Sister Songs | Page 8

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 feast;?Whose robes are fluent crystal, crocus-hued,?Whose wings are wind a-fire, whose mantles wrought?From spray that falling rainbows shake?These, ye familiars to my wizard thought,?Make things of journal custom unto her;?With lucent feet imbrued,?If young Day tread, a