| |
| IN my sleep I was fain of their fellowship, fain | |
| Of the live-oak, the marsh, and the main. | |
| The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep; | |
| Up-breathed from the marshes, a message of range and of sweep, | |
| Interwoven with waftures of wild sea-liberties, drifting, | 5 |
| Came through the lapped leaves sifting, sifting, | |
| Came to the gates of sleep. | |
| Then my thoughts, in the dark of the dungeon-keep | |
| Of the Castle of Captives hid in the City of Sleep, | |
| Upstarted, by twos and by threes assembling; | 10 |
| The gates of sleep fell a-trembling | |
| Like as the lips of a lady that forth falter yes, | |
| Shaken with happiness: | |
| The gates of sleep stood wide. | |
| |
| I have waked, I have come, my beloved! I might not abide: | 15 |
| I have come ere the dawn, O beloved, my live-oaks, to hide | |
| In your gospelling glooms,—to be | |
| As a lover in heaven, the marsh my marsh and the sea my sea. | |
| |
| Tell me, sweet burly-barked, man-embodied Tree | |
| That mine arms in the dark are embracing, dost know | 20 |
| From what fount are these tears at thy feet which flow? | |
| They rise not from reason, but deeper inconsequent deeps. | |
| Reason’s not one that weeps. | |
| What logic of greeting lies | |
| Betwixt dear over-beautiful trees and the rain of the eyes? | 25 |
| |
| O cunning green leaves, little masters! like as ye gloss | |
| All the dull-tissued dark with your luminous darks that emboss | |
| The vague blackness of night into pattern and plan, | |
| So, | |
| (But would I could know, but would I could know,) | 30 |
| With your question embroidering the dark of the question of man,— | |
| So, with your silences purfling this silence of man | |
| While his cry to the dead for some knowledge is under the ban, | |
| Under the ban,— | |
| So, ye have wrought me | 35 |
| Designs on the night of our knowledge,—yea, ye have taught me, | |
| So, | |
| That haply we know somewhat more than we know. | |
| |
| Ye lispers, whisperers, singers in storms, | |
| Ye consciences murmuring faiths under forms, | 40 |
| Ye ministers meet for each passion that grieves, | |
| Friendly, sisterly, sweetheart leaves, | |
| Oh, rain me down from your darks that contain me | |
| Wisdoms ye winnow from winds that pain me,— | |
| Sift down tremors of sweet-within-sweet | 45 |
| That advise me of more than they bring,—repeat | |
| Me the woods-smell that swiftly but now brought breath | |
| From the heaven-side bank of the river of death,— | |
| Teach me the terms of silence,—preach me | |
| The passion of patience,—sift me,—impeach me,— | 50 |
| And there, oh there | |
| As ye hang with your myriad palms upturned in the air, | |
| Pray me a myriad prayer. | |
| |
| My gossip, the owl,—is it thou | |
| That out of the leaves of the low-hanging bough, | 55 |
| As I pass to the beach, art stirred? | |
| Dumb woods, have ye uttered a bird? | |
| |
| Reverend Marsh, low-couched along the sea, | |
| Old chemist, rapt in alchemy, | |
| Distilling silence,—lo, | 60 |
| That which our father-age had died to know— | |
| The menstruum that dissolves all matter—thou | |
| Hast found it; for this silence, filling now | |
| The globëd charity of receiving space, | |
| This solves us all: man, matter, doubt, disgrace, | 65 |
| Death, love, sin, sanity, | |
| Must in yon silence, clear solution lie,— | |
| Too clear! That crystal nothing who ’ll peruse? | |
| The blackest night could bring us brighter news. | |
| Yet precious qualities of silence haunt | 70 |
| Round these vast margins, ministrant. | |
| Oh, if thy soul’s at latter gasp for space, | |
| With trying to breathe no bigger than thy race | |
| Just to be fellowed, when that thou hast found | |
| No man with room, or grace enough of bound, | 75 |
| To entertain that New thou tellst, thou art,— | |
| ’T is here, ’t is here, thou canst unhand thy heart | |
| And breathe it free, and breathe it free, | |
| By rangy marsh, in lone sea-liberty. | |
| |
| The tide ’s at full; the marsh with flooded streams | 80 |
| Glimmers, a limpid labyrinth of dreams. | |
| Each winding creek in grave entrancement lies | |
| A rhapsody of morning-stars. The skies | |
| Shine scant with one forked galaxy,— | |
| The marsh brags ten: looped on his breast they lie. | 85 |
| |
| Oh, what if a sound should be made! | |
| Oh, what if a bound should be laid | |
| To this bow-and-string tension of beauty and silence a-spring,— | |
| To the bend of beauty the bow, or the hold of silence the string! | |
| I fear me, I fear me you dome of diaphanous gleam | 90 |
| Will break as a bubble o’er-blown in a dream,— | |
| You dome of too-tenuous tissues of space and of night, | |
| Over-weighted with stars, over-freighted with light, | |
| Over-sated with beauty and silence, will seem | |
| But a bubble that broke in a dream, | 95 |
| If a bound of degree to this grace be laid, | |
| Or a sound or a motion made. | |
| |
| But no: it is made: list! somewhere,—mystery, where? | |
| In the leaves? in the air? | |
| In my heart? is a motion made: | 100 |
| ’T is a motion of dawn, like a flicker of shade on shade. | |
| In the leaves ’t is palpable: low multitudinous stirring | |
| Upwinds through the woods; the little ones, softly conferring, | |
| Have settled my lord’s to be looked for; so, they are still; | |
| But the air and my heart and the earth are a-thrill,— | 105 |
| And look where the wild duck sails round the bend of the river,— | |
| And look where a passionate shiver | |
| Expectant is bending the blades | |
| Of the marsh-grass in serial shimmers and shades,— | |
| And invisible wings, fast fleeting, fast fleeting, | 110 |
| Are beating | |
| The dark overhead as my heart beats,—and steady and free | |
| Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea—(Run home, little streams, | |
| With your lapfuls of stars and dreams),— | |
| And a sailor unseen is hoisting a-peak, | 115 |
| For list, down the inshore curve of the creek | |
| How merrily flutters the sail,— | |
| And lo, in the East! Will the East unveil? | |
| The East is unveiled, the East hath confessed | |
| A flush: ’t is dead; ’t is alive: ’t is dead, ere the West | 120 |
| Was aware of it: nay, ’t is abiding, ’t is unwithdrawn: | |
| Have a care, sweet Heaven! ’T is Dawn. | |
| |
| Now a dream of a flame through that dream of a flush is uprolled: | |
| To the zenith ascending, a dome of undazzling gold | |
| Is builded, in shape as a bee-hive, from out of the sea: | 125 |
| The hive is of gold undazzling, but oh, the Bee, | |
| The star-fed Bee, the build-fire Bee, | |
| Of dazzling gold is the great Sun-Bee | |
| That shall flash from the hive-hole over the sea. | |
| |
| Yet now the dewdrop, now the morning gray, | 130 |
| Shall live their little lucid sober day | |
| Ere with the sun their souls exhale away. | |
| Now in each pettiest personal sphere of dew | |
| The summed moon shines complete as in the blue | |
| Big dewdrop of all heaven: with these lit shrines | 135 |
| O’ersilvered to the farthest sea-confines, | |
| The sacramental marsh one pious plain | |
| Of worship lies. Peace to the ante-reign | |
| Of Mary Morning, blissful mother mild, | |
| Minded of nought but peace, and of a child, | 140 |
| |
| Not slower than Majesty moves, for a mean and measure | |
| Of motion,—not faster than dateless Olympian leisure | |
| Might pace with unblown ample garments from pleasure to pleasure,— | |
| The wave-serrate sea-rim sinks unjarring, unreeling, | |
| Forever revealing, revealing, revealing, | 145 |
| Edgewise, bladewise, halfwise, wholewise,—’t is done! | |
| Good-morrow, Lord Sun! | |
| With several voice, with ascription one, | |
| The woods and the marsh and the sea and my soul | |
| Unto thee, whence the glittering stream of all morrows doth roll, | 150 |
| Cry good and past good and most heavenly morrow, Lord Sun. | |
| |
| O Artisan born in the purple,—Workman Heat,— | |
| Parter of passionate atoms that travail to meet | |
| And be mixed in the death-cold oneness,—innermost Guest | |
| At the marriage of elements,—fellow of publicans,—blest | 155 |
| King in the blouse of flame, that loiterest o’er | |
| The idle skies yet laborest past evermore,— | |
| Thou, in the fine forge-thunder, thou, in the beat | |
| Of the heart of a man, thou Motive,—Laborer Heat: | |
| Yea, Artist, thou, of whose art you sea’s all news, | 160 |
| With his inshore greens and manifold mid-sea blues, | |
| Pearl-glint, shell-tint, ancientest, perfectest hues | |
| Ever shaming the maidens,—lily and rose | |
| Confess thee, and each mild flame that glows | |
| In the clarified virginal bosoms of stones that shine, | 165 |
| It is thine, it is thine: | |
| |
| Thou chemist of storms, whether driving the winds a-swirl | |
| Or a-flicker the subtiler essences polar that whirl | |
| In the magnet earth,—yea, thou with a storm for a heart, | |
| Rent with debate, many-spotted with question, part | 170 |
| From part oft sundered, yet ever a globëd light, | |
| Yet ever the artist, ever more large and bright | |
| Than the eye of a man may avail of:—manifold One, | |
| I must pass from the face, I must pass from the face of the Sun: | |
| Old Want is awake and agog, every wrinkle a-frown; | 175 |
| The worker must pass to his work in the terrible town: | |
| But I fear not, nay, and I fear not the thing to be done; | |
| I am strong with the strength of my lord the Sun: | |
| How dark, how dark soever the race that must needs be run, | |
| I am lit with the Sun. | 180 |
| |
| Oh, never the mast-high run of the seas | |
| Of traffic shall hide thee, | |
| Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories | |
| Hide thee, | |
| Never the reek of the time’s fen-politics | 185 |
| Hide thee, | |
| And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee, | |
| And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that bath tried thee, | |
| Labor, at leisure, in art,—till yonder beside thee | |
| My soul shall float, friend Sun, | 190 |
| The day being done. | |
| |
