The Star-Treader and other poems Part 3

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 r.e.t.a.r.dless sight; And Matter's gates disclose the candent ores Rock-held in furnaces of planet-cores.

She penetrates the sun's transplendent s.h.i.+eld, 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 t.i.tanic 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-s.p.a.ce 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 vest.i.tures 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 s.p.a.ce 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 surpa.s.sing All luminous horizons limited, The substance and the light of her have fed Ruin and silence of the night's ama.s.sing: 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.d, 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 cert.i.tude of night depart Uncertain G.o.d 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 G.o.ds 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 fellows.h.i.+ps 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 a.s.suageless wings they give To lift her from the stirless lands.