Classic Poem

SCENE: Before the Palace of the Sun, into which a god has just passed as the guest of Hyperion . Time : Dawn. The Hours of Night and Day advance on each other as the gates close .

MORNING HOURS

I N curbed expanses our wheeling dances
Meet from the left and right;
Under this vaporous awning
Tarrying awhile in our flight,
Waiting the day's advances,
We, the children of light,
Clasp you on verge of the dawning,
Sisters of Even and Night!

CHORUS

We who lash from the way of the sun
With the whip of the winds the thronging clouds
Who puff out the lights of the stars, or run
To scare dreams back to their shrouds,
Or tiar the temples of Heaven
With a crystalline gleam of showers;

EVENING HOURS

While to flit with the soft moth, Even,
Round the lamp of the day is ours;

NIGHT HOURS

And ours with her crescent argentine,
To make Night's forehead fair,
To wheel up her throne of the earth, and twine
The daffodils in her hair;

ALL

We, moulted as plumes are,
From the wings whereon Time is borne;

MORNING HOURS

We, buds who in blossoming foretell
The date when our leaves shall be torn;

NIGHT HOURS

We, knowing our dooms are to plunge with the gloom's car
Down the steep ruin of morn;

ALL

We hail thee, Immortal!
We robes of Life, mouldering while worn.

NIGHT HOURS

Sea-birds, winging o'er sea calm-strewn
To the lure of the beacon-stars, are we,
O'er the foamy wake of the white-sailed moon,
Which to men is the Galaxy.

MORNING HOURS

Our eyes, through our pinions folden,
By the filtered flame are teased
As we bow when the sun makes golden
Earthquake in the East.

EVENING HOURS

And we shake on the sky a dusted fire
From the ripened sunset's anther,
While the flecked main, drowsing in gorged desire,
Purrs like an outstretched panther.

MORNING HOURS

O'er the dead moon-maid
We draw softly the day's white pall;
And our children the Moments we see as
In drops of the dew they fall,
Or on light plumes laid they shoot the cascade
Of colours some Heaven's bow call;

ALL

And we sing, Guest, to thee, as
Thou pacest the crystal-paved hall!

We, while the sun with his hid chain swings
Like a censer around him the blossom-sweet earth,
Who dare the lark with our passionate wings,
And its mirth with our masterless mirth;
Or — when that flying laughter
Has sunk and died away
Which beat against Heaven's rafter —
Who vex the clear eyes of day,
Who weave for the sky in the loom of the cloud
A mantle of waving rain,
We, whose hair is jewelled with joys, or bowed
Under veilings of misty pain;
We hymn thee at leaving
Who strew thy feet's coming, O Guest!
We, the linked cincture which girdles
Mortality's feverous breast,
Who heave in its heaving, who grieve in its grieving,
Are restless in its unrest;
Our beings unstirred else
Were it not for the bosom they pressed.

We see the wind, like a light swift leopard
Leap on the flocks of the cloud that flee,
As we follow the feet of the radiant shepherd
Whose bright sheep drink of the sea.
When that drunken Titan the Thunder
Stumbles through staggered Heaven,
And spills on the scorched earth under
The fiery wine of the levin,
With our mystic measure of rhythmic motion
We charm him in snorting sleep,
While round him the sun enchants from ocean
The walls of a cloudy keep.
Beneath the deep umbers
Of night as we watch and hark,
The dim-winged dreams which feed on
The blossoms of day we mark,
As in murmurous numbers they swarm to the slumbers
That cell the hive of the dark;
And life shakes, a reed on
Our tide, in the death-wind stark.
Time, Eternity's fountain, whose waters
Fall back thither from whence they rose,
Deweth with us, its showery daughters,
The Life that is green in its flows.
But whether in grief or mirth we shower,
We make not the thing we breed,
For what may come of the passing Hour
Is what was hid in the seed.
And now as wakes,
Like love in its first blind guesses,
Or a snake just stirring its coils,
Sweet tune into half-caresses,
Before the sun shakes the clinging flakes
Of gloom from his spouting tresses,
Let winds have toils
To catch at our fluttering dresses!
Winter, that numbeth the throstle and stilled wren,
Has keen frost-edges our plumes to pare,
Till we break, with the Summer's laughing children,
Over the fields of air.
While the winds in their tricksome courses
The snowy steeds vault upon
That are foaled of the white sea-horses
And washed in the streams of the sun.
Thaw, O thaw the enchanted throbbings
Curdled at Music's heart;
Tread she her grapes till from their englobings
The melodies spurt and smart!
We fleet as a rain,
Nor yearn for the being men own,
With whom is naught beginneth
Or endeth without some moan;
We soar to our zenith
And are panglessly overblown.

Yet, if the roots of the truth were bare,
Our transience is only a mortal seeming;
Fond men, we are fixed as a still despair,
And we fleet but in your dreaming.
We are columns in Time's hall, mortals,
Wherethrough Life hurrieth;
You pass in at birth's wide portals,
And out at the postern of death.
As you chase down the vista your dream or your love
The swift pillars race you by,
And you think it is we who move, who move, —
It is you who die, who die!
O firmament, even
You pass, by whose fixture man voweth;
God breathes you forth as a bubble
And shall suck you back into His mouth!
Through earth, sea, and Heaven a doom shall be driven,
And, sown in the furrows it plougheth,
As fire bursts from stubble
Shall spring the new wonders none troweth.

The bowed East lifteth the dripping sun,
A golden cup, to the lips of Night,
Over whose cheek in flushes run
The heats of the liquid light.

MORNING HOURS

To our very pinions' ridge
We tremble expectantly; —
Is it ready, the burnished bridge
We must cast for our King o'er the sea?
And who will kneel with sunbeam-slips
To dry the flowers' sweet eyes?
Who touch with fire her finger-tips
For the lamp of the grape, as she flies?

ALL

List, list to the prances, his chariot advances,
It comes in a dust of light!
From under our brightening awning
We wheel in a diverse flight:
Yet the hands we unclasp, as our dances
Sweep off to the left and the right,
Are but loosed on the verge of the dawning
To join on the verge of the night.