The fields of the past are not void to me,
Who harvest with the scythe of thought;
Nor the orchards of future years unfruitful
To the hands of visionings.
I have retrieved from the darkness
The years and the things that were lost,
And they are held in the light of my dreams,
With the spirits of years unborn,
And of things yet bodiless.
As in an hospitable house,
They shall live while the dreams abide.
THE BALANCE
The world upheld their pillars for awhile—
Now, where imperial On and Memphis stood,
The hot wind sifts across the solitude
The sand that once was wall and peristyle,
Or furrows like the main each desert mile,
Where ocean-deep above its ancient food
Of cities fame-forgot, the waste is nude,
Traceless as billows of each sunken pile.
Lo! for that wrong shall vengeance come at last,
When the devouring earth, in ruin one
With royal walls and palaces undone,
And sunk within the desolated past,
Shall drift, and winds that wrangle through the vast
Immingle it with ashes of the sun.
SATURN
Now were the Titans gathered round their king,
In a waste region slipping tow'rd the verge
Of drear extremities that clasp the world—
A land half-moulded by the hasty gods,
And left beneath the bright scorn of the stars,
Grotesque, misfeatured, blackly gnarled with stone;
Or worn and marred from conflict with the deep
Conterminate, of Chaos. Here they stood,
Old Saturn midmost, like a central peak
Among the lesser hills that guard its base.
Defeat, that gloamed within each countenance
Like the first tinge of death, upon a sun
Gathering like some dusk vapor, found them cold,
Clumsy of limb, and halting as with weight
Of threatened worlds and trembling firmaments.
A wind cried round them like a trumpet-voice
Of phantom hosts—hurried, importunate,
And intermittent with a tightening fear.
Far off the sunset leapt, and the hard clouds,
Molten among the peaks, seemed furnaces
In which to make the fetters of the world.
Seared by the lightning of the younger gods,
They saw, beyond the grim and crouching hills,
Those levins thrust like spears into the heart
Of swollen clouds, or tearing through the sky
Like severing swords. Then, as the Titans watched,
The night rose like a black, enormous mist
Around them, wherein naught was visible
Save the sharp levin leaping in the north;
And no sound came, except of seas remote,
That seemed like Chaos ravening past the verge
Of all the world, fed with the crumbling coasts
Of Matter.
Till the moon, discovering
That harsh swart wilderness of sand and stone
Tissued and twisted in chaotic weld,
Lit with illusory fire each Titan's form,
They sate in silence, mute as stranded orbs—
The wrack of Time, upcast on ruinous coasts,
And in the slow withdrawal of the tide
Safe for awhile. Small solace did they take
From that frore radiance glistering on the dull
Black desert gripped in iron silences,
Like a false triumph o'er contestless fates,
Or a mirage of life in wastes of Death.
Yet were they moved to speak, and Saturn's voice
Seeming the soul of that tremendous land
Set free in sound, startled the haughty stars.