Poems By Richard Chenevix Trench: New ed |
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SUNSET. |
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41
SUNSET.
Faust is watching the setting sun, and after some mournful reflections exclaims:
Let us not mar with mournful thoughts like these:
See yonder where the sun of evening glows,
How gleam the green-girt cottages.
He stoops, he sinks—and overlived is day:
But he hastes on, to kindle life anew.
Ah! that no wing lifts me from earth away
Him to pursue, and evermore pursue:
Then should I in eternal evening-light
The hushed world at my feet behold,
See every vale in calm, and flaming every height,
And silver brooks see lost in floods of gold.
Then would not the wild mountain hinder more
My course divine with all its rugged heads:
Its heated bays even now the ocean spreads
My wondering eyes before.
Yet the god seems at last away to sink;
But the new impulse stirs with might:
I hasten his eternal beams to drink,
The day before me, and behind the night,
The heaven above me spread, and under me the sea:
Fair dream! which while I dwell on, he is gone.
Ah! that an actual wing may not so soon
Unto our spirit's wing united be,
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That still his spirit forward, upward springs,
When hidden in blue spaces overhead
The lark his shattering carol sings;
When over pine-clad mountains soars
The eagle, spread upon the air,
When over seas and over moors
The crane doth to its home repair.
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