Classic Poem

CXCI.

But eastward sometimes with the earth he was borne,
And lived the day long in perpetual morn,
Where the down-dipping rim of the planet gave way
Evermore in the white light, the fountain of day.

CXCII.

Sometimes he would hang up in space for a year,
And move without toil with the huge atmosphere;
Suns rose not and set not, no star shone, nor moon, —
He enjoyed the green blaze of a shadowless noon.

CXCIII.

In wild hours he rushed through earth's body and seas,
Up from, and down to, the antipodes,
So swiftly that darkness and light flashed together,
With the beauty of both and the sameness of neither.

CXCIV.

What a study was earth, so terrific, so tender,
Such a dove-tailing process of blackness and splendor,
An orb so mature, with what time had done for her,
Gentle beauty, stern beauty, and beautiful horror.

CXCV.

She told all her secrets to Prince Amadis,
Of her secular ages, uninhabited bliss;
She unveiled her vapor wheels, always at play,
The machinery that makes her phenomena, —

CXCVI.

The grim whistling avalanche, rough breath of the mountains,
The strange intermittence that sobs in some fountains,
The tiny frost atoms, that are stronger than thunder,
Which creep into rocks and then thrust them asunder, —

CXCVII.

The life of volcanoes, with the lava all seething,
And the fire and the sulphur the fierce earth is breathing,
With craters disposed round the globe in long rows
Over veins of dread fire-life whose tide ebbs and flows, —

CXCVIII.

The tortuous suck of the huge water-spout,
And unorbited meteor-globes, wheeling about,
The geysers, the mud-lakes, the fountains of naphtha,
Earth's roof falling in through-the slip of a rafter, —

CXCIX.

The new mountain-range that yet neath the sea lingers,
Just lifting among the cold waters its fingers,
The mixtures, the gases, the forces, the glories,
Of the subterranean laboratories.

CC.

Now he changes the silence of pure pathless snows,
For the crunching and grinding of icebergs and floes,
And he watches the isotherms waver and blend
With the line of the iceblink all round the world's end.