Classic Poem

Night fell o'er all. Bright gleamed the blue black sky
in highest height. Thou only wert with me,
Rio Salto, and thou wert not near by.

I heard the frogs, thy watchmen, but not thee;
they hoarsely called the coming of the rain
for farms, and places where the hemp holes be.

I saw the past: at twenty years, dull pain
my life, I thought a plot was being laid
for me. And I, alone and late, would fain.

come down this path, where 'mid the pallid shade
the hostile one might be. With laggard pace
I moved along, my pounding heart afraid.

But he would never see my stricken face,
although I trembled at a fire-fly's dart,
and at unwonted whistling sounds in space.

Slowly, slowly I crept along, my heart
in flight before. . . . What's that? A gun shot here:
and I should gasp alone, from all apart ...

no, not alone! There is the grave-yard near
with its small lamp of life, that dimly burns.
Mother would run to me with loving tear.

With finger tip she'll touch me, while she yearns,
and I shall feel her tears on my wound fall,
like coming down of dew when night returns.

With faint outcry will come the others, all,
to take me from the roadway, and, somehow,
to care for me within their country small,

that lovely spot, there where eternally thou,
my stream, art smiling on thy couch reclined,
fashioned, as nests are made, of moss and bough!

While I was thinking, and had heard, behind,
before, by ditch, on hedge, beyond a frail,
low vine, under a lofty elm, a kind.

of hiss, a flame, a burst ... lo! with bright trail,
bursting, and falling downward, fallen low,
from the infinite trembling of star spaces pale,

a globe of gold, that mutely dove below,
void, into fields, as into a void haze,
and in its swift descent it made to show.

furrows, hedges and homes, and water-ways
wandering in the dark, and forests wide
and masses of white cities in a maze.

Drawn upward out of self, " You saw? " I cried.
Only the sky was there, quiet and high.
No human shade nor sound of foot replied.

Sky and naught else: the dark and starry sky,
into whose depths submerged there seemed to fall
all that which seemed to me on earth to lie.

And now I felt the Earth a part of the All.
Trembling I felt: it too is from afar,
and saw myself down here, astray and small,

wandering among the stars, and in a star.