| |
| THE YEARS are a falling of snow, | |
| Slow, but without cessation, | |
| On hills and mountains and flowers and worlds that were; | |
| But snow and the crawling night in which it fell | |
| May be washed away in one swifter hour of flame. | 5 |
| Thus it was that some slant of sunset | |
| In the chasms of piled cloud— | |
| Transient mountains that made a new horizon, | |
| Uplifting the west to fantastic pinnacles— | |
| Smote warm in a buried realm of the spirit, | 10 |
| Till the snows of forgetfulness were gone. | |
| |
| Clear in the vistas of memory, | |
| The peaks of a world long unremembered, | |
| Soared further than clouds, but fell not, | |
| Based on hills that shook not nor melted | 15 |
| With that burden enormous, hardly to be believed. | |
| Rent with stupendous chasms, | |
| Full of an umber twilight, | |
| I beheld that larger world. | |
| |
| Bright was the twilight, sharp like ethereal wine | 20 |
| Above, but low in the clefts it thickened, | |
| Dull as with duskier tincture. | |
| Like whimsical wings outspread but unstirring, | |
| Flowers that seemed spirits of the twilight, | |
| That must pass with its passing— | 25 |
| Too fragile for day or for darkness, | |
| Fed the dusk with more delicate hues than its own. | |
| Stars that were nearer, more radiant than ours, | |
| Quivered and pulsed in the clear thin gold of the sky. | |
| |
| These things I beheld, | 30 |
| Till the gold was shaken with flight | |
| Of fantastical wings like broken shadows, | |
| Forerunning the darkness; | |
| Till the twilight shivered with outcry of eldritch voices, | |
| Like pain’s last cry ere oblivion. | 35 |
| |
