Classic Poem

I

As when, far off upon the sun-pale skies
Of a clear region of enormous heat,
The golden train from some dim desert seat
Of fabled empire grows upon the eyes,
A fleck, a cloud, a sea of Orient dyes,
And, high beneath his blinding canopies,
The God invisible — so beat by beat
My body hears the coming of the feet
Innumerable of surging ecstasies.

And as the city garlands every street
Before her wild & dithyrambic throng
I tremble into flower & flame to meet
The fury of the cymbal & the song —
Till suddenly the flood of rapture falls
And silence darkens down the temple walls.


II

Strange as some Mystery that paints the vast
Cloud-building arches of a shadowy fane
With Life's vertiginous & tragic train,
Wild as the star-sown melodies amassed
In ancient forests where great gales have passed
And shaken all their secrets loose again,
Divine as Life, and dear as Death and, last,
Endless as thou, O labyrinthine Pain,

Are the long windings of the mystic way
Up to that orient and unshadowed height
Where sense & spirit, winged and grown one,
Captives of loveliness, a moment stay,
Before they loose the fringes of the sun
And plunge into his blind abyss of light.


III

What power is this that gathers in its hold
All beauty & all terror, all things near
And known as childhood, fanciful as Fear,
Ghostly as sea-gleams over foundered gold,
And lovelier than the face of gods grown old,
Drawn to one murmur in the sense's ear,
As though the prisoned vastness of the sphere.
Lay like a dew-drop in a rose's fold?

Lie still & let me look into your eyes,
If haply I may read where we have been,
What sights beyond all seeing we have seen,
And from what verge of unimagined awe
Brought back the spoils of what divine emprise.
Ah, close your eyes. They see not what I saw ...