The Star-Treader and Other Poems

I, born of sound and foam,
Child of the sea and wind,
Was fire upon mankind—
Fuelled with Syria, and with Greece and Rome.
Time fanned me with his breath;
Love found new warmth in me,
And Life its ecstasy,
Till I grew deadly with the wind of death.

A NYMPH

How can the world be still so beautiful
When beauty's self is fled? Tis like the mute
And marble loveliness of some dead girl;
And we that hover here, are as the spirit
Of former voice and motion, and live color
In that which shall not stir nor speak again.

ANOTHER NYMPH

Nay, rather say this lovely, lifeless world
Is but a rigid semblance, counterfeiting
The world which was. Nor have the gods retained
Such power as once informed and rendered vital
The cryptic irresponsiveness of stone,—
That statue which Pygmalion made and loved.

ATÈ

I, who was discord among men,
Alone of all Time's hierarchy
Find that Time hath no need of me,
No lack that I might fill again.

THE POET

Tell me, O gods, are ye forever doomed
To fall and flutter among spacial winds,
Finding release nor foothold anywhere—
Debarred from doors of all the suns, like spirits
Whose names are blotted from the lists of Time,
Though they themselves yet wander undestroyed?

THE GODS TOGETHER

Throneless, discrowned, and impotent,
In man's sad disillusionment,
We passed with Earth's returnless youth,
Who were the semblances of truth,
The veils that hid the vacantness
Infinite, naked, meaningless,
The blank and universal Sphinx
Each world beholds at last—and sinks.
New gods protect awhile the gaze
Of man—each one a veil that stays—
Till the new gods, discredited,
Like mist that melts with noon, are fled
That power oppressive, limitless,
The tyranny of nothingness.
Our power is dead upon the earth
With the first dews and dawns of Time;
But in the far and younger clime
Of other worlds, it hath re-birth.
Yea, though we find not entrance here—
Astray like feathers on the wind,
To neither earth nor heaven consigned—
Fresh altars in a distant sphere
Are keen with fragrance, bright with fire,
New hearths to warm us from the night,
Till, banished thence, we pass in flight
While all the flames of dream expire.

A SUNSET

As blood from some enormous hurt
The sanguine sunset leapt;
Across it, like a dabbled skirt,
The hurrying tempest swept.

THE CLOUD-ISLANDS