The Adventure of the Apocalypse

Beauty's Patting

What secrets suddenly peer

Through the flicker-point of beauty's parting

And the twinkled cry of its vanishing tear

But never through the laugh and light of its starting?. . .

All day the sun is glorious thunder,

But taking his opalescent leave

After the last wine-flush of wonder—

Hinting the mother-of-pearl that is eve,

He puts on our lip a finger that closes

All speech—and mysteries tremble and wake

In the wink of an instant!. . .The star-spotted snake

Coil after indigo coil unlooses

And our eyes are crowded with peace or power

But the touch beyond thinking is gone—till the hour

When the gloom has slid, and the tip of its tail

Quivers with an ultimate fleck of white.

Then through a moment of fugitive night

Once more the wordless wizardries wail!...

Great is the splendour of vision breaking

In the songs the gold-hearted poets hurl,

But when the wide wings flutter and furl

And the ear its final thirst is slaking,

A tiny ember of time is haunted

By a spark the minstrel scarcely saw

But which through the passion of lips that chaunted

Was aching to utter its dream without flaw.

Only the ending's hush-haloed sound

Touches and drops what the lilt never found!...

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