 | Maiden Ecstasy |  |
43
THE VISIONARY.
I
Her eyes, that leap like fountains into dayAt sounds of joy, are to the sunlight blind,
Yet through night splendours track their starry way
And every planet find:
Her soul inlaid with each familiar ray
In colours of the mind.
II
To her lone eyes the sun had never been,But hid in mists of glory, over bright,
Stretched out a kindly veil that served to screen
All evil from her sight.
Pure as the heavens was earth, to her, unseen
Save in the moon's soft light.
44
III
The rolling blaze of noon, the pearl-shot skiesThat in light's urgent gusts to redness glow,
Enact not summer-day before her eyes:
The sun she cannot know;
So, a lost star she seems afar that lies
From all this glare below.
IV
Like the pale petals of a hanging roseHer eyelids droop, though daylight be outside;
But to the filtered moonbeams they unclose
As night-flowers open wide,
And drink of the new lustre while it flows
And clothes her as a bride.
V
The Angelic Brother, Heaven's First Painter born,Had coloured on her heart his Paradise,
That in day-blindness lives she not forlorn,
But knows the crowded skies;
The future day beholds, the youthful morn,
Where vision never dies.
45
VI
When the moon-mirror at her window staysFlashing its signal from the drowsy sky,
She hails her day, allied to other days
Of jewelled memory,
And, the night through across the shadow strays
While worlds are passing by.
VII
Her sightful soul bursts forth, her vision burns,That, as her eyes on the calmed forest fall,
The trunks are whitened; the green leafage turns
To silvered verdure, all;
And icicled in light are sombre ferns,
And the black cypress, tall.
VIII
She now is by the marsh whose mirror takesHeaven's sisters down to its twin, watery skies,
And greater than the starless noontide makes
The world she there descries,
While all above her and beneath her breaks
On her exalted eyes.
46
IX
She crieth: ‘What art thou, Sun, when this great sceneIs but thy shadow! Oft I look on high
At yonder moon, and see no night between
My vision and the sky;
How dark, then, to my soul has ever been
Thy one proud mystery!
X
‘While he still lived, who was to me a sun,Here stood we where the marsh two heavens had blent
Sun over sun; the day then o'er him shone,
My soul's last day, now spent:
Yet is the passion of that day my own
Though sun from sun be rent.
XI
‘Had I not loved content my heart had beenTo bless its lot, and not in spirit weep
To see the paradise that he had seen;
To share his lofty sleep,
And dream it was a sun that shone between
Our souls from yonder steep.
47
XII
‘But still between us the night-glory flows;We see it, share its joys: the fuller day
Brought by slow-coming death his spirit knows;
I linger on the way;
Yet would I see how the great sun arose
And bless his mighty ray!’
XIII
Across the trembling air-gulphs from her soulA light arose, as the moon-mirror hung
Before her, lucent as the marshy shoal
That heaven on heaven had flung:
She sees the sun in the moon-mirror roll
Its distant skies among.
XIV
It was the sun in glory visibleThrough the moon-mirror, deepened like the flood
That held the night-orb, shining at its full,
And heavenly neighbourhood;
In the moon-mirror, clear as glassy pool,
The sun before her stood.
48
XV
‘O vision yet more wondrous than my dreams,’Her heart exclaims, ‘that dost vouchsafe the light
Which from all days hath been, that o'er me streams
And thus exalts my sight!
To his dear eyes, that see me in those beams,
I am no more in night!’
XVI
Her soul seemed lost as in a soul's embraceBefore the day-revealer, while he shone
In the new heaven and lit her raptured face,
Pale like the Parian stone
That of a life still bears the lovely trace,
Although the soul hath flown.
XVII
Her vision floats along the sunny deepIn the new heaven that spreads before her eyes,
While ever wider is the mirror's sweep
Across those foreign skies;
When lo! flash out, along the topmost steep,
The hills of Paradise!
49
XVIII
While yet her spirit climbed the dizzy heightStep after step into eternal day,
Her eyes seemed watchful of the guiding light
Till glistened one last ray,
When, resting in the solemn vault of night,
Dead by the marsh she lay.
| Maiden Ecstasy | |