The snow-born sylph, her spools of glory spun,
Forgets the singing journeys that she came
To fill this frosty chrysalis of flame
Where sleeps a golden echo of the Sun.
The silver life and swordplay of the noon
Caught in mid-slash; the wildfire of the scar
Whose suds of thunder in a crystal jar
Compose a silent image of the moon.
Shut rainbow; hushed appeasement of the spray;
Meeting of myriad dews, as if to show
Aurora’s hand from out whose cup of snow
The solar horses drink the fires of day.
A masquer so anonymously white
Who smiles without a face: a cloister frail
In whose clear precinct music takes the veil
And sings, but to the vision, with its light;—
It was the psalm and incense of the plain,
The sleep-heard music humming on the roofs,
The candle lighted by our horses’ hoofs
When we rode home by moonlight after rain.
When tinder to a star it lay at night
Holding it like a glow-worm in its hand;
Or in a shallow ripple shaved the sand
Filming a stormy shipwreck of the light—
Still was its only study to acquire
Embryon ecstasies, the sperm of power—
Rose of the dawn, or nimbus of the shower
To sail, a ship of love, on seas of fire.
Its luck was always to sustain a King,
The jingled spur and stirrup of the cloud—
To launch a swan by the same art endowed
Or smooth the pebbles for a David’s sling.
True phœnix-fuel whom no burning mars
But pain and fire resuscitate afresh,
It has put on all forms of flame or flesh
And trawled the lovely bodies of the stars.
And once it was a youth before he died
To form this lily-calyx for the light,
Who made a pond his palace of delight
And thought himself beside the sun enskied.
With stars and flying clouds about him rolled
High in that silver paradise ensphered,
Down from his gaze his fatal beauty sheered,
A marble precipice, with ferns of gold.
Echo his dirge, the zephyr is his shroud,
Whose pride with running water was but one:
And both a brief reflection of the sun
Which any sigh suffices for a cloud.
Though every passing yearner for the skies
Out of his glass construct a secret hell,
If with our own reflections we must dwell
Let them be seen in one another’s eyes.
This crystal by a different hand is wheeled,
And here the sun its circle seems to dim
That we may see undazzled through to Him
Of whom it is the mirror or the shield.
Stagnant in drains where beauty scorns to bathe,
Yet who has seen it unalloyed with Light
Has seen black snow, has seen unanswered faith,
And courage unrewarded with delight.
Pool in the grime by city lanterns scarred,
Stainless it still from every contact came
As the light incense, orphan of the flame,
Survives the baser fuel it has charred.
Sight of the Earth, for every star an eye,
The element by which it sees and thinks,
It signs upon that stark and rocky Sphinx
Her smile of resignation to the sky.
Here though in exile from the singing shower,
It seems to boast its quiet faith—’To me
The world is like a trogon-feathered tree
That never sheds its leaves except to flower.’
It says it is the blossom in our blood
With folded petals smiling out the sere,
Brown, shuffled slippers of the limping year—
The leaves that drift and whisper in the mud.
Complain those burned brown leaves? then let them go!
(Though who should whimper whom the sun has kissed?)
That flowers may come, outsilvering the mist,
To stain the boasted ermines of the snow.
And now the world’s great autumn blows at last,
The brown horde yells before it, questing death—
Folding its cape, this waits with baited breath
To flaunt its cool evasion of the blast.
White armour of the world’s exultant strife,
In it the sunbeam is a lance at rest:
And like a sword the lightning in its breast
Lies hidden, with the miracle of life.
Wings, flowers, and flames are folded in its peace—
This common water where the sunlight falls;
Shake it, and from your hand you can release
A flight of coloured pigeons round the walls.
Rest, twinkling valour! on my friendly sill
When sheep are rabid, serpents well may rest.
(Coil, Christian Tagus, round the sacred hill,
That wears the steep Alcazar for a crest!)
But when your great commandos, in the rain
Shall gallop singing on our thirsty lands,
Down on my knees, my hat between my hands,
I’ll drink the huge elation of the plain.
Your spirit sings (and to its sister sprite)
That love is God, that dying is renewal,
That we are flames, and the black world is fuel
To hearts that burn and battle for delight.