Versione Italiana | Nota biografica | Versione lettura |
When death-dewed night is all a-swoon,
Haunted by the driving moon,
Haunted by long sweeps of shade,
Monolith and colonnade
Writhe fantastic arms in air;
Echoing flag and hollow stair
Chequered are by deep, black bars;
Far from grace of winds and stars,
Enmeshed in immortality,
I tread these stairs, and none but I.
Darkly yawns the looming portal,
Solid-hewn, deep-grained, immortal,
Where the stony griffins keep
Station, sunk in lidless sleep;
Earth-plots, where no flower blooms;
Cloisters, lost in mazing glooms,
Warded locks of mystery,
Oblivion the only key.
I have sensed, remote in dreams,
Thick musk, fuming censer-steams,
And heard a distant organ pour
Wild cadence down each corridor;
Traced the crusted wall-outline,
Hieroglyphed with secret sign,
Lingering o’er each storied scroll,
With nameless knowledge in my soul.
Alone, in one night’s spacious years,
Beset by crowding hopes and fears,
I have yearned and thought to see,
Through the moon-starts, fitfully,
Another wanderer slowly climb
These worn steps of Loss and Time—
No voice-music, hand-caress,
Spans my silent loneliness:
Enmeshed in immortality,
I tread these stairs—and none but I.
I know a solitude, where pointed trees
Half-baffle the rife sunlight, chequering
The bush with softly waving lights; and bees
Keep up a monotone, a murmuring.
Pulsing the pause ’twixt dream and dream, these chimes
A silvery lapse of water; birds sing there,
The magpie’s carol spells the heavy air,
The lorn coachwhip calls there, oftentimes.
A Lost wind whispers, wraith-like, in the leaves,
And gently wimples the fern’s fl owing fronds,
Plays with the halcyon water-drops, and leaves
A myrrhed musk in the swaying wattle-wands,
Opiate-charged for sleep. No colours bright
Dazzle the eye; a sarsenet stream of mist
Sobers and tames; and serried heaven-light
Breaks through in shadowed sheens of amethyst.
This is true Silence, silked and strung with sound,
And pang-fi red with a myriad lutany;
And ’tis the only rest my heart has found,
Vexed with earth’s cymbals, tinkling emptily.
O, for such quietude my eyes are faint
And my ears, stunned with swelling gyres of noise,
For the peaceful frenzy of one sweet soul-plaint,
One hazed vision—and one answering Voice.
Stumbling through channels of silence, we send out
That wild note of our onset to twist along
Paths of the wounded light, and veer about
The mountains with blunted mumblings of a gong.
And lean, grey, avid angels of the mist
Flap past us for a moment in sullen flight;
Sink back to another æon of unrest,
Chained by the iron chasms about their feet.
This is where Time died centuries ago,
His huge, white, rigid body broken over
The giant wheel of the sky to a flux of snow,
And mist still wandering near him, like a lover.