SONG TO OBLIVION
Art thou more fair
For all the beauty gathered up in thee,
As gold and gems within some lightless sea?
For light of flowers, and bloom of tinted air,
Art thou more fair?
Art thou more strong
For powers that turn to thee as unto sleep?
For world and star that find thy ways more deep
Than light may tread, too wearisome for song
Art thou more strong?
Nay! thou art bare
For power and beauty on thine impotence
Bestowed by fruitful Time's magnificence;
For fruit of all things strong, and bloom of fair,
Thou still art bare.
MEDUSA
As drear and barren as the glooms of Death,
It lies, a windless land of livid dawns,
Nude to a desolate firmament, with hills
That seem the fleshless earth's outjutting ribs,
And plains whose face is crossed and rivelled deep
With gullies twisting like a serpent's track.
The leprous touch of Death is on its stones,
Where for his token visible, the Head
Is throned upon a heap of monstrous rocks,
Grotesque in everlasting ugliness,
Within a hill-ravine, that splits athwart
Like some old, hideous and unhealing scar.
Her lethal beauty crowned with twining snakes
That mingle with her hair, the Gorgon reigns.
Her eyes are clouds wherein Death's lightnings lurk,
Yet, even as men that seek the glance of Life,
The gazers come, where, coiled and serpent-swift,
Those levins wait. As 'round an altar-base
Her victims lie, distorted, blackened forms
Of postured horror smitten into stone,—
Time caught in meshes of Eternity—
Drawn back from dust and ruin of the years,
And given to all the future of the world.
The land is claimed of Death: the daylight comes
Half-strangled in the changing webs of cloud
That unseen spiders of bewildered winds
Weave and unweave across the lurid sun
In upper air. Below, no zephyr comes
To break with life the circling spell of death.
Long vapor-serpents twist about the moon,
And in the windy murkness of the sky,
The guttering stars are wild as candle-flames
That near the socket.
Thus the land shall be,
And Death shall wait, throned in Medusa's eyes.
Till, in the irremeable webs of night
The sun is snared, and the corroded moon
A dust upon the gulfs, and all the stars
Rotted and fall'n like rivets from the sky,
Letting the darkness down upon all things.
ODE TO THE ABYSS
O many-gulfed, unalterable one,
Whose deep sustains
Far-drifting world and sun,
Thou wast ere ever star put out on thee;
And thou shalt be
When never world remains;
When all the suns' triumphant strength and pride
Is sunk in voidness absolute,
And their majestic music wide
In vaster silence rendered mute.
And though God's will were night to dusk the blue,
And law to cancel and disperse
The tangled tissues of the universe,
And mould the suns anew,
His might were impotent to conquer thee,
O invisible infinity!
Thy darks subdue
All light that treads thee down a space,
Exulting o'er thy deeps.
The cycles die, and lo! thy darkness reaps
The flame of mightiest stars;
In aeon-implicating wars
Thou tearest planets from their place;
Worlds granite-spined
To thine erodents yield
Their treasures centrally confined
In crypts by continental pillars sealed.
What suns and worlds have been thy prey
Through unhorizoned stretches of the Past!
What spheres that now essay
Time's undimensioned vast,
Shall plunge forgotten to thy gloom at length,
With life that cried its query of the Night
To ears with silence filled!
What worlds unborn shall dare thy strength,
Girt by a sun's unwearied might,
And dip to darkness when the sun is stilled!
O incontestable Abyss,
What light in thine embrace of darkness sleeps—
What blaze of a sidereal multitude
No peopled world is left to miss!
What motion is at rest within thy deeps—
What gyres of planets long become thy food—
Worlds unconstrainable,
That plunged therein to peace,
Like tempest-worn and crew-forsaken ships;
And suns that fell
To huge and ultimate eclipse,
And lasting gyre-release!
What sound thy gulfs of silence hold!
Stupendous thunder of the meeting stars,
And crash of orbits that diverged,
With Life's thin song are merged;
Thy quietudes enfold
Paean and threnody as one,
And battle-blare of unremembered wars
With festal songs
Sung in the Romes of ruined spheres,
And music that belongs
To younger, undiscoverable years
With words of yesterday.
Ah, who may stay
Thy soundless world-devouring tide?
O thou whose hands pluck out the light of stars,
Are worlds grown but as fruit for thee?
May no sufficient bars,
Nor marks inveterate abide
To baffle thy persistency?
Still and unstriving now,
What plottest thou,
Within thy universe-ulterior deeps,
Dark as the final lull of suns?
What new advancement of the night
On citadels of stars around whose might
Thy slow encroachment runs,
And crouching silence, thunder-potent, sleeps?
THE SOUL OF THE SEA
A wind comes in from the sea,
And rolls through the hollow dark
Like loud, tempestuous waters.
As the swift recurrent tide,
It pours adown the sky,
And rears at the cliffs of night
Uppiled against the vast.
Like the soul of the sea—
Hungry, unsatisfied
With ravin of shores and of ships—
Come forth on the land to seek
New prey of tideless coasts,
It raves, made hoarse with desire,
And the sounds of the night are dumb
With the sound of its passing.
THE BUTTERFLY
I
O wonderful and wingèd flow'r,
That hoverest in the garden-close,
Finding in mazes of the rose,
The beauty of a Summer hour!
O symbol of Impermanence,
Thou art a word of Beauty's tongue,
A word that in her song is sung,
Appealing to the inner sense!
Of that great mystic harmony,
All lovely things are notes and words—
The trees, the flow'rs, the songful birds,
The flame-white stars, the surging sea,
The aureate light of sudden dawn,
The sunset's crimson afterglow,
The summer clouds, the dazzling snow,
The brooks, the moonlight chaste and wan.
Lacking (who knows?) a cloud, a tree,
A streamlet's purl, the ocean's roar
From Nature's multitudinous store—
Imperfect were the melody!