Classic Poem

CLXXXI.

For a while he was witched by the wind that yields
Faint fragrance out of vanilla fields,
And watched the pendulous humming-bird cling
To the rocking flower, like a golden thing.

CLXXXII.

In the sultry noon there were palaces cool
In the weedy depths of a crystal pool,
All pillared with juicy stalks, and their eaves
Translucently roofed with lotus-leaves.

CLXXXIII.

Then he would drowsily float for hours
Over leagues and leagues of prairie flowers,
And find in the wide horizons round
Something that made his spirit bound, —

CLXXXIV.

A dash of the Tartar-like impulse, that leaps
The perilous dykes of the Asian steppes,
And goes mad with the wind, and the swiftness, and stretch
Of the glorious sky-line he gallops to reach.

CLXXXV.

He has leaned his face on the desert sand
To feel the hot breath of the sunburnt land;
He has counted the pulses that sob in the wind,
Which always seems fainting and lagging behind.

CLXXXVI.

He found a strange magic in noxious shades,
In poisonous plants, and the stilted arcades
Of mangrove roots, and the cedar swamps,
And the growths of the equatorial damps.

CLXXXVII.

In the rain he watched for the sun to come out,
And he shifted the ends of the rainbows about;
The lightning obeyed him, and startled the night
With most beautiful tempests and wild plays of light.

CLXXXVIII.

After sunset he marked where the light of a star
First struck with its thin shaft the ground from afar,
And listened, if haply shrill sound it might yield,
As the spear may ring on the boss of a shield.

CLXXXIX.

When weary of color, and dazzled with light,
He thickened the darkness of palpable night;
And his soul floated out of him, sweetly unbound
By the measured concourse of silence and sound.

CXC.

There were times when he hungered for sunsets, and pressed
'Gainst the motion of earth to the up-rolling west,
And thus draughts of beautiful light he kept drinking,
Where the sun, that he hunted, was evermore sinking.