The sun leaves rosy with his breath
A heaven rinsed with silver rains,
And on the golden verge of death
The lingering storm in glory gains:
While the red light and rolling thunder
Unvanquished from their fight withdraw:
Dim to the eyes’ yet vibrant wonder
Whom such a vision held in awe,
Exhaling in the mists of gold
From every pollen-wreathed husk,
His triumphs in the stars foretold,
A shade emerges in the dusk,
A wrestler such as Jacob knew
Whose strength increases with the hours,
A Hercules of matchless thew
Whose body is the breath of flowers—
So evening with a god grew full
When Jove, amid such blossomed thorns,
Raised, in the lily-breathing Bull,
The silver moonrise of his horns.
Antaeus of the fallen storms,
The resurrection of the power
Whose splendours in the frailest forms
The most unconquerably tower,
The Form whose challenge, high and loud,
The whistling fifes of wind had spun,
Whose rolling muscles to a proud
Repulse had dared the noonday sun,
Whose heavy torrent-hurling shock
Had filled the roaring gullies, bowed
The groaning tree, and split the rock—
Had worn no armour but a cloud,
And now from the wet earth reborn,
All Africa his phoenix pyre,
Out of a thousand leagues of thorn
Had softly smouldered into fire.
The lightning sinews of his limbs
Are in that soft effulgence furled
And on the breath of incense swims
The thunderbolt his anger hurled.
Diffusing on through endless space,
Majestic peace without a flaw,
Wild is the light that from his face
The woods and dreaming waters draw.
The skies are with his trophies hung—
The Bull, the Lion, and the Bear;
What spoil of victories unsung
Remains to be erected there?
The gorgeous Ram that horns his lyre
Of silence: whose great pelt is rolled
To quilt a thousand hills with fire
In the acacia’s fleece of gold—
Round which, astream through flowering vales,
Dread guardians, pythoning the spoils,
Lit by the moon with glittering scales
The great Zambezis wreathe their coils—
Shorn from the shoulders of the morning
By his strong arm of thunder, yields
Its shaggy hide, his thews adorning
In all the fragrance of the fields.
Yet through the wreaths of cloudy fire
That crown the hazard of his quest,
Still to new victories aspire
The broodings of his dark unrest.
And his long gaze, down some immense
Horizon of horizons drawn,
Yearns to the fleeced magnificence
And fire of its perennial dawn.
Short is the peace, though hushed and breathless,
In which we feel the victor’s will
And its intrinsic hydra, deathless,
Reviving at the self-same rill.