The Adventure of the Apocalypse

Words

Let me not utter five things in five words,

But by one word of densest diamond

Pack five things to a shining secrecy

That gathers a deep truth missed by them all;

Or else with five words capture one sole thing,

Pluck from it fires that light up earth's abysm—

Fires that were veiled by being locked together,

But now a fourfold seizure from without

Of splendours and terrors ruling time and space

And then a sudden self-sight, a fifth flame

That knows by a sheer eternity within! . . .

Words have not come to measure things that are;

They plunge to the unheard, leap to the unseen,

Being ear and eye a chaos of surprise

Till through a dark delight of consciousness

Huge nebulas swirl out dream-distances,

Stretching the soul to a rapt infinity! . . .

Words are the shadows of enhaloed hawks:

The shadows cling to clay and seem clay-born,

But he who marks their moving mystery

Feels how a strange spontaneous quiver wings

Their passage here and how intangible

They float for all their close and massive shapes.

Alone the poet looks up to the Inane,

Sees the gold wanderers of the boundless blue,

Catches the radiant rhythms each burning heart

Puts forth in every line of the wide form

Spanning the silences with pinion-song.

Thus in his scheme of shades from the vast throng

Haunting the earth-mind he shows across brief thought

Glimmers immortal, throbbings of the bliss

That reels through heaven a drunkard of Truth's sun.

Or, in rare moment quick with dawn and noon

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And eve at once, our little human dreams

Love with such far-flung eyes the undying birds

That the large lust comes swooping down for prey

And, where the shadows mystically shone,

Falls—crushing, piercing, ravishing every sense—

The living body and beauty and blaze of God!

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