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Star-Treader and Other Poems

<div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/cover.jpg" width-obs="400" height-obs="611" alt="" /></div> <h1 class="booktitle">THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS</h1> BY CLARK ASHTON SMITH   <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG class="border2" src="images/title.jpg" width-obs="400" height-obs="611" alt="" /></div> 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   <hr class="chap" /> <h2>CONTENTS</h2> <div> Page NERO 1 CHANT TO SIRIUS 5 THE STAR-TREADER 6 THE MORNING POOL 11 THE NIGHT FOREST 12 THE MAD WIND 14 SONG TO OBLIVION 15 MEDUSA 16 ODE TO THE ABYSS 18 THE SOUL OF THE SEA 21 THE BUTTERFLY 22 THE PRICE 26 THE MYSTIC MEANING 27 ODE TO MUSIC 28 THE LAST NIGHT 31 ODE ON IMAGINATION 32 THE WIND AND THE MOON 35 LAMENT OF THE STARS 36 THE MAZE OF SLEEP 39 THE WINDS 40 THE MASQUE OF FORSAKEN GODS 42 A SUNSET 49 THE CLOUD-ISLANDS 50 THE SNOW-BLOSSOMS 52 THE SUMMER MOON 53 THE RETURN OF HYPERION 54 LETHE 55 ATLANTIS 56 THE UNREVEALED 57 THE ELDRITCH DARK 58 THE CHERRY-SNOWS 59 FAIRY LANTERNS 60 NIRVANA 61 THE NEMESIS OF SUNS 62 WHITE DEATH 63 RETROSPECT AND FORECAST 64 SHADOW OF NIGHTMARE 65 THE SONG OF A COMET 66 THE RETRIBUTION 69 TO THE DARKNESS 70 A DREAM OF BEAUTY 72 THE DREAM-BRIDGE 73 A LIVE-OAK LEAF 74 PINE NEEDLES 75 TO THE SUN 76 THE FUGITIVES 78 AVERTED MALEFICE 79 THE MEDUSA OF THE SKIES 80 A DEAD CITY 81 THE SONG OF THE STARS 82 COPAN 85 A SONG OF DREAMS 86 THE BALANCE 88 SATURN 89 FINIS 99 </div> <hr class="chap" /> [1] <div class="figure"> <ANTIMG src="images/ill1.jpg" width-obs="300" height-obs="112" alt="" /></div> <h2 id="NERO">NERO</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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.[2] </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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[3] 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! </div> <div class="stanza"> 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[4] 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. [5]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="CHANT_TO_SIRIUS">CHANT TO SIRIUS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [6]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_STAR-TREADER">THE STAR-TREADER</h2> <h3>I</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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." </div> </div> <h3>II</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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![7] 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. </div> </div> <h3>III</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. [8]</div> </div> <h3>IV</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> </div> <h3>V</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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[9] 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. </div> </div> <h3>VI</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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;[10] 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. </div> </div> <h3>VII</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. [11]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_MORNING_POOL">THE MORNING POOL</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> And now it holds the limpid light And shadeless azure of the skies, Wherein, like some enclaspèd gem, The morning's golden glamour lies. [12]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_NIGHT_FOREST">THE NIGHT FOREST</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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[13] With tingle of fragrances, Falls on me as a veil Between my soul and the world. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [14]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_MAD_WIND">THE MAD WIND</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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? [15]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="SONG_TO_OBLIVION">SONG TO OBLIVION</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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? </div> <div class="stanza"> 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? </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [16]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="MEDUSA">MEDUSA</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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[17] 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [18]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="ODE_TO_THE_ABYSS">ODE TO THE ABYSS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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[19] 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! </div> <div class="stanza"> 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[20] 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? [21]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_SOUL_OF_THE_SEA">THE SOUL OF THE SEA</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [22]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_BUTTERFLY">THE BUTTERFLY</h2> <h3>I</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> O wonderful and wingèd flow'r, That hoverest in the garden-close, Finding in mazes of the rose, The beauty of a Summer hour! </div> <div class="stanza"> 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! </div> <div class="stanza"> 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, </div> <div class="stanza"> The aureate light of sudden dawn, The sunset's crimson afterglow, The summer clouds, the dazzling snow, The brooks, the moonlight chaste and wan. </div> <div class="stanza"> Lacking (who knows?) a cloud, a tree, A streamlet's purl, the ocean's roar From Nature's multitudinous store— Imperfect were the melody! [23]</div> </div> <h3>II</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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 </div> <div class="stanza"> Enraptured, marvelling I gaze, And note how airily 'tis wrought— A wingèd dream, a bodied thought, The spirit of the summer days? </div> <div class="stanza"> Thy beauty opes, O Butterfly, The doors of being, with subtle sense Of Beauty's frail impermanence, And grief of knowing it must die. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> </div> <h3>III</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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, </div> <div class="stanza"> 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,[24] </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> </div> <h3>IV</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> From out the web of former lives, The ancient catenated chain Of joy and sorrow, loss and gain, One certain truth my heart derives:— </div> <div class="stanza"> Though Beauty passes, this I know, From Change and Death, this verity: Her spirit lives eternally— 'Tis but her forms that come and go. [25]</div> </div> <h3>V</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> Obedient to her summonings, Forever must my soul aspire, And seek, on wings of lyric fire, To penetrate the Heart of Things, </div> <div class="stanza"> Wherein she sits, augustly throned, In loveliness that renders dumb— The Essence and the final Sum— With peril and with wonder zoned </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [26]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_PRICE">THE PRICE</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> Behind each thing a shadow lies; Beauty hath e'er its cost: Within the moonlight-flooded skies How many stars are lost! [27]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_MYSTIC_MEANING">THE MYSTIC MEANING</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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? </div> <div class="stanza"> What tidings do the billows bring And cry in vain upon the strand? If we might only understand The brooklet's cryptic murmuring! </div> <div class="stanza"> 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! [28]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="ODE_TO_MUSIC">ODE TO MUSIC</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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[29] Clouded and deep with imaged tree and sky; And where bright rivers gleam Past cities towering high, Each wonderful as some cloud-fantasy. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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[30] Of her moon-colored robe, or haply hear, With world-oblivious ear, Some echo of her voice's mystery. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [31]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_LAST_NIGHT">THE LAST NIGHT</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [32]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="ODE_ON_IMAGINATION">ODE ON IMAGINATION</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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,[33] 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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,[34] 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. [35]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_WIND_AND_THE_MOON">THE WIND AND THE MOON</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [36]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="LAMENT_OF_THE_STARS">LAMENT OF THE STARS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [37]</div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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: </div> <div class="stanza"> 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[38] 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [39]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_MAZE_OF_SLEEP">THE MAZE OF SLEEP</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. [40]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_WINDS">THE WINDS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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; </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza">       *       *       *       *       *       *       * </div> <div class="stanza"> Within the place unmanifest Where central Truth is immanent, Lies there a vast, entire content Of sound and movement one in rest? [41]</div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [42]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_MASQUE_OF_FORSAKEN_GODS">THE MASQUE OF FORSAKEN GODS</h2> Scene: A moonlit glade on a summer midnight <h3>THE POET</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> </div> <h3>THE PHILOSOPHER</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> The Huntress rides no more Across the upturned faces of the stars:[43] '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. </div> </div> <h3>THE POET</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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?[44] 'Tis the forsaken gods, that win a foothold About the magic circle which the moon Draws like some old enchantress round the glade. </div> </div> <h3>THE PHILOSOPHER</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> I see them not: the vision is addressed Only to thine acute and eager youth. </div> </div> <h3>JOVE</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> </div> <h3>PAN</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. [45]</div> </div> <h3>ARTEMIS</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> </div> <h3>APOLLO</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. [46]</div> </div> <h3>APHRODITE</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> </div> <h3>A NYMPH</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> </div> <h3>ANOTHER NYMPH</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. [47]</div> </div> <h3>ATÈ</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> </div> <h3>THE POET</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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? </div> </div> <h3>THE GODS TOGETHER</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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[48]— 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. [49]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="A_SUNSET">A SUNSET</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> As blood from some enormous hurt The sanguine sunset leapt; Across it, like a dabbled skirt, The hurrying tempest swept. [50]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_CLOUD-ISLANDS">THE CLOUD-ISLANDS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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! </div> <div class="stanza"> 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! </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [51]</div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [52]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_SNOW-BLOSSOMS">THE SNOW-BLOSSOMS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> But yestereve the winter trees Reared leafless, blackly bare, Their twigs and branches poignant-marked Upon the sunset-flare. </div> <div class="stanza"> White-petaled, opens now the dawn, And in its pallid glow, Revealed, each leaf-lorn, barren tree Stands white with flowers of snow. [53]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_SUMMER_MOON">THE SUMMER MOON</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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? [54]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_RETURN_OF_HYPERION">THE RETURN OF HYPERION</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [55]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="LETHE">LETHE</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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? [56]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="ATLANTIS">ATLANTIS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [57]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_UNREVEALED">THE UNREVEALED</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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? [58]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_ELDRITCH_DARK">THE ELDRITCH DARK</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [59]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_CHERRY-SNOWS">THE CHERRY-SNOWS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> The cherry-snows are falling now; Down from the blossom-clouded sky Of zephyr-troubled twig and bough, In widely settling whirls they fly. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [60]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="FAIRY_LANTERNS">FAIRY LANTERNS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 'Tis said these blossom-lanterns light The elves upon their midnight way; That fairy toil and elfin play Receive their beams of magic white. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [61]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="NIRVANA">NIRVANA</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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! [62]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_NEMESIS_OF_SUNS">THE NEMESIS OF SUNS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [63]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="WHITE_DEATH">WHITE DEATH</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [64]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="RETROSPECT_AND_FORECAST">RETROSPECT AND FORECAST</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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? [65]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="SHADOW_OF_NIGHTMARE">SHADOW OF NIGHTMARE</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [66]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_SONG_OF_A_COMET">THE SONG OF A COMET</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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[67] 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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,[68] 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. [69]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_RETRIBUTION">THE RETRIBUTION</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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! [70]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="TO_THE_DARKNESS">TO THE DARKNESS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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;[71] 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. [72]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="A_DREAM_OF_BEAUTY">A DREAM OF BEAUTY</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [73]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_DREAM-BRIDGE">THE DREAM-BRIDGE</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [74]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="A_LIVE-OAK_LEAF">A LIVE-OAK LEAF</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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? [75]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="PINE_NEEDLES">PINE NEEDLES</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> O little lances, dipped in grey, And set in order straight and clean, How delicately clear and keen Your points against the sapphire day! </div> <div class="stanza"> Attesting Nature's perfect art Ye fringe the limpid firmament, O little lances, keenly sent To pierce with beauty to the heart! [76]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="TO_THE_SUN">TO THE SUN</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [77]</div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [78]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_FUGITIVES">THE FUGITIVES</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. [79]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="AVERTED_MALEFICE">AVERTED MALEFICE</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [80]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_MEDUSA_OF_THE_SKIES">THE MEDUSA OF THE SKIES</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [81]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="A_DEAD_CITY">A DEAD CITY</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [82]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_SONG_OF_THE_STARS">THE SONG OF THE STARS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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! </div> <div class="stanza"> 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? </div> <div class="stanza"> 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,[83] 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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? </div> <div class="stanza"> 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[84]— 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! </div> <div class="stanza"> 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? [85]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="COPAN">COPAN</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [86]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="A_SONG_OF_DREAMS">A SONG OF DREAMS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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? </div> <div class="stanza"> Then spake I in answer, saying, Of my dreams I have made a road,[87] 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [88]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="THE_BALANCE">THE BALANCE</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [89]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="SATURN">SATURN</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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[90] 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> "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,[91] 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?" </div> <div class="stanza"> 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?[92] Then may we hope to conquer back thy realm For thee, not for the gods of nothingness." </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza">        * * * * *     * * * *     * * *     * * *  </div> <div class="stanza"> 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,[93] 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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.[94] 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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.[95] 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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[96] A truce with white Eternity, and both Stood watching from afar. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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;[97] He, with his host, was but as drift thereon, Borne wildly down the whelmed and reeling world. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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[98] Crept round those lofty shapes august, and seemed Such as might be the faltering ghostly noon Of mightier suns that totter down to death. </div> <div class="stanza"> 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. [99]</div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> <h2 id="FINIS">FINIS</h2> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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.[100] 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. </div> </div> <div class="figure2"> <ANTIMG src="images/ill2.jpg" width-obs="100" height-obs="115" alt="" /></div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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