Classic Poem

Smitten by sleep as never waking dares,
Untame and proud no more,
Too strangely meek—
Bent unresponsive to a whispering kiss,
All ignorant of tears
That rise at his defencelessness—
By day a bannered host, by night
A man asleep on the young heart of Life
Beating beneath in quietness;
A Pagan trusting immemorial charms,
A Lover spent,
As she who wakes to ward.

A captive bound in slumber here he lies
Delivered unsuspecting to her gaze,
Power and passion love-surprised,
Not death-despoiled,
For over him his soul in light abeyance hovering,
Each dear known curve the while consenting
In the languid grace of sleep;
An alien so inscrutable
As were Love mated with a fallen star,
Or flashing bird of lightning wing
Drooping from tropic paradise.
Is there a realm of sleep
Than day more fair?
Where blind to earth he may arise as evening star
To reign in golden systems of delight?
Returns he now a Sultan to his slaves?
Or gliding 'neath the shadow portal closed
To all save those with poppy sandals shod,
Tracing the muted password mystical
With phantoms long estranged
Holds pale converse?

Along what coasts of memory drift now
These idle sails
The helmsman's hands leave loose?
Led soft away in timelessness
With spirit trustful grown—
One faint shape lovely beckoning
Out of the shadow to a mortal dream?

Untouched by clamour or despite he sleeps.
Within his deepening secrecies
Playing a masque of kings?
Or Reveller with purple crews
Of wine-stained celebrants,
His brows with grape leaves twisted as a crown
While to his lute
He holds Love listening?
No longer man—
But Poet, Immortal now,
All mortal cannot be, in sleep he is;
Till gazing on him terrified,
Too long the guards of his brave citadel
Seem overthrown,
Day's armour slips aside—
No picket smile accosts the invading gaze,
The helmet raised—
But God! those hidden eyes!
Not this—
Not this resigning of the imperious will,
Awake, Beloved, light thy life within!
Moonlight harmonious on the outward wall
Too sad, too calm—
Too beautiful, too wholly lost
The shuttered soul in some
Ineffable, remote Unknown.

Strange passive face,
Stripped in the nakedness of sleep
From the last posture of disguise,
Command the sovereign Spirit to stand forth!
From day's shorn unrequitals given o'er in sleep
Will he return?
Or earthly lure suffice the wistfulness
Upon his face upturned to Beauty
Truth had never spoke?
Beauty reflected on her worshipper.

To give him rest from living, Love gave All—
And he has gone to sleep,
Alone.
His shadow only in the flesh is here.

While he prolongs his moment high above the clouds
She can but wake and wait—
Forgot,
As night forgets the crimson bud of dawn;
Longing to give him more than sense receives,
More than her body at his side stretched close—
Her spirit ranges baffled—for his sake
Divining new needs of divinity—
And, braving heaven to transcend Love,
Finds Love again,
And gives him back to Love
The First and Last.

No longer watching with affrighted eyes
Lest his diviner-lidded gaze be raised
Upon her marvelling,
Too sure surmised his light-winged heritage,
Or brushed too close
The heavenly fire he bears returning.
Out then the lifted torch!
Let veiling darkness fall
And Love within her heart the vigil keep,
Till dawn evoke the Lover as the man
To day's industrious labyrinth
Less jealous to engage him from her arms
Than sleep's lone peradventure of the gods.