Alcyone

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Title: Alcyone
Author: Archibald Lampman
Release Date: October 2, 2007 [EBook #22833]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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ALCYONE
by
ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN
OTTAWA
JAMES OGILVY
1899
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty

TO THE MEMORY OF
MY FATHER
HIMSELF A POET
WHO FIRST
INSTRUCTED ME
IN THE ART
OF VERSE.
CONTENTS
ALCYONE 1
IN MARCH 4
THE CITY OF THE END OF THINGS 5
THE SONG SPARROW 9
INTER VIAS 10
REFUGE 12
APRIL NIGHT 13
PERSONALITY 14
TO MY DAUGHTER 15
CHIONE 17
TO THE CRICKET 24
THE SONG OF PAN 25
THE ISLET AND THE PALM 27
A VISION OF TWILIGHT 28
EVENING 33

THE CLEARER SELF 34
TO THE PROPHETIC SOUL 36
THE LAND OF PALLAS 38
AMONG THE ORCHARDS 49
THE POET'S SONG 50
A THUNDERSTORM 56
THE CITY 57
SAPPHICS 60
VOICES OF EARTH 62
PECCAVI, DOMINE 63
AN ODE TO THE HILLS 66
INDIAN SUMMER 71
GOOD SPEECH 72
THE BETTER DAY 73
WHITE PANSIES 75
WE TOO SHALL SLEEP 77
THE AUTUMN WASTE 78
VIVIA PERPETUA 79
THE MYSTERY OF A YEAR 96
WINTER EVENING 97

WAR 98
THE WOODCUTTER'S HUT 103
AMOR VITÆ 108
WINTER-BREAK 110
ALCYONE
In the silent depth of space,
Immeasurably old, immeasurably far,

Glittering with a silver flame
Through eternity,
Rolls a great and
burning star,
With a noble name,
Alcyone!
In the glorious chart of heaven
It is marked the first of seven;
'Tis a
Pleiad:
And a hundred years of earth
With their long-forgotten
deeds have come and gone,
Since that tiny point of light,
Once a
splendour fierce and bright,
Had its birth
In the star we gaze upon.
It has travelled all that time--
Thought has not a swifter flight--

Through a region where no faintest gust
Of life comes ever, but the
power of night
Dwells stupendous and sublime,
Limitless and void
and lonely,
A region mute with age, and peopled only
With the
dead and ruined dust
Of worlds that lived eternities ago.
Man! when thou dost think of this,
And what our earth and its
existence is,
The half-blind toils since life began,
The little aims,
the little span,
With what passion and what pride,
And what hunger
fierce and wide,
Thou dost break beyond it all,
Seeking for the
spirit unconfined
In the clear abyss of mind
A shelter and a peace
majestical.
For what is life to thee,
Turning toward the primal light,

With that stern and silent face,
If thou canst not be
Something
radiant and august as night,
Something wide as space?

Therefore with a love and gratitude divine
Thou shalt cherish in thine
heart for sign
A vision of the great and burning star,
Immeasurably
old, immeasurably far,
Surging forth its silver flame
Through
eternity;
And thine inner heart shall ring and cry
With the music
strange and high,
The grandeur of its name
Alcyone!
IN MARCH
The sun falls warm: the southern winds awake:
The air seethes
upward with a steamy shiver:
Each dip of the road is now a crystal
lake,
And every rut a little dancing river.
Through great soft clouds
that sunder overhead
The deep sky breaks as pearly blue as summer:

Out of a cleft beside the river's bed
Flaps the black crow, the first
demure newcomer.
The last seared drifts are eating fast away
With
glassy tinkle into glittering laces:
Dogs lie asleep, and little children
play
With tops and marbles in the sunbare places;
And I that stroll
with many a thoughtful pause
Almost forget that winter ever was.
THE CITY OF THE END OF THINGS
Beside the pounding cataracts
Of midnight streams unknown to us

'Tis builded in the leafless tracts
And valleys huge of Tartarus.

Lurid and lofty and vast it seems;
It hath no rounded name that rings,

But I have heard it called in dreams
The City of the End of Things.
Its roofs and iron towers have grown
None knoweth how high within
the night,
But in its murky streets far down
A flaming terrible and
bright
Shakes all the stalking shadows there,
Across the walls,
across the floors,
And shifts upon the upper air
From out a thousand
furnace doors;
And all the while an awful sound
Keeps roaring on continually,

And crashes in the ceaseless round
Of a gigantic harmony.

Through

its grim depths re-echoing
And all its weary height of walls,
With
measured roar and iron ring,
The inhuman music lifts and falls.

Where no thing rests and no man is,
And only fire and night hold
sway;
The beat, the thunder and the hiss
Cease not, and change not,
night nor day.
And moving at unheard commands,
The abysses and vast fires
between,
Flit figures that with