The Star-Treader and Other Poems

THE MAZE OF SLEEP

Sleep is a pathless labyrinth,
Dark to the gaze of moons and suns,
Through which the colored clue of dreams,
A gossamer thread, obscurely runs.

THE WINDS

To me the winds that die and start,
And strive in wars that never cease,
Are dearer than the level peace
That lies unstirred at summer's heart;
More dear to me the shadowed wold,
Where, with report of tempest rife,
The air intensifies with life,
Than quiet fields of summer's gold.
I am the winds' admitted friend:
They seal our linked fellowships
With speech of warm or icy lips,
With touch of west and east that blend.
And when my spirit listless stands,
With folded wings that do not live,
Their own assuageless wings they give
To lift her from the stirless lands.

      *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Within the place unmanifest
Where central Truth is immanent,
Lies there a vast, entire content
Of sound and movement one in rest?
I know not this. Yet in my heart,
I feel that where all truths concur,
The shrine is peaceless with the stir
Of winds that enter and depart.

THE MASQUE OF FORSAKEN GODS

Scene: A moonlit glade on a summer midnight

THE POET

What consummation of the toiling moon
O'ercomes the midnight blue with violet,
Wherein the stars turn grey! The summer's green,
Edgèd and strong by day, is dull and faint
Beneath the moon's all-dominating mood,
That in this absence of the impassioned sun,
Sways to a sleep of sound and calm of color
The live and vivid aspect of the world—
Subdued as with the great expectancy
Which blurs beginning features of a dream,
Things and events lost 'neath an omening
Of central and oppressive bulk to come.
Here were the theatre of a miracle,
If such, within a world long alienate
From its first dreams, and shut with skeptic years,
Might now befall.

THE PHILOSOPHER