The Adventure of the Apocalypse

Wondrous chameleon

No creature of rare moments white and gold

Nor powered with a few flashes of wizardry

But claiming each life-light as heaven's own,

The soul sits smiling in the heart of time.

Wondrous chameleon equal to all hues,

Spurning no mood as void of the perfect dream,

It breaks forth everywhere the epiphany:

Out of its miracled deep it can lay bare

With selfsame beauty of omnipotent ease

The aureate Eternal, the argent Infinite,

The grey God and the black Beatitude!

Stainless, it makes of the most shadowy tones

Ineffable mysteries of a deathless fire. . . .

Each gaze divine, it leaps to every lure:

No delicate fantast, no austere recluse,

A universal hunger out of heaven,

It has come to lick up with ecstatic tongue

The whole domain of time's brief fluttering,

The insect-instants that are man's heart-beats!

Let then all hours grow one great harmony

Of paradise plucked from both dark and day—

Let all the moth-thrills of mortality

Lose separate insignificant smallnesses

To feed from strength to strength the magical

Chameleon at life's core, that many-coloured

Artist of the single-selfed apocalypse!

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