The Star-Treader and Other Poems

I flow beneath the columns that upbear
The world, and all the tracts of heaven and hell;
Foamless I sweep, where sounds nor glimmers tell
My motion nadir-ward; no moment's flare
Gives each to each the shapes that, unaware,
Commingle at my verge, to test the spell
Of waves intense with night, whose deeps compel
One face from pain, and rapture, and despair.
The fruitless earth's denied and cheated sons
Meet here, where fruitful and unfruitful cease.
And when their lords, the mightier, hidden Ones,
Have drained all worlds till being's wine is low,
Shall they not come, and from the oblivious flow
Drink at one draught a universe of peace?

ATLANTIS

Above its domes the gulfs accumulate
To where the sea-winds trumpet forth their screed;
But here the buried waters take no heed—
Deaf, and with closèd lips from press of weight
Imposed by ocean. Dim, inanimate,
On temples of an unremembered creed
Involved in long, slow tentacles of weed,
The dead tide lies immovable as Fate.
From out the ponderous-vaulted ocean-dome,
A clouded light is questionably shed
On altars of a goddess garlanded
With blossoms of some weird and hueless vine;
And wingèd, fleet, through skies beneath the foam,
Like silent birds the sea-things dart and shine.

THE UNREVEALED

How dense the glooms of Death, impervious
To aught of old memorial light! How strait
The sunless road, suspended, separate,
That leads to later birth! Untremulous
With any secret morn of stars, to us
The Past is closed as with division great
Of planet-girdling seas—unknown its gate,
Beyond the mouths of shadows cavernous.
Oh! may it be that Death in kindness strips
The soul of memory's raiment, rendering blind
Our vision, lest surmounted deeps appal,
As when on mountain peaks a glance behind
Betrays with knowledge, and the climber slips
Down gulfs of fear to some enormous fall?

THE ELDRITCH DARK

Now as the twilight's doubtful interval
Closes with night's accomplished certainty,
A wizard wind goes crying eerily;
And in the glade unsteady shadows crawl,
Timed to the trees, whose voices rear and fall
As with some dreadful witches' ecstasy,
Flung upward to the dark, whence glitters free
The crooked moon, impendent over all.
Twin veils of covering cloud and silence thrown
Across the movement and the sound of things,
Make blank the night, till in the broken west
The moon's ensanguined blade awhile is shown....
The night grows whole again.... The shadows rest,
Gathered beneath a greater shadow's wings.

THE CHERRY-SNOWS