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Home  »  The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse  »  164. The Vanishing Point

Nicholson & Lee, eds. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. 1917.

John Addington Symonds (1840–1893)

164. The Vanishing Point

THERE are who, when the bat on wing transverse

Skims the swart surface of some neighbouring mere,

Catch that thin cry too fine for common ear:

Thus the last joy-note of the universe

Is borne to those few listeners who immerse

Their intellectual hearing in no clear

Paean, but pierce it with the thin-edged spear

Of utmost beauty which contains a curse.

Dead on their sense fall marches hymeneal,

Triumphal odes, hymns, symphonies sonorous;

They crave one shrill vibration, tense, ideal,

Transcending and surpassing the world’s chorus;

Keen, fine, ethereal, exquisitely real,

Intangible as star’s light quivering o’er us.