The Star-Treader and Other Poems

One tone is mute within the starry singing,

The unison fulfilled, complete before;

One chord within the music sounds no more,

And from the stir of flames forever winging

The pinions of our sister, motionless

In pits of indefinable duress,

Are fallen beyond all recovery

By exultation of the flying dance,

Or rhythms holding as with sleep or trance

The maze of stars that only death may free—

Flung through the void's expanse.

In gulfs depressed nor in the gulfs exalted

Shall shade nor lightening of her flame be found;

In space that litten orbits gird around,

Nor in the bottomless abyss unvaulted

Of unenvironed, all-outlying night.

Allotted gyre nor lawless comet-flight

Shall find, and with its venturous ray return

From gloom of undiscoverable scope,

One ray of her to gladden into hope

The doubtful eyes denied that truthward yearn,

The faltering feet that grope.

Beyond restrainless boundary-nights surpassing

All luminous horizons limited,

The substance and the light of her have fed

Ruin and silence of the night's amassing:

Abandoned worlds forever morningless;

Suns without worlds, in frory beamlessness

Girt for the longer gyre funereal;

Inviolate silence, earless, unawaking

That once was sound, and level calm unbreaking

Where motion's many ways in oneness fall

Of sleep beyond forsaking.

Circled with limitation unexceeded

Our eyes behold exterior mysteries

And gods unascertainable as these—

Shadows and shapes irresolubly heeded;

Phantoms that tower, and substance scarcely known.

Our sister knows all mysteries one alone,

One shape, one shadow, crowding out the skies;

Whose eyeless head and lipless face debar

All others nameless or familiar,

Filling with night all former lips and eyes

Of god, and ghost, and star:

For her all shapes have fed the shape of night;

All darker forms, and dubious forms, or pallid,

Are met and reconciled where none is valid.

But unto us solution nor respite

Of mystery's multiform incessancy

From unexplored or system-trodden sky

Shall come; but as a load importunate,

Enigma past and mystery foreseen

Weigh mightily upon us, and between

Our sorrow deepens, and our songs abate

In cadences of threne.

A gloom that gathers silence looms more closely,

And quiet centering darkness at its heart;

But from the certitude of night depart

Uncertain god nor eidolon less ghostly;

But stronger grown with strength obtained from light

That failed, and power lent by the stronger night,

Perplex us with new mystery, and doubt

If these our flames, that deathward toss and fall

Be festal lights or lights funereal

For mightier gods within the gulfs without,

Phantoms more cryptical.

New shadows from the wings of Time unfolding

Across the depth and eminence of years,

Fall deeplier with the broadening gloom of fears.

Prophetic-eyed, with planet-hosts beholding

The night take form upon the face of suns,

We see (thus grief's vaticination runs—

Presageful sorrow for our sister slain)

A night wherein all sorrow shall be past,

One with night's single mystery at last;

Nor vocal sun nor singing world remain

As Time's elegiast.