New Poems | Page 4

chords of weeping,?And that sings the after-sleeping?To souls which wake too sore.?'But woe the singer, woe!' she said; 'beyond the
dead his singing-lore,?All its art of sweet and sore,?He learns, in Elenore!'
XIX
Where is the land of Luthany,?Where is the tract of Elenore??I am bound therefor.
XX
'Pierce thy heart to find the key;?With thee take?Only what none else would keep;?Learn to dream when thou dost wake,?Learn to wake when thou dost sleep.?Learn to water joy with tears,?Learn from fears to vanquish fears;?To hope, for thou dar'st not despair,?Exult, for that thou dar'st not grieve;?Plough thou the rock until it bear;?Know, for thou else couldst not believe;?Lose, that the lost thou may'st receive;?Die, for none other way canst live.?When earth and heaven lay down their veil,?And that apocalypse turns thee pale;?When thy seeing blindeth thee?To what thy fellow-mortals see;?When their sight to thee is sightless;?Their living, death; their light, most lightless;
Search no more--?Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore.'
XXI
Where is the land of Luthany,?And where the region Elenore??I do faint therefor.?'When to the new eyes of thee?All things by immortal power,?Near or far,?Hiddenly?To each other link-ed are,?That thou canst not stir a flower?Without troubling of a star;?When thy song is shield and mirror?To the fair snake-curl-ed Pain,?Where thou dar'st affront her terror?That on her thou may'st attain?Persean conquest; seek no more,?O seek no more!?Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore.'
XXII
So sang she, so wept she,?Through a dream-night's day;?And with her magic singing kept she--?Mystical in music--?That garden of enchanting?In visionary May;?Swayless for my spirit's haunting,?Thrice-threefold walled with emerald from our mortal
mornings grey.
XXIII
And as a necromancer?Raises from the rose-ash?The ghost of the rose;?My heart so made answer?To her voice's silver plash,--?Stirred in reddening flash,?And from out its mortal ruins the purpureal phantom
blows.
XXIV
Her tears made dulcet fretting,?Her voice had no word,?More than thunder or the bird.?Yet, unforgetting,?The ravished soul her meanings knew. Mine ears
heard not, and I heard.
XXV
When she shall unwind?All those wiles she wound about me,?Tears shall break from out me,?That I cannot find?Music in the holy poets to my wistful want, I doubt
me!
CONTEMPLATION.
This morning saw I, fled the shower,?The earth reclining in a lull of power:?The heavens, pursuing not their path,?Lay stretched out naked after bath,?Or so it seemed; field, water, tree, were still,?Nor was there any purpose on the calm-browed hill.
The hill, which sometimes visibly is?Wrought with unresting energies,?Looked idly; from the musing wood,?And every rock, a life renewed?Exhaled like an unconscious thought?When poets, dreaming unperplexed,?Dream that they dream of nought.?Nature one hour appears a thing unsexed,?Or to such serene balance brought?That her twin natures cease their sweet alarms,?And sleep in one another's arms.?The sun with resting pulses seems to brood,?And slacken its command upon my unurged blood.
The river has not any care?Its passionless water to the sea to bear;?The leaves have brown content;?The wall to me has freshness like a scent,?And takes half animate the air,?Making one life with its green moss and stain;?And life with all things seems too perfect blent?For anything of life to be aware.?The very shades on hill, and tree, and plain,?Where they have fallen doze, and where they doze remain.
No hill can idler be than I;?No stone its inter-particled vibration?Investeth with a stiller lie;?No heaven with a more urgent rest betrays?The eyes that on it gaze.?We are too near akin that thou shouldst cheat?Me, Nature, with thy fair deceit.
In poets floating like a water-flower?Upon the bosom of the glassy hour,?In skies that no man sees to move,?Lurk untumultuous vortices of power,?For joy too native, and for agitation?Too instant, too entire for sense thereof,?Motion like gnats when autumn suns are low,?Perpetual as the prisoned feet of love?On the heart's floors with pain-ed pace that go.?From stones and poets you may know,?Nothing so active is, as that which least seems so.
For he, that conduit running wine of song,?Then to himself does most belong,?When he his mortal house unbars?To the importunate and thronging feet?That round our corporal walls unheeded beat;?Till, all containing, he exalt?His stature to the stars, or stars?Narrow their heaven to his fleshly vault:?When, like a city under ocean,?To human things he grows a desolation,?And is made a habitation?For the fluctuous universe?To lave with unimpeded motion.?He scarcely frets the atmosphere?With breathing, and his body shares?The immobility of rocks;?His heart's a drop-well of tranquillity;?His mind more still is than the limbs of fear,?And yet its unperturbed velocity?The spirit of the simoom mocks.?He round the solemn centre of his soul?Wheels like a dervish, while his being is?Streamed with the set of the world's harmonies,?In the long draft of whatsoever sphere?He lists the sweet and clear?Clangour of his high orbit on to roll,?So gracious is his heavenly grace;?And the bold stars does hear,?Every one in his airy soar,?For evermore?Shout to each other from the peaks of space,?As thwart ravines of azure shouts the mountaineer.
'BY REASON OF THY