THE IDEA OF THE UNSEEN AND INTANGIBLE
AN ODE TO THE UNSEEN
Poets of flowers, singers of nooks in Space,
Petal-mongers, embroiderers of words
In the music-haunted houses of the birds,
Singers with the thrushes and pewees
In the glimmer-lighted roofs
Of the trees—
Unhand my soul!
Buds with singing in their hearts,
Birds with blooms upon their wings,
All the wandering whispers of delight,
The near familiar things;
Voice of pine trees, winds of daisies,
Sounds of going in the grain
Shall not bind me to thy singing
When the sky with God is ringing
For the Joy of the Rain.
Sea and star and hill and thunder,
Dawn and sunset, noon and night,
All the vast processional of the wonder
Where the worlds are,
Where my soul is,
Where the shining tracks are
Lift thine eyes to these
From the haunts of dewdrops,
Hollows of the flowers,
Caves of bees
That sing like thee,
Only in their bowers;
From the stately growing cities
Of the little blowing leaves,
To the infinite windless eaves
Of the stars;
From the dainty music of the ground,
The dim innumerable sound
Of the Mighty Sun
Creeping in the grass,
Softest stir of His feet
(Where they go
Far and slow
On their immemorial beat
Of buds and seeds
And all the gentle and holy needs
Of flowers),
To the old eternal round
Of the Going of His Might,
Above the confines of the dark,
Odors and winds and showers,
Day and night,
Above the dream of death and birth
Flickering East and West,
Boundaries of a Shadow of an Earth—
And soars
And plays
In illimitable light,
Sends the singing stars upon their ways
And on each and every world
When The Little Shadow for its Little Sleep
Is furled—
Pours the Days.
•••
The first time I gazed in the great town upon a solid mile of electric cars—threaded with Nothing—mesmerism hauling a whole city home to supper, it seemed to me as if the central power of all things, The Thing that floats and breathes through the universe, must have been found by someone—gathered up from between stars, and turned on—poured down gently on the planet—falling on a thousand wheels, and run on the tops of cars—the secret thrill that softly and out in the darkness and through all ages had done all things. I felt as if I had seen the infinite in some near familiar, humdrum place. I walked on in a dazed fashion. I do not suppose I could really have been more surprised if I had met a star walking in the street.
In my deepest dream
I heard the Song
Running in my sleep
Through the lowest caves of Being
Down below
Where no sound is, sun is,
Hearing, seeing
That men know.
There was something about it, about that sense of the mile of cars moving, that made it all seem very old.
An Ode to the Lightning.
Before the first new dust of dream God took
For making man and hope and love and graves
Had kindled to its fate. Before the floods
Had folded round the hills. Before the rainbow
Born of cloud had taught the sky its tints,
The Lightning Minstrel was. The cry of Vague
To Vague. The Chaos-voice that rolled and crept
From out the pale bewildered wonder-stuff
That wove the worlds,
Before the Hand had stirred that touched them,
While still, hinged on nothing,
Dim and shapeless Things
And clouds with groping sleep upon their wings
Floated and waited.
Before the winds had breathed the breath of life
Or blown from wastes of Space
To Earth’s creating place,
The souls of seeds
And ghosts of old dead stars,
Their feet with wonder should be thrilled.
—Primal fire of all desire
That leaps from men to men,
Brother of Suns
And all the Glorious Ones
That circle skies,
He flashed to these
The night that brought the birth,
The vision of the place
And raised his awful face
To all their glittering crowds,
And cried from where It lay
—A tiny ball of fire and clay
In swaddling clothes of clouds,
“Behold the Earth!”
•••••••
•••••••
Oh heavenly feet of The Hot Cloud! Bringer
Of the garnered airs. Herald of the shining rains!
Looser of the locked and lusty winds from their misty caves.
Opener of the thousand thousand-gloried doors twixt heaven
And heaven and Heaven’s heaven. Oh thou whose play
Men make to do their work (Why do their work?)
—And call from holidays of space, sojourns
Of suns and moons, and lock to earth
(Why lock to earth?)
That the Dead Face may flash across the seas
The cry of the new-born babe be heard around
A world. Ah me! and the click of lust
And the madness and the gladness and the ache
Of Dust, Dust!
AN ODE TO THE TELEGRAPH WIRES.
THE SONG THE WORLD SANG LAYING THE ATLANTIC CABLE
The mortal wires of the heart of the earth
I sing, melted and fused by men,
That the immortal fires of their souls should fling
To eaves of heaven and caves of sea,
And God Himself, and farthest hills and dimmest bounds of sense
The flame of the Creature’s ken,
The flame of the glow of the face of God
Upon the face of men.
Wind-singing wires
Along their thousand airy aisles,
Feet of birds and songs of leaves,
Glimmer of stars and dewy eves.
Sea-singing wires
Along their thousand slimy miles,
Shadowy deeps,
Unsunned steeps,
Beating in their awful caves
And weeds unfurled
Deserts of waves
The heart-beat of this upper world.
Infinite blue, infinite green,
Infinite glory of the ear
Ticking its passions through
Infinite fear,
Ooze of storm, sodden and slanting wrecks
The forever untrodden decks
Of Death,
Ever the seething wires
On the floors
Of the world,
Below the last
Locked fast
Water-darkened doors
Of the sun,
Lighting the awful signal fires
Of our speechless vast desires
On the mountains and the hills
Of the sea
Till the sandy-buried heights
And the sullen sunken vales
And fire-defying barrens of the deep
The hearth of souls shall be
Beacons of Thought,
And from the lurk of the shark
To the sunrise-lighted eerie of the lark
And where the farthest cloud-sail fills
Shall be felt the throbbing and the sobbing and the hoping
The might and mad delight,
The hell-and-heaven groping
Of our little human wills.
AN ODE TO THE WIRELESS
THE PRAYER OF MAN THROUGH ALL THE YEARS IN WHICH THE SKY-TELEGRAPH WOULD NOT WORK
Roofed in with fears,
Beneath its little strip of sky
That is blown about
In and out
Across my wavering strip of years—
Who am I
Whose singing scarce doth reach
The cloud-climbed hills,
To take upon my lips the speech
Of those whose voices Heaven fills
With splendor?
And yet—
I cannot quite forget
That in the underdawn of dreams
I have felt the faint surmise
Shining through the starry deep of my sleep
That I with God went singing once
Up and down with suns and storms
Through the phantom-pillared forms
And stately-silent naves
Of Heaven.
Great Spirit—Thou who in my being’s burning mesh
Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh,
Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust
Hast thrust
Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights,
Where are the deeds that needs must be,
The dreams, the high delights,
That I once more may hear my voice
From cloudy door to door rejoice—
May stretch the boundaries of love
Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears
To the faint-remembered glory of those years—
May lift my soul
And reach this Heaven of thine
With mine?
Where are the gleams?
Thou shalt tell me,
Shalt compel me.
The sometime glory shall return
I know.
The day shall be
When by wondering I shall learn
With vapor-fingers to discern
The music-hidden keys of skies—
Shall touch like thee
Until they answer me
The chords of the silent air
And strike the wild and slumber-music out
Dreaming there.
Above the hills of singing that I know
On the trackless, soundless path
That wonder hath
Beyond the street-cry of the poet,
The hurdy-gurdy singing
Of the throngs,
To the Throne of Silence,
Where the Doors
That guard the farthest faintest shores
Of Day
Swing their bars,
And shut the songs of heaven in
From all our dreaming-doing din,
Behind the stars.
There, at last,
The climbing and the singing passed,
And the cry,
My hushed and listening soul shall lie
At the feet of the place
Where the Singer sings
Who Hides His Face.