Songs before Sunrise | Page 5

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Edonian, till they felt her come?And maddened, and her mystic face?Lightened along the streams of Thrace.
For Pleasure slumberless and pale,?And Passion with rejected veil,
Pass, and the tempest-footed throng?Of hours that follow them with song?Till their feet flag and voices fail,
And lips that were so loud so long?Learn silence, or a wearier wail;
So keen is change, and time so strong,?To weave the robes of life and rend?And weave again till life have end.
But weak is change, but strengthless time,?To take the light from heaven, or climb
The hills of heaven with wasting feet.?Songs they can stop that earth found meet,?But the stars keep their ageless rhyme;
Flowers they can slay that spring thought sweet,?But the stars keep their spring sublime;
Passions and pleasures can defeat,?Actions and agonies control,?And life and death, but not the soul.
Because man's soul is man's God still,?What wind soever waft his will
Across the waves of day and night?To port or shipwreck, left or right,?By shores and shoals of good and ill;
And still its flame at mainmast height?Through the rent air that foam-flakes fill
Sustains the indomitable light?Whence only man hath strength to steer?Or helm to handle without fear.
Save his own soul's light overhead,?None leads him, and none ever led,
Across birth's hidden harbour-bar,?Past youth where shoreward shallows are,?Through age that drives on toward the red
Vast void of sunset hailed from far,?To the equal waters of the dead;
Save his own soul he hath no star,?And sinks, except his own soul guide,?Helmless in middle turn of tide.
No blast of air or fire of sun?Puts out the light whereby we run
With girded loins our lamplit race,?And each from each takes heart of grace?And spirit till his turn be done,
And light of face from each man's face?In whom the light of trust is one;
Since only souls that keep their place?By their own light, and watch things roll,?And stand, have light for any soul.
A little time we gain from time?To set our seasons in some chime,
For harsh or sweet or loud or low,?With seasons played out long ago?And souls that in their time and prime
Took part with summer or with snow,?Lived abject lives out or sublime,
And had their chance of seed to sow?For service or disservice done?To those days daed and this their son.
A little time that we may fill?Or with such good works or such ill
As loose the bonds or make them strong?Wherein all manhood suffers wrong.?By rose-hung river and light-foot rill
There are who rest not; who think long?Till they discern as from a hill
At the sun's hour of morning song,?Known of souls only, and those souls free,?The sacred spaces of the sea.
THE EVE OF REVOLUTION
1
The trumpets of the four winds of the world
From the ends of the earth blow battle; the night heaves, With breasts palpitating and wings refurled,
With passion of couched limbs, as one who grieves?Sleeping, and in her sleep she sees uncurled
Dreams serpent-shapen, such as sickness weaves,?Down the wild wind of vision caught and whirled,
Dead leaves of sleep, thicker than autumn leaves,
Shadows of storm-shaped things,?Flights of dim tribes of kings,?The reaping men that reap men for their sheaves,
And, without grain to yield,?Their scythe-swept harvest-field?Thronged thick with men pursuing and fugitives,
Dead foliage of the tree of sleep,?Leaves blood-coloured and golden, blown from deep to deep.
2
I hear the midnight on the mountains cry
With many tongues of thunders, and I hear?Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky
With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer,?And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly,
Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear,?A sound sublimer than the heavens are high,
A voice more instant than the winds are clear,
Say to my spirit, "Take?Thy trumpet too, and make?A rallying music in the void night's ear,
Till the storm lose its track,?And all the night go back;?Till, as through sleep false life knows true life near,
Thou know the morning through the night,?And through the thunder silence, and through darkness light."
3
I set the trumpet to my lips and blow.
The height of night is shaken, the skies break,?The winds and stars and waters come and go
By fits of breath and light and sound, that wake?As out of sleep, and perish as the show
Built up of sleep, when all her strengths forsake?The sense-compelling spirit; the depths glow,
The heights flash, and the roots and summits shake
Of earth in all her mountains,?And the inner foamless fountains?And wellsprings of her fast-bound forces quake;
Yea, the whole air of life?Is set on fire of strife,?Till change unmake things made and love remake;
Reason and love, whose names are one,?Seeing reason is the sunlight shed from love the sun.
4
The night is broken eastward; is it day,
Or but the watchfires trembling here and there,?Like hopes on memory's devastated way,
In moonless wastes of planet-stricken air??O many-childed mother great and grey,
O multitudinous bosom, and breasts that bare?Our fathers' generations, whereat lay
The weanling peoples and the tribes that were,
Whose new-born mouths long dead?Those ninefold nipples fed,?Dim