And in the northmost of the world’s whiteness, pacing slowly

Far and small in those spaces, white like a shadow

Of white, over that blank plain of silence without

End, those plateaus of solitude, he moves: further

In the secret of whiteness than ever the high-honking faint

Black ravels of wild geese fly wavering at the end

Of winter; further in silence than the last

Black tracery of unvisited forests that stand bleak

And tall like white-bound navies, hulls sunk in the virgin

Hush, where the sky is the sheen of a wide shell, and the creaking

Of their empty rigging gives weight to the stillness; and further

In solitude than all charactery of shadows

The figured world casts in its turning, the pads of his white

Feet, wandering, fill their own shadows. Below him, far

On the grilled globe of the middle earth the furrowed

Fields of men know husbandry and harvest; and there

Are the stern gods on their gray hills, the audacious

Prows of vessels tempting the goddess-natured sea,

And the falling of rain, air’s softnesses, and there is company there,

Variety and houses, coupling and colours; and

The fires are warm there, the water flows, and the other

Beasts and their seasons revolve their patient

Caravan; but that is in a different dream. And beyond

the green-altering

Tundra and the stiff sea, indeed before these, he slouches

Beyond maps, before maps, in a region

With not so much conformation, no: on the dim

Comb of the world, that place

That the maps make white for that they have not found it,

And white it is, in the yellowish green whiteness

Of its long dusk: the flatness vanishing

Under the bursts and whirls of its misted horizon; even

The years have not yet come to pass, but all

Drifts lost where yet no finding is. Yet all

Conjunction is bloodless, thin as the still air: the abstract

Meeting of lines projected from elsewhere, degrees

Of the rank world’s longitude, rhumbs of stars; but though they join

Always under his shifting feet, there is

No narrowness engendered there, but only

The beginnings of distance; and all directions join,

Are lost in his shadow beneath him, and direction

Becomes merely the way he walks, shambling: he the one

Hill on this level pallor, the single floe