Classic Poem

In the midst of a world full of omen and sign, impell'd by the seeing gift,
On auspice and portent reflecting, in part I conjecture their drift;
I catch faint words of the language which the world speaks far and wide
And the soul withdrawn in the deeps of man from the birth of each man has cried.
I know that a sense is beyond the sense of the manifest Voice and Word,
That the tones in the chant which we strain to seize are the tones that are scarcely heard;
While life pulsating with secret things has many too deep to speak,
And that which evades, with a quailing heart, we feel is the sense we seek:
Scant were the skill to discern a few where the countless symbols crowd,
To render the easiest reading, catch the cry that is trite and loud.

Wistfully therefore, a mage, I come, but the records that here I bring
Are light-tongued rumours and hints alone of the songs I had hoped to sing,
Could words implied by the heart of song be suffer'd, without eclipse
Of inborn splendour, their runes to render through channel of mortal lips.

Only as mystery's scribe I make my script of the things which seem;
And this book is a book of the visions beheld by one who has walk'd in a dream —
Has walk'd in a waking dream apart from the gates and the walls which fence
The common life of a world enswathed in the dreamless swoon of sense.

But you, who are keeping a mystic watch in the same suspended state,
And I, recounting the moods therein, for an hour of waking wait;
Triumphant then through the light derived shall light from the centre blaze,
And that be known which we glimpse alone through the moon-sweet mist and haze.
How will it come to us, that great day? What will the dawn disclose?
Past veils expended, all omens ended, what truth at the heart of those?