The Collected Poems of Lord De Tabley :: :: University of Virginia Library

My sense is dull. The tremulous evening glows:
The weeds of night coast round her lucid edge,
Yoked under bulks of tributary cloud.
The leaves are shaken on the forest flowers,
And silent as the silence of a shrine
Lies a great power of sunset on the groves.
Grayly the fingered shadows dwell between
The reaching chestnut branches. Gray the mask
Of twilight, and the bleak unmellow speed
Of blindness on the visage of fresh hills.

My soul is melted in pale aching dreams,
I feign some nearing issue in new time,
On which I wait, for which I think and move:
A haunting drift that guides me by a glimpse
To lovely things and meteor affluence.
I wander in my silence, incomplete.
My lonely feet are dew'd in chilly flowers,
And I am full of fever and alone—
The cup without its acorn, the brook bed

Dry of its stream, the chalice ebb'd of wine,
The deep night listening for its rising morn,
The droughty plain that sees the rain-cloud pause,
And hears the falling drift sing towards its breast.

The voice of dreams is sweet upon my brain,
Has fed me on thin comfort many a day,
Since all my mind was tender, and a child
Rich in the girlish impulse of ripe dreams
I threw my song upon the wind, or pored
On all this glorious nature and its blaze
Ineffable, enormous. I could guess
The thriving summer toward, as the globe
That metes the still year's process, and the edge
Of March-days sweetened in warm April's tread—
Levied the wavering clouds to do him praise,
And all their folds were bright against his head.
I pondered out the wonder-veiling years,
And still I dwelt on light in all my dreams,
Some strange great yearning: dim on forest-waves
The large eye-blinding radiance sheeted out,
And withered up the film of hooded peaks
To set their dinted vales with faltering fires:
As cloudy hollows claspt in buoyant green
Took savour of wood-incense from the drench
Of lime-boughs limp with perfume-searching rains,—
Methought at times the wildered spirit paused
In blindness on an edge of glory, faint
And trembling. Milky shiverings of cloud
Crept in meridian smoothly towards a sea
Where evening held in bright her western bars,
And all the full blue level glow'd again
Under a glowing sky.

I speak my soul
With words and signs and symbols of weak sound.
I cannot clasp the meaning as it lies,
I cannot blend with shallow speech my dream.
I, reeling from the level of my brain,
Would mix with flowery essence, or exchange
Life with an amaranth, so look heaven in face
A summer thro', and draw the zenith dews
Drizzled between the twilights, ere the streak
Of morning touch celestial thro' the halls
Of Nature, with the echo of a bird,
A startled leaflet, and an opening flower.

And thus I read the sacred loveliness
Of Heaven's clear face, unseen as stars by day,
But there no less tho' weak eyes reach them not—
Till on the vagueness of thin thought there came
Substantial impress: on the dreamy mist
A presence and a deity behind
Concentred yet pervasive. Silent eyes
Gave greeting, and, in wordless promise, sign
Of imminent revealment, and great lights,
Deep harmony and thunders, as the voice
Of breakers breaking on low-margin'd seas.

Thou all-enfolding ether, thou clear God,
Shall I profane thy fair immensity,
Or bound thy boundless essence in a name
Spoken as men can speak it between lips
That tell but half their thought, whose thought is weak?

Thou whom I only guess thro' my desire,
A far attainment, inmost prophecy,
An instinct and a voiceless oracle,
To enter where we would be, and be one;
There, face to face, to touch and be complete,
And shed our craving from us like old leaves
That grate beside the crowded knots of spring.

Come, thou great bliss, I have been patient long.
My lonely arms entreat thee from thy state.
Come, thro' the vaulted blue a burning sun.
Come, as the night comes, fielded round with stars!
My soul is throbbing, as a moonless sea,
Flood out thy rich beams full upon her breast!