Flower o' the thorn :: :: University of Virginia Library

THE hour of the setting,
The hour when Time truce calls with faring and fretting,
When Life lays itself in the fields of forgetting
To rest,
Unrecking if any be rueful or careful,
Is here.
All pauses, so holy the hour and so prayerful,
As, face to the West,
I stand on the crown of the causeway, where, under
The breach of the bridge,
The far-stretching lines of the railroad shine clear,
And gaze on the glamorous sky-scape, in sunder
With colour and splendour that's cloven,
Wide-woven
From ridge unto ridge.
From Eastward to Westward, the roar and the hum
Are sunken to silence: with worship and wonder
Life's dumb.

The rail sun-reflecting,
Briareus bounden, whose arms Space-subjecting
My soul and the soul of the world-all connecting
I feel,
Its lines as the rays of a sun-dial spreading,
Runs right
And left, on fan-fashion, encaging, embedding.
Earth's surface in steel.
Thought traces, far-faring, its world-woven grating,
That hums like a loom,
As, working Man's will of the day and the night,
Time and Space it devours in its course unabating,
From where, in the East, Day's renewing
Ensuing,
It gleams through the gloom,
To where, following seaward the feet of the sun,
It lies in the lap of the sunset, awaiting
Day done.

See, feather by feather,
The Phoenix of sunset fades out, as together
The cloud-vultures, freed from Dan Phoebus's tether,
Conspire
To smother its splendours: with wings over-meeting
Its nest,
Behold, they go, ember by ember, out-beating
The flickering fire.
The sun flashes out for a second, wide-wading
In billows of light,
Then drops to his grave in the glooms of the West;
Whilst hard on the heels of his fulgurous fading
Comes twilight, Eve's furnace out-raking,
And waking,
The wind of the West

Its funeral films for the death of the Day
Brings up, Heaven's broideries with cerecloths o'ershading
Of grey.

And lo, as replying,
As noting and voicing the need of Day dying,
A sound from the Eastward of shrilling and crying
There comes,
A sound that still holds, like the stroke of a hammer,
The ear,
Now sinks to a murmur, now soars to a clamour
Of trumpets and drums;
And yonder, to East, whence it comes, as the trace of
A storm in the sky,
A trail of grey smoke in the distance draws near.
An army with banners, it seems, o'er the face of
The landscape, with flashing of lances,
Advances:
With dusk ever nigh
It draweth in thunder, as Night on the plain
Pours, trumpeted in with the roar and the race of
The train.