The Star-Treader and Other Poems

O woven fabric and bright web of sound,

Whose threads are magical,

And with swift weaving thrall

And hold the spirit bound!

We may not know whence thy strange sorceries fall—

Whether they be Earth's voices wild and strong,

Her high and perfect song.

Or broken dreams of higher worlds unfound.

For, lo, thou art as dreams.

And to thy realm all hidden things belong—

All fugitive and evanescent gleams

The soul hath vainly sought;

All mystic immanence;

All visions of ungrasped magnificence,

And great ideals pinnacled in thought;

All paths with marvel fraught

That lead to lands obscure:

For, lo, upon thy road of sound we pass,

Seeking thy magic lure,

To vales mist-implicated and unsure,

Where all seems strange as visions in a glass;

And wonder-haunted hills,

Where Beauty is an echo and a dream

In sighing pines, and rills

Clouded and deep with imaged tree and sky;

And where bright rivers gleam

Past cities towering high,

Each wonderful as some cloud-fantasy.

Thou loosenest the bondage of the years,

Making the spirit free

Of all sublunar joys and fears.

Who mounts on thine imperious wings shall see

The ways of life as threads of day and night;

Serene above their change,

His eyes shall know but far transcendent things,

His ears shall hark but voices free and strange;

Vast seas of outer light

Shall beat upon his sight,

Eternal winds shall touch him with their wings;

His heart shall thrill

To larger, purer joy, and grief more deep

Than earth may know;

And e'en as dews of morning fill

The opened flower, into his soul shall flow

High melodies, like tears that angels weep.

Then shall he penetrate

The veils and outer barriers of sound,

And near the soul of melody,

Where, rapt in aural splendors ultimate,

His soul shall see

The marvel and the glory that surround

Eternal Beauty's shrine;

And catch afar the glint divine

Of her moon-colored robe, or haply hear,

With world-oblivious ear,

Some echo of her voice's mystery.

Thou hast Love's power to find

The soul's most secret chords, that else were still,

And stir'st them till they thrill

Disclosed to least, faint movements of thy wind.

Thine aural sorcery

O'erwhelms the heart as sunset storms the sight,

For thou art Beauty bodied forth in sound—

Her colors bright

And diverse forms expressed in harmony:

Within thy bound,

The flare of morning is become a song,

And tree and flower a music sweet and long.

And in thy speech

The power and majesty that swing

Planet and sun, and each

Dim atom of the system manifest,

Become articulate, expressed

Like ocean in the brooklet's whispering.

Beyond the woof of finite things,

Thy threads of wonder deep-entangled lie—

Time's intertexturings

Within Eternity—

With Song, mayhap, to be his memories;

For Beauty borders nigh

The ultimate, eternal Verities.