Collected Poems: With Autobiographical and Critical Fragments By Frederic W. H. Myers: Edited by his Wife Eveleen Myers |
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ODE TO NATURE |
 | Collected Poems: With Autobiographical and Critical Fragments |  |
333
ODE TO NATURE
I
O Mother gravely mild,Soul of the waste and wild,
Behold me compassed in thine icy calm!
Athirst, alone, again
I call thee and complain;—
Here in thy temple raise my solitary psalm.
II
Athirst;—yet not as thoughThy fountains of the snow
Could quench me, raving headlong from the hill;
Let other longings cease
With plenty and with peace;
Athirst to the end is he whom only love can fill.
III
The light loves blush and bloom;They perish; they perfume
A flying hour, and make a slight hurt whole:
334
Hath heaven revealed to me
In secret long ago, in sabbaths of the soul.
IV
When winds the Alpine horn,More than itself reborn
Peals in the magic answer of the hill;
Afresh, afar, afloat,
A new majestic note
From other lips is blown, in other airs is still.
V
Such was the love I sought;So to the hidden thought
Might flash the unspoken answer of the eyes;
No need of kiss or speech
When, each inmixt in each,
Thy heart in hers will call, and hers in thine replies.
VI
O hope too fond and fair!O angel in the air!
O dying dream, which yet to dream was joy!
Prayed longest, followed most
Of all that heavenly host
Who lured from child to man the visionhaunted boy.
335
VII
Sometimes the flying flameWas Fortune and was Fame;
Thro' cloudy rifts a wildering clarion rang;—
Oftener an Orphic crown,
From deep heaven fluttering down,
Lit on a poet's head, and sweet the poet sang.
VIII
But first and last and best,Most longed-for, least confest,
One form unknown descended as a dove;
Low in my soul I heard
One new melodious word,
And all the boy's frame trembled at the touch of Love.
IX
They melt, they fail, they fade,Those shapes in air arrayed,—
Love with the rest; ah, Love, the heavenly friend!
Only this Mother mild,
Guileless as unbeguiled,
Here in her holy place endureth to the end.
X
O fast and flying shroud!Cold Horns that cleave the cloud!
Uplifted Silence unaware of man!
336
Slide softly, thundering snow!
Let all in darkness end, as darkly all began!
XI
Hence, hence I too had birth,One soul with the ancient Earth,
Beyond this human ancestry of pain:—
My soul was even as ye;—
She was,—and she would be;—
O Earth, and Night, and Nought, enfold her once again!
| Collected Poems: With Autobiographical and Critical Fragments | |