THE RETURN OF HYPERION
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.
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.
LETHE
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.
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 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.