blinded suns that meet,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And from their mingled heat,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And battle-clouds intense,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">O'erspread the deep with fire.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Through stellar labyrinths I thrid<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Mine orbit placed amid<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The multiple and irised stars, or hid,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Unsolved and intricate,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In many a planet-swinging sun's estate.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Ofttimes I steal in solitary flight<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Along the rim of the exterior night<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That grips the universe;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And then return,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Past outer footholds of sidereal light,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To where the systems gather and disperse;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And dip again into the web of things,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To watch it shift and burn,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Hearted with stars. On peaceless wings<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I pierce, where deep-outstripping all surmise,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The nether heavens drop unsunned,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">By stars and planets shunned.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And then I rise<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Through vaulting gloom, to watch the dark<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Snatch at the flame of failing suns;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or mark<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The heavy-dusked and silent skies,<span class="pagenum">[68]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Strewn thick with wrecked and broken stars,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where many a fated orbit runs.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">An arrow sped from some eternal bow,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Through change of firmaments and systems sent,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And finding bourn nor bars,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I flee, nor know<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For what eternal mark my flight is meant.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[69]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_RETRIBUTION">THE RETRIBUTION</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Old Egypt's gods, Osiris, Ammon, Thoth,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Came on my dream in thunder, and their feet<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Revealed, were as the levin's fire and heat.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The hosts of Rome, the Arab and the Goth<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Have left their altars dark, yet stern and wroth<br /></span> +<span class="i2">In olden power they stood, whose wings were fleet,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And mighty as with strength of storms that meet<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In mingled foam of clouds and ocean-froth.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Above my dream, with arch of dreaded wings,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">In judgement and in sentence of what crime<br /></span> +<span class="i2">I knew not, sate the gods outcast of time.<br /></span> +<span class="i4">They passed, and lo, a plague of darkness fell,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Unsleeping, and accurst with nameless things,<br /></span> +<span class="i4">And dreams that stood the ministers of Hell!<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[70]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="TO_THE_DARKNESS">TO THE DARKNESS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Thou hast taken the light of many suns,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And they are sealed in the prison-house of gloom.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Even as candle-flames<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Hast thou taken the souls of men,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With winds from out a hollow place;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They are hid in the abyss as in a sea,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And the gulfs are over them<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As the weight of many peaks,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As the depth of many seas;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thy shields are between them and the light;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They are past its burden and bitterness;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The spears of the day shall not touch them,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The chains of the sun shall not hale them forth.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Many men there were,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In the days that are now of thy realm,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That thou hast sealed with the seal of many deeps;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Their feet were as eagles' wings in the quest of Truth—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Aye, mightily they desired her face,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Hunting her through the lands of life,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As men in the blankness of the waste<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That seek for a buried treasure-house of kings.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">But against them were the veils<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That hands may not rend nor sabers pierce;<span class="pagenum">[71]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">And Truth was withheld from them,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As a water that is seen afar at dawn,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And at noon is lost in the sand<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Before the feet of the traveller.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The world was a barrenness,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And the gardens were as the waste.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And they turned them to the adventure of the dark,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To the travelling of the land without roads,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To the sailing of the sea that hath no beacons.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Why have they not returned?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Their quest hath found end in thee,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or surely they had fared<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Once more to the place whence they came,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As men that have travelled to a fruitless land.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They have looked on thy face,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And to them it is the countenance of Truth.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thy silence is sweeter to them than the voice of love,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thine embrace more dear than the clasp of the beloved.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They are fed with the emptiness past the veil,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And their hunger is filled;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They have found the waters of peace,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And are athirst no more.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They know a rest that is deeper than the gulfs,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And whose seal is unbreakable as the seal of the void;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They sleep the sleep of the suns,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And the vast is a garment unto them.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[72]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="A_DREAM_OF_BEAUTY">A DREAM OF BEAUTY</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">I dreamed that each most lovely, perfect thing<br /></span> +<span class="i2">That Nature hath, of sound, and form, and hue—<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The winds, the grass, the light-concentering dew,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The gleam and swiftness of the sea-bird's wing;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Blueness of sea and sky, and gold of storm<br /></span> +<span class="i4">Transmuted by the sunset, and the flame<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Of autumn-colored leaves, before me came,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And, meeting, merged to one diviner form.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Incarnate Beauty 'twas, whose spirit thrills<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Through glaucous ocean and the greener hills,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And in the cloud-bewildered peaks is pent.<br /></span> +<span class="i4">Like some descended star she hovered o'er,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">But as I gazed, in doubt and wonderment,<br /></span> +<span class="i4">Mine eyes were dazzled, and I saw no more.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[73]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_DREAM-BRIDGE">THE DREAM-BRIDGE</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">All drear and barren seemed the hours,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">That passed rain-swept and tempest-blown.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The dead leaves fell like brownish notes<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Within the rain's grey monotone.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">There came a lapse between the showers;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The clouds grew rich with sunset gleams;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Then o'er the sky a rainbow sprang—<br /></span> +<span class="i2">A bridge unto the Land of Dreams.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[74]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="A_LIVE-OAK_LEAF">A LIVE-OAK LEAF</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">How marvellous this bit of green<br /></span> +<span class="i2">I hold, and soon shall throw away!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Its subtile veins, its vivid sheen,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Seem fragment of a god's array.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">In all the hidden toil of earth,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Which is the more laborious part—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To rear the oak's enormous girth,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Or shape its leaves with poignant art?<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[75]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="PINE_NEEDLES">PINE NEEDLES</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">O little lances, dipped in grey,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And set in order straight and clean,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">How delicately clear and keen<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Your points against the sapphire day!<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Attesting Nature's perfect art<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Ye fringe the limpid firmament,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">O little lances, keenly sent<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To pierce with beauty to the heart!<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[76]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="TO_THE_SUN">TO THE SUN</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Thy light is as an eminence unto thee,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And thou are upheld by the pillars of thy strength.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thy power is a foundation for the worlds;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They are builded thereon as upon a lofty rock<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whereto no enemy hath access.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thou puttest forth thy rays, and they hold the sky<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As in the hollow of an immense hand.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thou erectest thy light as four walls,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And a roof with many beams and pillars.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thy flame is a stronghold based as a mountain;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Its bastions are tall, and firm like stone.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">The worlds are bound with the ropes of thy will;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like steeds are they stayed and contrained<br /></span> +<span class="i0">By the reins of invisible lightnings.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With bands that are stouter than iron manifold,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And stronger than the cords of the gulfs,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thou withholdest them from the brink<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of outward and perilous deeps,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Lest they perish in the desolations of the night,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or be stricken of strange suns;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Lest they be caught in the pitfalls of the abyss,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or fall into the furnace of Arcturus.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Thy law is as a shore unto them,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And they are restrained thereby as the sea.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[77]</span></div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Thou art food and drink to the worlds;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Yea, by thy toil are they sustained,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That they fail not upon the road of space,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose goal is Hercules.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">When thy pillars of force are withdrawn,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And the walls of thy light fall inward,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Borne down by the sundering night,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And thy head is covered with the Shadow,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The worlds shall wander as men bewildered<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In the sterile and lifeless waste.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Athirst and unfed shall they be,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">When the springs of thy strength are dust,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And thy fields of light are black with dearth.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They shall perish from the ways<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That thou showest no longer,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And emptiness shall close above them.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[78]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_FUGITIVES">THE FUGITIVES</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">O fugitive fragrances<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That tremble heavenward<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Unceasing, or if ye linger,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Halt but as memories<br /></span> +<span class="i0">On the verge of forgetfulness,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Why must ye pass so fleetly<br /></span> +<span class="i0">On wings that are less than wind,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To a death unknowable?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Soon ye are gone, and the air<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Forgets your faint unrest<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In the garden's breathlessness,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where fall the snows of silence.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[79]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="AVERTED_MALEFICE">AVERTED MALEFICE</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Where mandrakes, crying from the moonless fen,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Told how a witch, with gaze of owl or bat<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Found, and each root malevolently fat<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Pulled for her waiting cauldron, on my ken<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Upstole, escaping to the world of men,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">A vapor as of some infernal vat;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Against the stars it clomb, and caught thereat<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As if their bright regard to veil again.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Despite the web, methought they saw, appalled,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The stealthier weft in which all sound was still ...<br /></span> +<span class="i4">Then sprang, as if the night found breath anew,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A wind whereby the stars were disenthralled ...<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Far off, I heard the cry of frustrate ill—<br /></span> +<span class="i4">A witch that wailed above her curdled brew.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[80]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_MEDUSA_OF_THE_SKIES">THE MEDUSA OF THE SKIES</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Haggard as if resurgent from a tomb,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The moon uprears her ghastly, shrunken head,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Crowned with such light as flares upon the dead<br /></span> +<span class="i0">From pallid skies more death-like than the gloom.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Now fall her beams till slope and plain assume<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The whiteness of a land whence life is fled;<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And shadows that a sepulcher might shed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Move livid as the stealthy hands of doom.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">O'er rigid hills and valleys locked and mute,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">A pallor steals as of a world made still<br /></span> +<span class="i0">When Death, that erst had crept, stands absolute—<br /></span> +<span class="i4">An earth now frozen fast by power of eyes<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That malefice and purposed silence fill,<br /></span> +<span class="i4">The gaze of that Medusa of the skies.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[81]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="A_DEAD_CITY">A DEAD CITY</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">The twilight reigns above the fallen noon<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Within an ancient land, whose after-time<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Lies like a shadow o'er its ruined prime.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like rising mist the night increases soon<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Round shattered palaces, ere yet the moon<br /></span> +<span class="i2">On mute, unsentried walls and turrets climb,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">And touch with whiteness of sepulchral rime<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The desert where a city's bones are strewn.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">She comes at last; unburied, thick, they show<br /></span> +<span class="i2">In all the hoary nakedness of stone.<br /></span> +<span class="i4">From out a shadow like the lips of Death<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Issues a wind, that through the stillness blown,<br /></span> +<span class="i4">Cries like a prophet's ghost with wailing breath<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The weirds of finished and forgotten woe.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[82]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_SONG_OF_THE_STARS">THE SONG OF THE STARS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">From the final reach of the upper night<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To the nether darks where the comets die,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">From the outmost bourn of the reigns of light<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To the central gloom of the midmost sky,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In our mazeful gyres we fly.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And our flight is a choral chant of flame,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That ceaseless fares to the outer void,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With the undersong of the peopled spheres,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The voices of comet and asteroid,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And the wail of the spheres destroyed.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Forever we sing to a god unseen—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In the dark shall our voices fail?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The void is his robe inviolate,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The night is his awful veil—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">How our fires grow dim and pale!<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">From the ordered gyres goes ever afar<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Our song of flame o'er the void unknown,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where circles nor world, nor comet, nor star.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shall it die ere it reach His throne?<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">On the shoreless deeps of the seas of gloom<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Sailing, we venture afar and wide,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where ever await the tempests of doom,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where the silent maelstroms lurk and hide,<span class="pagenum">[83]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">And the darkling reefs abide.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And the change and ruin of stars is a song<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That rises and ebbs in a tide of fire—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A music whose notes are of dreadful flame,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose harmonies ever leap high'r<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where the suns and the worlds expire.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is such music not fit for a god?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Yet ever the deep is a dark,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And ever the night is a void,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Nor brightens a word nor a mark<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To show if our God may hark.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">From the gyres of change goes ever afar<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Our flaming chant o'er the deep unknown,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The song of the death of planet and star.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shall it die ere it reach His throne?<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">In our shadows of light the planets sweep,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And endure for the span of our prime—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Globed atoms that hazard the termless deep<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With races that bow to the law of Time,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And yet cherish a dream sublime.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And they cry to the god behind the veil.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Yet how should their voices pass the night,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The silence that waits in the rayless void,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">If he hear not our music of light,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And the thundrous song of our might?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And they strive in the gloom for truth<span class="pagenum">[84]</span>—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Yet how should they pierce the veil,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">When we, with our splendors of flame,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In the darkness faint and fail,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Our fires how feeble and pale!<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">From the ordered gyres goes ever afar<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Our song of flame o'er the void unknown,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where circles nor world, nor comet, nor star,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shall it die ere it reach His throne?<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[85]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="COPAN">COPAN</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Around its walls the forests of the west<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Gloom, as about some mystery's final pale<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Might lie its multifold exterior veil.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Sculptured with signs and meanings unconfessed,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Its lordly fanes and palaces attest<br /></span> +<span class="i2">A past before whose wall of darkness fail<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Reason and fancy, finding not the tale<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Erased by time from history's palimpsest.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Within this place, that from the gloom of Eld<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Still meets the light, a people came and went<br /></span> +<span class="i4">Like whirls of dust between its columns blown—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">An alien race, whose record, shadow-held,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Is sealed with those of others long forespent<br /></span> +<span class="i4">That died in sunless planets lost and lone.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[86]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="A_SONG_OF_DREAMS">A SONG OF DREAMS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">A voice came to me from the night, and said,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What profit hast thou in thy dreaming<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of the years that are set<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And the years yet unrisen?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Hast thou found them tillable lands?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is there fruit that thou canst pluck therein,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or any harvest to be mown?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shalt thou dig aught of gold from the mines of the past,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or trade for merchandise<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In the years where all is rotten?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Are they a sea that will bring thee to any shore,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or a desert that vergeth upon aught but the waste?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shalt thou drink from the springs that are emptied,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or find sustenance in shadows?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">What value hath the future given thee?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is there aught in the days yet dark<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That thou canst hold with thy hands?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Are they a fortress<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That will afford thee protection<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Against the swords of the world?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is there justice in them<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To balance the world's inequity,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or benefit to outweigh its loss?<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Then spake I in answer, saying,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of my dreams I have made a road,<span class="pagenum">[87]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">And my soul goeth out thereon<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To that unto which no eye hath opened,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Nor ear become keen to hearken—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To the glories that are shut past all access<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of the keys of sense;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose walls are hidden by the air,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And whose doors are concealed with clarity.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And the road is travelled of secret things,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Coming to me from far—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of bodiless powers,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And beauties without colour or form<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Holden by any loveliness seen of earth.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And of my dreams have I builded an inn<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Wherein these are as guests.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And unto it come the dead<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For a little rest and refuge<br /></span> +<span class="i0">From the hollowness of the unharvestable wind,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And the burden of too great space.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">The fields of the past are not void to me,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Who harvest with the scythe of thought;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Nor the orchards of future years unfruitful<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To the hands of visionings.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I have retrieved from the darkness<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The years and the things that were lost,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And they are held in the light of my dreams,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With the spirits of years unborn,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And of things yet bodiless.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As in an hospitable house,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They shall live while the dreams abide.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[88]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="THE_BALANCE">THE BALANCE</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">The world upheld their pillars for awhile—<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Now, where imperial On and Memphis stood,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">The hot wind sifts across the solitude<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The sand that once was wall and peristyle,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or furrows like the main each desert mile,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Where ocean-deep above its ancient food<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Of cities fame-forgot, the waste is nude,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Traceless as billows of each sunken pile.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Lo! for that wrong shall vengeance come at last,<br /></span> +<span class="i2">When the devouring earth, in ruin one<br /></span> +<span class="i2">With royal walls and palaces undone,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And sunk within the desolated past,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shall drift, and winds that wrangle through the vast<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Immingle it with ashes of the sun.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[89]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="SATURN">SATURN</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Now were the Titans gathered round their king,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In a waste region slipping tow'rd the verge<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of drear extremities that clasp the world—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A land half-moulded by the hasty gods,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And left beneath the bright scorn of the stars,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Grotesque, misfeatured, blackly gnarled with stone;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or worn and marred from conflict with the deep<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Conterminate, of Chaos. Here they stood,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Old Saturn midmost, like a central peak<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Among the lesser hills that guard its base.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Defeat, that gloamed within each countenance<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like the first tinge of death, upon a sun<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Gathering like some dusk vapor, found them cold,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Clumsy of limb, and halting as with weight<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of threatened worlds and trembling firmaments.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A wind cried round them like a trumpet-voice<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of phantom hosts—hurried, importunate,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And intermittent with a tightening fear.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Far off the sunset leapt, and the hard clouds,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Molten among the peaks, seemed furnaces<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In which to make the fetters of the world.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Seared by the lightning of the younger gods,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They saw, beyond the grim and crouching hills,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Those levins thrust like spears into the heart<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of swollen clouds, or tearing through the sky<span class="pagenum">[90]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like severing swords. Then, as the Titans watched,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The night rose like a black, enormous mist<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Around them, wherein naught was visible<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Save the sharp levin leaping in the north;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And no sound came, except of seas remote,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That seemed like Chaos ravening past the verge<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of all the world, fed with the crumbling coasts<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of Matter.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i6">Till the moon, discovering<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That harsh swart wilderness of sand and stone<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Tissued and twisted in chaotic weld,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Lit with illusory fire each Titan's form,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They sate in silence, mute as stranded orbs—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The wrack of Time, upcast on ruinous coasts,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And in the slow withdrawal of the tide<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Safe for awhile. Small solace did they take<br /></span> +<span class="i0">From that frore radiance glistering on the dull<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Black desert gripped in iron silences,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like a false triumph o'er contestless fates,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or a mirage of life in wastes of Death.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Yet were they moved to speak, and Saturn's voice<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Seeming the soul of that tremendous land<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Set free in sound, startled the haughty stars.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">"O Titans, gods, sustainers of the world,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Is this the end? Must Earth go down to Chaos,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Lacking our strength, beneath the unpracticed sway<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of godlings vain, precipitate with youth,<span class="pagenum">[91]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Who think, unrecking of disastrous chance,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To bind their will as reins upon the sun,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or stand as columns to the ponderous heavens?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Must we behold, with eyes of impotence<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That universal wrack, even though it whelm<br /></span> +<span class="i0">These our usurpers in impartial doom<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Beneath the shards and fragments of the world?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Were it not preferable to return,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And meeting them in fight unswervable,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Drag down the earth, ourselves, and these our foes,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">One sacrifice unto the gods of Chaos?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Why should we stay, and live the tragedy<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of power that survives its use?"<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i10">Now spake<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Enceladus, when that the echoings<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of Saturn's voice had fled remote, and seemed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Dead thunders caught and flung from star to star;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">"Wouldst hurl thy kingdom down the nightward gulf,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like to a stone a curious child might cast<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To test the fall of some dark precipice?<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Patience and caution should we take as mail,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Not rashness for a weapon—too keen sword<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That cuts the strainèd knot of destiny,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Ne'er to be tied again. Were it not best<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To watch the slow procedure of the days,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That we may grasp a time more opportune,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">When desperation is not all our strength,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Nor the foe newly filled with victory?<span class="pagenum">[92]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Then may we hope to conquer back thy realm<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For thee, not for the gods of nothingness."<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">He ceased, and after him no lesser god<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Gave voice upon the shaken silences,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">None venturing to risk comparison,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Inevitable then, of eloquence<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With his; but silence like the ambiguousness<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of signal and of lesser stars o'ercast<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And merged in one confusion by the moon,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Possessed that multitude, till Saturn rose.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Around his form the light intensified,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And strengthened with addition wild and strange,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Investing him as with a phantom robe,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And gathering like a crown about his brow.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">His sword, whereon the shadows lay like rust<br /></span> +<span class="i0">He took, and dipping it within the moon,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Made clean its length of blade, and from it cast<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Swift flickerings at the stars. And then his voice<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Came like a torrent, and from out his eyes<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Streamed wilder power that mingled with the sound.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0"> + +* * * * * + +* * * * + +* * * + +* * * +<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">And his resurgent power, in glance and word,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Poured through the Titans' souls, and was become<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The fountains of their own, and at his flame<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Their fires were lit once more, whose restlessness<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Leapt and aspired against the steadfast stars.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And now they turned, majestic with resolve,<span class="pagenum">[93]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where, red upon the forefront of the north,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Arcturus was a beacon to the winds.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And with the flickering winds, that lightly struck<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The desert dust, then sprang again in air,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They passed athwart the foreland of the north.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Against their march they saw the shrunken waste,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A rivelled region like a world grown old<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose sterile breast knew not the lips of Life<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In all its epoch; or a world that was<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The nurse of infant Death, ere he became<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Too large, too strong for its restraining arms,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And towered athwart the suns.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i6">And there they crossed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Metallic slopes that rang like monstrous shields,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">But gave not to their tread, and clanging plains<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like body-mail of greater, vaster gods.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where hills made gibbous shadows in the moon,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They heard the eldritch laughters of the wind,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Seeming the mirth of death; and 'neath their gaze<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Gaunt valleys deepened like an old despair.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Yet strode they on, through the moon's fantasies,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Bold with resolve, across a land like doubt.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">And now they passed among huge mountain-bulks,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Themselves like peaks detached, and moving slow<br /></span> +<span class="i0">'Mid fettered brethren, adding weight and gloom<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To that mute conclave great against the stars.<span class="pagenum">[94]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Emerging thence, the Titans marched where still<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Their own portentous shadows went before<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like night that fled but shrunk not, dusking all<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That desert way.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i6">And thus they came where Sleep,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The sleep of weary victory, had seized<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The younger gods as captives, borne beyond<br /></span> +<span class="i0">All flight of mounting battle-ecstasies<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In that high triumph of forgetfulness.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And on that sleep the striding Titans broke,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Vague and immense at first like forming dreams<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To those disturbèd gods, in mist of drowse<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Purblind and doubtful yet, though soon they knew<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Their erst-defeated foes, and rising stood<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In silent ranks expectant, that appeared<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To move, with shaking of astonished fires<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That bristled forth, or were displayed like plumes<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Late folded close, now trembling terribly,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Pending between the desert and the stars.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Then, sudden as the waking from a dream,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The battle leapt, where striving shapes of gods<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Moved brightly through the whirled and stricken air,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Sweeping it to a froth of fire; and all<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That ancient, deep-established desert rocked,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Shaken as by an onset of the gulfs<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of gathered and impatient Chaos, while,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Above the place where central battle burned<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The stars drew back in fright or dazzlement,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Paling to more secluded distances.<span class="pagenum">[95]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Lo, where the moon had wrought illusive dreams<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That clothed the wild in doubt and fantasy,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Hiding its hideousness with bright mirage,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or deepening it with gulfs and glooms of Hell,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Mightier confusion, chaos absolute<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Upon the imperilled sky and trembling world,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Now made a certainty within itself,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The one thing sure in shaken sky or world.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Maelstroms of battle caught in storms of fire,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Torn and involved by weaponry of gods—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Crescented blades that met with rounds of shields;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Grappling of shapes, seen through the riven blaze<br /></span> +<span class="i0">An instant, then once more obscure, and known<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Only by giant heavings of that war<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of furious gods and roused elements,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Divided, leagued, contending evermore<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Along the desert—these, augmentative<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Round one thick center, stunned the faltering night.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">So huge that chaos, complicate within<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With movements of gigantic legionry,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Antagonistic streams, impetuous-hurled<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where Jove and Saturn thunder-crested, led<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In fight unswervable—so wide the strife<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of differing impulse, that Decision found<br /></span> +<span class="i0">No foothold, till that first confusion should<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In ordered conflict re-arrange, and stand<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With its true forces known. This seemed remote,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With that wide struggle pending terribly,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As if all-various, colored Time had made<span class="pagenum">[96]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">A truce with white Eternity, and both<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Stood watching from afar.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i6">Through drifts of haze<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The broadening moon, made ominous with red,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Glared from the westering night. And now that war<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Built for itself, far up, a cope of cloud,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And drew it down, far off, upon all sides,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Impervious to the moon and sworded stars.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And by their own wild light the gods fought on<br /></span> +<span class="i0">'Neath that stupendous concave like a sky<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Filled and illumed with glare of bursting suns.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And cast by their own light, upon that sky<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The gods' own shadows moved like shapen gloom,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Phantasmagoric, changed and amplified,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">A shifting frieze that flickered dreadfully<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In spectral battle indecisive. Then,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Swift, as it had begun, the contest turned,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And on the heaving Titans' massive front<br /></span> +<span class="i0">It seemed that all the motion and the strength<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Self-thwarting and confounded, of that strife,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Was flung in centered impact terrible,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With rush of all that fire, tempestuous-blown<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As if before some wind of further space,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Striking the earth. Lo, all the Titans' flame<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Bent back upon themselves, and they were hurled<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In vaster disarray, with vanguard piled<br /></span> +<span class="i0">On rear and center. Saturn could not stem<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The loosened torrents of long-pent defeat;<span class="pagenum">[97]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">He, with his host, was but as drift thereon,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Borne wildly down the whelmed and reeling world.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Hurling like slanted rain, the lurid levin<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Fell o'er that flight of Titans, and behind,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In striding menace, all-victorious Jove<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Loomed like some craggy cloud with thunders crowned<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And footed with the winds. In that defeat,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With Jove's pursuit involved and manifold,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Few found escape unscathed, and some went down<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Like senile suns that grapple with the dark,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And reel in flame tremendous, and are still.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Ebbing, the battle left those elder gods<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Upcast once more on coasts of black defeat—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Gripped in despair, a vaster Tartarus.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The victor gods, their storms and thunders spent,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Went dwindling northward like embattled clouds,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And where the lingering haze of fight dissolved,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The pallor of the dawn began to spread<br /></span> +<span class="i0">On darkness purple like the pain of Death.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Ringed with that desolation, Saturn stood<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Mute, and the Titans answered unto him<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With brother silence. Motionless, they seemed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Some peristyle or range of columns great,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Alone enduring of a fallen fane<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In deserts of some vaster world whence Life<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And Faith have vanished long, that vaguely slips<br /></span> +<span class="i0">To an immemoried end. And twilight slow<span class="pagenum">[98]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Crept round those lofty shapes august, and seemed<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Such as might be the faltering ghostly noon<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of mightier suns that totter down to death.<br /></span> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Then turned they, passing from that dismal place<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Blasted anew with battle, ere the swift<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Striding of light athwart stupendous chasms<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And wasteful plains, should overtake them there,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Bowed with too heavy a burden of defeat.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Slowly they turned, and passed upon the west<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Where, like a weariness immovable<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In menace huge, the plain its monstrous bulk,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The peaks its hydra heads, the whole world crouched<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Against their march with the diminished stars.<br /></span> +<span class="pagenum">[99]</span></div></div> + +<hr class="chap" /> + +<h2 id="FINIS">FINIS</h2> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">It seemed that from the west<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The live red flame of sunset,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Eating the dead blue sky<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And cold insensate peaks,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Was loosened slowly, and fell.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Above it, a few red stars<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Burned down like low candle-flames<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Into the gaunt black sockets<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Of the chill insensible mountains.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">But in the ascendant skies<br /></span> +<span class="i0">(Cloudless, like some vast corpse<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Unfeatured, cerementless)<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Succeeded nor star nor planet.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">It may have been that black,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Pulseless, dead stars arose<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And crossed as of old the heavens.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">But came no living orb,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Nor comet seeming the ghost,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Homeless, of an outcast world,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Seeking its former place<br /></span> +<span class="i0">That is no more nor shall be<br /></span> +<span class="i0">In all the Cosmos again.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Null, blank, and meaningless<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As a burnt scroll that blackens<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With the passing of the fire,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Lay the dead infinite sky.<span class="pagenum">[100]</span><br /></span> +<span class="i0">Lo! in the halls of Time,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">I thought, the torches are out—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The revelry of the gods,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Or lamentation of demons<br /></span> +<span class="i0">For which their flames were lit,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Over and quiet at last<br /></span> +<span class="i0">With the closing peace of night,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Whose dumb, dead, passionless skies<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Enfold the living world<br /></span> +<span class="i0">As the sea a sinking pebble.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<div class="figure2"> +<img src="images/ill2.jpg" width="100" height="115" alt="" /> +</div> + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Star-Treader and other poems, by +Clark Ashton Smith + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS *** + +***** This file should be named 38410-h.htm or 38410-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/4/1/38410/ + +Produced by David Starner, Matthew Wheaton and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This +file was produced from images generously made available +by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Star-Treader and other poems + +Author: Clark Ashton Smith + +Release Date: December 25, 2011 [EBook #38410] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS *** + + + + +Produced by David Starner, Matthew Wheaton and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This +file was produced from images generously made available +by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + + + + + + + + + THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS + + BY + + CLARK ASHTON SMITH + + + A. M. ROBERTSON + + STOCKTON STREET AT UNION SQUARE + SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA + + MCMXII + + + COPYRIGHT 1912 + BY + A. M. ROBERTSON + + + Philopolis Press + San Francisco + + + TO MY MOTHER + + + + + CONTENTS + + + NERO + CHANT TO SIRIUS + THE STAR-TREADER + THE MORNING POOL + THE NIGHT FOREST + THE MAD WIND + SONG TO OBLIVION + MEDUSA + ODE TO THE ABYSS + THE SOUL OF THE SEA + THE BUTTERFLY + THE PRICE + THE MYSTIC MEANING + ODE TO MUSIC + THE LAST NIGHT + ODE ON IMAGINATION + THE WIND AND THE MOON + LAMENT OF THE STARS + THE MAZE OF SLEEP + THE WINDS + THE MASK OF FORSAKEN GODS + A SUNSET + THE CLOUD-ISLANDS + THE SNOW-BLOSSOMS + THE SUMMER MOON + THE RETURN OF HYPERION + LETHE + ATLANTIS + THE UNREVEALED + THE ELDRITCH DARK + THE CHERRY SNOWS + FAIRY LANTERNS + NIRVANA + THE NEMESIS OF SUNS + WHITE DEATH + RETROSPECT AND FORECAST + SHADOW OF NIGHTMARE + THE SONG OF A COMET + THE RETRIBUTION + TO THE DARKNESS + A DREAM OF BEAUTY + THE DREAM BRIDGE + A LIVE-OAK LEAF + PINE NEEDLES + TO THE SUN + THE FUGITIVES + AVERTED MALEFICE + THE MEDUSA OF THE SKIES + A DEAD CITY + THE SONG OF THE STARS + COPAN + A SONG OF DREAMS + THE BALANCE + SATURN + FINIS + + + + + NERO + + + This Rome, that was the toil of many men, + The consummation of laborious years-- + Fulfilment's crown to visions of the dead, + And image of the wide desire of kings-- + Is made my darkling dream's effulgency, + Fuel of vision, brief embodiment + Of wandering will, and wastage of the strong + Fierce ecstacy of one tremendous hour, + When ages piled on ages were a flame + To all the years behind, and years to be. + + Yet any sunset were as much as this, + Save for the music forced by hands of fire + From out the hard strait silences which bind + Dull Matter's tongueless mouth--a music pierced + With the tense voice of Life, more quick to cry + Its agony--and save that I believed + The radiance redder for the blood of men. + Destruction hastens and intensifies + The process that is Beauty, manifests + Ranges of form unknown before, and gives + Motion and voice and hue where otherwise + Bleak inexpressiveness had leveled all. + + If one create, there is the lengthy toil; + The laboured years and days league tow'rd an end + Less than the measure of desire, mayhap, + After the sure consuming of all strength, + And strain of faculties that otherwhere + Were loosed upon enjoyment; and at last + Remains to one capacity nor power + For pleasure in the thing that he hath made. + But on destruction hangs but little use + Of time or faculty, but all is turned + To the one purpose, unobstructed, pure, + Of sensuous rapture and observant joy; + And from the intensities of death and ruin, + One draws a heightened and completer life, + And both extends and vindicates himself. + + I would I were a god, with all the scope + Of attributes that are the essential core + Of godhead, and its visibility. + I am but emperor, and hold awhile + The power to hasten Death upon his way, + And cry a halt to worn and lagging Life + For others, but for mine own self may not + Delay the one, nor bid the other speed. + There have been many kings, and they are dead, + And have no power in death save what the wind + Confers upon their blown and brainless dust + To vex the eyeballs of posterity. + But were I god, I would be overlord + Of many kings, and were as breath to guide + Their dust of destiny. And were I god, + Exempt from this mortality which clogs + Perception, and clear exercise of will, + What rapture it would be, if but to watch + Destruction crouching at the back of Time, + The tongueless dooms which dog the travelling suns; + The vampire Silence at the breast of worlds, + Fire without light that gnaws the base of things, + And Lethe's mounting tide, that rots the stone + Of fundamental spheres. This were enough + Till such time as the dazzled wings of will + Came up with power's accession, scarcely felt + For very suddenness. Then would I urge + The strong contention and conflicting might + Of chaos and creation, matching them, + Those immemorial powers inimical, + And all their stars and gulfs subservient-- + Dynasts of Time, and anarchs of the dark-- + In closer war reverseless; and would set + New discord at the universal core, + A Samson-principle to bring it down + In one magnificence of ruin. Yea, + The monster Chaos were mine unleashed hound, + And all my power Destruction's own right arm! + + I would exult to mark the smouldering stars + Renew beneath my breath their elder fire, + And feed upon themselves to nothingness. + The might of suns, slow-paced with swinging weight + Of myriad worlds, were made at my desire + One long rapidity of roaring light, + Through which the voice of Life were audible, + And singing of the immemorial dead + Whose dust is loosened into vaporous wings + With soaring wrack of systems ruinous. + And were I weary of the glare of these, + I would tear out the eyes of light, and stand + Above a chaos of extinguished suns, + That crowd, and grind, and shiver thunderously, + Lending vast voice and motion, but no ray + To the stretched silence of the blinded gulfs. + Thus would I give my godhead space and speech + For its assertion, and thus pleasure it, + Hastening the feet of Time with casts of worlds + Like careless pebbles, or with shattered suns + Brightening the aspect of Eternity. + + + + + CHANT TO SIRIUS + + + What nights retard thee, O Sirius! + Thy light is as a spear, + And thou penetratest them + As a warrior that stabbeth his foe + Even to the center of his life. + Thy rays reach farther than the gulfs; + They form a bridge thereover, + That shall endure till the links of the universe + Are unfastened, and drop apart, + And all the gulfs are one, + Dissevered by suns no longer. + + How strong art thou in thy place! + Thou stridest thine orbit, + And the darkness shakes beneath thee, + As a road that is trodden by an army. + Thou art a god, + In thy temple that is hollowed with light + In the night of infinitude, + And whose floor is the lower void; + Thy worlds are as priests and ministers therein. + Thou furrowest space, + Even as an husbandman, + And sowest it with alien seed; + It beareth alien fruits, + And these are thy testimony, + Even as the crops of his fields + Are the testimony of an husbandman. + + + + + THE STAR-TREADER + + + I + + A voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams, + Saying, "Make haste: the webs of death and birth + Are brushed away, and all the threads of earth + Wear to the breaking; spaceward gleams + Thine ancient pathway of the suns, + Whose flame is part of thee; + And deeps outreach immutably + Whose largeness runs + Through all thy spirit's mystery. + Go forth, and tread unharmed the blaze + Of stars where through thou camest in old days; + Pierce without fear each vast + Whose hugeness crushed thee not within the past. + A hand strikes off the chains of Time, + A hand swings back the door of years; + Now fall earth's bonds of gladness and of tears, + And opens the strait dream to space sublime." + + + II + + Who rides a dream, what hand shall stay! + What eye shall note or measure mete + His passage on a purpose fleet, + The thread and weaving of his way! + It caught me from the clasping world, + And swept beyond the brink of Sense, + My soul was flung, and poised, and whirled, + Like to a planet chained and hurled + With solar lightning strong and tense. + Swift as communicated rays + That leap from severed suns a gloom + Within whose waste no suns illume, + The winged dream fulfilled its ways. + Through years reversed and lit again + I followed that unending chain + Wherein the suns are links of light; + Retraced through lineal, ordered spheres + The twisting of the threads of years + In weavings wrought of noon and night; + Through stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll, + Those folds that form the raiment of the soul. + + + III + + Enkindling dawns of memory, + Each sun had radiance to relume + A sealed, disused, and darkened room + Within the soul's immensity. + Their alien ciphers shown and lit, + I understood what each had writ + Upon my spirit's scroll; + Again I wore mine ancient lives, + And knew the freedom and the gyves + That formed and marked my soul. + + + IV + + I delved in each forgotten mind, + The units that had builded me, + Whose deepnesses before were blind + And formless as infinity-- + Knowing again each former world-- + From planet unto planet whirled + Through gulfs that mightily divide + Like to an intervital sleep. + One world I found, where souls abide + Like winds that rest upon a rose; + Thereto they creep + To loose all burden of old woes. + And one I knew, where warp of pain + Is woven in the soul's attire; + And one, where with new loveliness + Is strengthened Beauty's olden chain-- + Soft as a sound, and keen as fire-- + In light no darkness may depress. + + + V + + Where no terrestrial dreams had trod + My vision entered undismayed, + And Life her hidden realms displayed + To me as to a curious god. + Where colored suns of systems triplicate + Bestow on planets weird, ineffable, + Green light that orbs them like an outer sea, + And large auroral noons that alternate + With skies like sunset held without abate, + Life's touch renewed incomprehensibly + The strains of mirth and grief's harmonious spell. + Dead passions like to stars relit + Shone in the gloom of ways forgot; + Where crownless gods in darkness sit + The day was full on altars hot. + I heard--once more a part of it-- + The central music of the Pleiades, + And to Alcyone my soul + Swayed with the stars that own her song's control. + Unchallenged, glad I trod, a revenant + In worlds Edenic longly lost; + Or walked in spheres that sing to these, + O'er space no light has crossed, + Diverse as Hell's mad antiphone uptossed + To Heaven's angelic chant. + + + VI + + What vasts the dream went out to find! + I seemed beyond the world's recall + In gulfs where darkness is a wall + To render strong Antares blind! + In unimagined spheres I found + The sequence of my being's round-- + Some life where firstling meed of Song, + The strange imperishable leaf, + Was placed on brows that starry Grief + Had crowned, and Pain anointed long; + Some avatar where Love + Sang like the last great star at morn + Ere Death filled all its sky; + Some life in fresher years unworn + Upon a world whereof + Peace was a robe like to the calms that lie + On pools aglow with latter spring: + There Life's pellucid surface took + Clear image of all things, nor shook + Till touch of Death's obscuring wing; + Some earlier awakening + In pristine years, when giant strife + Of forces darkly whirled + First forged the thing called Life-- + Hot from the furnace of the suns-- + Upon the anvil of a world. + + + VII + + Thus knew I those anterior ones + Whose lives in mine were blent; + Till, lo! my dream, that held a night + Where Rigel sends no word of might, + Was emptied of the trodden stars, + And dwindled to the sun's extent-- + The brain's familiar prison-bars, + And raiment of the sorrow and the mirth + Wrought by the shuttles intricate of earth. + + + + + THE MORNING POOL + + + All night the pool held mysteries, + Vague depths of night that lay in dream, + Where phantoms of the pale-white stars + Wandered, with darkness-tangled gleam. + + And now it holds the limpid light + And shadeless azure of the skies, + Wherein, like some enclasped gem, + The morning's golden glamour lies. + + + + + THE NIGHT FOREST + + + Incumbent seemingly + On the jagged points of peaks + That end the visible west, + The rounded moon yet floods + The valleys hitherward + With fall of torrential light, + Ere from the overmost + Aggressive mountain-cusp, + She slip to the lower dark. + But here, on an eastward slope + Pointed and thick with its pine, + The forest scarcely remembers + Her light that is gone as a vision + Or ecstasy too poignant + And perilous for duration. + Withdrawn in what darker web + Or dimension of dream I know not, + In silence pre-occupied + And solemnest rectitude + The pines uprear, and no sigh + For the rapture of moonlight past, + Comes from their bosom of boughs. + Far in their secrecy + I stand, and the burden of dusk + Dull, but at times made keen + With tingle of fragrances, + Falls on me as a veil + Between my soul and the world. + + What veil of trance, O pines, + Divides you from my soul, + That I feel but enter not + Your distances of dream? + Ah! strange, imperative sense + Of world-deep mystery + That shakes from out your boughs-- + A fragrance yet more keen, + Pressing upon the mind. + + The wind shall question you + Of the dream I may not gain, + And all its sombreness + And depth immeasurable, + Shall tremble away in sound + Of speech not understood + That my heart must break to hear. + + + + + THE MAD WIND + + + What hast thou seen, O wind, + Of beauty or of terror + Surpassing, denied to us, + That with precipitate wings, + Mad and ecstatical, + Thou spurnest the hollows and trees + That offer thee refuge of peace, + And findest within the sky + No safety nor respite + From the memory of thy vision? + + + + + SONG TO OBLIVION + + + Art thou more fair + For all the beauty gathered up in thee, + As gold and gems within some lightless sea? + For light of flowers, and bloom of tinted air, + Art thou more fair? + + Art thou more strong + For powers that turn to thee as unto sleep? + For world and star that find thy ways more deep + Than light may tread, too wearisome for song + Art thou more strong? + + Nay! thou art bare + For power and beauty on thine impotence + Bestowed by fruitful Time's magnificence; + For fruit of all things strong, and bloom of fair, + Thou still art bare. + + + + + MEDUSA + + + As drear and barren as the glooms of Death, + It lies, a windless land of livid dawns, + Nude to a desolate firmament, with hills + That seem the fleshless earth's outjutting ribs, + And plains whose face is crossed and rivelled deep + With gullies twisting like a serpent's track. + The leprous touch of Death is on its stones, + Where for his token visible, the Head + Is throned upon a heap of monstrous rocks, + Grotesque in everlasting ugliness, + Within a hill-ravine, that splits athwart + Like some old, hideous and unhealing scar. + Her lethal beauty crowned with twining snakes + That mingle with her hair, the Gorgon reigns. + Her eyes are clouds wherein Death's lightnings lurk, + Yet, even as men that seek the glance of Life, + The gazers come, where, coiled and serpent-swift, + Those levins wait. As 'round an altar-base + Her victims lie, distorted, blackened forms + Of postured horror smitten into stone,-- + Time caught in meshes of Eternity-- + Drawn back from dust and ruin of the years, + And given to all the future of the world. + The land is claimed of Death: the daylight comes + Half-strangled in the changing webs of cloud + That unseen spiders of bewildered winds + Weave and unweave across the lurid sun + In upper air. Below, no zephyr comes + To break with life the circling spell of death. + Long vapor-serpents twist about the moon, + And in the windy murkness of the sky, + The guttering stars are wild as candle-flames + That near the socket. + + Thus the land shall be, + And Death shall wait, throned in Medusa's eyes. + Till, in the irremeable webs of night + The sun is snared, and the corroded moon + A dust upon the gulfs, and all the stars + Rotted and fall'n like rivets from the sky, + Letting the darkness down upon all things. + + + + + ODE TO THE ABYSS + + + O many-gulfed, unalterable one, + Whose deep sustains + Far-drifting world and sun, + Thou wast ere ever star put out on thee; + And thou shalt be + When never world remains; + When all the suns' triumphant strength and pride + Is sunk in voidness absolute, + And their majestic music wide + In vaster silence rendered mute. + And though God's will were night to dusk the blue, + And law to cancel and disperse + The tangled tissues of the universe, + And mould the suns anew, + His might were impotent to conquer thee, + O invisible infinity! + Thy darks subdue + All light that treads thee down a space, + Exulting o'er thy deeps. + The cycles die, and lo! thy darkness reaps + The flame of mightiest stars; + In aeon-implicating wars + Thou tearest planets from their place; + Worlds granite-spined + To thine erodents yield + Their treasures centrally confined + In crypts by continental pillars sealed. + What suns and worlds have been thy prey + Through unhorizoned stretches of the Past! + What spheres that now essay + Time's undimensioned vast, + Shall plunge forgotten to thy gloom at length, + With life that cried its query of the Night + To ears with silence filled! + What worlds unborn shall dare thy strength, + Girt by a sun's unwearied might, + And dip to darkness when the sun is stilled! + + O incontestable Abyss, + What light in thine embrace of darkness sleeps-- + What blaze of a sidereal multitude + No peopled world is left to miss! + What motion is at rest within thy deeps-- + What gyres of planets long become thy food-- + Worlds unconstrainable, + That plunged therein to peace, + Like tempest-worn and crew-forsaken ships; + And suns that fell + To huge and ultimate eclipse, + And lasting gyre-release! + What sound thy gulfs of silence hold! + Stupendous thunder of the meeting stars, + And crash of orbits that diverged, + With Life's thin song are merged; + Thy quietudes enfold + Paean and threnody as one, + And battle-blare of unremembered wars + With festal songs + Sung in the Romes of ruined spheres, + And music that belongs + To younger, undiscoverable years + With words of yesterday. + Ah, who may stay + Thy soundless world-devouring tide? + O thou whose hands pluck out the light of stars, + Are worlds grown but as fruit for thee? + May no sufficient bars, + Nor marks inveterate abide + To baffle thy persistency? + Still and unstriving now, + What plottest thou, + Within thy universe-ulterior deeps, + Dark as the final lull of suns? + What new advancement of the night + On citadels of stars around whose might + Thy slow encroachment runs, + And crouching silence, thunder-potent, sleeps? + + + + + THE SOUL OF THE SEA + + + A wind comes in from the sea, + And rolls through the hollow dark + Like loud, tempestuous waters. + As the swift recurrent tide, + It pours adown the sky, + And rears at the cliffs of night + Uppiled against the vast. + + Like the soul of the sea-- + Hungry, unsatisfied + With ravin of shores and of ships-- + Come forth on the land to seek + New prey of tideless coasts, + It raves, made hoarse with desire, + And the sounds of the night are dumb + With the sound of its passing. + + + + + THE BUTTERFLY + + + I + + O wonderful and winged flow'r, + That hoverest in the garden-close, + Finding in mazes of the rose, + The beauty of a Summer hour! + + O symbol of Impermanence, + Thou art a word of Beauty's tongue, + A word that in her song is sung, + Appealing to the inner sense! + + Of that great mystic harmony, + All lovely things are notes and words-- + The trees, the flow'rs, the songful birds, + The flame-white stars, the surging sea, + + The aureate light of sudden dawn, + The sunset's crimson afterglow, + The summer clouds, the dazzling snow, + The brooks, the moonlight chaste and wan. + + Lacking (who knows?) a cloud, a tree, + A streamlet's purl, the ocean's roar + From Nature's multitudinous store-- + Imperfect were the melody! + + + II + + O Beauty, why so sad my heart? + Why stirs in me a nameless pain + Which seems like some remembered strain, + As on this product of thine art + + Enraptured, marvelling I gaze, + And note how airily 'tis wrought-- + A winged dream, a bodied thought, + The spirit of the summer days? + + Thy beauty opes, O Butterfly, + The doors of being, with subtle sense + Of Beauty's frail impermanence, + And grief of knowing it must die. + + Again I seem to know the tears + Of other lives, the woe and pain + Of days that died; resurgent wane + The moons of countless bygone years. + + + III + + On other worlds, on other stars, + To us but tiny points of light, + Or lost in distances of night + Beyond our system's farthest bars, + + A priest to Beauty's service sworn, + I sought and served her all my days, + With music and with hymns of praise. + In sunset and the fires of morn, + + With thrilling heart her form I knew, + And in the stars she whitely gleamed, + And all the face of Nature seemed + Expression of her shape and hue. + + I grieved to watch the summers pass + With all their gorgeous shows of bloom, + And sterner autumn months assume + Their realm with withered leaves and grass. + + Mine was the grief of Change and Death, + Of fair things gone beyond recall, + The paling light of dawns, and all + The flowers' vanished hues and breath. + + + IV + + From out the web of former lives, + The ancient catenated chain + Of joy and sorrow, loss and gain, + One certain truth my heart derives:-- + + Though Beauty passes, this I know, + From Change and Death, this verity: + Her spirit lives eternally-- + 'Tis but her forms that come and go. + + + V + + Lo! I am Beauty's constant thrall, + Must ever on her voice await, + And follow through the maze of Fate + Her luring, strange and mystical. + + Obedient to her summonings, + Forever must my soul aspire, + And seek, on wings of lyric fire, + To penetrate the Heart of Things, + + Wherein she sits, augustly throned, + In loveliness that renders dumb-- + The Essence and the final Sum-- + With peril and with wonder zoned + + What though I fail, my duller sense + Baffled as by a wall of stone? + The high desire, the search alone + Are their own prize and recompense. + + + + + THE PRICE + + + Behind each thing a shadow lies; + Beauty hath e'er its cost: + Within the moonlight-flooded skies + How many stars are lost! + + + + + THE MYSTIC MEANING + + + Alas! that we are deaf and blind + To meanings all about us hid! + What secrets lurk the woods amid? + What prophecies are on the wind? + + What tidings do the billows bring + And cry in vain upon the strand? + If we might only understand + The brooklet's cryptic murmuring! + + The tongues of earth and air are strange. + And yet (who knows?) one little word + Learned from the language of the bird + Might make us lords of Fate and Change! + + + + + ODE TO MUSIC + + + O woven fabric and bright web of sound, + Whose threads are magical, + And with swift weaving thrall + And hold the spirit bound! + We may not know whence thy strange sorceries fall-- + Whether they be Earth's voices wild and strong, + Her high and perfect song. + Or broken dreams of higher worlds unfound. + For, lo, thou art as dreams. + And to thy realm all hidden things belong-- + All fugitive and evanescent gleams + The soul hath vainly sought; + All mystic immanence; + All visions of ungrasped magnificence, + And great ideals pinnacled in thought; + All paths with marvel fraught + That lead to lands obscure: + For, lo, upon thy road of sound we pass, + Seeking thy magic lure, + To vales mist-implicated and unsure, + Where all seems strange as visions in a glass; + And wonder-haunted hills, + Where Beauty is an echo and a dream + In sighing pines, and rills + Clouded and deep with imaged tree and sky; + And where bright rivers gleam + Past cities towering high, + Each wonderful as some cloud-fantasy. + + Thou loosenest the bondage of the years, + Making the spirit free + Of all sublunar joys and fears. + Who mounts on thine imperious wings shall see + The ways of life as threads of day and night; + Serene above their change, + His eyes shall know but far transcendent things, + His ears shall hark but voices free and strange; + Vast seas of outer light + Shall beat upon his sight, + Eternal winds shall touch him with their wings; + His heart shall thrill + To larger, purer joy, and grief more deep + Than earth may know; + And e'en as dews of morning fill + The opened flower, into his soul shall flow + High melodies, like tears that angels weep. + Then shall he penetrate + The veils and outer barriers of sound, + And near the soul of melody, + Where, rapt in aural splendors ultimate, + His soul shall see + The marvel and the glory that surround + Eternal Beauty's shrine; + And catch afar the glint divine + Of her moon-colored robe, or haply hear, + With world-oblivious ear, + Some echo of her voice's mystery. + + Thou hast Love's power to find + The soul's most secret chords, that else were still, + And stir'st them till they thrill + Disclosed to least, faint movements of thy wind. + Thine aural sorcery + O'erwhelms the heart as sunset storms the sight, + For thou art Beauty bodied forth in sound-- + Her colors bright + And diverse forms expressed in harmony: + Within thy bound, + The flare of morning is become a song, + And tree and flower a music sweet and long. + And in thy speech + The power and majesty that swing + Planet and sun, and each + Dim atom of the system manifest, + Become articulate, expressed + Like ocean in the brooklet's whispering. + Beyond the woof of finite things, + Thy threads of wonder deep-entangled lie-- + Time's intertexturings + Within Eternity-- + With Song, mayhap, to be his memories; + For Beauty borders nigh + The ultimate, eternal Verities. + + + + + THE LAST NIGHT + + + I dreamed a dream: I stood upon a height, + A mountain's utmost eminence of snow, + Whence I beheld the plain outstretched below + To a far sea-horizon, dim and white. + Beneath the sun's expiring, ghastly light, + The dead world lay, phantasmally aglow; + Its last fear-weighted voice, a wind, came low; + The distant sea lay hushed, as with affright. + + I watched, and lo! the pale and flickering sun, + In agony and fierce despair, flamed high, + And shadow-slain, went out upon the gloom. + Then Night, that grim, gigantic struggle won, + Impended for a breath on wings of doom, + And through the air fell like a falling sky. + + + + + ODE ON IMAGINATION + + + Imagination's eyes + Outreach and distance far + The vision of the greatest star + That measures instantaneously-- + Enisled therein as in a sea-- + Its cincture of the system-laden skies. + Abysses closed about with night + A tribute yield + To her retardless sight; + And Matter's gates disclose the candent ores + Rock-held in furnaces of planet-cores. + She penetrates the sun's transplendent shield, + And through the obstruction of his vestment dire, + Pierces the centermost sublimity + Of his terrific heart, whose gurge of fire + Heaves upward like a monstrous sea, + And inly riven by Titanic throes, + Fills all his frame with outward cataract + Of separate and immingling torrent streams. + Her eyes exact + From the Moon-Sphinx that wanes and grows + In wastes celestial, alien dreams + Brought down on wings of fleetest beams. + Adown the clefts of under-space + She rides, her steed a falling star, + To seek, where void and vagueness are, + Some mark or certainty of place. + Upon their heavenly precipice + The gathered suns shrink back aghast + From that interminate abyss, + And threat of sightless anarchs vast. + + She stands endued + With supermundane crown, and vestitures + Of emperies that include + All under-worlds and over-worlds of dream-- + Kingdoms o'ercast, and eminent heights extreme + Where moon-transcending light endures. + She wanders in fantastic lands, where grow + In scarce-discerned fields and closes blind, + Vague blossoms stirred by wings of eidolons; + Or roves in forests where all sound is low: + Each voice that shuns + The noiseful day, and enters there to find + Twilight that naught exalts nor grieves, + Is quickly tuned to the susurrous leaves. + + Upon some supersensual eminence + She hears the fragments of a thunder loud, + Where lightnings of ulterior Truth intense + Flame through the walls of hollow cloud. + But these she may not wholly grasp + With incomplete terrestrial clasp. + Her eyes inevitably see, + 'Neath rounds and changes of exterior things, + The movements of Essentiality-- + Of ageless principles--that alter not + To temporal alterings-- + Unswerved by shattered worlds upbuilt once more. + And stars no longer hot; + Or broken constellations strewn + Like coals about the heavenly floor, + And rush of night upon the noon + Of their lost worlds, unsphered restorelessly + In icy deserts of the sky. + From the beginning of the spheres, + When systems nebulous out-thrown + Drove back the brinks + Of nullity with limitary marks, + Till end of suns, and sunless death of years, + To her are known + The unevident inseparable links + That bind all deeps, all suns, all days and darks. + + + + + THE WIND AND THE MOON + + + Oh, list to the wind of the night, oh, hark, + How it shrieks as it goes on its hurrying quest! + Forever its voice is a voice of the dark, + Forever its voice is a voice of unrest. + Oh, list to the pines as they shiver and sway + 'Neath the ceaseless beat of its myriad wings-- + How they moan and they sob like living things + That cry in the darkness for light and day! + Now bend they low as the wind mounts higher, + And its eerie voice comes piercingly, + Like the plaint of humanity's misery, + And its burden of vain desire. + Now to a sad, tense whisper it fails, + Then wildly and madly it raves and it wails. + + Oh, the night is filled with its sob and its shriek, + Its weird and its restless, yearning cry, + As it races adown the darkened sky, + With scurry of broken clouds that seek, + Borne on the wings of the hastening wind, + A place of rest that they never can find. + And around the face of the moon they cling, + Its fugitive face to veil they aspire; + But ever and ever it peereth out, + Rending the cloud-ranks that hem it about; + And it seemeth a lost and phantom thing, + Like a phantom of dead desire. + + + + + LAMENT OF THE STARS + + + One tone is mute within the starry singing, + The unison fulfilled, complete before; + One chord within the music sounds no more, + And from the stir of flames forever winging + The pinions of our sister, motionless + In pits of indefinable duress, + Are fallen beyond all recovery + By exultation of the flying dance, + Or rhythms holding as with sleep or trance + The maze of stars that only death may free-- + Flung through the void's expanse. + + In gulfs depressed nor in the gulfs exalted + Shall shade nor lightening of her flame be found; + In space that litten orbits gird around, + Nor in the bottomless abyss unvaulted + Of unenvironed, all-outlying night. + Allotted gyre nor lawless comet-flight + Shall find, and with its venturous ray return + From gloom of undiscoverable scope, + One ray of her to gladden into hope + The doubtful eyes denied that truthward yearn, + The faltering feet that grope. + + Beyond restrainless boundary-nights surpassing + All luminous horizons limited, + The substance and the light of her have fed + Ruin and silence of the night's amassing: + Abandoned worlds forever morningless; + Suns without worlds, in frory beamlessness + Girt for the longer gyre funereal; + Inviolate silence, earless, unawaking + That once was sound, and level calm unbreaking + Where motion's many ways in oneness fall + Of sleep beyond forsaking. + + Circled with limitation unexceeded + Our eyes behold exterior mysteries + And gods unascertainable as these-- + Shadows and shapes irresolubly heeded; + Phantoms that tower, and substance scarcely known. + Our sister knows all mysteries one alone, + One shape, one shadow, crowding out the skies; + Whose eyeless head and lipless face debar + All others nameless or familiar, + Filling with night all former lips and eyes + Of god, and ghost, and star: + + For her all shapes have fed the shape of night; + All darker forms, and dubious forms, or pallid, + Are met and reconciled where none is valid. + But unto us solution nor respite + Of mystery's multiform incessancy + From unexplored or system-trodden sky + Shall come; but as a load importunate, + Enigma past and mystery foreseen + Weigh mightily upon us, and between + Our sorrow deepens, and our songs abate + In cadences of threne. + + A gloom that gathers silence looms more closely, + And quiet centering darkness at its heart; + But from the certitude of night depart + Uncertain god nor eidolon less ghostly; + But stronger grown with strength obtained from light + That failed, and power lent by the stronger night, + Perplex us with new mystery, and doubt + If these our flames, that deathward toss and fall + Be festal lights or lights funereal + For mightier gods within the gulfs without, + Phantoms more cryptical. + + New shadows from the wings of Time unfolding + Across the depth and eminence of years, + Fall deeplier with the broadening gloom of fears. + Prophetic-eyed, with planet-hosts beholding + The night take form upon the face of suns, + We see (thus grief's vaticination runs-- + Presageful sorrow for our sister slain) + A night wherein all sorrow shall be past, + One with night's single mystery at last; + Nor vocal sun nor singing world remain + As Time's elegiast. + + + + + THE MAZE OF SLEEP + + + Sleep is a pathless labyrinth, + Dark to the gaze of moons and suns, + Through which the colored clue of dreams, + A gossamer thread, obscurely runs. + + + + + THE WINDS + + + To me the winds that die and start, + And strive in wars that never cease, + Are dearer than the level peace + That lies unstirred at summer's heart; + + More dear to me the shadowed wold, + Where, with report of tempest rife, + The air intensifies with life, + Than quiet fields of summer's gold. + + I am the winds' admitted friend: + They seal our linked fellowships + With speech of warm or icy lips, + With touch of west and east that blend. + + And when my spirit listless stands, + With folded wings that do not live, + Their own assuageless wings they give + To lift her from the stirless lands. + + * * * * * + + Within the place unmanifest + Where central Truth is immanent, + Lies there a vast, entire content + Of sound and movement one in rest? + + I know not this. Yet in my heart, + I feel that where all truths concur, + The shrine is peaceless with the stir + Of winds that enter and depart. + + + + + THE MASQUE OF FORSAKEN GODS + + SCENE: _A moonlit glade on a summer midnight_ + + + THE POET + + What consummation of the toiling moon + O'ercomes the midnight blue with violet, + Wherein the stars turn grey! The summer's green, + Edged and strong by day, is dull and faint + Beneath the moon's all-dominating mood, + That in this absence of the impassioned sun, + Sways to a sleep of sound and calm of color + The live and vivid aspect of the world-- + Subdued as with the great expectancy + Which blurs beginning features of a dream, + Things and events lost 'neath an omening + Of central and oppressive bulk to come. + Here were the theatre of a miracle, + If such, within a world long alienate + From its first dreams, and shut with skeptic years, + Might now befall. + + + THE PHILOSOPHER + + The Huntress rides no more + Across the upturned faces of the stars: + 'Tis but the dead shell of a frozen world, + Glittering with desolation. Earth's old gods-- + The gods that haunt like dreams each planet's youth-- + Are fled from years incredulous, and tired + With penetrating of successive masks, + That give but emptiness they served to hide. + Remains not faith enough to bring them back-- + Pan to his wood, Diana to her moon, + And all the visions that made populous + An eager world where Time grows weary now. + Yet Youth, that lives, might for a little claim + The pantheon of dream, on such a night, + When 'neath the growing marvel of the moon + The films of time wear perilously thin, + And thought looks backward to the simpler years, + Till all the vision seems but just beyond. + If one have faith, it may be that he shall + Behold the gods--once only, and no more, + Because of Time's inhospitality, + For which they may not stay. + + + THE POET + + Within the marvel of the light, what flower + Of active wonder from quiescence springs! + Is it a throng of luminous white clouds, + Phantoms of some old storm's death-driven Titans, + That float beneath the moon, and speak with voices + Like the last echoes of a thunder spent? + 'Tis the forsaken gods, that win a foothold + About the magic circle which the moon + Draws like some old enchantress round the glade. + + + THE PHILOSOPHER + + I see them not: the vision is addressed + Only to thine acute and eager youth. + + + JOVE + + All heaven and earth were once my throne; + Now I have but the wind alone + For shifting judgment-seat. + The pillared world supported me: + Yet man's old incredulity + Left nothing for my feet. + + + PAN + + Man hath forgotten me: + Yet seems it that my memory + Saddens the wistful voices of the wood; + Within each erst-frequented spot + Echo forgets my music not, + Nor Earth my tread where trampling years have stood. + + + ARTEMIS + + Time hath grown cold + Toward beauty loved of old. + The gods must quake + When dreams and hopes forsake + The heart of man, + And disillusion's ban + More chill than stone, + Rears till the former throne + Of loveliness + Is dark and tenantless. + Now must I weep-- + Homeless within the deep + Where once of old + Mine orbed chariot rolled,-- + And mourn in vain + Man's immemorial pain + Uncomforted + Of light and beauty fled. + + + APOLLO + + Time wearied of my song-- + A satiate and capricious king + Who for his pleasure bade me sing, + First of his minstrel throng. + Till, cloyed with melody, + His ear grew faint to voice and lyre; + Forgotten then of Time's desire, + His thought was void of me. + + + APHRODITE + + I, born of sound and foam, + Child of the sea and wind, + Was fire upon mankind-- + Fuelled with Syria, and with Greece and Rome. + Time fanned me with his breath; + Love found new warmth in me, + And Life its ecstasy, + Till I grew deadly with the wind of death. + + + A NYMPH + + How can the world be still so beautiful + When beauty's self is fled? Tis like the mute + And marble loveliness of some dead girl; + And we that hover here, are as the spirit + Of former voice and motion, and live color + In that which shall not stir nor speak again. + + + ANOTHER NYMPH + + Nay, rather say this lovely, lifeless world + Is but a rigid semblance, counterfeiting + The world which was. Nor have the gods retained + Such power as once informed and rendered vital + The cryptic irresponsiveness of stone,-- + That statue which Pygmalion made and loved. + + + ATE + + I, who was discord among men, + Alone of all Time's hierarchy + Find that Time hath no need of me, + No lack that I might fill again. + + + THE POET + + Tell me, O gods, are ye forever doomed + To fall and flutter among spacial winds, + Finding release nor foothold anywhere-- + Debarred from doors of all the suns, like spirits + Whose names are blotted from the lists of Time, + Though they themselves yet wander undestroyed? + + + THE GODS TOGETHER + + Throneless, discrowned, and impotent, + In man's sad disillusionment, + We passed with Earth's returnless youth, + Who were the semblances of truth, + The veils that hid the vacantness + Infinite, naked, meaningless, + The blank and universal Sphinx + Each world beholds at last--and sinks. + New gods protect awhile the gaze + Of man--each one a veil that stays-- + Till the new gods, discredited, + Like mist that melts with noon, are fled-- + That power oppressive, limitless, + The tyranny of nothingness. + Our power is dead upon the earth + With the first dews and dawns of Time; + But in the far and younger clime + Of other worlds, it hath re-birth. + Yea, though we find not entrance here-- + Astray like feathers on the wind, + To neither earth nor heaven consigned-- + Fresh altars in a distant sphere + Are keen with fragrance, bright with fire, + New hearths to warm us from the night, + Till, banished thence, we pass in flight + While all the flames of dream expire. + + + + + A SUNSET + + + As blood from some enormous hurt + The sanguine sunset leapt; + Across it, like a dabbled skirt, + The hurrying tempest swept. + + + + + THE CLOUD-ISLANDS + + + What islands marvellous are these, + That gem the sunset's tides of light-- + Opals aglow in saffron seas? + How beautiful they lie, and bright, + Like some new-found Hesperides! + + What varied, changing magic hues + Tint gorgeously each shore and hill! + What blazing, vivid golds and blues + Their seaward winding valleys fill! + What amethysts their peaks suffuse! + + Close held by curving arms of land + That out within the ocean reach, + I mark a faery city stand, + Set high upon a sloping beach + That burns with fire of shimmering sand. + + Of sunset-light is formed each wall; + Each dome a rainbow-bubble seems; + And every spire that towers tall + A ray of golden moonlight gleams; + Of opal-flame is every hall. + + Alas! how quickly dims their glow! + What veils their dreamy splendours mar! + Like broken dreams the islands go, + As down from strands of cloud and star, + The sinking tides of daylight flow. + + + + + THE SNOW-BLOSSOMS + + + But yestereve the winter trees + Reared leafless, blackly bare, + Their twigs and branches poignant-marked + Upon the sunset-flare. + + White-petaled, opens now the dawn, + And in its pallid glow, + Revealed, each leaf-lorn, barren tree + Stands white with flowers of snow. + + + + + THE SUMMER MOON + + + How is it, O moon, that melting, + Unstintedly, prodigally, + On the peaks' hard majesty, + Till they seem diaphanous + And fluctuant as a veil, + And pouring thy rapturous light + Through pine, and oak, and laurel, + Till the summer-sharpened green, + Softening and tremulous, + Is a lustrous miracle-- + How is it that I find, + When I turn again to thee, + That thy lost and wasted light + Is regained in one magic breath? + + + + + THE RETURN OF HYPERION + + + The dungeon-clefts of Tartarus + Are just beyond yon mountain-girdle, + Whose mass is bound around the bulk + Of the dark, unstirred, unmoving East. + Alike on the mountains and the plain, + The night is as some terrific dream, + That closes the soul in a crypt of dread + Apart from touch or sense of earth, + As in the space of Eternity. + + What light unseen perturbs the darkness? + Behold! it stirs and fluctuates + Between the mountains and the stars + That are set as guards above the prison + Of the captive Titan-god. I know + That in the deeps beneath, Hyperion + Divides the pillared vault of dark, + And stands a space upon its ruin. + Then light is laid upon the peaks, + As the hand of one who climbs beyond; + And, lo! the Sun! The sentinel stars + Are dead with overpotent flame, + And in their place Hyperion stands. + The night is loosened from the land, + As a dream from the mind of the dreamer. + A great wind blows across the dawn, + Like the wind of the motion of the world. + + + + + LETHE + + + I flow beneath the columns that upbear + The world, and all the tracts of heaven and hell; + Foamless I sweep, where sounds nor glimmers tell + My motion nadir-ward; no moment's flare + Gives each to each the shapes that, unaware, + Commingle at my verge, to test the spell + Of waves intense with night, whose deeps compel + One face from pain, and rapture, and despair. + + The fruitless earth's denied and cheated sons + Meet here, where fruitful and unfruitful cease. + And when their lords, the mightier, hidden Ones, + Have drained all worlds till being's wine is low, + Shall they not come, and from the oblivious flow + Drink at one draught a universe of peace? + + + + + ATLANTIS + + + Above its domes the gulfs accumulate + To where the sea-winds trumpet forth their screed; + But here the buried waters take no heed-- + Deaf, and with closed lips from press of weight + Imposed by ocean. Dim, inanimate, + On temples of an unremembered creed + Involved in long, slow tentacles of weed, + The dead tide lies immovable as Fate. + + From out the ponderous-vaulted ocean-dome, + A clouded light is questionably shed + On altars of a goddess garlanded + With blossoms of some weird and hueless vine; + And winged, fleet, through skies beneath the foam, + Like silent birds the sea-things dart and shine. + + + + + THE UNREVEALED + + + How dense the glooms of Death, impervious + To aught of old memorial light! How strait + The sunless road, suspended, separate, + That leads to later birth! Untremulous + With any secret morn of stars, to us + The Past is closed as with division great + Of planet-girdling seas--unknown its gate, + Beyond the mouths of shadows cavernous. + + Oh! may it be that Death in kindness strips + The soul of memory's raiment, rendering blind + Our vision, lest surmounted deeps appal, + As when on mountain peaks a glance behind + Betrays with knowledge, and the climber slips + Down gulfs of fear to some enormous fall? + + + + + THE ELDRITCH DARK + + + Now as the twilight's doubtful interval + Closes with night's accomplished certainty, + A wizard wind goes crying eerily; + And in the glade unsteady shadows crawl, + Timed to the trees, whose voices rear and fall + As with some dreadful witches' ecstasy, + Flung upward to the dark, whence glitters free + The crooked moon, impendent over all. + + Twin veils of covering cloud and silence thrown + Across the movement and the sound of things, + Make blank the night, till in the broken west + The moon's ensanguined blade awhile is shown.... + The night grows whole again.... The shadows rest, + Gathered beneath a greater shadow's wings. + + + + + THE CHERRY-SNOWS + + + The cherry-snows are falling now; + Down from the blossom-clouded sky + Of zephyr-troubled twig and bough, + In widely settling whirls they fly. + + The orchard earth, unclothed and brown, + Is wintry-hued with petals bright; + E'en as the snow they glimmer down; + Brief as the snow's their stainless white. + + + + + FAIRY LANTERNS + + + 'Tis said these blossom-lanterns light + The elves upon their midnight way; + That fairy toil and elfin play + Receive their beams of magic white. + + I marvel not if it be true; + I know this flower has lighted me + Nearer to Beauty's mystery, + And past the veils of secrets new. + + + + + NIRVANA + + + Poised as a god whose lone, detached post, + An eyrie, pends between the boundary-marks + Of finite years, and those unvaried darks + That veil Eternity, I saw the host + Of worlds and suns, swept from the furthermost + Of night--confusion as of dust with sparks-- + Whirl tow'rd the opposing brink; as one who harks + Some warning trumpet, Time, a withered ghost, + Fled with them; disunited orbs that late + Were atoms of the universal frame, + They passed to some eternal fragment-heap. + And, lo, the gods, from space discorporate, + Who were its life and vital spirit, came, + Drawn outward by the vampire-lips of Sleep! + + + + + THE NEMESIS OF SUNS + + + Lo, what are these, the gyres of sun and world, + Fulfilled with daylight by each toiling sun-- + Lo, what are these but webs of radiance spun + Beneath the roof of Night, and torn or furled + By Night at will? All opposite powers upwhirled + Are less than chaff to this imperious one-- + As wind-tossed chaff, until its sport be done, + Scattered, and lifted up, and downward hurled. + + All gyres are held within the path unspanned + Of Night's aeonian compass--loosely pent + As with the embrace of lethal-tightening weight; + All suns are grasped within the hollow hand + Of Night, the godhead sole, omnipotent, + Whose other names are Nemesis and Fate. + + + + + WHITE DEATH + + + Methought the world was bound with final frost; + The sun, made hueless as with fear and awe, + Illumined yet the lands it could not thaw. + Then on my road, with instant evening crost, + Death stood, and in its shadowy films enwound, + Mine eyes forgot the light, until I came + Where poured the inseparate, unshadowed flame + Of phantom suns in self-irradiance drowned. + + Death lay revealed in all its haggardness-- + Immitigable wastes horizonless; + Profundities that held nor bar nor veil; + All hues wherewith the suns and worlds were dyed + In light invariable nullified; + All darkness rendered shelterless and pale. + + + + + RETROSPECT AND FORECAST + + + Turn round, O Life, and know with eyes aghast + The breast that fed thee--Death, disguiseless, stern; + Even now, within thy mouth, from tomb and urn, + The dust is sweet. All nurture that thou hast + Was once as thou, and fed with lips made fast + On Death, whose sateless mouth it fed in turn. + Kingdoms debased, and thrones that starward yearn, + All are but ghouls that batten on the past. + + Monstrous and dread, must it fore'er abide, + This unescapable alternity? + Must loveliness find root within decay, + And night devour its flaming hues alway? + Sickening, will Life not turn eventually, + Or ravenous Death at last be satisfied? + + + + + SHADOW OF NIGHTMARE + + + What hand is this, that unresisted grips + My spirit as with chains, and from the sound + And light of dreams, compels me to the bound + Where darkness waits with wide, expectant lips? + Albeit thereat my footing holds, nor slips, + The threats of that Omnipotence confound + All days and hours of gladness, girt around + With sense of near, unswervable eclipse. + + So lies a land whose noon is plagued with whirr + Of bats, than their own shadows swarthier, + Whose flight is traced on roofs of white abodes, + Wherein from court to court, from room to room, + In hieroglyphics of abhorrent doom, + Is slowly trailed the slime of crawling toads. + + + + + THE SONG OF A COMET + + + A plummet of the changing universe, + Far-cast, I flare + Through gulfs the sun's uncharted orbits bind, + And spaces bare + That intermediate darks immerse + By road of sun nor world confined. + Upon my star-undominated gyre + I mark the systems vanish one by one; + Among the swarming worlds I lunge, + And sudden plunge + Close to the zones of solar fire; + Or 'mid the mighty wrack of stars undone, + Flash, and with momentary rays + Compel the dark to yield + Their aimless forms, whose once far-potent blaze + In ashes chill is now inurned. + A space revealed, + I see their planets turned, + Where holders of the heritage of breath + Exultant rose, and sank to barren death + Beneath the stars' unheeding eyes. + Adown contiguous skies + I pass the thickening brume + Of systems yet unshaped, that hang immense + Along mysterious shores of gloom; + Or see--unimplicated in their doom-- + The final and disastrous gyre + Of blinded suns that meet, + And from their mingled heat, + And battle-clouds intense, + O'erspread the deep with fire. + + Through stellar labyrinths I thrid + Mine orbit placed amid + The multiple and irised stars, or hid, + Unsolved and intricate, + In many a planet-swinging sun's estate. + Ofttimes I steal in solitary flight + Along the rim of the exterior night + That grips the universe; + And then return, + Past outer footholds of sidereal light, + To where the systems gather and disperse; + And dip again into the web of things, + To watch it shift and burn, + Hearted with stars. On peaceless wings + I pierce, where deep-outstripping all surmise, + The nether heavens drop unsunned, + By stars and planets shunned. + And then I rise + Through vaulting gloom, to watch the dark + Snatch at the flame of failing suns; + Or mark + The heavy-dusked and silent skies, + Strewn thick with wrecked and broken stars, + Where many a fated orbit runs. + An arrow sped from some eternal bow, + Through change of firmaments and systems sent, + And finding bourn nor bars, + I flee, nor know + For what eternal mark my flight is meant. + + + + + THE RETRIBUTION + + + Old Egypt's gods, Osiris, Ammon, Thoth, + Came on my dream in thunder, and their feet + Revealed, were as the levin's fire and heat. + The hosts of Rome, the Arab and the Goth + Have left their altars dark, yet stern and wroth + In olden power they stood, whose wings were fleet, + And mighty as with strength of storms that meet + In mingled foam of clouds and ocean-froth. + + Above my dream, with arch of dreaded wings, + In judgement and in sentence of what crime + I knew not, sate the gods outcast of time. + They passed, and lo, a plague of darkness fell, + Unsleeping, and accurst with nameless things, + And dreams that stood the ministers of Hell! + + + + + TO THE DARKNESS + + + Thou hast taken the light of many suns, + And they are sealed in the prison-house of gloom. + Even as candle-flames + Hast thou taken the souls of men, + With winds from out a hollow place; + They are hid in the abyss as in a sea, + And the gulfs are over them + As the weight of many peaks, + As the depth of many seas; + Thy shields are between them and the light; + They are past its burden and bitterness; + The spears of the day shall not touch them, + The chains of the sun shall not hale them forth. + + Many men there were, + In the days that are now of thy realm, + That thou hast sealed with the seal of many deeps; + Their feet were as eagles' wings in the quest of Truth-- + Aye, mightily they desired her face, + Hunting her through the lands of life, + As men in the blankness of the waste + That seek for a buried treasure-house of kings. + But against them were the veils + That hands may not rend nor sabers pierce; + And Truth was withheld from them, + As a water that is seen afar at dawn, + And at noon is lost in the sand + Before the feet of the traveller. + The world was a barrenness, + And the gardens were as the waste. + And they turned them to the adventure of the dark, + To the travelling of the land without roads, + To the sailing of the sea that hath no beacons. + Why have they not returned? + Their quest hath found end in thee, + Or surely they had fared + Once more to the place whence they came, + As men that have travelled to a fruitless land. + They have looked on thy face, + And to them it is the countenance of Truth. + Thy silence is sweeter to them than the voice of love, + Thine embrace more dear than the clasp of the beloved. + They are fed with the emptiness past the veil, + And their hunger is filled; + They have found the waters of peace, + And are athirst no more. + They know a rest that is deeper than the gulfs, + And whose seal is unbreakable as the seal of the void; + They sleep the sleep of the suns, + And the vast is a garment unto them. + + + + + A DREAM OF BEAUTY + + + I dreamed that each most lovely, perfect thing + That Nature hath, of sound, and form, and hue-- + The winds, the grass, the light-concentering dew, + The gleam and swiftness of the sea-bird's wing; + Blueness of sea and sky, and gold of storm + Transmuted by the sunset, and the flame + Of autumn-colored leaves, before me came, + And, meeting, merged to one diviner form. + + Incarnate Beauty 'twas, whose spirit thrills + Through glaucous ocean and the greener hills, + And in the cloud-bewildered peaks is pent. + Like some descended star she hovered o'er, + But as I gazed, in doubt and wonderment, + Mine eyes were dazzled, and I saw no more. + + + + + THE DREAM-BRIDGE + + + All drear and barren seemed the hours, + That passed rain-swept and tempest-blown. + The dead leaves fell like brownish notes + Within the rain's grey monotone. + + There came a lapse between the showers; + The clouds grew rich with sunset gleams; + Then o'er the sky a rainbow sprang-- + A bridge unto the Land of Dreams. + + + + + A LIVE-OAK LEAF + + + How marvellous this bit of green + I hold, and soon shall throw away! + Its subtile veins, its vivid sheen, + Seem fragment of a god's array. + + In all the hidden toil of earth, + Which is the more laborious part-- + To rear the oak's enormous girth, + Or shape its leaves with poignant art? + + + + + PINE NEEDLES + + + O little lances, dipped in grey, + And set in order straight and clean, + How delicately clear and keen + Your points against the sapphire day! + + Attesting Nature's perfect art + Ye fringe the limpid firmament, + O little lances, keenly sent + To pierce with beauty to the heart! + + + + + TO THE SUN + + + Thy light is as an eminence unto thee, + And thou are upheld by the pillars of thy strength. + Thy power is a foundation for the worlds; + They are builded thereon as upon a lofty rock + Whereto no enemy hath access. + Thou puttest forth thy rays, and they hold the sky + As in the hollow of an immense hand. + Thou erectest thy light as four walls, + And a roof with many beams and pillars. + Thy flame is a stronghold based as a mountain; + Its bastions are tall, and firm like stone. + + The worlds are bound with the ropes of thy will; + Like steeds are they stayed and contrained + By the reins of invisible lightnings. + With bands that are stouter than iron manifold, + And stronger than the cords of the gulfs, + Thou withholdest them from the brink + Of outward and perilous deeps, + Lest they perish in the desolations of the night, + Or be stricken of strange suns; + Lest they be caught in the pitfalls of the abyss, + Or fall into the furnace of Arcturus. + Thy law is as a shore unto them, + And they are restrained thereby as the sea. + + Thou art food and drink to the worlds; + Yea, by thy toil are they sustained, + That they fail not upon the road of space, + Whose goal is Hercules. + When thy pillars of force are withdrawn, + And the walls of thy light fall inward, + Borne down by the sundering night, + And thy head is covered with the Shadow, + The worlds shall wander as men bewildered + In the sterile and lifeless waste. + Athirst and unfed shall they be, + When the springs of thy strength are dust, + And thy fields of light are black with dearth. + They shall perish from the ways + That thou showest no longer, + And emptiness shall close above them. + + + + + THE FUGITIVES + + + O fugitive fragrances + That tremble heavenward + Unceasing, or if ye linger, + Halt but as memories + On the verge of forgetfulness, + Why must ye pass so fleetly + On wings that are less than wind, + To a death unknowable? + Soon ye are gone, and the air + Forgets your faint unrest + In the garden's breathlessness, + Where fall the snows of silence. + + + + + AVERTED MALEFICE + + + Where mandrakes, crying from the moonless fen, + Told how a witch, with gaze of owl or bat + Found, and each root malevolently fat + Pulled for her waiting cauldron, on my ken + Upstole, escaping to the world of men, + A vapor as of some infernal vat; + Against the stars it clomb, and caught thereat + As if their bright regard to veil again. + + Despite the web, methought they saw, appalled, + The stealthier weft in which all sound was still ... + Then sprang, as if the night found breath anew, + A wind whereby the stars were disenthralled ... + Far off, I heard the cry of frustrate ill-- + A witch that wailed above her curdled brew. + + + + + THE MEDUSA OF THE SKIES + + + Haggard as if resurgent from a tomb, + The moon uprears her ghastly, shrunken head, + Crowned with such light as flares upon the dead + From pallid skies more death-like than the gloom. + Now fall her beams till slope and plain assume + The whiteness of a land whence life is fled; + And shadows that a sepulcher might shed + Move livid as the stealthy hands of doom. + + O'er rigid hills and valleys locked and mute, + A pallor steals as of a world made still + When Death, that erst had crept, stands absolute-- + An earth now frozen fast by power of eyes + That malefice and purposed silence fill, + The gaze of that Medusa of the skies. + + + + + A DEAD CITY + + + The twilight reigns above the fallen noon + Within an ancient land, whose after-time + Lies like a shadow o'er its ruined prime. + Like rising mist the night increases soon + Round shattered palaces, ere yet the moon + On mute, unsentried walls and turrets climb, + And touch with whiteness of sepulchral rime + The desert where a city's bones are strewn. + + She comes at last; unburied, thick, they show + In all the hoary nakedness of stone. + From out a shadow like the lips of Death + Issues a wind, that through the stillness blown, + Cries like a prophet's ghost with wailing breath + The weirds of finished and forgotten woe. + + + + + THE SONG OF THE STARS + + + From the final reach of the upper night + To the nether darks where the comets die, + From the outmost bourn of the reigns of light + To the central gloom of the midmost sky, + In our mazeful gyres we fly. + And our flight is a choral chant of flame, + That ceaseless fares to the outer void, + With the undersong of the peopled spheres, + The voices of comet and asteroid, + And the wail of the spheres destroyed. + Forever we sing to a god unseen-- + In the dark shall our voices fail? + The void is his robe inviolate, + The night is his awful veil-- + How our fires grow dim and pale! + + From the ordered gyres goes ever afar + Our song of flame o'er the void unknown, + Where circles nor world, nor comet, nor star. + Shall it die ere it reach His throne? + + On the shoreless deeps of the seas of gloom + Sailing, we venture afar and wide, + Where ever await the tempests of doom, + Where the silent maelstroms lurk and hide, + And the darkling reefs abide. + And the change and ruin of stars is a song + That rises and ebbs in a tide of fire-- + A music whose notes are of dreadful flame, + Whose harmonies ever leap high'r + Where the suns and the worlds expire. + Is such music not fit for a god? + Yet ever the deep is a dark, + And ever the night is a void, + Nor brightens a word nor a mark + To show if our God may hark. + + From the gyres of change goes ever afar + Our flaming chant o'er the deep unknown, + The song of the death of planet and star. + Shall it die ere it reach His throne? + + In our shadows of light the planets sweep, + And endure for the span of our prime-- + Globed atoms that hazard the termless deep + With races that bow to the law of Time, + And yet cherish a dream sublime. + And they cry to the god behind the veil. + Yet how should their voices pass the night, + The silence that waits in the rayless void, + If he hear not our music of light, + And the thundrous song of our might? + And they strive in the gloom for truth-- + Yet how should they pierce the veil, + When we, with our splendors of flame, + In the darkness faint and fail, + Our fires how feeble and pale! + + From the ordered gyres goes ever afar + Our song of flame o'er the void unknown, + Where circles nor world, nor comet, nor star, + Shall it die ere it reach His throne? + + + + + COPAN + + + Around its walls the forests of the west + Gloom, as about some mystery's final pale + Might lie its multifold exterior veil. + Sculptured with signs and meanings unconfessed, + Its lordly fanes and palaces attest + A past before whose wall of darkness fail + Reason and fancy, finding not the tale + Erased by time from history's palimpsest. + + Within this place, that from the gloom of Eld + Still meets the light, a people came and went + Like whirls of dust between its columns blown-- + An alien race, whose record, shadow-held, + Is sealed with those of others long forespent + That died in sunless planets lost and lone. + + + + + A SONG OF DREAMS + + + A voice came to me from the night, and said, + What profit hast thou in thy dreaming + Of the years that are set + And the years yet unrisen? + Hast thou found them tillable lands? + Is there fruit that thou canst pluck therein, + Or any harvest to be mown? + Shalt thou dig aught of gold from the mines of the past, + Or trade for merchandise + In the years where all is rotten? + Are they a sea that will bring thee to any shore, + Or a desert that vergeth upon aught but the waste? + Shalt thou drink from the springs that are emptied, + Or find sustenance in shadows? + What value hath the future given thee? + Is there aught in the days yet dark + That thou canst hold with thy hands? + Are they a fortress + That will afford thee protection + Against the swords of the world? + Is there justice in them + To balance the world's inequity, + Or benefit to outweigh its loss? + + Then spake I in answer, saying, + Of my dreams I have made a road, + And my soul goeth out thereon + To that unto which no eye hath opened, + Nor ear become keen to hearken-- + To the glories that are shut past all access + Of the keys of sense; + Whose walls are hidden by the air, + And whose doors are concealed with clarity. + And the road is travelled of secret things, + Coming to me from far-- + Of bodiless powers, + And beauties without colour or form + Holden by any loveliness seen of earth. + And of my dreams have I builded an inn + Wherein these are as guests. + And unto it come the dead + For a little rest and refuge + From the hollowness of the unharvestable wind, + And the burden of too great space. + + The fields of the past are not void to me, + Who harvest with the scythe of thought; + Nor the orchards of future years unfruitful + To the hands of visionings. + I have retrieved from the darkness + The years and the things that were lost, + And they are held in the light of my dreams, + With the spirits of years unborn, + And of things yet bodiless. + As in an hospitable house, + They shall live while the dreams abide. + + + + + THE BALANCE + + + The world upheld their pillars for awhile-- + Now, where imperial On and Memphis stood, + The hot wind sifts across the solitude + The sand that once was wall and peristyle, + Or furrows like the main each desert mile, + Where ocean-deep above its ancient food + Of cities fame-forgot, the waste is nude, + Traceless as billows of each sunken pile. + + Lo! for that wrong shall vengeance come at last, + When the devouring earth, in ruin one + With royal walls and palaces undone, + And sunk within the desolated past, + Shall drift, and winds that wrangle through the vast + Immingle it with ashes of the sun. + + + + + SATURN + + + Now were the Titans gathered round their king, + In a waste region slipping tow'rd the verge + Of drear extremities that clasp the world-- + A land half-moulded by the hasty gods, + And left beneath the bright scorn of the stars, + Grotesque, misfeatured, blackly gnarled with stone; + Or worn and marred from conflict with the deep + Conterminate, of Chaos. Here they stood, + Old Saturn midmost, like a central peak + Among the lesser hills that guard its base. + Defeat, that gloamed within each countenance + Like the first tinge of death, upon a sun + Gathering like some dusk vapor, found them cold, + Clumsy of limb, and halting as with weight + Of threatened worlds and trembling firmaments. + A wind cried round them like a trumpet-voice + Of phantom hosts--hurried, importunate, + And intermittent with a tightening fear. + Far off the sunset leapt, and the hard clouds, + Molten among the peaks, seemed furnaces + In which to make the fetters of the world. + + Seared by the lightning of the younger gods, + They saw, beyond the grim and crouching hills, + Those levins thrust like spears into the heart + Of swollen clouds, or tearing through the sky + Like severing swords. Then, as the Titans watched, + The night rose like a black, enormous mist + Around them, wherein naught was visible + Save the sharp levin leaping in the north; + And no sound came, except of seas remote, + That seemed like Chaos ravening past the verge + Of all the world, fed with the crumbling coasts + Of Matter. + + Till the moon, discovering + That harsh swart wilderness of sand and stone + Tissued and twisted in chaotic weld, + Lit with illusory fire each Titan's form, + They sate in silence, mute as stranded orbs-- + The wrack of Time, upcast on ruinous coasts, + And in the slow withdrawal of the tide + Safe for awhile. Small solace did they take + From that frore radiance glistering on the dull + Black desert gripped in iron silences, + Like a false triumph o'er contestless fates, + Or a mirage of life in wastes of Death. + Yet were they moved to speak, and Saturn's voice + Seeming the soul of that tremendous land + Set free in sound, startled the haughty stars. + + "O Titans, gods, sustainers of the world, + Is this the end? Must Earth go down to Chaos, + Lacking our strength, beneath the unpracticed sway + Of godlings vain, precipitate with youth, + Who think, unrecking of disastrous chance, + To bind their will as reins upon the sun, + Or stand as columns to the ponderous heavens? + Must we behold, with eyes of impotence + That universal wrack, even though it whelm + These our usurpers in impartial doom + Beneath the shards and fragments of the world? + Were it not preferable to return, + And meeting them in fight unswervable, + Drag down the earth, ourselves, and these our foes, + One sacrifice unto the gods of Chaos? + Why should we stay, and live the tragedy + Of power that survives its use?" + + Now spake + Enceladus, when that the echoings + Of Saturn's voice had fled remote, and seemed + Dead thunders caught and flung from star to star; + "Wouldst hurl thy kingdom down the nightward gulf, + Like to a stone a curious child might cast + To test the fall of some dark precipice? + Patience and caution should we take as mail, + Not rashness for a weapon--too keen sword + That cuts the strained knot of destiny, + Ne'er to be tied again. Were it not best + To watch the slow procedure of the days, + That we may grasp a time more opportune, + When desperation is not all our strength, + Nor the foe newly filled with victory? + Then may we hope to conquer back thy realm + For thee, not for the gods of nothingness." + + He ceased, and after him no lesser god + Gave voice upon the shaken silences, + None venturing to risk comparison, + Inevitable then, of eloquence + With his; but silence like the ambiguousness + Of signal and of lesser stars o'ercast + And merged in one confusion by the moon, + Possessed that multitude, till Saturn rose. + Around his form the light intensified, + And strengthened with addition wild and strange, + Investing him as with a phantom robe, + And gathering like a crown about his brow. + His sword, whereon the shadows lay like rust + He took, and dipping it within the moon, + Made clean its length of blade, and from it cast + Swift flickerings at the stars. And then his voice + Came like a torrent, and from out his eyes + Streamed wilder power that mingled with the sound. + + * * * * * + + And his resurgent power, in glance and word, + Poured through the Titans' souls, and was become + The fountains of their own, and at his flame + Their fires were lit once more, whose restlessness + Leapt and aspired against the steadfast stars. + And now they turned, majestic with resolve, + Where, red upon the forefront of the north, + Arcturus was a beacon to the winds. + And with the flickering winds, that lightly struck + The desert dust, then sprang again in air, + They passed athwart the foreland of the north. + + Against their march they saw the shrunken waste, + A rivelled region like a world grown old + Whose sterile breast knew not the lips of Life + In all its epoch; or a world that was + The nurse of infant Death, ere he became + Too large, too strong for its restraining arms, + And towered athwart the suns. + + And there they crossed + Metallic slopes that rang like monstrous shields, + But gave not to their tread, and clanging plains + Like body-mail of greater, vaster gods. + Where hills made gibbous shadows in the moon, + They heard the eldritch laughters of the wind, + Seeming the mirth of death; and 'neath their gaze + Gaunt valleys deepened like an old despair. + Yet strode they on, through the moon's fantasies, + Bold with resolve, across a land like doubt. + + And now they passed among huge mountain-bulks, + Themselves like peaks detached, and moving slow + 'Mid fettered brethren, adding weight and gloom + To that mute conclave great against the stars. + Emerging thence, the Titans marched where still + Their own portentous shadows went before + Like night that fled but shrunk not, dusking all + That desert way. + + And thus they came where Sleep, + The sleep of weary victory, had seized + The younger gods as captives, borne beyond + All flight of mounting battle-ecstasies + In that high triumph of forgetfulness. + And on that sleep the striding Titans broke, + Vague and immense at first like forming dreams + To those disturbed gods, in mist of drowse + Purblind and doubtful yet, though soon they knew + Their erst-defeated foes, and rising stood + In silent ranks expectant, that appeared + To move, with shaking of astonished fires + That bristled forth, or were displayed like plumes + Late folded close, now trembling terribly, + Pending between the desert and the stars. + Then, sudden as the waking from a dream, + The battle leapt, where striving shapes of gods + Moved brightly through the whirled and stricken air, + Sweeping it to a froth of fire; and all + That ancient, deep-established desert rocked, + Shaken as by an onset of the gulfs + Of gathered and impatient Chaos, while, + Above the place where central battle burned + The stars drew back in fright or dazzlement, + Paling to more secluded distances. + Lo, where the moon had wrought illusive dreams + That clothed the wild in doubt and fantasy, + Hiding its hideousness with bright mirage, + Or deepening it with gulfs and glooms of Hell, + Mightier confusion, chaos absolute + Upon the imperilled sky and trembling world, + Now made a certainty within itself, + The one thing sure in shaken sky or world. + Maelstroms of battle caught in storms of fire, + Torn and involved by weaponry of gods-- + Crescented blades that met with rounds of shields; + Grappling of shapes, seen through the riven blaze + An instant, then once more obscure, and known + Only by giant heavings of that war + Of furious gods and roused elements, + Divided, leagued, contending evermore + Along the desert--these, augmentative + Round one thick center, stunned the faltering night. + + So huge that chaos, complicate within + With movements of gigantic legionry, + Antagonistic streams, impetuous-hurled + Where Jove and Saturn thunder-crested, led + In fight unswervable--so wide the strife + Of differing impulse, that Decision found + No foothold, till that first confusion should + In ordered conflict re-arrange, and stand + With its true forces known. This seemed remote, + With that wide struggle pending terribly, + As if all-various, colored Time had made + A truce with white Eternity, and both + Stood watching from afar. + + Through drifts of haze + The broadening moon, made ominous with red, + Glared from the westering night. And now that war + Built for itself, far up, a cope of cloud, + And drew it down, far off, upon all sides, + Impervious to the moon and sworded stars. + And by their own wild light the gods fought on + 'Neath that stupendous concave like a sky + Filled and illumed with glare of bursting suns. + And cast by their own light, upon that sky + The gods' own shadows moved like shapen gloom, + Phantasmagoric, changed and amplified, + A shifting frieze that flickered dreadfully + In spectral battle indecisive. Then, + Swift, as it had begun, the contest turned, + And on the heaving Titans' massive front + It seemed that all the motion and the strength + Self-thwarting and confounded, of that strife, + Was flung in centered impact terrible, + With rush of all that fire, tempestuous-blown + As if before some wind of further space, + Striking the earth. Lo, all the Titans' flame + Bent back upon themselves, and they were hurled + In vaster disarray, with vanguard piled + On rear and center. Saturn could not stem + The loosened torrents of long-pent defeat; + He, with his host, was but as drift thereon, + Borne wildly down the whelmed and reeling world. + + Hurling like slanted rain, the lurid levin + Fell o'er that flight of Titans, and behind, + In striding menace, all-victorious Jove + Loomed like some craggy cloud with thunders crowned + And footed with the winds. In that defeat, + With Jove's pursuit involved and manifold, + Few found escape unscathed, and some went down + Like senile suns that grapple with the dark, + And reel in flame tremendous, and are still. + + Ebbing, the battle left those elder gods + Upcast once more on coasts of black defeat-- + Gripped in despair, a vaster Tartarus. + The victor gods, their storms and thunders spent, + Went dwindling northward like embattled clouds, + And where the lingering haze of fight dissolved, + The pallor of the dawn began to spread + On darkness purple like the pain of Death. + Ringed with that desolation, Saturn stood + Mute, and the Titans answered unto him + With brother silence. Motionless, they seemed + Some peristyle or range of columns great, + Alone enduring of a fallen fane + In deserts of some vaster world whence Life + And Faith have vanished long, that vaguely slips + To an immemoried end. And twilight slow + Crept round those lofty shapes august, and seemed + Such as might be the faltering ghostly noon + Of mightier suns that totter down to death. + + Then turned they, passing from that dismal place + Blasted anew with battle, ere the swift + Striding of light athwart stupendous chasms + And wasteful plains, should overtake them there, + Bowed with too heavy a burden of defeat. + Slowly they turned, and passed upon the west + Where, like a weariness immovable + In menace huge, the plain its monstrous bulk, + The peaks its hydra heads, the whole world crouched + Against their march with the diminished stars. + + + + + FINIS + + + It seemed that from the west + The live red flame of sunset, + Eating the dead blue sky + And cold insensate peaks, + Was loosened slowly, and fell. + Above it, a few red stars + Burned down like low candle-flames + Into the gaunt black sockets + Of the chill insensible mountains. + But in the ascendant skies + (Cloudless, like some vast corpse + Unfeatured, cerementless) + Succeeded nor star nor planet. + It may have been that black, + Pulseless, dead stars arose + And crossed as of old the heavens. + But came no living orb, + Nor comet seeming the ghost, + Homeless, of an outcast world, + Seeking its former place + That is no more nor shall be + In all the Cosmos again. + Null, blank, and meaningless + As a burnt scroll that blackens + With the passing of the fire, + Lay the dead infinite sky. + Lo! in the halls of Time, + I thought, the torches are out-- + The revelry of the gods, + Or lamentation of demons + For which their flames were lit, + Over and quiet at last + With the closing peace of night, + Whose dumb, dead, passionless skies + Enfold the living world + As the sea a sinking pebble. + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Star-Treader and other poems, by +Clark Ashton Smith + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS *** + +***** This file should be named 38410.txt or 38410.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/4/1/38410/ + +Produced by David Starner, Matthew Wheaton and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This +file was produced from images generously made available +by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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