XXVIII
The storm,—that makes the sky its own,
And smites its spirit through Earth’s nerves,
And, like an instrument which serves
High purposes to us unknown
Of song that knows not that it sings,—
Itself is all majestic things
Imagination forms or feels;
Itself all wonders it reveals
To thought, which knows but semblances
Of such concealed realities.
The star, that flames through storm and crowds
An instant with its utterance
Of silence and serene romance,
And glides again into the clouds,
Shone for some present end; and filled
A moment’s need as Heaven willed:—
A thought, some dreamer labored for,
Immaculate as is a star;
A hope, some weary watcher read
Pale in the loved face of his dead.
XXIX
Towards evening, where the sweet-gum flung
Its thorny balls among the weeds,
And where the milkweed’s sleepy seeds,—
A fairy Feast of Lanterns,—swung;
The cricket tuned a plaintive lyre,
And o’er the hills the sunset hung
A purple parchment scrawled with fire.
From silver-blue to amethyst
The shadows broadened in the vale;
And, belt by belt, the pearly pale
Aladdin fabric of the mist
Stretched its vague exhalation far;
A jewel on an Afrit’s wrist,
One star gemmed sunset’s cinnabar.
Then night drew near, as when, alone,
The heart and soul grow intimate;
And on the hills the twilight sate
With shadows, whose wild robes were sown
With dreams and whispers—dreams, that led
The heart once with love’s monotone,
And whispers of the living dead.
XXX
Of life and of eternity
These are the dreams that came to me:
The one:—A whitened whirl of sea;
A gallows beetling through the rains,
And, tossing in its rusty chains,
Carrion upon the gallows-tree:
Gaunt ravens swarm above and tear
Long strips from shrivelled skin and hair:
A ship hurls pounding on the rocks:
Wild minute-guns boom through the spume
And crashing surf: out of the gloom
The strangled dead leers down and mocks.
An incorporeal solitude,
Which darkness out of darkness hewed,
The other dream: Enormous deeps
Of naught, where ancient Silence sleeps,
The eldest of Heav’n’s Titan brood:—
In unilluminated night,
Vast and insufferable white,
A summit soars: its light, which dyes
Not darkness, of itself is born:
Around its splendor, as in scorn,
Night’s dark, defiant chaos lies.