Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Ever when the western sky is burning
With the splendour of the sinking sun,
There awakes in me a passionate yearning
For the light that heart has never won.

And I watch the mystic glow of even
In its fitful beauty round me shed,
On the fir-stems where their roof is riven,
On the banks of heather ripe and red;

On the rich green meadows by the river,
On the foliage of the hanging trees,
On the stream unruffled by the shiver
Of the scarce awakening evening breeze.

And I long with still intense desire,
With a strength that none may ever know,
Long to bathe me in that flood of fire,
Long to be transfigured by that glow.

163

Then I follow it, but cannot find it:
See 'tis shining—I will seek it there:
Ah! a moment past I was behind it—
It has vanished now, I know not where.

Then I turn my face, and it is gleaming
In the very spot where I had been—
Light—mysterious beyond all dreaming—
Nearest evermore when most unseen.

Well I know that when to-day has faded
Far into the years that wait for it,
It will seem no longer grey and shaded,—
No—but bathed in sunset, glory-lit.

Now I see the brightness of to-morrow,
And I journey towards it rich in hope,
Doomed instead to find the dusk of sor row,
Doomed through deep'ning twilight shades to grope.

Once it seemed that I was strangely near it:
Joyously I went to where it shone:
Ah! the fault was in my wayward spirit—
When I gained the glow, the glow had gone.

164

Peace—oh! peace—the day is fast declining,
Faintly fades away the mystic light:
Ay, and even now the moon is shining,
And the fields are damp, and cold, and white.