Classic Poem

'Twixt midnight and the dawn a weirdness falls;
In hush of wonder, night-winds softlier blow:
A far cock hails the wane of night—and lo!
An eerie dream-horn through the silence calls.
Through the thin air faint drones of meaning go;
Capricious gusts wake drowsily and run
Across the dusky fields to prophesy the sun.

I, wakened by the spirit of the time,
Slough off the drowse, as soul doth flesh at last;
Over the window-sill myself I cast;
With feet of awe that seem not mine, I climb
The hill moon-washed and silent. All is past—
The bitter longing and the dull delay,
The fever that is wrought of dream and clay.

Grown strangely big and cognizant, I stand
No more a thing of hours and sordid miles,
No more the slave of sought-for afterwhiles:
I seem to hear and half way understand
The wash of æther upon stellar isles!
Entempled 'twixt the sky and summit there
I know what makes men rear their domes of prayer.

Dawn-blanched the slinking moon to westward dips:
Across enchanted hills from some far farm
A dog bays out its sense of vague alarm.
I hear a sigh as though from Titan lips,
Yearning for speech, yet fettered with a charm;
Speech which, it seems, if I could only hear.
Would make death seem less cold and life less dear.

If this could last, it seems that I might lay
My hand on God and understand the Scheme:
But breaking in upon my groping dream
Now blares the scarlet music of the Day.
Drenched with the dew and shivering, I seem
A wailer in a bitter scheme of mud,
A hope half strangled in a stream of blood!

And yet—the birds are singing to the sun!
With clank of harness and a whistled lay
The plowman goes afield, as glad he may,
While I am wishing that the day were done!
What is it that the wild bees strive to say?
Would I could hear with some sixth, subtler sense
The meadow-lark at worship on the fence!