University of Virginia Library

Masters of the known and found,
Singers of a world completed,
All to a time and end ordained,
Powers foredestined to their bound
And truth immutably contained,
A dominion mapped and meted,—
Like as in Egyptian noon
Gods of granite throned august
Gaze on old realms round them strewn
Far as the horizon dust,—
All beneath that searching sky
Gathered into wisdom's eye!
Prophets of the found and known,
Chanters of the Laws unchanging,
Comes not an hour that undoes all
With a whispered homelessness,
With a sudden touch estranging?
Certainties you deemed your own,
Housing with a friendly wall,
Glide into a doubt and guess
Swift as when, the low light going,
Darkness on the wind comes flowing
Out of nothing; and surmise,
Dream, desire, are frontierless;
And the unroofed mind has skies
To breathe of, where a rumour sings
Of other mind and vaster things
Wooed to wilder destinies.
Thought throbs: there a power entices
(Like, on a wonder-night, all June
In a draught of stolen spices)
Not to stay, not to stay,
But to embark for the outer dark.
Only charms the untrodden way,
Only the unspelt secret rune.

Conqueror with foot superb
Planted on the last step won,
Whom the trumpet-mouths proclaim
Destiny's accepted son,
Robed in a resounding name,
What profounder pangs disturb
Something that's unquarried yet
In the deep soul? All the gain
Weighs but as an ashy grain
In the world those pangs beget.
Fierce fruitions but betray
And deliver to the hard
Hope of things unhazarded.
Where that world is, who shall say?
Under western evening starred
Black waves tempt to far-away
Visioned walls of a wide shore,
Lands the only-coveted,
Gleaming as they gleamed before
Alexander's dying eyes
In the tent at Babylon.
Dumb his soldiers streamed beside him,
Dumb'd with grief that only saw
The pillar of the world undone,
Nor guessed what potent visions gnaw
The unsated mind with cruelties,—
Ramparts where Time's jealous spies,
Sentinelled afar, deride him,
Mocking all that passion willed
With the frustrate and the unfulfilled.
O the inexorable Lure
Spur to the demon hearts of men!
Ravening Genghis, hot Timour,
And the empire-storming Saracen,
Fate's infuriate charioteers,
Fly from a whisper in their ears
(Earth before them, Time behind)
Whispering, “Haste ere blood be chill,
Storm and scatter, work your will!”
Hunters hunted in the mind,
Hunting what they cannot name,
Thunder over earth, to find
Nothing. Though the harvest black
Be reaped in rue and curse and wrong,
There's a thing they cannot tame.
Still they keep their torrent-track,
Maddened by a shadowy song
Sung beyond the reach of sense.
What song is this which wastes the worth
Of human things, and distastes earth,
And fevers with magnificence
Of swiftness, trampling, ruin-crowned,
Toward a goal that none has found?
Is it the song the Adventurer stole
Body-bound upon the mast
For the enchantment of his soul?
Over farthest foam of waves
That are sailors' restless graves,
He heard exulting as he passed
Perilous voices challenging
The mortal heart of him, and fear
Became a glory, so to hear
Secure as an immortal, sing
The Sirens.

Whither is she gone, wing'd by the evening airs,
Yon sail that draws the last of light afar,
On the sea-verge alone, despising other cares
Than her own errand and her guiding star?
She leaves the safe land, leaves the roofs, and the long roads
Travelling the hills to end for each at his own hearth.
She leaves the silence under slowly-darkening elms,
The friendly human voices, smell of dew and dust,
And generations of men asleep in the old earth.
Between two solitudes she glides and fades,
And round us falls the darkness she invades.

Waters empty and outcast, O barren waters!
What have your wastes to do
With the earth-treader, the earth-tiller; this frail
Body of man; the sower, whom the green shoot gladdens;
Hewer of trees; the builder, who houses him from the bleak winds,
And whom awaits at last long peace beneath the grass
In soil his fathers knew?
What shall he hope for from your careless desolation,
Lion-indolence, or cold roar of your risen wrath?
What sows he in your furrows, or what fruit gathers
But hazard, loss, and his own hard courage? ...
Yon sail goes like a spirit seeking you.

I heard a trumpet from beyond the moon,
Piercing ice-blue gulfs of air,
Cry down the secret waters of the world,
Under the far sea-streams, to summon there
The foundered ships, the splendid ships, the lost ships.
In their ribb'd ruin and age-long sleep they heard,
Where each had found her shadowy burial-bed,
Clutched in blind reef, shoal-choked or shingle-bound;
Heard from betraying isles and capes of dread
In corners of all oceans, where the light
Gropes faltering over their spilt merchandize:
And shapes at last were stirred
On glimmerless abysses' oozy floors
Known to the dark fins only and drowned eyes;—
Sunk out of memory, they that glided forth
Bound from cold rivers to the tropic shores,
Or questing up the white gloom of the North,
Or shattered in the glory of old wars,
The laden ships, the gallant ships, the lost ships!

I saw them clouding up over the verge,
Ghosts that arose out of an unknown grave,
Strange to the buoyant seas that young they rode upon
And strange to the idle glitter of the wave.
Magically re-builded, rigged and manned,
They stole in their slow beauty toward the land.
Mariners, O mariners!
I heard a voice cry; Home, come home!
Here is the rain-fresh earth; leaf-changing seasons; here
Spring the flowers; and here, older than memory, peace
Tastes on the air sweet as honey in the honey-comb.
Smells not the hearth-smoke better than spices of India?
Are not children's kisses dearer than ivory and pearls?
And sleep in the hill kinder than nameless water
And the cold, wandering foam?
Dear are the names of home, I heard a far voice answer,
Pleasant the tilled valley, the flocks and farms; and sweet
The hum in cities of men, and words of our own kin.
But we have tasted wild fruit, listened to strange music;
And all shores of the earth are but as doors of an inn;
We knocked at the doors, and slept; to arise at dawn and go.
We spilt blood for gold, trafficked in costly cargoes,
But knew in the end it was not these we sailed to win;
Only a wider sea; room for the winds to blow,
And a world to wander in.

O divine summits and O unascended solitudes!
O alone soaring over care and stain!
Who without wing shall set foot upon your pinnacles?
Or who your spaciousness of light attain?
Flames in the dawn-cold, towering incredible,
When else the earth is shadow-drowned and prone,
Veiled and unveiled by the misty-footed winds that guard
Bright chasm and black gulf round a thunder-throne,
Realmed with a vision beyond reaches of mortality,—
Thither some splendour in the mind aspires,
Sharing the terror of your dark, tumultuous sisterhood,
Silent in glory as of chanting choirs.
Changing and changeless, O far-illumined Presences
In apparition from some world august,
Up from this flesh have you drawn us, as in ecstasy
That thirsts to elude this forfeiture of dust.
Even on your last heights man has set his perilous foot,
And mid the void as on some dazzling shore
Stands in the vast air, stricken and insatiate,
Wingless, a spirit craving wings to soar.

Now at last voyaging a fabulous dominion
Surpassing all the measures of his kind,
He, a free rider of the undulating silences,
Has in himself begotten a new mind;
Made him a companion of the winds of Heaven, travelling
Unpaven streets of cloudy golden snows,
Piercing forlorn mist, cold though it encompass him
Like a dead mind that nothing sees or knows,
Vacant, a cavern fleecy and immaterial,
A soundless vapour that he pulses through,
Suddenly emerging, and swims into the sun again
And steers his path up toward the topless blue;—
Towers in the frosty flame-apparelled mystery
Of brain-intoxicating sharp sapphire
Round him and above him, throbbing in the midst of it,
A daring, a defiance, a desire!

Mote in the hollow vast, drowned amid the vivid light,
Invading far and far the virgin sky,
Charioting with beats of fire the fiery-beating heart of man
(O heart of flesh, O force of dread!) on high!
Careless of death is he, riding in the eagle's ways
Above the peak and storm, so dear a sting
Drives him unresting to strive beyond the boundaries
Of his condition, being so brief a thing,
Being a creature perishable and passionate,
To drink the bright wine, danger, and to woo
Life on the invisible edge of airy precipices,
A lover, else to his own faith untrue,
Giving the glory of youth for flower of sacrifice
Upon the untried way that he must tread,
So that he savour the breath of life to the uttermost,
Breath only sweet when all is hazarded.
Is it that, moving in a rapture of deliverance
From chains of time and paths of dust and stone,
Serving a spirit of swiftness irresistible,
He makes his pilgrimage, alone, alone,
Seeking a privacy of boundlessness, abandoning
A self surpassed, yet other worlds to dare?
Nay, in that element hailing his predestinate
World, and exulting to be native there?

Hymn the Finders! Hymn the bold
Trusters of Earth, those patient ones,
That listen to the subtle words
Of Silence in the streams and stones;
Ponderers of the secret-souled
Bodies quick with ignorant being;
Followers of the clues that thread
Differences and accords;
Wooers of what powers agreeing
May the hands of man bestead;
Seers who have turned aside
From the greeds that ask and ache
Blinded to all else beside,—
Letting the clear spirit take
Truth from vision open-eyed.
Breaks the bud for him that sees
In a world of promises.

Hymn the breaker of the dark,
Hymn the finder of the flame,
Troubler of the essential spark
Lurking in the withered pith
Or from stony prison freed,
Friend and fury, holy need
And fierce destroyer, hard to tame,
Risen, a God to wrestle with!
Hymn the bender of the wheel,
Mother of the shapes of speed!
Hymn the launcher of the keel
Carrying thought's arrow-aim
Beyond the sundown,—sowing seed
Of man on coasts untrod before,
To widen memory's haunted shore
And add the nearness of a name.
Far-descended old desire!
That stirred in swarming forest-ages,
Prowled by fear whose stealthy eye
Watched from glooms, where hunger-rages
Ravened; see at last the Hand
Emerging human, stretched to try
Shapes of things with wondering pleasure,
When its strength forgets to kill;
Tempted on to understand,
Serving ways of secret will,—
Fit and fashion, poise and measure.
Hymn the hand that builds the wall
And spans the river, and arches over
Man the worshipper and lover
Song-like stone; the hand so strong
To strike, yet in whose touch is all
Life's mystery that wooes from things
Their strength, as music from the strings,—
Touch of the mind that seeks behind
The world for the befriending Mind.

Hymn the openers of the gates!
Hymn the changers of the fates!
Hymn the seekers! them that saw,
Past the seeming starry roof
Of human earth, in mazy plan
Bright eternities of law;
Them that neared those orbs to man,
Unafraid, and put to proof
Divination's ancient scheme;
Stept into the timeless stream,
Star-like spirits among the stars!
Hymn the seekers! Chosen souls,
Grapnel'd in the very marrow
By a thought that night and day
Draws them whither their unknown
Mighty lover far away
Beckons them to the frore Poles
Or new meridians; like to him
Who climbed in Panama the tree,
And splendour of untravelled sea
Smote him like a glorious arrow:
Never shall he rest again
Till he sail that virgin main!
Or like him who quietly
Sitting in his Polar tent
Found so great a way to die;
Hope-forsaken, famine-spent,
Wrote his words of faith and cheer
Till the pen dropt from the hand
That wrote them.

Hymn the lost, who never
Found, but kept high heart to steer
Onward toward the mark they meant,
Sailing out of sight of land.
Wail not them, nor lost endeavour,
For they heard what tranced the ear,
Filled the exulting soul, the song
Pale and prudent mortals fear,
Song of those who, out of Time,
Sing the heights the immortals climb,
The Sirens.