New Poems | Page 9

South and on the North;
And with its great approaches does
prevail
Upon the sullen fastness of the height,
And summoning its
levied power
Crescent and confident through the crescent hour,

Goes down with laughters on the subject vale.
Light flagrant,
manifest;
Light to the sentient closeness of the breast,
Light to the
secret chambers of the brain!
And thou up-floatest, warm, and
newly-bathed,
Earth, through delicious air,
And with thine own
apparent beauties swathed,
Wringing the waters from thine arborous
hair;
That all men's hearts, which do behold and see,
Grow weak
with their exceeding much desire,
And turn to thee on fire,

Enamoured with their utter wish of thee,
Anadyomene!
What
vine-outquickening life all creatures sup,
Feel, for the air within its
sapphire cup
How it does leap, and twinkle headily!
Feel, for
Earth's bosom pants, and heaves her scarfing sea; And round and round
in bacchanal rout reel the swift spheres intemperably!
My little-worlded self! the shadows pass
In this thy sister-world, as in
a glass,
Of all processions that revolve in thee:
Not only of cyclic
Man
Thou here discern'st the plan,
Not only of cyclic Man, but of
the cyclic Me.
Not solely of Mortality's great years
The reflex just
appears,
But thine own bosom's year, still circling round
In ample
and in ampler gyre
Toward the far completion, wherewith crowned,

Love unconsumed shall chant in his own furnace-fire.
How many
trampled and deciduous joys
Enrich thy soul for joys deciduous still,

Before the distance shall fulfil
Cyclic unrest with solemn equipoise!

Happiness is the shadow of things past,
Which fools still take for
that which is to be!
And not all foolishly:
For all the past, read true,

is prophecy,
And all the firsts are hauntings of some Last,
And all
the springs are flash-lights of one Spring.
Then leaf, and flower, and
falless fruit
Shall hang together on the unyellowing bough;
And
silence shall be Music mute
For her surcharg-ed heart. Hush thou!

These things are far too sure that thou should'st dream
Thereof, lest
they appear as things that seem.
Shade within shade! for deeper in the glass
Now other imaged
meanings pass;
And as the man, the poet there is read.
Winter with
me, alack!
Winter on every hand I find:
Soul, brain, and pulses dead;

The mind no further by the warm sense fed,
The soul weak-stirring
in the arid mind,
More tearless-weak to flash itself abroad
Than the
earth's life beneath the frost-scorched sod.
My lips have drought, and
crack,
By laving music long unvisited.
Beneath the austere and
macerating rime
Draws back constricted in its icy urns
The genial
flame of Earth, and there
With torment and with tension does prepare

The lush disclosures of the vernal time.
All joys draw inward to
their icy urns,
Tormented by constraining rime,
And there
With
undelight and throe prepare
The bounteous efflux of the vernal time.

Nor less beneath compulsive Law
Rebuk-ed draw
The numb-ed
musics back upon my heart;
Whose yet-triumphant course I know

And prevalent pulses forth shall start,
Like cataracts that with
thunderous hoof charge the disbanding snow. All power is bound
In
quickening refusal so;
And silence is the lair of sound;
In act its
impulse to deliver,
With fluctuance and quiver
The endeavouring
thew grows rigid;

Strong
From its retracted coil strikes the resilient
song.
Giver of spring,
And song, and every young new thing!
Thou only
seest in me, so stripped and bare,
The lyric secret waiting to be born,

The patient term allowed
Before it stretch and flutteringly unfold

Its rumpled webs of amethyst-freaked, diaphanous gold.
And what
hard task abstracts me from delight,
Filling with hopeless hope and

dear despair
The still-born day and parch-ed fields of night,
That
my old way of song, no longer fair,
For lack of serene care,
Is
grown a stony and a weed-choked plot,
Thou only know'st aright,

Thou only know'st, for I know not.
How many songs must die that
this may live!
And shall this most rash hope and fugitive,
Fulfilled
with beauty and with might
In days whose feet are rumorous on the
air,
Make me forget to grieve
For songs which might have been, nor
ever were?
Stern the denial, the travail slow,
The struggling wall
will scantly grow:
And though with that dread rite of sacrifice

Ordained for during edifice,
How long, how long ago!
Into that
wall which will not thrive
I build myself alive,
Ah, who shall tell
me will the wall uprise?
Thou wilt not tell me, who dost only know!

Yet still in mind I keep,
He which observes the wind shall hardly
sow,
He which regards the clouds shall hardly reap.
Thine ancient
way! I give,
Nor wit if I receive;
Risk all, who all would gain: and
blindly. Be it so.
'And blindly,' said I?--No!
That saying I unsay: the wings
Hear I
not in praevenient winnowings
Of coming songs, that lift my hair and
stir it?
What winds with music wet do the sweet storm foreshow!

Utter stagnation
Is the solstitial slumber of the spirit,
The blear and
blank negation of all life:
But these sharp questionings mean strife,
and strife
Is the negation of negation.
The thing from which I turn
my troubled look
Fearing the gods' rebuke;
That perturbation
putting glory on,
As is the golden vortex in the West

Over the
foundered sun;
That--but low breathe it, lest the Nemesis
Unchild
me, vaunting this--
Is bliss, the hid, hugged, swaddled bliss!
O
youngling Joy carest!
That on my now first-mothered breast
Pliest
the strange wonder of thine infant lip,
What this