Classic Poem

Silence! A great crowd sits and waits,
Tier upon tier in circles strangely mute;
The air hangs limp and almost visible,
Pregnant with power unuttered:

A Stick is waving silently …
Three trembling jewels fell shining midst our thoughts
Leaving a glitter from another world:
Then three more fell, and then the throbbing air
Awoke and sang, and stretched its rope-like throat
And beat and beat against that domed roof:
Dark wings shot out and struck to bear it up,
The place was full of multitudinous striving;
I was tossed hither, thither in uneasy effort
As in a cloud of dreams; but suddenly
Our prison burst, and to the lidless sky
We raced and raced until the soft soft blue
Tore at our shoulders, ripped our aching flesh,
Laid bare our soul to burn, catch fire and blaze,
Exultingly suck in the azure air
And fill the spacy nothingness of heaven
With the distract, disruptive power of passion;
Till little wisps of clouds did madly pluck
Themselves in fragments, jangling stars did dance,
And a whole firmament of glass and metal
Cracked up and shivered, jarring wayside stones
And vitreous spangles hid in loam and clay;
Till gently glittering, trembling up and down,
We shook together, filled a mobile lake
With soft and shimmering waters—Flash!
We smoothly lie
Unruffled to the calm and breathless sky
Where nothing sails:

No Cloud, no Ship, no Bird
Only a thought comes winging—keen and gay,
A thought that will not stay
To be remembered or even known
When it hath passed its way.
It sings itself so joyously in space
Bubbling like spirit water, frail and thin,
Which eager hands may seek in vain to trace,
Close, holding nothing in.
Nothing, just nothing—O something escapes,
Something has vanished, shut wings up like a lark,
And fallen in the dust,
And left a gap
Where strings are faintly stirred.
Where strings are stirring faint and rhythmically
Like the slow beat of oars that wider sweep
And wider still, and though no ship there be
Yet we set sail—the currents eddy round
And close above our heads.

Drowned! Drowned!
Engulfed in consciousness so vast and free
We move like swaying forms within the sea,
Or we are like the sea that flows through all
Anemones, transparent flowers, tall
And waving daughters, crowding thick tip-toe
Upon a rock to see the Nautilus go
Into the dim translucent worlds that wane
With shadows, to light up again
With a pale glow that travels—O so far!
We follow, follow, follow, hunt the gleam
That radiates the world, that bathes our arms,
Slips round our bodies, glints within our eyes,
And then withdraws—Fades! Fades! Fades!
And without movement dies.

I can still hear the beating of the oars,
I can still hear the stirring of the strings,
I can see the rhythmic swaying tide,
And the pale anemones,
And the Nautilus,
And the Green Gleam,
Who wanders there where your tall daughters stare
And lifts their eyelids, spreads their streaming hair
To ripple with the unwrinkled waving light
That runs like green blood through all plants and flowers,
Or glows opaquely in some fish's side
Like a dense jewel floating by?—
I ask but no one answers; all is still;
For they are no man's daughters, no one knows
How they wait ever, standing tip-toe there
While all the world through their frail bodies flows,
Ebbs from their finger-tips—Swells—and Sways,
Hanging upon their lips, and rocks them all
In rooted motion—Sea-urchins, sea-farers, in among the sea-sunflowers,
In among the ox-rays, the trepang and the colander:
The polyps spread their fringe of arms, the drunken algæ reel around
Far from the dipping guillemot—O they fade and fade
And there is but a web of woven streams
Where images are blurred; dim rain-drops fall,
Dim, shuddering drops of white and violet light.
I hear the thunder call;
It swells, it comes,
And trampling feet come with it—O beware!
These halls of quietness are not long to hold
Their weeping daughters, pale, inviolate;
The Wind's tumultuous feet are at the gate,
They come, they come, to break your tender stems,
To wound your swaying mouths and trample down
Your bleeding bodies, tear your coral veins
And stain the purple bottom of the sea
With shrieking patterns. What ecstatic pains
Uplift you now and bring that vanished gleam
Flickering like June lightning? Louder grow
Those multitudinous feet! O blindly gape,
Strain forth your bodies' ichor, lean to them
Who come to pluck you with invisible hands;
So shall you flower, and the last flying gleam
Shall kiss your scattered blossoms.
The whole sea moves, its waters tumbling down
In green and purple columns drown my sight;
I catch a glimpse of wan and fleeting forms
Tossing a handful of dishevelled jewels,
Of glittering bubbles—then thick masses dim,
In semicircles ranged, opaque and dark,
Emerge, and with a muffled tap of drum
Move arms, show teeth, nod heads and look like men.