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A Nocturne
DOWN-GAZING, I behold, | |
| Miraculous by night, | |
| A city all of gold. | |
| Here, there, and everywhere, | |
| In myriad fashion fair, | 5 |
| A mystery untold | |
| Of Light! | |
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| Not royal Babylon, | |
| Nor Tyre, nor Rome the great— | |
| In the all-powerful state | 10 |
| Her wisdom and her armèd legions won— | |
| Was so illuminate | |
| As the strange world which, awed, I look upon. | |
| With it compared, the ancient glories fail, | |
| And, in the glow it doth irradiate, | 15 |
| The planets of the firmament grow pale! | |
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| Night, birth-fellow to Chaos, never wore | |
| A robe so gemmed before. | |
| The splendour streams | |
| In lines and jets and scintillating gleams | 20 |
| From tower and spire and campanile bright, | |
| And palaces of light. | |
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| How beautiful is this | |
| Unmatched Cosmopolis!— | |
| City of wealth and want, | 25 |
| Of pitiless extremes, | |
| Selfish ambitions, pure aspiring dreams; | |
| Whose miseries, remembered, daunt | |
| The bravest spirit hope hath cheered— | |
| This city loved and hated, honoured, feared: | 30 |
| This Titan City, bold to dare: | |
| This wounded Might | |
| That, dreading darkness, still conceals its care | |
| And hides its gaping hurt ’neath veils of light! | |
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| Oh, I have looked on Venice when the moon | 35 |
| Silvered each dark lagoon, | |
| And have in dreams beheld her | |
| Clothed in resplendent pride, | |
| The Adriatic’s bride! | |
| Naples I, too, have seen— | 40 |
| An even lovelier Queen— | |
| And thought that nothing in the world excelled her— | |
| Nay marvelled, as at close of day | |
| I gazed across her opalescent bay | |
| And saw Vesuvius burn on high | 45 |
| Against the soft Italian sky, | |
| That anything on earth could wear | |
| A charm so past compare! | |
| |
| Yet, O Manhattan! Glowing now | |
| Against the sombre night, | 50 |
| Thine opulence and squalor hid from sight, | |
| Never was aught more beautiful than thou | |
| Dost in thy calm appear— | |
| So glorified and so transfigured here— | |
| Since the Eternal, to creation stirred, | 55 |
| Breathed from His awful lips the mystic word: | |
| Let there be Light! | |
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