Poems
THEME/S
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, phyer's score,
As if an endless edge infinity bore,
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.
Now a new art must passion, a strange bent
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
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And give a shape to elusive secrecy
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 somnambule 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
Which poets carry to God's ether and God's flame!
1.6.48
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