Sunset
I
1
Now is sunset,
The nightfall lightens
Over the funeral pyre of the day …
On a balcony we
Sweep the round world whose rim
Is edged with fire …
Unstirring cumulus cloud
Is purple and scarlet … bearded cloud of the west
Is incandescent …
Beyond and below
Our planet is a fire, and the flaming
Makes our sky a glory over the dark green Earth …
A painted glory:
No wind breathes:
No tree stirs:
The world of life for a breathless moment
Is ordered and is art:
But we live …
2
Inarticulate, stripped of desire,
Motionless,
We yet live …
Our lifted faces are lighted,
Our bodies are torches touched to the fixed fire of sunset
And kindled with the unburning flame of dream …
We see the little cottage
Painted among the painted trees:
We see the clover fields, lush green,
The western hills, dark blue,
The wild, windless garden,
Grey stones …
Daring to tap and crack this glass of silence
A robin tweets …
3
Earth never seemed capable of this:
Her beautiful hours
Sweet with orchards or rough with rain-storm
Or grave with stars
Came with the ease of familiar things
Woven of the weather of the human heart:
But this
Is not of the Earth we know:
And our eyes see
A life or a death beyond and behind, within and without
Our life …
We live, but neither memory
Nor yet vision
Warms the naked moment …
We merely breathe, gaze and wonder …
We only know
That the world of human life is a capsule
Floating in vaster existences,
And that the melting of it
Would be no death
But an emergence …
II
1
Earth, over her rims,
Is a fire …
The human world, builded by hands,
Ivied by ages,
The human soul, born out of nature,
And in splendour of superstition
And tear-bought wisdom
Grown rich and weary,
Are at end of Day,
In sunset …
The magic capsule
Glowing inside with cathedrals and coliseums,
Sounding with an endless song,
Lighted with heroes and with gods,
With dreams swaying crowds,
Is melting …
The world begun by Egypt and Babylonia,
Built temple-high by Greece,
And pinnacled by Europe,
Dissolves …
2
We did not know
That the accustomed, the fixed eternal,
Could become a phantom
And fade in dying light of its own sun …
No dream of Doomsday
Could forbode the doom …
But it is here, with the whole planet
Raimented in flame …
The whole planet
On its funeral pyre …
And the sun sets
That rose on Pharaoh,
And the day ends
That dawned with Homer …
3
It ends, yet the spared live;
They live,
But neither memory nor vision
Warms the naked moment;
They merely breathe, gaze and wonder …
And the doom falls
On silence …
III
1
They live and gazing
In this visionary hour
They see a trace of the world outside
The dissolving world …
And they know
That world has been slowly dawning
And the light of its growing dawn
Mingles with this sunset
And gives it this breathless splendour …
That dawn rose
In brains like Galileo's,
Its light gathered
In spirits like Nietzsche's;
Its kindled sun
Burnt out the old sun,
And the dying creatures of that sun
Sink in the beams of the new human fire-god …
2
Those beams shall break
On the young green of a new spring,
With the nations gathered in a single song
And the bright intelligence
Of a new youth raying through the human spirit …
With a new self
For each soul that wins it, orbed like a fresh-born planet,
And swinging in harmony with all other planets;
With a new sky
Storm-cleansed of old demons and gods,
With a new earth
For new adventures …
3
Those beams shall break
On the second Day of Man:
But in this hour
Of awful sunset
We do not know that Day:
We only know
Our dissolving world floats in a vaster existence,
And this dissolution
Is no death,
But an emergence.
1
Now is sunset,
The nightfall lightens
Over the funeral pyre of the day …
On a balcony we
Sweep the round world whose rim
Is edged with fire …
Unstirring cumulus cloud
Is purple and scarlet … bearded cloud of the west
Is incandescent …
Beyond and below
Our planet is a fire, and the flaming
Makes our sky a glory over the dark green Earth …
A painted glory:
No wind breathes:
No tree stirs:
The world of life for a breathless moment
Is ordered and is art:
But we live …
2
Inarticulate, stripped of desire,
Motionless,
We yet live …
Our lifted faces are lighted,
Our bodies are torches touched to the fixed fire of sunset
And kindled with the unburning flame of dream …
We see the little cottage
Painted among the painted trees:
We see the clover fields, lush green,
The western hills, dark blue,
The wild, windless garden,
Grey stones …
Daring to tap and crack this glass of silence
A robin tweets …
3
Earth never seemed capable of this:
Her beautiful hours
Sweet with orchards or rough with rain-storm
Or grave with stars
Came with the ease of familiar things
Woven of the weather of the human heart:
But this
Is not of the Earth we know:
And our eyes see
A life or a death beyond and behind, within and without
Our life …
We live, but neither memory
Nor yet vision
Warms the naked moment …
We merely breathe, gaze and wonder …
We only know
That the world of human life is a capsule
Floating in vaster existences,
And that the melting of it
Would be no death
But an emergence …
II
1
Earth, over her rims,
Is a fire …
The human world, builded by hands,
Ivied by ages,
The human soul, born out of nature,
And in splendour of superstition
And tear-bought wisdom
Grown rich and weary,
Are at end of Day,
In sunset …
The magic capsule
Glowing inside with cathedrals and coliseums,
Sounding with an endless song,
Lighted with heroes and with gods,
With dreams swaying crowds,
Is melting …
The world begun by Egypt and Babylonia,
Built temple-high by Greece,
And pinnacled by Europe,
Dissolves …
2
We did not know
That the accustomed, the fixed eternal,
Could become a phantom
And fade in dying light of its own sun …
No dream of Doomsday
Could forbode the doom …
But it is here, with the whole planet
Raimented in flame …
The whole planet
On its funeral pyre …
And the sun sets
That rose on Pharaoh,
And the day ends
That dawned with Homer …
3
It ends, yet the spared live;
They live,
But neither memory nor vision
Warms the naked moment;
They merely breathe, gaze and wonder …
And the doom falls
On silence …
III
1
They live and gazing
In this visionary hour
They see a trace of the world outside
The dissolving world …
And they know
That world has been slowly dawning
And the light of its growing dawn
Mingles with this sunset
And gives it this breathless splendour …
That dawn rose
In brains like Galileo's,
Its light gathered
In spirits like Nietzsche's;
Its kindled sun
Burnt out the old sun,
And the dying creatures of that sun
Sink in the beams of the new human fire-god …
2
Those beams shall break
On the young green of a new spring,
With the nations gathered in a single song
And the bright intelligence
Of a new youth raying through the human spirit …
With a new self
For each soul that wins it, orbed like a fresh-born planet,
And swinging in harmony with all other planets;
With a new sky
Storm-cleansed of old demons and gods,
With a new earth
For new adventures …
3
Those beams shall break
On the second Day of Man:
But in this hour
Of awful sunset
We do not know that Day:
We only know
Our dissolving world floats in a vaster existence,
And this dissolution
Is no death,
But an emergence.
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