University of Virginia Library

MORNING TWILIGHT

Now the night's long murmur of awful incense
Breathed away from colourless fields of folded
Flowers about mine eyes to the silent air-vault
Sweeps: paradisal
Airs float down diaphanous lawns of dawnlight
Sloping out from infinite fields of utter
Darkness, whence calm pallor of moonlit cloud-cirques
Glows to the full moon.
Light with light, gloom swiftly with ardent gloom now
Counterchanges; high overhead supernal
Stars with keen flames fluctuating await the
Glory of sunrise.
Sanguine-cinctured, pitiless: yet a little
Longer round me plays the malignant lustre,
Yet a little longer about the night's far
Arduous air-ways
Rings her music, ring the melodious angel
Harps of darkness, cool as upon a low shore
Fall lithe ripples, fall the reluctant ripples,
Fall, till the morning
Backward fold them. Break, for the sun resumes the
Fields with glancing feet; whither linger longer
Now your echoes, voices of argent night, now
Slowly to silence
Dying? dawn upon the supreme of high heaven
Flares, empurpled past the low verge of skyland,
Flares, and flames illimitable relume night's
Holy of Holies.
Equal-sated, shades of the under-world love
Ruined moonlight, wreckage of sunrise fury;
Us yet living, us in the hold of sorrows,
Us may the sunlight
Glorify to death of remembered anguish,
Break the labours, shatter the hard remembrance?
Yet us too the chilly revolving waters
Alway await: us
Too the golden passion of instant ardour
Shall not likewise more than a little longer
Glorify to gladness: a little longer
While we go deathward.