Sister Songs | Page 8

of thy
universe,
Who has no worlds to sigh for, ruling thee,
Ascends his
vermeil throne of empery,
One grace alone I seek.
Oh! may this
treasure-galleon of my verse,
Fraught with its golden passion, oared
with cadent rhyme,
Set with a towering press of fantasies,
Drop
safely down the time,
Leaving mine isled self behind it far
Soon to
be sunken in the abysm of seas,
(As down the years the splendour
voyages
From some long ruined and night-submerged star),
And in
thy subject sovereign's havening heart
Anchor the freightage of its
virgin ore;
Adding its wasteful more
To his own overflowing
treasury.
So through his river mine shall reach thy sea,
Bearing its
confluent part;
In his pulse mine shall thrill;
And the quick heart
shall quicken from the heart that's still.
Ah! help, my Daemon that hast served me well!

Not at this last, oh,
do not me disgrace!
I faint, I sicken, darkens all my sight,
As,
poised upon this unprevisioned height,
I lift into its place
The
utmost aery traceried pinnacle.
So; it is builded, the high tenement,

- God grant--to mine intent!
Most like a palace of the Occident,

Up-thrusting, toppling maze on maze,
Its mounded blaze,
And
washed by the sunset's rosy waves,
Whose sea drinks rarer hue from

those rare walls it laves.
Yet wail, my spirits, wail!
So few therein
to enter shall prevail!
Scarce fewer could win way, if their desire
A
dragon baulked, with involuted spire,
And writhen snout spattered
with yeasty fire.
For at the elfin portal hangs a horn
Which none
can wind aright
Save the appointed knight
Whose lids the
fay-wings brushed when he was born.
All others stray forlorn,
Or
glimpsing, through the blazoned windows scrolled
Receding
labyrinths lessening tortuously
In half obscurity;
With mystic
images, inhuman, cold,
That flameless torches hold.
But who can
wind that horn of might
(The horn of dead Heliades) aright, -

Straight
Open for him shall roll the conscious gate;
And light leap
up from all the torches there,
And life leap up in every torchbearer,

And the stone faces kindle in the glow,
And into the blank eyes the
irids grow,
And through the dawning irids ambushed meanings show.

Illumined this wise on,
He threads securely the far intricacies,

With brede from Heaven's wrought vesture overstrewn;
Swift Tellus'
purfled tunic, girt upon
With the blown chlamys of her fluttering seas;

And the freaked kirtle of the pearled moon:
Until he gain the
structure's core, where stands -
A toil of magic hands -
The
unbodied spirit of the sorcerer,
Most strangely rare,
As is a vision
remembered in the noon;
Unbodied, yet to mortal seeing clear,
Like
sighs exhaled in eager atmosphere.
From human haps and
mutabilities
It rests exempt, beneath the edifice
To which itself
gave rise;

Sustaining centre to the bubble of stone
Which, breathed
from it, exists by it alone.
Yea, ere Saturnian earth her child
consumes,
And I lie down with outworn ossuaries,
Ere death's grim
tongue anticipates the tomb's
Siste viator, in this storied urn
My
living heart is laid to throb and burn,
Till end be ended, and till
ceasing cease.
And thou by whom this strain hath parentage;
Wantoner between the
yet untreacherous claws
Of newly-whelped existence! ere he pause,

What gift to thee can yield the archimage?
For coming seasons'

frets
What aids, what amulets,
What softenings, or what
brightenings?
As Thunder writhes the lash of his long lightnings

About the growling heads of the brute main
Foaming at mouth, until
it wallow again
In the scooped oozes of its bed of pain;
So all the
gnashing jaws, the leaping heads
Of hungry menaces, and of ravening
dreads,
Of pangs
Twitch-lipped, with quivering nostrils and
immitigate fangs, I scourge beneath the torment of my charms
That
their repentless nature fear to work thee harms.
And as yon
Apollonian harp-player,
Yon wandering psalterist of the sky,
With
flickering strings which scatter melody,
The silver-stoled damsels of
the sea,
Or lake, or fount, or stream,
Enchants from their ancestral
heaven of waters
To Naiad it through the unfrothing air;
My song
enchants so out of undulous dream
The glimmering shapes of its
dim-tressed daughters,
And missions each to be thy minister.

Saying; "O ye,
The organ-stops of being's harmony;
The blushes on
existence's pale face,
Lending it sudden grace;
Without whom we
should but guess Heaven's worth
By blank negations of this sordid
earth,
(So haply to the blind may light
Be but gloom's undetermined
opposite);
Ye who are thus as the refracting air
Whereby we see
Heaven's sun before it rise
Above the dull line of our mortal skies;

As breathing on the strained ear that sighs
From comrades viewless
unto strained eyes,
Soothing our terrors in the lampless night;
Ye
who can make this world where all is deeming
What world ye list,
being arbiters of seeming;
Attend upon her ways, benignant powers!

Unroll ye life a carpet for her feet,
And cast ye down before them
blossomy hours,
Until her going shall be clogged with sweet!
All
dear emotions whose new-bathed hair,
Still streaming from the soul,
in love's warm air
Smokes with a mist of tender fantasies;
All these,

And all the heart's wild growths which, swiftly bright,
Spring up
the crimson agarics of a night,
No pain in withering, yet a joy arisen;

And all thin shapes more exquisitely rare,
More subtly fair,
Than
these weak ministering words have spell to prison
Within the magic
circle of this rhyme;
And all the fays who in our creedless clime


Have sadly ceased
Bearing to other children childhood's proper