| |
| I MARK the months in liveries dank and dry, | |
| The day-tides many-shaped and hued; | |
| I see the nightfall shades subtrude, | |
| And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by. | |
| |
| I view the evening bonfires of the sun | 5 |
| On hills where morning rains have hissed; | |
| The eyeless countenance of the mist | |
| Pallidly rising when the summer droughts are done. | |
| |
| I have seen the lightning-blade, the leaping star, | |
| The caldrons of the sea in storm, | 10 |
| Have felt the earthquake’s lifting arm, | |
| And trodden where abysmal fires and snowcones are. | |
| |
| I learn to prophesy the hid eclipse, | |
| The coming of eccentric orbs; | |
| To mete the dust the sky absorbs, | 15 |
| To weigh the sun, and fix the hour each planet dips. | |
| |
| I witness fellow earth-men surge and strive; | |
| Assemblies meet, and throb, and part; | |
| Death’s soothing finger, sorrow’s smart; | |
| —All the vast various moils that mean a world alive. | 20 |
| |
| But that I fain would wot of shuns my sense— | |
| Those sights of which old prophets tell, | |
| Those signs the general word so well, | |
| Vouchsafed to their unheed, denied my watchings tense. | |
| |
| In graveyard green, behind his monument | 25 |
| To glimpse a phantom parent, friend, | |
| Wearing his smile, and “Not the end!” | |
| Outbreathing softly: that were blest enlightenment; | |
| |
| Or, if a dead Love’s lips, whom dreams reveal | |
| When midnight imps of King Decay | 30 |
| Delve sly to solve me back to clay, | |
| Should leave some print to prove her spirit-kisses real; | |
| |
| Or, when Earth’s Frail lie bleeding of her Strong, | |
| If some Recorder, as in Writ, | |
| Near to the weary scene should flit | 35 |
| And drop one plume as pledge that Heaven inscrolls the wrong. | |
| |
| —There are who, rapt to heights of trancéd trust, | |
| These tokens claim to feel and see, | |
| Read radiant hints of times to be— | |
| Of heart to heart returning after dust to dust. | 40 |
| |
| Such scope is granted not my powers indign… | |
| I have lain in dead men’s beds, have walked | |
| The tombs of those with whom I’d talked, | |
| Called many a gone and goodly one to shape a sign, | |
| |
| And panted for response. But none replies; | 45 |
| No warnings loom, nor whisperings | |
| To open out my limitings, | |
| And Nescience mutely muses: When a man falls he lies. | |
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