The Adventure of the Apocalypse

Art of arts

Never through Angelo's eye, Beethoven's ear,

Is caught the Timeless Wonder tense and sheer.

Eternity comes outvasting all their art,

An intimate blindness breaking in the heart

To sudden seizure of a shadowless sky,

Deep blue unheard, huge wind shutting the eye,

And yet the music and magnificence

A rapture that is everything at once,

So colour is audible and symphony seen

And both a plunging mystery too keen

To rest on painter's canvas, player's score,

As if an endless edge infinity wore,

Cleaving a chasm of splendour and surprise

From shaken brain down unto trembling thighs—

A straight canal of dreaming opaline,

Shot through the darkness of the mortal spine

For tryst of God below with God above

In spark on lotus-spark of deathless love! . . .

Colour is a burst of rhythm which cannot move,

Tune is a fire whose tongue is never still,

And both go yearning with a wordless will.

A different art must passion, a strange skill

To pluck miraculous signs from God's intent

Power and peace that pledge their hearts away

Each to the other in everlasting play

And, striking heart on heart, ring forth a call

To unborn universes, a rise and fall

And rise again of lion thunders fraught

With lightning-bolts of brief yet boundless thought

Uttering the mystic ocean, the magic land

In shining speech the seraphs understand,

Words that are more than tune, words that make mind

Crystallise from the Unknowable behind

And give a shape to elusive secrecy

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That silver moments for the ear and eye

May spring like stars to rumour the immense

Sable of Spirit devouring intelligence!

The echoer of the Eternal's master-mood—

Plumbing more truly His infinitude

Than the bright seer brush-fixed in heaven's court

Or the vast somnambuie of the pianoforte

Wandering from key to key of ivory gates—

Is the art where sight and sound mingle their fates

By symbol and by rhythm sharing one birth

Out of that deepest thrill of beauty's mirth,

The million-meaninged wonderment of name

The poets bring God's ether and God's flame!

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