New Poems | Page 8

leaves among!?What little noises stir and pass?From blade to blade along the voluble grass!?O Nature, never-done?Ungaped-at Pentecostal miracle,?We hear thee, each man in his proper tongue!?Break, elemental children, break ye loose?From the strict frosty rule?Of grey-beard Winter's school.?Vault, O young winds, vault in your tricksome courses?Upon the snowy steeds that reinless use?In coerule pampas of the heaven to run;?Foaled of the white sea-horses,?Washed in the lambent waters of the sun.?Let even the slug-abed snail upon the thorn?Put forth a conscious horn!?Mine elemental co-mates, joy each one;?And ah, my foster-brethren, seem not sad--?No, seem not sad,?That my strange heart and I should be so little glad.?Suffer me at your leafy feast?To sit apart, a somewhat alien guest,?And watch your mirth,?Unsharing in the liberal laugh of earth;?Yet with a sympathy,?Begot of wholly sad and half-sweet memory--?The little sweetness making grief complete;?Faint wind of wings from hours that distant beat,?When I, I too,?Was once, O wild companions, as are you,?Ran with such wilful feet.?Wraith of a recent day and dead,?Risen wanly overhead,?Frail, strengthless as a noon-belated moon,?Or as the glazing eyes of watery heaven,?When the sick night sinks into deathly swoon.
A higher and a solemn voice?I heard through your gay-hearted noise;?A solemn meaning and a stiller voice?Sounds to me from far days when I too shall rejoice,?Nor more be with your jollity at strife.?O prophecy?Of things that are, and are not, and shall be!?The great-vanned Angel March?Hath trumpeted?His clangorous 'Sleep no more' to all the dead--?Beat his strong vans o'er earth, and air, and sea.?And they have heard;?Hark to the Jubilate of the bird?For them that found the dying way to life!?And they have heard,?And quicken to the great precursive word;?Green spray showers lightly down the cascade of the larch;?The graves are riven,?And the Sun comes with power amid the clouds of heaven!?Before his way?Went forth the trumpet of the March;?Before his way, before his way?Dances the pennon of the May!?O earth, unchilded, widowed Earth, so long?Lifting in patient pine and ivy-tree?Mournful belief and steadfast prophecy,?Behold how all things are made true!?Behold your bridegroom cometh in to you,?Exceeding glad and strong.?Raise up your eyes, O raise your eyes abroad!?No more shall you sit sole and vidual,?Searching, in servile pall,?Upon the hieratic night the star-sealed sense of all:?Rejoice, O barren, and look forth abroad!?Your children gathered back to your embrace?See with a mother's face.?Look up, O mortals, and the portent heed;?In very deed,?Washed with new fire to their irradiant birth,?Reintegrated are the heavens and earth!?From sky to sod,?The world's unfolded blossom smells of God.
O imagery?Of that which was the first, and is the last!?For as the dark, profound nativity,?God saw the end should be,?When the world's infant horoscope He cast.?Unshackled from the bright Phoebean awe,?In leaf, flower, mould, and tree,?Resolved into dividual liberty,?Most strengthless, unparticipant, inane,?Or suffered the ill peace of lethargy,?Lo, the Earth eased of rule:?Unsummered, granted to her own worst smart?The dear wish of the fool--?Disintegration, merely which man's heart?For freedom understands,?Amid the frog-like errors from the damp?And quaking swamp?Of the low popular levels spawned in all the lands.?But thou, O Earth, dost much disdain?The bondage of thy waste and futile reign,?And sweetly to the great compulsion draw?Of God's alone true-manumitting law,?And Freedom, only which the wise intend,?To work thine innate end.?Over thy vacant counterfeit of death?Broods with soft urgent breath?Love, that is child of Beauty and of Awe:?To intercleavage of sharp warring pain,?As of contending chaos come again,?Thou wak'st, O Earth,?And work'st from change to change and birth to birth?Creation old as hope, and new as sight;?For meed of toil not vain,?Hearing once more the primal fiat toll:-?'Let there be light!'?And there is light!?Light flagrant, manifest;?Light to the zenith, light from pole to pole;?Light from the East that waxeth to the West,?And with its puissant goings-forth?Encroaches on the 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