For in the prime, thy influence was felt;
When eyes first saw, thy beauty was as this;
Thy quiet look bade hope, fear, passion melt
Before men dreamed of empire. The abyss
Of thought yawned through their jungle then, as ever
Dark past, dark future, menaced their endeavour:
Yet, on thy nights, stood some by hill and sea
Naked; and blind impulsive spirits knelt,
Not questioning why they knelt, feeling in thee
Thought's strangest, sweetest, saddest mystery.
Still Moon, bright Moon, compassionate Moon above,
Thou shinedst there ere any life began,
When of his pain or of his powerless love
Thou heardest not from heart of any man;
Though long the earth had shaken off the vapour
Left by the vanished gleams of fire, the shaper,
Old, old, her stony wrinkled face did grow
Whilst only her blind elements did move;
Dumb, bare, and prayerless thou saw'st her go,
And afterwards again shalt see her so.
A time there was when Life had never been,
A time will be, it will have passed away;
Still wilt thou shine, still tender and serene,
When Life which in thy sister's yesterday
Had never flowered, will have drooped and faded;
Passed with the clouds that once her bosom shaded.
She will be barren then as not before,
Bared of her snows and all her garments green;
No darkling sea by any earthly shore
Will take thy rays: thy kin will be no more.
Pale satellite, old mistress of our fires,
Who hast seen so much and been so much to men,
Symbol and goal of all our wild desires,
Not any voice will cry upon thee then;
Dreamer and dream, they will have all gone over,
The sick of heart, the singer and the lover,
An end there will have been to all their lust,
Their sorrow, and the sighing of their lyres;
O all this Life that stained Earth's patient crust,
Time's dying breath will have blown away like dust.
Gone from thine eye that brief confusèd stir,
The rumours and the marching and the strife;
Earth will be still, and all the face of her
Swept of the last remains of moving life;
The last of all men's monuments that defied them,
Like those his valiant gestures that denied them,
Into the waiting elements will fade,
And thou wilt see thy fellow traveller,
A forlorn round of rocky contours made,
A glimmering disk of empty light and shade,
Ah, depth too deep for thought therein to cast;
The old, the cold companions, you will go,
Obeying still some long-forgotten past,
And all our pitiful history none will know;
Still shining, Moon, still peaceful, wilt thou wander,
But on that greater ball no heart will ponder
The thought that rose and nightingale are gone,
And all sweet things but thou; and only vast
Ridges of rock remain, and stars and sun;
O Moon, thou wilt be lovely alone for none.
And so, pale wanderer, so thou leavest me,
Passing beyond imagination's range,
Away into the void where waits for thee
Thy inconceivable destiny of change;
And after all the memories I have striven
To paint, this picture that thyself hast given
Lives, and I watch, to all those others blind,
Thy form, gliding into eternity,
Fading, an unconjectured fate to find,
The last, most wonderful image of the mind.
THE HAPPY NIGHT
I have loved to-night; from love's last bordering steep
I have fallen at last with joy and forgotten the shore;
I have known my love to-night as never before,
I have flung myself in the deep, and drawn from the deep,
And kissed her lightly, and left my beloved to sleep.
And now I sit in the night and my heart is still:
Strong and secure; there is nothing that's left to will,
There is nothing to win but only a thing to keep.