The Secret Splendour

Why, Soul, look ever ahead to the unborn Gods?

The flute of the future can pour its goldenest honey

liven now if the ear is tuned to the inmost hush.

The ecstatic end is each instant: here on thy brow

Sit all the epiphanies. Lustres that gather

Today are no flowerless path to paradise,

But a music and mystery hiding every heaven

Washed by the secret waves of prophecy.

Lovely the rainbowed horizon, the shimmery heart

Of the dreaming distance, but to live afar

Is blindness toward the deeps of wine within!...

Leaping below to unbottomed bliss, the gap

Twixt throb and aching throb of the pulse of life

 Crypts in a Calm that is mother of the worlds

The whole future's farness of the unblown rose!

Vast over thee the noon is everywhere:

An upward tunnel opens through the sun

To expanses that have never known a name

 Nor broken with the faintest gossamer wing.

All the great Gods are waiting thy finger-flames

To rise and reach and taste with ten white tongues.

Straight runs the shaft of the flawless infinite hour

From pinnacle to abyss in a sheathed Now.

O the dark waste of this sweet pillar of gold,

A crystal python vertically hung

From burning mouth to burning tail, with a body

Plunging like groove on groove through endless light!

Timeless is the nectar laughing in that jar

Moment by moment: if never hast thou seen

 That fullness How in thy form, barren thy life

And a wide mirage the call of coming dawns.

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