The Star-Treader and Other Poems

All night the pool held mysteries,
Vague depths of night that lay in dream,
Where phantoms of the pale-white stars
Wandered, with darkness-tangled gleam.
And now it holds the limpid light
And shadeless azure of the skies,
Wherein, like some enclaspèd gem,
The morning's golden glamour lies.

THE NIGHT FOREST

Incumbent seemingly
On the jagged points of peaks
That end the visible west,
The rounded moon yet floods
The valleys hitherward
With fall of torrential light,
Ere from the overmost
Aggressive mountain-cusp,
She slip to the lower dark.
But here, on an eastward slope
Pointed and thick with its pine,
The forest scarcely remembers
Her light that is gone as a vision
Or ecstasy too poignant
And perilous for duration.
Withdrawn in what darker web
Or dimension of dream I know not,
In silence pre-occupied
And solemnest rectitude
The pines uprear, and no sigh
For the rapture of moonlight past,
Comes from their bosom of boughs.
Far in their secrecy
I stand, and the burden of dusk
Dull, but at times made keen
With tingle of fragrances,
Falls on me as a veil
Between my soul and the world.
What veil of trance, O pines,
Divides you from my soul,
That I feel but enter not
Your distances of dream?
Ah! strange, imperative sense
Of world-deep mystery
That shakes from out your boughs—
A fragrance yet more keen,
Pressing upon the mind.
The wind shall question you
Of the dream I may not gain,
And all its sombreness
And depth immeasurable,
Shall tremble away in sound
Of speech not understood
That my heart must break to hear.

THE MAD WIND

What hast thou seen, O wind,
Of beauty or of terror
Surpassing, denied to us,
That with precipitate wings,
Mad and ecstatical,
Thou spurnest the hollows and trees
That offer thee refuge of peace,
And findest within the sky
No safety nor respite
From the memory of thy vision?

SONG TO OBLIVION

Art thou more fair
For all the beauty gathered up in thee,
As gold and gems within some lightless sea?
For light of flowers, and bloom of tinted air,
Art thou more fair?
Art thou more strong
For powers that turn to thee as unto sleep?
For world and star that find thy ways more deep
Than light may tread, too wearisome for song
Art thou more strong?
Nay! thou art bare
For power and beauty on thine impotence
Bestowed by fruitful Time's magnificence;
For fruit of all things strong, and bloom of fair,
Thou still art bare.

MEDUSA