The Star-Treader and Other Poems

And his resurgent power, in glance and word,
Poured through the Titans' souls, and was become
The fountains of their own, and at his flame
Their fires were lit once more, whose restlessness
Leapt and aspired against the steadfast stars.
And now they turned, majestic with resolve,
Where, red upon the forefront of the north,
Arcturus was a beacon to the winds.
And with the flickering winds, that lightly struck
The desert dust, then sprang again in air,
They passed athwart the foreland of the north.
Against their march they saw the shrunken waste,
A rivelled region like a world grown old
Whose sterile breast knew not the lips of Life
In all its epoch; or a world that was
The nurse of infant Death, ere he became
Too large, too strong for its restraining arms,
And towered athwart the suns.
And there they crossed
Metallic slopes that rang like monstrous shields,
But gave not to their tread, and clanging plains
Like body-mail of greater, vaster gods.
Where hills made gibbous shadows in the moon,
They heard the eldritch laughters of the wind,
Seeming the mirth of death; and 'neath their gaze
Gaunt valleys deepened like an old despair.
Yet strode they on, through the moon's fantasies,
Bold with resolve, across a land like doubt.
And now they passed among huge mountain-bulks,
Themselves like peaks detached, and moving slow
'Mid fettered brethren, adding weight and gloom
To that mute conclave great against the stars.
Emerging thence, the Titans marched where still
Their own portentous shadows went before
Like night that fled but shrunk not, dusking all
That desert way.
And thus they came where Sleep,
The sleep of weary victory, had seized
The younger gods as captives, borne beyond
All flight of mounting battle-ecstasies
In that high triumph of forgetfulness.
And on that sleep the striding Titans broke,
Vague and immense at first like forming dreams
To those disturbèd gods, in mist of drowse
Purblind and doubtful yet, though soon they knew
Their erst-defeated foes, and rising stood
In silent ranks expectant, that appeared
To move, with shaking of astonished fires
That bristled forth, or were displayed like plumes
Late folded close, now trembling terribly,
Pending between the desert and the stars.
Then, sudden as the waking from a dream,
The battle leapt, where striving shapes of gods
Moved brightly through the whirled and stricken air,
Sweeping it to a froth of fire; and all
That ancient, deep-established desert rocked,
Shaken as by an onset of the gulfs
Of gathered and impatient Chaos, while,
Above the place where central battle burned
The stars drew back in fright or dazzlement,
Paling to more secluded distances.
Lo, where the moon had wrought illusive dreams
That clothed the wild in doubt and fantasy,
Hiding its hideousness with bright mirage,
Or deepening it with gulfs and glooms of Hell,
Mightier confusion, chaos absolute
Upon the imperilled sky and trembling world,
Now made a certainty within itself,
The one thing sure in shaken sky or world.
Maelstroms of battle caught in storms of fire,
Torn and involved by weaponry of gods—
Crescented blades that met with rounds of shields;
Grappling of shapes, seen through the riven blaze
An instant, then once more obscure, and known
Only by giant heavings of that war
Of furious gods and roused elements,
Divided, leagued, contending evermore
Along the desert—these, augmentative
Round one thick center, stunned the faltering night.
So huge that chaos, complicate within
With movements of gigantic legionry,
Antagonistic streams, impetuous-hurled
Where Jove and Saturn thunder-crested, led
In fight unswervable—so wide the strife
Of differing impulse, that Decision found
No foothold, till that first confusion should
In ordered conflict re-arrange, and stand
With its true forces known. This seemed remote,
With that wide struggle pending terribly,
As if all-various, colored Time had made
A truce with white Eternity, and both
Stood watching from afar.
Through drifts of haze
The broadening moon, made ominous with red,
Glared from the westering night. And now that war
Built for itself, far up, a cope of cloud,
And drew it down, far off, upon all sides,
Impervious to the moon and sworded stars.
And by their own wild light the gods fought on
'Neath that stupendous concave like a sky
Filled and illumed with glare of bursting suns.
And cast by their own light, upon that sky
The gods' own shadows moved like shapen gloom,
Phantasmagoric, changed and amplified,
A shifting frieze that flickered dreadfully
In spectral battle indecisive. Then,
Swift, as it had begun, the contest turned,
And on the heaving Titans' massive front
It seemed that all the motion and the strength
Self-thwarting and confounded, of that strife,
Was flung in centered impact terrible,
With rush of all that fire, tempestuous-blown
As if before some wind of further space,
Striking the earth. Lo, all the Titans' flame
Bent back upon themselves, and they were hurled
In vaster disarray, with vanguard piled
On rear and center. Saturn could not stem
The loosened torrents of long-pent defeat;
He, with his host, was but as drift thereon,
Borne wildly down the whelmed and reeling world.
Hurling like slanted rain, the lurid levin
Fell o'er that flight of Titans, and behind,
In striding menace, all-victorious Jove
Loomed like some craggy cloud with thunders crowned
And footed with the winds. In that defeat,
With Jove's pursuit involved and manifold,
Few found escape unscathed, and some went down
Like senile suns that grapple with the dark,
And reel in flame tremendous, and are still.
Ebbing, the battle left those elder gods
Upcast once more on coasts of black defeat—
Gripped in despair, a vaster Tartarus.
The victor gods, their storms and thunders spent,
Went dwindling northward like embattled clouds,
And where the lingering haze of fight dissolved,
The pallor of the dawn began to spread
On darkness purple like the pain of Death.
Ringed with that desolation, Saturn stood
Mute, and the Titans answered unto him
With brother silence. Motionless, they seemed
Some peristyle or range of columns great,
Alone enduring of a fallen fane
In deserts of some vaster world whence Life
And Faith have vanished long, that vaguely slips
To an immemoried end. And twilight slow
Crept round those lofty shapes august, and seemed
Such as might be the faltering ghostly noon
Of mightier suns that totter down to death.
Then turned they, passing from that dismal place
Blasted anew with battle, ere the swift
Striding of light athwart stupendous chasms
And wasteful plains, should overtake them there,
Bowed with too heavy a burden of defeat.
Slowly they turned, and passed upon the west
Where, like a weariness immovable
In menace huge, the plain its monstrous bulk,
The peaks its hydra heads, the whole world crouched
Against their march with the diminished stars.