C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Raphael’s Song
By William Vaughn Moody (1869–1910)
From Scene I, Act I, of ‘The Masque of Judgment’
T
The stars grow far and few;
Into her house of day
Hung with Sidonian blue
Stealeth the earth, as a mænad girl
Steals to her home when the orgies are o’er
That startled the glens and the sleeping shore,
And up from the passionate deeps of night
Into the shallows and straits of light
Softly the forests whirl.
Laugh, earth! For thy feigning-face is wise;
There is naught so clear as thy morning eyes;
And the sun thy lord is an easy lord!
What should they be to him,—
Thine hours of dance in the woodland dim,
The brandished torch and the shouted word,
The flight, the struggle, the honeyed-swoon
’Neath the wild, wild lips of the moon?