A DREAM OF BEAUTY
I dreamed that each most lovely, perfect thing
That Nature hath, of sound, and form, and hue—
The winds, the grass, the light-concentering dew,
The gleam and swiftness of the sea-bird's wing;
Blueness of sea and sky, and gold of storm
Transmuted by the sunset, and the flame
Of autumn-colored leaves, before me came,
And, meeting, merged to one diviner form.
Incarnate Beauty 'twas, whose spirit thrills
Through glaucous ocean and the greener hills,
And in the cloud-bewildered peaks is pent.
Like some descended star she hovered o'er,
But as I gazed, in doubt and wonderment,
Mine eyes were dazzled, and I saw no more.
THE DREAM-BRIDGE
All drear and barren seemed the hours,
That passed rain-swept and tempest-blown.
The dead leaves fell like brownish notes
Within the rain's grey monotone.
There came a lapse between the showers;
The clouds grew rich with sunset gleams;
Then o'er the sky a rainbow sprang—
A bridge unto the Land of Dreams.
A LIVE-OAK LEAF
How marvellous this bit of green
I hold, and soon shall throw away!
Its subtile veins, its vivid sheen,
Seem fragment of a god's array.
In all the hidden toil of earth,
Which is the more laborious part—
To rear the oak's enormous girth,
Or shape its leaves with poignant art?
PINE NEEDLES
O little lances, dipped in grey,
And set in order straight and clean,
How delicately clear and keen
Your points against the sapphire day!
Attesting Nature's perfect art
Ye fringe the limpid firmament,
O little lances, keenly sent
To pierce with beauty to the heart!
TO THE SUN
Thy light is as an eminence unto thee,
And thou are upheld by the pillars of thy strength.
Thy power is a foundation for the worlds;
They are builded thereon as upon a lofty rock
Whereto no enemy hath access.
Thou puttest forth thy rays, and they hold the sky
As in the hollow of an immense hand.
Thou erectest thy light as four walls,
And a roof with many beams and pillars.
Thy flame is a stronghold based as a mountain;
Its bastions are tall, and firm like stone.
The worlds are bound with the ropes of thy will;
Like steeds are they stayed and contrained
By the reins of invisible lightnings.
With bands that are stouter than iron manifold,
And stronger than the cords of the gulfs,
Thou withholdest them from the brink
Of outward and perilous deeps,
Lest they perish in the desolations of the night,
Or be stricken of strange suns;
Lest they be caught in the pitfalls of the abyss,
Or fall into the furnace of Arcturus.
Thy law is as a shore unto them,
And they are restrained thereby as the sea.
Thou art food and drink to the worlds;
Yea, by thy toil are they sustained,
That they fail not upon the road of space,
Whose goal is Hercules.
When thy pillars of force are withdrawn,
And the walls of thy light fall inward,
Borne down by the sundering night,
And thy head is covered with the Shadow,
The worlds shall wander as men bewildered
In the sterile and lifeless waste.
Athirst and unfed shall they be,
When the springs of thy strength are dust,
And thy fields of light are black with dearth.
They shall perish from the ways
That thou showest no longer,
And emptiness shall close above them.
THE FUGITIVES
O fugitive fragrances
That tremble heavenward
Unceasing, or if ye linger,
Halt but as memories
On the verge of forgetfulness,
Why must ye pass so fleetly
On wings that are less than wind,
To a death unknowable?
Soon ye are gone, and the air
Forgets your faint unrest
In the garden's breathlessness,
Where fall the snows of silence.
AVERTED MALEFICE
Where mandrakes, crying from the moonless fen,
Told how a witch, with gaze of owl or bat
Found, and each root malevolently fat
Pulled for her waiting cauldron, on my ken
Upstole, escaping to the world of men,
A vapor as of some infernal vat;
Against the stars it clomb, and caught thereat
As if their bright regard to veil again.
Despite the web, methought they saw, appalled,
The stealthier weft in which all sound was still ...
Then sprang, as if the night found breath anew,
A wind whereby the stars were disenthralled ...
Far off, I heard the cry of frustrate ill—
A witch that wailed above her curdled brew.
THE MEDUSA OF THE SKIES
Haggard as if resurgent from a tomb,
The moon uprears her ghastly, shrunken head,
Crowned with such light as flares upon the dead
From pallid skies more death-like than the gloom.
Now fall her beams till slope and plain assume
The whiteness of a land whence life is fled;
And shadows that a sepulcher might shed
Move livid as the stealthy hands of doom.
O'er rigid hills and valleys locked and mute,
A pallor steals as of a world made still
When Death, that erst had crept, stands absolute—
An earth now frozen fast by power of eyes
That malefice and purposed silence fill,
The gaze of that Medusa of the skies.
A DEAD CITY
The twilight reigns above the fallen noon
Within an ancient land, whose after-time
Lies like a shadow o'er its ruined prime.
Like rising mist the night increases soon
Round shattered palaces, ere yet the moon
On mute, unsentried walls and turrets climb,
And touch with whiteness of sepulchral rime
The desert where a city's bones are strewn.
She comes at last; unburied, thick, they show
In all the hoary nakedness of stone.
From out a shadow like the lips of Death
Issues a wind, that through the stillness blown,
Cries like a prophet's ghost with wailing breath
The weirds of finished and forgotten woe.