The Star-Treader and other poems Part 5

As blood from some enormous hurt The sanguine sunset leapt; Across it, like a dabbled skirt, The hurrying tempest swept.

THE CLOUD-ISLANDS

What islands marvellous are these, That gem the sunset's tides of light-- Opals aglow in saffron seas?

How beautiful they lie, and bright, Like some new-found Hesperides!

What varied, changing magic hues Tint gorgeously each sh.o.r.e and hill!

What blazing, vivid golds and blues Their seaward winding valleys fill!

What amethysts their peaks suffuse!

Close held by curving arms of land That out within the ocean reach, I mark a faery city stand, Set high upon a sloping beach That burns with fire of s.h.i.+mmering sand.

Of sunset-light is formed each wall; Each dome a rainbow-bubble seems; And every spire that towers tall A ray of golden moonlight gleams; Of opal-flame is every hall.

Alas! how quickly dims their glow!

What veils their dreamy splendours mar!

Like broken dreams the islands go, As down from strands of cloud and star, The sinking tides of daylight flow.

THE SNOW-BLOSSOMS

But yestereve the winter trees Reared leafless, blackly bare, Their twigs and branches poignant-marked Upon the sunset-flare.

White-petaled, opens now the dawn, And in its pallid glow, Revealed, each leaf-lorn, barren tree Stands white with flowers of snow.

THE SUMMER MOON

How is it, O moon, that melting, Unstintedly, prodigally, On the peaks' hard majesty, Till they seem diaphanous And fluctuant as a veil, And pouring thy rapturous light Through pine, and oak, and laurel, Till the summer-sharpened green, Softening and tremulous, Is a l.u.s.trous miracle-- How is it that I find, When I turn again to thee, That thy lost and wasted light Is regained in one magic breath?

THE RETURN OF HYPERION

The dungeon-clefts of Tartarus Are just beyond yon mountain-girdle, Whose ma.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce of Eternity.

What light unseen perturbs the darkness?

Behold! it stirs and fluctuates Between the mountains and the stars That are set as guards above the prison Of the captive t.i.tan-G.o.d. I know That in the deeps beneath, Hyperion Divides the pillared vault of dark, And stands a s.p.a.ce upon its ruin.

Then light is laid upon the peaks, As the hand of one who climbs beyond; And, lo! the Sun! The sentinel stars Are dead with overpotent flame, And in their place Hyperion stands.

The night is loosened from the land, As a dream from the mind of the dreamer.

A great wind blows across the dawn, Like the wind of the motion of the world.

LETHE

I flow beneath the columns that upbear The world, and all the tracts of heaven and h.e.l.l; Foamless I sweep, where sounds nor glimmers tell My motion nadir-ward; no moment's flare Gives each to each the shapes that, unaware, Commingle at my verge, to test the spell Of waves intense with night, whose deeps compel One face from pain, and rapture, and despair.

The fruitless earth's denied and cheated sons Meet here, where fruitful and unfruitful cease.

And when their lords, the mightier, hidden Ones, Have drained all worlds till being's wine is low, Shall they not come, and from the oblivious flow Drink at one draught a universe of peace?

ATLANTIS

Above its domes the gulfs acc.u.mulate To where the sea-winds trumpet forth their screed; But here the buried waters take no heed-- Deaf, and with closed lips from press of weight Imposed by ocean. Dim, inanimate, On temples of an unremembered creed Involved in long, slow tentacles of weed, The dead tide lies immovable as Fate.

From out the ponderous-vaulted ocean-dome, A clouded light is questionably shed On altars of a G.o.ddess garlanded With blossoms of some weird and hueless vine; And winged, fleet, through skies beneath the foam, Like silent birds the sea-things dart and s.h.i.+ne.

THE UNREVEALED

How dense the glooms of Death, impervious To aught of old memorial light! How strait The sunless road, suspended, separate, That leads to later birth! Untremulous With any secret morn of stars, to us The Past is closed as with division great Of planet-girdling seas--unknown its gate, Beyond the mouths of shadows cavernous.

Oh! may it be that Death in kindness strips The soul of memory's raiment, rendering blind Our vision, lest surmounted deeps appal, As when on mountain peaks a glance behind Betrays with knowledge, and the climber slips Down gulfs of fear to some enormous fall?

THE ELDRITCH DARK

Now as the twilight's doubtful interval Closes with night's accomplished certainty, A wizard wind goes crying eerily; And in the glade unsteady shadows crawl, Timed to the trees, whose voices rear and fall As with some dreadful witches' ecstasy, Flung upward to the dark, whence glitters free The crooked moon, impendent over all.

Twin veils of covering cloud and silence thrown Across the movement and the sound of things, Make blank the night, till in the broken west The moon's ensanguined blade awhile is shown....

The night grows whole again.... The shadows rest, Gathered beneath a greater shadow's wings.