Songs before Sunrise | Page 6

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 face with deathless eyes and withered hair,
Fostress of obscure lands,
Whose multiplying hands
Wove the
world's web with divers races fair
And cast it waif-wise on the stream,
The waters of the centuries,
where thou sat'st to dream;
5
O many-minded mother and visionary,
Asia, that sawest their westering waters sweep
With all the ships and
spoils of time to carry

And all the fears and hopes of life to keep,
Thy vesture wrought of
ages legendary
Hides usward thine impenetrable sleep,
And thy veiled head, night's
oldest tributary,
We know not if it speak or smile or weep.
But where for us began
The first live light of man
And first-born
fire of deeds to burn and leap,
The first war fair as peace
To shine and lighten Greece,
And the
first freedom moved upon the deep,
God's breath upon the face of time
Moving, a present spirit, seen of
men sublime;
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There where our east looks always to thy west,
Our mornings to thine evenings, Greece to thee,
These lights that
catch the mountains crest by crest,
Are they of stars or beacons that we see?
Taygetus takes here the
winds abreast,
And there the sun resumes Thermopylae;
The light is Athens where
those remnants rest,
And Salamis the sea-wall of that sea.
The grass men tread upon
Is very Marathon,
The leaves are of that
time-unstricken tree
That storm nor sun can fret
Nor wind, since she that set
Made it her
sign to men whose shield was she;

Here, as dead time his deathless things,
Eurotas and Cephisus keep
their sleepless springs.
7
O hills of Crete, are these things dead? O waves,
O many-mouthed streams, are these springs dry?
Earth, dost thou
feed and hide now none but slaves?
Heaven, hast thou heard of men that would not die?
Is the land thick
with only such men's graves
As were ashamed to look upon the sky?
Ye dead, whose name
outfaces and outbraves
Death, is the seed of such as you gone by?
Sea, have thy ports not heard
Some Marathonian word
Rise up to
landward and to Godward fly?
No thunder, that the skies
Sent not upon us, rise
With fire and
earthquake and a cleaving cry?
Nay, light is here, and shall be light,
Though all the face of the hour
be overborne with night.
8
I set the trumpet to my lips and blow.
The night is broken northward; the pale plains
And footless fields of
sun-forgotten snow
Feel through their creviced lips and iron veins
Such quick breath
labour and such clean blood flow
As summer-stricken spring feels in her pains
When dying May bears

June, too young to know
The fruit that waxes from the flower that wanes;
Strange tyrannies and vast,
Tribes frost-bound to their past,
Lands
that are loud all through their length with chains,
Wastes where the wind's wings break,
Displumed by daylong ache

And anguish of blind snows and rack-blown rains,
And ice that seals the White Sea's lips,
Whose monstrous weights
crush flat the sides of shrieking ships;
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Horrible sights and sounds of the unreached pole,
And shrill fierce climes of inconsolable air,
Shining below the
beamless aureole
That hangs about the north-wind's hurtling hair,
A comet-lighted
lamp, sublime and sole
Dawn of the dayless heaven where suns despair;
Earth, skies, and
waters, smitten into soul,
Feel the hard veil that iron centuries wear
Rent as with hands in sunder,
Such hands as make the thunder
And
clothe with form all substance and strip bare;
Shapes, shadows, sounds and lights
Of their dead days and nights

Take soul of life too keen for death to bear;
Life, conscience, forethought, will, desire,
Flood men's inanimate
eyes and dry-drawn hearts with fire.
10

Light, light, and light! to break and melt in