The Star-Treader and Other Poems

Imagination's eyes

Outreach and distance far

The vision of the greatest star

That measures instantaneously—

Enisled therein as in a sea—

Its cincture of the system-laden skies.

Abysses closed about with night

A tribute yield

To her retardless sight;

And Matter's gates disclose the candent ores

Rock-held in furnaces of planet-cores.

She penetrates the sun's transplendent shield,

And through the obstruction of his vestment dire,

Pierces the centermost sublimity

Of his terrific heart, whose gurge of fire

Heaves upward like a monstrous sea,

And inly riven by Titanic throes,

Fills all his frame with outward cataract

Of separate and immingling torrent streams.

Her eyes exact

From the Moon-Sphinx that wanes and grows

In wastes celestial, alien dreams

Brought down on wings of fleetest beams.

Adown the clefts of under-space

She rides, her steed a falling star,

To seek, where void and vagueness are,

Some mark or certainty of place.

Upon their heavenly precipice

The gathered suns shrink back aghast

From that interminate abyss,

And threat of sightless anarchs vast.

She stands endued

With supermundane crown, and vestitures

Of emperies that include

All under-worlds and over-worlds of dream—

Kingdoms o'ercast, and eminent heights extreme

Where moon-transcending light endures.

She wanders in fantastic lands, where grow

In scarce-discernèd fields and closes blind,

Vague blossoms stirred by wings of eidolons;

Or roves in forests where all sound is low:

Each voice that shuns

The noiseful day, and enters there to find

Twilight that naught exalts nor grieves,

Is quickly tuned to the susurrous leaves.

Upon some supersensual eminence

She hears the fragments of a thunder loud,

Where lightnings of ulterior Truth intense

Flame through the walls of hollow cloud.

But these she may not wholly grasp

With incomplete terrestrial clasp.

Her eyes inevitably see,

'Neath rounds and changes of exterior things,

The movements of Essentiality—

Of ageless principles—that alter not

To temporal alterings—

Unswerved by shattered worlds upbuilt once more.

And stars no longer hot;

Or broken constellations strewn

Like coals about the heavenly floor,

And rush of night upon the noon

Of their lost worlds, unsphered restorelessly

In icy deserts of the sky.

From the beginning of the spheres,

When systems nebulous out-thrown

Drove back the brinks

Of nullity with limitary marks,

Till end of suns, and sunless death of years,

To her are known

The unevident inseparable links

That bind all deeps, all suns, all days and darks.